Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

Oman. That mysterious, single-hertz heartbeat that causes such unusual signal interference. Now Quinn knows exactly where she is: Henrietta’s and Moretti’s top secret facility.

37

  AFTERIMAGE

HENRIETTA IS BAREFOOT, bagless, and conspicuously without her big, round, color-correcting glasses.

Everything she brought with her other than the dress she is wearing is now either hanging or stacked inside in a long, mesh, biometrically sealed locker. The floor is covered in squishy, Vaseline-colored, probably antimicrobial silicone tiles that remind her of Moretti’s man cave, and that she can’t help but anxiously pinch into little knots with her pink-painted toes. She is being closely observed by two humorless women in badged and buttoned blazers, shapeless navy skirts, and cornflower-blue berets.

Even in the room’s excessive air-conditioning, Henrietta is sweating, and as she passes through the millimeter-wave, full-body scanner, she wonders if the additional density of moisture under her arms and just above her butt is getting false-color rendered. After exiting the plasma glass capsule, she is handed a quarter-sheet of paper with a sixteen-digit number printed on it, then escorted into the neighboring waiting room. At the front desk, she is asked—in heavily accented, monosyllabic English—to read her number aloud. Once it is verified, she trades the slip of paper for some sort of laminated, illustrated document that reminds her of an airline safety card.

Next on the brisk and orderly agenda: sit down and wait.

The address of the U-shaped, eighteenth-century, French-Gothic building with the arched entrance and cobblestone approach was sent to her by Jean-Baptiste Allard via Semaphore message about fifteen minutes after she left the VW Jetstream trailer—just enough time, Henrietta imagines, for him to throw back another cognac, pull himself together, and decide to enter into an illicit quid pro quo agreement with a foreign intelligence operative. I cannot send you The Static itself, the message began, but I can arrange for you to view it, very briefly, inside a nearby cleanroom. In exchange, Henrietta used the twenty-minute car ride from Ground Zero to the old Hôtel de Broglie, where several French intelligence agencies maintain satellite offices, to author another forgery of Simon and his imaginary, heterosexual, biracial nuclear family—this time perched atop bales of hay in the photo zone of a local fall festival, illuminated by celestial beams of golden, late-afternoon sunlight amid a backdrop of autumn foliage.

Eventually Allard will wonder how it is that Henrietta always seems to have such ready access to suburban-stereotypical photos of his son’s family—especially given that CIA employees are not exactly the most prolific users of social media. And then it will occur to him that his grandson has not sufficiently aged between spring and fall. Finally, he will do what he should have done the moment Henrietta sent him anything—what he would have done reflexively had this been a normal investigation rather than a matter so personal as to have undermined any hope of objectivity: run the two images through a pipeline of content authenticity algorithms, which, if they are any good at all, will instantly invalidate Henrietta’s story. But by then, neither Jean-Baptiste Allard nor Alessandro Moretti will have any idea where to find her.

The Static is apparently being treated as a form of signals intelligence as Henrietta is sitting in the waiting room of the Brigade de renseignement et de guerre electronique, or the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Brigade. Essentially the French equivalent of the NSA. The laminated card she is holding makes the bold assertion that INFORMATION CANNOT BE STOLEN FROM THE CLEANROOM, and then explains, in six different languages and through the use of Ikea-like illustrations, exactly why.

First and foremost, no electronics of any kind are permitted inside. No phones or watches—smart or otherwise (some Europeans are mysteriously still given to the romantic notion of those hopelessly inaccurate mechanical timepieces). Certainly no metaspecs, which means Henrietta needs to be mindful of her eyes if she is to avoid manifesting annoying, floating ghosts. Even purely corrective lenses are forbidden, since photosensitive optics can be used to produce invisible images that can later be chemically developed. If you are so quaint as to require glasses to see, the BRGE will be happy to print you up a temporary pair in your exact prescription—for an additional fee.

No jewelry or other accessories. No shoes, jackets, or jumpers (aka sweaters). No medical devices (internal or external, including hearing aids) or assistive technologies such as prostheses (wheelchairs provided upon request). And finally, no dental work more intricate than composite-resin fillings, which Henrietta suspects is in response to the Russian mole who stole plans for a new NATO-funded Joint Strike Fighter by using his tongue to tap Morse code against a fake molar housing an accelerometer, a solid-state drive, a Bluetooth transmitter, and a ten-year battery.

The cleanroom itself is, in essence, a giant Faraday cage—a structure designed to block all types of electromagnetic signals—and it is not only “air-gapped” (disconnected from external networks), but also “light-gapped,” which Henrietta knows means that all incoming data passes through optical isolators, or chips containing plasma diodes on one end and photosensors on the other, separated by a one-hundred-micrometer gap. Incoming data is translated into light pulses on one side of the chip that are read by the optical sensor on the other side, ensuring that it is physically impossible for data to travel in the opposite direction no matter how much malware one somehow manages to accumulate.

In short, information that enters the cleanroom stays in the cleanroom. Not at all the circumstances Henrietta had envisioned for studying a message that traveled through time just to find her, but it’s this or nothing.

“Henrietta Yi,” the man at the front desk says. From the waist up, his uniform is identical to those worn by the women in the security room. “We are ready for you.”

Henrietta stands, dries her palms on her dress, and checks to make sure she has her shoulder bag—which, of course, she does not. The clerk extends his hand, into which Henrietta places the only thing of