Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  The baby at the bottom of the crib is sleeping with his knees drawn in, his butt up in the air, and his head turned toward Ranveer. His flawless complexion is a radiant, golden-honey brown, and his perfect little black curls lick at his forehead and the tops of his ears. Ranveer can hear a tiny whistle coming from his plump, pursed lips as the infant takes quick, shallow breaths. He has never held a baby before, and he wonders what it would be like, seeing as how so many people seem to enjoy it so much. He even briefly considers lifting the baby out of the crib and rocking him, before dismissing the impulse as an unnecessary risk. Better to get the job done and get out before a paranoid mother subconsciously misses the ambient red rhythm of the LEDs and things really end up messy.

  From a compartment in his pouch, Ranveer produces the dark glass vial of hebenon solution and gives it a few quick shakes. If there were a handbook for such things, it would advise that hebenon is best used in circumstances where the subject is in a very deep sleep or a coma. The name comes from the botanical substance Claudius used to murder his own brother in Hamlet, though the modern-day version is decidedly less organic than its Elizabethan predecessor. The three primary ingredients are oxybuprocaine, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen cyanide. A small drop is placed in the ear, where the oxybuprocaine immediately begins to numb any surface it comes into contact with. When the fluid’s passage is obstructed by the eardrum, the sulfuric acid rapidly dispatches with the thin membrane, allowing the solution to continue down into the middle ear via the eustachian tube and then eventually into the throat, where it triggers the reflex to swallow. Once ingested, the hydrogen cyanide halts cellular respiration, which typically kills the victim in approximately sixty seconds, give or take.

  Honestly, not a bad way to go, all things considered.

  During such moments it is not uncommon for religion to intrude upon Ranveer’s thoughts, and in particular, the four objectives known as purusarthas that just about all Hindus agree guide one toward a rewarding and respectable existence. They are dharma (righteousness and moral values), artha (economic prosperity and financial security), kama (indulgence of the senses, including love), and moksha (freedom and liberation). The purusarthas are not unlike algebra in that there is a specific order of operations, which, if not observed, will yield dramatically different results. The general consensus is that dharma should be prioritized above all others, since one’s moral code dictates how one approaches the other three objectives. But just as all religions that have graduated beyond the autocratic dogma of cult status invite impassioned debate, there are those who disagree. When Ranveer was a boy, he often snuck out of his room at night and sat on the stairs in the dark and listened to his father and his uncle drink Darjeeling tea and argue about the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian text that maintained that artha, not dharma, was to be prioritized above all other objectives. Without prosperity and financial security, the argument went, sensuality and indeed even morality were not possible.

  Invariably, Ranveer’s father would react incredulously. “If one were truly to place one’s economic prosperity above one’s morality,” he argued, “just imagine the types of things one could justify doing.”

  Just imagine.

  There is enough greenish light in the room from electroluminescent nightlights that Ranveer is easily able to guide the dropper over the infant’s ear without dialing his specs into the infrared range. He pauses for a moment and listens, but all he can hear is the whistle and tiny rattle of breathing. Even through the obfuscation glove, he can feel the warmth radiating up from the baby’s cheek, and he can smell the sweet milk of his mother.

  Justifying one’s actions solely through religion is not enough. Unless you integrate philosophy and science into your worldview, you are no better than some of the mindless zealots Ranveer was surrounded by back in Tehran. You have to understand, before you choose to take a life, why it is so hard to do so. You have to accept that the innate social structure that keeps humankind intact demands that murder be abhorrent. Although we feel very little remorse for slaughtering just about any other living creature—consuming its flesh, wrapping ourselves in its skin, boiling the gelatin out of its bones and connective tissue for cheap cosmetics and children’s novelties—the sight of a severed human head or a bloated rotting corpse must necessarily evoke in us the most profound horror if the species is to avoid self-destruction. Yet somehow murder has existed for as long as life has been available to extinguish and will always exist despite any and all efforts to prevent or punish it.

  Murder is as necessary as our revulsion to it. The two forces balance each other out in a mysterious societal equilibrium that both rattles and intrigues us. The ability to murder is, frankly, what sets some people apart. Power belongs to those with the strength to overcome their fears and weaknesses and instincts—those who are capable of overriding the more primitive regions of the brain with the more highly evolved. Ranveer knows that no matter how many people he kills, in the end, he will be judged not on his moral code or his actions, but by the only criteria that has ever truly counted for anything in all the billions of years life has existed on Earth: his own ability to survive and prosper.

  A single drop of the solution is released as Ranveer squeezes the soft silicone bulb, and when the fluid is funneled down through the outer ear, the infant briefly looks as though he is going to wake up and cry, but then he becomes peaceful again. His breathing pauses, but only long enough to swallow, and then it resumes. At forty-six seconds, the short shallow breaths stop once again, and this time, the child’s little back does not resume its rhythmic rise and fall.

  As he unsheathes his ribbed Damascus steel, Ranveer notes that the baby’s cheek is a little small for a four-digit number, and therefore uses the blade to split the infant’s onesie down the back instead. Usually he carves tags into his victims, or brands them with a plasma torch, or inks them with a disposable tattoo pen. But tonight, he uses a fine-point permanent marker against the smooth and flawless skin.

