Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  Quinn’s job is just as much a process of disproving as it is confirmation, and there is one hypothesis she feels she can finally put behind her: the assassination syndicate theory. There are three solid data points suggesting a single killer.

  First, handwriting analysis algorithms give all the handwritten tags (oddly, the numeric sequence on the inside of the Russian girl’s arm was branded, and of course, Prime’s sequence was a clever outlier) an 89 percent chance of having been written by the same left-handed person. Second, all the killings thus far have occurred serially rather than in parallel, and with tight but sufficient travel time in between. And third, it’s just not realistic that local resources are being tapped for all these jobs.

  On the plane between D.C. and L.A., Quinn became an expert on contract killing, and she now knows that while you can pay to have someone murdered in every major metropolitan area in the world, you can’t do it over and over again without, at some point, hiring some yokel dumb enough to lock his keys inside his fifty-year-old getaway car, or leave behind a few seconds of pixelated surveillance footage, or inadvertently make contact with an undercover agent.

  Quinn learned that, like most things, hiring a hitman isn’t like it is in the movies. In the real world, doing death right usually means doing it yourself. Of course, you get the occasional mobster, gangster, or run-of-the-mill sociopath who might be your real estate agent or your gynecologist, but most “assassins” are twitchy, wild-eyed tweakers with face tattoos and just enough brain cells still firing to navigate the dark web. She also learned that one of the biggest differences between professionals and amateurs is weapon selection—that those who dabble are more likely to assume that bigger is always better, while properly mentored assassins understand how to pick just the right caliber for the task at hand, sometimes opting for something smaller for the sake of concealment, noise suppression, and tighter splatter patterns. Finally, Quinn was surprised to discover that only between 2 and 5 percent of homicides in most countries can be attributed to contract killings, primarily because the overwhelming majority of murders are crimes of passion. Exceedingly rare are violent crimes of pure dispassion.

  Establishing that there is only one Elite Assassin leads Quinn to two more important assertions:

  He is uncannily good at what he does, suggesting that he is probably not self-taught, but rather either had, or still has, the backing of a state with a well-established and extremely aggressive intelligence service.

  He is on a tight schedule and is therefore almost constantly in transit. In fact, his itinerary is so arduous that Quinn has come to think of him as essentially homeless.

  It is generally considered a bad thing to have your mark always on the move, but not so for a competent data scientist. To an analyst, travel means data, data means queries, and queries eventually lead to answers. Especially when you have the home-field advantage.

  Finding a list of airlines is easy. Quinn simply needs to cross-reference cities and dates with flight schedules—or rather, she needs to compose the right search expressions to do the correlating for her. There are several possibilities, but one in particular stands out: Emirates. The Dubai-based airline services more cities on her list than any other. Throw in registered flight paths for recent Emirates Executive private jets, and Emirates is a match for every city where there is an unsolved murder involving a tagged body. Whoever this guy is, he is very particular about his airline.

  Elite indeed.

  Finding hotels isn’t quite as straightforward, but the airline lead gives her an idea. Rather than looking at individual hotels, she makes lists of holding companies—ownership and management organizations whose loyalty programs span multiple brands. A query that cross-references luxury hotel properties with the cities on her list reveals that her man is almost certainly a high-ranking and devoted customer of Crystal Collective Worldwide.

  She spends the rest of the day making calls to other field offices and sending junior FBI agents out to collect passenger and guest records. After stopping at an Applebee’s for a chicken Caesar and a cheap glass of chardonnay that keeps her just under her per diem, she spends the evening in her room at the Best Western Suites next to the airport, writing search algorithms. As encouraged as she felt earlier in the day, she now feels deflated; she has not been able to extract a single additional lead from the data. No single name emerges from guest records obtained in cities where the Elite Assassin has left his mark. She doesn’t even uncover sets of names or patterns that might suggest aliases. Unless her man somehow obtains an entirely new identity for every city he visits, his stays are simply not recorded—perhaps a perk enjoyed by customers with sufficiently elite status.

  As she falls asleep, Quinn wonders if pinpointing both the airline and the hotel chain in a single day might have been too easy. The connections were indirect enough that they wouldn’t be automatically surfaced by pattern-matching algorithms, but still obvious enough to be uncovered by even a mediocre analyst. As a challenge, she tries to convince herself that this is some kind of an elaborate, well-choreographed ruse designed to make multiple assassins look like one. Maybe they are careful to never leave less time between two deaths than it would take to fly between the two cities. Maybe they use hacked, black-market mobile robotic surgical instruments trained on the same handwriting set to do the tagging. Maybe they are so well coordinated that some percentage of the deaths are essentially randomly generated noise designed to conceal the real signal. Or maybe…

  Quinn’s eyes snap open and she sits up in bed. Maybe the killer isn’t being pursued as much as the investigator is being led.

