7
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
RANVEER STANDS BESIDE the orchid blooms in the foyer of his suite, enjoying the lingering floral notes and citric sting of perfume. He was not surprised to find the most beautiful woman currently on staff waiting for him in his room, but he was somewhat surprised by her attire. Her crimson and gold-embroidered traditional Omani robe left everything but her curly black hair, glossy red lips, and matching cherry toenails to the imagination. Which is precisely where she now firmly resides.
But if Ranveer still intends to get in a swim, a sonic vitamin soak, a Thai massage, both a manicure and a pedicure, a light meal, and a twenty-minute power nap before going to work, he had better stop reminiscing about the sexual prowess and inhibitions of Omani women and start thinking about settling in. He has always hated the boorish and juvenile adage that you cannot spell “woman” without spelling “Oman,” yet there it is.
He always does his own unpacking lest the staff stumble upon something they find objectionable, and since all of his clothing is custom-cut, heat-welded, wrinkle-free nanofabric (fully compatible with in-room, waterless, ultraviolet sanitizing machines—in his line of work, one is bound to encounter stains), there is no need to iron. Once every scrap of clothing he owns other than what is currently on his slender, well-defined back is neatly hung, he stows his garment case on the dust-free top shelf of the closet, then turns his attention to the tools of his trade.
He lays a thoroughly scarred titanium alloy case (lined with tightly woven polyethylene fiber so that it may double as an impromptu ballistic shield should the need unexpectedly arise) on the bed and presses his thumbs against twin sensors positioned on either side of the handle. After a pattern of green strobes complete their quick biometric sniff, the latches release, indicating that the high-resolution scans match Ranveer’s epidermal ridges, and that the measured blood flow and temperature are consistent with digits that have not been severed.
In the event that anything was dislodged from its foam cocoon during travel, Ranveer raises the lid with the caution and attention of an explosive ordnance disposal technician. Nothing appears amiss, and entombed inside are the individual components of what Ranveer maintains is the most magnificent and elegant weapon ever conceived.
The gas gun is complex, but complexity enables configurability, configurability yields flexibility, and flexibility is the hallmark of any good assassin. Compare it to a conventional pistol: A nine- or a ten-millimeter round will always be a nine- or a ten-millimeter round. Its bore, grain, propellant, jacket, and primer are all determined at the time of its manufacturing, and that’s all it will ever be. Put a ten-millimeter cartridge into a ten-millimeter pistol, and you are going to do ten millimeters’ worth of damage. No more, no less. How does that saying go? If your only tool is a .50 caliber, Israeli-made Desert Eagle, suddenly everything looks like it needs a very big hole?
Which, of course, everything does not. Sometimes it is desirable to kill a man with a projectile that does not even pierce the skin. An object sufficiently slow and dense can bounce right off that magical spot at the intersection of eyes, nose, and forehead, crushing the sinuses and fracturing the skull, leaving a man every bit as dead as if you’d taken his head clean off, yet with much less mess. The cab driver in Nairobi, for instance. As Ranveer leaned forward between the seats so he could reach the dark, clean-shaven cheek, he noted that the man did not even bleed—externally, at least—but rather had perfectly clear cerebrospinal fluid draining from his ears and nose, and raccoon-like black eyes already starting to show.
Other times, in close-quarter situations—say, when you are effectively invisible and standing directly in front of your mark, amused by the fact that he is wielding a very capable-looking assault rifle that fires only light—a big-bore, frangible round is very much in order: tightly packed metal powder bound with wax and designed specifically for breaching things like haptic suits and chest cavities without the risk of exiting through the back and penetrating a thin plywood wall.
A third classic gas gun configuration is what is known in the business as the micro-meteor: an incredibly tiny, very high-velocity, extremely hot projectile that pierces the heart or the brain so quickly that it is usually mistaken for a headache or indigestion until the triggerman is enjoying a scone and a cup of tea three blocks away. Later, when you break into the chap’s flat to leave your tag, you can see that he died relatively peacefully with a wet washcloth across his forehead and prescription painkillers spilling from a bottle that slipped from his stiff fingers. When coroners can’t find any blood and have to use a digital caliper to measure cauterized entrance and exit wounds of less than a millimeter in diameter, nobody even bothers looking for the slug.
There are those in Ranveer’s business who swear by the virtues of minimalism—who insist that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. But Ranveer suspects that they are merely simpletons who tragically lack imagination. By decoupling targeting, payload, propulsion, and ignition, the gas gun becomes not just a weapon, but an implement for challenging and provocative artistic expression.
The model Ranveer commissioned from a contact in Germany accepts six different muzzles of six different bores. The propellant is a cartridge of hydrogen gas, which is used to fill a chamber to the desired pressure and is then ignited by a spark produced by a small rechargeable battery. Ammunition can be anything from a rubber pellet to a chunk of depleted uranium to buckshot to a needle laced with a suitably exotic and nasty neurotoxin. Need a long-range laser sight? Click. Need a military-grade, infrared scope for painting warm targets through walls? Click. How about depth-sensing radar combined with a real-time, false-color visual to help pinpoint weak seams in body armor? Click and click. All depends on the job.
