Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  “That’s a very long story.”

  “Is there a short version?”

  Henrietta makes a face as she thinks it over. “Let’s just say that you never know what the world has in store for you.”

  “Amen to that,” Quinn says. “Last week I was downstairs trying to catch nuclear terrorists. Now I’m about to get on a plane and start chasing an international serial killer.”

  “You were on the Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force?”

  “Right up to the end.”

  Henrietta’s almond eyes slowly close for a solemn, prolonged moment.

  “Are you OK?”

  When she opens them again, she blinks several times, and Quinn can see that she is doing her best to remain composed.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I just want to thank you.”

  “I wish I could take some credit,” Quinn says. “All we did was spend five years proving there are no nuclear threats left.”

  “I know, but…that matters.”

  Quinn smiles. “Thank you for saying that.”

  The progress bar completes and Quinn’s phone reboots.

  “Anyway,” Henrietta says, “you’re all set, Ms. Mitchell.”

  Quinn looks down at her handset. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. The app is installed along with all the required certificates. And I generated new encryption keys for you while I was at it. I also installed public keys for Ms. Townes, Mr. Moretti, and myself, so you can contact us securely anytime.”

  “Perfect.”

  Henrietta stands and drops her phone back into the pocket of her dress. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.” Quinn offers her hand. “It was nice meeting you, Henrietta.”

  The girl enthusiastically accepts Quinn’s gesture. “You too, Ms. Mitchell.”

  She rolls her chair right back into the carpet divots from which it was originally lifted, as though concealing evidence of her presence, then starts toward the elevators.

  “Henrietta?” Quinn says.

  The girl stops.

  “This secret project you’re working on. Can you tell me if it has anything to do with the Epoch Index?”

  “No.”

  “No, it doesn’t? Or no, you can’t tell me?”

  “Safe travels, Ms. Mitchell,” says the girl, and her polka-dot dress twirls with her effervescent turn.

  9

  MIMICRY

  CHANGE IN PLANS.

  Ranveer remains so uninspired by what lies ahead that he has rented a private studio at Yoga’ubdi on the outskirts of Sohar so he can spend the morning meditating on it. It took some finessing, and some administrative rejiggering motivated by a small stack of Omani rial notes, but he was able to secure a bright and airy second-story room for himself with a balcony that opens out onto both the serene blue-green Gulf of Oman as well as the small adjacent parking lot below so that his subconscious can keep track of any comings and goings. Nine times out of ten, too many car doors slamming in rapid staccato succession means either that some form of an assault is imminent, or that a statistically significant number of civilians have suddenly been given very good reason to flee uncommonly rapidly. The key to walking out of either situation alive is early detection.

  Although he grew up in Iran, where any religion other than Islam barely registers as a rounding error, Ranveer was raised a closet Hindu, and while he no longer claims adherence to any form of organized religion, yoga and meditation have remained part of his constitution as a cultural vestige. Perhaps it is because, when forced into Muslim prayer five times a day for the first half of his life by the incessant calls to worship broadcast from mosque minarets more ubiquitous in Tehran than coffee shops in Seattle, he did his best to antagonize Allah by secretly meditating instead. To most people, meditation is a form of peaceful, spiritual grounding; to Ranveer, it is an act of pure defiance.

  But yoga is different. To old-school Hindus, yoga means creepily limber old people with gnarled feet in loose-fitting tunics. This is a far cry from the Western interpretation that, having no natural predators, flourished among Californians before invading the rest of North America and Western Europe, rapidly evolving toward a state where it is synonymous with form-fitting, designer-branded, synthetic-fiber ensembles that have given rise to all-new subgenres of bizarre erotic fetishes. As far as Ranveer is concerned, the cure for yoga perversion is simple: a monthlong retreat led by a two-hundred-year-old guru with yak cheese and snot in his beard in the bitter frigidity of the Himalayas. After that, Downward Dog will never again possess the power to elicit an erection.

