“How many nodes is the data stored across?” Quinn asks.
“Three.”
That’s doable, Quinn thinks. She can probably identify and attack all three before the data has a chance to replicate further. But it also doesn’t make sense. Three nodes means basic redundancy—not what you’d expect from data that should have been circulating for years. Such a small number of nodes is more characteristic of a leak that found its way down into the shadowphiles as recently as just last week.
“Subtract the timestamp on the result from the current time and format the difference into the largest possible time-based units.”
“Eleven days, sixteen hours, forty-two minutes, and six seconds.”
“What the fuck,” Quinn says.
“Command not recognized.”
“Describe the context of the result.”
“Crime scene report filed by the Royal Oman Police. Quinn Mitchell is listed as an associate investigator.”
“That can’t be right,” Quinn says.
“Authenticity verified.”
“Why would a crime scene report be available on the shadowphiles?”
“The majority of crime scene investigation reports leak to the shadowphiles within days or weeks of being filed.”
“How?”
“The FBI Cyber Division believes undetected worms operate inside most law enforcement agency networks.”
“If it’s a report by the Royal Oman Police, why is it in English?”
“The document contains sections in Arabic for the Royal Oman Police, French for Interpol, and English for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“Read the relevant English section.”
In its arrhythmic, synthetic voice: “ ‘The suspect entered the home of Ameen and Liesha Nassif through the front door after cutting around and removing the deadbolt, then placing it in a nearby flowerpot. The abundance of water in the entryway suggests the use of a portable, high-velocity waterjet. The suspect appears to have had prior knowledge of the residence, as traces of footwear were found forming a direct path to the victim’s room upstairs. Randomized fingerprints found on the baby monitor suggest the suspect used obfuscation gloves while disabling the device in order to reduce the risk of alerting the other occupants of the home. The victim, a nine-month-old male, was killed by—’ ”
“Stop,” Quinn says.
She does not need to hear the rest. Quinn remembers the report now as the one forwarded by Moretti when she was in the lobby of the Al Hujra Hotel. The one she could not even get through because of how much it brought back the day she lost Molly. But she does not need the details. She does not need to be told that the Elite Assassin remained bedside until the breathing stopped, and that he then reached over and calmly switched the baby monitor back on before anyone on the other end had a chance to notice that it wasn’t transmitting. She does not need a breakdown of the suspect’s MO since it was nearly identical to her own. Quinn thinks back to that moment in the privacy room when Ranveer reached across the table and put his hand on hers. The connection they made. How she allowed a serial killer to comfort her. And now, the search result that she thought would absolve her of all future crimes—that would prove she did not send the Epoch Index and hence is nothing like the Elite Assassin—has revealed the exact opposite, showing her just how closely she and Ranveer are already aligned.
A lean older man with foggy wire-frame specs and a wide black umbrella is approaching Quinn’s car. Cautiously. Respectfully. Leaning to the side in an attempt to see in, leading with a concerned and warm smile. One of the church pastors, Quinn thinks. She takes a deep breath and smiles back to let him know that everything is OK. That she does not need anything from him, or from the church, or from God. Quinn has just solved the riddle of the scorpion, and its meaning is rising up inside her. It isn’t really a riddle at all, but more of an allegory. The scorpion stung the turtle simply because, given the opportunity, that’s what scorpions do. Intertwining the two creatures’ fates does not change the scorpion’s nature.
33
BLACK BALL
AS SOON AS Henrietta is on the other side of the perimeter wall, she knows for sure that what she is looking at is not the result of a nuclear attack.
What was once a section of Paris known as Station F is now a massive, sparkling, crystalline crater one-third full of rainwater. Scaffolding and catwalks have already been erected so that all the physicists, forensic chemists, U.S. federal investigators, and whatever their French, British, and German counterparts are can mill about high above Ground Zero without their boots shattering the delicate and dazzling sheets beneath, and without them slipping on steep inclines and slicing open their backsides. If you need to get down into the hole to collect samples, there are ladders in designated locations that lead to suspended excavation platforms in the dry sections, and there are tools down there for smashing and digging and cutting and sifting. It is like an exotic alien archaeological dig.
Everyone keeps using the term “blast radius” to describe the 256 meters from the center to the outside edge, but “blast” is the wrong word. Henrietta has coined what she believes is a much more accurate term: reclamation radius. As she has pointed out multiple times to her colleagues and peers, the shards are oriented concentrically inward rather than away from the origin as they would be had they been forged by a crude blast.
Whatever did this did not release energy like every other detonation in the history of human-engineered explosives, from delicate little lady-finger firecrackers to city-incinerating thermonuclear hydrogen bombs. Instead, Henrietta believes that the destruction here was caused by instantaneous absorption. She cannot yet explain where the energy and missing matter went, but likewise, nobody else can explain the enigmatic absence of debris, burns, scoring, and radiation.
