Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

fidgety manager-on-duty; several varieties of women, primping on the way up and irritably adjusting undergarments on the way down. There is only one occupant—tall, slender, and dark—who seems entirely unconcerned with the goings-on around him.

Quinn has found her man.

She takes her time isolating several still images from various frames and runs them through algorithms to combine and enhance them. She is proud of her work, and she wants him to look his very best.

She stops for coffee and a warm chocolate croissant on the way to LAX, then spends some time sharing her new photo album with the folks at the Emirates counter. But she shows them several other images as well. Random faces mixed in. Some are from advertisements, some are wanted terrorists, some are photos she took moments ago of people in line at Shake Shack. One is a shot of her ex-husband she spontaneously took in the kitchen one Sunday afternoon that she can’t bring herself to delete. She cycles through them on her handset and asks a pretty young customer service agent if any of them are familiar. The girl seems to know to be careful, but what she doesn’t know is that the handset is recording her responses: sampling her voice, constantly comparing images of her eyes, monitoring her body temperature and heart rate. When the girl denies ever seeing Quinn’s man, the handset does not react. As far as the CIA’s best field polygraph software is concerned, she is not lying.

Airlines, Quinn realizes, are not like luxury hotels. Terminal gates are far less intimate than lobbies and front desks. There’s no reason to assume that one of perhaps hundreds of Emirates L.A. ground crew members would be able to place one specific face. But while the girl cannot recall Quinn’s man, her terminal probably can. Nobody has boarded a plane in a major airport in decades without being photographed by the airline in ultra-high definition from every conceivable angle. Names and aliases can change by the day, but faces can’t. That puts her man’s destination—and the location of the next murder—just a few keystrokes away.

Quinn passes the image to the terminal’s public buffer, a secure and isolated memory location to which some devices allow write-only access over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The protocol is used for the ad hoc exchange of lightweight data like business cards, phone numbers, and personal identification—all those things we once traded physically, but that have long since been converted to bits. The next step is to use what she learned from her interactions with CCW’s chipper-yet-reticent hotel staff. She asks the girl if she has ever heard the saying We know what we are, but know not what we may be. Tells her it’s considered the wisest of all the Native American proverbs; she has reason to believe the man in the photo she just sent over is a brutal international serial killer; the girl may never be in a better position to save someone’s life than she is right now. The whole spiel. The girl’s eyes were already wide, but as she listens to Quinn, they expand to near-manga proportions.

Finally, Quinn slides her handset down into her purse, waves away all the drama, and tells the girl to forget the whole thing. It’s not important, anyway. She isn’t really there to try to save innocent people’s lives. Really, she’s there to book a vacation. But the problem is that she just doesn’t know where in the world to go. Maybe the girl can help her out. I don’t know, maybe make a suggestion. Someplace exotic, someplace mundane—doesn’t matter. It’s all up to her. The girl is initially a little slow on the uptake, but then she starts picking up what Quinn is putting down. She cheerfully addresses her screen—taps in some input, brushes away output she doesn’t like, toggles a few switches here and there—and then she brightly suggests, of all places in the world, Sohar, Oman.

Quinn is surprised by the girl’s recommendation, but after a moment of consideration, she’s game. She would like to book herself a seat on the next flight out. Very well. Will Ms. Mitchell be traveling business or Sultan Class today? Neither, sadly. Today, Ms. Mitchell will be traveling coach.

13

  NIGHT SHIFT

IF YOU REALLY want to sleep soundly at night, get yourself a dog.

Don’t bother with commercial alarm systems. Despite exorbitant recurring financial commitments, they are easily disabled or circumvented by almost any professional, and even a few promising amateurs. Window contact sensors are useless when it’s far faster and quieter to use a portable ion implantation device to transmute glass into a pile of goo than it is to jimmy open a latch. Pressure plates around a door do you no good when it’s faster to cut a hole in the wall right next to it with a common keychain laser than it is to pick the lock. Infrared motion sensors are nothing but a false sense of security in a world where you can buy heat-shielded clothing right off the bargain rack, provided you know where to shop. And if you’re rich enough to afford a security system that actually works, a simple localized electromagnetic pulse emitted from a quadcopter or a privately operated satellite network will keep things quiet for more than enough time to get a job done and tie up any loose ends.

Don’t think you’re any better off with armed guards, either. All guards do is increase the price of a job. Rather than a single target, you have to factor in multiple. And there’s no discount for buying in bulk, so a lot of Ranveer’s colleagues actually prefer jobs that involve patrols. They feel it’s a more efficient use of their valuable time.

The trick with guards is to take them out before they can trigger a silent alarm or get off a phone call, lest you get all the way up to the bedroom only to find that your target has ditched his