  * * *

  —

  Ranveer is somewhere between sixty seconds and two minutes into his breathing routine when he feels a cold metal cylinder pressed against the nape of his neck. At the same moment, he feels warm breathing in his ear, and in a surly Eastern European accent, he hears:

  “Namaste, motherfucker.”

  Ranveer opens his eyes and turns his head just enough to see the wide, mischievous grin of Henryk Szczęście, a man said to be every bit as dangerous and unpredictable as an attempt to pronounce his surname. But the interloper’s joviality is short-lived; Henryk’s expression instantly morphs into horror when he looks down and sees the long, lithe slab of Damascus steel pressed against his Achilles tendon with just enough pressure to be felt, but not quite enough to break the skin.

  “How do you fancy walking?” Ranveer casually inquires, his English distinctly British. Both men know that barely a flick of Ranveer’s wrist would unspool and snarl the muscles and tendons in Henryk’s lower leg like a poorly cast fishing reel.

  “What the fuck, man?” Henryk lowers the instrument in his hand and ever so cautiously steps away from the blade. “You meditate with a goddamn knife?”

  When Ranveer was growing up, yoga and meditation were considered subversive and somehow spiritually underhanded by the Islamic Republic, so yeah, he sometimes meditated with a knife.

  “You don’t?”

  The metal object formerly pressed up against Ranveer’s neck turns out to be the business end of Henryk’s vaporizer. Although he is breathing heavily, he gives the device a good long suck as though he were an asthmatic clinging to life by the fraying thread of his inhaler. Meanwhile, Ranveer leans over and lays his blade gingerly across an incense bowl, where it will not accidentally impale anyone. He then unfolds his legs, stands, and stretches to his full and not-inconsiderable height. The Iranian is several centimeters taller than the Pole, but to balance things out, Henryk has at least fifty pounds on him. By the time Henryk exhales, it barely looks like he is sighing on a cold Warsaw morning, as the majority of the vapor he drew has apparently been permanently sequestered somewhere deep inside his body. The two men regard each other for a protracted moment before coming together in a warm, back-slapping embrace.

  “It’s good to see you, my friend,” Henryk says.

  “You too.”

  Henryk is bald, stocky, tattooed, and has a jaw that looks like it would shatter your fist long before it would succumb to dislocation or fracturing. In fact, in looking at him, it is hard to imagine where you could possibly strike such that your hand or foot or elbow or knee would not come out on the losing end of the bargain. He continues to draw significantly more than his fair share of air as sweat beads on his scalp like condensation, and his uncharacteristically petite ears are as red and radiant as signal flares. Despite the heat, he is wearing a heavy crimson tracksuit that some would consider stylish and that has black (possibly carbon-fiber) herringbone patterns down the sleeves and legs. Both it and his sneakers are emblazoned with the intricate logo of a European designer brand that Ranveer does not recognize on account of the fact that the two men move in very different fashion circles.

  “I came in the way you told me,” Henryk says, “and parked ju
st where you said. I thought you were being careful, but then I come in and find you half asleep.”

  “Focusing my mind,” Ranveer corrects. “There’s a difference.”

  Henryk has been known to beat people to death even while in possession of a perfectly good pistol, and to release choke holds just prior to asphyxiation in order to give his victims enough time to regain consciousness purely so that he can make them experience the horror of knowing that they are about to die all over again. It’s like edging for homicidal sociopaths.

  “The fucking elevator is broken. I had to take the goddamn stairs.”

  He also has the mouth of a sailor with a raging case of gonorrhea.

  “This is a yoga studio. You’re supposed to get exercise.”

