The transport went out of Switzerland at three in the morning under a manifest that said agricultural research, sterile insect program, and crossed into Honduran airspace at the lowest legal altitude.
Nick rode in the cargo hold with his back against the wall and a hand on the metal of Spartacus’s crate. Inside the crate, by the small breathing he had learned to read, Spartacus was awake. Spartacus had been awake since takeoff. The other four crates held the four other raptors and the two spitter crates and an eighth crate that bore, in stenciled black, the word ANKY. Joyce had been pleased with the addition. Joyce had said the buyers were going to enjoy the variety.
The plane had a side door. The side door, on the run-in to the drop zone, was going to open.
Nick had jumped out of side doors of planes for a living, on and off, since he had been twenty-three.
Spartacus, in his crate, had not.
The drop zone was a clearing west of the Aguilar compound by three kilometers of low canopy and one ridge. The jumpmaster, a Russian by the patches on his shoulder, gave Nick a hand-signal at the door. Nick gave a hand-signal back. He stepped to the rim. He saw, below him, the canopy of mahogany and ceiba and palm in the kind of green a satellite photograph never quite captures, and he stepped off and was, for thirty seconds, the only man in the cargo plane’s mission file.
Then the crates went out.
They went out on parachutes the engineers at Grendel had spec’d to two-thousand-pound payloads with quick-release harnesses on the underside. The parachutes opened in white columns above the canopy. The crates fell at a controlled rate. The raptors came down on their own legs, not in the crates. The crates dropped first as decoys and the raptors, in body armor with the parachute harnesses sewn into the armor itself, dropped second, and the armor took the shock.
Five raptors. Two spitters. One ankylosaur in his own oversized chute. A bouquet of parachutes coming down out of the canopy at first light.
In a command building three klicks from the drop zone, the buyers watched the monitors.
The Russian observer said, with the flat impatience of a Russian observer used to better demonstrations, “What is big deal? Dropping weapons from plane.”
Then the camera on Orestes’s shoulder swung, and the buyers saw, on the monitor, a black-scaled chest in flak armor under a parachute, and a clawed foot coming into the bottom of frame. A collective gasp went up.
Joyce, at the front of the room, was insufferable.
“That, gentlemen,” he said, “is the big deal.”
He was, in his element, a man Nick would have admired in any other context. The black field jacket. The hand on the small of the back. The smile. The pacing. He was selling.
Nick landed in the clearing on his own chute. He cut the harness. He killed the chute with two minutes of careful packing and a small cut from a folding knife. He went to the ATV that had been pre-positioned for him, the keys taped to the underside of the seat, and he started the engine and motored back through the logging road to the village where the headquarters had been set up.
A second SUV came into the gravel lot ten minutes after his, behind him, out of his line of sight.
In the headquarters, the buyers were mesmerized.
“How do the bio readouts look?” Nick said, walking past Joyce.
“The heart-rates went through the roof when we dumped them out of the plane,” Sherman said, watching meters. “But they’re back in predator mode.”
Nick stopped.
He had seen, at one of the monitors, a knot of half a dozen narco-looking characters in chains and shades and tropical-weight suits. They were watching the feed. They were nodding to each other.
“Who are they.”
“Those,” Joyce said, “are the gentlemen who hired us.”
“They look just like the bunch we are trying to take out.”
“A rival group. They’ve made a deal with the government, and their end of it starts with eliminating Pepe Aguilar.”
“We’re working for drug-runners.”
Joyce shrugged. “An unproven product. The need for a great deal of discretion. And they were the highest bidders.”
He nodded toward a hard-looking American who had crossed to them. “All the major players have sent somebody to observe. You know Andy Slade.”
Slade, who had a face Nick remembered from a checkpoint on a border he was not going to name, nodded.
“Harris.”
“You still in?”
“Consulting.” Slade nodded at the monitors. “These things know what they’re doing?”
“Only too well.”
The tracking screen on the wall showed seven blinking red dots moving in a slow precise approach toward the rectangular swatch of green that was the Aguilar compound.
“Approaching outer perimeter,” the tracking technician said.
He pointed to an eighth blinking dot, a long way behind the others.
“This one is lagging.”
The ankylosaur. He was not built for sprint. He was built for last, and large.
Joyce was about to make a remark about this. He never made the remark.
Zeiss came in through the back door of the headquarters at speed. He crossed the room in five strides and put his lips at the Baron’s ear and said something that, Nick saw across the room, shifted the color in the Baron’s face from its usual flush to a deeper redder note. The Baron’s hand closed at the rail of the table. The Baron signaled Joyce.
Joyce went to him. Joyce listened. Joyce’s face went, by a fraction, the color of a man who has paid a great deal of money for a thing that has come back wrong.
“Excellent.” His voice was not, exactly, the same voice he had been using a moment ago. “Saw what?”
“Hoptoads,” the Baron said. “He gives us genes from hoptoads.”
Nick saw it land. He saw Joyce understand what Joyce had been told.
Joyce turned his head. He looked across the headquarters. He found Nick’s eyes. He held them. The smile that came was not the half-smile.
“Stay with Harris and the woman,” Joyce said to Zeiss, in a voice the whole room could hear. “The slightest sign of sabotage or escape. And you kill them.”
“My pleasure,” Zeiss said.
Maya, by the side door, looked at Nick. The look held, briefly, the kind of bright alarmed brightness an animal’s eye gets when the animal has been promised, by something it has been training, a certain small kindness.
She put the brightness away.
