As expected, the flight computer tells them everything they need to know. Just after entering Iranian airspace, the logs show that the rear emergency hatch was open for a little under two minutes. All those clipped nylon ties on the floor in the back that looked like they were used for your standard in-flight BDSM entertainment now look a lot more like the remnants of hasty parachute preparation.
It’s easy to spot the man in charge of these types of operations. He’s the one who waits to make his entrance. Who wears a stylish, open-collared suit instead of ballistic body armor. Who does not bother with the ski mask—not because of what it might do to his hair, but because he prefers that you know exactly who he is. Because he knows that his face is the last thing on the planet you want to see at that particular moment. Because men who operate at that level are fully committed, and there will never be any hiding from the things they have done.
Anyway, that guy—he makes a distasteful reference to someone’s mother’s vagina in Arabic, then uses his handset to call it in. He wants Thunderbolt drones in the air all along the Gulf coast within the hour. He wants random northbound checkpoints from Bandar Abbas to Kermanshah. The government no longer has any kind of biometric signature on this guy, so they’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. No one gets into Tehran without showing an ID, and anyone whose paperwork is not in order gets detained. It will take their man at least a couple of days to cover the distance—perhaps as long as a week—but just in case, he expects a perimeter around the capital by nightfall.
And, as if suddenly remembering where he is, he wants this son-of-a-dog plane off the son-of-a-dog runway. Now. And for the next twenty-four hours, every private, commercial, and cargo flight from Qatar is to be diverted here, and it is to be thoroughly searched. Any aircraft failing to comply is to be shot down. Human remains are to be recovered and volumetrically scanned, and 3D models are to be brought to him personally.
The two pilots turn and look at each other for a long, wide-eyed moment, then race each other back into the cockpit. They both know that once the jet is safely parked in the Emirates hangar, they’ll collapse in the back and drink, repeatedly, to not being dead. The nice thing about piloting luxury jets—especially in parts of the world like Iran, where alcohol is banned—is that a well-stocked minibar is always close at hand.
But luxury is about much more than limitless access to fine mind-altering substances. It isn’t even about comfort or status or quality. Those who really understand what money can buy know that extravagance is really about experience. Sometimes that means getting to pass the time by playing games with zip ties in the back of private planes, and sometimes that means the thrill of spontaneous illegal skydiving to keep from being detained. But sometimes it means something much more subtle. Sometimes it means reserving not only the plane, and not just someone to fly it, but the opportunity to put on a uniform, sit in the cockpit, and pretend like you are the copilot.
24
DEAD DROP
THE GRID HAS its own administrative buildings among Doha Port, the main one being the Bariq Pavilion. Inside, it is predictably modern-opulent—a little hologram-heavy for Quinn’s personal taste—and right on the edge of being a parody of futurism. Quinn has set up base in yet another luxurious lobby oasis, where she anxiously awaits two things: word on whether her man was apprehended at the airport, and a brand-new handset.
Instead, she is approached by the port master, who, with a triumphant grin, delivers her old handset inside a sealed plastic evidence bag. Apparently, items of value are lost to the Persian Gulf all the time, and his crew has become quite adept at using a tethered submersible to retrieve everything from golf clubs to diamond earrings as small as a mere two carats.
Once it detected separation from its primary guardian—probably when the Bluetooth connection with her metaspecs became sufficiently frayed—the handset shut itself down. Sadly, Quinn has enough experience with how complex electronics interact with water that she knows not to boot it back up until as much of the moisture has been wicked away as possible. Like any modern device, Quinn’s handset is water-resistant to an extent, but she’s pretty sure that ninety minutes at the bottom of the Persian Gulf exceeds even the most optimistic ingress protection designations.
The first step is to get an idea of what she’s dealing with here. After unzipping the plastic pouch, Quinn can see that the port master went to the trouble of rinsing the OtterBox off with fresh water and conducting a cursory toweling. That’s a good start. There’s a decent ding in the side of the OtterBox from its high-velocity interaction with the railing, so Quinn decides that it has done its duty and has earned an honorable discharge.
But something stops her from tossing it. Quinn is reminded of the laptop Vanessa Townes now displays on a shelf in her office—the shattered Dell clamshell that might have saved her life. The OtterBox, it occurs to Quinn, is no less a symbol of serendipity. When her handset collided with the rail, it could have gone either way. And what she initially interpreted as fate working against her was, in fact, random acts aligning and, for once, finding in her favor.
Quinn knows how close she came to having her throat neatly slit. To grasping her neck as though she were choking in a hopeless effort to hold on to all that blood. Sitting down on the floor of the twins’ basement, quietly watching in horror as the thick red pool spread out around her. Mourning herself with silent tears from wide, terrified eyes. She knows that swallowing the trauma of narrow escape and letting it grow inside her is probably a mistake. But for now she decides to plant it like a toxic seed and to see if she can grow it into something from which she might later be able to draw strength.
