It’s easy to spot the man in charge of these types of operations. He’s the one who waits to make his entrance. Who wears a stylish, open-collared suit instead of ballistic body armor. Who does not bother with the ski mask—not because of what it might do to his hair, but because he prefers that you know exactly who he is. Because he knows that his face is the last thing on the planet you want to see at that particular moment. Because men who operate at that level are fully committed, and there will never be any hiding from the things they have done.
Anyway, that guy—he makes a distasteful reference to someone’s mother’s vagina in Arabic, then uses his handset to call it in. He wants Thunderbolt drones in the air all along the Gulf coast within the hour. He wants random northbound checkpoints from Bandar Abbas to Kermanshah. The government no longer has any kind of biometric signature on this guy, so they’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. No one gets into Tehran without showing an ID, and anyone whose paperwork is not in order gets detained. It will take their man at least a couple of days to cover the distance—perhaps as long as a week—but just in case, he expects a perimeter around the capital by nightfall.
And, as if suddenly remembering where he is, he wants this son-of-a-dog plane off the son-of-a-dog runway. Now. And for the next twenty-four hours, every private, commercial, and cargo flight from Qatar is to be diverted here, and it is to be thoroughly searched. Any aircraft failing to comply is to be shot down. Human remains are to be recovered and volumetrically scanned, and 3D models are to be brought to him personally.
The two pilots turn and look at each other for a long, wide-eyed moment, then race each other back into the cockpit. They both know that once the jet is safely parked in the Emirates hangar, they’ll collapse in the back and drink, repeatedly, to not being dead. The nice thing about piloting luxury jets—especially in parts of the world like Iran, where alcohol is banned—is that a well-stocked minibar is always close at hand.
But luxury is about much more than limitless access to fine mind-altering substances. It isn’t even about comfort or status or quality. Those who really understand what money can buy know that extravagance is really about experience. Sometimes that means getting to pass the time by playing games with zip ties in the back of private planes, and sometimes that means the thrill of spontaneous illegal skydiving to keep from being detained. But sometimes it means something much more subtle. Sometimes it means reserving not only the plane, and not just someone to fly it, but the opportunity to put on a uniform, sit in the cockpit, and pretend like you are the copilot.
24
DEAD DROP
THE GRID HAS its own administrative buildings among Doha Port, the main one being the Bariq Pavilion. Inside, it is predictably modern-opulent—a little hologram-heavy for Quinn’s personal taste—and right on the edge of being a parody of futurism. Quinn has set up base in yet another luxurious lobby oasis, where she anxiously awaits two things: word on whether her man was apprehended at the airport, and a brand-new handset.
Instead, she is approached by the port master, who, with a triumphant grin, delivers her old handset inside a sealed plastic evidence bag. Apparently, items of value are lost to the Persian Gulf all the time, and his crew has become quite adept at using a tethered submersible to retrieve everything from golf clubs to diamond earrings as small as a mere two carats.
Once it detected separation from its primary guardian—probably when the Bluetooth connection with her metaspecs became sufficiently frayed—the handset shut itself down. Sadly, Quinn has enough experience with how complex electronics interact with water that she knows not to boot it back up until as much of the moisture has been wicked away as possible. Like any modern device, Quinn’s handset is water-resistant to an extent, but she’s pretty sure that ninety minutes at the bottom of the Persian Gulf exceeds even the most optimistic ingress protection designations.
The first step is to get an idea of what she’s dealing with here. After unzipping the plastic pouch, Quinn can see that the port master went to the trouble of rinsing the OtterBox off with fresh water and conducting a cursory toweling. That’s a good start. There’s a decent ding in the side of the OtterBox from its high-velocity interaction with the railing, so Quinn decides that it has done its duty and has earned an honorable discharge.
But something stops her from tossing it. Quinn is reminded of the laptop Vanessa Townes now displays on a shelf in her office—the shattered Dell clamshell that might have saved her life. The OtterBox, it occurs to Quinn, is no less a symbol of serendipity. When her handset collided with the rail, it could have gone either way. And what she initially interpreted as fate working against her was, in fact, random acts aligning and, for once, finding in her favor.
Quinn knows how close she came to having her throat neatly slit. To grasping her neck as though she were choking in a hopeless effort to hold on to all that blood. Sitting down on the floor of the twins’ basement, quietly watching in horror as the thick red pool spread out around her. Mourning herself with silent tears from wide, terrified eyes. She knows that swallowing the trauma of narrow escape and letting it grow inside her is probably a mistake. But for now she decides to plant it like a toxic seed and to see if she can