Ranveer takes the hydrogen cartridge assembly into the master bathroom and begins attaching the silicone hose to the sink. Emirates will allow disassembled gas-powered weapons in the belly of a plane without asking questions, but only if the hydrogen cartridges are empty. That means one of the first things he is tasked with upon reaching a new destination is procuring some hydrogen, and the easiest place to find hydrogen is in water. Once the feeder tube is secured, Ranveer opens the faucet and, satisfied that there are no leaks, selects the right adapter and plugs the rig into the wall. Over the next two hours, the device will use electrolysis to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms and fill the two docked cartridges with enough gas to get him into and out of just about any conceivable situation.
The next item unpacked and strategically positioned for quick access is what appears to be a simple sheathed blade but, like everything Ranveer covets, is much more than it seems. The knowledge to forge Damascus steel is thought to have been lost in the eighteenth century, but you simply need to know where to look. With the right contacts in India or Sri Lanka, it is possible to purchase a beautifully banded and mottled weapon of between 5 and 180 centimeters in length that converges along a nanometer-scale surface and is strong enough to peel the edge off most other blades like slicing the wax off a brandy bottle’s seal. It’s true that in an age of cheap synthetic diamonds and prolific laser technology, it is not technically the most menacing hand-to-hand, close-quarter implement one can buy, but Ranveer has a soft spot for tradition.
His leather-bound pocket apothecary goes into the room’s safe for now. The capsules, syringes, solutions, aerosols, gels, and lozenges within can produce effects either quick and painless or slow and excruciating. Some leave no trace at all, while others leave a chemical calling card behind designed to speak posthumous volumes. There’s even a putty-like substance that some of Ranveer’s colleagues are particularly fond of; when mixed with enzymes in human saliva, it rapidly expands and congeals, simultaneously silencing a victim and obstructing both the nasal and oral airways, usually inducing a state wherein one becomes surprisingly receptive to any final admonishments requested by a client—a custom Ranveer suspects was ma
de popular by gangster movies, and serves no real purpose in his exceedingly pragmatic mind.
But even with all of these toys to choose from, he is still baffled. Nothing immediately presents itself as the obvious solution to the specific problem at hand. He decides to let his subconscious turn the enigma over for the next several hours while he indulges in the many amenities offered by the hotel, fully confident that a little pampering is just the thing to reveal the right approach to taking out a target who, according to his information, is only nine months old.
8
HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE
NAIROBI, LONDON, AND Beijing. South Africa, Moscow, and Caracas. This guy could host his own travel show, Quinn thinks. Experience the world through the scope of one of the world’s most elite and creative assassins.
She did what she could from her cube in Langley. The Kremlin is pretty cagey about the kinds of gadgets they let the CIA cart into the heart of their capital city—even when chaperoned by Interpol—so she had to make do with a dynamic rendering of the cybernetic hacker girl’s flat synthesized from high-resolution scans. But American money talks in Venezuela in ways that it does not in Russia, so Quinn was able to experience the sickening scene of the MRI massacre through a live video stream fed to her bulky black metaspecs by a tiny cyclops quadcopter.
Ironhide was also available to her—an adorable little tank-tread robot bristling with manipulators. It was one of the many DARPA-built explosive ordnance disposal “technicians” that the CIA, FBI, and ATF redeployed as remote-controlled prostheses for investigating crime scenes from afar. But being an inexperienced pilot, Quinn found it preferable to feed a gloved French Interpol forensic specialist verbal instructions instead, although Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Leblanc made it abundantly clear that he had flown all the way from Paris to Caracas to lend his particular expertise to the investigation, not to be ordered around the forty-two-acre hacienda by an American woman nibbling on a banana nut muffin two thousand miles away.
It was hard to know when it was time to stop investigating remotely and to get out into the field. For at least a decade, it had been possible to solve most crimes through a series of elegantly composed queries across a variety of indices further refined by specially trained neural networks, ultimately culminating in a list of names short enough that you could send a couple of agents—or sometimes even the local doughnut patrol—out to visit each one, approach with sufficient swagger, flash a badge, commence browbeating, and see which one of them either reached or ran. Quinn hoped that the Elite Assassin would be no exception, but she also knew that it would almost certainly not be that easy. If it were, the case would never have found its way to the CIA, and certainly not to her. Eventually, she knew she would need to step away from the comfort of her home base and initiate a proper chase. The only question was when.
The answer, apparently, was right now. When a local FBI crime lab determined that a residue found in an alley just outside the Black Horizon V-Sports Studio was likely an incinerated polyester and spandex blend—the material most commonly used in full-body chroma-key suits—Quinn was told to log into the CIA’s travel site and book herself a flight to L.A. When your adversary hands you the home-field advantage, Moretti said with his meticulously groomed goatee framing his famously roguish grin, you goddamn well take it.
* * *
—
Quinn has just finished canceling her car appointment and rescheduling her mammogram. Now she is trying to decide between a Red Roof Inn and the airport Best Western.
