Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

both already know. Your limited time with me is better spent asking about things you haven’t yet figured out.”

“Fine,” Quinn says. She is doing her best to appear unperturbed. “Then I’d like you to tell me who wanted all these people dead, and I’d like you to tell me why.”

Ranveer drops his eyes for a moment, then drums his fingertips on the brushed-steel surface before him. Quinn notices that his fingernails are significantly better manicured than her own.

“Ms. Mitchell,” he begins. “May I ask you a question?”

At this point, Quinn is flying entirely blind and relying purely on instinct. She decides she is willing to entertain anything that keeps her man talking—and that keeps the clock ticking.

“Why not?”

“Have you ever heard of the Epoch Index?”

Quinn’s gaze sharpens. She is leaning against the back of her chair, looking down at Ranveer, hoping to appear confident and in control. But now she moves around to the other side and sits, and they regard each other on an equal level.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything. Until someone figures out how to decrypt it, there’s no way to know what it is.”

“What would you say if I told you that I decrypted it.”

“I’d say you were lying.”

“Why?”

“Because the smartest people in the world have been trying to decrypt it and haven’t been able to.”

“Let’s approach this from a different angle,” Ranveer proposes. “Why encrypt anything at all?”

“To make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Exactly. Which implies that if it were to fall into the right hands, it could be decrypted.”

“So the CIA is the wrong hands.”

“You might say that.”

“And you’re the right hands.”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Well, that’s easy enough to prove, isn’t it? If you decrypted it, you must know where it came from.”

“I do.”

“And?”

Ranveer smiles reticently. “I can confirm that the rumors as to its origins are true.”

“Let’s be clear here,” Quinn says. “Are you claiming that the Epoch Index came from the future?”

“I am.”

“Which implies that someone from the future wanted all these people dead, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Ranveer, I’m not that stupid,” Quinn tells him. “I know that none of this is possible.”

“If I were to present you with irrefutable proof,” Ranveer says, “then will you believe me?”

“Probably not,” Quinn says, “but irrefutable proof is certainly a good start.”

Ranveer leans forward. He watches Quinn astutely—clearly a precursor to a deliberate and purposeful delivery.

“The Epoch Index was detected by the Large Hadron Collider over a decade ago, but it wasn’t until a Korean physicist named Henrietta Yi—whom I suspect you’ve met by now—had the idea of using parallelized neural networks to analyze the backlog of data that it was finally discovered.”

“I know all this,” Quinn says. “What I don’t know is what happened to the Epoch Index after it was discovered.”

“After the European Organization for Nuclear Research confirmed the anomaly, they contacted a small number of governments and turned the data over.”

“Then how did you end up with it?”

“That’s not important right now. What is important is that the data consisted of a series of encrypted blocks that nobody knew how to decrypt.”

“Nobody but you,” Quinn corrects.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Think about it,” Ranveer says. “You already know the answer.”

“I’d really rather not play—” But then something unexpectedly aligns in Quinn Mitchell’s mind. “The twins.”

“The twins,” Ranveer confirms. “I took the index to Naan and Pita. They have more distributed computing resources at their disposal than anyone else on the entire planet. The CIA included. The encryption on the first block was relatively weak, so it only took about a month to break it.”

“What was it?”

“First of all, verification. Enough information to prove, definitively, that the Epoch Index is from the future.”

“How?”

“Years of global temperature charts. Hour by hour. Which would all prove to be exactly correct down to a tenth of a degree.”

Quinn tries to think of a way to disprove the premise. Obviously, any number of people can use predictive modeling to anticipate future temperatures, but not down to the hour, and certainly not down to fractions of degrees.

“OK,” Quinn allows. “What else?”

“Instructions. Along with the first name on the list.”

“The first target,” Quinn clarifies.

“Yes.”

“And presumably the rest of the blocks were additional targets.”

“And payment.”

“What kind of payment?”

“Whatever has value by virtue of being unknowable or undiscovered. Cryptocurrency trends, stock tips, sports scores. Novel molecular compounds. Did the CIA or the QSS ever identify the substance used to anesthetize the twins?”

“No.”

“Now you know why,” Ranveer says. “Anyway, the twins acted as middlemen. Given their neighbors, the information was not difficult to trade on.” He reaches down and taps the case at his feet. “They even arranged the transfer of cash.”

“Why the tags?” Quinn asks. “Why not just send the twins four-digit numbers directly? Or have them send the numbers directly to you?”

“One less digital breadcrumb for you to scoop up. Safer to let the media do the communication for us.”

“That’s just sick,” Quinn says, though she has to admit, it is as brilliant as it is twisted.

“Pita’s idea, if I remember correctly.”

“Why didn’t you kill them?”

“The twins? Because there was no need for them to die.” He takes a moment more to consider Quinn’s question more deeply. “And because I like them.”

“You mean because you still have use for them.”

“That too.”

“Why would Naan and Pita go along with something like this?” Quinn asks. “Somehow they don’t strike me as the murdering type.”

“The twins are the two most intelligent people I’ve ever met,” Ranveer says. “They understood the significance of the Epoch Index even before I did.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Naan and Pita went along with it because they had no choice.”

“Because you forced them.”

“No. They participated voluntarily. Reluctantly, but voluntarily. They accepted that everyone named by the Epoch Index had to be eliminated.”

“Why?” Quinn asks. “Why was it so important to the future that all these people die?”

“Because,” Ranveer says, “they were the most dangerous terrorists the world would ever see.”

“Terrorists?” In her mind, Quinn begins reviewing the victims’ profiles. A Kenyan cab driver who, on weekends, was