He looked at my hand as if I was offering to beat him to death with it. After a few seconds’ hesitation he took my hand and shook it.
“What about the Jakoby family?” I asked. “The Twins. SAM said that they were involved. He told me that they were the ones who genetically engineered the unicorn for the hunt and they treat Cyrus as if he’s their prisoner rather than their father. SAM doesn’t know them that well, but he said that they have a lab somewhere and that Cyrus has been trying to find it for years. The Twins call their lab the Dragon Factory.”
“Wonder if they’ve engineered a dragon?” Hu mused.
“There was nothing in the recovered records that gives any indication of the location of the Dragon Factory,” Church said. “And MindReader has not been able to pin down a recent location for either Paris or Hecate Jakoby. They were last seen at an art show in London a week ago. We have nine of their known residences under surveillance by police in four countries. At this moment, beyond providing animals for the hunts we don’t know the scale or depth of their involvement. We’re poised to seize all of their known holdings and assets, however, but that move won’t be made until we’re sure it won’t interfere with our attempts to find that trigger device.”
“And their dad?”
“There are no photos of Cyrus Jakoby anywhere. No personal details of any kind other than when the Twins mentioned him in passing during press interviews. If he’s being kept as a prisoner, then it might explain why he’s so conspicuously off the radar. There was a sensational news story about the birth of the Twins, but none of the papers carried photos of the father.”
“Sounds like he doesn’t want his face publicly known,” I said. “That squares with the assumption that ‘Jakoby’ is not his real name. Could be anything from a drug lord on the lam to someone in witness protection.”
“It covers too much ground for easy speculation. Bottom line is that we don’t know who he is, and it is remarkable that MindReader cannot dig up a single piece of verification on him.”
“If he’s tied to the Cabal, could someone have used that old system—”
“Pangaea,” he supplied.
“—to erase records of him?”
“Yes. And considering the connections to the Cabal that already exist in this case I think that’s what has happened.”
“How about Otto Wirths?”
“Same thing. Nothing. The names are probably aliases. However, there is another possible tie to the death camps. Eduard Wirths, the senior medical officer at Auschwitz, was nicknamed ‘Otto’ as a child. Some of his close adult friends still called him that, though in all the official records he went by Eduard.”
“So, you’re thinking that Otto is what? Son, grandson? Named after Eduard’s nickname?”
“It’s worth considering.”
Hu said, “Or he could be a clone of Eduard Wirths. Hey, don’t look at me like that, Ledger. If we’re playing with clones, then we have to factor them into all of this. And it’s been thought of before. You know, The Boys from Brazil. Ira Levin book. Movie with Gregory Peck—”
“They were cloning Hitler.”
“Why not? Maybe someone’s cloning the whole upper echelon of the Nazi Party. Or a whole army of Hitlers!”
“Don’t even joke,” I said.
“Okay, but if we run into an army of short guys with toothbrush mustaches and undescended testicles don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I shook my head and turned to Church. “How’s the Kid?”
Church did not answer right away. “We’re doing some additional testing.”
“I want him to go with me when we raid the Deck.”
“Why?”
“He used to live there. We don’t have time to learn the layout and intricacies on our own. I don’t like taking a kid into a combat situation, God knows, but we’re short on advantages.”
Church nodded. “We can wire you with a camera and have the boy online with you from the TOC. But he doesn’t go into the field.” He paused. “I don’t entirely trust the boy,” he said.
“Why the hell not? If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be anywhere with this.”
“I’m sensible of the debt we — and the world — owe him. But his connection to the key players behind this makes me uneasy. We can discuss it more later. Dr. Sanchez is with him at the moment.”
“Rudy’s back?”
“Yes. He flew in early this morning at my request. He’s been with the boy for several hours now. I’d like to hear his assessment on the boy before I—”
The door burst open and Bug rushed in. He was grinning from ear to ear. Grace was a half step behind him. She shot me a quick, excited look, but it had nothing to do with last night.
“We have the buggers,” she said. “Captain Smythe from the Ark Royal just called. There was a small plane in a hangar at the Hive. One of Smythe’s pilots searched the plane and checked the controls and mileage, gas usage — the lot.”
Bug said, “I matched the mileage log against traffic control records, using Arizona as a probable location. I think we found the Deck. It’s definitely Arizona. A nowhere spot near Gila Bend, just over the border from Mexico.”
“Never heard of it,” said Hu. “Are you sure?”
Bug slapped a satellite printout onto the table. It showed a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a desert landscape. Smack dab in the center was a structure with twelve sides.
“Son of a bitch,” Hu said.
I clapped Bug on the shoulder. “Outstanding!”
Church said as he got to his feet, “Captain Ledger, Major Court-land… get your teams ready to roll. Alert all stations. I’ll get on the horn and find us an E-bomb.” His face was hard and colder than I’d ever seen it. “We’re going to war.”
Chapter Ninety-Eight
I was alone in a world of heat shimmers, scorpions, biting flies, and nothing else. The Sonoran Desert may not be the Sahara, but it has its moments. The temperature at one o’clock in the afternoon was 122 degrees, and there was not so much as a wisp of cloud between its furnace heat and me except camouflaged BDUs and a thin film of sunscreen. Bunny and Top were in the air-conditioned back of an FBI van that was painted to look like a Comcast Cable TV truck out on a dirt road that led from nowhere to nowhere. Grace and Alpha Team were somewhere in a Black Hawk helicopter on a mesa fifteen miles to the northwest. Somewhere up in the wild blue yonder was the 358th Fighter Squadron, ready to rain hell and damnation down on the Deck if I gave the word. One of those planes carried an E-bomb. The upside was that we could get one; the downside was that my own electronics might not survive it. The ruggedized unit I had in my pack was supposed to be able to withstand the EMP, but as has been pointed out to me so many times since joining the G, it was a piece of equipment built by the lowest bidder.
A westerly breeze did nothing but push hot air past barrel cactus, water-starved junipers, jimson weed, and tumbleweed. I shimmied through the hard pan to the lip of a ridge that looked down on a small cluster of buildings nestled in a shallow basin between two nondescript ranges of small mountains. According to the Pima County Assessor’s Office, the buildings were commercially zoned for “scientific research and development.” The IRS told Bug that all appropriate taxes had been paid by Natural White, a company doing research on a cure for “vitiligo,” a pigmentation disorder in which melanocytes — the cells that make pigment — in the skin are destroyed. As a result, white patches appear on the skin in different parts of the body.