But the mysteries of Ground Zero do not stop there. Perhaps the most interesting and perplexing observation is that the phenomenon seems to have triggered a perfectly spherical spacetime collapse. Everything (and everyone) that was on the inside is, quite simply, gone. Everything that came into contact with the perimeter of the sphere has been transmuted into an iridescent crystalline structure. And everything beyond the reclamation radius appears entirely untouched. Buildings on all four sides have parabolic scoops removed, exposing multiple floors, ductwork, wiring, and furniture, yet not a single pane of glass beyond the barrier is so much as nicked. The surrounding buildings and the ground beneath are like injection-molded foam for shipping what must have looked like an enormous crystal ball. Except, according to Henrietta’s working hypothesis, the event wouldn’t have triggered the bright, blinding white of a high-energy burst of light like a traditional blast, but rather the deepest and most absolute of blacks.
A magnificent and colossal black ball.
Surveillance footage shows zilch. In one frame, Station F is there; in the next, it simply isn’t. While Henrietta can buy that whatever happened could have started and finished faster than a single camera’s frame rate—say 1/120th of a second—given that there were over two hundred cameras with their glass eyes cast in this direction, she finds it significantly harder to believe that it just happened to land right in between frames in every single case. That includes satellites, and the omnipresent, citywide drone mesh network that staggers and coordinates exposures in order to avoid just such frame-based blind spots. It should be impossible for something of this magnitude to happen without being captured.
Yet that’s exactly what the evidence suggests. One moment everything in and around Station F was normal, and the next, everything had already happened. It is for this reason that Henrietta has privately christened the crystalline riddle as “The Antecedent.”
One possible explanation is that the entire anomaly manifested, developed, and resolved faster than the speed of light. Maybe someone finally found a way to hack conservation laws, exposing e
xploitable subatomic flaws. Henrietta is one of the very few who now know that universal constants and enduring truths aren’t quite as immutable as everyone once thought.
A cryogenically preserved former Oxford philosophy professor whose work she thoroughly studied used to describe scientific and technological progress as a giant bag of white and black balls. New discoveries were like reaching into the bag and seeing which one you happened to pull out. White balls were safe and generally represented net gains for humanity, while black balls were catastrophic existential threats. Nobody knows the ratio of black balls to white, or if all the white balls are just the easiest ones to reach. Or if maybe the first black ball any civilization draws is always its last. All we know for sure is that once a ball is drawn, regardless of whether it’s white or black, there does not seem to be any good way of changing your mind and putting it back.
* * *
—
Henrietta would much rather be set up in the center of the platform, just below the origin, where all the best particle interactions are most likely to occur, but there is way too much competition—too many people trying to out-jurisdiction one another by comparing the heavy collections of biometrically signed and encrypted credentials that swing from their lanyards. The dynamic reminds her of card games like Magic: The Gathering; Yu-Gi-Oh; and, of course, Pokémon. Two players enter the fenced-off interior of the platform, play the best hands they can assemble, argue in multiple languages, and by the time it’s all over, only one remains.
So instead of competing, Henrietta snaps various sensors and experiments into the magnetic pogo-pin ports of autonomous quadcopter drones and sends them up to collect data on her behalf. Initially there was some attempt to control the airspace above the crater, but the French National Police officers looked so silly running around trying to figure out who was controlling what that, once they realized everyone was dicking around with them, they decided to sit quietly in their folding chairs, cross their arms and legs as tightly as possible, pitch their chins, and pretend not to care.
The irony is that, as far as Henrietta can tell, the source of mysterious energy isn’t even emanating from the focal point of the surrounding crystalline parabola anymore. We are all so accustomed to thinking of the position of everything around us as being relative to the Earth’s surface that it seldom occurs to anyone that we are, in essence, an arbitrary point of reference in the universe. There’s no reason why phenomena can’t be relative to the center of the solar system, or the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, or some cosmological anomaly spawned by the Big Bang. Whatever physical laws The Antecedent obeys, and whatever forces now act upon its baffling and abstract mass, its location in spacetime seems to be shifting very gradually like some sort of dizzying, multidimensional parallax.
Henrietta has been able to take the threat of a micro vacuum decay off the table, and she’s leaning away from the theory of a rogue chapter of ingenious bad actors who somehow figured out how to weaponize dark matter. But there is one thing she has not been able to categorically dismiss: the possibility of the emergence of an entirely new particle.
While levels of ionizing radiation are at or below baseline, the emissions around Ground Zero are not quite as innocuous as first responders initially thought. Before the site was opened to investigators, multiple biological samples were exposed via drone and analyzed using portable digital pathology scanners. Healthy cells and even samples of malignant tumors appeared to be entirely unaffected, but curiously, precancerous cells in closest proximity to the drone’s antennas showed significant accelerated advancement. It is as though some sort of interaction between ambient electromagnetic radiation and the charged particles produced by The Antecedent cause localized fields inside of which matter can reach its temporal potential exponentially faster. Transitory nanoscale time machines are flashing in and out of existence all around like microscopic fireflies operating in wavelengths of invisible light. Henrietta believes that the exposure risk has not been sufficiently conveyed: Anyone with any kind of metallic implant who is at increased risk of cancer would be well advised to stay very far away.
