Hired to Hunt Yourself

Bob is leading a double life, and one of his identities is instructed to spy on, capture, or kill the other.

This can occur in a number of ways: When an organization discovers it has been infiltrated and The Mole is given the task of uncovering the spy; or when a superhero's Secret Identity is instructed to find out the identity of his heroic alter-ego; or when a Career Killer who uses an alias is hired to kill his civilian identity, or when a detective or police officer is assigned to solve a crime that he himself committed.

Someone in this situation may find himself having to maintain a careful balance. He can't actually kill/capture/unmask himself; but being too intentionally incompetent might either cause suspicion to fall on him or else get another man assigned to the job — someone who won't hold back from completing it.

Sometimes a person might intentionally set himself up in this situation, using his position to Destroy the Evidence and cover his tracks. Other times, he may not even realize it himself, in which case the discovery that he's actually been hunting himself will be The Reveal.

See also Detective Mole, Mole in Charge.

This trope is sometimes a SPOILER.

Examples of Hired to Hunt Yourself include:

Anime and Manga

• Death Note: L, the world's best detective, maintains several other detective identities. When someone hires the world's second- or third-best detective to uncover L's identity, they're really hiring him. Light also does this, joining the anti-Kira task force to put him in a position to better cover up the fact that he is Kira.
• A brief aside in Kino no Tabi concerns a sentient tank which has unknowingly been tasked with hunting down and destroying itself.
• An early Lupin III manga chapter featured Lupin paying an assassin to take down a crime lord. What the assassin didn't know was that he had multiple personalities, and that the crime lord in question was one of them.
• Early on in Ranma One Half, before Shampoo joined the regular cast, the amazon put Akane through forced amnesia to make her forget about Ranma. She agrees to give Ranma the cure if he does one thing for her- kill the female Ranma! (This was before Shampoo learned of Ranma's curse) Ranma gets her to compromise by changing the demand from 'kill' to 'beat up'.

Comic Books

• In Lobo vs. Mask, Lobo ended up unknowingly hunting himself due to a time loop caused by the Mask.

Film

• A Scanner Darkly: Bob Arctor, codenamed "Fred", a narc, goes undercover to find a drug dealer. His superiors, who don't know his true identity so as to protect him from corrupt cops, tell him that Bob is their prime suspect (mistaking money he received for successful tips for money earned from the sale of illegal drugs) and assign "Fred" to spy on himself. The screwy part is that the effects of the drug make it so that "Fred" forgets that he's Bob, so he starts to suspect himself too.
• In No Way Out, the CIA suspects that a murdered secretary was having an affair with a KGB agent and assign Kevin Costner's character to find out who it was. The problem being, he was the one having an affair with the secretary, and thus has been put in charge of finding evidence to implicate himself as a KGB sleeper agent. Complicating things further, he didn't kill the secretary, but he does work for the KGB.
  • No Way Out was based on the 1948 film The Big Clock, which was set in a media company rather than the CIA.
• The Man in the Iron Mask:

Aramis: The King has ordered me to seek out the secret general of the Jesuits and kill him. Porthos: You should let the secret general worry about that. Aramis: Therein is the problem. I am he.

• In The Green Hornet, Chudnofsky hires the Green Hornet via e-mail to kill Britt Reid. Kato gets the e-mail, and shows up (as the Green Hornet's sidekick) to rescue Britt from the villains, causing them to put the pieces together:

Chudnofsky: Britt Reid is the Green Hornet! Scanlon: Yeah, I know. You hired a guy to kill himself.

• In Infernal Affairs both central characters are in this situation. One is a policeman undercover in a criminal gang, while the other is a corrupt policeman secretly working for the boss of the same gang. Both end up being ordered by their apparent bosses to find the mole within their team.
  • The Departed, being a remake, has the same setup.
• Breach. Based on the Real Life story of Robert Hanssen (see below).
• A variation occurs in the Denzel Washington vehicle Out Of Time. Matt, the police chief trying to solve a double homicide, had nothing to do with the murder, but there was lots of incriminating evidence since he was having a secret affair with one of the victims. As a result, he had to find ways to hide the evidence against him from the other cops long enough to figure out what really happened.
• Star Wars has a variant example. Chancellor Palpatine declares war on Darth Sidious; what do the Jedi and the Sith (except Dooku) don't know is that they're the same person.

