Scorpion

the innocent voice of the little girl in the kitchen casually telling her that Molly is sleeping in the pool. Feels, all over again, the sickening realization that she did not confirm that they were being watched. Through the kitchen window, sees the dark, still shape gently rising and falling on the calm, sparkling surface. Hears the plate shatter at her feet. Quinn cannot remember how she got outside and into the neighbor’s yard, but she can feel herself pushing against the resistance of the water, and the weight of what is in her arms, and the pull of her own wet clothes as she climbs the pool stairs. Her daughter’s eyes half open but unseeing as Quinn lays her out on a lounge chair in the sun. The limpness of her neck as she pinches her chin and straightens her head. The purple of her lips and gums. Sweeping the wet blond hair away from her porcelain-pale face. In an instant, Quinn relives the fifteen exhausting and dizzying minutes of CPR, of pleading with her daughter to come back to her, of the taste of chlorine and the smell of sunscreen and the feel of her mouth sealed around her baby’s cold lips. Compression against the tiny chest. Those beautiful blue eyes staring right past her into the sky. And then she feels herself being pulled away at the waist by an EMT and watches herself vomit violently on the deck of the pool.

Her specs are dialed down now, and her forehead is pressed against two fingers. She is focusing on her breathing as she tastes the salt of her tears at the corners of her mouth. It is ten minutes before she can open her eyes again. The other people in the lobby are conspicuously ignoring her. She wipes her nose and cheeks and goes back to the report.

The nine-month-old child was found by his mother when she began to wonder why he was sleeping so late. His pajamas were split open down the back, where the number 1401 was neatly printed in black indelible ink. The toxicity report shows hydrogen cyanide. Burns in the aural canal and throat indicate that the solution was administered through the ear.

Everything about this case just changed, and Quinn now knows that she cannot keep living twelve hours in this man’s past. She does not want to be this close to death. These murders are no longer data points and statistics to be factored into queries and equations. They are more than just locations and timestamps and parameters. These are people. Babies. Quinn knows that she has two choices right now. She can call Van and wake her up and tell her that she can’t do this anymore. Tell her that she needs to come home. Ask her to talk to Moretti for her. Order a car to take her back to the airport and a glass of wine while she waits. Have another at the airport, and a third on the plane. Or she can close her eyes, take a deep breath, and get back to the task of catching this sociopathic motherfucker before he has the chance to kill again.

Quinn adds the new case information to her database and triggers a set of routines that aggregate statistics across victims. The results are instantaneous and not significantly different from before: 86 percent are male; 92 percent are under the age of twenty-four; roughly half have ties to regions traditionally associated with the energy industry, and the other half have some kind of technical or scientific background. Not nearly enough to go on. And no secondary correlation. No ransom demands, no blackmail, and no evidence of corruption. No scandals or cover-ups. No ties to organized crime. Most people think that without a body you don’t have a murder, but there’s one more thing you need to be sure you have a lead: somewhere there has to be a motive.

She extracts all the victims’ names and universally unique identifiers into a separate list, then runs a query against all the most common indices. The results are nothing she hasn’t already seen. Most are related to news articles and law enforcement reports and social media posts, and about half appear to be false positives. She finds some potentially interesting results pertaining to individual victims, but most have already been doled out to Interpol to run down and thus far have yielded no relevant insights. As far as Quinn can tell, there is still nothing that neatly ties all the victims together. Still no signal in the noise.

But there is the age pattern—the fact that each victim was younger than the one before. Perhaps the Elite Assassin is nearing some sort of conclusion, his bloodlust finally satisfied by the ultimate barbarity of infanticide. Or perhaps the pattern does not signal an end to the killings, but rather foreshadows an entirely new beginning.

—

At the counter, Quinn watches the hotel manager, Tariq al-Fasi Hashem, peevishly buff away a smudge on a plasma glass display with his microfiber pocket square. She strongly suspects that if she knew what was in that man’s flawlessly groomed head, she probably wouldn’t be loitering in yet another absurdly luxurious hotel lobby wishing that she knew what was in other people’s flawlessly groomed heads. Instead, she’d be using what was in her own disheveled, foggy, jet-lagged mind to compose queries that narrowed high-value results down to sets of actionable leads. If she could just get someone to recount a seemingly innocuous conversation about food or weather or currency exchange, she might be able to predict the next city. Then she might be able to narrow Emirates flights down to the point where she could distribute printouts to agents with orders to stake out gates, and Sultan Lounges, and CCW lobbies just like this one. Or, if she could get into a room where her man stayed and manage to recover a DNA sample, even though she knows that the universe would never