Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

buy access. Data sold in bulk and at wholesale. While the shadowphiles were once restricted to criminals with a talent for command-line scripting, enough user-experience designers have turned to the dark side that stalking, hunting, and spying are now as easy as pointing and clicking.

One of the advantages of Ranveer’s new gig is that most of his targets have no idea that anyone would want them dead, which means that the Nassif family is unlikely to employ armed guards, or to have had a custom-built safe room installed. Therefore, Ranveer decides not to waste crypto credits querying financial records for evidence to the contrary. But he does try cross-referencing recurring payments with all known local security companies to see what kind of commercial-grade alarm system he could be up against. Nothing. And, thankfully, no payments to any businesses affiliated with pet care as far back as three years, which means the Nassif family does not have so much as a guinea pig watching over them. Finally, with no memberships, payments, or social media posts consistent with the ownership of firearms, even if Ranveer does encounter the unfortunate combination of light sleeper and creaky floorboard, he shouldn’t have much more to worry about than a carbon-fiber tennis racket, golf club, or cricket bat. With any luck, he will be back at the hotel in time for a nightcap to help ease his jet lag.

The job is still a go, so the rest of the ride is spent on autopilot, Ranveer positioned in the center of the backseat bench, long legs folded into a full Lotus Pose, palms upturned with index fingertips connected to thumbs and eyes serenely closed.

14

  DARK TOURISM

YOU COULD ARGUE that the privacy glass surrounding the Emirates Sultan Lounge is installed backwards. That the sheikhs, celebrities, and businesspeople sequestered behind the walls of hexagonal plasma glass blocks should, if they choose, be free to amuse themselves with views of the boorish, drooling, and uncouth buffoons from which they are being spared. And that the less affluent should be kept mercifully unaware of the pampering and coddling in which they will never be permitted to indulge.

But that is not the way the stratification of civilization has played out. The barrier is tinted as though an allusion to discretion, but those with either masochistic inclinations or leisure obsessions can still peer through and discern the manicures, pedicures, massages, and three-Michelin-star cuisine. The billiard tables, the jazz quartet, and the live indoor putting green. It turns out that the deprived revel in the act of coveting almost as much as the privileged relish being watched; that exhibitionism and voyeurism, rather than breeding malice, achieve a perverse and improbable cultural balance; that witnessing others’ entitlement is a twisted form of dark tourism.

But Quinn isn’t into it. Since one does not simply hop a flight to Oman, she has plenty of time to kill, so she wanders over to Terminal  B and into a Planet Hollywood. There is only one other patron in the restaurant, and Quinn has made the lone waitress’s job unduly grueling by sitting as far away from him as geometrically possible. She could have saved everyone a great deal of trouble by drinking alone at the bar rather than at a corner table, but she refuses to stage such a mournful display.

Dinner this evening is a tower of onion rings accompanied by chardonnay. She has just enough time before her plane boards for an excess of greasy American fare and to catch a good pre-sleep buzz. To that end, she is well into her second glass of what have turned out to be much more generous pours than you’d expect from a sticky, kitschy tourist trap like this.

Quinn’s handset is out, and she is looking down at her ex-husband’s profile photo. Her thumb hovers in the airspace over the message icon. She sometimes indulges in what a former therapist referred to as “emotional cutting” by scrolling back through old conversations. It’s like the travelers who cup their eyes against the glass wall of the Sultan Lounge trying to spy on a life they will never have. But the difference is, when Quinn stands on the outside looking in, she is a tourist fascinated by her own past. It is not the unfamiliar and the exotic she hopes to one day obtain, but the mundane and the everyday she would do anything to get back.

Quinn has learned that hate is very much like pain. In the moment, it drowns everything else out, but over time, its strength and weight inevitably fade. When she was in the hospital having Molly, before she was given the epidural, Quinn swore she would never go through the experience of childbirth again. And there were moments during her divorce that she claimed to despise the man she once believed she could not live without. But time has a way of averaging out the extremes. Eroding even our best defenses. Exposing our fates and mocking our dreams. Quinn has come to believe that all of us eventually figure out who we are and what we want; the only question is whether it will be too late.

She is fantasizing about tapping that anachronistic handset icon and giving her ex-husband a completely unexpected call when she receives a Semaphore notification. It is an incoming connection request from Henrietta Yi. Quinn is grateful for the intervention and accepts it unhesitatingly.

“Henrietta,” Quinn says. She can see from her own live thumbnail in the corner that she looks like backlit, baggy-eyed shit, but she’s had enough wine that she’s mostly indifferent.

Henrietta waves into the camera with a combination of hesitation and enthusiasm. Her hair is down, and her bangs are perfectly shaped to frame her round, radiant face. “Hi, Ms. Mitchell. I’m so sorry to bother you. Is now a good time?”

“Now’s a perfect time,” Quinn says. “You might have just saved me from drunk-dialing my ex-husband.”

Henrietta is momentarily taken aback by Quinn’s candor, but she recovers