Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  “You know where you are, right? Best not to ask those kinds of questions.”

  “Why aren’t the numbers sequential?”

  “You can enter whatever number you want into the console when you lock it. As long as it’s unique.”

  Quinn takes a step forward as she scans. She is looking at an entire wall of random four-digit numbers that international criminals use to exchange illicit goods.

  If the numeric sequences with which the Elite Assassin tagged his victims had simply been safe deposit box numbers, Quinn would have made the connection a long time ago. In fact, it would have been next to impossible not to, since any number of algorithms would have connected the dots for her, and several of the dashboards she flicks through dozens of times a day would have refused to drop the matter until properly acknowledged. Every safe deposit box, P.O. box, offshore transaction ID, and numbered bank account on the planet is indexed and included in hundreds of default routine queries without Quinn even having to check a box.

  She even did one better. Long before Oman, Quinn compiled custom indices of all known instances of four-digit numbers matching body tags and proceeded to do everything she could think of to correlate them to financial transactions—including treating them as ciphers and using half a dozen different neural networks to attempt to decrypt them. There were thousands of hits but nothing more statistically significant than if the numbers had been generated randomly. And nothing that could be traced back to a single individual or corporate entity.

  But all that was before a stranger explained to her that there were places in the world where customers can generate their own temporary identifiers; unregulated and unaudited international dead drops; institutions with air-gapped internal networks that the CIA had not yet found a way to infiltrate.

  “How secure is this place?” Quinn asks. “Do people leave large sums of money here?”

  “I wouldn’t. There are better places for that.”

  “What places?”

  “Around here? Or anywhere?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “If you want to stay close, Dubai. If you’re talking globally, Frankfurt, London, Chicago, Singapore, Hong Kong. A bunch in Switzerland.” She squints at Quinn. “Are you OK?”

  “This is it,” Quinn says. “This is what the numbers are for.”

  The woman turns to see if she can find the same life-altering epiphany in the wall of lockers as Quinn.

  “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

  “Whatever you have to atone for,” Quinn tells the woman, “you just did it.”

  “I think I’ve lost the plot.”

  “You may have just helped save a lot of lives,” Quinn tells the girl.

  In the ensuing stupefied silence, Quinn makes her exit, and it isn’t until she is on her way to the airport that she remembers the tampons in the front pocket of her jeans and suddenly understands what it was that the young woman called out after her.

  “You’re going the wrong way!” she’d said.

  But, for once, Quinn knows that she isn’t.

  25

  FAMILY BUSINESS

  RANVEER’S RIFLE IS assembled, scoped, and stocked for the optics, not for the shot. The things he came here to do need to be done up close.

  Movement is what he is looking for. He already knows the routine of everyone inside—that by now, the house should be tidied up and quiet. But like the very young, old men seldom sleep through the night. Even Ranveer, in the last year, has had to start paying closer attention to how much he drinks in the evenings. Sooner or later, he muses, enlarged prostates come for us all.

  Infrared heat signatures look just right for the middle of the night. No kettle on in the kitchen as a thermal sign of insomnia. There’s a tiny orange blob stalking around the back—almost certainly a raccoon or a cat.

  Infiltration-wise, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than this. The old man likes to sleep with the doors and windows wide open, which he is able to do because everyone knows who his son is. But there’s one critical flaw in that logic: what if you are there on family business?

  It is a modest home. Two stories. Brick. Plants on every last horizontal stone surface deep enough to accommodate a pot. Trees lining the flat roof, concealing an illicit satellite dish that everyone knows is there.

  The perimeter of the property is defined by a tall brick wall, and Ranveer hangs the rifle from one shoulder as he lets himself in through the iron gate in the back, gingerly closing and latching it behind him. The cat he detected from the park across the street—a neighborhood stray, it would seem, with only one eye—leaps up onto the edge of the fountain as Ranveer approaches, expertly positioning itself precisely at petting height. Ranveer moves his case to his other hand so that he can comply, and the cat rattles with gratitude.

  Ranveer does not even pause at the screen door, but slides it open, pivots around it, and closes it behind him in a single fluid motion. He must balance vigilance with expediency, and one of the best ways to do so is to trust what you already know. Double- and triple-checking costs time; if you’re good enough at what you do, you should only have to do it once.

  There is enough of a moon tonight, and there are frequent enough windows throughout the home, that he does not need full-time infrared, though he does have his metaspecs in sentry mode; should they detect a heat signature consistent with any living thing bigger than the pirate cat outside, he will get a haptic alert, and the shape will be painted with a false-color overlay.

  The old man and his nurse are in separate bedrooms off the main level. But they are not why he is here. The boy’s room is upstairs.

  As he ascends, Ranveer’s shoes use radar to check for inconsistent density in the material below them, providing tactile feedback about where best to step to avoid creaking. He distributes his weight on the treads as directed, case in one hand and railing in the other. The floor plan of the house is not complicated, and at the top, Ranveer follows the handrail along the open second-story landing. The door at the end of the hall is closed, and as his gloved hand tightens around the cold oblong knob, he looks down, giving the main level one final inspection before entering.

