Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

“It’ll pass.”

Moretti moves around the room until he can get a good look at Ranveer’s face, then he looks back up at Quinn. “So, what’s the good word, Officer Mitchell? Did you get what we need?”

Ranveer’s neck is bent and his face is pressed into the cold steel, but he can still twist around and look up. His expression is not one of pleading. It is strained by the physical position he is in, but Quinn can see that he is not afraid, and he is not trying to convey any kind of threat. There is nothing he wants or needs from her anymore. He has the serenity of a man who, even though he is out of time, has still managed to fulfill his mission. As Quinn watches him, his eyes soften, and his lips constrict into a cunning and subtle grin. He seems pleased to be leaving Quinn with the unfinished fable of the scorpion.

PART THREE

27

  MAN CAVE

ALESSANDRO MORETTI HAD one room of his secret facility turned into his own personal gym. Henrietta can hear the music and the clanking of weights from all the way down the hall. She’s practiced her pitch enough that she has the whole thing memorized, and abruptly decides that now is the right time.

The door is ajar, and Henrietta knocks as she pushes it farther open and slips tentatively inside. Moretti glances down the length of his chest as he pushes through one final rep, then drops the bar noisily into its catch.

This is the first time Henrietta has been in this room. The entire facility is her domain with two exceptions: Mr. Moretti’s office and what appears to be an adjoining man cave.

It’s almost all weights in here. No space for sissy cardio. Variously shaped bars are strewn about like metallic bones amid hinged benches. There are a couple of steel frames that look disconcertedly like cages. And a rack of graduating dumbbells against the wall. Above them, a wide plasma glass screen, its dangling wires exposed, the brutality of the afternoon’s global news muted. In the corner, a mini fridge with a see-through door etched with the Monster energy drink logo, and a plasma-accented boombox rattling classic rock planted on top. The concrete floor is covered by thick black interlocking tiles forming a sprawling rubberized mat that singes the air with its potent outgassing.

Henrietta wonders if it has occurred to Moretti that the quantum fields they are generating here in order to facilitate dynamic mass redistribution could be commercialized for the creation of the very first infinitely configurable weight set—though, sadly, at a per-unit cost of billions.

“Mr. Moretti?” she says apprehensively.

Her boss is sitting up now, and Henrietta can see that he is wearing a white ribbed wife-beater T-shirt tucked into his steel-gray pleated trousers. His back is covered in a fine black down, and there is an indistinct bluish tattoo on one shoulder that Henrietta assumes is related to his days as an Army Ranger. A gold chain hangs on the outside of his shirt, converging against his sternum, weighted by an emerald- and ruby-studded Lady of Guadalupe pendant—not as a symbol of any form of faith, but, according to rumors, a trophy taken off a Mexican drug lord as he lay maimed along with his family in the debris of a drone strike—courtesy of the CIA. Moretti’s pink, neatly pressed dress shirt is hung by its collar behind him on a metal peg.

Mr. Moretti is smelly and sweaty, Henrietta sings in her head.

Moretti puts his hands out like he’s catching a body falling from the sky, but instead of looking up, he is glaring straight ahead.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he wants to know.

Instantaneously the music ducks below the level of anticipated conversation, and the boombox’s neon blaze accordingly fades.

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“No.” Henrietta now sees that her calculations were way off. She assumed Moretti would be more receptive to her proposal during his downtime, but it’s obvious to her now that he takes his breaks just as seriously as he does his work. “I’m sorry. It can wait.”

Moretti scoops up a tall black can from the floor, rattles it, and tips it back. He uses the other hand to halt Henrietta’s retreat.

“You already interrupted me,” he says, grimacing from the potency of whatever energy-enhancing chemicals he is ingesting. “What is it?”

Henrietta contemplates aborting her plan—either hastily evacuating, or fabricating an update that her boss will pretend to understand. But the part of her that is perpetually eager to please is being overridden by something inside of her that has been growing in control: the feeling that she is running out of time to become the person she feels she was always meant to be.

“Well,” Henrietta says as she steps farther into the room. “It’s about the email I sent you.”

“Which one?”

“The one about me getting back into research.”

“Refresh my memory,” Moretti says, by which he means, I didn’t bother reading it.

“Last week, I sent you a proposal for how I think I can get back into civilian research.”

“Ah,” Moretti realizes. “This again.”

“Now that we’re almost operational here, and now that the whole Elite Assassin thing has been wrapped up, I thought it would be a good time for me to get back to publishing some of my research. On my own time, of course. Maybe even spend evenings and weekends working part-time at a university. It wouldn’t affect my work here. I promise.”

Moretti turns to retrieve a white hand towel that was spread over the bench to protect the material from the back of his head, then uses it to dab at the black tufts of his armpits.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

Henrietta had been planning this conversation for months—long before she got up the courage to send the email. She wasn’t exactly expecting her boss to be