Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

that collected as many as thousands of leaflets a day, bundled them up, and shoveled them into industrial shredders and incinerators.

Ranveer took one from the bin and read it over a cup of tea. He discovered that it was not transactional like the old series—that it did not promise wealth or material gain or the American Dream. There were no pictures of peaceful green suburbs, or expensive SUVs, or multiracial groups practicing religious freedom. Instead, they were inspirational. What they promised was intangible, complex, and abstract. The literature reminded Ranveer of the things his father had taught him, and, in fact, began with a quote from one of the old man’s favorite plays.

We know what we are,

but know not what we may be.

The next chapter in Ranveer’s life began the day he secretly established communication with the CIA.

26

  THE EPOCH INDEX

QUINN HAS BEEN commuting to Swiss Fort Knox Site VII for five straight days now via a muscular, marigold-yellow helicopter with a shrouded rear rotor. There are racks inside for snowboards, skis, and poles, and chargers for GoPros, drones, and headphones. Maybe it’s no Chinese-made autonomous quadcopter, but she’ll take a crisp aerial view of the Alps over the heat-shimmering Grid any day.

Settling on SFK Site VII was not difficult. It was mostly a matter of ranking all the most secure dead drop locations in the world by number of direct Emirates flights connecting nearby airports with cities where she knew the Elite Assassin had been. Took all of forty, forty-five minutes. Did most of it with a cheap ballpoint pen borrowed from a British Airlines kiosk that she first had to scribble to life on the back of a Starbucks receipt. Didn’t need petaflops of parallel processing prowess to figure out exactly where her man was going to be. Didn’t even need the entire payload of caffeine from her triple venti vanilla latte. All Quinn needed was the missing key provided by the woman with the orange-red hair, combined with a little creativity.

On her first trip on-site, she didn’t even make it off the helipad before being intercepted by security guards in white tactical gear carrying automatic weapons and crouching in the cold alpine chopper wash. They were respectful when she waved her credentials at them, but not remotely intimidated. She was hastily sent away with the name and phone number of a Mr. Eberlein, director of Site VII, from whom she would need to be granted clearance to even be allowed to disembark, and with whom she arranged to meet early the next morning.

Eberlein was polite but adamant that there was no way she would be given access to anyone’s reserved receptacle for any reason, under any circumstances, with or without a court order from the United States, Switzerland, or any other sovereign entity, nor would she be conducting interrogations or making any arrests on SFK property. By day three, after her superiors had contacted his superiors, and after Eberlein’s aggression had started to become decidedly less passive, he begrudgingly extended what he insisted was the best offer she was going to get.

Each morning, Quinn was to be escorted to a vacant privacy room where she was free to spend her day as she pleased (lunch and refreshments would not be provided, and access to facilities would be strictly supervised). Should the gentleman in her photographs—the man allegedly associated with the provided list of URIs, or Unique Receptacle Identifiers—happen to pay SFK Site VII a visit, said gentleman would be informed by none other than Eberlein himself that a Ms. Quinn Mitchell representing the United States Central Intelligence Agency wished to make his distinguished acquaintance. Should he find consultation with Ms. Mitchell desirable, he would—under his own volition and free of any and all forms of coercion, including but not limited to the express or implied threat of legal action and/or physical harm—be escorted to the aforementioned privacy room, where he might remain for as long as he found an audience with Ms. Mitchell both to his liking and in his best interests. Ms. Mitchell would not be permitted to detain the gentleman for any reason whatsoever, and positively no accusations or any form of intimidation would be tolerated. Period. Quinn suspected that one more day of escalation—of the United States threatening to take an overall keener interest in the entirety of the Swiss banking system, for instance—might have gotten her a somewhat better deal, but she didn’t want to risk her man slipping in and out while government officials postured and jousted. With a smile as patronizing as she was able to muster, she briefly grasped Eberlein’s effeminate fingers and squeezed.

—

The stark concrete privacy room reminds Quinn of a walk-in freezer where she is the meat. The first day was spent catching up on administrative work. Since she was alone, she took off her metaspecs and used her handset’s pico optics to project her workspace onto one of the white concrete walls. She browsed her backlog of messages, filed several field reports read only by a persnickety AI that unfailingly requested additional meaningless details, and entered some expenses—including the one for her brand-new handset (hence the pico projector), which she’d asked for in case her old one belatedly succumbed to its misadventure, and which Moretti begrudgingly approved.

That was yesterday. It is now her second day on-site and her fifth day in the Swiss Alps, and she is starting to wonder if she’s going to need a contingency plan. She suspects she can only spend one or two more days in an SFK privacy room eating rösti (an exotic interpretation of the humble hash brown, packed by the cook at the B&B), drinking thermoses of Swiss coffee, and sheepishly requesting trips to the restroom before she’s going to need to come up with a cheaper way to set a trap. Quinn is staying in the nearby town of Valais, and the costs of lodging, helicopter commutes, and the fruit cognacs she discovered