Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  Quinn cycles through a deep breath and swallows. “What is it?”

  “Your last name wasn’t always Mitchell,” Ranveer begins. His dark eyes are eerily serene and perfectly steady. “You used to be Quinn Claiborne.”

  He pauses, presumably waiting for a reaction. Quinn shakes her head to show him that she is both underwhelmed and piqued.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “That’s public record.”

  “You changed it back to Mitchell, your maiden name, after your brother’s surgery,” he continues. “After the radiation therapy ensured that he would never be able to have children.”

  He pauses again. This time, Quinn is quiet.

  “Your husband, James, was upset. You fought about it for days. He proposed that you hyphenate your name, but you refused. You went back to Mitchell and insisted that your children bear your last name instead of his. He had two brothers who both had children. His name wasn’t in danger of dying out. But continuing the Mitchell line was up to you. What angered James was not that you wanted to give up his name. It was that you chose your father’s name—the name of a man who so clearly never cared about you—over the name of a man who loved you more than anything else in the world. That was why he felt betrayed.”

  “You—” Quinn isn’t sure what she wants to say, but she wants this to stop. This man is sick. Anyone who would play these types of games is sick. She will not participate. She will not play, and she will not let him make her cry. “James could have told someone that. He could have told his therapist. All of this could have been stolen from digital records.”

  “I’m not finished,” Ranveer says. “There’s one more thing about your father that nobody else in the world besides you could possibly know. Isn’t there?”

  Quinn can feel her face drain of all expression and the nausea rise up in her gut. She now knows exactly where this going.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says. “I want you to stop.”

  “You were with your father when he died. It was the middle of the night. Nobody expected him to live as long as he did, and the hospice nurse had to go out to get more morphine. Your brother and your stepmother were asleep downstairs. They’d asked you to wake them if his condition changed, and you promised them that you would.”

  “Stop it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I said stop.”

  Quinn wants to reach across the table and make him stop, but instead she puts her hand over her mouth. She finds she is powerless to do anything but listen as the man across from her reveals her darkest and most shameful secret.

  “There was a baby monitor in the room, and you reached over and calmly switched it off. And then—very slowly—you closed the valve on his oxygen tank. He opened his eyes and looked at you, and you could see the fear in them. You held his hand and you kissed his forehead and you stroked his wispy white hair. He didn’t smell like your father anymore. He smelled like excrement. He smelled like death. You talked to him and you wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes and from where they pooled up against the plastic tubing. His mouth moved, but he couldn’t speak. You promised him that everything was going to be OK, and that one day he would be with your mother again, and eventually with you and your brother, and that everything would go back to how it was. You sang him the songs he sang to you and your brother when you were little, and you kept singing until his ragged breathing finally stopped. And then you put his hand down on top of the comforter, opened the valve on the oxygen tank, switched the baby monitor back on, and went downstairs to wake everyone up. You told them that you’d fallen asleep in the chair, and when you woke up, he was gone. You lied to them because you wanted his last moments to be yours. You felt like you deserved them. He gave your brother everything, and your stepmother only married him for his money. You wanted something from him that nobody else would ever be able to have, so you took it.”

  Quinn lowers her chin to her chest as she begins to weep, and when she feels Ranveer’s hand on top of hers, she does not pull away. Her sobs reverberate throughout the concrete room as she grieves.

  “He was suffering,” she says between convulsions. “It was what he would have wanted.”

  “I know.”

  “He wouldn’t have made it through the night. I was just—”

  “It’s OK.”

  When she finally opens her eyes, she sees Ranveer looking at her in a way that nobody has looked at her in a very long time. Maybe ever. There is no judgment or embarrassment or discomfort in his expression. He is not dissociating or looking for ways to put distance between them. He is not making jokes or otherwise trying to expedite her emotion. Instead, he is sitting right there with her, sharing in her pain, and Quinn realizes that it is perhaps the most human moment of her entire life.

  Quinn takes her hand back. “I’m not a murderer,” she tells the man across from her.

  Ranveer watches her for a moment, and she cannot tell what he is thinking. “Do you know the story of the scorpion and the turtle?” he finally asks.

  “What?”

  “It’s an old Persian fable.”

  Quinn leans back and blots her eyes with her sleeve.

  “A scorpion wishes to cross a river,” Ranveer begins, “but cannot swim. It turns to a nearby turtle and asks for a ride. The turtle, knowing the scorpion’s nature, refuses. But the scorpion points out that if it were to kill the turtle, they would both drown. The turtle sees the logic in the scorpion’s argument and agrees. Halfway across the river, the scorpion buries its stinger deep into the soft flesh of the turtle’s neck. As they both sink below the current, the turtle asks the scorpion why. Do you know what the scorpion says?”

  They watch each other across the cold steel surface of the table, the silence between them protracting, until the stillness in the room is shattered by sudden commotion outside. The yelling and barking of orders is loud enough to penetrate the thick metal door, and they both reflexively stand, Ranveer lunging for his case, and Quinn making one last attempt to clean up her face.

