Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

time data is flushed to local storage, it triggers an event which immediately copies, compresses, encrypts, and transfers those bytes via optical fiber to a data center in Santa Monica. Then, once a day, all that data gets copied, compressed, encrypted, and moved to another data center in Provo, Utah, just in case all of Southern California gets swallowed up by an earthquake.”

“Well,” the manager replies, and at that moment, Quinn honestly can’t tell if he is impressed with her research or on the verge of clawing out her eyes. “If you say so, Ms. Mitchell.”

“I do. Which means I can get all the footage I want. I can get a Foreign or Domestic Intelligence Surveillance Court Order that will give me access to footage dating all the way back to the system’s inception. And not just security footage. I can get guest records, financial records, vendor records. I can find out what every one of your guests had for breakfast for probably the last thirty years. I can get biometric signatures from your guest authentication system, cross-reference them with thousands of other indices, and find out anything I want about any guest or employee I want. And if I were to find anything at all irregular, no matter how minor, I would be obligated, ethically, to pass that information on to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Which I can’t imagine would reflect particularly positively on this establishment. Unfortunately, all of that would take me about thirty-six hours. And I don’t have thirty-six hours. Do you know why?”

The manager is now listening in a way that, just a moment ago, he was not. A delicate clearing of the throat. “I do not.”

“Because I’m trying to prevent a murder.”

Followed by a prominent swallow.

“I’m so sorry to hear that, Ms. Mitchell,” the manager says. “I really, really wish there was something more I could do.”

“That’s the good news,” Quinn says. She slides something across the counter and smiles. “There is.”

The manager’s eyes dip momentarily to the card on the desk. “What is this?”

“Read it.”

The manager slides the rectangle of thick paper stock toward him, plucks it from the polished marble, and takes a moment to examine the embossed print before reading it aloud. “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

“The great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Quinn tells him.

“I’m not sure I understand,” the manager confesses. “What does this mean?”

“It means that who you are isn’t a final destination. All of us are on a journey toward who we will become, and every decision we make is a step along that path. Now do you understand?”

The manager sheepishly teeter-totters his hand and squeaks, “Maybe?”

“It means that, one day, all of this…” Quinn gesticulates as though breaststroking through the concentrated opulence in which they are submerged. “This place, your job, the people you’re protecting. None of this is going to matter to you anymore. Nothing you have is going to matter to you anymore. All that will matter are the things you’ve done—or the things you haven’t done—and the effect that they’ve had on others. Is this making any sense?”

“It is.”

“Good,” Quinn says. “Then listen to me very carefully. Are you listening?”

“I am.”

“You may never be in a better position to save someone’s life than you are right now.”

By saying absolutely nothing, the manager inadvertently says it all.

“These types of warrants,” Quinn continues, “they’re sledgehammers. They inevitably turn up all kinds of unpleasantness we’re not even looking for. Nobody wants that. What I need is a scalpel. Seventy-two hours’ worth of surveillance footage. That’s it. And you’ll never see me again. My ID is on the other side of that card. Give it some thought and do whatever you think is right.”

With that, Quinn turns away from the counter and walks straight through the lobby, doing her very best not to catch a heel, fall on her face, and ruin the entire effect. She doesn’t even pause at the doors, but continues out into the parking lot, and before she gets to the next hotel on her list, her handset lets her know that she has just received exactly seventy-two hours’ worth of compressed video from an anonymous and untraceable account.

Quinn is getting the hang of this.

—

It seems word travels fast between CCW properties. Quinn is greeted by name just inside the lobbies of both the second and third hotels and assured—in hushed and rushed tones as she is walked back out beneath sprawling, cut-glass awnings—that she will have what she needs. Which, moments later, she does. It is barely lunchtime, and Quinn already has enough data to keep her busy for the rest of the day.

The rental takes her back to the FBI field office by way of an obscure establishment known as “Jack in the Box,” which Quinn had heard rumors of back east but had never beheld with her own eyes. She gets herself set up at an empty cubicle with her Brunch Burger (a hamburger on a croissant—brilliant, she thinks) and a very large, and very dark, premium roast coffee.

Despite how mind-numbing the task before her is, Quinn can’t bring herself to delegate to an intern or a junior analyst. If they got a hit, she’d have to verify it, and if they didn’t, she’d have to double-check to make sure they didn’t miss anything, so what’s the point? Quinn much prefers the stress of having way too much to do to the anxiety caused by the possibility that something might not have been done right. Management is probably not in Quinn’s future, and if it is, God help her underlings. A Vanessa Townes she is not.

She casts to the slab of plasma glass in the cube rather than her metaspecs so that she can see to her lunch as she works. The first thing she does is arrange all the video feeds from the first hotel in a grid and watches them all simultaneously at 10x speed. Every time she sees someone