Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  Ranveer suddenly remembers her smell—a combination of dryer sheets and baby powder and plain white soap. To an only child who grew up as a Hindu in Tehran among the aromas of cumin and rose water and incense, such bouquets of Western domesticity were once foreign and exotic, and he is surprised by how much he is looking forward to inhaling them again. But even though the glass doors behind him are now sealed off to the Gulf winds, the doors ahead are not parting. And Amberley-Ash is not smiling.

  “I’m surprised you came in person,” she says. These days, most structural glass is manufactured with microscopic patterns of engineered imperfections that bat a wide range of sound frequencies around until they lose most of their energy, eventually emerging from the other side as nearly imperceptible white noise. Therefore, Amberley-Ash’s voice emanates from an acoustic panel embedded in the ceiling.

  Ranveer slips his hands into his trouser pockets and shifts his weight. “Aren’t you going to invite me in for a drink?”

  “Your merchandise is to your left,” Amberley-Ash tells him. “Take it and go.”

  Ranveer confirms that there is indeed a black polymer case placed against the glass surface to his left. Inside it, he imagines, is the aluminum canister of aerosolized designer molecule, the formula for which was purchased from one of her neighbors and synthesized specifically for him.

  “I must admit,” Ranveer says, “this isn’t the reception I was hoping for.”

  “Well, this is the only reception you’re going to get,” says Amberley-Ash. “In fact, this is the last reception you’re ever going to get from me. After this, we’re done. Don’t ever contact me again.”

  Ranveer isn’t entirely sure what’s going on, but this is one of the things he likes about her. She is every bit as headstrong and confident as she is intelligent, and he has no doubt whatsoever that even without four centimeters of glass between them, they’d be having the very same conversation.

  The last time he bought from her, she invited him in and, despite the fact that Ranveer is old enough to be her father, they found themselves sitting close to one another in her upstairs conversation pit drinking various chilled gin concoctions and later ordering Indian pizzas (baked in-flight) along with several flavors of sorbet (packed in liquid nitrogen). She told him about her time at Stanford, and how she dropped out just a few credits shy of a degree in order to become one of the best-funded and youngest female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley history. Their backgrounds, upbringings, and life experiences could not have been more different, yet there they were, at that particular moment, in that specific location, both just happy not to be alone.

  That night, while she slept, Ranveer took a cognac out onto the balcony and read several articles about her as well as excerpts from her unauthorized biography. As he suspected, there had been significant gaps in Amberley-Ash’s own account of her past.

  Patricia Ash Westbrook died of breast cancer, but not before her daughter, Amberley-Ash, watched what happened as surgeons carved flesh off of her mother until it seemed there was nothing left but bone, and used a permanently implanted port in her neck to fill her with toxic chemicals that seemed to eradicate her will to live even faster than it killed cancer cells. Having watched her mother slowly die in a way that was anything but peaceful and dignified, Amberley-Ash knew that there was no way she could return to her former life and resume her previous routine. After burying what was left of her mother, rather than returning to school, she used her inheritance to establish her first lab in the Bay Area and declared that she was dedicating her life to discovering a universal cancer vaccine.

  Corpuscule, the name she incorporated under, demonstrated promising early results, and Amberley-Ash’s passion, charisma, and clarity of vision enabled her to close one of the biggest initial rounds of investment Silicon Valley had ever seen. Almost overnight, she became the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny and was constantly pursued both by her competition and by the media. That was when Amberley-Ash decided to stop sleeping.

  To keep herself awake and focused, she used amphetamines and dopamine reuptake inhibitors, and to try to keep herself coherent during press tours, she experimented with various types of mood stabilizers. Having formed several expensive pharmacological attachments, she began synthesizing her own cocktails and distributing them liberally throughout the company’s reporting structure to increase her team’s productivity. According to multiple depositions, she “strongly implied” that performance-enhancing drugs were not a choice, but a requirement.

  When her most senior scientist went home after not sleeping for three days, took a shower, put on a clean Corpuscule-branded lab jacket, and hanged himself in his basement—and after the DEA raided all three of Corpuscule’s laboratories and found that they were deeper into narcotics at that point than they were into research—Amberley-Ash decided not to attend the board meeting in which it was well known she would be stripped of all remaining control of her company, and to skip the appointment her personal lawyer had arranged for her to surrender herself to federal authorities, and instead, while she still had a passport, to embezzle what was left of her sizable capital and use it to relocate.

  There was something about the beautiful young woman that reminded Ranveer of Ophelia, Hamlet’s betrothed—her madness and self-destruction prompted by the tragic death of a parent. That night, while sitting out on Amberley-Ash’s balcony, he wondered if passion born of tragedy always revolved toward madness. Perhaps, but today Ranveer knows that the equation is much more complicated than that. He now understands that nothing of great consequence is achieved without some measure of madness, and that the acts throughout history with the most profound and lasting impacts on humanity are those that were initially indistinguishable from pure insanity.

  * * *

  —

  Ranveer’s hands come out of his pockets and form a gesture of mock surrender. “I give up,” he tells her. “You win. I should have called. Now can I please come in?”

