The Epoch Index

by Christian Cantrell

  Quinn uses what she has learned from her interactions with hotel managers. She puts her handset away and tells the girl to forget the whole thing. It's not important anyway. She isn't really there to try to stop a brutal serial murder before he can kill his next innocent victim. Really she's there to book a vacation, but the problem is that she just doesn't know where to go. Maybe the girl can help her out. Maybe she can make a suggestion. Someplace exotic, someplace mundane — it's all up to her. The girl is confused at first, then catches on. She cheerfully addresses her screen — taps in some input, brushes away some irrelevant output, makes a few selections — and then she brightly suggests, of all places in the world, Sohar, Oman. Quinn is surprised by the girl's recommendation, but she likes it. She books herself a seat on the next flight out. Will Ms. Mitchell be traveling First or Business Class today? Neither. Today Ms. Mitchell will be traveling coach.

  PART FIVE: Security

  If you really want to sleep soundly at night, get yourself a dog.

  Don't bother with a commercial alarm system. Despite their expense, they are easily disabled or circumvented by almost any professional, and even a few promising amateurs. Window contact sensors are useless when it's faster and quieter to use a portable ion implantation device to transmute the glass into a pile of harmless goo than it is to jimmy open the latch. Pressure plates around a door do you no good when it's faster to cut a hole in the wall next to it with a common keychain laser than it is to pick the lock. Pyroelectric passive infrared motion sensors are nothing but a false sense of security in a world where you can buy heat-shielded clothing right off the bargain rack if you know where to shop. And if you're rich enough to afford a security system that actually works, a simple localized electromagnetic pulse emitted from a hover drone or a privately operated satellite network will keep things quiet for more than enough time to do a job, and tie up loose ends.

  Don't think you're any better off with armed guards, either. All guards do is increase the price of job. Rather than a single target, you have to factor in several. And there's no discount for buying in bulk, so a lot of Ranveer's colleagues actually prefer the odd patrol. They feel it's a more efficient use of their time. The key is to take them out before they can trigger a silent alarm or get off a phone call lest you get all the way up to the bedroom only to find that your target has ditched his whore and barricaded himself in a safe room behind his closet. Depending on composition and configuration, a good safe room can add up to three hours to a job. Any plans you had for later that night, you're probably not going to make.

  But the biggest downside to bodyguards is not that they are easily dispatched — it's that they are easily corrupted. Security professionals are almost always either stupid or underpaid, and quite often both, which amounts to a dangerous and unfortunate combination when it comes to the safety of you and your family. It often costs less to get a guard to look the other way than to buy a moderately good cigar. Or, for the price of an evening's worth of quality companionship, you can sometimes even get a bodyguard to walk right into his employer's bedroom, conduct business on your behalf, then get on the next plane to Bermuda. In Ranveer's world, there's certainly no shame in outsourcing when a situation calls for it.

  Where expensive electronics and cheap minions fail, a dog can succeed. A well-trained canine can't be fooled or bribed, and even if you're cold and callous enough to kill a man's best friend, it's almost impossible to do so before he can manage to get out some pretty unsettling racket. Where jobs involve dogs — even the little yappy kind — your best friend is usually a gas gun configured for sniping, a high vantage point at least 100 yards away, and a tall thermos of coffee.

  But at the end of the day, the safety of each and every one of us really comes down to nothing more than the simple goodwill of others. Unless you have the resources of an entire nation dedicated to keeping you alive (and sometimes even then), just about anyone on the street can kill you or your family at any moment for any reason — or for no reason, in particular. Most of us come into contact with anywhere from dozens to thousands of people everyday who could instantly reduce us to human smoothies with nothing more than an almost imperceptible tweak of a steering wheel or the slightest of nudges toward an inbound train. And those are just the careless and the cowards among us. Anyone with any balls and ingenuity can kill almost anyone else in about a dozen different ways with just about any implement within arm's reach: a pencil through the soft tissue of the eye and into the temporal lobe behind; the spine of a book into the throat with enough force to crush the trachea; a coffee cup to the temple where the middle meningeal artery is easily lacerated. And then there are the myriad of actual weapons and poisons and methods of sabotage that can be used against any one of us before our brains can even begin to register the possibility of danger. One minute we're driving, or sitting at an outdoor café, or jogging with headphones on, and the next minute, we're simply not. One Sunday morning, you wake up early to make blueberry pancakes and sausage for everyone, and the next, you can't think of a single reason to get out of bed. The truth is that most of us survive day-to-day not due to any real ability to keep ourselves and our families safe, but simply because there is usually nobody in the immediate proximity who wishes otherwise.

  Unfortunately for the Nassar family, however, Ranveer is both in the immediate proximity, and he wishes otherwise. And from the looks of it, it's not going to be a difficult job. One of the advantages of the kinds of contracts Ranveer has been interested in lately is that most of his targets have no idea that anyone would want them dead, which means they almost never plan accordingly. While the car he borrowed from the hotel navigates the suburbs outside of Sohar, Ranveer uses his handset to do a little research. He knows for a fact that there won't be armed guards, so he doesn't even bother looking through financial records for evidence to the contrary, but he does try cross-referencing recurring payments with all known local security companies. Nothing. And thankfully, no payments to any businesses affiliated with pet care as far back as three years. It looks like the Nassar family doesn't have so much as a guinea pig watching over them. With any luck, he will be back at the hotel in time for a nightcap to help ease his jet lag, and maybe even a little late-night companionship should the mood strike him.