  The whispered stories of Henryk’s violent nature have expanded to nearly mythical proportions, but ever since he and Ranveer spent a snowy evening in Gdansk over a decade ago pouring each other shots of Belvedere Polish rye, Ranveer has known that none of them are true. Henryk was moonlighting as a lookout for a U.S. Navy Island-class landing ship that the CIA repurposed as a mobile black site, and Ranveer was in town to put as many prisoners out of their misery as possible before they had a chance to unburden themselves. As far as Ranveer could tell, while Henryk had probably been indirectly complicit in dozens of deaths, he didn’t seem capable of putting a suffering dog out of its misery, much less ending another man’s life by his own hand. So rather than establishing a reputation through actual acts of violence, Henryk’s MO has always been to take credit for unclaimed bodies as a sophisticated form of criminal mimicry. He is like a harmless red and black milk snake that is nearly indistinguishable from its lethal coral brethren.

  “How is your father?” Henryk asks. “Still in Tehran?”

  “Same house I grew up in.”

  “How is the dentistry business these days?”

  “He finally retired.”

  “Ah. And how does a retired dentist in Tehran spend his days? Is he still flying hawks?”

  “Falcons. Every day. He’s president of the Tehran Falcon Flying Club now. Falcons, football, and complaining about the Supreme Leader. That’s retirement in Iran.”

  “And a good retirement it is,” Henryk affirms. “You’ll give him my love, I hope.”

  “Of course. And Aleksander?”

  “He wants me out of the game, as usual,” Henryk says. “I told him only if he agrees to marry me. I think I almost have him convinced. We are going to Greece in the spring. That is the best time to go.”

  “If you ever talk him into marrying you, you must invite me.”

  “Of course! I will introduce you to his sisters.”

  “I’m sure they’re lovely.”

  “Angels,” Henryk says. He is momentarily distracted while he rolls his shoulder and grimaces. “Every one of them.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong is I’m getting old. Two-and-a-half-hour drive up from Muscat and I’m stiff as a morning boner. I used to be able to drive from Warsaw to Madrid without even stopping to pee. Now I can’t even make it through the night.” He taps his sternum with a thick finger bound in a gold band with a giant inset ruby the same color as his tracksuit. “And fucking acid reflux. I eat Zantac like they are M&M’s. Aleksander’s nephew sends them from America. Buys the stuff in bulk from Costco.”

  Ranveer smiles. “I had to get a steroid injection in my lower back last year,” he confides, placing his hands over his kidneys and bending against them. “Still gets stiff.”

  “So even the legendary Ranveer ages,” Henryk declares. “What you need is a good woman to sleep with.”

  “How do you think I threw out my back?”

  “I mean to marry,” Henryk says. “Settle down. Make some little Ranveers. We can’t keep doing this forever.”

  “Someday,” Ranveer says. “But not today.”

  Henryk has conducted enough business that he knows a transition when he hears one. He punctuates the pleasantries with one last grin, dips a paw into his tracksuit pocket, and removes a dark glass vial. Ranveer notes that if this were a German transaction, the solution would be hermetically sealed and securely ensconced deep inside high-density foam custom-molded to a Zero Halliburton titanium attaché with biometric latches. But the Poles, being a significantly scrappier lot, have their own way of doing business. The high-value merchandise appears to have been transported thousands of kilometers in a tracksuit pocket, where it was secured by the latest in zipper technology and might have even been run through the washing machine once or twice along with a tissue or a metro ticket.

  When Henryk holds the prize up to the light—clamped between thick index finger and club-like thumb—it is just possible to see the thin liquid vacillate within. He takes a moment to regard the cylinder earnestly.

  “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” he recites.

  “Fitting,” Ranveer observes.

  “Have you ever used hebenon before?”

  “No.”

  “It separates, so you must shake it. Don’t forget. Otherwise it won’t work. And all you need is a drop. Maybe two, depending on weight. No more. Use a borosilicate glass dropper, not a plastic one. And do not get it on you.”

  The vial is delicately passed from fat to slender fingers. Payment has already been made in cryoon, the official cryptocurrency of Estonia, which the current technocratic parliament keeps pegged to the euro.

  “I trust you verified payment,” Ranveer says.

  “With you, I do not have to,” Henryk says. “But yes, I did. Very generous. Aleksander and I thank you.”

