Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

check in or out, she taps the button she configured to record the feed’s timestamp. She decides to narrow her search down to only two days rather than all three, which allows her to get two hotels done before it’s dark out and she is entirely incapable of focusing anymore. On her way back to the hotel, she picks up a burrito and a tall bottle of sangria, takes one more antacid tablet than the directions on the bottle recommend, and falls asleep fully clothed with the TV on. The next morning, after three miniature pots of in-room coffee and as much twenty-four-hour news programming as she can stand (very little), she tames her hair in a hasty, messy bun, slips on her specs, and works through the feed from the third hotel.

The next step is to write a script that parses timestamps out of the guest records, then compares them to the timestamps she recorded from the front desk video feeds. Eventually, she should find a mismatch. If her hypothesis is correct, someone should appear on video who did not officially check in—someone who paid in a way that cannot be easily traced, and who did not have his face scanned. Someone whose elite status allows him to play by a completely different set of rules. Someone who, even when surrounded by cameras, somehow remains the invisible man.

She finds a few anomalies that she needs to verify manually, but after all the data sets from all three hotels have been analyzed, Quinn has not found an obvious discrepancy.

Fuck.

In the shower, she briefly considers masturbating. Maybe an orgasm can light up her brain in a way that might lead to a case-changing epiphany. But the gap between where she is right now mentally and where she would need to be to get off feels daunting, so she snaps right back into analyst mode. Either she needs data from longer periods of time, or she has the wrong hotels. Or…

She thinks back to the rental car counter at LAX. The clusters of luggage, the crowds being corralled through the lanes of a configurable, nylon-belt maze. And all those signs for rewards programs: Next time, skip the line.

Of course the Elite Assassin would not be made to wait. In retrospect, it seems obvious. So how else can she combine surveillance footage with data to get a good look at her man’s face?

Dressing while avoiding catching a glimpse of herself in a full-body mirror is second nature to Quinn. She has put on weight since her divorce, and even though she commits to working out every day and taking the stairs instead of the elevator—

That’s it. The elevator. Her man likely stays on the top floor of the hotel, and something tells Quinn that he is not the type to take the stairs.

She doesn’t want to waste time commuting into the FBI field office, so when she finishes dressing, she orders up a grilled cheese and fruit salad instead of French fries, then opens the elevator surveillance videos from the Villas at Playa Del Rey—the most expensive of the three hotels. Each elevator has four different cameras, so she picks the feeds with the most direct view of the occupants’ faces, then overlays a facial recognition filter. She adjusts parameters until her food arrives, backing down the threshold to prevent false positives caused by reflections in polished metal panels and by dolls in the arms of little girls, and then she makes sure the algorithm continues to track correctly at very high speeds. When she has the right settings, she configures all the feeds from all the hotels to play in off-screen buffers simultaneously at 100x while dumping everything they find to a log file. She wants to know exactly how many faces are being tracked, and for exactly how long.

When the data is ready, and when all her dishes are out in the hallway, she knows that her man is in there, and she knows she has everything she needs to find him. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to make the data talk. Quinn takes a diet soda from the minibar, checks the price on the card, then puts it back. Involuntarily, her mind hatches a plan wherein she eats every last chip, nut, and candy bar, then replaces them all with their reasonably priced doppelgängers from 7-Eleven before housekeeping is any the wiser. But the scheme goes the way of masturbation, and she is right back on track. She’ll go out for coffee later.

The first thing she does is divide the data up into individual elevator trips, which is relatively easy since all she has to do is find the points where no faces are being tracked, indicating empty cars. Since she is focused on the penthouse suite, she initially assumes that whichever elevator trip is longest most likely contains the footage she’s after. However, because of intermittent stops, she realizes it’s not going to be that easy. She needs to subtract the time it takes for the elevator to pause, and for occupants to come and go.

It takes her two hours and costs U.S. taxpayers not only that diet soda from the minibar, but a tin of Planters mixed nuts as well, but she is eventually able to isolate blocks of time when some faces change while other faces do not. By subtracting those periods from the total time of each elevator trip, she has calculated what she calls “absolute travel time.” After applying all the modifiers and comparing all the data, she finds that there are eighteen pieces of footage that run a full seven seconds longer than any of the others.

That’s way outside her expected margin of error. The data has finally spoken. Or Quinn has finally learned how to listen.

Each clip shows a different configuration of occupants: a fidgety manager-on-duty; a bellhop wheeling several metal cases accompanied by a fidgety manager-on-duty; a chef fussing over several covered dishes on a cart accompanied by a