Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

social network and cryptocurrency for the afterlife. Like most data stores built on blockchain technology, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and by no one, and both read and write access are completely free (which, almost overnight, decimated traditional media’s ability to exploit the bereaved by charging astronomical prices for anemic, ephemeral eulogies). Creating and modifying entries in Project Legatum requires a cryptographically verifiable, digitally signed death certificate to ensure that the service cannot be vandalized or misused, and the newest version of the platform even supports “smart wills” that contain signed code that can facilitate dynamic transactions like the automated distribution of estates based on current market conditions.

Predictably, Derrick’s entry—compiled and appended to the Project Legatum blockchain not by his parents, but by his clan—is a sanitized recapitulation of a spirited life lived to its fullest with no dignity whatsoever afforded to those forces who saw fit to end it prematurely. And, sadly, with no hint whatsoever of a pattern. Quinn has even tried running steganographic neural networks against the images, videos, and text contained in all the Project Legatum entries courtesy of the Elite Assassin to see if messages are somehow being concealed inside the digital memorials, the results of which are consistently zilch. At times, Quinn feels she has become almost as obsessed with conspiratorial puzzles as Prime.

Quinn’s job is just as much a process of disproving as it is confirmation, and there is one hypothesis she feels she can finally put behind her: the assassination syndicate theory. There are three solid data points suggesting a single killer.

First, handwriting analysis algorithms give all the handwritten tags (oddly, the numeric sequence on the inside of the Russian girl’s arm was branded, and of course, Prime’s sequence was a clever outlier) an 89 percent chance of having been written by the same left-handed person. Second, all the killings thus far have occurred serially rather than in parallel, and with tight but sufficient travel time in between. And third, it’s just not realistic that local resources are being tapped for all these jobs.

On the plane between D.C. and L.A., Quinn became an expert on contract killing, and she now knows that while you can pay to have someone murdered in every major metropolitan area in the world, you can’t do it over and over again without, at some point, hiring some yokel dumb enough to lock his keys inside his fifty-year-old getaway car, or leave behind a few seconds of pixelated surveillance footage, or inadvertently make contact with an undercover agent.

Quinn learned that, like most things, hiring a hitman isn’t like it is in the movies. In the real world, doing death right usually means doing it yourself. Of course, you get the occasional mobster, gangster, or run-of-the-mill sociopath who might be your real estate agent or your gynecologist, but most “assassins” are twitchy, wild-eyed tweakers with face tattoos and just enough brain cells still firing to navigate the dark web. She also learned that one of the biggest differences between professionals and amateurs is weapon selection—that those who dabble are more likely to assume that bigger is always better, while properly mentored assassins understand how to pick just the right caliber for the task at hand, sometimes opting for something smaller for the sake of concealment, noise suppression, and tighter splatter patterns. Finally, Quinn was surprised to discover that only between 2 and 5 percent of homicides in most countries can be attributed to contract killings, primarily because the overwhelming majority of murders are crimes of passion. Exceedingly rare are violent crimes of pure dispassion.

Establishing that there is only one Elite Assassin leads Quinn to two more important assertions:

He is uncannily good at what he does, suggesting that he is probably not self-taught, but rather either had, or still has, the backing of a state with a well-established and extremely aggressive intelligence service.

He is on a tight schedule and is therefore almost constantly in transit. In fact, his itinerary is so arduous that Quinn has come to think of him as essentially homeless.

It is generally considered a bad thing to have your mark always on the move, but not so for a competent data scientist. To an analyst, travel means data, data means queries, and queries eventually lead to answers. Especially when you have the home-field advantage.

Finding a list of airlines is easy. Quinn simply needs to cross-reference cities and dates with flight schedules—or rather, she needs to compose the right search expressions to do the correlating for her. There are several possibilities, but one in particular stands out: Emirates. The Dubai-based airline services more cities on her list than any other. Throw in registered flight paths for recent Emirates Executive private jets, and Emirates is a match for every city where there is an unsolved murder involving a tagged body. Whoever this guy is, he is very particular about his airline.

Elite indeed.

Finding hotels isn’t quite as straightforward, but the airline lead gives her an idea. Rather than looking at individual hotels, she makes lists of holding companies—ownership and management organizations whose loyalty programs span multiple brands. A query that cross-references luxury hotel properties with the cities on her list reveals that her man is almost certainly a high-ranking and devoted customer of Crystal Collective Worldwide.

She spends the rest of the day making calls to other field offices and sending junior FBI agents out to collect passenger and guest records. After stopping at an Applebee’s for a chicken Caesar and a cheap glass of chardonnay that keeps her just under her per diem, she spends the evening in her room at the Best Western Suites next to the airport, writing search algorithms. As encouraged as she felt earlier in the day, she now feels deflated; she has not been able to extract a single additional lead from the data. No single name emerges from guest records obtained in cities where the Elite Assassin has left his mark. She doesn’t even uncover sets of names or patterns that might suggest