  11

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  WHEN RANVEER IS alone in the yoga studio once again, he crosses the padded room in his bare feet and stands before the open window. He watches as Henryk rolls his shoulder and grimaces once more before stuffing himself back inside the glass cockpit of the squat white Porsche with red Laguna leather interior. As Ranveer secures the vial of hebenon solution inside his foldable apothecary, he reviews the chain of events that led him to this moment, in order to ensure that absolutely nothing has been overlooked.

  It starts, somewhat improbably, with what the media has branded the #seulementmoi movement—or “only me”—which symbolizes an unexpected cultural shift in France wherein, in defiance of centuries of tradition, mistresses have suddenly and unexpectedly fallen out of favor. Wherever rapid societal transformations occur, there are inevitably casualties, frequently in the form of powerful white men caught—in this case, literally—with their pants down.

  As soon as #seulementmoi was identified by zeitgeist algorithms, Le Milieu (“The Underworld”) began composing queries to identify potential blackmail targets. One of the richer veins led to an Interpol officer named Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Leblanc who maintained no fewer than three separate families—one in Paris, one in Bordeaux, and one just over the border in Geneva—and who appeared to be seriously considering starting a fourth in Frankfurt, where his work often took him. Unless Monsieur Leblanc wanted his boss and all three of his wives to receive detailed dossiers describing his indiscretions—including not just names, photos, and receipts, but explicit video footage—he was to install an application called Signal on his handset and use it to regularly send details of all of Interpol’s investigations to the specified anonymous account.

  Ranveer has associates who watch blackmail markets like the Japanese track bluefin tuna prices and were kind enough to inform him that his work had recently attracted the attention of the CIA, and in particular, an unusually talented analyst by the name of Quinn Mitchell. The escalation of the case was only a matter of time—a milestone after which all the rules of the game would inevitably need to change. Had Quinn Mitchell already been tasked with tracking the Elite Assassin back in Moscow, Ranveer would have had to interrupt the Israeli hacker’s brash rationalization of why his houseguest would not ki
ll him by grasping that obnoxious topknot, spinning him around in his chair like a barber, snapping his head back to open up access, and wrenching his Damascus steel through his neck, half decapitating him to ensure his larynx detached, spray-painting the matrix of plasma glass and casting the room into crimson while listening to the last of his gurgling and gasps.

  The Israeli, for all his economic philosophy, will never know how close he came to experiencing Ranveer’s knife, and how much he owes his life to forces outside his control.

  Interpol does not particularly concern Ranveer—and neither does the CIA, for that matter—but given what he knows about this analyst, and considering the nature of his next target, Ranveer deems it prudent to take additional precautions and tie up more loose ends than he might otherwise. The endgame is not the phase of an operation to start taking chances; from here on out, there will be collateral damage.

  Which is why Ranveer’s gym bag does not contain protein bars and electrolyte-infused sports drinks and spare deodorant, but rather all the components required to assemble his gas gun into the long and complex micro-meteor configuration. Why he loaded it with a tungsten carbide cartridge with a programmable caliber that he dialed down to mere micrometers. Why he needed Henryk to park right beside the silver borrowed Mercedes-Benz H2-Class so that, as he rearranged his balls after a two-and-a-half-hour drive in the tiny white Porsche, Ranveer could place a white-hot shot just a hair to the right of his tracksuit’s zipper, ripping an almost imperceptible hole in the left ventricle of the giant Pole’s already-enlarged heart, the sudden pain radiating deceptively all the way out to his shoulder. Why he requested a studio that faced the water so that the projectile, after passing clean through, would end up somewhere in the Gulf of Oman, where it would be impossible to recover. And why he used an electromagnetic pulse emitter to disable the elevator so that Henryk would have to take the stairs, not only to get his newly defective heart pumping more than usual, but also to give Ranveer sufficient time to disassemble and conceal the rifle, mimic a relaxed and placid meditative state, and make his old friend believe he approached stealthily, craftily, and entirely unobserved.

  Henryk will probably pop a few more Zantac during his drive south to Muscat and might even opt for a light beer instead of a vodka on the rocks on his afternoon flight back home to Warsaw. He will likely fall asleep earlier than usual next to Aleksander as the two of them watch Eurovision together in bed. Tomorrow morning, Aleksander will let Henryk sleep in and will put on the coffee and scramble their eggs and start on the kielbasa. Just before serving, he will go back into the bedroom to wake his fiancé with a delicate kiss upon his little ear, which he will find to be cold and stiff against his lips.

  Astonishing how comforting and peaceful a scene can be one moment and how completely it can gut you the next, when the only thing that has changed is your ability to see what is really there.

  12

  LEGWORK

  JET LAG HAS Quinn up at 4:45 a.m., and even though she is still haunted by the thought that the leads she uncovered the night before were just a little too easy, the fact remains that they are the only leads she has.

  After taking advantage of the free continental breakfast served daily in the Best Western lobby and draining several cups of weak, urn-brewed coffee, she finds her white Toyota Camry rental car in the parking lot and instructs it to take her to whichever CCW property is closest to the airport. Quinn knows that she cannot rely on the junior FBI agents the assistant director in charge put at her disposal to bring her what she needs, since most of them still seem more enamored with their badges and their newly issued service weapons than they are with stopping the next murder. For now, it is time to put the handset and the metaspecs away and to apply some old-fashioned legwork to this case.

