The manager is now listening in a way that, just a moment ago, he was not. A delicate clearing of the throat. “I do not.”
“Because I’m trying to prevent a murder.”
Followed by a prominent swallow.
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Ms. Mitchell,” the manager says. “I really, really wish there was something more I could do.”
“That’s the good news,” Quinn says. She slides something across the counter and smiles. “There is.”
The manager’s eyes dip momentarily to the card on the desk. “What is this?”
“Read it.”
The manager slides the rectangle of thick paper stock toward him, plucks it from the polished marble, and takes a moment to examine the embossed print before reading it aloud. “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
“The great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Quinn tells him.
“I’m not sure I understand,” the manager confesses. “What does this mean?”
“It means that who you are isn’t a final destination. All of us are on a journey toward who we will become, and every decision we make is a step along that path. Now do you understand?”
The manager sheepishly teeter-totters his hand and squeaks, “Maybe?”
“It means that, one day, all of this…” Quinn gesticulates as though breaststroking through the concentrated opulence in which they are submerged. “This place, your job, the people you’re protecting. None of this is going to matter to you anymore. Nothing you have is going to matter to you anymore. All that will matter are the things you’ve done—or the things you haven’t done—and the effect that they’ve had on others. Is this making any sense?”
“It is.”
“Good,” Quinn says. “Then listen to me very carefully. Are you listening?”
“I am.”
“You may never be in a better position to save someone’s life than you are right now.”
By saying absolutely nothing, the manager inadvertently says it all.
“These types of warrants,” Quinn continues, “they’re sledgehammers. They inevitably turn up all kinds of unpleasantness we’re not even looking for. Nobody wants that. What I need is a scalpel. Seventy-two hours’ worth of surveillance footage. That’s it. And you’ll never see me again. My ID is on the other side of that card. Give it some thought and do whatever you think is right.”
With that, Quinn turns away from the counter and walks straight through the lobby, doing her very best not to catch a heel, fall on her face, and ruin the entire effect. She doesn’t even pause at the doors, but continues out into the parking lot, and before she gets to the next hotel on her list, her handset lets her know that she has just received exactly seventy-two hours’ worth of compressed video from an anonymous and untraceable account.
Quinn is getting the hang of this.
* * *
—
It seems word travels fast between CCW properties. Quinn is greeted by name just inside the lobbies of both the second and third hotels and assured—in hushed and rushed tones as she is walked back out beneath sprawling, cut-glass awnings—that she will have what she needs. Which, moments later, she does. It is barely lunchtime, and Quinn already has enough data to keep her busy for the rest of the day.
The rental takes her back to the FBI field office by way of an obscure establishment known as “Jack in the Box,” which Quinn had heard rumors of back east but had never beheld with her own eyes. She gets herself set up at an empty cubicle with her Brunch Burger (a hamburger on a croissant—brilliant, she thinks) and a very large, and very dark, premium roast coffee.
Despite how mind-numbing the task before her is, Quinn can’t bring herself to delegate to an intern or a junior analyst. If they got a hit, she’d have to verify it, and if they didn’t, she’d have to double-check to make sure they didn’t miss anything, so what’s the point? Quinn much prefers the stress of having way too much to do to the anxiety caused by the possibility that something might not have been done right. Management is probably not in Quinn’s future, and if it is, God help her underlings. A Vanessa Townes she is not.
She casts to the slab of plasma glass in the cube rather than her metaspecs so that she can see to her lunch as she works. The first thing she does is arrange all the video feeds from the first hotel in a grid and watches them all simultaneously at 10x speed. Every time she sees someone check in or out, she taps the button she configured to record the feed’s timestamp. She decides to narrow her search down to only two days rather than all three, which allows her to get two hotels done before it’s dark out and she is entirely incapable of focusing anymore. On her way back to the hotel, she picks up a burrito and a tall bottle of sangria, takes one more antacid tablet than the directions on the bottle recommend, and falls asleep fully clothed with the TV on. The next morning, after three miniature pots of in-room coffee and as much twenty-four-hour news programming as she can stand (very little), she tames her hair in a hasty, messy bun, slips on her specs, and works through the feed from the third hotel.
