EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

by Stephanie Osborn

  “It is,” Peabody said. “I told you I liked the sound of this new department, and gave you my word I’d work for you, and I intend to keep it, even though this could have ‘benefited’ me, in the old-department sense.”

  “Oh shit. Okay, Lee oughta be in here in a few minutes.”

  “All right. I’m debating about asking you both to bring your wives in here, too. I expect ICPD needs to be involved; they’re next on the list, as it were, anyhow.”

  “Uh-oh. Lemme get Cal in here, then. We’ll tell Lee to bring in Maia as soon as he gets here.”

  Ashton’s wife, ICPD Detective Callista Ames, appeared in the room seconds later, as Peabody ‘manufactured’ five chairs and positioned them in a loose talking circle. Moments later, IPD Director Lee Carter appeared, and Ashton pinged him to bring in his wife, Colonel Maia Peterson, ICPD’s chief of Investigations.

  “Okay, we’re all here,” Carter said, once Peterson had arrived in the VR room. “What’s up, Nick?”

  “That’s for Mr. Peabody, here, to tell us,” Ashton said, “but he says it’s important, it’s bad, and we needed ICPD involved as well.”

  Carter looked Peabody up and down, then turned back to Ashton.

  “And you trust him?”

  “Yes, I do,” Ashton said, frank. “He and I had a long discussion, with some heart-to-heart chatting, a while back, and I think he’s here to report to us something that we don’t want.”

  “No joke,” Peabody said, shaking his head in disgust. “I really liked the image of the new IPD you drew for me, Detective Ashton, and...” He shook his head again. “To make quick work of it, there’s a movement afoot from what they’re calling the ‘oldies’ in the IPD to assassinate you four, and bring me, or one of the other higher-ranking ‘oldies,’ into the director slot and simply resurrect the old IPD. Then they figure to find a way to wipe out the ICPD. If that happens, they’ll probably try to go after this Emperor, and get rid of him, too, then install somebody on the Throne who’ll work with them.” Peabody turned to look Ashton squarely in the eyes. “I. Don’t. Want. It.”

  “Shit,” Ames murmured. “All four of us? Plus the ICPD?”

  “Of course,” Peterson said, “because we’re helping our husbands with their efforts in reconstructing Headquarters by providing, not only our own services as investigators, but that of our division. Especially through me.”

  “Exactly,” Peabody averred. “Detective Ashton, sir, you told me to come to you and report in, especially if I saw crooked cops in the department. I was up the whole night last night, trying to figure out what to do. Then I remembered what you said, and how we talked about Emily. You told me I had to choose. I chose. I’m here. “

  “Who are the heads of the conspiracy?” Carter asked, his face still evincing skepticism.

  “Captain Ted Bradly and Lieutenant Bill Carr,” Peabody declared. “They were being helped by about half a dozen others, uh, lessee...” He thought, then counted off on his fingers. “George Holland, Dave Seeger, Hunter Williams, Noah Warner, Matt Lowe, aaaand...who was it, who was it...sittin’ over in the corner...oh! Theo Wang. And Williams had managed to find a couple of Gorecki’s old ‘enforcers,’ name of Pete Brandt and Joe Hennig, who were out of town when the Emperor’s wrath came down.”

  “Damn,” Ames murmured in dismay. “So we didn’t get ‘em all.”

  “Apparently not, but it’s no surprise, really,” Ashton agreed. “Lee, how does that ring against what you know?”

  “It rings reasonably well, I think. They’re all previous staff of the old Headquarters regime. I specifically remember Hunter Williams; he came into the beat cops division about the same time you did, Nick,” Carter noted. “I wondered, at the time, if we were gonna have trouble with him. I hoped he’d kept his ass clean, because apparently he got away with telling the Marines that he was one of the ‘straight shooters,’ as you like to put it. But it sounds like that was all a lie. Probably for the lot of ‘em.”

