So no informant ever spoke them. Buddha, by contrast, routinely used enough names to fill a small hard drive. Tiger was infamous for a number of things—her outrageous figure and thick mane of gold and black stripes only a small portion of that list. Tracker presumably had a name, but the only one he answered to was tribal, and that appeared on no birth certificate. Both were freelancers who had worked with the Cross crew many times, including a “down south” job that cost Rhino the tip of one finger and added a teenage death-match veteran who came to be called Princess. All this preceded an off-the-books government unit tasked with capturing a “specimen” of some entity that could apparently kill without leaving a trace of its own presence…although the skull and spine torn from the bodies of the victims had become its terrifying signature. If being imperiously questioned by the slender, ice-eyed blond man seated in a captain’s chair at the front of a rolling motor home made him nervous, the unremarkable man wearing a grayish urban duster gave no sign.
