Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

since any number of algorithms would have connected the dots for her, and several of the dashboards she flicks through dozens of times a day would have refused to drop the matter until properly acknowledged. Every safe deposit box, P.O. box, offshore transaction ID, and numbered bank account on the planet is indexed and included in hundreds of default routine queries without Quinn even having to check a box.

She even did one better. Long before Oman, Quinn compiled custom indices of all known instances of four-digit numbers matching body tags and proceeded to do everything she could think of to correlate them to financial transactions—including treating them as ciphers and using half a dozen different neural networks to attempt to decrypt them. There were thousands of hits but nothing more statistically significant than if the numbers had been generated randomly. And nothing that could be traced back to a single individual or corporate entity.

But all that was before a stranger explained to her that there were places in the world where customers can generate their own temporary identifiers; unregulated and unaudited international dead drops; institutions with air-gapped internal networks that the CIA had not yet found a way to infiltrate.

“How secure is this place?” Quinn asks. “Do people leave large sums of money here?”

“I wouldn’t. There are better places for that.”

“What places?”

“Around here? Or anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

“If you want to stay close, Dubai. If you’re talking globally, Frankfurt, London, Chicago, Singapore, Hong Kong. A bunch in Switzerland.” She squints at Quinn. “Are you OK?”

“This is it,” Quinn says. “This is what the numbers are for.”

The woman turns to see if she can find the same life-altering epiphany in the wall of lockers as Quinn.

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“Whatever you have to atone for,” Quinn tells the woman, “you just did it.”

“I think I’ve lost the plot.”

“You may have just helped save a lot of lives,” Quinn tells the girl.

In the ensuing stupefied silence, Quinn makes her exit, and it isn’t until she is on her way to the airport that she remembers the tampons in the front pocket of her jeans and suddenly understands what it was that the young woman called out after her.

“You’re going the wrong way!” she’d said.

But, for once, Quinn knows that she isn’t.

25

  FAMILY BUSINESS

RANVEER’S RIFLE IS assembled, scoped, and stocked for the optics, not for the shot. The things he came here to do need to be done up close.

Movement is what he is looking for. He already knows the routine of everyone inside—that by now, the house should be tidied up and quiet. But like the very young, old men seldom sleep through the night. Even Ranveer, in the last year, has had to start paying closer attention to how much he drinks in the evenings. Sooner or later, he muses, enlarged prostates come for us all.

Infrared heat signatures look just right for the middle of the night. No kettle on in the kitchen as a thermal sign of insomnia. There’s a tiny orange blob stalking around the back—almost certainly a raccoon or a cat.

Infiltration-wise, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than this. The old man likes to sleep with the doors and windows wide open, which he is able to do because everyone knows who his son is. But there’s one critical flaw in that logic: what if you are there on family business?

It is a modest home. Two stories. Brick. Plants on every last horizontal stone surface deep enough to accommodate a pot. Trees lining the flat roof, concealing an illicit satellite dish that everyone knows is there.

The perimeter of the property is defined by a tall brick wall, and Ranveer hangs the rifle from one shoulder as he lets himself in through the iron gate in the back, gingerly closing and latching it behind him. The cat he detected from the park across the street—a neighborhood stray, it would seem, with only one eye—leaps up onto the edge of the fountain as Ranveer approaches, expertly positioning itself precisely at petting height. Ranveer moves his case to his other hand so that he can comply, and the cat rattles with gratitude.

Ranveer does not even pause at the screen door, but slides it open, pivots around it, and closes it behind him in a single fluid motion. He must balance vigilance with expediency, and one of the best ways to do so is to trust what you already know. Double- and triple-checking costs time; if you’re good enough at what you do, you should only have to do it once.

There is enough of a moon tonight, and there are frequent enough windows throughout the home, that he does not need full-time infrared, though he does have his metaspecs in sentry mode; should they detect a heat signature consistent with any living thing bigger than the pirate cat outside, he will get a haptic alert, and the shape will be painted with a false-color overlay.

The old man and his nurse are in separate bedrooms off the main level. But they are not why he is here. The boy’s room is upstairs.

As he ascends, Ranveer’s shoes use radar to check for inconsistent density in the material below them, providing tactile feedback about where best to step to avoid creaking. He distributes his weight on the treads as directed, case in one hand and railing in the other. The floor plan of the house is not complicated, and at the top, Ranveer follows the handrail along the open second-story landing. The door at the end of the hall is closed, and as his gloved hand tightens around the cold oblong knob, he looks down, giving the main level one final inspection before entering.

Children’s rooms often seem small to adults, but never so small as when they were once your own.

It is that bizarre sense of scale that throws Ranveer off the most. He can’t remember the last time he was in a hotel with a bathroom this small. Yet