“Sorry,” Van says, though she does not sound it. “My mistake.”
“You make it sound like Advanced Analytics isn’t important. This agency couldn’t function without them.”
“But they can function without you,” Van says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means when you retire, do you want to look back at your career and realize you spent it doing a job any number of other people could do? Or do you want to retire knowing that you did something only you could’ve done?”
“Like what?” Quinn asks. “What can only I do?”
“That’s up to you, isn’t it?”
“No, seriously,” Quinn says. “No more bullshit, Vanessa. Tell me what you think I should do.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It does to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I respect your opinion. Because…” Quinn hesitates, then commits to what she wants to say. “Because I don’t have anyone else to talk this through with. Because all I have are my own obnoxious, self-pitying, exhausting thoughts, and to be perfectly honest, I haven’t exactly been a very good advocate for myself over the last few years.”
“Quinn, I’m the one who should be apologizing to you,” Van says.
“For what?”
“For not being there. Through everything.”
“That’s not your job,” Quinn says. “And you were there.”
“Not like I should have been. Not like I wish I’d been.”
“Well, good news,” Quinn says. “You can be here for me now. You can tell me what to do.”
Van leans back in her chair. “You really want to know what I think?”
“Yes,” Quinn says. “I want you to be completely honest.”
Van’s eyes drop momentarily to her laptop as she gathers her thoughts. But before she can begin, something changes on the plasma glass wall, and Quinn can’t stop herself from looking.
“What is that?” she asks.
It is a man’s hand. Index finger severed. Numbers tattooed, but in relief: black blocks with flesh-colored digits. A bright green background. Not as much blood as Quinn would have thought. Probably bled out from somewhere else.
“I’m sorry,” Van says. She leans forward and snatches the remote off its cradle. “Let me turn this damn thing off.”
“Wait,” Quinn says. “It’s six.”
Van’s thumb hovers above the inductive surface. “What is?”
“The number on the missing finger,” Quinn says. “It’s six.”
“We figured,” Van says. “It fits the sequence. Some kind of countdown.”
“It’s not a countdown.”
“How do you know?”
“Why would a countdown start at seven and go down to three?”
“Tattoos are a very personal form of expression,” Van says. “Who knows what kind of meaning it might have.”
“Exactly,” Quinn says. “They are very personal, and it does have meaning, but it’s not a countdown. It’s a prime.”
“A prime,” Van repeats. “As in number?”
“One of only two with digits in consecutive descending order.”
“Interesting,” Van observes. “What’s the other?”
“Forty-three.”
“Huh.”
“Who is this?”
“Not sure yet. Just came over the wire this morning. Probably a false positive.”
“What do you mean?”
Van places the remote back into the cradle’s magnetic grasp, then checks her laptop.
“It got swept up by the case bot because of the numbers, but they were already there, so I seriously doubt our guy’s responsible.”
“Who killed him, then?”
“Coroner’s calling it some kind of deranged self-mutilation-slash-suicide.”
“Why?”
“Because he was in the last place on the planet anyone could possibly be murdered.”
“Where?”
“In the middle of a v-sports arena,” Van says. “Surrounded by hundreds of cameras. With millions of people watching. Live.”
Quinn stands and walks toward the wall. The other images have scaled and stacked themselves to make room for the new evidence.
“Why is the background green?”
“Chroma-key. Green screen. The players wear VR headsets, but the audience wants to see the action from a third-person perspective, not first-person. So they play in these huge arenas that are painted entirely green so everything but the players can be replaced with a virtual environment.”
“Everything green becomes invisible,” Quinn says.
“Exactly.”
“And everyone inside is wearing a headset.”
“Right.”
“Then that’s how he did it,” Quinn says.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s how he committed the murder. If everything green is invisible to everyone outside the arena, and everyone inside the arena is essentially blind to everything except what’s being rendered for them, all the killer had to do was put on a green suit, and he’d be a ghost.”
“A green suit?”
“Something full-body. Something the same shade as the walls. Like they use in movies.”
“Holy shit,” Van says. “But why go to all that trouble? Why not just kill him at home?”
“I don’t know,” Quinn admits. “Where did he live?”
“Let me check.” Van pulls her laptop closer and begins typing. “In L.A.”
“Where in L.A.?”
“Hollywood. Huge house. The guy was loaded.”
“We’re talking about a professional gamer here, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And he lived in a huge house in Hollywood.”
“A damn mansion.”
Quinn’s eyes narrow. “He didn’t live alone, did he?”
Back to the laptop.
“This can’t be right,” Van says. “I’m showing twenty-two other residents.”
“That was his clan.”
“His what?”
“His clan. If v-sports is anything like e-sports, he probably lived with his team. He would have been constantly surrounded by friends. People streaming on social media. The only place the Elite Assassin could possibly get to him was during a match. The only way to kill him without being seen by anyone was to do it in front of everyone.”
“OK,” Van concedes, “but what about the tattoos?”
“What about them?”
“How can they be the mark of the Elite Assassin if they were already there?”
“Why risk the ambiguity of having two numbers on one body? And why waste valuable time tagging when all you have to do to turn a five-digit number into a four-digit number is cut off a finger?”