  “Consider it an early wedding gift.”

  Henryk reverts into his default state of grinning but stalls in a way that Ranveer recognizes. There is something more on his friend’s mind, and Ranveer knows that it will not stay there for long.

  “What is it?”

  “Doesn’t it get to you sometimes?” Henryk asks. “What we do?”

  Ranveer takes a moment to summon just the right response.

  “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

  Ranveer can see that it takes Henryk a moment to place the Hamlet reference, but once he does, the payoff is a grin so brilliant that Ranveer swears it radiates warmth.

  “You are one smooth motherfucker,” Henryk declares.

  Ranveer passes the vial to his left hand and offers his right.

  “Until next time.”

  Henryk brushes Ranveer’s gesture aside and moves in for another embrace. Ranveer is prepared and reciprocates—mindful of the vial.

  “Watch the shoulder,” Henryk mumbles into Ranveer’s chest.

  “Watch the back.”

  10

  CRIMES OF DISPASSION

  QUINN ALWAYS FIGURED her first trip to L.A. would be to the original Disneyland with her family. She did not foresee visiting a satellite FBI field office and being assigned to the dingy cubicle of an agent out on a long-term, undercover, gang-related assignment. But a secure place to work and access to support resources are a necessity, both of which were easily procured through a single call from what has turned out to be the exceptionally persuasive Interpol liaison, Alessandro Moretti.

  As far as Quinn can tell, the murder of Derrick Jamal Young—better known by his gaming handle, Prime—was as arbitrary as the rest of the Elite Assassin’s victims. Nothing whatsoever to indicate why this particular kid was so deserving of such a big, messy hole blown through his torso by some sort of custom-built, untraceable, sawed-off shotgun.

  None of that is to say Derrick wasn’t a little strange. He had a bizarre obsession with prime numbers and cryptography (which he often expressed through impassioned, barely coherent YouTube ramblings that got a curiously high number of views, likes, and equally incoherent comments), and before he b
ecame a professional gamer, he briefly worked as a technician in a tissue-engineering lab. But his record at work was exemplary. According to social media, he’d quit simply to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a professional v-sports athlete. When she got a hit on a couple of legal indices, Quinn thought she’d finally found something, but when she had the case unsealed, she found the charges against Derrick were nothing but typical overreaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Some light, recreational hacking that Derrick pled down to misdemeanor copyright infringement, and that his parents were somehow able to conceal—probably more for their own professional benefit than Derrick’s, given that there are far worse secrets for a professional gamer to keep than a past replete with hacking, complete with a legit federal rap sheet.

  It has become increasingly popular for the deceased to have entries in a data repository called Project Legatum. Legatum is a global, decentralized registry of linked death notices distributed across millions of devices, each dedicating a few spare processor cycles here and there to help propagate updates and verify integrity. Kind of a combination social network and cryptocurrency for the afterlife. Like most data stores built on blockchain technology, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and by no one, and both read and write access are completely free (which, almost overnight, decimated traditional media’s ability to exploit the bereaved by charging astronomical prices for anemic, ephemeral eulogies). Creating and modifying entries in Project Legatum requires a cryptographically verifiable, digitally signed death certificate to ensure that the service cannot be vandalized or misused, and the newest version of the platform even supports “smart wills” that contain signed code that can facilitate dynamic transactions like the automated distribution of estates based on current market conditions.

  Predictably, Derrick’s entry—compiled and appended to the Project Legatum blockchain not by his parents, but by his clan—is a sanitized recapitulation of a spirited life lived to its fullest with no dignity whatsoever afforded to those forces who saw fit to end it prematurely. And, sadly, with no hint whatsoever of a pattern. Quinn has even tried running steganographic neural networks against the images, videos, and text contained in all the Project Legatum entries courtesy of the Elite Assassin to see if messages are somehow being concealed inside the digital memorials, the results of which are consistently zilch. At times, Quinn feels she has become almost as obsessed with conspiratorial puzzles as Prime.