Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

a life and a child with—was intently studying and plucking a fingernail. When the facilitator eventually asked her husband how it felt to see his wife so upset, her husband described having what amounted to an out-of-body experience, which the facilitator promptly labeled as “dissociation.” As he went on to describe the phenomenon as a mild to moderate detachment from one’s immediate surroundings and a type of psychological defense mechanism against various forms of stress, conflict, or trauma, Quinn began to realize that they were colluding to put her outburst behind them as quickly as possible because it made them uncomfortable—them—and that nobody had any intention whatsoever of trying to comfort her. Finally, she tapped the red X on the plasma glass panel, pulled off her metaspecs, and confirmed what, by then, she already knew to be true: despite the tricks metaspecs and telepresence can play on your brain, and even though her husband was dutifully playing the couples-therapy game, the reality was that Quinn was completely alone in her pain.

She spent the remainder of the hour in the teletherapy room asking herself questions like who had she become and what had she done to deserve everything that was happening to her. But most of all, she wanted to know why she was not worth fighting for. Why nobody ever seemed to be on her side. Not her mother when her father told her she needed to lose weight. Not her father when her mother told her she was embarrassed by Quinn’s grades, and that nobody would want to date someone with her complexion. Neither of them when her brother stole money from her, or called her an ugly fat bitch, or even pushed her up against a wall more than once. Not her husband when she needed him to tell her that he did not blame her for Molly. Not even a therapist who, during one of her most vulnerable moments, seemed to want to comfort her husband instead of her. That was the moment Quinn realized that the only person who would ever love her more than anyone else in the world was, at only seven years old, already dead.

By the time the session timed out, Quinn had decided that her soon-to-be-ex-husband was not the only one capable of making major life changes. The next day, she applied for an open position as an operations officer with the newly formed Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force. Maybe James was distracting himself from death and divorce by shooting down Chinese-built stealth drones carrying narcotics across the Mexican border, but she was going to do something even more hardcore.

Quinn was going to stop nuclear wars.

—

Nineteen bodies attributed to the Elite Assassin so far. Twenty counting the yet-to-be-confirmed murder in L.A. And, Quinn has been warned, there are likely to be more.

She is still going through case files, briefings, and autopsy reports, but Quinn has already noticed that the majority of the deaths were caused by projectiles of various calibers, which no ballistics experts have yet been able to identify. A few of the fatalities were the result of exotic elements like polonium-210 or toxic nerve agents like VX, sarin, and an especially deadly Russian chemical weapon known as Novichok. Throats slit by an uncharacteristically acute blade, strangulation, and falls from high places make up most of the miscellany. And, of course, there was the poor kid who suffered “blunt trauma to the neck and head”—medical-speak for getting crushed to death by oxygen tanks inside an MRI.

Although there is no obvious correlation between victims, there is one element that ties them all together: the four-digit numbers carved, branded, or otherwise indelibly imprinted somewhere on all the bodies. The chest, the forehead, across the back. On a cheek or down the thigh. The severing of a finger to turn five digits into four. They are clearly meant to be tags of some sort that the killer (or killers—Quinn has not ruled out the possibility of some sort of assassination syndicate) uses to communicate.

There is also the alert that flashes persistently in the notification pane of her favorite graphical query tool, which, when expanded, points out that each victim is younger than the last. Some by several years, others just by months. It is as though the dead have been sorted in descending chronological order. Quinn has wondered if the victims’ ages factor into some sort of code or otherwise point toward a motive, though neither her own analyses nor those of the myriad convolutional neural networks to which she has access suggest any meaningful patterns.

If age is somehow significant, it must also correspond to location—zip code (or the local equivalent thereof), country code, latitude and longitude—something position-based, since there is clearly no need to travel all over the world to find people who were born on designated days. In a college statistics course, Quinn learned about the “birthday problem,” which states that you only need 70 randomly chosen people to have a 99.9 percent chance of two of them having been born on the same day. To reach a 50/50 split, you need as few as 23. Even if you entirely dismiss statistics, it only takes 367 people to guarantee that at least two of them will have the same birthday (including February 29), which, in a city like Beijing, may be repeated as many as ten times in a single residential building. Even if the code required higher chronological resolution, there are more people in cities like Shanghai now than there are seconds in a year.

Death is as common in CIA investigations as root canals are in dentistry, but Quinn has largely been able to keep her distance from it. It’s one thing to factor homicides into an investigation, but actually investigating those homicides is an entirely different proposition. She does not want to scan corpses, compare the details of coroner reports, and generate real-time 3D models of brutal murders. Watch them over and over again for something someone might have missed,