  “Oh hell yes,” Peabody agreed, vehement. “He was one of the guys that they used to send over to a place called the Fire Water Bar whenever they needed to hire a hit man. Well, there were a couple of hit women, maybe half a dozen or so, but the biggest lot of ‘em were male. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, and I think some of us have some familiarity with that location,” Peterson said, voice dry, as she shot wry glances at Ashton and Ames.

  “No shit,” Ames muttered, and Peabody raised a surprised eyebrow. “That place oughta be shut down, at least.”

  “It is,” Peabody noted. “We had to meet last night at an alternate location called the Cool Breeze Pub.”

  “Why did you go?” Carter demanded to know.

  “Call it investigator’s instinct,” Peabody said, pulling a face. “Carr came around and invited me, since I’m one of the – since I used to be one of the ranking ‘oldies,’ as they’re putting it. I had a feeling something was up, and that I needed to find out what. I took Detective Ashton’s little talk the other day very seriously, sir – he more than earned my respect in the doing, let me add – and I understand what the difference is, now, between his management style and my own. And I can honestly admit to you, his is better – and with all due respect, sir, you need to hang onto him, as hard as you can. And let me add that he’s good where he is, heading up Investigations. But I thought maybe I ought to find out what was going down so I could report it to him. It was only when I realized the magnitude of what was happening that I thought the rest of you needed to be in on this.”

  Carter studied him for a long moment. Then he looked at Ashton, querying. Ashton nodded, calm, and Carter nodded in turn.

  “All right, Peabody,” he said. “Let’s all sit down here so you can debrief to us in detail on what happened, and what they’re planning.”

  Once they all had a good understanding of what Peabody had witnessed, they began a preliminary plan. When that was complete, Carter gave Peabody explicit instructions.

  “Keep going to those meetings, Peabody. Look like one of them, sound like one of them, as much as you need to, to keep them from cluing in on the fact that you’re our informant. But whatever else you do, keep us four apprised of anything that comes out of them, any intelligence information, anything that can help us not only stay alive, but nail these dirty cops to the wall… along with their henchmen. I’ll outfit you with some special equipment to tap into your VR and record everything, in order to help with that.”

  “Yes, sir, Director Carter. Thank you,” Peabody said. From force of habit, he started to salute, then caught himself and shook his head. “Sorry, sir. Old habits die hard. I don’t think that’s something you’d want.”

  “Well considered, and no, I don’t,” Carter said, then patted Peabody on the shoulder. “And one last thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re more than welcome, sir.”

  He dropped the channel, and they were all at home once more.

  But before Nick could even finish his now-cold breakfast, he got a ping from Carter, and dropped into another VR simulation. This time, it looked like a workshop, rather than a nondescript meeting room.

  “There you are,” Carter said. “Given that intel we just got, there were a couple of things I wanted to show you how to do right away, son. Things we might need.”

  “Such as?”

  “How to hack the Headquarters VR system, so you can pick out mail messages and the like. That way, you can know who’s doing what, when.”

  “Oh. Right now, that sounds like a very good plan, Lee.”

  “I thought so, Nick. And it won’t take long, the things I’m going to show you to do. We’re not going to actually do them until tonight, after we get off shift.”

  “Can we do it from home?”

  “Some of it, yes. But we’ll need to do a couple of things today, at the office, in order to allow for it. That said, just close the door to your office and do it, and nobo
dy’ll be the wiser. Neither you nor I have surveillance on these offices, like we did in the old HQ.” Carter gave a wry chuckle. “In that respect, this’ll be way the hell easier.”

  “Let’s see, then.”

  “Right. Now the first thing you need to know…”

  Skulking

  Just because Carter and Peterson didn’t live in a gated community didn’t mean they didn’t have any security at all. If the truth be told, Carter had been tucking away his salary for years with the idea of buying a place with some land – given his former position in the IPD, he hadn’t had a lot to spend it on anyway – and Maia Peterson had had notions of retiring in the country, as well. When Carter became the revamped IPD director, he’d gotten a salary commensurate with the position, and combined with their joint savings, suddenly they found they could acquire their dream house. The fact that there was a new subdivision opening up on the very edge of the Imperial City’s west-southwestern suburbs, with large homes on considerable acreage, appealed to them. So they purchased one of the larger, more remote parcels, and had had a home custom-built. Modern techniques meant it went up in a matter of weeks, and was good quality, so they’d moved in right away.