  PART TWO

  16

  LUXURY LOBBY LOITERING

  QUINN MITCHELL IS not exactly what you would call cosmopolitan. In high school, she went on a group ski trip to Quebec, where she did several things she later had to disclose as part of her security clearance application so that she wouldn’t fail her polygraph. In college, she did a semester in Frankfurt, where she hoped to do some of those things again, but which turned out to be so demanding that she cried almost every night and came home two weeks early. And when she was first married, she and her now-ex-husband took a vacation to Cancún, which they each pretended to enjoy but which they admitted to each other years later they both hated. Unless you count going to the World Showcase at Epcot, Quinn is about as domestic as Americans get.

  Prior to booking her flight, she probably couldn’t have found Oman on an unlabeled map, and she had absolutely zero idea of what to expect once she landed. Turns out, at least as far as properties owned and operated by Crystal Collective Worldwide are concerned, it isn’t all that different from L.A.: plenty of decorum, almost no cooperation. Although she sees little else when she closes her eyes, nobody here can remember anyone even slightly resembling the gentleman in question. Miraculously, most don’t even need to look down at her handset before they are certain that they can be of no assistance whatsoever to a female American CIA officer with no head covering. After a full day of curt but polite interviews in the cool dim lobbies of every Crystal Collective Worldwide hotel in the city, the only thing she has learned is that, by the time she gets the necessary paperwork in place and manages to orchestrate the cooperation of both the Omani kingdom and various local authorities, all surveillance footage will have long since been erased, and her man will be three cities away with at least as many new bodies in his wake.

  Quinn was planning on her base of operations being the U.S. embassy, but Muscat is a two-and-a-half-hour drive south, so although she feels she is not all t
hat welcome at the Al Hujra Hotel—by far the most expensive of all CCW properties in Sohar, and apparently the favorite of everyone from royalty to rock stars—she gets herself set up at a table in a quiet corner of the lobby, orders a coffee and two bottles of water, unclips her handset from her belt, and starts going through her messages. The one forwarded by Moretti is marked urgent, and as soon as she begins reading it, she reflexively makes a noise that turns the heads of the people around her.

  Quinn remembers the innocent voice of the little girl in the kitchen casually telling her that Molly is sleeping in the pool. Feels, all over again, the sickening realization that she did not confirm that they were being watched. Through the kitchen window, sees the dark, still shape gently rising and falling on the calm, sparkling surface. Hears the plate shatter at her feet. Quinn cannot remember how she got outside and into the neighbor’s yard, but she can feel herself pushing against the resistance of the water, and the weight of what is in her arms, and the pull of her own wet clothes as she climbs the pool stairs. Her daughter’s eyes half open but unseeing as Quinn lays her out on a lounge chair in the sun. The limpness of her neck as she pinches her chin and straightens her head. The purple of her lips and gums. Sweeping the wet blond hair away from her porcelain-pale face. In an instant, Quinn relives the fifteen exhausting and dizzying minutes of CPR, of pleading with her daughter to come back to her, of the taste of chlorine and the smell of sunscreen and the feel of her mouth sealed around her baby’s cold lips. Compression against the tiny chest. Those beautiful blue eyes staring right past her into the sky. And then she feels herself being pulled away at the waist by an EMT and watches herself vomit violently on the deck of the pool.

  Her specs are dialed down now, and her forehead is pressed against two fingers. She is focusing on her breathing as she tastes the salt of her tears at the corners of her mouth. It is ten minutes before she can open her eyes again. The other people in the lobby are conspicuously ignoring her. She wipes her nose and cheeks and goes back to the report.

  The nine-month-old child was found by his mother when she began to wonder why he was sleeping so late. His pajamas were split open down the back, where the number 1401 was neatly printed in black indelible ink. The toxicity report shows hydrogen cyanide. Burns in the aural canal and throat indicate that the solution was administered through the ear.

  Everything about this case just changed, and Quinn now knows that she cannot keep living twelve hours in this man’s past. She does not want to be this close to death. These murders are no longer data points and statistics to be factored into queries and equations. They are more than just locations and timestamps and parameters. These are people. Babies. Quinn knows that she has two choices right now. She can call Van and wake her up and tell her that she can’t do this anymore. Tell her that she needs to come home. Ask her to talk to Moretti for her. Order a car to take her back to the airport and a glass of wine while she waits. Have another at the airport, and a third on the plane. Or she can close her eyes, take a deep breath, and get back to the task of catching this sociopathic motherfucker before he has the chance to kill again.

  Quinn adds the new case information to her database and triggers a set of routines that aggregate statistics across victims. The results are instantaneous and not significantly different from before: 86 percent are male; 92 percent are under the age of twenty-four; roughly half have ties to regions traditionally associated with the energy industry, and the other half have some kind of technical or scientific background. Not nearly enough to go on. And no secondary correlation. No ransom demands, no blackmail, and no evidence of corruption. No scandals or cover-ups. No ties to organized crime. Most people think that without a body you don’t have a murder, but there’s one more thing you need to be sure you have a lead: somewhere there has to be a motive.