  The car pulls noiselessly up in front of a two-story white stone structure, and just over seven minutes later, Ranveer is standing in an upstairs bedroom at the side of a nicely finished wooden crib having just bypassed the biometric bolt downstairs by cutting it right out of the steel door it was in with a portable watersaw and placing it gently in a nearby flowerpot. (It's best to choose high-pressure water over a plasma torch where fire alarms could be involved.) He reaches over to the diaper-changing surface beside him and switches off what his glasses are telling him is the transmitting end of a 100 channel, 2.4 gigahertz, water and shock resistant, fully shielded and redundant baby monitor designed to withstand any contingency this cruel and unpredictable world can possibly throw at it except for being intentionally switched off.

  The baby at the bottom of the crib is sleeping with his knees drawn in, his butt up in the air, and his head turned toward the wall. Ranveer can hear a tiny whistle coming from his plump pursed lips as he takes quick, shallow breaths. He has never held a baby before and he wonders what it would it be like, seeing as how so many people seem to enjoy it, and he even briefly considers lifting the baby out and rocking him before dismissing the impulse as a stupid and unnecessary risk. Better to get the job done and get out before a paranoid mother subconsciously misses the ambient red rhythm of the LEDs that let her sleep soundly at night.

  From a compartment in his pouch, Ranveer removes a small glass vial of hebenon solution and shakes it gently. It's three primary constituents are oxybuprocaine, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen cyanide. Hebenon is best used in circumstances where the target is in a very deep sleep or a coma. A small drop is placed in the ear where the oxybuprocaine immediately begins to numb any surface it com
es into contact with. When the solution is stopped by the eardrum, the sulfuric acid rapidly dispatches with the thin membrane, allowing the solution to continue down into the middle ear via the eustachian tube, and then eventually into the throat where it triggers the reflex to swallow. The hydrogen cyanide then gets busy halting cellular respiration which kills the victim in roughly one minute.

  All in all, not a bad way to go.

  There is enough greenish light in the room from electroluminescent nightlights that Ranveer is easily able to guide the dropper over the infant's ear without dialing his glasses into the infrared range. He pauses for a moment and listens, but all he can hear is the whistle and tiny rattle of the infant's breathing. He can feel the warmth radiating up from the baby's cheek, and he can somehow smell the sweet milk of his mother.

  It is easier to kill, Ranveer has found, when you understand why it is so hard. The innate social structure that keeps humankind intact demands that murder be abhorrent. Although we feel little remorse for slaughtering just about any other living creature — eating its flesh, wrapping ourselves in its skin, boiling the gelatin out of its bones for cheap cosmetics and children's novelties — the sight of a severed human head or a bloated rotting corpse must necessarily evoke in us the most profound horror if the species is to avoid self-destruction. Yet somehow murder has existed for as long as life has been available to extinguish, and will always exist despite any and all efforts to prevent or punish it. Murder is as necessary as our revulsion to it. The two forces balance each other out in a mysterious societal equilibrium which both rattles and intrigues us. The ability to murder is, frankly, what sets some men apart. Power belongs to those with the strength to overcome their fears and weaknesses and instincts — those who are capable of overriding the more primitive regions of the brain with the more highly evolved. Ranveer knows that no matter how many people he kills, in the end he will be judged not by his morals or his actions, but by the only criteria that has ever truly counted for anything in the entire history of life on Earth: his own ability to survive and prosper.

  A single drop of the solution is released as he squeezes the plastic bulb, and when the fluid is funneled down through the outer ear, the infant's expression briefly changes, then becomes peaceful again. At 46 seconds, the short shallow breaths stop, and the child's little back ceases to rise and fall.

  Usually Ranveer marks his victims with a hot brand or a tattoo pen or his blade of ribbed Damascus steel. But tonight, he uses a thick permanent marker instead. After all, he is not a monster.

  PART SIX: Follow the Money

  Quinn's man seems to have an uncommonly forgettable face. Although she sees little else when she closes her eyes — and feels that, even disguised, she could easily pick him out of a crowd at 100 meters — nobody else can remember seeing anyone even faintly reminiscent of the gentleman on her handset. Miraculously, most don't even have to look down at her images before they are certain they can be of no assistance whatsoever. She also discovers that her badge makes much less of an impression on the Omani people than on Americans and Europeans. After a full day of curt but polite interviews at the United Emirates Airlines counter at the Sohar Airport, and in the cool dim lobbies of every Crystal Collective Worldwide hotel in the city, the only thing she has learned is that by the time she gets the necessary paperwork in place and manages to orchestrate the cooperation of both the Omani Kingdom and various local authorities, all surveillance footage will have been destroyed, and her man will be three cities away with at least as many new bodies to his credit.