  But part of that ‘custom build’ involved a sensored, reinforced fence, a sturdy gate operable in VR, and extensive and active security on the house itself, complete with alerts delivered to their respective departments in virtual reality. Two experienced police officers, used to dealing with a corrupt system, were not foolhardy enough to move so far out of the city proper without having extensive security built into the entire design.

  More, the fact that it was a new subdivision meant that the street layout maps – at least the ones to which Brandt and Hennig had access – didn’t have Carter’s home address anywhere on them.

  So it took the pair of saboteurs a couple of days to even figure out where it was, let alone reach it.

  “And now that we’ve found the damn place,” Hennig grumbled, as he stood on the muddy sidewalk, soiled from all the construction in the vicinity, and stared at the locked gate, “we gotta figure out how to get in there, dammit.”

  “This ain’t gonna be quite as easy as we’d hoped,” Brandt agreed.

  But the pair of infiltrators didn’t take into account the ingenuity of four experienced police investigative types who were eager to bust a group of conspiracists. Carter & Co. expressly wanted these two crooks to find a way into the property. So the night before, and with some help from The Team, they had made a way. A reasonably easy way.

  As the two ‘enforcers’ walked the fenced perimeter, looking for a weakness, Brandt suddenly stopped dead, then ran to a small copse of trees.

  “Joe! Hey, Joe! Come ‘ere!”

  Hennig scurried over.

  “Whatcha got, Pete?”

  “Look here. In this buncha trees. One of ‘em musta fell in the storm the other night.” He pointed.

  “Well, damn, wouldja look at that,” Hennig said with a broad grin. “It took the fence down with it.”

  “C’mon, let’s go,” Brandt said, slipping through the opening created by the fallen tree.

  “Yeah,” Jones told Colonel Peterson. “The security alert came in a couple minutes ago – I guess it pinged you, too, huh? – and I pulled it straight up, soon as I got it. I see ‘em in the security video. They came in through the ‘downed tree’ and are sneaking through the back yard, right now.”

  “Good,” Peterson said with a wicked smirk. “Make sure none of the security systems have alerted at the house, or we could lose ‘em. I want to see everything they do, let ‘em do it, record it, then catch them and all the rest of their confederates red-handed. Lee agrees with me, and is even more vehement, if that’s possible. Let me know as soon as they reach the house.”

  “All over it,” Jones confirmed.

  Hennig and Brandt approached the low, sprawling house from the rear; the wooded lot in the rear of the house allowed for that surprisingly easily… or so it seemed. Looking for security monitoring, and consequently spotting several panning cameras on the rear of the house, they timed their movements to the cameras in order to avoid being in the line of sight of any given camera. Hennig knelt abruptly.

  “Whatcha got, Joe?” Brandt asked, doubling back to his partner’s side.

  “Incoming gas line,” Hennig noted, fingering the pipeline. “Like we figured. That looks promising. Keep moving. We don’t want the cameras to spot us.”

  The cameras the pair of ‘enforcers’ saw were actually dummies that Carter, Ashton, Ames, and Peterson had set up for the purpose a couple of nights before; the real security cameras were well camouflaged in the trimwork of the house and the trees in the back, their feeds run through virtual reality channels to the household security control panel, and Maia Peterson’s people in ICPD. They, in turn, kept Ashton and Carter apprised of all activity. So once Hennig and Brandt reached the back of the house, Jones notified them, and within moments, Jones, Carter, Peterson, Ashton, and Ames were in a ‘room’ floating outside a three-dimensional simulacrum of the house, watching the two crooks explore the outside of the structure.

  “Lee, honey, they’ll come around the corner in another minute or two,” Peterson noted.