“So, you think our guy did this,” Van says.
“I think we have to assume he did it until we can prove otherwise. If we don’t, we could be missing something key.”
Once again, Van leans back in her chair. This time she is smiling.
“What?” Quinn wants to know.
“We?”
5
HOMELESSNESS
THE FATHER OF modern Estonian cybergrime is Otto “Kron” Hammer, and his favorite places to play are the intimate converted cinemas throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The entire Middle East has gone mad for any kind of crunchy coldwave dubstep or acid jazz trip-hop with liquid neurofunk freestyle layered in, so they treat him like a god. Sohar is Kron’s most frequent stop since, as the famous saying goes, you cannot spell “woman” without spelling “Oman.”
He is in the most expensive suite in the best hotel in Sohar, sitting up in a sumptuous four-poster bed, watching a coquettish
aspiring model named either Mira or Dona indulge him in his nascent yoga fetish. She is wearing a white and silver long-sleeve bikini-cut number that they bought in the lobby on their way up, along with the mat on which she currently stands in a firmly planted Tree Pose. The suspended bronze gong standing against the wall was borrowed from the hotel’s sanctuary.
As requested, Mira-Dona’s lacquer-black hair is not pulled back, nor coiled into a bun, nor otherwise restrained in a way that would be practical for working out. Instead, it spills down over her shoulders so that it can blanket her breasts and drape luxuriously over her sharp shoulder blades and sweep over the mat when she bends. The motion of a woman’s hair is to Kron what, to a drunk, is the clink and burble of the day’s first drink.
But his attention is abruptly drawn past the erotic tableau at the foot of the bed and into the suite’s marbled foyer. He has been in plenty of hotel rooms where people have tried to enter unannounced, but it has never happened this late, and certainly never on the top floor. Whatever they’re doing to get into the room, it seems more mechanical than digital, because all the locks slide, rotate, and pop without so much as the beep of a keycard.
Kron ensures that he is covered enough that any paparazzi photos won’t have to be censored (nobody looks good with pixelated junk), but not so covered that people might assume he was already asleep. Through squinty eyes and between the widely spread fingers of an outstretched hand ready to deflect strobes, he is surprised to register the interloper not as a gaggle of reporters, but as Tariq, the hotel manager. Behind Tariq, a platoon of housekeeping ninjas is already dispersing.
“Tariq?” Kron shrieks. He is not so much angry as confused. “What the fuck’s going on?”
Miraculously, Mira-Dona has continued to hold her impeccable pose. Hotel personnel swarm about her like a flash flood around the ancient, deeply rooted tree she has become spiritually.
“My apologies, Mr. Kron,” Tariq begins, not very apologetically, “but you must leave this hotel at once.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong?”
“There is nothing wrong, per se,” Tariq replies. “Sadly, we have no other vacancies, so there is a car on its way prepared to take you anywhere in Sohar you wish to go. At our expense, of course.”
“What did I do?” He looks at Mira-Dona, trying to detect some resemblance. “She’s not your daughter, is she? Fuck, bro. How was I supposed to know?”
“She is not,” Tariq reassures him. And then not very reassuringly: “You have two minutes to vacate this room or you will be removed by force.”
Not all of the hotel manager’s crew are there to tidy up and dust, Kron notes. There are two men stationed at the canopy bed’s posts who look more than up to the task of showing him the door. Mira-Dona leans to the side, transitioning into a Half-Moon Pose, seemingly entirely unbothered by the unexpected direction her evening has taken.
“This contingency was explained to you when you selected this suite, was it not?”
Some kind of bizarre disclaimer solemnly dispensed by Tariq begins coming back to Kron just as his head is wrapped in the salmon cardigan he left neatly folded on the dresser. It was flung by a third henchman and is closely followed by his stretch-denim leggings, which, this time, Kron is quick enough to catch. He dips beneath the blankets and does not reemerge until he is fully dressed.
At which point the room has been further transformed. There are tripods positioned throughout, each topped by buzzing fixtures producing what Kron mistakes for some kind of freaky mood lighting but is in fact ultraviolet germicidal irradiation emanating from low-pressure mercury-vapor tubes. Tariq is now bedside, offering Kron the same disposable wraparound sunglasses everyone else in the room is already wearing, including Mira-Dona, who has finally concluded her workout and is hugging the shopping bag from downstairs, presumably containing the eveningwear she arrived in. Kron’s case is packed and awaiting him in the foyer, ready to faithfully follow its master on its tiny casters like an excited puppy, and a masked housekeeper is standing on a stepladder, vigorously sanitizing the top shelf of the closet.
Kron’s Arabic is for shit, but between the bed and the door, he picks up on a pattern.
“What are they talking about?” he asks Mira-Dona. “What the bloody fuck does ranveer mean?”
“Ranveer is a man,” Mira-Dona says. She has stopped to put on her heels, and Kron inadvertently takes careful note of their effect on her ass beneath her bikini bottom.
“Well then, who the fuck is Ranveer? And what the fuck gives him the right to take my room?”
