Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

grow it into something from which she might later be able to draw strength.

—

You can use uncooked rice as a moisture-absorbing medium, or those little packets of silica gel you sometimes see tucked inside products that had to cross oceans on autonomous freighters in order to find their way to you—neither of which Quinn keeps handy. But she is nothing if not resourceful, so out comes the sandwich bag of tampons from the bottom of her purse. She proceeds to disembowel the remainder of her feminine hygiene stash, separating rayon and cotton cores from applicators and ripcords, and contoured tips from no-slip grips. The evidence bag is wet, so Quinn uses the tampons’ Ziploc to build her handset its high-absorbency nest, wrapping the makeshift invention up with a hair tie in order to apply some compression.

Ideally, if you had a handset that, say, fell into the Potomac River while recording your husband showing your daughter how to skip rocks, and that you didn’t recover until several hours later after coming back with a pair of telescopic fishing nets from the nearest Walmart, you’d let it dry overnight. But given that it’s been almost three hours since Quinn has had access to Semaphore—and in the meantime, QSS (Qatar State Security) has descended upon Hamad International Airport with support from a small team of U.S. Marines deployed from the embassy, and a separate investigative unit was dispatched to the PLC exclave—Quinn decides to skip the formalities and slip an exploratory finger down into the sanitary burrow after only twenty minutes. It comes up surprisingly dry, which means either that her handset has sufficiently drained and will probably work just fine, or that there’s still an entire thriving marine microhabitat trapped inside, and she is about to ignite a catastrophic chemical fire.

A tiny gurgle of moisture emerges from around the power button when she depresses and holds it down, which she takes to be a bad sign. But that just turns out to be the silicone gasket doing its job, since, moments later, the screen lights up. Quinn is well on her way back to the world of the connected.

There are eight Semaphore messages waiting for her—all from a woman with a stunning profile photo named Fatimah Al Thani. The ID maps to QSS, so whoever she is, she almost certainly knows something. No sooner has Quinn tapped the call icon than an immaculately made up, dark-eyed, perfectly beauty-marked young face framed in an embroidered honey-colored headdress appears on her screen.

“Ms. Mitchell. I see you have your handset back.”

The woman is in the twins’ kitchen. A real-time filter is being applied both to accentuate the face in the foreground and probably in an attempt to obscure the classified goings-on behind her, but blended into the background bokeh is what Quinn knows to be a prismatic band of nutritional supplement brands.

“Yes, just now,” Quinn says. “I’m sorry to rush you, but I need to know: did they get him?”

“I haven’t heard,” the woman says. “I’ve been focused on the situation here.”

Quinn’s eyes close for a moment, and she steadies herself with a deep and deliberate breath.

“Are you OK, Ms. Mitchell?”

“I’m fine,” Quinn says. “Listen, I need the numbers from the twins, but please don’t send photos. Just the numbers. Can you do that?”

Fatimah’s head tilts just perceptibly. “You haven’t listened to your messages, have you?”

“No, why?”

“Ms. Mitchell, Naan and Pita are alive.”

Quinn squints at the woman on her handset as she tries to connect what she has just been told with what she’s sure she knows.

“That’s impossible,” Quinn says. “I saw them. I saw him.”

“We thought they were dead, too, but a physician has confirmed that they are both indeed alive. Their breathing is extremely shallow—nearly undetectable—but they are breathing, and brain activity is normal.”

“Why would he leave them alive?”

“We believe the intent was murder. We found a unique molecular signature that isn’t present in their transdermal patches. It’s nothing we’ve ever seen, and it’s not in any index QSS has access to. Perhaps he is inexperienced with the substance and accidentally administered a nonlethal dose.”

“What about the numbers?”

“There aren’t any.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

“Then he wasn’t trying to kill them,” Quinn says. “If he wanted them dead, they’d be dead. And tagged. He wants them alive, but he also wants to keep them quiet. He knew I was getting close. Can you wake them up?”

Quinn is momentarily distracted by a notification of a new message. Alessandro Moretti. Urgent.

“We won’t know that until we’ve positively identified the substance.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Quinn says. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

The woman nods and smiles in a way that lifts her beauty mark just so, and then the connection is closed. The message from Moretti is voice only.

“Airport was a bust. Your man boarded a private jet for Iran, but Tehran is saying he never got there. We think he’s an Iranian defector, so they probably want the sonovabitch even worse than we do. My guess is they have him in custody but don’t want anyone to know. Either way, he ain’t ever leaving Iran, so trail’s cold. Might as well pack it up and come on home.”

—

Quinn does not move. Part of her is relieved that she has just been released. Handed a ticket back to Langley. Back to her neat and clean and air-conditioned cubicle—back to her simple and predictable routine. Moretti will probably even stamp the mission a success. Cornering the Elite Assassin and forcing him into Iran, where he will probably be tortured to death, stoned, or hanged from a mobile crane, is as good as incarceration. Another victory by omission for Quinn. Another way to spin all the time she will never get back into a perverse and twisted win.

But the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. First of all, if Tehran really had him, they would not be discreet. That is not the Ayatollah’s way. If they’d apprehended the Elite Assassin—if they had anyone in their custody