  “I know. I’m on it, Maia,” Carter said, splitting his attention between their group VR room and another channel in the lower part of his vision. “I left everything in the garage just so this morning for a reason. I’m raising the garage door now. It’ll look like I left it open this morning, or that the automatic-close function glitched.”

  “This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious,” Ames noted, stifling a snicker, as their view – but not their perps’ view – of the house depicted the garage door opening silently.

  “You’re not gonna let ‘em in the house itself, are you, honey?” Peterson asked then.

  “Not planning on it, no,” Carter replied. “Just the garage. I’m thinking what they’ll see in the garage will do the trick, as far as that’s concerned. I have the door into the house triple-locked, anyway.”

  Just then, they saw Brandt and Hennig round the corner of the house, and stop dead, gaping at the open garage door.

  “Holy shit,” Brandt remarked in surprise. “Today must be our lucky day.”

  “That seems awful damn weird to me,” Hennig said, suspicious. “What the hell is the damn door doing wide open like that? Lemme see something, here. C’mon in here, so’s we don’t accidentally lock ourselves out or something...”

  Brandt followed, curious, as Hennig eased into the garage proper, keeping his eyes peeled for any security traps. Hennig then made straight for the door control panel, where he promptly hit the ‘close door’ switch, covering his finger with his shirtsleeve to avoid latent prints.

  The door descended partway, then vibrated hard and stalled, finally reversing its motion and moving back to a fully open position.

  Hennig tried again. The same thing happened.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “It really is our lucky day. The door’s malfunctioning.”

  In the VR room, Cally Ames giggled.

  “You did that, didn’t you, Lee?” she wondered.

  “Yup,” Carter confirmed, grinning. “Every time he hits the button on the control panel, I counter it in VR, then reverse it.”

  “Nice effect,” Peterson decided. “It really looks like the damn thing is malfunctioning.”

  “Hey, it serves our purpose,” Ashton noted.

  “It sure does!” Ames giggled again.

  “Hey-hey, lookit what I found,” Brandt said, from the far corner of the garage.

  “What is it, Pete?” Hennig wondered, coming to his buddy’s side.

  “We got a gas-heated water reservoir,” Brandt said with a grin, pointing, “an’ a ‘lectric car charger not ten feet from it.”

  “Ooo, I get it,” Hennig said. “Yeah, that’ll work. I got the packages. Did you bring the kit like I said?”

  “Sure did, Joe,” Brandt said, pu
lling out a tiny tool kit from a pocket.

  “Let’s see what we can do, then,” Hennig said. “We can set it up for now, and put some ‘a those tiny remote timers on shit – nobody will ever find the remains of those, after this blows – and we can work out exact times later.”

  “All over it.”

  “…And so what we’ll need to do for that is to let it run as they plan, except we disable things,” Ashton decreed, as they watched and listened to the ‘enforcers’ planning their demise. “Do it just so, and they’ll be able to set the timers in VR without realizing that those timers aren’t hooked to anything live.”

  “What are they planning, Nick?” Ames wondered. “I’m not gettin’ it.”

  “It’s an old trick,” Peterson said, “but a smooth one. Create a gas leak in the hot water heater so that the house fills with enough gas to reach an optimum mix with the air, then have the charger for our electric car ‘malfunction’ so that the charger doesn’t shut off once the battery is charged. The battery overcharges, overloads, pops, and...”

  “There’s a big bada-boom,” Carter said. “Except we’re gonna ensure there isn’t a big boom, ‘cause even if none of us are there, Maia and I kinda like our new house.”

  “It’s a plan,” Ashton said. “I think we have the folks that can do this.”

  “We do,” Peterson averred.

  “Then let’s get rolling,” Carter said.

  Later that day, back at what some of the young cops were calling ‘Temporary New Headquarters,’ Carter came to Ashton’s office, which was within easy earshot of the beat cops’ bullpen. Ashton, seeing him approach, rose from his desk and came to the door to meet him.

  “What’s up, Lee?” he wondered.

  “Aw, new house woes,” Carter grumbled. “You know we’d talked about maybe you and Cally coming to dinner tomorrow night?”