  There are no CIA field offices nearby, so although she feels she is not all that welcome at the Al Hujra Hotel, she gets herself set up at a table in a quiet corner of the lobby, orders a coffee and two bottles of water, unclips her handset from her belt, and starts going through her messages. One is marked urgent, and as soon as she begins reading it, she reflexively makes a noise which turns the heads of the people around her.

  Quinn remembers the innocent voice of the little girl in the kitchen casually telling her that Molly is sleeping in the pool. She sees the dark still shape through the window gently rising and falling on the surface of the calm sparkling water. She feels the weight of the limp body and of her own wet clothes as she climbs the pool stairs, and remembers the purple of her daughter's lips as she lays her out on a lounge chair in the sun. In an instant, she relives the 15 exhausting and dizzying minutes of CPR, then feels herself being pulled away at the waste and watches herself vomit violently on the deck of the pool.

  Her glasses are dialed down now and her forehead is pressed against two fingers. She is focusing on her breathing as she tastes the salt of tears on the corners of her lips. It is 20 minutes before she opens her eyes again. The other people in the lobby are conspicuously ignoring her. She wipes her nose and cheeks, and goes back to the report.

  The nine-month-old child was found by his mother when she began to wonder why he was sleeping so late. His pajamas were split open down the back where the number 114 was neatly printed in black indelible ink. The toxicity report shows hydrogen cyanide. Burns in the aural canal and throat indicate that the solution was administered through the ear.

  In Quinn's mind, her man has just gone from an assassin to a psychopath. She knows now that she can't keep living 12 hours in his past — can't keep being shaken and thrown by the wake he leaves behind him. She is not right for this kind of work. Intelligence gathering and data analysis is one thing, but death this close up is far too personal for her. These murders are no longer data points and statistics to be factored into queries and equations. They are more than just locations and timestamps and parameters. The only way to put this behind her is to figure out how to get out in front of this endless stream of death.

  She adds the new case information to her database and triggers a set of routines which search for commonalities across victims. The results are instantaneous and not significantly different from before: 90.9% are male; 81.8% are under the age of 24; 54.5% are of Middle Eastern descent; and 40.9% have ties, either directly or indirectly, to the energy industry.

  She extracts all the victims' names into a separate list and runs a search against all the most common indexes. The results are nothing she hasn't already seen: most are related to news articles and law enforcement reports covering the murders, and about half appear to be false positives. She finds some potentially interesting results pertaining to individual victims, but most have already been doled out to junior agents to run down. There is nothing that neatly ties all the victims together. Nothing that anticipates the killer's next move.

  The CIA has access to thousands of indexes compiled and derived from every imaginable source of data which, when combined, encompass what is for all intents and purposes the entire sum of human knowledge with the exception of trade secrets yet to be reverse engineered, and some foreign intelligence yet to be stolen. She has access to so much information, in fact, that by default, she typically only searches about a dozen indexes — those primarily related to field reports, news sources, aggregated evidence, and various types of incoming intelligence. The key to finding the common threads that wrap investigations up into nice neat packages is usually not so much about finding the connections themselves as it is about quieting the noise that conceals them.

  But in this case, at the risk of being mislead by more false positives and red herrings, Quinn decides to broaden her search. She starts looking at books the victims or the victims' families were known to have read, personal preferences they might have in common which were extrapolated from purchases, foods they were likely to have eaten based on autopsies and cellular analysis, links in social graphs compiled from every form of communication the CIA has access to, and even possible patterns in genetic material.

  Some additional sporadic leads are produced, but Quinn's instincts are telling her that this case is all or nothing. She either finds the connection between all the victims, or she has found nothing at all. She writes a search expre
ssion which includes every index she has access to at her pay grade, then filters out all the results she has already seen along with everything that doesn't have a 100% relevancy rating for every single name on the list. By modern consumer technology standards, the results should appear instantaneously, but with government hardware doing the crunching and spinning in concrete bunkers buried somewhere outside of Washington, D.C., there is a pause that somehow perfectly convey's the strain Quinn knows she has just put the machines under.

  And then somehow both anti-climatically, but still wonderfully elegantly, one single result is produced: the Epoch Index.

  This is both good and bad news. The good news is that there is a match which is almost certainly not a false positive. The bad news is that the Epoch Index is not something she is sure she can work with. In fact, it has been the policy of most law enforcement and three-letter federal agencies to essentially pretend that the Epoch Index doesn't exist. The briefing she and her colleagues received several years ago described, at a very high level, how the index is compiled and maintained, then concluded with an abrupt and ominous warning to leave it the hell alone. In truth, very few people actually understand what the Epoch Index actually is, and absolutely nobody understands the repercussions of messing with it.

  The Epoch Index exists because of the Large Hadron Collider which, in its day, was the largest and most complex scientific experiment undertaken in human history (other than humanity itself, as some scientists smugly point out). The LHC is a high-energy particle accelerator — a 27-kilometer long tunnel buried up to 500 feet deep beneath both France and Switzerland — designed for the express purpose of accelerating subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light, smashing as many of them together as possible amid some of the most sensitive electronic sensors ever built, and then seeing what happens. The ultimate goal was to increase our understanding of the fundamental nature of physics, and hopefully even uncover a few clues about the origins of the universe.