  She extracts all the victims’ names and universally unique identifiers into a separate list, then runs a query against all the most common indices. The results are nothing she hasn’t already seen. Most are related to news articles and law enforcement reports and social media posts, and about half appear to be false positives. She finds some potentially interesting results pertaining to individual victims, but most have already been doled out to Interpol to run down and thus far have yielded no relevant insights. As far as Quinn can tell, there is still nothing that neatly ties all the victims together. Still no signal in the noise.

  But there is the age pattern—the fact that each victim was younger than the one before. Perhaps the Elite Assassin is nearing some sort of conclusion, his bloodlust finally satisfied by the ultimate barbarity of infanticide. Or perhaps the pattern does not signal an end to the killings, but rather foreshadows an entirely new beginning.

  * * *

  —

  At the counter, Quinn watches the hotel manager, Tariq al-Fasi Hashem, peevishly buff away a smudge on a plasma glass display with his microfiber pocket square. She strongly suspects that if she knew what was in that man’s flawlessly groomed head, she probably wouldn’t be loitering in yet another absurdly luxurious hotel lobby wishing that she knew what was in other people’s flawlessly groomed heads. Instead, she’d be using what was in her own disheveled, foggy, jet-lagged mind to compose queries that narrowed high-value results down to sets of actionable leads. If she could just get someone to recount a seemingly innocuous conversation about food or weather or currency exchange, she might be able to predict the next city. Then she might be able to narrow Emirates flights down to the point where she could distribute printouts to agents with orders to stake out gates, and Sultan Lounges, and CCW lobbies just like this one. Or, if she could get into a room where her man stayed and manage to recover a DNA sample, even though she knows that the universe would never be charitable enough to hand her a direct hit, it is possible she could get a partial match off an aunt or an uncle who did not count on having a serial-killing nephew when they agreed to genetic sequencing to see if they were at risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s. Anything to narrow the data set down to the size of the resources she has at her disposal—to adjust the ratio of warm bodies to cold.

  For the very first time in her life, Quinn understands how people justify torture. It occurs to her that, even with all the data she has access to, and all the tools with which she can sort, filter, group, join, visualize, query, and pivot, she cannot reach into the one place where all the answers to all the world’s greatest mysteries perpetually lie. Every single killer currently at large, every kidnapper, every rapist, and every terrorist is known by somebody out there. Enough knowledge exists to rain retribution down on the entire planet like a sublime golden solar storm, if only she could access and synthesize and index the contents of everyone’s minds.

  Like her colleagues, Quinn spent a fair amount of time studying the “enhanced interrogation techniques” liberally employed throughout the United States’ morally ambiguous history. She imagines Tariq in an orange jumpsuit, being pinned down beside the in-floor drain of his black-site cell inside the belly of a U.S. Navy Island-class landing ship in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Poland, kicking and twisting and pissing himself, coughing and sputtering through a towel saturated by a seemingly endless stream of cold water. Or shackled to a wall for two days in an artful, twisted pose designed to place all of his weight on a single quadriceps and hamstring and calf muscle until all three simultaneously seize and spasm and light up nerve endings in a way that rivals childbirth, and that reduces men to quivering, tearful, barely audible pleas to whoever their gods are, but that inflicts no lasting damage that can be used as evidence before an international tribunal. Or kneeling, bent over, with hands zip-tied behind him and his—

  She stops herself there. Quinn knows all she would get out of him is every insult he has ever heard, every obscenity arranged in every possible combination, and every lie he hopes will just make it stop. And she knows that even if she were to save a hypothetical life, it would be at the exp
ense of her own humanity. That she would become a walking fatality. Quinn knows that torture is the ultimate expression of frustration, impotence, and defeat—and she recognizes that those are exactly the things she is feeling right now.

  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to reach Tariq—this man who, on the surface, is just the manager of a luxury hotel, but who is clearly entrusted with so much more. Nobody is just anything. Everyone you meet, everyone you see around you—whether you’re rubbing elbows at a black-tie gala or eating Chick-fil-A waffle fries in a suburban food court—everyone is endlessly complex. Everyone, no matter how seemingly guarded, has a rich and personal and meaningful story to tell. You just need to know how to ask.

  Quinn turns on her handset, logs into the CIA’s encrypted virtual private network, swivels the throat mic down from her metaspecs, and begins subvocalizing queries like the desperately murmured prayers of the tortured.

  * * *

  —

  “Good afternoon,” Tariq says with none of the ooze of the manager back in L.A. Without bothering to ask permission, he hitches his steel-gray trousers just above the knees and seats himself on the edge of the white divan across from Quinn. This is his hotel, and he will sit when and where he damn well pleases. “The concierge said you wished to see me.”

  Quinn relocates her specs to the top of her head. She is trying to suppress the fact that, up close, she finds the manager of the Al Hujra—the man she was fantasizing about waterboarding just thirty-five minutes ago—unexpectedly attractive. Usually, curly hair doesn’t do much for her, but there’s something about the way it blends with his salt-and-pepper stubble and complements his dark complexion that she finds distinguished.