* * *
—
You can use uncooked rice as a moisture-absorbing medium, or those little packets of silica gel you sometimes see tucked inside products that had to cross oceans on autonomous freighters in order to find their way to you—neither of which Quinn keeps handy. But she is nothing if not resourceful, so out comes the sandwich bag of tampons from the bottom of her purse. She proceeds to disembowel the remainder of her feminine hygiene stash, separating rayon and cotton cores from applicators and ripcords, and contoured tips from no-slip grips. The evidence bag is wet, so Quinn uses the tampons’ Ziploc to build her handset its high-absorbency nest, wrapping the makeshift invention up with a hair tie in order to apply some compression.
Ideally, if you had a handset that, say, fell into the Potomac River while recording your husband showing your daughter how to skip rocks, and that you didn’t recover until several hours later after coming back with a pair of telescopic fishing nets from the nearest Walmart, you’d let it dry overnight. But given that it’s been almost three hours since Quinn has had access to Semaphore—and in the meantime, QSS (Qatar State Security) has descended upon Hamad International Airport with support from a small team of U.S. Marines deployed from the embassy, and a separate investigative unit was dispatched to the PLC exclave—Quinn decides to skip the formalities and slip an exploratory finger down into the sanitary burrow after only twenty minutes. It comes up surprisingly dry, which means either that her handset has sufficiently drained and will probably work just fine, or that there’s still an entire thriving marine microhabitat trapped inside, and she is about to ignite a catastrophic chemical fire.
A tiny gurgle of moisture emerges from around the power button when she depresses and holds it down, which she takes to be a bad sign. But that just turns out to be the silicone gasket doing its job, since, moments later, the screen lights up. Quinn is well on her way back to the world of the connected.
There are eight Semaphore messages waiting for her—all from a woman with a stunning profile photo named Fatimah Al Thani. The ID maps to QSS, so whoever she is, she almost certainly knows something. No sooner has Quinn tapped the call icon than an immaculately made up, dark-eyed, perfectly beauty-marked young face framed in an embroidered honey-colored headdress appear
s on her screen.
“Ms. Mitchell. I see you have your handset back.”
The woman is in the twins’ kitchen. A real-time filter is being applied both to accentuate the face in the foreground and probably in an attempt to obscure the classified goings-on behind her, but blended into the background bokeh is what Quinn knows to be a prismatic band of nutritional supplement brands.
“Yes, just now,” Quinn says. “I’m sorry to rush you, but I need to know: did they get him?”
“I haven’t heard,” the woman says. “I’ve been focused on the situation here.”
Quinn’s eyes close for a moment, and she steadies herself with a deep and deliberate breath.
“Are you OK, Ms. Mitchell?”
“I’m fine,” Quinn says. “Listen, I need the numbers from the twins, but please don’t send photos. Just the numbers. Can you do that?”
Fatimah’s head tilts just perceptibly. “You haven’t listened to your messages, have you?”
“No, why?”
“Ms. Mitchell, Naan and Pita are alive.”
Quinn squints at the woman on her handset as she tries to connect what she has just been told with what she’s sure she knows.
“That’s impossible,” Quinn says. “I saw them. I saw him.”
“We thought they were dead, too, but a physician has confirmed that they are both indeed alive. Their breathing is extremely shallow—nearly undetectable—but they are breathing, and brain activity is normal.”
“Why would he leave them alive?”
“We believe the intent was murder. We found a unique molecular signature that isn’t present in their transdermal patches. It’s nothing we’ve ever seen, and it’s not in any index QSS has access to. Perhaps he is inexperienced with the substance and accidentally administered a nonlethal dose.”
“What about the numbers?”
“There aren’t any.”
“You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“Then he wasn’t trying to kill them,” Quinn says. “If he wanted them dead, they’d be dead. And tagged. He wants them alive, but he also wants to keep them quiet. He knew I was getting close. Can you wake them up?”
Quinn is momentarily distracted by a notification of a new message. Alessandro Moretti. Urgent.
“We won’t know that until we’ve positively identified the substance.”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Quinn says. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The woman nods and smiles in a way that lifts her beauty mark just so, and then the connection is closed. The message from Moretti is voice only.
“Airport was a bust. Your man boarded a private jet for Iran, but Tehran is saying he never got there. We think he’s an Iranian defector, so they probably want the sonovabitch even worse than we do. My guess is they have him in custody but don’t want anyone to know. Either way, he ain’t ever leaving Iran, so trail’s cold. Might as well pack it up and come on home.”
* * *
—
Quinn does not move. Part of her is relieved that she has just been released. Handed a ticket back to Langley. Back to her neat and clean and air-conditioned cubicle—back to her simple and predictable routine. Moretti will probably even stamp the mission a success. Cornering the Elite Assassin and forcing him into Iran, where he will probably be tortured to death, stoned, or hanged from a mobile crane, is as good as incarceration. Another victory by omission for Quinn. Another way to spin all the time she will never get back into a perverse and twisted win.