  “I haven’t been sitting around waiting for you to call, you arrogant fuck.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is what you did to Henryk.”

  “Henryk,” Ranveer repeats as if the word were unfamiliar. “What happened to Henryk?”

  “Don’t stand there and fucking lie to me. I monitor the shadowphiles for leaked crime reports just like you. I know goddamn well Henryk didn’t die of an aortic aneurysm. Not only are you into some really fucked-up shit right now, but you’re obviously cleaning up after yourself. I’m honoring our agreement, but there’s no fucking way I’m ending up like Henryk.”

  “Listen to me,” Ranveer says. “Henryk lived an unhealthy lifestyle.”

  “Because he did business with you. I haven’t spent the last decade cooped up in this fucking aquarium trying to get sober and the last three years in teletherapy for two fucking hours a day just to get my throat slit now. There’s no way you’re getting in here.”

  Ranveer is a surprisingly gifted conversationalist when he wants to be, because he knows the secret: everyone’s favorite topic is themselves. Keep the exchange about them, and you can run out the clock on absolutely any social interaction. Young people? Relationships. The middle-aged? Kids, careers, and sports. Old people? Their shitty health. But the last time Ranveer was here, there were things he’d wanted to say, too—things that most other people weren’t able to hear, but that he felt like Amberley-Ash could. And there are things he’d like to say to her now. Things about Henryk and Oman and L.A. Things about Caracas, Moscow, Cape Town, and Beijing. About this woman from the CIA. He’d told himself that his decision to come on-Grid was a rational one: get in and get out, don’t leave a digital trail, don’t take chances on one of the street-smart, slippery errand boys hanging around Doha Port. But he realizes now that the real reason he came here was because he wanted to stay the night.

  “If you’l
l give me a chance, I’ll explain.”

  “How fucking stupid do you think I am?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I asked for something twice,” Ranveer says, “and I’m not in the habit of pleading. But please, Amberley-Ash, may I come inside? I would very much like to sit down and have a drink with you.”

  Without hesitation, and with all the accompanying aggression a hand gesture can possibly embody, Amberley-Ash gives Ranveer the finger through the thick glass. Her iridescent fingernails are chewed quick-short and she is wearing way too many rings.

  “Fuck. You. Motherfucker.”

  Ranveer looks down at the polished concrete floor and nods. Without looking up, he wanders over to his left and bends down for the case. It is lighter than he expects it to be, and he wonders briefly if it is empty—if Amberley-Ash is playing him—but decides that while she may be brash and somewhat reckless, she is certainly not stupid. He starts back toward the outer doors, stopping just out of range of the motion sensor.

  “You know,” he begins, turning halfway back. “This little piece of glass between us. That isn’t what’s keeping you safe right now.”

  Her middle finger is still up, and it had apparently followed his movement as though she were using it to ward him off. But when Ranveer unbuttons his coat and lets the heavy piece of hardware inside swing into view, her arm lowers to her side, and her expression changes.

  “A few centimeters of glass is nothing to me,” he continues. “I could be inside there in thirty seconds. Or, for less than I paid for what’s in this case, I could have divers cut through these pylons and drop this box into the Gulf and have you drowned like the pathetic unwanted kitten that you are. I could have someone fly a drone out here one night with linear-shaped charges strapped to the bottom and land it on your roof, right above your bed, and wait for you to open your eyes and register what’s about to happen to you right before I press the ignition switch. Or I could have a few friends of mine come out and visit you for a week. Their specialty is strapping people down and injecting them with substances that make them feel happier than they ever thought possible, and that their bodies and brains will crave every second of every day for the rest of their lives. Of course, I’d ask them to leave the recipe for you so that you’d be able to synthesize all you ever wanted. I suppose you’d have to throw that cute little T-shirt away, but then again, it’s a little tacky and juvenile anyway, isn’t it?”

  Amberley-Ash is trying to stand stone-still, but Ranveer can see that she is quivering. When she finally blinks, tears spill from both eyes and race one another down to the corners of her lips.

  “I think we understand one other,” Ranveer says. “If you ever say anything to anyone about me—about seeing me, about having met me, about what’s in this case—you have my word that I will kill everyone you have ever loved. If you’re lucky, I’ll save you for last. But I might just let you rot in this box for the rest of your life knowing that it was all your fault.”

  Ranveer is a surprisingly gifted conversationalist when he wants to be, but he is even better at eliciting interminable stretches of absolute silence.

  20

  GONE DARK

  QUINN ISN’T SURE how many times she allows the video of Molly to loop. Eventually, a man in greasy slate coveralls with his industrial metaspecs headset turned around backwards and his knee pads down around his ankles comes in to get a drink, and Quinn tries to shut the video off in time but can’t, and the pair of heavy, bulbous, oblivious boots briefly converge with Molly’s synthetic spirit.

  In truth, the mechanic just did Quinn a big favor. She needs to stop feeling sorry for herself and focus on getting the hell out of this warehouse, out of Oman, on an upcoming flight. Off this horrifying case and through this purgatorial phase of both her career and, it seems, her entire life.