34
BACK DOOR
WHILE SHE WAITS for Moretti to give her clearance to leave for Paris, Quinn sits at her cubicle and investigates the attack on her own. It takes her all of about fifteen minutes to reach the conclusion that the story about a nuclear detonation is a cover-up—that her own people are lying to her, not only about one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history, but more to the point, about the death of her ex-husband.
The weather is what gives it away. Something about it feels wrong. In all of the drone and street-level footage she has pinned around her virtual workspace, Paris is overcast, but no rain is falling. She zooms and pans, but can’t find a single umbrella, nor ultra-chic hydrophobic rain bonnet, nor cobblestone pothole turned placid black puddle. No motorbike headlight skittering along glazed pavement, and not a single concentric ripple along the surface of the Seine. Yet James had made it a point to comment on how shitty the weather was. And she clearly recalls drops on his Burberry trench coat. Big ones. Finally, Doppler radar archives confirm it. The weather in the footage she was sent is more consistent with the previous day than the day of the attack.
But that’s all there is to go on. Case notes claim that the blast itself, along with the massive resulting electromagnetic pulse, destroyed the rest of the surveillance footage. When she sees Hammerstein at the coffeepot and asks him about off-site backups, he shrugs, turns, and is reabsorbed into the sleepless and detached chaos. Van isn’t returning messages, which means she’s probably already been deployed, and the only response she’s gotten from Henrietta is a promise to talk soon. All the intelligence Quinn has is roughly one cumulative hour of glitchy and grainy incineration not much better than what the rest of the world is watching: building façades twisted by searing white heat into grotesque steel claws.
So Quinn decides to find her own footage. Satellite imagery from NASA and the European Space Agency is locked down, but a key characteristic of any good intelligence officer is the ability to find creative ways around obstacles—even those erected by your own agency. Several times a day, trojans installed by Russian and Chinese assets phone their CIA homes wondering if anyone would care to crack open a back door and have unfettered access to the intelligence networks of our nation’s greatest adversaries. Yes, please. All you have to do is place an encrypted text file with an IP address at a designated endpoint, set up a secure tunnel, and then wait for the ping. It’s a sort of post–Soviet Bloc, digital-era dead drop.
As Quinn suspects, both nations have been actively photographing Ground Zero from space at every orbital opportunity. She downloads several terabytes of high-resolution photos—enough that her activity will probably trigger countermeasures, burning back doors and possibly even sources. But fuck it. Not her fault it’s easier to get answers from her enemies than from her own people.
She takes the stairs down one level and slips into the teletherapy room so nobody will walk by her cube and ask what she’s doing. The furniture looks significantly older than it did the last time she was in here. Fortunately, it is cheap and light enough to be easily moved into the corner.
The topographical imagery she begins pinning to the walls verifies that something definitely happened—something big—but it wasn’t a nuclear blast. Everything is much too clean. Too precise. Almost pristine. At first, Quinn doesn’t believe that what she is looking at is even three-dimensional. She has studied all kinds of craters left by all kinds of explosives, and she knows their anatomy intimately. Apparent boundary, true boundary, rupture zone, plastic zone. Ejecta and fallback. Displacement of ground surface.
But she has never seen anything like this before. Never one so perfectly round. It is like one of those circular crops you see from the air, watered and fertilized through center-pivot irrigation. Like it was inscribed
by a geometric compass the size of a tower crane. But the shadows clearly give it depth. After correcting for perspective, she drags out a circular ruler and finds that she can eclipse it perfectly at 512 meters in diameter. It also seems to have an unusual texture. Water has accumulated at its lowest point, but even from space, Quinn can see that it is almost white, and that it sparkles like otherworldly ice.
Ultimately, Quinn does not care all that much about how it was done. She is much more interested in the who than the what. While she continues waiting for clearance to leave, she switches gears and goes back upstairs. Starts learning everything she can about the most technologically advanced maximum-security detention facility on the planet. Gets requests approved and documents digitally signed by superiors who have not slept in days; who themselves are besieged by superiors with impossible expectations; who recognize her name from the whole Elite Assassin thing and therefore trust that whatever she is asking for must be critical.
After Quinn wraps up her investigation at Ground Zero, rather than returning to Washington, she will disappear. Her last verified location will be The Hague, where she will take prearranged temporary custody of a prisoner who, according to the paperwork she is preparing, the CIA believes can help with the events in Paris. Which is true, in a way—though the type of help she needs isn’t the type you want documented. Appeasing the future by eliminating the innocent for things they may do seems foolish to Quinn when there are so many among us who continue to go unpunished for what they have already done.
35
Scorpion Page 25
