There are four men outside the room: a clearly perturbed Eberlein, two almost excessively Scandinavian armed guards, and the man Quinn has been chasing all over the world.
Standing right there.
As though he weren’t some sort of aristocratic, sociopathic serial killer. Like he might actually be a human being instead of an apparition that can only be captured on surveillance footage long after he has escaped, and whose interactions with the physical world are detectable only through the bodies and the blood and the anguish he leaves in his wake.
Like she didn’t, finally, just catch the motherfucker.
* * *
—
“Ms. Mitchell,” Eberlein announces with poorly disguised disgust. “Allow me to introduce Mr. Ranveer.”
In the wake of the director’s imperial flair, Ranveer steps into the privacy room and begins scanning. He is gripping a small metal case that Quinn can tell carries some serious weight, and it does not escape her notice that it is in his left hand. Her eyes dart across his waist and she sees that his oversized metal watch is on his right wrist.
Quinn knows that he is looking for more doors, one-way mirrors, cameras. Dark muzzle-sized holes in the tall white walls. She can tell that he is considering the furniture, calculating its value as either a weapon or a shield. As cautious as he is being, it occurs to her that he is probably far safer at the moment than she is—that if something were to go down right now, he would be everyone’s top priority. Ranveer is, after all, the only one in the room holding a case full of money.
The sharp, falcon-like eyes finally find Quinn, and she feels the cold in the room suddenly soak through all the layers of her clothes and into her skin. He is steadfast and placid while she struggles to keep herself still against the chill closing in around her and the fear rising up from within. He does not conduct his threat assessment by looking her up and down, but by holding her gaze and watching her eyes for changes over time. Quinn is shivering on the inside, but on the outside, she projects all the resolve of an immovable object.
The appraisal is terminated by a curt and decisive nod. “Ms. Mitchell.”
“Mr. Ranveer,” Eberlein injects, “I wish to reiterate that you—”
“I understand,” Ranveer interrupts. “Your services have been impeccable. You may leave us.”
His British English is perfect, and Quinn is trying very hard not to find the man charming. Eberlein is clearly relieved by his client’s graciousness, and when Ranveer offers his hand to the director, the fastidious man performs a pitifully obsequious bow as he receives it. Quinn tries to see if any Swiss francs or euros change hands, but it doesn’t look like it. There’s probably an affluence threshold beyond which passing cash is considered tacky.
“Thank you, Mr. Ranveer. We will be right outside should you require anything at all.”
Eberlein gestures impatiently at the guards, tugs at the door, and all three men give Quinn one final look of contempt through the narrowing gap. It closes with a surprising report that settles nicely over the thick layer of tension already accumulating throughout the bright white room.
Quinn has considered this conversation frequently and repeatedly, but now that her man is actually standing right here in front of her, the situation seems to defy all of her rehearsals. Instead of working from a script, she decides to clear her mind—to take it one line at a time and accept that the situation will likely be fluid.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” she says, then immediately regrets starting out with a conciliatory cliché. She knows she does not have much leverage at the moment, but that is certainly not what she wants to convey. Nor is it the opening move she suspects a more experienced officer would choose.
“Of course,” Ranveer replies.
“Please, have a seat.”
Ranveer sits in the chair opposite Quinn and sets the heavy case down at his feet. She notices that he grips the table with both hands to confirm that it is indeed bolted down.
“My name is Quinn Mitchell. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
She waits for a reaction, which comes, eventually, in the form of another shallow nod.
“I’m investigating a series of murders that I think you might know something about.”
“I understand,” Ranveer responds flatly.
She watches him for a moment while she tries to work out what kind of game he is playing. He did not have to agree to see her, so surely he must have something more to offer than stretches of awkward silence punctuated by polite platitudes. It occurs to Quinn that he may simply be waiting for her to reveal what she knows. That he may be here to extract information from her. Quinn begins to wonder if perhaps he is the one who laid the trap—if instead of him being alone in a room deep underground with her, it is the other way around.
“Mr. Ranveer, can you account for your whereabouts over the last four weeks?”
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
Quinn is startled by the killer’s willingness to dispense with all pretense. His forthrightness induces a new wave of panic since, if he walked in here ready to confirm her accusations, he obviously expects to walk out on his own terms.
“Yes,” she finally says. “I’m pretty sure that I do, but I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Ms. Mitchell,” Ranveer says, shaking his head, “these are not the right questions.”
Quinn tries to stifle a look of surprise. “What does that mean?”
“It means there is no point in discussing what we both already know. Your limited time with me is better spent asking about things you haven’t yet figured out.”
“Fine,” Quinn says. She is doing her best to appear unperturbed. “Then I’d like you to tell me who wanted all these people dead, and I’d like you to tell me why.”