“He isn’t taking your room,” Mira-Dona says. She seems not the least bit self-conscious about her attire—or lack thereof—as the two of them are herded into the suite’s private elevator. “You took his.”
* * *
—
Ranveer is the richest homeless man in the world. He is homeless because the tools of his trade are nicely portable, and his work encourages him to be mobile. He is rich because he gets paid enormous sums to solve the kinds of problems that manifest themselves as people.
He is a tall, slender, sinewy man who has never eaten a piece of meat in his life, and although you would never use the word “muscular” to describe him, you somehow know he could rip a Tokyo telephone book in half given the proper motivation. He wears his receding hairline with grace and elegance, and his heavy chevron mustache curls so naturally and impeccably down over the corners of his upper lip that it is hard to believe he was not born with it. His black eyes somehow portray both congeniality and malice simultaneously, and have a tendency to make the people who endure his stare suddenly wish that they could be elsewhere.
This evening, Ranveer is traveling from L.A. to Sohar, Oman. From the time he leaves his room on one end and starts unpacking on the other, he will not open a door, wait in a line, or lift a single case. The hotel and the airline have arranged everything, and even in an increasingly complex, chaotic, and unpredictable world, he is fully confident that there will be no mistakes.
He only flies Emirates Airlines. If Emirates doesn’t provide regular service to a city where he needs to be—or if it is not possible to charter a private supersonic jet through Emirates Executive—he does not need to be there. He only stays in properties owned and operated by Crystal Collective Worldwide. If CCW doesn’t have a resort, hotel, or timeshare in close proximity to his destination, then it’s road-trip time. Ranveer understands the meaning of brand loyalty, and he expects that loyalty to go both ways.
CCW has a suite in every location designated just for him. If the property is entirely full, and if you are willing to be extorted out of three times the posted rate to stay in Ranveer’s reserved quarters, you do so with the understanding that you may be thrown out onto the street at any moment, whether you happen to be sleeping, showering, or shagging. Doesn’t matter if you’re a politician, executive, or rock star. There won’t even be so much as a knock or the beep of a keycard. The door will simply be thrown open, and then you, your groupies, and your things will all be on your way out by the shortest possible route. This is solemnly explained to you by the manager on duty before you biometrically authenticate. Once you are gone, the room will be reset and, as part of a smoothly executed ultraviolet germicidal irradiation operation, slow-baked under low-pressure mercury-vapor tubes. Finally, Ranveer’s cases will be brought in, and the most beautiful woman currently on staff will either lounge on a divan or sit primly on the end of the four-poster bed, wearing a combination of her very best smile and her most fitted uniform—one or two extra buttons undone.
But it isn’t the service at CCW properties that Ranveer values most, or even their emphasis on charm, elegance, and aesthetics when hiring, all the way up the line from housekeeping to senior management. It is the fact that the staff is trained not to ask questions—and more importantly, when the wrong people come calling, not to respond.
At the airport, Ranveer is personally escorted to his GoldCoach suite situated deep in Sultan Class territory by a nervous airline executive who appears less familiar with the luxuries of the 797 than Ranveer is. The bumbling oaf bumps his head both coming and going, and his hair cream leaves an unsightly smudge on the bulkhead, which a flight attendant must dispatch with a rigorous buff. The eye roll she throws Ranveer’s way, and the genial smile with which it is received, convey their tacit agreement that her boss is not long for the world of the employed.
The suite and its private lavatory contain separate plasma glass displays on which someone from Boeing-Comac is taking the opportunity to personally thank Ranveer for his patronage. While in the air, Ranveer enjoys a spicy egg curry with two bottles of mineral water while he scours three different news networks in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the constant global unrest. A cognac accompanies the checking of cricket scores (more ball tampering by the bloody Australians), after which Ranveer dims the lights, converts his heated, antimicrobial, silicone-infused memory foam seat into a luxurious berth, then sleeps soundly for the rest of the flight, his mechanically stabilized suite impervious to turbulence, chop, and bumps.
* * *
—
Ranveer’s driver is entirely for show—a chauffeur in designation only, since it is illegal for humans to operate any type of vehicle anywhere in the Sultanate of Oman. But the position still exists because the wealthy never tire of demonstrating that they can afford to pay the less affluent simply to be present. And because, in this part of the world, interacting with unfamiliar AIs is considered beneath anyone of sufficient stature. It is not unlike the attendants you frequently see in Middle Eastern airports: if you pay close enough attention, you will notice that the dense flock of smart cases never follows the man whose belongings they contain, but rather an underling whose sole job it is to imprint upon their primitive neural networks and shepherd them from one entourage to the next.
In the back of the white Range Rover, Ranveer removes his metaspecs from an inside pocket of his jacket, unfolds them, then fits the wide, iridescent displays in place. The frames are a satin-finished rose gold, and the lenses—three layers of laminated, synthetic-sapphire waveguides—are connected at the bridge, where etched optical channels just perceptibly glitter. Each wide, tapered, ivory-white temple is thick enough to house a battery, plasma light source, camera, bone-conduction speaker, and the silicon required to drive it all, but thin enough that the whole rig still qualifies as a stylish accessory rather than a cumbersome, conspicuous peripheral.
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