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

franchises, do not despair. There is still additional status to be bought. But getting smeared across the surface of the Pacific by a super typhoon is for suckers. Getting murdered by skinny Somali pirates is whack. Going feral, bludgeoning one another to death with rocks, and descending into cannibalism is for losers. You need guaranteed safety, comfort, and convenience. You want a comprehensive turnkey micronation solution. What you’re looking for is The Grid.

The pitch? A matrix of platforms constructed in the Persian Gulf, located just off the coast of Qatar’s capital city, Doha.

The value prop? While technically still subject to Qatari law, each “exclave” would be granted a perpetual, nonexclusive, nontransferable, irrevocable, and exceedingly liberal license to pursue a wide range of personal interests and/or business activities. TL;DR: carte blanche.

The cost? Two hundred million USD gets you your very own multitiered exclave with a helipad, boat landing, office/laboratory space, luxury living quarters, and an elevator. Recurring costs of between five hundred thousand and one million USD per month covers various access to utilities (including undersea fiber connectivity), security, maintenance, janitorial services, transportation, and twenty-four-hour, on-demand meal delivery from a wide variety of culinary enterprises.

Why Qatar? Because oil is over. Because you should have diversified yesterday. Because consider your assets: plenty of coastline, contractors who know how to build stable offshore platforms (but who, in the age of energy diversification, have unexpectedly found themselves with an abundance of time on their hands), unlimited solar power (have you even been to the Middle East? It’s like fucking Tatooine in August), and the fact that Qatar is rated by the World Risk Index as the safest nation on the planet as measured by exposure to natural disasters.

The question is: why not Qatar? Why shouldn’t you become the Estonia of the Arabian Peninsula? Eff Oman and Saudi Arabia. To hell with Jordan and Iran. Let those sad sacks eat sand while you chart a new economic future by becoming the universal leader in startup incubation.

The Grid is on, bitches!

Who’s in?

18

  SIX MINUTES

KNOW WHAT’S WORSE than flying coach? Quinn does. It’s called flying cargo. As in being strapped into a jump seat amid stacks of netted and tethered pallets cinched to a roller-studded floor. But if your employer is on the list of most-favored three-letter agencies, there are irrefutable advantages—principally that it’s exceedingly easy on the budget. As in free. Plenty of resources go into keeping paying airline customers safe, but nobody wants to spend more than they have to protecting cargo, so airline executives calculate that if they make space freely available to employees of all the top anti-terrorist organizations on the planet, slightly more attention may get paid to plots bent on blowing up our next-day Amazon Prime orders.

The arrangement works just fine for Quinn since, as of right now, she has no idea where she is going. The last geographical certainty she experienced was when Tariq had the concierge set her up with a car that took her directly to the nearest KFC, where she attempted a gastrointestinal reset with a full Ramadan meal. With no plan any more concrete than her determination to “stop following bodies and start following the money,” she proceeded to the cargo hangar of Sohar Airport, where she flashed her credentials, watched as her baggage underwent perfunctory inspection, and was shown to a second-story combination kitchenette/break room with harsh white lighting, pedestal seating, and a plasma glass flight board mounted at a 45-degree angle between the ceiling and the back wall.

Even though Quinn knows she should be looking for patterns in global financial transactions, she is distracted by something printed on the archaic thermal-paper boarding pass that was handed to her downstairs. All airports have an ICAO code issued by the International Civil Aviation Organization and used by air traffic control for flight planning. The designation for Sohar Airport is OOSH, which Quinn does not read as a code or an acronym, but as a single word—oosh—that she has not heard or thought about in a very long time.

Molly’s first words were not the traditional “mama” or “dada,” but rather “baba” for balloon and, shortly thereafter, “oosh” for shoes. She loved shoes—taking them off and putting them back on over and over again—which Quinn had always attributed to the fact that her husband stopped at the mall on his way home from work one evening when Quinn was still pregnant to get himself a new pair of running shoes and came home with a pair of baby Nikes with little pink swooshes. For some reason, that tiny pair of sneakers was far more meaningful to Quinn than all of the flowers he got her from the grocery store when he ran out to pick her up some Entenmann’s frosted doughnuts, or the sometimes-sentimental-sometimes-sarcastic cards, or the bucket of Twizzlers he brought home from Costco because she was always craving them. Those shoes meant that he wasn’t just thinking about her when they weren’t together, but that he was thinking about the life growing inside of her, and that he couldn’t wait to meet Molly, and to fall in love with her, and to sleep on the couch with her on his chest listening to his heartbeat. He would be there to change her diapers and feed her in the middle of the night, and to teach her to tie her shoes, and to put Band-Aids on her knees when she fell, and to show her how to ride a bike, and catch a fish, and swing a bat. He would relearn geometry so he could help her with her homework, and help teach her how to drive, and meet her boyfriends, and intimidate them just a little. When she cried over her first breakup, he would hug her and tell her that it was his loss, and that she was the most special person he had ever known in his entire life, and he would mean every word of it. The first