Ranveer drops his eyes for a moment, then drums his fingertips on the brushed-steel surface before him. Quinn notices that his fingernails are significantly better manicured than her own.
“Ms. Mitchell,” he begins. “May I ask you a question?”
At this point, Quinn is flying entirely blind and relying purely on instinct. She decides she is willing to entertain anything that keeps her man talking—and that keeps the clock ticking.
“Why not?”
“Have you ever heard of the Epoch Index?”
Quinn’s gaze sharpens. She is leaning against the back of her chair, looking down at Ranveer, hoping to appear confident and in control. But now she moves around to the other side and sits, and they regard each other on an equal level.
“I’ve heard of it.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything. Until someone figures out how to decrypt it, there’s no way to know what it is.”
“What would you say if I told you that I decrypted it.”
“I’d say you were lying.”
“Why?”
“Because the smartest people in the world have been trying to decrypt it and haven’t been able to.”
“Let’s approach this from a different angle,” Ranveer proposes. “Why encrypt anything at all?”
“To make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
“Exactly. Which implies that if it were to fall into the right hands, it could be decrypted.”
“So the CIA is the wrong hands.”
“You might say that.”
“And you’re the right hands.”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Well, that’s easy enough to prove, isn’t it? If you decrypted it, you must know where it came from.”
“I do.”
“And?”
Ranveer smiles reticently. “I can confirm that the rumors as to its origins are true.”
“Let’s be clear here,” Quinn says. “Are you claiming that the Epoch Index came from the future?”
“I am.”
“Which implies that someone from the future wanted all these people dead, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Ranveer, I’m not that stupid,” Quinn tells him. “I know that none of this is possible.”
“If I were to present you with irrefutable proof,” Ranveer says, “then will you believe me?”
“Probably not,” Quinn says, “but irrefutable proof is certainly a good start.”
Ranveer leans forward. He watches Quinn astutely—clearly a precursor to a deliberate and purposeful delivery.
“The Epoch Index was detected by the Large Hadron Collider over a decade ago, but it wasn’t until a Korean physicist named Henrietta Yi—whom I suspect you’ve met by now—had the idea of using parallelized neural networks to analyze the backlog of data that it was finally discovered.”
“I know all this,” Quinn says. “What I don’t know is what happened to the Epoch Index after it was discovered.”
“After the European Organization for Nuclear Research confirmed the anomaly, they contacted a small number of governments and turned the data over.”
“Then how did you end up with it?”
“That’s not important right now. What is important is that the data consisted of a series of encrypted blocks that nobody knew how to decrypt.”
“Nobody but you,” Quinn corrects.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Think about it,” Ranveer says. “You already know the answer.”
“I’d really rather not play—” But then something unexpectedly aligns in Quinn Mitchell’s mind. “The twins.”
“The twins,” Ranveer confirms. “I took the index to Naan and Pita. They have more distributed computing resources at their disposal than anyone else on the entire planet. The CIA included. The encryption on the first block was relatively weak, so it only took about a month to break it.”
“What was it?”
“First of all, verification. Enough information to prove, definitively, that the Epoch Index is from the future.”
“How?”
“Years of global temperature charts. Hour by hour. Which would all prove to be exactly correct down to a tenth of a degree.”
Quinn tries to think of a way to disprove the premise. Obviously, any number of people can use predictive modeling to anticipate future temperatures, but not down to the hour, and certainly not down to fractions of degrees.
“OK,” Quinn allows. “What else?”
“Instructions. Along with the first name on the list.”
“The first target,” Quinn clarifies.
“Yes.”
“And presumably the rest of the blocks were additional targets.”
“And payment.”
“What kind of payment?”
“Whatever has value by virtue of being unknowable or undiscovered. Cryptocurrency trends, stock tips, sports scores. Novel molecular compounds. Did the CIA or the QSS ever identify the substance used to anesthetize the twins?”
“No.”
“Now you know why,” Ranveer says. “Anyway, the twins acted as middlemen. Given their neighbors, the information was not difficult to trade on.” He reaches down and taps the case at his feet. “They even arranged the transfer of cash.”
“Why the tags?” Quinn asks. “Why not just send the twins four-digit numbers directly? Or have them send the numbers directly to you?”
“One less digital breadcrumb for you to scoop up. Safer to let the media do the communication for us.”
“That’s just sick,” Quinn says, though she has to admit, it is as brilliant as it is twisted.
“Pita’s idea, if I remember correctly.”
“Why didn’t you kill them?”
“The twins? Because there was no need for them to die.” He takes a moment more to consider Quinn’s question more deeply. “And because I like them.”
“You mean because you still have use for them.”
