Scorpion
Page 5
From the opposite pocket, Ranveer plucks his handset, which detects the presence of his specs and redirects its output accordingly. None of his messages contain codes indicating that anything has gone wrong, so Ranveer decides that the job in Oman is still on.
He is surprised to find that the hotel’s copious open entrance is not air-conditioned today—even in anticipation of his arrival. Luxury, he has always believed, is an all-or-nothing proposition. It is supposed to be an impenetrable façade—a backdrop against which we can convincingly play the people we want the world to believe we are. Characters whose scripts have been stripped of disgrace and mistakes. Luxury is a type of meta-diversion designed to help us forget about all the things we had to do in order to obtain it in the first place.
But Ranveer also knows that it is the little things that foretell shifts in the balance of power and money throughout the world, and although he would certainly prefer not to glisten on his way into the lobby, he knows that it is precisely these dynamics that will always ensure a need for people like him. As oil-rich nations who cannot even begin to conceive of a world where their obscene wealth is not preordained continue to face the realities of a renewable energy economy, chaos and confusion and ultimately bloodshed are as inevitable as the winds, tides, sunrises, and the perpetual turn of the hydro-powered turbines that faithfully forecast their demise.
The manager of the Al Hujra Hotel, Tariq al-Fasi Hashem, greets Ranveer warmly in the lobby, and Ranveer thinks highly enough of the man to shake his hand and inquire briefly after his family. Such titans of the hospitality industry have an especially difficult balance to strike, as they must make their guests feel exceptional by receiving them personally while ensuring that they safeguard their own stations in life by subsequently delegating the more remedial tasks to assistants. Once the orderly exchange of pleasantries is complete, Tariq snaps his fingers, thereby decreeing that Ranveer is now officially in the care of a plump, second-tier manager. The young man expertly neglects to relieve Ranveer of his attaché; everyone in high-end hospitality knows that one of the keys to successfully accompanying a powerful man to his room without losing your job in the process is knowing exactly which bags he wishes never to see and which he will not let out of his sight.
Keycards are quaint anachronisms by CCW standards. As part of the check-in process, most guests are content with facial recognition systems. But not Ranveer. For him, it is an old-fashioned, short-range RFID card or nothing. He has accepted that being anything other than a recluse means being recorded almost everywhere you go, but that doesn’t mean he won’t take reasonable precautions—even if it means paying a premium for obsolete technology—to ensure that he does not leave legally admissible, biometric evidence behind. The proliferation of mass surveillance has spawned all manner of innovative and lucrative new industries, not the least of which is the art of avoiding it.
An austere man in a long white thawb and a black-banded headdress stands between Ranveer’s party and the bank of elevators, a fully grown, mottled, hooded falcon perched on his thickly gloved arm. Both man and bird appear to be guarding an ornate and overburdened luggage cart. The assistant manager is momentarily stymied, then settles on a path that would have led his guest far afield had Ranveer not already plotted his own course. Instead of avoiding the spectacle, he approaches the raptor and her handler directly, correctly identifying the species and asking her name. Sawt Alraed. Arabic for the rumble of thunder. Some sort of fraternalism passes between the two men—the strong, silent bond of the hunter.
6
DOWNSIZING
FIVE YEARS AGO, when Quinn moved from the Office of Advanced Analytics to work under Vanessa Townes on the Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force, she filled seven file boxes. Today, as she moves upstairs to work on an unnamed special project led by Van’s boss, Alessandro Moretti, she only needs four.
The difference is pictures. Three boxes’ worth are now sealed in a plastic bin inside a low-cost, long-term storage unit out in Chantilly, Virginia, along with most of the rest of her past. Everyone reaches a time in their lives when they begin downsizing, Quinn knows, but that time is not supposed to be your late thirties. And the objects you shed are supposed to be superfluous purchases and accumulated gifts, not photos of everyone who once gave your life purpose.
As she unpacks various laser-etched acrylic acknowledgments that the CIA prefers to bestow in lieu of raises, bonuses, or even Amazon gift cards, it occurs to Quinn that she is glad to be away from the teletherapy room. When she was downstairs, she could see it every time she refocused her vision through her plasma glass monitor—right there between Hammerstein’s open mouth, blank stare, and douchey spiky hair and Teresa Moore’s ass since she converted from an exercise ball to an obnoxiously loud treadmill desk. It is just opposite the Mothers’ Room, where, long ago, Quinn frequently absconded to relieve the pressure in her breasts.
Back then, Quinn and her husband, James Claiborne, were textbook nine-to-five spies. They commuted together from the subdued and affluent suburbs of Potomac Falls, Virginia, where every structure that wasn’t a mall was a data center; where weekend barbecues were staged by couples who had been reduced to birthday sex and who, when you asked them what they did for a living, replied simply that they “worked for the government”—a euphemism for “you don’t have sufficient clearance to know how I spend my days, but if I wanted, I could pull up chats of your wife flirting with her ex-boyfriends on Facebook and then your marriage would be every bit as loveless as mine. Nice to meet you, too.” Most conversations were redirected toward the constant antics of overprivileged, hyperactive, social-media-obsessed children, impassioned prognostication around whatever sports were in season, the work being done by dubious, sporadic, and incompetent contractors on one’s egregiously overpriced single-family colonial (made all the more infuriating by the dogmatic regime of the HOA), whatever shows everyone was watching that you weren’t because how do people have so much time to watch so much TV?, and, surreptitiously, whoever’s weight had noticeably fluctuated (preferably increased) since they last gathered.
