Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

let the CIA cart into the heart of their capital city—even when chaperoned by Interpol—so she had to make do with a dynamic rendering of the cybernetic hacker girl’s flat synthesized from high-resolution scans. But American money talks in Venezuela in ways that it does not in Russia, so Quinn was able to experience the sickening scene of the MRI massacre through a live video stream fed to her bulky black metaspecs by a tiny cyclops quadcopter.

Ironhide was also available to her—an adorable little tank-tread robot bristling with manipulators. It was one of the many DARPA-built explosive ordnance disposal “technicians” that the CIA, FBI, and ATF redeployed as remote-controlled prostheses for investigating crime scenes from afar. But being an inexperienced pilot, Quinn found it preferable to feed a gloved French Interpol forensic specialist verbal instructions instead, although Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Leblanc made it abundantly clear that he had flown all the way from Paris to Caracas to lend his particular expertise to the investigation, not to be ordered around the forty-two-acre hacienda by an American woman nibbling on a banana nut muffin two thousand miles away.

It was hard to know when it was time to stop investigating remotely and to get out into the field. For at least a decade, it had been possible to solve most crimes through a series of elegantly composed queries across a variety of indices further refined by specially trained neural networks, ultimately culminating in a list of names short enough that you could send a couple of agents—or sometimes even the local doughnut patrol—out to visit each one, approach with sufficient swagger, flash a badge, commence browbeating, and see which one of them either reached or ran. Quinn hoped that the Elite Assassin would be no exception, but she also knew that it would almost certainly not be that easy. If it were, the case would never have found its way to the CIA, and certainly not to her. Eventually, she knew she would need to step away from the comfort of her home base and initiate a proper chase. The only question was when.

The answer, apparently, was right now. When a local FBI crime lab determined that a residue found in an alley just outside the Black Horizon V-Sports Studio was likely an incinerated polyester and spandex blend—the material most commonly used in full-body chroma-key suits—Quinn was told to log into the CIA’s travel site and book herself a flight to L.A. When your adversary hands you the home-field advantage, Moretti said with his meticulously groomed goatee framing his famously roguish grin, you goddamn well take it.

—

Quinn has just finished canceling her car appointment and rescheduling her mammogram. Now she is trying to decide between a Red Roof Inn and the airport Best Western.

“Ms. Mitchell?”

She is certain the voice she hears behind her is that of a child’s, and the tiny Asian girl she sees standing there when she spins around in her chair appears to be all of twelve years old. She is wearing a pair of oversized, round, wire-rimmed specs that pinch the tip of her petite nose.

“Yes?”

“Henrietta Yi,” the girl says by way of self-introduction.

Despite the space buns, polka-dot baby doll dress, and ivory-white high-tops, Quinn is starting to get that this girl is not, in fact, a colleague’s lost daughter. The badge dangling from her pink Hello Kitty lanyard advertises clearance at the highest possible level.

“Hello,” Quinn replies, her tone disclosing that she knows she is missing key context here.

“Mr. Moretti’s tech guy,” the young woman clarifies.

“Oh!” Quinn says. “I’m so sorry. I was expecting someone named Simon.”

“Simon is my assistant,” the girl says. “I’m the tech guy.”

“Is that like an official title?” Quinn asks. “Tech guy?”

“Mr. Moretti just calls me that.”

“That’s kind of demeaning, isn’t it?”

“That’s just Mr. Moretti,” the girl says dismissively.

“Let me ask you something,” Quinn says. She looks around to confirm that they are still alone, leans forward, and lowers her voice. “How long have you worked with him?”

“With Mr. Moretti? Oh, for a while now.”

“Is it true what they say?”

“What do they say?”

“That he has a horrible temper?”

Henrietta touches the corner of her lips, makes a face like a sideways kiss, and shifts her eyes behind her enormous specs. “I think it’s exaggerated,” she says. “Besides, I have a pretty bad temper myself, so I can’t really talk.”

“Fair enough,” Quinn says, even though she finds the idea of a girl like Henrietta Yi being anything but fanatically sweet almost impossible to believe.

“So, is now a good time?”

“Sure.” Quinn doesn’t want her session to time out and have to start all over again, so she reaches back around and clicks Submit. Best Western it is. “Can we do it here or do we need to go to your lab or something?”

“We can do it here,” Henrietta says. “It’ll just take a minute.”

The cube next to Quinn’s is empty, so the girl appropriates the accompanying chair. She then reaches down into the single pocket sewn into the front of her dress, draws out a handset that, in her diminutive hands, looks more like a tablet, and sits. Only the toes of her sneakers reach the carpet’s tight weave.

“I just need your phone,” Henrietta prompts.

Moretti’s “tech guy” is here to install an app called Semaphore. It’s a tool Interpol uses to exchange end-to-end encrypted communications with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies while cooperating on cases. Quinn plucks her handset from its charging cradle and passes it to Henrietta.

“Do you need my code, or…”

“Nope!”

Henrietta places Quinn’s phone on the edge of the desk, and when she does something to her own phone, Quinn’s unlocks. Quinn’s handset is ensconced in something that looks ballistically impervious, while Henrietta’s is bursting at its heat-welded seams with a bumblebee-yellow Pikachu theme.

“Cute,” Quinn says. “My daughter used to love Pokémon.”

“Yay!” Henrietta exclaims. “Did she ever play any of the games?”

“All of them,” Quinn bemoans. “She even had the AR Poké-goggles.”

“Oh my God, I still have mine,” Henrietta says, a touch conspiratorially. “Your