“Ms. Mitchell?”
She is certain the voice she hears behind her is that of a child’s, and the tiny Asian girl she sees standing there when she spins around in her chair appears to be all of twelve years old. She is wearing a pair of oversized, round, wire-rimmed specs that pinch the tip of her petite nose.
“Yes?”
“Henrietta Yi,” the girl says by way of self-introduction.
Despite the space buns, polka-dot baby doll dress, and ivory-white high-tops, Quinn is starting to get that this girl is not, in fact, a colleague’s lost daughter. The badge dangling from her pink Hello Kitty lanyard advertises clearance at the highest possible level.
“Hello,” Quinn replies, her tone disclosing that she knows she is missing key context here.
“Mr. Moretti’s tech guy,” the young woman clarifies.
“Oh!” Quinn says. “I’m so sorry. I was expecting someone named Simon.”
“Simon is my assistant,” the girl says. “I’m the tech guy.”
“Is that like an official title?” Quinn asks. “Tech guy?”
“Mr. Moretti just calls me that.”
“That’s kind of demeaning, isn’t it?”
“That’s just Mr. Moretti,” the girl says dismissively.
“Let me ask you something,” Quinn says. She looks around to confirm that they are still alone, leans forward, and lowers her voice. “How long have you worked with him?”
“With Mr. Moretti? Oh, for a while now.”
“Is it true what they say?”
“What do they say?”
“That he has a horrible temper?”
Henrietta touches the corner of her lips, makes a face like a sideways kiss, and shifts her eyes behind her enormous specs. “I think it’s exaggerated,” she says. “Besides, I have a pretty bad temper myself, so I can’t really talk.”
“Fair enough,” Quinn says, even though she finds the idea of a girl like Henrietta Yi being anything but fanatically sweet almost impossible to believe.
“So, is now a good time?”
“Sure.” Quinn doesn’t want her session to time out and have to start all over again, so she reaches back around and clicks Submit. Best Western it is. “Can we do it here or do we need to go to your lab or something?”
“We can do it here,” Henrietta says. “It’ll just take a minute.”
The cube next to Quinn’s is empty, so the girl appropriates the accompanying chair. She then reaches down into the single pocket sewn into the front of her dress, draws out a handset that, in her diminutive hands, looks more like a tablet, and sits. Only the toes of her sneakers reach the carpet’s tight weave.
“I just need your phone,” Henrietta prompts.
Moretti’s “tech guy” is here to install an app called Semaphore. It’s a tool Interpol uses to exchange end-to-end encrypted communications with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies while cooperating on cases. Quinn plucks her handset from its charging cradle and passes it to Henrietta.
“Do you need my code, or…”
“Nope!”
Henrietta places Quinn’s phone on the edge of the desk, and when she does something to her own phone, Quinn’s unlocks. Quinn’s handset is ensconced in something that looks ballistically impervious, while Henrietta’s is bursting at its heat-welded seams with a bumblebee-yellow Pikachu theme.
“Cute,” Quinn says. “My daughter used to love Pokémon.”
“Yay!” Henrietta exclaims. “Did she ever play any of the games?”
“All of them,” Quinn bemoans. “She even had the AR Poké-goggles.”
“Oh my God, I still have mine,” Henrietta says, a touch conspiratorially. “Your daughter’s lucky she grew out of it. If I were to add up all the time I spent playing Pokémon, I could have probably gotten another degree.”
Quinn starts to say something, but stops. Instead, she says, “So where do you sit?”
“I work off-site.”
“Oh. Where?”
Henrietta looks uncomfortable. “With Mr. Moretti.”
“Got it,” Quinn says. “The top secret project.”
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault. What did you do before that?”
“I worked with Mr. Moretti on the Epoch Index.”
Quinn’s eyebrows go up. “Re
ally? The Epoch Index? The message picked up by the Large Hadron Collider?”
“That’s the one.”
“Are you allowed to talk about it?”
“There isn’t much to say. We never figured it out.”
“Didn’t the guy who discovered it claim it was some kind of message from the future?”
Henrietta resets her oversized specs, which promptly slip right back down into the little dents on either side of her nose, then daintily raises a hand. “Actually, that was me.”
“You discovered the Epoch Index?”
“Well, technically it was discovered by an AI. But I’m the one who trained the neural network to identify anomalous data.”
“What did the message say?”
“We don’t know. It was encrypted.”
“Do you really think it was from the future?”
“That part was exaggerated. There was a theory that it was caused by quantum resonance from a parallel universe, but obviously there’s no way to prove that.”
“What do you think?”
“I think it was a pretty standard encrypted transmission that was accidentally picked up by a faulty sensor.”
“Are we still trying to decrypt it?”
“We don’t have it anymore. All the evidence was sealed.”
Quinn looks skeptical. “You’re telling me that the CIA found something it couldn’t explain and didn’t secretly keep a copy?”
Henrietta checks the installation progress. “You’d have to ask Mr. Moretti about that.”
“How in the world did you go from working at the Large Hadron Collider to being Moretti’s tech guy?”
Scorpion Page 6