Cyrus opened his mouth to reply, but Paris jumped in. “We understand that planned obsolescence is part of any sensible manufacturing system, but this is way too fast. We’re expected to turn over comprehensive reports for six field tests, and just based on the preliminary reports we’ve shared with our clients the aggression factor has caused concern. We could bullshit our way through a three or four percent increase in violent behavior, throw in some mumbo jumbo about the natural variables of transgenics and so on, but we’re talking about a fifteen-point-seven increase in aggression between test one and test three.”
Cyrus pursed his lips. “Ah,” he said, “I see your point. That’s higher than our worst-case computer models.”
“By almost eight percent,” said Hecate. “With a comparable drop in higher reasoning. We can’t fudge the math on that kind of behavioral shift.”
“Is this just in the GMOs?”
Genetically modified organisms were the easiest to bring to market, but anomalous behavior and other gene-clash problems tended to come at them out of the blue. The much more stable genetically engineered organisms were ideal, but they had to be grown from embryos and raised to full maturity. For the Berserkers that was a fifteen- to twenty-year span. The Twins had chosen the faster route of making modifications through the introduction of viral vectors carrying exogenous pieces of DNA. It was quicker, but the likelihood of unexpected mutations was much higher.
“Of course,” she said, “but we don’t have GEOs mature enough for field-testing.”
Cyrus leaned back in his seat, chin on his breast, and pondered the problem. Hecate and Paris waited while Cyrus thought it through.
“I doubt you’ll see these problems in the genetically engineered animals. Different blueprint, different results. But in the modified animals . . . it’s difficult to control random gene incompatibility. Even if you suppress a gene, it doesn’t remove it and unwanted traits can emerge.”
The Twins waited. They knew this, but interrupting Cyrus was not a path toward obtaining his cooperation. Cyrus chewed on it for a while, his eyes narrowed and focused inward.
“What steps have you taken?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” Hecate said. “The Somalia test was just last night completed and our people are still crunching the numbers.”
Paris nodded. “We’ve been playing with some ideas, though. A time-release dopamine dampener that would kick in just as the mission started. By the time the Berserkers were in full attack we’re hoping to cause a down-spike in the dopamine to start a cool-off.”
Cyrus made a face. “That’s a Band-Aid, not a cure. Besides, none of the dopamine dampeners we could use are reliable. Nothing has been field tested on anything remotely like a Berserker. Plus there’s adrenaline rush and other factors. You’d burn through six months of chemistry trying to get the dose right, and then another six working out how to make the dose appropriate to each individual Berserker.” He shook his head. “Nice theory, but impractical. Medication isn’t your answer.”
Paris made a disgusted face. “We know, Alpha . . . that’s why we’re here. We have fifty ideas, but none of them are practical in the time we have left. We have contracts with hard delivery dates. We burned through our swing time early this year when we had unexpected effects of cognitive dissonance. The buyers want their products now.”
“Fuck the buyers!” snapped Cyrus. Both of the tiger-hounds stiffened at his sides. “And fuck your salespeople if they can’t figure out how to put positive spin on this.”
“Our people can—”
“Your people are idiots, Paris!” When Cyrus was angry his carefully acquired American accent slipped and the more staccato German accent emerged. “Otto could sell that product for single use and get nearly the money you two are getting for extended use and ownership.” The Twins flinched and Paris looked away. “What’s your current guarantee?”
“Eighteen to twenty-four months at ninety percent operational efficiency,” Hecate said quietly.
Cyrus stared for a moment, then smiled. “You gave a two-year window on a transgenic soldier? I’m crazy, my young gods, but I think you two are crazier by an order of magnitude.”
Despite their best efforts, the Twins flushed with shame.
In a small voice Paris said, “We needed a buyer who could finance—”
“Don’t!” growled Cyrus. “Don’t embarrass yourselves with an excuse. You’re supposed to be above that sort of thing and you should at least try and act the part.”
Isis let out a low growl that was eloquent in its meaning, but this time it was directed only at Paris. Hecate noted the shift.
Cyrus steepled his fingers. “When you made that deal you were cash poor. Is that still the case?”
“Well,” Hecate said, “. . . no. The hunting business alone has brought in over two hundred million and the—”
“Then, as I said, fuck the customers. You tell them what the product will and will not do. Don’t discuss it with them. Tell them.”
“Yes, Alpha,” said Paris.
“Yes, Alpha,” said Hecate.
Cyrus gave them a broad fatherly smile. “Now, my young gods, let’s see what we can do to solve all your problems.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Over Denver airspace
Saturday, August 28, 10:55 A.M.
Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 5 minutes E.S.T.
I leaned forward in my chair and watched as Hu pressed the play button and the forest came alive on the video screen.
“The sound cuts in and out—mostly out.”
“Can you clean it up? Run it through some filters or something?”
“This is the enhanced version,” Hu said. “From the angle and the image jump we figure it to be a cheap lapel camera. No lavaliere mike to extend the pickup. The rustle of clothes and the breathing of the cameraman kill most of the sound anyway.”
The camera image changed as the person with the lapel camera began to move forward through intensely dense tropical foliage. Occasionally we’d get snatches of sound, mostly of the cameraman’s labored breathing or the whisk of big leaves as they brushed across his chest. We heard a few muffled snatches of conversation. Not 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 cl
earing 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 drüben!” 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 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.
When his contact, a sweaty Portuguese man named DaCosta, finally showed, Veder didn’t complain, didn’t comment. He waited until DaCosta sat down and ordered a beer. When the beer arrived and the waiter had gone, DaCosta opened the conversation.
“You had a pleasant trip?”
Veder said nothing.
From experience he knew that DaCosta would jabber on for several minutes, complaining about the heat or the inconvenience of travel, bragging about golf scores or women, expounding on the peso and the dollar. Veder let him ramble. To engage him on even the smallest point would invite a conversational tangent that would drag this out even further. When DaCosta finally wound down, the fat little man shifted from chatty tourist to businessman. He looked around to make sure there was no one in easy listening distance of their table and then reached into an inner pocket of his white tropical suit to produce an envelope from which he removed several four-by-six-inch color prints. He placed them one by one on the table as if he was casting a fortune. There were seven faces. Five men, two women, each of them middle-aged or older.