  Children’s rooms often seem small to adults, but never so small as when they were once your own.

  It is that bizarre sense of scale that throws Ranveer off the most. He can’t remember the last time he was in a hotel with a bathroom this small. Yet this is where he spent a good portion of the first twenty years of his life. How did he manage to practice yoga on the ornate Persian rug without jamming his fingertips and toes into the walls? How did he and his father both fit on the bed with a backgammon or a chessboard between them? How did so few books aligned in the hutch above the desk once seem like an entire library—books on falconry, exotic European supercars, football clubs, and all the Shakespearean plays his father loved so much? How did he study at a desk smaller than an in-room bar where he now regularly pours himself brandies? The hexagonally patterned ball wedged between the headboard and the bookcase reminds him that he even practiced his foot and knee juggling in the cramped space before his mother finally forbade all sports indoors.

  The only time Ranveer remembers being conscious of the size of his room growing up was when he ran out of space for posters and found he had to rotate them regularly: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Argentina. All the different Arab clubs. When he steps the rest of the way into the room and closes the door, he remembers that the solid wooden panels were the only spaces left for the schedules, rosters, and statistics he and his father worked so hard to compile.

  All of this was before being smitten with cricket. Before his mother had a stroke while working in the garden and died of pneumonia a month later in the hospital. Before he and his father stopped talking.

  Ranveer sits on the edge of the bed where his father once sat at the end of almost every day
—the same bed Ranveer slept in all through primary, middle, and high school, and even most of university. Each day ended with a kiss from his father and each morning began with his mother making him breakfast: warm bread spread with feta cheese and a dollop of fig jam, or a tomato and onion omelet, or a hot bowl of lentil soup. Always a glass of golden tea.

  But everything changed the day the Ministry of Intelligence came to visit Ranveer. It wasn’t for several more years that he realized that they’d used predictive analytics to anticipate his aptitudes, but his father must have known right away because it changed the way he saw his son. Ranveer remembers how the family scrambled to stash their Hindu statues and shrines every time the men in gray suits knocked. When they were gone, before giving him his good-night kiss, Ranveer’s father made sure his son understood who those men were, what they represented, and that they had no regard for life—human or otherwise—and no wish for peace. He squeezed Ranveer’s arm and reminded him that he was to become a doctor or an engineer, not a thug and a murderer.

  Ranveer has done a lot of difficult things in his life, but none so difficult as telling his father that he’d made up his mind. It was on a Saturday evening, and he was driving his father’s old white Mercedes diesel home from a falcon club meeting. He can remember how he gripped the wheel hard to keep his hands from shaking and the pain he felt in his stomach. Not only had Ranveer made his decision, but he’d already accepted the Ministry’s invitation, signed the papers they put in front of him one after another, and committed to reporting for training right after graduation. Ranveer’s father looked straight ahead as they drove and never asked his son why. And Ranveer never told him.

  He never mentioned the document that the men in gray suits showed him on their final visit—the warrant naming everyone in his immediate and extended families except for him. His refusal to join, it was explained to him, would result in their immediate arrests, after which they would all be found guilty and sentenced under Sharia law to seventy-four lashes, which Ranveer would be made to watch. However, if he were to accept their invitation, not only would the warrant be destroyed, but Ranveer’s entire family would be allowed to continue their observance of Hinduism. The Ministry was even willing to overlook the satellite dish on the roof the family used to watch international football matches, and the occasional bottles of “Tigris wine” his uncle bought from an illegal Iraqi immigrant and shared with the family.

  From that moment, Ranveer’s father never trusted him again. But it is exactly that distrust that Ranveer now needs. If you know how to use it, animosity and hostility can be powerful tools. Distrust is as lifelong and dependable as greed and self-interest. Love nowhere near as unconditional as hate. After disassembling the gas gun and fitting its components into their foam molds, Ranveer slides the case all the way back beneath the bed, fully confident that nobody will honor this room with his or her presence as long as his father is still alive.

  Ranveer has always traveled lightly, but it is critical that, from now on, he use even more discretion. As he executes his next maneuver—the most complex and delicate move he has ever attempted—nothing he wishes to see again can be in his possession. That means gaining access to the last name on his list through highly unconventional methods, and arming himself with effective but invisible weapons.

  The Ministry represented the end of Ranveer’s childhood and the beginning of a new life. It was there that he studied his trade; that he was given many opportunities to employ and refine it against Mossad and the General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia; that he earned enough trust that he was allowed to travel. It was also at the Ministry of Intelligence, many years later, that Ranveer came across a new series of propaganda pamphlets distributed by the Americans. Iranian firewalls had gotten good enough at blocking packets from foreign networks that the CIA had gone back to underground printing presses, and there were teams that collected as many as thousands of leaflets a day, bundled them up, and shoveled them into industrial shredders and incinerators.

