Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

“Of course! I will introduce you to his sisters.”

“I’m sure they’re lovely.”

“Angels,” Henryk says. He is momentarily distracted while he rolls his shoulder and grimaces. “Every one of them.”

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is I’m getting old. Two-and-a-half-hour drive up from Muscat and I’m stiff as a morning boner. I used to be able to drive from Warsaw to Madrid without even stopping to pee. Now I can’t even make it through the night.” He taps his sternum with a thick finger bound in a gold band with a giant inset ruby the same color as his tracksuit. “And fucking acid reflux. I eat Zantac like they are M&M’s. Aleksander’s nephew sends them from America. Buys the stuff in bulk from Costco.”

Ranveer smiles. “I had to get a steroid injection in my lower back last year,” he confides, placing his hands over his kidneys and bending against them. “Still gets stiff.”

“So even the legendary Ranveer ages,” Henryk declares. “What you need is a good woman to sleep with.”

“How do you think I threw out my back?”

“I mean to marry,” Henryk says. “Settle down. Make some little Ranveers. We can’t keep doing this forever.”

“Someday,” Ranveer says. “But not today.”

Henryk has conducted enough business that he knows a transition when he hears one. He punctuates the pleasantries with one last grin, dips a paw into his tracksuit pocket, and removes a dark glass vial. Ranveer notes that if this were a German transaction, the solution would be hermetically sealed and securely ensconced deep inside high-density foam custom-molded to a Zero Halliburton titanium attaché with biometric latches. But the Poles, being a significantly scrappier lot, have their own way of doing business. The high-value merchandise appears to have been transported thousands of kilometers in a tracksuit pocket, where it was secured by the latest in zipper technology and might have even been run through the washing machine once or twice along with a tissue or a metro ticket.

When Henryk holds the prize up to the light—clamped between thick index finger and club-like thumb—it is just possible to see the thin liquid vacillate within. He takes a moment to regard the cylinder earnestly.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” he recites.

“Fitting,” Ranveer observes.

“Have you ever used hebenon before?”

“No.”

“It separates, so you must shake it. Don’t forget. Otherwise it won’t work. And all you need is a drop. Maybe two, depending on weight. No more. Use a borosilicate glass dropper, not a plastic one. And do not get it on you.”

The vial is delicately passed from fat to slender fingers. Payment has already been made in cryoon, the official cryptocurrency of Estonia, which the current technocratic parliament keeps pegged to the euro.

“I trust you verified payment,” Ranveer says.

“With you, I do not have to,” Henryk says. “But yes, I did. Very generous. Aleksander and I thank you.”

“Consider it an early wedding gift.”

Henryk reverts into his default state of grinning but stalls in a way that Ranveer recognizes. There is something more on his friend’s mind, and Ranveer knows that it will not stay there for long.

“What is it?”

“Doesn’t it get to you sometimes?” Henryk asks. “What we do?”

Ranveer takes a moment to summon just the right response.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

Ranveer can see that it takes Henryk a moment to place the Hamlet reference, but once he does, the payoff is a grin so brilliant that Ranveer swears it radiates warmth.

“You are one smooth motherfucker,” Henryk declares.

Ranveer passes the vial to his left hand and offers his right.

“Until next time.”

Henryk brushes Ranveer’s gesture aside and moves in for another embrace. Ranveer is prepared and reciprocates—mindful of the vial.

“Watch the shoulder,” Henryk mumbles into Ranveer’s chest.

“Watch the back.”

10

  CRIMES OF DISPASSION

QUINN ALWAYS FIGURED her first trip to L.A. would be to the original Disneyland with her family. She did not foresee visiting a satellite FBI field office and being assigned to the dingy cubicle of an agent out on a long-term, undercover, gang-related assignment. But a secure place to work and access to support resources are a necessity, both of which were easily procured through a single call from what has turned out to be the exceptionally persuasive Interpol liaison, Alessandro Moretti.

As far as Quinn can tell, the murder of Derrick Jamal Young—better known by his gaming handle, Prime—was as arbitrary as the rest of the Elite Assassin’s victims. Nothing whatsoever to indicate why this particular kid was so deserving of such a big, messy hole blown through his torso by some sort of custom-built, untraceable, sawed-off shotgun.

None of that is to say Derrick wasn’t a little strange. He had a bizarre obsession with prime numbers and cryptography (which he often expressed through impassioned, barely coherent YouTube ramblings that got a curiously high number of views, likes, and equally incoherent comments), and before he became a professional gamer, he briefly worked as a technician in a tissue-engineering lab. But his record at work was exemplary. According to social media, he’d quit simply to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a professional v-sports athlete. When she got a hit on a couple of legal indices, Quinn thought she’d finally found something, but when she had the case unsealed, she found the charges against Derrick were nothing but typical overreaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Some light, recreational hacking that Derrick pled down to misdemeanor copyright infringement, and that his parents were somehow able to conceal—probably more for their own professional benefit than Derrick’s, given that there are far worse secrets for a professional gamer to keep than a past replete with hacking, complete with a legit federal rap sheet.

It has become increasingly popular for the deceased to have entries in a data repository called Project Legatum. Legatum is a global, decentralized registry of linked death notices distributed across millions of devices, each dedicating a few spare processor cycles here and there to help propagate updates and verify integrity. Kind of a combination