Literature

• In the fourth of the Baccano Light Novels, the infamous assassin Vino purchases the identity of retiring hitman Felix Walken for reasons which only really make sense to himself but involves having a legal identity under which to get married. Then an enemy of Vino's adopted family tries to hire "Felix" to kill Vino. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, Tanner Mirabel is searching for Argent Reivich, who killed the woman he loved. Then it turns out that he is Argent Reivich, having overwritten his own memories with those of Tanner. Then it gets even more complicated.
• Tour of the Merrimack: In Wolf Star, an intelligence officer assigned to root out an enemy spy turns out to be the spy. He is discovered when he tries to frame someone else.
• The original novel A Scanner Darkly, which was the basis for the aforementioned movie.
• In Brothers In Arms, Admiral Naismith is hired to kidnap Lord Vorkosigan--which is quite easy for him since they happen to be the same person. The client knows about his double identity and successfully uses the job to lure him into a trap.
• In Michael Connelly's mystery novel The Poet, the Serial Killer that the FBI is hunting turns out to be one of the FBI agents.
• Arguably the Trope Codifier, which may have inspired many of the above examples, is Kenneth Fearing's novel The Big Clock. This book is about a journalist who is having an affair with a woman who is also the mistress of the owner of the magazine he works for. When the owner discovers that his mistress is unfaithful, he murders her, and then orders the journalist to find her lover so that he can frame the man for the murder.

Live Action TV

• Dexter, as a serial killer who works for the police, is sometimes put into the position of having to investigate his own crime scenes — the first instance of this is the Season 1 episode Return to Sender.
  • Also all of season 2, in which the police are hunting the "Bay Harbor Butcher"--Dexter himself.
  • And again in Season 3, when Dexter accidentally murders the District Attorney's brother.
  • And again in season 5, when Dexter has to cover up that he and Lumen are the vigilantes hunting down Jordan's circle.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold": When a murder occurs on the planet Argelius, the chief city administrator, Mr. Hengist, takes charge of the investigation, and continues investigating as more murders take place. It later turns out that the creature inhabiting his body is responsible for the murders.
• In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, an alien committed a crime and then erased his own memory of it. Afterward, he worked so hard on solving the crime that he ended up revealing himself as the culprit.
• In the new V miniseries, a Fifth Column member is chosen to co-head an FBI task force to track down the Fifth Column.
• Pushing Daisies: In "The Fun in Funeral", Emerson brings Ned in on his latest case, investigating the death of a funeral director. Emerson knows full well that Ned killed (or "accidentally involuntarily manslaughtered") the funeral director when he brought Chuck back to life, but he points out to Ned that the best way to cover it up is for them to take the case and make sure no one else solves it.
• Highlander: This is essentially the reasoning for Methos joining the Watchers as Adam Pierson and getting made head of the Methos Project.
• This happened on Bones with some frequency, including the times that:
  • The hunt for the Gormogan's apprentice revealed that it was Zack Addy, who had been tampering with evidence for some time before his reveal.
  • The Grave Digger turned out to be the FBI agent assigned to head the Grave Digger investigation.

Theater

• The play Oedipus Rex is about Oedipus' attempt to hunt down the murderer of Laius, not connecting it with that time twenty years ago when he killed an old man he met on the road...

Video Games

• In Morrowind, one minor side quest has a runaway slave who poses as a guide to the slave hunter hired to bring him back in. For bonus points, the guide uses a direct translation of the name under which he is wanted, as only other members of the race (who obviously aren't going to help), the odd slave trader and an extremely intelligent Player Character know the language.
• In the NES game Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken, Yasu is assigned to help the player character solve a murder that Yasu himself committed
• In STALKER, the Marked One is hunting down Strelok, who turns out to be himself.
• Occurred as a Good Bad Bug in Uplink. It was possible to get a "track down the IP of the hacker who brought down our mainframe" mission in which you are the hacker. You could then report yourself for a reward with no negative consequences. This was fixed in a later patch.
• Three examples from Ace Attorney
  • Luke Atmey is trying to catch the Kurain Urn thief, but actually committed the crime himself in order to have an alibi for the murder he would commit later.
  • Tyrell Badd planted himself as the head of the Yatagarasu case to conceal evidence which would incriminate himself and his partners as the Yatagarasu.
  • And a double-agent. Calisto Yew defended agents of the smuggling ring in court, in order to have access to their information and facilities to uncover the ring's dealings for the Yatagarasu...but she was double-secretly an agent of the ring herself.

Web Comics

• Marilith: Marilith, an assassin looking to make a little money on the side, kidnaps a rich businessman's daughter to hold for ransom. The businessman puts a bounty on the kidnapper's head. Marilith's boss then gives her the assignment of hunting down and killing the kidnapper for the bounty.

Western Animation

• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Hall Monitor", SpongeBob and Patrick take it upon themselves to catch a maniac loose in Bikini Bottom, not realizing that said "maniac" was actually SpongeBob himself, wreaking havoc in his misguided attempts to help the citizens.
• In the Easy Amnesia episode of Donkey Kong Country, DK ends up a pirate working for Kaptain Skurvy. After some decent plundering (Including the show's MacGuffin), Skurvy decides to get rid of 'Donkey Kroc' by sending him off to find...Donkey Kong. The minute DK leaves the pirates start laughing about the Snipe Hunt.

Real Life

• Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who was spying for the Soviet Union and later Russian Federation, was at one point the head of the FBI task force looking for a mole in the Bureau--Hanssen himself.