I snorted. “Then it was a horse with a strap-on.”
“That’s an unfortunate image,” said Church.
“You know what I mean.”
“Again,” interjected Hu, “we studied the video and that horn doesn’t wobble. There’s no evidence that the animal was wearing a headdress or a strap. The horn appears to be approximately eighteen inches long and relatively slender at the base. That creates a lot of leverage that would definitely cause a wobble if it was just held in place by straps. The creature tossed its head and then fell over, and the horn didn’t move in any way consistent with it being anchored to the skull by artificial means.”
“Then I got nothing,” I said. “I must have been out the day we covered mythical beasts at the police academy.”
Church took a Nilla wafer and bit off a section.
“We can rule out natural mutation,” ventured Hu. “The horn was perfectly placed in the center of the forehead and there are no other apparent signs of deformation, which you’d probably get if this was a freak of some kind.”
“What about surgical alteration?” I asked.
“Possible,” said Hu, “but unlikely, ’cause you’d also be talking about a lot of cosmetic work to hide the surgery and we don’t see any signs of that. Even good cosmetic work leaves some kind of mark. Let’s leave it on the table, though, because it’s the most reasonable suggestion. I mean, unless this animal is a surviving example of a species that until now was only believed to be part of mythology.”
I said, “I thought the unicorn myth grew out of early reports of travelers seeing a rhinoceros for the first time.”
“Probably did,” Hu admitted. “And from sightings of narwhales, which are cetaceans that have a single tooth that looks almost exactly like the horn on the animal in the video. Back in the eighteen-hundreds people would sell narwhale horns claiming that they were taken from unicorns.”
“Any other suggestions?” asked Church. His face was hard to read, but my guess was that he wasn’t buying the cryptid theory any more than I was.
“There’s always genetics,” suggested Hu. He saw my expression and added, “No, I’m not talking about reclaiming the DNA of an extinct species; no Jurassic Park stuff. I’m talking about radical genetic engineering. Transgenics — the transfer of genes from one species to another.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, “but what the hell would you mate a horse with to get a unicorn, because I don’t see horses and narwhales doing the dirty boogie.”
Even Church smiled at that.
“Not crossbreeding,” Hu said. “That’s too problematic and it’s also becoming old-fashioned. Transgenics is genetic manipulation during the embryonic phase. Someone may have taken genes from either a rhinoceros or a narwhale and introduced it to the DNA of a horse to produce what we saw on that tape.”
“Can we do that?” I asked.
“If we set the Wayback Machine to last month I’d say no. But hey…” He clicked the remote, and the picture of the dead animal popped onto the screen. “Check it out. Transgenic science is growing exponentially. They have goats that can produce spider silk in their milk. They were given genes from the orb weaver spider. There’s a whole farm of them in Canada.”
“Jesus… that’s disturbing,” I said.
Hu seemed excited by it and was warming to his topic. “Actually, there are two really good ways of doing this. Either you transform embryonic stem cells growing in tissue culture with the desired DNA, or you inject the desired gene into the pronucleus of a fertilized animal egg. We’ve been doing it for a long time with mouse eggs. Very easy to work with.”
“I’ll bet you were an extremely creepy child,” I murmured. Hu shot me a malicious look. “Okay, okay… so we got someone out there making weirdo animals. Hooray for insanity. Why would someone send us this video and why do we give a shit? Seems like we have bigger fish to fry.”
Church said, “Before I get to that, speculate for me. If such an animal existed, or was created, who would want to hunt it? And why?”
“A hunt for something genuinely unique? That’s easy.”
“How so?”
“When I was in college I had a roommate whose father was a big-game hunter,” I said. “You know the type — a businessman by day whose hunter-gatherer gene isn’t as recessive as it should be. Point is, he paid for information on cats, and if there was a report of a particularly large one he and his friends would book a flight to some part of the U.S. or Mexico, or to some remote spot in a jungle somewhere. They went all over the world. Each man in his group would bring a small-caliber rifle with only three bullets. It was a challenge. The small caliber and the short ammunition increased the risk, especially against a big animal. When I went with my roommate to his dad’s house for Christmas there were five cat heads on the wall… all from enormous cats. Record-sized cats. His dream was to eventually go to Asia, but then tiger hunting became illegal.” I paused. “In our senior year his dad went away to a ‘conference,’ supposedly in Japan. He was gone for a couple of weeks. Five months after he returned a ‘friend’ gifted him with a mounted tiger head. My roommate told me about it. I never asked him if his father had somehow managed to find a way to hunt a tiger. My roommate was pissed because he didn’t believe — any more than I did — that his dad would have hung someone else’s trophy.”
Church nodded. “I take your point.”
Hu frowned. “I don’t. Are you saying that someone’s genetically designing unicorns just for trophy hunters?”
“Why not?” I said. “If this footage is as real as you say it is, then I think we were watching a private hunt. A public hunt would be all over the Net and in every paper. And considering how much my friend’s dad paid to hunt his large trophy cats… I can only imagine how much someone would pay to hunt a truly unique animal.”
“Yes,” Church said slowly. “The superrich would pay through the nose. Millions. Excellent assessment, Captain, and that ties in neatly with the men in that video. We ran facial recognition and voice pattern software on each of them and we think we’ve ID’d three of the five so far. One of them is Harold S. Sunderland, brother of Senator J. P. Sunderland of Texas. Harold is basically a rich layabout who lives off of family money. His brother, J.P., is the brains, and he’s one of the strongest proponents of biotech legislation. He’s pushing for earmarks for genetic research for agriculture. MindReader hasn’t found a direct financial connection between Sunderland and biotech profits, but in light of this video I’ll be very surprised if we don’t dig some up.”
“Again… so what?”
“J. P. Sunderland is a very close friend of Vice President William Collins.”
“Yikes,” I said. “That puts a weird topspin on this.”
“It does and we’re still sorting out how Sunderland’s interest in advanced genetics ties to the Vice President’s crusade against the DMS.”
“It might be a coincidence,” said Hu, but we both ignored him.
“Who’s the other guy in the video?”
“Ah,” said Church, “that’s the real issue. The man leading the hunt… what did you notice about him?”
I shrugged. “He’s a German guy trying to fake a South African accent. Or maybe a German who has been living in South Africa long enough for the accents to overlap. Who is he?”
“If he’s who he appears to be — and the recognition software came back with a high probability — then he’s the reason this video is more than a scientific curiosity, and it moves us into some very dangerous territory. We believe his name is Gunnar Haeckel. You won’t have heard of him, but once upon a time he belonged to a group of assassins known as the Brotherhood of the Scythe. Despite the rather melodramatic name, these were very heavy hitters. Also very isolated — the four members never met each other so they wouldn’t be able to identify one another if captured. Each of the assassins had a code name: Haeckel was North; the others were East, West, and South. These codes do not appear to relate to their homelands and may have no significance at all except to hide their actual names. They operated for a few years during the latter part of the Cold War. We know for certain that three of the Brotherhood were terminated.”