  Ranveer took one from the bin and read it over a cup of tea. He discovered that it was not transactional like the old series—that it did not promise wealth or material gain or the American Dream. There were no pictures of peaceful green suburbs, or expensive SUVs, or multiracial groups practicing religious freedom. Instead, they were inspirational. What they promised was intangible, complex, and abstract. The literature reminded Ranveer of the things his father had taught him, and, in fact, began with a quote from one of the old man’s favorite plays.

  We know what we are,

  but know not what we may be.

  The next chapter in Ranveer’s life began the day he secretly established communication with the CIA.

  26

  THE EPOCH INDEX

  QUINN HAS BEEN commuting to Swiss Fort Knox Site VII for five straight days now via a muscular, marigold-yellow helicopter with a shrouded rear rotor. There are racks inside for snowboards, skis, and poles, and chargers for GoPros, drones, and headphones. Maybe it’s no Chinese-made autonomous quadcopter, but she’ll take a crisp aerial view of the Alps over the heat-shimmering Grid any day.

  Settling on SFK Site VII was not difficult. It was mostly a matter of ranking all the most secure dead drop locations in the world by number of direct Emirates flights connecting nearby airports with cities where she knew the Elite Assassin had been. Took all of forty, forty-five minutes. Did most of it with a cheap ballpoint pen borrowed from a British Airlines kiosk that she first had to scribble to life on the back of a Starbucks receipt. Didn’t need petaflops of parallel processing prowess to figure out exactly where her man was going to be. Didn’t even need the entire payload of caffeine from her triple venti vanilla latte. All Quinn needed was the missing key provided by the woman with the orange-red hair, combined with a little creativity.

  On her first trip on-site, she didn’t even make it off the helipad before being intercepted by security guards in white tactical gear carrying automatic weapons and crouching in the cold alpine chopper wash. They were respectful when she waved her credentials at them, but not remotely intimidated. She was hastily sent away with the name and phone number of a Mr. Eberlein, director of Site VII, from whom she would need to be granted clearance to even be allowed to disembark, and with whom she arranged to meet early the next morning.

  Eberlein was polite but adamant that there was no way she would be given access to anyone’s reserved receptacle for any reason, under any circumstances, with or without a court order from the United States, Switzerland, or any other sovereign entity, nor would she be conducting interrogations or making any arrests on SFK property. By day three, after her superiors had contacted his superiors, and after Eberlein’s aggression had started to become decidedly less passive, he begrudgingly extended what he insisted was the best offer she was going to get.

  Each morning, Quinn was to be escorted to a vacant privacy room where she was free to spend her day as she pleased (lunch and refreshments would not be provided, and access to facilities would be strictly supervised). Should the gentleman in her photographs—the man allegedly associated with the provided list of URIs, or Unique Receptacle Identifiers—happen to pay SFK Site VII a visit, said gentleman would be informed by none other than Eberlein himself that a Ms. Quinn Mitchell representing the United States Central Intelligence Agency wished to make his distinguished acquaintance. Should he find consultation with Ms. Mitchell desirable, he would—under his own volition and free of any and all forms of coercion, including but not limited to the express or implied threat of legal action and/or physical harm—be escorted to the aforementioned privacy room, where he might remain for as long as he found an audience with Ms. Mitchell both to his liking and in his best interests. Ms. Mitchell would not be permitted to detain the gentleman for any reason whatsoever, and positively no accusations or any form of intimidation would be tolerated. Period. Quinn suspected that one more day of es
calation—of the United States threatening to take an overall keener interest in the entirety of the Swiss banking system, for instance—might have gotten her a somewhat better deal, but she didn’t want to risk her man slipping in and out while government officials postured and jousted. With a smile as patronizing as she was able to muster, she briefly grasped Eberlein’s effeminate fingers and squeezed.

  * * *

  —

  The stark concrete privacy room reminds Quinn of a walk-in freezer where she is the meat. The first day was spent catching up on administrative work. Since she was alone, she took off her metaspecs and used her handset’s pico optics to project her workspace onto one of the white concrete walls. She browsed her backlog of messages, filed several field reports read only by a persnickety AI that unfailingly requested additional meaningless details, and entered some expenses—including the one for her brand-new handset (hence the pico projector), which she’d asked for in case her old one belatedly succumbed to its misadventure, and which Moretti begrudgingly approved.

  That was yesterday. It is now her second day on-site and her fifth day in the Swiss Alps, and she is starting to wonder if she’s going to need a contingency plan. She suspects she can only spend one or two more days in an SFK privacy room eating rösti (an exotic interpretation of the humble hash brown, packed by the cook at the B&B), drinking thermoses of Swiss coffee, and sheepishly requesting trips to the restroom before she’s going to need to come up with a cheaper way to set a trap. Quinn is staying in the nearby town of Valais, and the costs of lodging, helicopter commutes, and the fruit cognacs she discovered and now uses to get to sleep at night are mounting.

  Just as Quinn begins to consider other options, there are two quick raps on the thick steel door, which is subsequently pushed inward with some obvious effort. This is the first time anyone has been to see her, so Quinn immediately taps a code into her handset, kills the projector, and pushes her chair back as she stands.