Ten minutes later Ellison was playing a video file on a giant monitor while half a dozen men in business clothes and a single woman with frosted gray-blond hair and a neat burgundy suit all stared into the screen. The image was green and murky: the waters of the Bering Sea tended to be somewhat cloudy from all the plankton. Light fell from behind, casting the figure as a dim silhouette. It was impossible to make out the color of the girl’s long scrolling hair or the features of her face. But the important part was clear enough: this was a girl’s head and torso, shifting at the hips into a sinuous, whiplashing tail with broad, sensitively curling fins. She appeared for only an instant, and Ellison tapped a few keys on his laptop. Now the video played again and again, slowed down to a twentieth of its original speed. The whiplash of the tail became a dreamlike snaking, and the girl turned her head to the surface before vanishing upward. Then she was back in the bottom corner of the frame: her tail snaked again, her head turned again, and again she flicked away . . . Ellison had watched this tape a thousand times, but once again he was mesmerized by the strange beauty of the image, the heartbreaking grace of the mermaid’s movements.

It was appalling to think that Dorian Hurst was—there was no other word for it—dating one of these creatures. But Ellison had to admit to himself that the mermaid on the screen was completely irresistible. If he were in Dorian’s place . . .

“Be simple enough to fake something like this,” the Secretary of Defense snarled. It made his jowls quiver. His stiff white hair looked like cake frosting, and there was an unpleasant dullness, an obvious absence of feeling, in the hard glint of his eyes.

“We’ve already checked for signs of digital manipulation, Mr. Secretary,” a young, fidgety man with a sky blue tie objected. “It appears to be legitimate.”

“You don’t need digital manipulation to pay some girl to tie on a fake tail and go swimming. They have these girls in Florida, as a tourist attraction. Babes in tanks.” The Secretary of Defense sounded somewhere between snide and impatient. “This all you got, Agent Ellison?”

Ellison tapped again, zeroing in on the section of the footage that showed the tail, blowing it up so that it filled the whole screen. “With all due respect, Secretary Moreland,” Ellison said, trying to stay calm, “a girl wearing a mermaid costume still has knees.”

“And your point is?” Secretary Moreland droned. The woman in the burgundy suit was quicker on the uptake, though. She let out a sudden cry and jumped from her chair, eyes round with shock, pointing at the screen.