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

turned placid black puddle. No motorbike headlight skittering along glazed pavement, and not a single concentric ripple along the surface of the Seine. Yet James had made it a point to comment on how shitty the weather was. And she clearly recalls drops on his Burberry trench coat. Big ones. Finally, Doppler radar archives confirm it. The weather in the footage she was sent is more consistent with the previous day than the day of the attack.

But that’s all there is to go on. Case notes claim that the blast itself, along with the massive resulting electromagnetic pulse, destroyed the rest of the surveillance footage. When she sees Hammerstein at the coffeepot and asks him about off-site backups, he shrugs, turns, and is reabsorbed into the sleepless and detached chaos. Van isn’t returning messages, which means she’s probably already been deployed, and the only response she’s gotten from Henrietta is a promise to talk soon. All the intelligence Quinn has is roughly one cumulative hour of glitchy and grainy incineration not much better than what the rest of the world is watching: building façades twisted by searing white heat into grotesque steel claws.

So Quinn decides to find her own footage. Satellite imagery from NASA and the European Space Agency is locked down, but a key characteristic of any good intelligence officer is the ability to find creative ways around obstacles—even those erected by your own agency. Several times a day, trojans installed by Russian and Chinese assets phone their CIA homes wondering if anyone would care to crack open a back door and have unfettered access to the intelligence networks of our nation’s greatest adversaries. Yes, please. All you have to do is place an encrypted text file with an IP address at a designated endpoint, set up a secure tunnel, and then wait for the ping. It’s a sort of post–Soviet Bloc, digital-era dead drop.

As Quinn suspects, both nations have been actively photographing Ground Zero from space at every orbital opportunity. She downloads several terabytes of high-resolution photos—enough that her activity will probably trigger countermeasures, burning back doors and possibly even sources. But fuck it. Not her fault it’s easier to get answers from her enemies than from her own people.

She takes the stairs down one level and slips into the teletherapy room so nobody will walk by her cube and ask what she’s doing. The furniture looks significantly older than it did the last time she was in here. Fortunately, it is cheap and light enough to be easily moved into the corner.

The topographical imagery she begins pinning to the walls verifies that something definitely happened—something big—but it wasn’t a nuclear blast. Everything is much too clean. Too precise. Almost pristine. At first, Quinn doesn’t believe that what she is looking at is even three-dimensional. She has studied all kinds of craters left by all kinds of explosives, and she knows their anatomy intimately. Apparent boundary, true boundary, rupture zone, plastic zone. Ejecta and fallback. Displacement of ground surface.

But she has never seen anything like this before. Never one so perfectly round. It is like one of those circular crops you see from the air, watered and fertilized through center-pivot irrigation. Like it was inscribed by a geometric compass the size of a tower crane. But the shadows clearly give it depth. After correcting for perspective, she drags out a circular ruler and finds that she can eclipse it perfectly at 512 meters in diameter. It also seems to have an unusual texture. Water has accumulated at its lowest point, but even from space, Quinn can see that it is almost white, and that it sparkles like otherworldly ice.

Ultimately, Quinn does not care all that much about how it was done. She is much more interested in the who than the what. While she continues waiting for clearance to leave, she switches gears and goes back upstairs. Starts learning everything she can about the most technologically advanced maximum-security detention facility on the planet. Gets requests approved and documents digitally signed by superiors who have not slept in days; who themselves are besieged by superiors with impossible expectations; who recognize her name from the whole Elite Assassin thing and therefore trust that whatever she is asking for must be critical.

After Quinn wraps up her investigation at Ground Zero, rather than returning to Washington, she will disappear. Her last verified location will be The Hague, where she will take prearranged temporary custody of a prisoner who, according to the paperwork she is preparing, the CIA believes can help with the events in Paris. Which is true, in a way—though the type of help she needs isn’t the type you want documented. Appeasing the future by eliminating the innocent for things they may do seems foolish to Quinn when there are so many among us who continue to go unpunished for what they have already done.

35

  THE STATIC

HENRIETTA HAS NEVER had a contact before. She’s had colleagues and peers. Superiors and subordinates. Teachers, students, and advisors. She even had an intern once who referred to himself as her apprentice, as though she were the Sith Lord of Theoretical Physics. But Jean-Baptiste Allard is Henrietta’s very first contact.

Allard apparently holds a position of tremendous influence at the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, or DGSI—a sort of French CIA/FBI mashup in charge of defending the homeland against foreign and domestic threats. Moretti instructed Henrietta to contact Allard if there was anything she needed while she was in Paris. So contact Allard, Henrietta has.

He is set up in a trailer about a block from Ground Zero. Henrietta used Semaphore to find him, then, after she name-dropped Alessandro Moretti, Allard shared his location. All foreign agents are supposed to be chaperoned everywhere they go inside the tightly controlled zone de silence, but nobody stopped her as she followed the animated arrows and way-finding dots virtually rendered by her metaspecs.

She can see that the door of the VW Jetstream trailer