  To that end, she begins rummaging through her carry-on, where she encounters a Ziploc bag of tampons, the charging case for her metaspecs, a silicone-handled hairbrush that looks like it was used to groom a full-grown golden retriever, a miniature pharmacy of everything from Imodium A-D to a cornucopia of pain relievers, the tangle of dongles all federal employees must carry if they want their government-issued hardware to interface with the rest of the modern world, and, finally, a tri-fold keyboard and Bluetooth travel mouse.

  Quinn unfurls the keyboard on the round laminate surface in front of her and gyrates the mouse until she sees the cursor appear in the virtual workspace projected by her metaspecs. She is hoping that enough money is changing hands as a result of her man’s ambitious itinerary to cause some blips here and there, and by properly visualizing and/or querying the right transactional data sets, she might be able to identify exactly how he’s getting paid. So she spends the next hour painting with data—searching for correlations between times of death and salient financial events associated with everything from stocks and bonds, to foreign exchange markets, to real estate and art transactions. She even brings in some of the more mundane fare that you don’t typically associate with the international assassination echelon, like mutual funds, IRAs, and CDs. Anything that can be hastily liquidated, since assassins, Quinn assumes, prefer to be paid in cash.

  There are plenty of correlational spikes, but nothing anywhere close to definitive, so Quinn decides to try to model the problem as insider trading—discernible market fluctuations (some entity generating liquidity) occurring prior to what are supposed to be unknowable future events (in this case, murders). A pause that somehow perfectly conveys the strain Quinn knows she has just put hundreds of virtual machines under once again ends without generating a single lead.

  She’s not sure what to try next, so instead of trying anything, she casts a sideways glance at the vending wall. Most of the encased wares are covered in stylized Arabic squiggles that she can’t imagine anyone being able to decipher, but there are plenty of universally recognizable brands as well. She has no idea what the contactless payment landscape is like here, so after targeting, via eye tracking, a Coke Zero and a bag of Hershey’s Miniatures, she expects the worst as she waves her handset in front of the designated sensor. Fortunately, Quinn’s handset and the vending wall are both fluent in the lingua franca of commerce. In fact, Omani technology even appears to be ahead of most of the United States, since it supports several different payment systems and even a few of the more stable—

  Cryptocurrencies.

  * * *

  —

  Seeing up Henrietta Yi’s nose is no small feat given that it is so petite. But that is exactly the view that Quinn is met with as soon as her connection request is accepted.

  Henrietta is on the move. The dramatically angled perspective on her features is relatively stable, while the primarily white background behind leaps in time to her frenzied stride.

  “Henrietta?” Quinn asks. “Is everything OK?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Henrietta assures her. She pauses and Quinn can see that she checks both lengths of long hallway before selecting a direction and continuing. “Just looking for someplace quiet.”

  Henrietta is almost certainly in Moretti’s “undisclosed location,” and although Quinn knows her gaze should be tactfully averted, instead it is intentionally sharpened. But all she can see are the steel triangular trusses of exposed ceiling, suspended trays of bundled cables, and blinding white plasma diodes like little suns eclipsed and then exposed by Henrietta’s head as she progresses.

  There is something about the Epoch Index—and hence, Moretti’s secret facility—that fascinates and captivates Quinn. Recently, when she needed a break from pounding out futile Elite Assassin queries, she indulged her curiosity by running several cross-index searches, which, interestingly, returned nothing at all. It’s not like she was expecting to surface the encrypted Epoch Index itself—or even the results of all the analyses that had to have been done on it—but she was expecting to find something. G
iven the volume of data the CIA and other government agencies have access to, and the lengths algorithms go to in an attempt to interpret search terms, you can run a query on input generated by your cat walking across your keyboard and usually get anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hits. The only way a search returns nothing at all is through active redaction—a process that continuously scans one or more indices and instantly eradicates any results returned by terms the agency considers anathema.

  So, Quinn did the next best thing: a little digging on Henrietta. Here, her efforts were much more productive.

  The earliest hit was from a study done on a rare congenital disorder called chromatic illusory palinopsia, or CIP—a condition that causes photochemical activity in the retina to continue for long periods of time, even in the absence of stimulus. Those big round metaspecs Henrietta wears that make her look like an adorable little owl apparently shift certain colors to safer locations on the spectrum where they won’t cause persistent floaters—or, as she called them as a little girl, ghosts.

  Quinn also uncovered hundreds of academic citations, the titles of which were difficult enough to get through, much less the content itself. But she downloaded the last paper Henrietta published before leaving academia—“Existential Risk Mitigation: Avoiding Astronomical Impact Events Through Early Intervention”—and was about to have a go at it when she noticed a result from a terrorist-related index. She assumed it was a false positive, but when she clicked through and started to scroll, she felt her entire world tilt. Henrietta Yi had lost both her parents in the nuclear attack on Seoul.

  Quinn immediately recalled Henrietta’s reaction when she learned that Quinn’s last assignment had been the Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force. And now she thought she understood how one of the most brilliant and promising young physicists in the world walked away from research in order to devote her life to the mission of the CIA.