Quinn and James dropped their daughter, Molly, off at daycare in the mornings on their way into Langley, ate dinner together almost every night, and on weekends, when the yard work was done and the minivan was washed, went to the playground, or for a bike ride, or to the mall. Maybe the occasional Pixar movie, or birthday party inside a giant padded jungle gym in a nearby industrial park. Once a year, they went to Disney World in Florida or rented a house at Lake Anna, and at least three times a year, they played with the idea of trying for a second child. Quinn was not what you would call classically attractive, and she was always at least ten pounds away from a weight she imagined her father approving of, but she had long, natural blond hair that other women squandered vast resources attempting to emulate, and she had a shape and perkiness to her that drew plenty of looks when she was out walking or bending down to scoop up a pile of leaves. For years, Quinn and her husband defied the conventional wisdom that spies could not stay married by carving out a successful and predictable domestic existence that was the envy of many of their colleagues and friends.
But when Molly drowned in a neighbor’s pool, and when Quinn and her husband found they could not stop blaming both themselves and each other, it was clear that they would finally become the statistic they thought they would never be. There was a sudden and savage hatred between them that neither had the energy to explore or even try to understand, and they knew that the only way to survive and to move forward was to do so alone. They sold the house, and Quinn found an apartment in Arlington. Her work became the centerpiece of her life, sustained by the perpetual cycle of grocery shopping, laundry, boxes of wine, and antidepressants. She used her CIA discount to buy a subcompact 9mm Glock that she hoped would make her feel safe living alone, and in the evenings, she sometimes imagined what the end of it would taste like, and wondered if the slide
would break her teeth as it cycled in a new round and ejected a smoking cartridge out onto the unvacuumed carpet of her empty apartment.
They did try at first, Quinn and James. They couldn’t afford out-of-network marriage counseling, so they signed up for weekly teletherapy sessions. Several different contractors provided the service, but they all worked the same way: cardboard coasters with dynamic-projection-mapping markers were placed on furniture inside spaces equipped with position-tracking cameras. Metaspecs were donned, various parties connected, and for the next fifty-minute hour, rooms were transformed into individual or group therapy sessions.
You tended to get a different facilitator each time. It was like calling Comcast customer support: random representatives, exact same scripts. In their last session, the one that came up was from Kentucky. For some reason, Quinn always wanted to know where the facilitator was located. Without fail, the rote answer was, “While I appreciate your interest, we are here to talk about you,” which was usually enough for her to be able to place the accent. Quinn’s husband was joining from Southern California, where he was on long-term assignment, and she still remembers the artifacts around his arm and fingers as he kept checking his watch.
Quinn can’t remember what they were discussing, but she very clearly remembers breaking down, sobbing, and putting her hands over her metaspecs until she eventually started wondering if maybe she’d been disconnected. But when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that the man in front of her was observing her with poorly concealed discomfort, probably wishing he could go back to the good old days of working with opioid addicts and meth heads, and the man beside her—the man she’d married thirteen years ago and shared a life and a child with—was intently studying and plucking a fingernail. When the facilitator eventually asked her husband how it felt to see his wife so upset, her husband described having what amounted to an out-of-body experience, which the facilitator promptly labeled as “dissociation.” As he went on to describe the phenomenon as a mild to moderate detachment from one’s immediate surroundings and a type of psychological defense mechanism against various forms of stress, conflict, or trauma, Quinn began to realize that they were colluding to put her outburst behind them as quickly as possible because it made them uncomfortable—them—and that nobody had any intention whatsoever of trying to comfort her. Finally, she tapped the red X on the plasma glass panel, pulled off her metaspecs, and confirmed what, by then, she already knew to be true: despite the tricks metaspecs and telepresence can play on your brain, and even though her husband was dutifully playing the couples-therapy game, the reality was that Quinn was completely alone in her pain.
She spent the remainder of the hour in the teletherapy room asking herself questions like who had she become and what had she done to deserve everything that was happening to her. But most of all, she wanted to know why she was not worth fighting for. Why nobody ever seemed to be on her side. Not her mother when her father told her she needed to lose weight. Not her father when her mother told her she was embarrassed by Quinn’s grades, and that nobody would want to date someone with her complexion. Neither of them when her brother stole money from her, or called her an ugly fat bitch, or even pushed her up against a wall more than once. Not her husband when she needed him to tell her that he did not blame her for Molly. Not even a therapist who, during one of her most vulnerable moments, seemed to want to comfort her husband instead of her. That was the moment Quinn realized that the only person who would ever love her more than anyone else in the world was, at only seven years old, already dead.
