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

Just imagine.

There is enough greenish light in the room from electroluminescent nightlights that Ranveer is easily able to guide the dropper over the infant’s ear without dialing his specs into the infrared range. He pauses for a moment and listens, but all he can hear is the whistle and tiny rattle of breathing. Even through the obfuscation glove, he can feel the warmth radiating up from the baby’s cheek, and he can smell the sweet milk of his mother.

Justifying one’s actions solely through religion is not enough. Unless you integrate philosophy and science into your worldview, you are no better than some of the mindless zealots Ranveer was surrounded by back in Tehran. You have to understand, before you choose to take a life, why it is so hard to do so. You have to accept that the innate social structure that keeps humankind intact demands that murder be abhorrent. Although we feel very little remorse for slaughtering just about any other living creature—consuming its flesh, wrapping ourselves in its skin, boiling the gelatin out of its bones and connective tissue for cheap cosmetics and children’s novelties—the sight of a severed human head or a bloated rotting corpse must necessarily evoke in us the most profound horror if the species is to avoid self-destruction. Yet somehow murder has existed for as long as life has been available to extinguish and will always exist despite any and all efforts to prevent or punish it.

Murder is as necessary as our revulsion to it. The two forces balance each other out in a mysterious societal equilibrium that both rattles and intrigues us. The ability to murder is, frankly, what sets some people apart. Power belongs to those with the strength to overcome their fears and weaknesses and instincts—those who are capable of overriding the more primitive regions of the brain with the more highly evolved. Ranveer knows that no matter how many people he kills, in the end, he will be judged not on his moral code or his actions, but by the only criteria that has ever truly counted for anything in all the billions of years life has existed on Earth: his own ability to survive and prosper.

A single drop of the solution is released as Ranveer squeezes the soft silicone bulb, and when the fluid is funneled down through the outer ear, the infant briefly looks as though he is going to wake up and cry, but then he becomes peaceful again. His breathing pauses, but only long enough to swallow, and then it resumes. At forty-six seconds, the short shallow breaths stop once again, and this time, the child’s little back does not resume its rhythmic rise and fall.

As he unsheathes his ribbed Damascus steel, Ranveer notes that the baby’s cheek is a little small for a four-digit number, and therefore uses the blade to split the infant’s onesie down the back instead. Usually he carves tags into his victims, or brands them with a plasma torch, or inks them with a disposable tattoo pen. But tonight, he uses a fine-point permanent marker against the smooth and flawless skin.

PART TWO

16

  LUXURY LOBBY LOITERING

QUINN MITCHELL IS not exactly what you would call cosmopolitan. In high school, she went on a group ski trip to Quebec, where she did several things she later had to disclose as part of her security clearance application so that she wouldn’t fail her polygraph. In college, she did a semester in Frankfurt, where she hoped to do some of those things again, but which turned out to be so demanding that she cried almost every night and came home two weeks early. And when she was first married, she and her now-ex-husband took a vacation to Cancún, which they each pretended to enjoy but which they admitted to each other years later they both hated. Unless you count going to the World Showcase at Epcot, Quinn is about as domestic as Americans get.

Prior to booking her flight, she probably couldn’t have found Oman on an unlabeled map, and she had absolutely zero idea of what to expect once she landed. Turns out, at least as far as properties owned and operated by Crystal Collective Worldwide are concerned, it isn’t all that different from L.A.: plenty of decorum, almost no cooperation. Although she sees little else when she closes her eyes, nobody here can remember anyone even slightly resembling the gentleman in question. Miraculously, most don’t even need to look down at her handset before they are certain that they can be of no assistance whatsoever to a female American CIA officer with no head covering. After a full day of curt but polite interviews in the cool dim lobbies of every Crystal Collective Worldwide hotel in the city, the only thing she has learned is that, by the time she gets the necessary paperwork in place and manages to orchestrate the cooperation of both the Omani kingdom and various local authorities, all surveillance footage will have long since been erased, and her man will be three cities away with at least as many new bodies in his wake.

Quinn was planning on her base of operations being the U.S. embassy, but Muscat is a two-and-a-half-hour drive south, so although she feels she is not all that welcome at the Al Hujra Hotel—by far the most expensive of all CCW properties in Sohar, and apparently the favorite of everyone from royalty to rock stars—she gets herself set up at a table in a quiet corner of the lobby, orders a coffee and two bottles of water, unclips her handset from her belt, and starts going through her messages. The one forwarded by Moretti is marked urgent, and as soon as she begins reading it, she reflexively makes a noise that turns the heads of the people around her.

Quinn remembers