But the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. First of all, if Tehran really had him, they would not be discreet. That is not the Ayatollah’s way. If they’d apprehended the Elite Assassin—if they had anyone in their custody whom they knew the United States wanted—images and video would be streaming all over the world twenty-four hours a day.
Secondly, the Elite Assassin isn’t that stupid. He would not fly into hostile territory without a plan. In fact, infiltrating Tehran was probably his intention all along. Complete the final job in Oman, collect payment in Qatar, and then retire back home in Iran, skipping like a perfectly launched sliver of rock across the hot desert sands.
But, of course, Quinn doesn’t have any proof. And no leads to follow up on. No plausible theories to run by Van or Moretti, and no real case to make for why she might need to wait around for Naan and Pita to wake up. So she shovels her makeshift office back into her bag and tosses the Ziploc into the nearest trash can. With a working phone and a trail that’s gone cold, the only place left for Quinn to go is the airport.
But first she needs to use the restroom. They’re in the back, just beyond some sort of a locker room where, on her way past, she gets a glimpse of a woman in a black hooded bodysuit stacking bins into a tall cubby. The restroom door is heavy, and after Quinn pushes through, she is pleased to discover that all the stalls appear pristine. She picks one in the middle and sits.
She is thinking about stopping by the Bariq Pavilion Food Court on her way out and grabbing a slice of that robot-tossed, New York–style pizza (with dough made from municipal tap water flown in all the way from Brooklyn), but something doesn’t feel right. When she wipes, she closes her eyes and sighs. Just minutes after sacrificing every last one of her tampons to the cause of resuscitating her handset, Quinn realizes that she has just gotten her period.
She could probably bum something off Fatimah, but that would mean going all the way back out to PLC. Quinn is about to resign herself to searching the Bariq Pavilion for a convenience store when she recalls the woman in the locker room. A complete stranger who she will never have to see again, and who is in close proximity. Perfect.
Quinn gets herself squared away as best she can with the supplies at hand, washes up, and walks out of the bathroom doing her very best to project poise and aplomb. The locker room is as Quinn remembers it: empty but for her potential savior. The petite woman has opened a second cubby and is distributing her multidimensional bins among them like a three-dimensional, block-based puzzle game. Centered on the wall is a holographic console, presumably for authentication.
“Excuse me,” Quinn says from the opening. “Do you speak English?”
“I’m American,” the woman replies without turning. “English is all I speak.”
“Perfect,” Quinn says. “This is a little embarrassing, but…”
“You need a tampon.”
“How’d you know that?”
For the first time, the woman pauses her shifting and shimmying and turns. A piece of the most vibrant orange-red hair Quinn has ever seen escapes the woman’s hood and falls across a sun-bleached seashell complexion.
“You were in there for at least fifteen minutes, and the first thing you did when you came out was approach a complete stranger. What else could it be? You probably have a little twat wad tucked into your panties right now, don’t you?”
Quinn doesn’t exactly love the woman’s demeanor, but it’s not like she’s flush with options.
“Worst timing ever,” she manages.
The woman indicates a stuffed black duffel against the opposite wall. “Outside pocket. Help yourself.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Quinn’s knees pop as she squats. The duffel is covered in outside pockets, and she starts rummaging through them like a perverted TSA agent hoping to palm something dirty.
“Need underwear, too?”
“No, thank you,” Quinn says. In a feeble attempt to pretend like all this is normal, Quinn says, “So, are you here visiting?”
“Nope,” the woman says. “Leaving.”
Quinn rakes her fingers through the expected sundries: lotion, deodorant, tissues, hair ties, Tylenol, mints, lip balm, nail clippers.
“You don’t sound very excited.”
&nb
sp; “I have a lot to answer for,” the woman says. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Of course,” Quinn says, and as she unzips the next pocket in line, she discovers a threadbare pink teddy bear with a matching ribbon embroidered on its chest. The international symbol of breast cancer awareness. In an instant, Quinn glimpses the vulnerable little girl that the woman’s tough outer shell has been forged to protect. Another life long enough to know loss, but too brief to find peace.
Beneath the bear, Quinn lays eyes on her prize.
“Take two,” the woman tells her. “I’m not expecting any surprises.”
Quinn doesn’t mind if she does. She stands and slips the cylinders into the front pocket of her jeans one at a time as though she were loading a double-barreled shotgun.
“Again,” Quinn says, “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Good deed for the day,” the woman says.
Quinn is just about to go see about swapping out her field dressing for the real thing when something stops her—something about the lockers. Instead of little engraved labels, they are numbered with miniature plasma-dot displays. And as far as Quinn can tell, the digits are entirely random.
“What’s wrong?” the woman asks her.
“What is this place?”
“Storage,” the woman says. “But most people use it as a dead drop.”
“A dead drop?”
“A place to leave things for other people to pick up.”
“What kinds of things?”
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