By the time the session timed out, Quinn had decided that her soon-to-be-ex-husband was not the only one capable of making major life changes. The next day, she applied for an open position as an operations officer with the newly formed Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force. Maybe James was distracting himself from death and divorce by shooting down Chinese-built stealth drones carrying narcotics across the Mexican border, but she was going to do something even more hardcore.
Quinn was going to stop nuclear wars.
* * *
—
Nineteen bodies attributed to the Elite Assassin so far. Twenty counting the yet-to-be-confirmed murder in L.A. And, Quinn has been warned, there are likely to be more.
She is still going through case files, briefings, and autopsy reports, but Quinn has already noticed that the majority of the deaths were caused by projectiles of various calibers, which no ballistics experts have yet been able to identify. A few of the fatalities were the result of exotic elements like polonium-210 or toxic nerve agents like VX, sarin, and an especially deadly Russian chemical weapon known as Novichok. Throats slit by an uncharacteristically acute blade, strangulation, and falls from high places make up most of the miscellany. And, of course, there was the poor kid who suffered “blunt trauma to the neck and head”—medical-speak for getting crushed to death by oxygen tanks inside an MRI.
Although there is no obvious correlation between victims, there is one element that ties them all together: the four-digit numbers carved, branded, or otherwise indelibly imprinted somewhere on all the bodies. The chest, the forehead, across the back. On a cheek or down the thigh. The severing of a finger to turn five digits into four. They are clearly meant to be tags of some sort that the killer (or killers—Quinn has not ruled out the possibility of some sort of assassination syndicate) uses to communicate.
There is also the alert that flashes persistently in the notification pane of her favorite graphical query tool, which, when expanded, points out that each victim is younger than the last. Some by several years, others just by months. It is as though the dead have been sorted in descending chronological order. Quinn has wondered if the victims’ ages factor into some sort of code or otherwise point toward a motive, though neither her own analyses nor those of the myriad convolutional neural networks to which she has access suggest any meaningful patterns.
If age is somehow significant, it must also correspond to location—zip code (or the local equivalent thereof), country code, latitude and longitude—something position-based, since there is clearly no need to travel all over the world to find people who were born on designated days. In a college statistics course, Quinn learned about the “birthday problem,” which states that you only need 70 randomly chosen people to have a 99.9 percent chance of two of them having been born on the same day. To reach a 50/50 split, you need as few as 23. Even if you entirely dismiss statistics, it only takes 367 people to guarantee that at least two of them will have the same birthday (including February 29), which, in a city like Beijing, may be repeated as many as ten times in a single residential building. Even if the code required higher chronological resolution, there are more people in cities like Shanghai now than there are seconds in a year.
Death is as common in CIA investigations as root canals are in dentistry, but Quinn has largely been able to keep her distance from it. It’s one thing to factor homicides into an investigation, but actually investigating those homicides is an entirely different proposition. She does not want to scan corpses, compare the details of coroner reports, and generate real-time 3D models of brutal murders. Watch them over and over again for something someone might have missed, panning, zooming, and scrubbing backwards and forwards like morbid, silent slapstick. Analyze the necrobiome—the microbes and the scavengers and the insects that feast on decaying corpses, which can be used to determine the time and location of death. Measure blood-spray patterns and use neural networks to infer murder weapons by feeding the models close-up captures of pale, cavernous wounds.
But most of all, Quinn does not want to interview the parents of the dead and watch them cover their mouths and see their eyes well up as the reality of the worst thing that has ever happened to them hits them all over again. She knows what it is like to have every moment of every day tainted by death, and all she wants to do is keep moving into the future. Keep accumulating time into ne
at, orderly stacks shaped by routine. Keep herself distracted with anything at all that can drown out the excruciating whispers of her past.
But that moment back in Van’s office (which she now suspects her former boss of meticulously orchestrating) was undeniable. Something inside of her suddenly and unexpectedly aligned. Even though all the images of death had started to make her feel sick, once she was able to distance herself and see them as evidence—intricate and complex puzzle pieces rather than people—something clicked. Quinn now believes there is some part of her she does not yet know that has yet to be brought to the surface and exposed.
She places the last of the laser-etched plastic slabs on the top shelf of her new cubicle. Quinn has tried throwing these trinkets away on no fewer than two separate occasions, and both times, she turned back and fished them out of the trash before she even made it to the elevator. She tried storing them in the back of a file drawer, but the next day, she dug them out and placed them back up on her shelf. There is something about them that Quinn hates, but the reality is that they are all she has to show for her career. And, in a way, her entire life. The little money she makes is mostly gone as soon as it comes in, her marriage is over, and her baby is thirty minutes away in Fairfax Memorial Park, buried beneath a praying stone angel—one of three adjacent plots she and James bought, anticipating the day they would be reunited. But while people begin decomposing almost immediately, acrylic takes anywhere between one thousand and five thousand years to decay. Which means, unless Quinn can catch the Elite Assassin and save at least one life, cheap plastic keepsakes may be all she leaves behind.