Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

app is highly contextual, it knew to adjust the skin tone of the man’s arms and hands to match the face, and even to dial in the ethnicity of the child to a genetically accurate balance between mom and dad. Swapping the gender from female to male was as easy as a toggle. The result is probably even more convincing than it needs to be; the thing about deception is that it is less about fidelity and more about showing people exactly what it is they desperately want to believe.

“How old?”

“Three.”

“What’s his name?”

“Allan,” Henrietta tells him. “It was as close to Allard as they felt they could get.”

Allard transforms into a much older man as the phone drops from his unsteady hand. He covers his face and leans forward, his slender shoulders heaving in deep sobs.

Henrietta stands and leans in close so that she can speak tenderly. “There could be a steady stream of these,” she tells him. “Birthdays, first days of school, graduations. Videos. Even holograms. Or, I could see to it that nothing about your son, or your grandson, reaches you ever again. It’s up to you.”

She does not wait for a response, but pockets her phone, takes one last sip of her wine, and leaves the old man to grieve and weep all alone.

36

  BEARINGS

QUINN’S HONDA CLARITY won’t take her to Joint Base Andrews. The FAA and Department of Transportation maintain spatial databases used to geofence protected locations behind intricately shaped exclusion zones. Anything autonomous, including commercial drones, will slow as they approach invisible digital walls described by complex geometric equations. Manual overrides are blithely ignored as vehicles ease to a gentle but stubborn stop. Instructions are stored in secure elements ensuring they cannot be defeated without extremely sophisticated and highly illegal hacks. All this means Quinn is stuck waiting for a black government-owned SUV to meet her at her apartment and pick her up.

As she sits on the edge of her bed next to her suitcase and waits, she once again wonders whether she should pack her Glock. It’s in a shoebox on the top shelf of her closet, and considering her mission, it doesn’t feel right to leave her only weapon behind. But even though she is flying on a private, government-chartered, supersonic jet, she suspects her luggage will still be thoroughly checked. And given her connection to the events she is going to investigate, getting caught smuggling a personal firearm into France could easily mean an abrupt end to her entire plan. Quinn arrives at the same conclusion she did the first two dozen times she thought the question through: better to let the Elite Assassin help her procure the proper tools.

She receives a notification when her ride is finally outside, and as soon as she begins towing her suitcase behind her down the hall of her apartment building, she regrets not trading it in for something more sophisticated. Before all her recent travel, it had been a while since Quinn had flown, and in the meantime, it seems the entire world has upgraded from low-tech legacy baggage to various forms of smart luggage. Even children are now followed around airports by eerily loyal SpongeBob, Frozen, and Hello Kitty cases trained on their voices, gaits, and faces. It occurs to Quinn how much fun Molly would have had turning her suitcase into an indefatigable hide-and-seek machine.

The SUV has her Honda boxed in, and Quinn is reminded that it still needs a new cooling fan. There is so much she is leaving undone. Her apartment is an abject mess, and she still hasn’t found an accountant to help her with her taxes. There’s the storage unit out in Chantilly containing an entire life trapped in suspended animation. Things that need to be said to both her mother and her brother. Radar reflectors still embedded in her flesh.

This is not an off-the-lot SUV. It has a bulky, reinforced front bumper that looks like a battering ram, and non-pneumatic polymer tires evocative of honeycombs that can’t go flat. The back gate lifts as she approaches, and Quinn heaves her bag into the vast empty space. She picks a side, and the corresponding rear door opens to receive her, then pivots closed. The windows are tinted well beyond the legal limit, and inside the SUV it is dim and quiet. Quinn feels the vehicle rise on its magnetic suspension in preparation for a pleasant, air-cushioned ride.

“Good morning, Ms. Mitchell,” the autonomous system says as the SUV pulls away. It uses the flat, gender-neutral voice that the federal government finally commissioned after a couple of politically fraught false starts.

Quinn does not respond. She is waiting for the rest of it. Some acknowledgment of her destination. At the very least, an ETA. But that seems to be all the vehicle has to say, and it remains quiet as it exits her apartment complex.

So Quinn removes her metaspecs from their charging case, unfolds them, and immerses herself in a virtual world. A panorama of satellite imagery and machine-translated social media posts. Dynamically generated data visualizations. Unfiltered query results and pinned person-of-interest profile photos. Configuration files for bots trained to scrape the shadowphiles for anything potentially germane. Her specs are aware that she is in transit and have therefore added the vehicle’s bearing to her heads-up display. She ignores it at first, but something about it picks at the edge of her attention until, finally, she realizes what it is: “W” is the wrong direction.

Quinn snatches the specs off her face. It takes her a moment to place herself, but she sees that she is heading west on 66. Joint Base Andrews is east of Arlington. On the other side of the Potomac, right outside the Beltway. She’s even been there before. That’s where the C-130 Hercules landed after bringing Quinn, Moretti, and the tactical team back from Zürich. When the SUV eases over and exits onto the Toll Road, Quinn relaxes. She suspects that, in all