  No more guest lists. Quinn already knows that they are all dead ends. It’s surveillance footage she’s after now. She knows her man is almost certainly captured on dozens of different video feeds every single day. And she knows that he knows this. Rather than avoiding surveillance, his game is probably to stay lost in the noise. All but the best disguises can’t fool facial recognition anyway, and somehow caking his face with prosthetic paste and embedding false eyeballs to change his pupillary distance seem well beneath him, so Quinn’s instincts are telling her that he relies on anonymity. But she also knows that there isn’t nearly as much randomness in the universe as most of us perceive. Randomness is usually more the result of our inability to see patterns than the actual absence of them. And finding patterns is what Quinn does.

  “Uncooperative” isn’t exactly the word she would use to describe the staff at the recently renovated Villas at Playa Del Rey. In fact, just about everyone Quinn talks to appears to have been abducted as a child and brainwashed by some kind of customer-service cult until reaching the legal age of employment. Copious amounts of words are exchanged, yet somehow each interaction concludes with her having no more information than she had going into it. Curiously, perhaps even less. Before she left Langley, Moretti came in to see her off, and as he walked her out, he explained to Quinn that being in the field was not like being in the computer lab, and that interrogating people was not like querying indices. Data sometimes obscured the truth, sure, but it was never intentionally deceitful or manipulative. It wasn’t calculating. People, on the other hand, were evil sons of bitches. They’d have you chasing your tail for days, not giving two fucks about all the bodies piling up so long as it suited them. Even if some little part of you knew they were lying, they’d figure out a way to speak to some other part of you that would make you believe them. The worst of them were even capable of convincing themselves of their own lies so that they were effectively lying to you and telling you the truth at the same time.

  Even when people were seemingly fully transparent, it was seldom without some amount of subtle distortion.

  “So, what am I supposed to do?” Quinn asked her new boss as she stepped into the elevator. Her flight was leaving from Reagan National in less than an hour.

  “There’s only one thing you can do,” Moretti told her through closing doors. His hands were in his pockets in a way that crinkled up his sport coat, and he shrugged his oversized shoulder pads. “Do it right back.”

  * * *

  —

  There’s a button at the front desk that summons out-of-sight Villas at Playa Del Rey staff and that, as far as Quinn can tell, only needs to be activated in situations where said staff is intentionally avoiding persistent CIA field analysts. Fortunately, their Pavlovian training prevents them from ignoring whatever the unseen stimulus is, and the hidden door behind the counter slides open almost instantaneously.

  “Good morning, Ms. Mitchell,” the manager croons. He is the type to convey exasperation through heightened congeniality. “Is there something more I can do for you?”

  “I just want to make sure I have all this straight,” Quinn says. “For my report.”

  The man’s posture is almost unnaturally erect, and his hair resembles one of those hyper-realistic oil paintings that somehow look even more real than reality.

  “What exactly can I clarify for you?”

  “You told me you don’t retain security footage for more than twenty-four hours, is that right?”

  “Sadly, we do not.” Each phrase is accompanied by a dramatic tilt of the head to one side or the other, and it occurs to Quinn how much flexibility she’s lost in her own neck from spending so much time immobile in front of plasma glass. “That is the policy of the Villas at Playa Del Rey as well as all Crystal Collective Worldwide properties.”

  “What about off-site backups?”

  A mimed moment of contemplation during which ceiling panels are examined, lips are pursed, and a delicate fingertip is nestled within a clean-shaven and well-hydrated chin cleft. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “That’s OK,” Quinn says. “Bec
ause I know all about that. You see, any time data is flushed to local storage, it triggers an event which immediately copies, compresses, encrypts, and transfers those bytes via optical fiber to a data center in Santa Monica. Then, once a day, all that data gets copied, compressed, encrypted, and moved to another data center in Provo, Utah, just in case all of Southern California gets swallowed up by an earthquake.”

  “Well,” the manager replies, and at that moment, Quinn honestly can’t tell if he is impressed with her research or on the verge of clawing out her eyes. “If you say so, Ms. Mitchell.”

  “I do. Which means I can get all the footage I want. I can get a Foreign or Domestic Intelligence Surveillance Court Order that will give me access to footage dating all the way back to the system’s inception. And not just security footage. I can get guest records, financial records, vendor records. I can find out what every one of your guests had for breakfast for probably the last thirty years. I can get biometric signatures from your guest authentication system, cross-reference them with thousands of other indices, and find out anything I want about any guest or employee I want. And if I were to find anything at all irregular, no matter how minor, I would be obligated, ethically, to pass that information on to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Which I can’t imagine would reflect particularly positively on this establishment. Unfortunately, all of that would take me about thirty-six hours. And I don’t have thirty-six hours. Do you know why?”