Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (best english novels for beginners txt) 📗

whore and barricaded himself inside a safe room behind his walk-in closet. Modern safe rooms are pretty legit; depending on composition and configuration, some models can add up to three hours to a job. And don’t forget: there’s that obnoxious cokehead prostitute to deal with who your target so valiantly left tangled up naked in the sheets so there would be more oxygen for him. Safe rooms don’t exchange air with the outside world, because if they did, you could just screw a canister of arsenic pentafluoride or straight-up chlorine into the bypass and gas the fucker faster and with far less effort than you could strangle him with two-hundred-pound monofilament fishing line strung between a pair of oyster-shucking gloves.

The bottom line is, if your target ends up hermetically sealed inside any kind of halfway decent safe room, you can probably kiss your plans for later that night goodbye.

But the biggest downside to bodyguards is not that they are easily dispatched by a properly configured gas gun or, if you’re feeling especially mischievous, the quick zip of Damascus steel across the jugular, after which you need to keep them pointed away from you until they’re finished spouting. It’s that they are easily corrupted. Security professionals are almost always either stupid or underpaid—quite often both—which amounts to a dangerous and unfortunate combination when it comes to the safety of you and your family. It often costs less to get a guard to look the other way than to buy a moderately good cigar in some countries. Or, given that most bodyguards aren’t all that fond of their narcissistic and egomaniacal bosses, for the price of an evening’s worth of quality companionship, you can sometimes convince one to walk right into his employer’s bedroom, conduct business on your behalf, then get on the next flight to Bermuda. In Ranveer’s world, there’s no shame in outsourcing so long as the job gets done.

Where expensive electronics and cheap minions fail, a dog can prevail. A well-trained canine can’t be fooled or bribed, and even if you’re cold and callous enough to kill a man’s best and most loyal companion, it’s almost impossible to do so before he can manage to get out some pretty unsettling racket. Where jobs involve dogs—even the little yappy kind—your best bet is usually a sniping configuration, a downwind vantage point at least a hundred meters away, and a tall thermos of coffee.

But at the end of the day, when you think about it, the safety of each and every one of us really comes down to nothing more than the simple goodwill of others. Unless you have the resources of an entire nation dedicated to keeping you alive (and sometimes even then), just about anyone on the street can kill you or your family at any moment for any reason at all—or for no reason in particular. Most of us come into contact with anywhere from dozens to thousands of people every day who could instantly reduce us to human smoothies with nothing more than an almost imperceptible tweak of a steering wheel or the slightest nudge toward an inbound train. And those are just the careless and the cowards among us. Anyone with any balls or ingenuity can kill almost anyone else around them in a dozen different ways with nearly any implement within arm’s reach: a pencil through the soft tissue of the eye and into the temporal lobe behind; the spine of a book against the throat with enough force to crush the trachea; a “World’s Best Dad” coffee cup to the temple where the middle meningeal artery is easily lacerated. The list goes on. And then there are the myriad of actual weapons and poisons and methods of sabotage that can be used against any one of us before our brains can even begin to register the possibility of danger. The truth is that most of us survive day-to-day not because of any real ability to keep ourselves and our families safe, but simply because there is nobody in the immediate vicinity who wishes otherwise.

—

Side-loaded on Ranveer’s handset is a handy little app that allows him to hack e-ink license plates anywhere in the world. After using GLONASS (the Russian version of GPS) to determine his location, and the camera in his metaspecs to capture the VIN of the Mercedes-Benz H2-Class he borrowed from the hotel, the app uses his handset’s near-field transmitter to broadcast a signal similar to the one issued by the Directorate General of Traffic under the Royal Oman Police after a car has been reported as stolen. However, rather than flashing the Arabic word for “thief!” thereby making the vehicle exceedingly easy for officers to spot (and often shaming your more respectable criminals into abandoning their boosted rides before they can reach the nearest chop shop), Ranveer’s payload generates a random but perfectly valid Omani tag so that if it is somehow recorded, the Mercedes cannot be traced back to the hotel. As an additional security measure, the SUV’s data connection has been disabled so that its location cannot be triangulated, which means it is searching for the Nassif family’s home amid the suburbs west of Sohar using only onboard sensors and cached maps.

It would be fair to say that Ranveer generally works the night shift, and that he is currently on his way into the office. Since he is self-employed and only gets paid for the results he produces, he decides to make optimal use of his evening commute.

He may not be some hotshot CIA analyst, but Ranveer knows his way around the shadowphiles. Wired once described the shadowphiles as the lowest point in our rich, vast, and exponentially expanding datascape; the point at which all phished, leaked, and hacked information eventually collects after most of its immediate commercial value has been extracted; illicit indices of personal details and financial transactions concealed beneath multiple layers of onion routing and asymmetrical encryption, but accessible to anyone well enough connected to