Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

fall asleep earlier than usual next to Aleksander as the two of them watch Eurovision together in bed. Tomorrow morning, Aleksander will let Henryk sleep in and will put on the coffee and scramble their eggs and start on the kielbasa. Just before serving, he will go back into the bedroom to wake his fiancé with a delicate kiss upon his little ear, which he will find to be cold and stiff against his lips.

Astonishing how comforting and peaceful a scene can be one moment and how completely it can gut you the next, when the only thing that has changed is your ability to see what is really there.

12

  LEGWORK

JET LAG HAS Quinn up at 4:45 a.m., and even though she is still haunted by the thought that the leads she uncovered the night before were just a little too easy, the fact remains that they are the only leads she has.

After taking advantage of the free continental breakfast served daily in the Best Western lobby and draining several cups of weak, urn-brewed coffee, she finds her white Toyota Camry rental car in the parking lot and instructs it to take her to whichever CCW property is closest to the airport. Quinn knows that she cannot rely on the junior FBI agents the assistant director in charge put at her disposal to bring her what she needs, since most of them still seem more enamored with their badges and their newly issued service weapons than they are with stopping the next murder. For now, it is time to put the handset and the metaspecs away and to apply some old-fashioned legwork to this case.

No more guest lists. Quinn already knows that they are all dead ends. It’s surveillance footage she’s after now. She knows her man is almost certainly captured on dozens of different video feeds every single day. And she knows that he knows this. Rather than avoiding surveillance, his game is probably to stay lost in the noise. All but the best disguises can’t fool facial recognition anyway, and somehow caking his face with prosthetic paste and embedding false eyeballs to change his pupillary distance seem well beneath him, so Quinn’s instincts are telling her that he relies on anonymity. But she also knows that there isn’t nearly as much randomness in the universe as most of us perceive. Randomness is usually more the result of our inability to see patterns than the actual absence of them. And finding patterns is what Quinn does.

“Uncooperative” isn’t exactly the word she would use to describe the staff at the recently renovated Villas at Playa Del Rey. In fact, just about everyone Quinn talks to appears to have been abducted as a child and brainwashed by some kind of customer-service cult until reaching the legal age of employment. Copious amounts of words are exchanged, yet somehow each interaction concludes with her having no more information than she had going into it. Curiously, perhaps even less. Before she left Langley, Moretti came in to see her off, and as he walked her out, he explained to Quinn that being in the field was not like being in the computer lab, and that interrogating people was not like querying indices. Data sometimes obscured the truth, sure, but it was never intentionally deceitful or manipulative. It wasn’t calculating. People, on the other hand, were evil sons of bitches. They’d have you chasing your tail for days, not giving two fucks about all the bodies piling up so long as it suited them. Even if some little part of you knew they were lying, they’d figure out a way to speak to some other part of you that would make you believe them. The worst of them were even capable of convincing themselves of their own lies so that they were effectively lying to you and telling you the truth at the same time.

Even when people were seemingly fully transparent, it was seldom without some amount of subtle distortion.

“So, what am I supposed to do?” Quinn asked her new boss as she stepped into the elevator. Her flight was leaving from Reagan National in less than an hour.

“There’s only one thing you can do,” Moretti told her through closing doors. His hands were in his pockets in a way that crinkled up his sport coat, and he shrugged his oversized shoulder pads. “Do it right back.”

—

There’s a button at the front desk that summons out-of-sight Villas at Playa Del Rey staff and that, as far as Quinn can tell, only needs to be activated in situations where said staff is intentionally avoiding persistent CIA field analysts. Fortunately, their Pavlovian training prevents them from ignoring whatever the unseen stimulus is, and the hidden door behind the counter slides open almost instantaneously.

“Good morning, Ms. Mitchell,” the manager croons. He is the type to convey exasperation through heightened congeniality. “Is there something more I can do for you?”

“I just want to make sure I have all this straight,” Quinn says. “For my report.”

The man’s posture is almost unnaturally erect, and his hair resembles one of those hyper-realistic oil paintings that somehow look even more real than reality.

“What exactly can I clarify for you?”

“You told me you don’t retain security footage for more than twenty-four hours, is that right?”

“Sadly, we do not.” Each phrase is accompanied by a dramatic tilt of the head to one side or the other, and it occurs to Quinn how much flexibility she’s lost in her own neck from spending so much time immobile in front of plasma glass. “That is the policy of the Villas at Playa Del Rey as well as all Crystal Collective Worldwide properties.”

“What about off-site backups?”

A mimed moment of contemplation during which ceiling panels are examined, lips are pursed, and a delicate fingertip is nestled within a clean-shaven and well-hydrated chin cleft. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“That’s OK,” Quinn says. “Because I know all about that. You see, any