The next step is to write a script that parses timestamps out of the guest records, then compares them to the timestamps she recorded from the front desk video feeds. Eventually, she should find a mismatch. If her hypothesis is correct, someone should appear on video who did not officially check in—someone who paid in a way that cannot be easily traced, and who did not have his face scanned. Someone whose elite status allows him to play by a completely different set of rules. Someone who, even when surrounded by cameras, somehow remains the invisible man.
She finds a few anomalies that she needs to verify manually, but after all the data sets from all three hotels have been analyzed, Quinn has not found an obvious discrepancy.
Fuck.
In the shower, she briefly considers masturbating. Maybe an orgasm can light up her brain in a way that might lead to a case-changing epiphany. But the gap between where she is right now mentally and where she would need to be to get off feels daunting, so she snaps right back into analyst mode. Either she needs data from longer periods of time, or she has the wrong hotels. Or…
She thinks back to the rental car counter at LAX. The clusters of luggage, the crowds being corralled through the lanes of a configurable, nylon-belt maze. And all those signs for rewards programs: Next time, skip the line.
Of course the Elite Assassin would not be made to wait. In retrospect, it seems obvious. So how else can she combine surveillance footage with data to get a good look at her man’s face?
Dressing while avoiding catching a glimpse of herself in a full-body mirror is second nature to Quinn. She has put on weight since her divorce, and even though she commits to working out every day and taking the stairs instead of the elevator—
That’s it. The elevator. Her man likely stays on the top floor of the hotel, and something tells Quinn that he is not the type to take the stairs.
She doesn’t want to waste time commuting into the FBI field office, so when she finishes dressing, she orders up a grilled cheese and fruit salad instead of French fries, then opens the elevator surveillance videos from the Villas at Playa Del Rey—the most expensive of the three hotels. Each elevator has four different cameras, so she picks the feeds with the most direct view of the occupants’ faces, then overlays a facial recognition filter. She adjusts parameters until her food arrives, backing down the threshold to prevent false positives caused by reflections in polished metal panels and by dolls in the arms of little girls, and then she makes sure the algorithm continues to track correctly at very high speeds. When she has the right settings, she configures all the feeds from all the hotels to play in off-screen buffers simultaneously at 100x while dumping everything they find to a log file. She wants to know exactly how many faces are being tracked, and for exactly how long.
When the data is ready, and when all her dishes are o
ut in the hallway, she knows that her man is in there, and she knows she has everything she needs to find him. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to make the data talk. Quinn takes a diet soda from the minibar, checks the price on the card, then puts it back. Involuntarily, her mind hatches a plan wherein she eats every last chip, nut, and candy bar, then replaces them all with their reasonably priced doppelgängers from 7-Eleven before housekeeping is any the wiser. But the scheme goes the way of masturbation, and she is right back on track. She’ll go out for coffee later.
The first thing she does is divide the data up into individual elevator trips, which is relatively easy since all she has to do is find the points where no faces are being tracked, indicating empty cars. Since she is focused on the penthouse suite, she initially assumes that whichever elevator trip is longest most likely contains the footage she’s after. However, because of intermittent stops, she realizes it’s not going to be that easy. She needs to subtract the time it takes for the elevator to pause, and for occupants to come and go.
It takes her two hours and costs U.S. taxpayers not only that diet soda from the minibar, but a tin of Planters mixed nuts as well, but she is eventually able to isolate blocks of time when some faces change while other faces do not. By subtracting those periods from the total time of each elevator trip, she has calculated what she calls “absolute travel time.” After applying all the modifiers and comparing all the data, she finds that there are eighteen pieces of footage that run a full seven seconds longer than any of the others.
That’s way outside her expected margin of error. The data has finally spoken. Or Quinn has finally learned how to listen.
