Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

Naan is watching his hands closely. “Even you?” she asks.

Ranveer removes the stainless-steel canister from its foam enclosure.

“Especially me,” he confesses.

22

  BAD IDEA

IT IS LATE for Moretti when Quinn virtually catches up with him while on the shuttle from Hamad International to Doha Port, and she can tell right away from his eyes that he’s had a Scotch or two, which she envisions him sipping with his ringed pinky finger protruding like an underwhelming erection. His study seems much more traditional than modern, and in the background, she can see plenty of paneling and complete collections of leather-bound books. The chair he’s swiveling in has those buttoned dimples like the walls of an insane asylum, and the kind of trim that looks like brass thumbtacks. Before another call comes in and he abruptly disconnects, Moretti paints a colorful if only marginally constructive picture of The Grid for Quinn.

Apparently, there is a widespread assumption that the CIA and other law enforcement agencies hate micronation exclaves like The Grid and The Hive (a knockoff just off the coast of Kuwait with tessellated hexagons rather than squares). People think the fact that the well-moneyed but morally bankrupt of the world have carved out safe havens for themselves must endlessly irk those who get underpaid to attempt to apprehend them. But the reality is that the CIA secretly loves these new little communes of corruption and depravity. To the agency, it is self-incarceration without so much as an arraignment.

Sometimes all the CIA has to do is leak semi-credible intelligence about an imminent operation at just the right time, and twenty-four hours later, a South American drug lord, or the president of a humanitarian organization that is actually a front for a Somali terrorist cell, or an African warlord sitting on millions in diamonds and backed by an army of Kalashnikov-wielding orphans hooked on cocaine cut with gunpowder is safely tucked away in the waters of the Persian Gulf, where they will piss away the last of their fortunes and die either of an overdose or from cirrhosis since they cannot risk leaving The Grid to be fitted with a newly printed liver.

As a bonus, Moretti continued, you get an order of magnitude more information from a gangster who doesn’t know his exclave is bugged than from one who you’ve managed to flip. And if the CIA changes its mind and decides they’d rather have someone dead, it is a simple matter to slip a little ricin into the antibiotics regularly droned over from pharmacies in Doha and Kuwait City to clear up the gonorrhea that remains in constant circulation.

Would it be more satisfying to see these people given a burial at sea by a team of rambunctious Navy SEALs? Or led out of a courtroom in orange jumpsuits, Kevlar vests, shackles, and Velcro sneakers? Fuckin’ A it would. But law enforcement, like everything else, is a numbers game. Investigations, surveillance, litigation, and incarceration cost millions. Tipping off a douchebag lawyer or duping a banana republic dictator into spending the rest of his life in a glass prison costs about a buck ninety-nine USD. If the tradeoff is that your perp gets to enjoy vintage brut instead of sock-strained prison wine, and conjugal visits from parasitic whores instead of getting bent over and soaped up in the showers, so be it.

Getting hung up on by Moretti, Quinn has discovered, should not be viewed as an insult so much as an act of mercy.

—

On-Grid and on edge, Quinn has something clenched in her teeth like an obstinate dog. She is gathering her hair behind her head in alternate fistfuls until she can grasp it all at once, at which point she takes the loop from between her teeth and goes to work like a rodeo roper. Wearing her hair up usually gives Quinn a headache—and, she thinks, makes her cheeks look like a chipmunk’s—but the breeze coming off the Persian Gulf has it plastered across her face like blond papier-mâché, and she is running as short on patience as she is on Dramamine, so it’s either get it out of her face or chop it the fuck off. Quinn was hoping to take one of those Dragonfly quadcopter things, but her budget request got rejected, so the complimentary ferry it is.

But the advantage is that it gives her time to think about how she will approach the twins once she gets out to the PLC exclave. Tariq, back in the lobby of the Al Hujra Hotel in Oman, utterly obliterated all of her confidence in her go-to phrase. In college, Quinn nearly failed the mid-level English class in which she had to deconstruct Hamlet, but as a CIA intern, when tasked with writing the next edition of the propaganda pamphlet to be dispersed throughout Tehran, she drew on what she’d learned. The objective was to recruit assets. According to her instructor, the edition that was currently in circulation—promising thousands in USD and, in some cases, political asylum in exchange for verifiable intelligence—had lost its potency like an overprescribed antibiotic. Quinn’s approach did not emphasize material gain, but duty and humanity and legacy. On the cover, translated into Arabic, was her favorite line from Hamlet, spoken in madness by the tragic young Ophelia:

We know what we are,

but know not what we may be.

The pamphlet tested extraordinarily well, and because of her outstanding work, after graduation, her application to become an intelligence analyst was given the highest-priority consideration. She’d assumed the assignment had just been a standard hypothetical exercise left over from the days before ubiquitous connectivity—that all U.S. propaganda must be distributed electronically these days—but eighteen months later, after being sworn in, she was told that her work ended up being used in the field. And that it had yielded at least one extremely high-value asset.

—

PLC’s quadpad is empty and the exclave is dark. Quinn hoped to be