Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

fighter pilot, and either built-in ear protection or some pretty serious headphones. The black carbon-fiber model offered to Quinn by the junior officer who escorted her from the entrance into the belly of the massive building got slapped out of his bewildered grasp into a wall of lockers in protest of Quinn’s having been abducted by a ruggedized and eerily silent Cadillac Escalade. The only other one besides Quinn who has audaciously foregone head protection is the man she pursued around the globe and until this very moment believed was spending the rest of his life at the bottom of a deep dark hole.

The Elite Assassin stands off to the side, self-separated from the pack, leaning casually in his black slacks and silver coat against a console that has been bolted into place but not yet lit up. Whatever all this is, Ranveer seems to know that it is not his show. His arms are crossed, and he unknots them just enough to give Quinn an almost offhand wave before cinching them back tight across his body.

In retrospect, Quinn realizes, she should have figured it out. Of course he works for the CIA. What self-respecting, internationally recognized villain, at some point in his distinguished career, hasn’t? She can tell from the way he is standing there that he has never seen the inside of a prison cell, and that he is pompously confident he never will.

“Mitchell!” Moretti barks. He, Van, and the tall guy are all standing at what appears to be the only functional console in the place. He beckons her over with an exaggerated gesture. “Glad you could finally make it. Come on in. We got a lot to talk about.”

“What’s he doing here?” Quinn asks in a deceptively calm tone.

“Same as you. He works for me. Don’t worry about him. He’s as docile as a pussycat.”

Moretti’s comment has the dismissiveness of a man who believes he is in total control—and who will continue to believe such right up until the moment he is brutally proven wrong.

“You sent me on an errand to recover a rogue asset?”

“I sent you,” Moretti says, “to do exactly what you did: nail that sonovabitch.”

“Why?”

“Because he stole my Epoch Index, that’s why. Because his instructions were to find me someone who could decrypt it, not disappear and go on a goddamn global killing spree.”

“You’re welcome,” Ranveer glibly interjects.

Quinn looks at the assassin. His hands are in his pockets now, and he crosses his ankles like he is modeling for a European men’s lifestyle brand.

“Why’d you run?” Quinn asks him. “Once you found out what the Epoch Index was, if you were working for the CIA, why’d you disappear?”

“Because the CIA doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of thing.”

Quinn gives him a dubious look. “For going around the world assassinating foreign terrorists? Do you even know what the CIA does?”

“Even the U.S. government has lines it won’t cross,” Ranveer says. “That’s why the world needs people like us.”

Quinn watches him through glaring, narrowed eyes. “Us?”

“Hey,” Moretti says, “you two can have drinks and catch up later. Right now, I need to show you something.”

“Not until we get one thing straight,” Quinn announces. Her feet remain planted. She is speaking to no one and to everyone. “No more bullshit from this point forward. If everyone in this room is not one hundred percent honest with me, I’m walking right out of here and going straight to the media with everything I know. Is that understood?”

Moretti’s former joviality is no longer in evidence, and he squints at Quinn across the distance. “That would be a very serious mistake,” he tells her. He reaches up and resets his hard hat.

“Dial it down, Al,” Van says. “No more games, Quinn. You have my word. Come on. He’s right. There’s something you need to see.”

Reflexively, Quinn looks to Ranveer for direction. For reasons she does not yet understand, he is the only one in the room she trusts. The subtle gesture he makes with his head tells her, in his understated way, not to worry. Whatever this is, it’s safe.

So she goes.

It is only now that Quinn really begins to see where she is. Whatever this place may look like from the outside, it is definitely not a data center. At least not a traditional one. It feels much more like a control room. It seems to still be months away from being ready to do whatever it’s eventually going to do, and the smell is unmistakably that of construction. There are clusters of metal studs awaiting stacks of drywall. Ductwork, plumbing, and a red interconnected fire suppression system exposed overhead. Conduits and thick bundles of color-coded fiber-optic cabling are laid out along suspended wire racks, dangling here and there at designated drops above blank, bolted-down consoles.

Everything is oriented in a semicircle like some kind of high-tech henge—all of it facing what has to be one of the most expansive curvatures of black plasma glass in the world. The dropped ceiling overhead abruptly ends as Quinn approaches, opening up at least four or five additional stories, and the black glass goes all the way up to the top. She is synthesizing what she remembers seeing of the building from the outside as the SUV crept through the checkpoint—comparing the outer dimensions with what she is seeing on the inside—and from what she can tell, the glass wall doesn’t just encircle the core of the structure, but also seems to contain the overwhelming majority of the building’s entire volume.

The scale of what is in front of her doesn’t make any sense. All that plasma glass can’t possibly be intended as display surface. In fact, you can make an effective control room out of a building a tiny fraction the size of this one. With a shared metaspec space, you don’t even need to be co-located. Modern situation rooms are virtual, augmented, and decentralized. But the thing about plasma glass is that it’s also incredibly strong. And its conductive properties