Each clip shows a different configuration of occupants: a fidgety manager-on-duty; a bellhop wheeling several metal cases accompanied by a fidgety manager-on-duty; a chef fussing over several covered dishes on a cart accompanied by a fidgety manager-on-duty; several varieties of women, primping on the way up and irritably adjusting undergarments on the way down. There is only one occupant—tall, slender, and dark—who seems entirely unconcerned with the goings-on around him.
Quinn has found her man.
She takes her time isolating several still images from various frames and runs them through algorithms to combine and enhance them. She is proud of her work, and she wants him to look his very best.
She stops for coffee and a warm chocolate croissant on the way to LAX, then spends some time sharing her new photo album with the folks at the Emirates counter. But she shows them several other images as well. Random faces mixed in. Some are from advertisements, some are wanted terrorists, some are photos she took moments ago of people in line at Shake Shack. One is a shot of her ex-husband she spontaneously took in the kitchen one Sunday afternoon that she can’t bring herself to delete. She cycles through them on her handset and asks a pretty young customer service agent if any of them are familiar. The girl seems to know to be careful, but what she doesn’t know is that the handset is recording her responses: sampling her voice, constantly comparing images of her eyes, monitoring her body temperature and heart rate. When the girl denies ever seeing Quinn’s man, the handset does not react. As far as the CIA’s best field polygraph software is concerned, she is not lying.
Airlines, Quinn realizes, are not like luxury hotels. Terminal gates are far less intimate than lobbies and front desks. There’s no reason to assume that one of perhaps hundreds of Emirates L.A. ground crew members would be able to place one specific face. But while the girl cannot recall Quinn’s man, her terminal probably can. Nobody has boarded a plane in a major airport in decades without being photographed by the airline in ultra-high definition from every conceivable angle. Names and aliases can change by the day, but faces can’t. That puts her man’s destination—and the location of the next murder—just a few keystrokes away.
Quinn passes the image to the terminal’s public buffer, a secure and isolated memory location to which some devices allow write-only access over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The protocol is used for the ad hoc exchange of lightweight data like business cards, phone numbers, and personal identification—all those things we once traded physically, but that have long since been converted to bits. The next step is to use what she learned from her interactions with CCW’s chipper-yet-reticent hotel staff. She asks the girl if she has ever heard the saying We know what we are, but know not what we may be. Tells her it’s considered the wisest of all the Native American proverbs; she has reason to believe the man in the photo she just sent over is a brutal international serial killer; the girl may never be in a better position to save someone’s life than she is right now. The whole spiel. The girl’s eyes were already wide, but as she listens to Quinn, they expand to near-manga proportions.
Finally, Quinn slides her handset down into her purse, waves away all the drama, and tells the girl to forget the whole thing. It’s not important, anyway. She isn’t really there to try to save innocent people’s lives. Really, she’s there to book a vacation. But the problem is that she just doesn’t know where in the world to go. Maybe the girl can help her out. I don’t know, maybe make a suggestion. Someplace exotic, someplace mundane—doesn’t matter. It’s all up to her. The girl is initially a little slow on the uptake, but then she starts picking up what Quinn is putting down. She cheerfully addresses her screen—taps in some input, brushes away output she doesn’t like, toggles a few switches here and there—and then she brightly suggests, of all places in the world, Sohar, Oman.
Quinn is surprised by the girl’s recommendation, but after a moment of consideration, she’s game. She would like to book herself a seat on the next flight out. Very well. Will Ms. Mitchell be traveling business or Sultan Class today? Neither, sadly. Today, Ms. Mitchell will be traveling coach.
13
NIGHT SHIFT
IF YOU REALLY want to sleep soundly at night, get yourself a dog.
