“But Haeckel got away?” I asked.
“No. Gunnar Haeckel is supposed to be dead.”
“Please don’t tell me he’s a zombie,” I said.
Church ignored that. “Haeckel and the Brotherhood were players in some bad business that was concluded during the last years of the Cold War. They were the muscle for a group with an equally cryptic name — the Cabal — which was made up of expatriated Germans, many of whom were Nazis who had escaped the postwar trials. Haeckel was the son of a Nazi scientist, and though he was born after the war he was a ruthless killer with a lot of notches on his gun. Until now we believed that he was permanently taken off the board.”
“ ‘Taken off the board’?” Hu asked.
“Killed,” I said. To Church, “How good’s your intel on the hit on Haeckel?”
His eyes glittered behind his tinted lenses. “Personal knowledge.”
That hung in the air and we all looked at it for what it was.
“There are three possibilities,” I said. “Four, if Haeckel has an identical twin.”
“He doesn’t.”
“A son?”
“His only known child was a girl who died at age two in a car accident in which Haeckel’s wife died. Haeckel was a suspect in the deaths. The man in the video looks to be about fifty. If Haeckel is alive, then he would be fifty-one next April. Has to be the same man.”
“Okay, then either the recognition software is wrong, but from what you’ve told me that’s unlikely, so that means the hit wasn’t as successful as you thought it was. You say you have personal knowledge… could you be wrong?”
“I have a copy of his autopsy report. It includes detailed photos of the entire postmortem. As soon as the NSA is off our backs I’ll forward a diplomatic request to South Africa for an exhumation of Haeckel’s grave. Ditto on a request for any tissue samples that might still be stored in the hospital in Cape Town where the autopsy was performed.” Church sat back in his chair. “I can’t account for why he appears to be alive and well in this video. At least one of the men in the hunting party was carrying a late-model weapon, so we know this isn’t old footage. Until we know more we’re going to go on the assumption that somehow Haeckel survived. Our real concern is what he represented. The Cabal posed a very grave threat to humanity. The list of crimes attributed to them is considerable, though most of their atrocities were perpetrated at three or even four removes by using terrorist organizations funded by layers of dummy companies.”
“What were they after?”
“Ethnic cleansing for a start, and their fingerprints are all over some of the most violent racial conflicts of the last half of the twentieth century. They had vast resources and privately funded insurgents, rebels, coups… they even sent covert ops teams in to deliberately pollute water sources throughout Africa and Israel. They’re suspected of having helped the spread of diseases that target third world cultures. There were several cases where they funded both sides of a genocidal conflict because it served their goals to rack up bodies of anyone who was not ‘pure.’ ”
“So… we’re talking the Nazi extermination ideal here. Kill the Jews, Gypsies, blacks… anyone who wasn’t a blond-haired, blue eyed son of Odin.”
Church nodded. “The death of Adolf Hitler hardly put an end to genocide. It just became more politically useful to world governments to keep it off the public radar, to call it something else. To blame terrorists and splinter groups.” Church’s voice was uncharacteristically bitter. Couldn’t blame him a bit. “But understand me, Captain, this long ago ceased to be part of German culture or even the Aryan ideal. Germany stands with us in the war on ethnic genocide. No… these men and women are a shadow nation unto themselves. They no longer want to remake a nation; they want to remake the world.”
“And Haeckel was a button man for these assholes?”
“Was. Possibly still is.” Church adjusted his glasses and his tone shifted back to neutral.
“And I think I get why that video has you so jacked. If that animal is the product of some kind of newfangled genetic design, and if Haeckel’s working for whoever made it, and if they are these same assholes — this Cabal — then that means that they’ve ducked your punch, been working in secret for a lot of years, and are screwing around with cutting-edge genetics.”
“Yes,” Church said slowly.
Dr. Hu smiled at me. “I told you that video would blow you away.”
“Yeah, glad you’re happy about it, Doc.”
“Hey,” he said, pushing up his sleeve to show his light brown skin, “I’m on the hit list, too. But you have to admire the scope of it. The imagination of it.”
“No, I fucking well don’t,” I said.
Church said, “When you get back to the Warehouse I’ll give you a more complete account of the Cabal and the efforts to dismantle it. In the meantime it’s important to know that we have only two links to Gunnar Haeckel, and Haeckel is our only link to the Cabal — if it indeed still exists. The first connection is this video, though we still don’t know who sent it, or why. The second is whatever is stored at Deep Iron. It might be nothing, but considering that Jigsaw went off the grid while running this same mission, I think it’s safe to say that there will be a connection.”
“You make anything out of the other stuff… the comment about the ‘Extinction Wave’?”
“No, but we’ll do a MindReader search on it. Hard to search for something without more to put in the search argument. Otherwise I’d Google it.”
“Did you Google it?”
He ignored the question.
There was a soft bing! and I heard Hanler’s voice: “Buckle up, Captain. We’re making our descent.”
“Mission objectives?” I asked Church.
“Your first priority is to locate and secure whatever the Haeckel family stored there. Secondary mission is to locate Jigsaw Team.”
From the bitter lines on his face I could tell that he didn’t like the order of priorities any more than I did.
Church said, “We’re operating without support here. I’d prefer to have you met by SWAT, HRT, and the National Guard, but those are calls I can’t make under the present circumstances. You have Sims and Rabbit. I was able to get a technical support vehicle out to them, which means you’ll have weapons and body armor but no advanced equipment. And we have no other boots on the ground.”
“Three of us on a mission in which a dozen operators went missing? Swell.”
“It’s asking a lot of you, but believe me when I tell you that this is of the first importance. There may be opposition that we don’t know about.”
“If we have a new enemy, boss… they may have some opposition they don’t know about.”
Church gave me a long, considering look.
“Good hunting, Captain,” he said.
Chapter Thirty
Clive Monroe looked nothing at all like what he was, but he looked exactly like what he had been. He wore a gray city suit with a chalk stripe, polished brogans, and a bowler hat. His clothes at least looked the part of an investment banker down from London to have a flutter on an afternoon of jump races at Sandown. He even had an umbrella in the car and a precisely trimmed mustache. He could have been on a poster for British business.