The Dragon Factory

enough to make out words, but enough to get a sense that there were several people with the cameraman. After a minute or two of this the image changed as several people passed by the cameraman to lead the way through the jungle. I counted five white men, all of them in their forties or early fifties. All of them fit but not hard. Except the man leading the pack, a stern-faced guy who looked like he was carved from granite. The rest looked like they had muscles courtesy of LA Fitness. Good dentists, expensive tans. Everyone carried expensive hunting rifles, top-of- the-line, with all sorts of doodads. The stern guy’s rifle was of the same quality, but all he had on it was a good scope. His gun looked worn but immaculate.

“Big-game hunters,” I observed.

Hu just smiled.

The group of men burst through the wall of foliage into a wider trail that paid out into a broad clearing that had a barren slash-and-burn quality to it. The blackened stumps of vegetation barely reached to the ankles of the men’s boots.

There was a few minutes of them walking, and then they stopped to drink from canteens. The sound was off for most of this, though I caught snatches of a few words. “Africa,” a couple of racial invectives, and then what sounded like “Extinction Wave,” but they were both joking and I lost both ends of that sentence as the sound cut out.

“This sure as hell isn’t Denver,” I said. “Looks like the Brazilian rain forest. Clear-cut land for cattle farming, probably owned by a fast-food chain.”

“McMoo,” agreed Hu. “We identified two of the bird species in the video.” He froze the picture and touched the screen. “That parrot there is an Amazona aestiva-or Blue-fronted Amazon-which is definitely indigenous to Brazil.”

He restarted the video and we watched as the men fanned out in a line facing a point far across the clearing and off-camera.

“Right over there!” one of them said, and it took me a half second to process that he’d said, “Gleich da druben!” The others shouted and then the sound cut out again.

“That’s German,” Hu said.

“I know. But one of the other guys-the one with the Australian bush hat-rattled off something in Afrikaans… though it sounds like he has an accent under the South African. Might also be a German.”

The five men and our unseen cameraman were still focused on the spot way off across the field. Suddenly one of them pointed.

“There it is!” he said in English. A British accent. “We found it!”

“Gelukwensing!” cried the South African. Congratulations.

They all gaped, staring in stupid shock at whatever they saw. A couple of them actually had their mouths hanging open.

“Guns!” the Brit hissed, and everyone raised their weapons.

“Not yet, not yet!” growled the South African in thickly accented English. “Wait until they flush it this way.”

“Good God A’mighty,” drawled one of the men in a thick Cajun accent. “Will you look at that!”

“Hou jy daarvan, meneer?” murmured the South African, then said it in English: “Do you like it, gentlemen?”

“It’s beautiful,” murmured the fifth man. His accent was pure West Texas.

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

Chihuahua, Mexico

Sixteen weeks ago

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