“That too.”
“Why would Naan and Pita go along with something like this?” Quinn asks. “Somehow they don’t strike me as the murdering type.”
“The twins are the two most intelligent people I’ve ever met,” Ranveer says. “They understood the significance of the Epoch Index even before I did.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Naan and Pita went along with it because they had no choice.”
“Because you forced them.”
“No. They participated voluntarily. Reluctantly, but voluntarily. They accepted that everyone named by the Epoch Index had to be eliminated.”
“Why?” Quinn asks. “Why was it so important to the future that all these people die?”
“Because,” Ranveer says, “they were the most dangerous terrorists the world would ever see.”
“Terrorists?” In her mind, Quinn begins reviewing the victims’ profiles. A Kenyan cab driver who, on weekends, was learning to fly at Nairobi Aviation College. A Chinese man arrested by the Ministry of Public Security for selling banned video games. A geneticist working for a South African food-processing company. A Russian hacker who lost her legs in a retaliatory missile strike. A young former executive of Petróleos de Venezuela. A top v-sports athlete obsessed with prime numbers and cryptography. The nine-month-old son of an Omani investor. Nine months old. And at least a dozen others—all mostly unremarkable. “Bullshit,” Quinn says. “What kind of terrorists?”
“All kinds,” Ranveer says. “Even the kind you used to hunt before you began hunting me.”
Quinn shakes her head. “That’s impossible,” she says. “We never found any nuclear terrorists.”
Ranveer shows a row of impeccable white teeth as he grins. “Exactly.”
“You’re sick,” Quinn tells the man across from her. “You’ve been murdering innocent people. Children. Babies. There’s no way they were all terrorists.”
“They weren’t,” Ranveer agrees. “Not yet. Remember, the Epoch Index came from the future.”
“Why didn’t you just have them arrested?” Quinn asks. “Or have them—I don’t know—watched or something?”
“That wasn’t an option.”
“Why?”
“The digitally signed death certificate of each target was the decryption key for the next block. The only way to decrypt the entire list was to eliminate every target on it. Each death had to be verified, and they had to be done in the correct order.”
Quinn recalls the flag that her dashboard raised about the victims’ ages. “From oldest to youngest,” she says.
“So it would seem.”
“That’s very clever,” Quinn says with a sardonic grin. She feels like a trial lawyer about to eviscerate her witness. “But it’s also complete bullshit. And I can prove it.”
“I already know your objection,” Ranveer says.
“What?”
“You’re going to say that some properties of death certificates are predictable. Name, universally unique identifier, birth date, address. But some—like time, cause, and place of death—are not.”
“Exactly. And any change in the contents, no matter how minor, changes the entire digital signature, which means unless the targets were eliminated at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place, and in exactly the right way, it wouldn’t work.”
“Except…” He pauses, presumably to give Quinn the opportunity to find the flaw in her own logic.
“Except what?”
“Except for the fact that the blocks were encrypted in the future, Ms. Mitchell, when all of those details were already known.”
Quinn leans back in her chair and smiles. She no long
er feels intimidated by the man across from her, but oddly invigorated by the exchange.
“I’m impressed,” she says. “You’ve really put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”
“No,” Ranveer says. “Someone much more ruthless and calculating than I put a lot of thought into this. I’m just following orders.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” Quinn says.
“What?”
“Someone more ruthless and calculating than you. Who is he?”
Ranveer leans forward, placing his arms on the steel surface between them and interlacing his long fingers. He watches her with his perfectly black eyes, and she perceives in him a tranquility that is simultaneously comforting and unsettling.
“You.”
Quinn’s expression instantly changes. She takes in a breath and starts to say something but stops. Before she can counter, Ranveer continues.
“You are the one who saves countless lives, Ms. Mitchell. You are the one who figures out how to adapt to an insane and disintegrating world. I came here to tell you that Molly did not die in vain, and that your life has not been wasted. I came here to tell you that you are the architect of the Epoch Index.”
Molly. Hearing that name come out of this man’s mouth both infuriates and weakens her. Quinn’s hands are pressed into the metal surface in front of her, and her eyes are one blink away from spilling tears of both rage and pain.
“I promised you irrefutable proof,” Ranveer continues. “The Epoch Index had a short, clear-text prologue. Perhaps you’ll recognize it. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
“That’s a—” Quinn shakes her head. “That doesn’t mean anything. That’s from Hamlet. You’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that.”
“Oh, I can,” Ranveer assures her. “The last decrypted block—the one I was picking up when we nearly met on The Grid—wasn’t a name. It was a message. For you. From you. Your most private memory. Something you never told anyone and never wrote down. Something to prove that the Epoch Index is real, and that you are its creator.”
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