Our unseen cameraman stepped farther into the clearing and turned toward the far end of the field. The sound cut off and on several times, giving us just enough so we could hear the racket of drums and sticks beating on metal pots as a line of brown-skinned men in threadbare old jeans and shorts emerged from the row of trees in the distance to drive a single animal into the center of the clearing. At first the animal was just a shapeless white blur, indistinct against the greens and grays of the tree line, but with each second it moved closer to the camera and the group of hunters.
For a minute I thought it was a horse.
Then my heart caught in my throat.
“What the fu—?”
The hunters pointed their guns.
“No…,” I murmured.
The sound cut out again so it all played out in a grotesque silence as four barrels jerked and red flame leaped toward the center of the field. The animal wheeled to run, but on its first step it stumbled and went down to its front knees. It was snow-white and beautiful, but suddenly red poppies seemed to blossom on its flanks. The guns fired again and the sound came back on long enough for us to hear the flat echo of the reports and the high-pitched scream of the animal as it went down.
Then all of the men were running and the cameraman was running with them, the image bouncing sickeningly. The group slowed to a trot and then a walk and came to a stop in a half circle around the fallen, bleeding animal. Its chest heaved with the labor of staying alive and it rolled one terrified eye at them.
“I hit it first!” said the man from Louisiana.
The sound faded to a crackle, which was some relief, because we could not hear the animal’s final, desperate scream as the American stepped up, chest puffed out and face flushed with excitement. He put a foot on the animal’s shoulder, drew a pistol, and took aim at the animal’s head. But the South African touched his arm to correct the placement of the pistol’s laser sight and then the gun bucked once in dreadful silence. Blood geysered up and the animal’s body convulsed once; then it settled down into the terminal stillness that cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is.
“God damn it,” I said.
The clip ended with the South African squatting down, a big hunting knife in his hands as he began to field-dress the animal. The screen went dark and I sat for a long minute in stunned silence.
“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Hu said as the video feed of him filled the screen once more. He looked at me and what he saw on my face wiped the smile from his.
“What is this? Some kind of sick game?” I demanded. “That animal—”
“We studied this file a hundred times,” interrupted Hu. “If this is makeup effects, then it’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
“But it’s impossible,” I said. “It can’t be real.”
“It looked pretty real to me,” Hu said.
“But it can’t be. That animal… It was a… a…”
Hu nodded.
“It was a unicorn,” he said, and the smile crept back onto his face.
Interlude
He had a mind like an insect. Cold, efficient, uncluttered by personal attachment, unpolluted by emotion. It made him a superb killer.
If there had been even a spark of humanity in him, he might have been famous, or even infamous, but he never once sought glory and he viewed the desire for personal recognition as a foolish mistake. An amateur’s risk.
Conrad Veder never made mistakes, foolish or otherwise.
He accepted assignments based entirely on gain, and even that was measured. He was not a greedy man. Greed creates vulnerability, a rudder by which he could be steered. Veder could not be steered. To him the acquisition of money meant that he could afford certain physical comforts and that he would have the capital necessary for the kind of investments that would allow him to retire at a young enough age to genuinely enjoy retirement. He’d once seen a Florida bumper sticker that read: “Retirement is wasted on the old,” and he couldn’t agree more. He was forty-six and his various portfolios and holdings — maintained under a dozen aliases — could already be cashed out to yield 11 million euros. It was a comfortable amount, but it needed more cushion to buffer against the uncertainties of the world’s fluctuating currencies.
At his current rate of 1 million per hit and a reliable employment of two to three hits per year, he figured that he could retire at fifty with enough in the bank to generate a nice interest-income cash flow. Properly managed, that money would grow faster than he would spend it and see him into his nineties, no matter how much of a beating the dollar took on the global market. Besides, he had a man working on currency exchanges and the switch to Canadian dollars in late 2007 had already yielded a nice windfall.
This current job would be Veder’s third this year and it was only the middle of May. There might even be a fourth and fifth contract before Christmas, which would give him his second $6 million year in a row. It was a nice way to end his thirtieth year as a paid killer.
Veder’s first murder had been a five-hundred-dollar hit he’d taken while he was still in tenth grade. He hadn’t felt a single flicker of emotion when he murdered the wife of his social studies teacher. It had been quick; it had been clean. And Veder had been paid. He remembered it now for mental records-keeping purposes only. Veder never formed an emotional attachment to his targets. That was also a fool’s game and it crossed the line from professional to psychotic, and Veder was calmly certain that he was as sane as the next man. Kings and presidents and generals were often far more emotionally involved in the deaths they ordered, even with the legal mandates their positions provided. Veder was a problem solver, no different in his calculating mind than the operators in Delta Force or Mossad or any of the other clandestine groups of paid killers. He needed as little proof of guilt or justification of the kill order as they did. The only real differences were that they had backup and Veder seldom used or required any and that he got paid a lot more.
The closest he ever came to idealism was a brief stint with a cadre of shooters working for a group of international businessmen who were working toward one of those grand causes, one of those “betterment of the species” things, but though Veder was content to take their money and listen to the occasional geopolitical or ethnic tirade, he was never a convert to their cause. He had agreed to join a team of four elite assassins — sadly labeled with the ludicrous nickname of the Brotherhood of the Scythe — and had done some quality work there. When their program had collapsed he was sorry to see the steady stream of income end, but in truth he really enjoyed the freedom and simplicity of the life of a solitary operator. Fewer complications, no tirades.
Now he sat in a cantina in the shadow of Chihuahua City’s city hall, which sat like a Gothic cathedral on the Plaza de Armas. He was drinking lukewarm mineral water and waiting for his contact to arrive. The man was late — a passive-aggressive maneuver he often used — but Veder didn’t care. He never let things like that provoke him. He sipped his water, nibbled a corn tamale, and let his insect mind process the data of everything that touched his senses.
He spent much of the morning strolling along the short blocks to the north side of Plaza Hidalgo to view political murals by Aarón Piña Mora on the walls of the government palace. Veder had a passing interest in art. Enough to like looking at it but not enough to invest money in it. But it passed the time and as he sat waiting for his contact he reconstructed the faces of the Mora murals in his mind. It was a useful exercise: remembering the shapes of ears, the cut of cheekbones, the fullness of lips, the angle of noses. If any of the men from those murals, Benito Juárez, Simón Bolívar, or Miguel Hidalgo, had still been alive Veder would have been able to pick them out of a crowd at twilight.