Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

to cause some blips here and there, and by properly visualizing and/or querying the right transactional data sets, she might be able to identify exactly how he’s getting paid. So she spends the next hour painting with data—searching for correlations between times of death and salient financial events associated with everything from stocks and bonds, to foreign exchange markets, to real estate and art transactions. She even brings in some of the more mundane fare that you don’t typically associate with the international assassination echelon, like mutual funds, IRAs, and CDs. Anything that can be hastily liquidated, since assassins, Quinn assumes, prefer to be paid in cash.

There are plenty of correlational spikes, but nothing anywhere close to definitive, so Quinn decides to try to model the problem as insider trading—discernible market fluctuations (some entity generating liquidity) occurring prior to what are supposed to be unknowable future events (in this case, murders). A pause that somehow perfectly conveys the strain Quinn knows she has just put hundreds of virtual machines under once again ends without generating a single lead.

She’s not sure what to try next, so instead of trying anything, she casts a sideways glance at the vending wall. Most of the encased wares are covered in stylized Arabic squiggles that she can’t imagine anyone being able to decipher, but there are plenty of universally recognizable brands as well. She has no idea what the contactless payment landscape is like here, so after targeting, via eye tracking, a Coke Zero and a bag of Hershey’s Miniatures, she expects the worst as she waves her handset in front of the designated sensor. Fortunately, Quinn’s handset and the vending wall are both fluent in the lingua franca of commerce. In fact, Omani technology even appears to be ahead of most of the United States, since it supports several different payment systems and even a few of the more stable—

Cryptocurrencies.

—

Seeing up Henrietta Yi’s nose is no small feat given that it is so petite. But that is exactly the view that Quinn is met with as soon as her connection request is accepted.

Henrietta is on the move. The dramatically angled perspective on her features is relatively stable, while the primarily white background behind leaps in time to her frenzied stride.

“Henrietta?” Quinn asks. “Is everything OK?”

“Everything’s fine,” Henrietta assures her. She pauses and Quinn can see that she checks both lengths of long hallway before selecting a direction and continuing. “Just looking for someplace quiet.”

Henrietta is almost certainly in Moretti’s “undisclosed location,” and although Quinn knows her gaze should be tactfully averted, instead it is intentionally sharpened. But all she can see are the steel triangular trusses of exposed ceiling, suspended trays of bundled cables, and blinding white plasma diodes like little suns eclipsed and then exposed by Henrietta’s head as she progresses.

There is something about the Epoch Index—and hence, Moretti’s secret facility—that fascinates and captivates Quinn. Recently, when she needed a break from pounding out futile Elite Assassin queries, she indulged her curiosity by running several cross-index searches, which, interestingly, returned nothing at all. It’s not like she was expecting to surface the encrypted Epoch Index itself—or even the results of all the analyses that had to have been done on it—but she was expecting to find something. Given the volume of data the CIA and other government agencies have access to, and the lengths algorithms go to in an attempt to interpret search terms, you can run a query on input generated by your cat walking across your keyboard and usually get anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hits. The only way a search returns nothing at all is through active redaction—a process that continuously scans one or more indices and instantly eradicates any results returned by terms the agency considers anathema.

So, Quinn did the next best thing: a little digging on Henrietta. Here, her efforts were much more productive.

The earliest hit was from a study done on a rare congenital disorder called chromatic illusory palinopsia, or CIP—a condition that causes photochemical activity in the retina to continue for long periods of time, even in the absence of stimulus. Those big round metaspecs Henrietta wears that make her look like an adorable little owl apparently shift certain colors to safer locations on the spectrum where they won’t cause persistent floaters—or, as she called them as a little girl, ghosts.

Quinn also uncovered hundreds of academic citations, the titles of which were difficult enough to get through, much less the content itself. But she downloaded the last paper Henrietta published before leaving academia—“Existential Risk Mitigation: Avoiding Astronomical Impact Events Through Early Intervention”—and was about to have a go at it when she noticed a result from a terrorist-related index. She assumed it was a false positive, but when she clicked through and started to scroll, she felt her entire world tilt. Henrietta Yi had lost both her parents in the nuclear attack on Seoul.

Quinn immediately recalled Henrietta’s reaction when she learned that Quinn’s last assignment had been the Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force. And now she thought she understood how one of the most brilliant and promising young physicists in the world walked away from research in order to devote her life to the mission of the CIA.

The direction of momentum changes as Henrietta backs through a door. Quinn watches her conduct a quick occupancy audit, then she lifts the handset to eye height and summons a smile.

“Hi, Ms. Mitchell!” she says with false composure.

“It’s Quinn, remember?”

“Quinn, I mean. Yes. Sorry.”

“You sure everything’s all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” Henrietta sings in an unconvincing pitch. “I’m just not supposed to take calls here, so I had to duck out of sight. And, sorry, but I kind of need to make this quick. Simon and I are just about to…” She pauses and shakes her head, pulling herself back from what Quinn suspects is an extremely technical and highly confidential ledge. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

Now that Henrietta is stationary, Quinn detects interference in the video feed. It