Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

aliases. Unless her man somehow obtains an entirely new identity for every city he visits, his stays are simply not recorded—perhaps a perk enjoyed by customers with sufficiently elite status.

As she falls asleep, Quinn wonders if pinpointing both the airline and the hotel chain in a single day might have been too easy. The connections were indirect enough that they wouldn’t be automatically surfaced by pattern-matching algorithms, but still obvious enough to be uncovered by even a mediocre analyst. As a challenge, she tries to convince herself that this is some kind of an elaborate, well-choreographed ruse designed to make multiple assassins look like one. Maybe they are careful to never leave less time between two deaths than it would take to fly between the two cities. Maybe they use hacked, black-market mobile robotic surgical instruments trained on the same handwriting set to do the tagging. Maybe they are so well coordinated that some percentage of the deaths are essentially randomly generated noise designed to conceal the real signal. Or maybe…

Quinn’s eyes snap open and she sits up in bed. Maybe the killer isn’t being pursued as much as the investigator is being led.

11

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

WHEN RANVEER IS alone in the yoga studio once again, he crosses the padded room in his bare feet and stands before the open window. He watches as Henryk rolls his shoulder and grimaces once more before stuffing himself back inside the glass cockpit of the squat white Porsche with red Laguna leather interior. As Ranveer secures the vial of hebenon solution inside his foldable apothecary, he reviews the chain of events that led him to this moment, in order to ensure that absolutely nothing has been overlooked.

It starts, somewhat improbably, with what the media has branded the #seulementmoi movement—or “only me”—which symbolizes an unexpected cultural shift in France wherein, in defiance of centuries of tradition, mistresses have suddenly and unexpectedly fallen out of favor. Wherever rapid societal transformations occur, there are inevitably casualties, frequently in the form of powerful white men caught—in this case, literally—with their pants down.

As soon as #seulementmoi was identified by zeitgeist algorithms, Le Milieu (“The Underworld”) began composing queries to identify potential blackmail targets. One of the richer veins led to an Interpol officer named Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Leblanc who maintained no fewer than three separate families—one in Paris, one in Bordeaux, and one just over the border in Geneva—and who appeared to be seriously considering starting a fourth in Frankfurt, where his work often took him. Unless Monsieur Leblanc wanted his boss and all three of his wives to receive detailed dossiers describing his indiscretions—including not just names, photos, and receipts, but explicit video footage—he was to install an application called Signal on his handset and use it to regularly send details of all of Interpol’s investigations to the specified anonymous account.

Ranveer has associates who watch blackmail markets like the Japanese track bluefin tuna prices and were kind enough to inform him that his work had recently attracted the attention of the CIA, and in particular, an unusually talented analyst by the name of Quinn Mitchell. The escalation of the case was only a matter of time—a milestone after which all the rules of the game would inevitably need to change. Had Quinn Mitchell already been tasked with tracking the Elite Assassin back in Moscow, Ranveer would have had to interrupt the Israeli hacker’s brash rationalization of why his houseguest would not kill him by grasping that obnoxious topknot, spinning him around in his chair like a barber, snapping his head back to open up access, and wrenching his Damascus steel through his neck, half decapitating him to ensure his larynx detached, spray-painting the matrix of plasma glass and casting the room into crimson while listening to the last of his gurgling and gasps.

The Israeli, for all his economic philosophy, will never know how close he came to experiencing Ranveer’s knife, and how much he owes his life to forces outside his control.

Interpol does not particularly concern Ranveer—and neither does the CIA, for that matter—but given what he knows about this analyst, and considering the nature of his next target, Ranveer deems it prudent to take additional precautions and tie up more loose ends than he might otherwise. The endgame is not the phase of an operation to start taking chances; from here on out, there will be collateral damage.

Which is why Ranveer’s gym bag does not contain protein bars and electrolyte-infused sports drinks and spare deodorant, but rather all the components required to assemble his gas gun into the long and complex micro-meteor configuration. Why he loaded it with a tungsten carbide cartridge with a programmable caliber that he dialed down to mere micrometers. Why he needed Henryk to park right beside the silver borrowed Mercedes-Benz H2-Class so that, as he rearranged his balls after a two-and-a-half-hour drive in the tiny white Porsche, Ranveer could place a white-hot shot just a hair to the right of his tracksuit’s zipper, ripping an almost imperceptible hole in the left ventricle of the giant Pole’s already-enlarged heart, the sudden pain radiating deceptively all the way out to his shoulder. Why he requested a studio that faced the water so that the projectile, after passing clean through, would end up somewhere in the Gulf of Oman, where it would be impossible to recover. And why he used an electromagnetic pulse emitter to disable the elevator so that Henryk would have to take the stairs, not only to get his newly defective heart pumping more than usual, but also to give Ranveer sufficient time to disassemble and conceal the rifle, mimic a relaxed and placid meditative state, and make his old friend believe he approached stealthily, craftily, and entirely unobserved.

Henryk will probably pop a few more Zantac during his drive south to Muscat and might even opt for a light beer instead of a vodka on the rocks on his afternoon flight back home to Warsaw. He will likely