  The heavy metal slab is swung open with surprising ease, and before it can slam against the wall, the room is full of masked figures in dark body armor behind blinding strobes. The plasma dots on the ends of the submachine guns are meant to stun and blind anyone inside without the concussion and violence of flashbang grenades. Three men are on top of Ranveer before anyone can speak. The heavy case drops, the flashes stop, and he is bent roughly over the table and cuffed.

  Eberlein is screaming somewhere down the hall. For a moment, his voice gets louder, then it fades rapidly into the distance. When everyone has declared the room clear, Alessandro Moretti steps inside, surveying the situation while holstering his pistol. He is wearing a Kevlar vest and his shirtsleeves are rolled up. His eyes are baggy but bright, and Quinn can see that these are the moments he lives for—the rush that makes all the paperwork and bureaucracy worthwhile.

  He nods at Quinn and smiles at her for perhaps the very first time.

  “Well done, Mitchell.”

  “Thank—” She clears her throat. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You OK?”

  “Fine. The strobes.”

  “It’ll pass.”

  Moretti moves around the room until he can get a good look at Ranveer’s face, then he looks back up at Quinn. “So, what’s the good word, Officer Mitchell? Did you get what we need?”

  Ranveer’s neck is bent and his face is pressed into the cold steel, but he can still twist around and look up. His expression is not one of pleading. It is strained by the physical position he is in, but Quinn can see that he is not afraid, and he is not trying to convey any kind of threat. There is nothing he wants or needs from her anymore. He has the serenity of a man who, even though he is out of time, has still managed to fulfill his mission. As Quinn watches him, his eyes softe
n, and his lips constrict into a cunning and subtle grin. He seems pleased to be leaving Quinn with the unfinished fable of the scorpion.

  PART THREE

  27

  MAN CAVE

  ALESSANDRO MORETTI HAD one room of his secret facility turned into his own personal gym. Henrietta can hear the music and the clanking of weights from all the way down the hall. She’s practiced her pitch enough that she has the whole thing memorized, and abruptly decides that now is the right time.

  The door is ajar, and Henrietta knocks as she pushes it farther open and slips tentatively inside. Moretti glances down the length of his chest as he pushes through one final rep, then drops the bar noisily into its catch.

  This is the first time Henrietta has been in this room. The entire facility is her domain with two exceptions: Mr. Moretti’s office and what appears to be an adjoining man cave.

  It’s almost all weights in here. No space for sissy cardio. Variously shaped bars are strewn about like metallic bones amid hinged benches. There are a couple of steel frames that look disconcertedly like cages. And a rack of graduating dumbbells against the wall. Above them, a wide plasma glass screen, its dangling wires exposed, the brutality of the afternoon’s global news muted. In the corner, a mini fridge with a see-through door etched with the Monster energy drink logo, and a plasma-accented boombox rattling classic rock planted on top. The concrete floor is covered by thick black interlocking tiles forming a sprawling rubberized mat that singes the air with its potent outgassing.

  Henrietta wonders if it has occurred to Moretti that the quantum fields they are generating here in order to facilitate dynamic mass redistribution could be commercialized for the creation of the very first infinitely configurable weight set—though, sadly, at a per-unit cost of billions.

  “Mr. Moretti?” she says apprehensively.

  Her boss is sitting up now, and Henrietta can see that he is wearing a white ribbed wife-beater T-shirt tucked into his steel-gray pleated trousers. His back is covered in a fine black down, and there is an indistinct bluish tattoo on one shoulder that Henrietta assumes is related to his days as an Army Ranger. A gold chain hangs on the outside of his shirt, converging against his sternum, weighted by an emerald- and ruby-studded Lady of Guadalupe pendant—not as a symbol of any form of faith, but, according to rumors, a trophy taken off a Mexican drug lord as he lay maimed along with his family in the debris of a drone strike—courtesy of the CIA. Moretti’s pink, neatly pressed dress shirt is hung by its collar behind him on a metal peg.

  Mr. Moretti is smelly and sweaty, Henrietta sings in her head.

  Moretti puts his hands out like he’s catching a body falling from the sky, but instead of looking up, he is glaring straight ahead.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he wants to know.

  Instantaneously the music ducks below the level of anticipated conversation, and the boombox’s neon blaze accordingly fades.

  “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “No.” Henrietta now sees that her calculations were way off. She assumed Moretti would be more receptive to her proposal during his downtime, but it’s obvious to her now that he takes his breaks just as seriously as he does his work. “I’m sorry. It can wait.”

  Moretti scoops up a tall black can from the floor, rattles it, and tips it back. He uses the other hand to halt Henrietta’s retreat.

  “You already interrupted me,” he says, grimacing from the potency of whatever energy-enhancing chemicals he is ingesting. “What is it?”

  Henrietta contemplates aborting her plan—either hastily evacuating, or fabricating an update that her boss will pretend to understand. But the part of her that is perpetually eager to please is being overridden by something inside of her that has been growing in control: the feeling that she is running out of time to become the person she feels she was always meant to be.