She nodded.
In the field three klicks east, on the outer perimeter of the Aguilar compound, Spartacus paused at a sentry tree.
He sniffed the air. He grunted, low. He waved Casper and Pollux forward with a flick of his head. Pollux dropped to his belly and slithered out across the leaf litter to a tree at the edge of a treeline. He raised his head. He spat.
The plug of black mucus took out the lens of a surveillance camera mounted in the tree.
In the narco surveillance room, two outer perimeter screens went black. A narco-guard leaned over the desk man’s shoulder.
“Qué pasó.”
“Acabamos de perder el imagen.”
“VĂste algo.”
“Creo que vi un legarto.”
“Un legarto.”
The desk man spread his arms to indicate size.
“Un legarto grandote.”
The narco-guard reached for the radio.
The radio stayed in its cradle.
A perimeter guard at the edge of the jungle, walking sentry, had stopped at a tree to light a cigarette. A spitter, hanging upside down from a branch by its tail, swung into his face. The man’s last expression in this life was an expression of mild irritated puzzlement at having a piece of jungle hardware appear inches from his nose, and then the jaws closed on the face and the face was gone.
The deinonychus passed the body, hopping in single file, like kangaroos, over a two-foot trip wire strung between trees.
Inside the perimeter, four more narco squads were converging in the wrong directions on the wrong cameras. The deinonychus moved through the trees in chameleon green-brown. They did not run, yet. They were waiting for the spitters to finish.
In the headquarters, on the monitors, the buyers were watching it all happen.
Nick was standing with Maya near the door. Zeiss had a Sig at hip height with the muzzle pointed at Nick’s lower back. The Baron had not, since hearing the word hoptoads, moved.
Joyce, in front of the bank of monitors, made a small gesture with his right hand, and the gesture meant play through. The buyers were watching. The buyers were going to see the demonstration. The settling of accounts with Mr. Harris and the woman would happen after.
Nick, in his earpiece, heard a small voice he had been waiting forty minutes to hear.
“Objective secured.” Overton’s voice. Soft. From a long way south. “Hammond has the can. The real one. Confirm.”
“Confirm,” Nick subvocalized.
“Going dark.”
The earpiece clicked.
He turned, very slightly, and met Maya’s eye, and gave her, in the smallest of motions, a single nod. She read it. She returned the nod.
In the jungle, three klicks east, Spartacus crossed the inner perimeter with the spitters and three deinonychus behind him.
The compound was, by his unreckoned watch, ninety seconds from going up.
In Switzerland, in a freezer in a town in the canton called Draxburg, a Grendel scientist named Wetzel was, at this exact moment, finishing the third of eight DNA sequencing runs and was, at this exact moment, calling his supervisor on a line that the Baron had had patched, by a private arrangement with the canton, to the headquarters in Honduras.
The line rang.
The Baron picked up.
He listened. He nodded once. He set the receiver down. He turned his head and looked, for a second, at Joyce, and Joyce gave the smallest nod back, the nod of a chief of staff confirming what a chief of staff had not wanted to confirm. The Baron straightened the cuffs of his jacket. He walked across the headquarters to where Nick stood with Maya at the side door.
He stopped six feet away.
He smiled the small twenty-three-Baron smile. The flush in his cheeks was deeper than it had been on the parapet, deeper than at the dinner, deeper than at the courtyard with the crossbow. The smile, on top of the flush, was a face that, in this lighting, was not a face that wanted to negotiate.
“Mr. Harris.”
“Sir.”
“You have, it seems, sent us a present of frogs.”
“I figured once I had the can. Somebody was going to come after it.”
“Yes.”
The Baron looked at Maya. He looked back at Nick. He took out a small ivory toothpick from a chased silver case in his vest pocket and, with a small careful motion, began to clean the corner of an upper molar.
“In the canton,” the Baron said, “we have a saying. Wer einen Schweizer betrügt, der trinkt nicht zweimal aus demselben Brunnen. He who tries to deceive a Swiss does not drink from the same well twice.” He smiled. “I am paraphrasing. It is more poetic in the original.”
“I’m sure.”
“Zeiss.”
“Sir.”
“In the truck.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Baron turned and walked back to the bank of monitors. Joyce stood at the rail with his hands behind his back. The buyers were watching the slaughter beginning at the Aguilar compound on the screens, transfixed. The Baron resumed his place at the front of the room. He set his hand on the rail. He spoke to the buyers in the calm clear English of the international weapons industry.
“My friends,” he said, “the demonstration is going beautifully. But you must, I am afraid, excuse me for ten minutes. A small staff matter.”
He crossed the room without looking back at Nick.
Zeiss took Nick’s elbow with a free hand. The Sig went into the small of Nick’s back. Maya, behind, was at Nick’s shoulder. Two other men, men in dark uniforms Nick had not seen before, came in through the side door. One took Maya by the elbow. The other walked behind them.
They went out the side door of the headquarters into the bright Honduran morning.
A grey panel truck was at the back of the building. It was the truck the Tangier raptors had ridden in. It had been repainted on the way over.
“Get in,” Zeiss said.
Nick went up the ramp into the back of the truck. Maya behind him. The men behind her. The ramp closed.
The truck started.
The truck began to drive away from the headquarters along the logging road that ran south out of the village toward the river.
In the dim of the panel truck, Nick met Maya’s eye. He kept his mouth shut. So did she.
Above them, in the canopy on either side of the logging road, the leaves moved.
It might have been wind. It was not wind.