Don’t bother with commercial alarm systems. Despite exorbitant recurring financial commitments, they are easily disabled or circumvented by almost any professional, and even a few promising amateurs. Window contact sensors are useless when it’s far faster and quieter to use a portable ion implantation device to transmute glass into a pile of goo than it is to jimmy open a latch. Pressure plates around a door do you no good when it’s faster to cut a hole in the wall right next to it with a common keychain laser than it is to pick the lock. Infrared motion sensors are nothing but a false sense of security in a world where you can buy heat-shielded clothing right off the bargain rack, provided you know where to shop. And if you’re rich enough to afford a security system that actually works, a simple localized electromagnetic pulse emitted from a quadcopter or a privately operated satellite network will keep things quiet for more than enough time to get a job done and tie up any loose ends.
Don’t think you’re any better off with armed guards, either. All guards do is increase the price of a job. Rather than a single target, you have to factor in multiple. And there’s no discount for buying in bulk, so a lot of Ranveer’s colleagues actually prefer jobs that involve patrols. They feel it’s a more efficient use of their valuable time.
The trick with guards is to take them out before they can trigger a silent alarm or get off a phone call, lest you get all the way up to the bedroom only to find that your target has ditched his whore and barricaded himself inside a safe room behind his walk-in closet. Modern safe rooms are pretty legit; depending on composition and configuration, some models can add up to three hours to a job. And don’t forget: there’s that obnoxious cokehead prostitute to deal with who your target so valiantly left tangled up naked in the sheets so there would be more oxygen for him. Safe rooms don’t exchange air with the outside world, because if they did, you could just screw a canister of arsenic pentafluoride or straight-up chlorine into the bypass and gas the fucker faster and with far less effort than you could strangle him with two-hundred-pound monofilament fishing line strung between a pair of oys
ter-shucking gloves.
The bottom line is, if your target ends up hermetically sealed inside any kind of halfway decent safe room, you can probably kiss your plans for later that night goodbye.
But the biggest downside to bodyguards is not that they are easily dispatched by a properly configured gas gun or, if you’re feeling especially mischievous, the quick zip of Damascus steel across the jugular, after which you need to keep them pointed away from you until they’re finished spouting. It’s that they are easily corrupted. Security professionals are almost always either stupid or underpaid—quite often both—which amounts to a dangerous and unfortunate combination when it comes to the safety of you and your family. It often costs less to get a guard to look the other way than to buy a moderately good cigar in some countries. Or, given that most bodyguards aren’t all that fond of their narcissistic and egomaniacal bosses, for the price of an evening’s worth of quality companionship, you can sometimes convince one to walk right into his employer’s bedroom, conduct business on your behalf, then get on the next flight to Bermuda. In Ranveer’s world, there’s no shame in outsourcing so long as the job gets done.
Where expensive electronics and cheap minions fail, a dog can prevail. A well-trained canine can’t be fooled or bribed, and even if you’re cold and callous enough to kill a man’s best and most loyal companion, it’s almost impossible to do so before he can manage to get out some pretty unsettling racket. Where jobs involve dogs—even the little yappy kind—your best bet is usually a sniping configuration, a downwind vantage point at least a hundred meters away, and a tall thermos of coffee.
But at the end of the day, when you think about it, the safety of each and every one of us really comes down to nothing more than the simple goodwill of others. Unless you have the resources of an entire nation dedicated to keeping you alive (and sometimes even then), just about anyone on the street can kill you or your family at any moment for any reason at all—or for no reason in particular. Most of us come into contact with anywhere from dozens to thousands of people every day who could instantly reduce us to human smoothies with nothing more than an almost imperceptible tweak of a steering wheel or the slightest nudge toward an inbound train. And those are just the careless and the cowards among us. Anyone with any balls or ingenuity can kill almost anyone else around them in a dozen different ways with nearly any implement within arm’s reach: a pencil through the soft tissue of the eye and into the temporal lobe behind; the spine of a book against the throat with enough force to crush the trachea; a “World’s Best Dad” coffee cup to the temple where the middle meningeal artery is easily lacerated. The list goes on. And then there are the myriad of actual weapons and poisons and methods of sabotage that can be used against any one of us before our brains can even begin to register the possibility of danger. The truth is that most of us survive day-to-day not because of any real ability to keep ourselves and our families safe, but simply because there is nobody in the immediate vicinity who wishes otherwise.
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