  “Well,” Henrietta says as she steps farther into the room. “It’s about the email I sent you.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one about me getting back into research.”

  “Refresh my memory,” Moretti says, by which he means, I didn’t bother reading it.

  “Last week, I sent you a proposal for how I think I can get back into civilian research.”

  “Ah,” Moretti realizes. “This again.”

  “Now that we’re almost operational here, and now that the whole Elite Assassin thing has been wrapped up, I thought it would be a good time for me to get back to publishing some of my research. On my own time, of course. Maybe even spend evenings and weekends working part-time at a university. It wouldn’t affect my work here. I promise.”

  Moretti turns to retrieve a white hand towel that was spread over the bench to protect the material from the back of his head, then uses it to dab at the black tufts of his armpits.

  “I don’t think so,” he says.

  Henrietta had been planning this conversation for months—long before she got up the courage to send the email. She wasn’t exactly expecting her boss to be enthusiastic about the idea, but she also wasn’t expecting it all to be over so fast.

  “Mr. Moretti, I—”

  “I said no,” Moretti repeats. “Is there anything else?”

  Henrietta starts to turn, but stops.

  “Yes,” she says. She resets her specs, folds her arms across the chest of her floral dress, and shifts her weight. “I’d like to know why.”

  She can tell that Moretti was not expecting to have to provide any kind of justification. He watches her for a moment, and she knows that he is contemplating the physics of the interaction: how much force he can get away with applying without causing more resistance. His expression changes, and she can see that he has resigned himself to a moderately softer approach.

  “Well, for one,” he begins, “we got this whole thing going on in Paris.”

  “What thing?”

  “Some Japanese astronomer claims he discovered plans for a machine that can generate particles that travel faster than the speed of light.”

  “Superluminal particles? This is the first I’m hearing of this.”

  “You’re hearing about it now,” Moretti says.

  “What do you mean he discovered plans?”

  “Says he found them in the sensor backlogs of a bunch of solar probes. Some kind of message. Sound familiar?”

  “Are his claims credible?”

  “We’ll know soon enough. We’re setting up an experiment between Paris and Langley, so I need you to supervise on our end.”

  “OK,” Henrietta says with cautious optimism. “How about after the experiment? Or even after we’re fully operational here? I’m not saying it has to be right now. I just want to know that there’s some kind of plan to let me get back into academia.”

  “Why?” Moretti asks emphatically. “What’s so goddamn special about academia? What, do you want more money? Is this your way of asking for a raise?”

  “It isn’t about the money, Mr. Moretti. It’s about the science.”

  “Fuck the science,” Moretti says. “What about the mission? After what happened to your parents, you’d think you’d be a little more committed.”

  “I am committed to the mission,” Henrietta insists. “But this isn’t what my parents wanted for me. My father wanted me to contribute to the greater scientific good, not spend my life locked up in some secret bunker nobody will ever even know about.”

  “Oh, make no mistake,” Moretti says. He stands, throws one leg over the bench, and takes a step toward Henrietta. “The world will know about this place.”

  “But when?” Henrietta asks. “In a hundred years?”

  “A hundred years. Two hundred years. A thousand years, if we’re lucky. The longer it takes for the world to find out about what we’re doing here, the bette
r we’re doing it. But I promise you, the world will know, and history will remember.”

  “Fine,” Henrietta says. “But why can’t I do civilian research on my own time?”

  “Because you’re tainted, Henrietta. Can’t you see that? There’s no way you can separate what you know about this place from outside academic research. I can’t let you go around publishing. That could jeopardize everything. This whole fucking place. I’m sorry, but everything you do for the rest of your career will be classified. The sooner you accept that, the better.”

  “Then I’ll quit,” Henrietta says matter-of-factly.

  “Excuse me?” Moretti asks her. “What did you just say?”

  “I said, if you won’t be reasonable, then I’ll quit.”

  “Oh-kay,” Moretti says in a way that Henrietta knows means he is escalating. “Let me explain something to you, sweetheart. There is no quitting for people like you.”

  “How do you intend to stop me?”

  “How do I intend to stop you?” Moretti asks bemusedly. “By turning the full force of this agency against you, that’s how. Do you know why I’m having Simon work so closely with you?”

  “Simon is my assistant.”

  “Simon isn’t your assistant,” Moretti says. “Simon is your replacement. Don’t think for a second I didn’t see this coming. From now on, if you so much as show up late for work without a goddamn doctor’s note, I’ll have you arrested for sharing information with North Korea. I’ll have you implicated in the terrorist attack on Seoul, and I’ll have you thrown in the deepest, darkest hole this country knows how to dig. Is that a clear enough answer for you?”

  He is pointing at her now, and she can see the veins in his biceps and the tendons in his neck. Henrietta doesn’t know why she isn’t crying. She has stepped outside of herself and is amazed to see that instead of shrinking, she is standing up straight and staring Moretti right in the eye. Her arms are now down at her sides, her hands clenched into little fists, her chin lowered almost to her chest. And on her face is an eerie and defiant smile.