Soon
after Caracara begins, there is a knock at the Manhattan
apartment of Rachel Sutherland (played by Natasha Henstridge),
an employee at the American Museum of Natural History who
keeps a pet caracara. (The bird in the film, however, is
a hawk, not a caracara.) The two men flash FBI badges and
offer her $100 per day to engage in surveillance on a suspected
criminal for a week or so. After initial hesitation, she
naively agrees. Within a couple of days, a third man appears--David
J. McMillan (played by Jonathan Schaech). One evening,
the first two tie up and gag Rachel and then change the
surveillance telescope into a sniper rifle; when McMillan
arrives, he kills the other two men, and Rachel struggles
to get free. While McMillan is just outside on the balcony
ledge, to get a better view of a particular apartment across
the way, she forces the cage against the balcony door.
McMillan is then unable to return to her apartment in order
to fire the rifle, which is aimed at a party held in honor
of Nelson Mandella, so he climbs to another ledge to escape.
During the rest of the film, McMillan hunts down anyone
who knows what he looks like, including Rachel, her best
friend, her mother, and those who hired him, while presumably
continuing to track Mandella. The trail of those who hired
McMillan turns out to be a pyramid, presumably headed by
Edmund Mkambati (played by Roy Lewis), a South African
dissident who is a friend but rival of Mandella. While
there are twists and turns in identifying who hires McMillan,
NYPD's Jack Pelligrino (played by Michael Filipowich),
aided by Rachel, simultaneously tries to track down McMillan.
Directed by Graeme Clifford, the film is in sharp contrast
with the "lone gunman" theory of conspiracy that
revolves around American victims of assassination. MH
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