EMPIRE: Resurgence

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Why not, Stan? What’s going on?” asked Lina Schneider, the head of the Investigations Office.

  “Most of these people communicate a lot, with a lot of other people. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack. We need to throttle it down, or process it, or something.”

  Schneider looked at the data coming in. It was just the headers – who was talking to whom, which is what they had the Imperial Warrant for – but it was scrolling too fast to read.

  “OK. I see it. Let me talk to Olivia.”

  “So that’s it, folks,” Olivia Darden, the head of the Zoo, summarized to the assembled Zoo animals in the virtual lecture hall of channel 591. “They’re getting data, but they’re drinking from a fire hose, and we need to fix that. Have at it.”

  Matthew Houseman and his group dropped out of channel 591 directly to their table in channel 700.

  “All right,” Houseman said. “Where do we start?”

  “I think the first thing is obvious,” Denise Coutard said. “They’re looking at the raw feed. One line per message. If people are sending messages back and forth in a conversation, that’s going to add up. So we need to process the feed. One line per correspondent, say, with a count of messages sent.”

  “That’s a good one,” Rick Pender said. “Then sort those by count.”

  “We can do a ‘where is he’ on every correspondent,” Lucia Martelli said. “See if there’s a birth record. If there is a birth record, then he’s not one of our people in hiding. Mark that in the list.”

  “There’s one more thing we have,’ Lois Costas said. “If we’re looking for the missing babies, we know their ages. If the ‘where is he’ returns an age, we can eliminate anyone who’s not within maybe three years of the correct age for one of that family’s missing babies.”

  “Why three years, Lois?” Pender asked.

  “Because no one is going to sign up for VR outside of the one-to-seven-year-old age group. They need to start school at some point, and they can’t get onto VR very young.”

  “OK. That works for me,” Pender said. “I could go for minus one year to plus three years from the missing baby’s fourth birthday for the VR signup of the alias.”

  Houseman collected the group’s consensus with a look around the table.

  “Let’s proceed with that, then. A sorted listing of the correspondents, with message count, birth status, and age test, using the minus one, plus three criterion. Also, a flag on the unlinked aliases and their correspondents, I think. So they can be separated out. Who’s going to write the code?”

  “I got it,” Tom Mayall said. “Easy.”

  “Is this the output from the Zoo’s post-processing software, Stan?” Lina Schneider asked, pointing to the display in the investigation map room.

  “Yes. It sure makes it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s all we have so far. Chaff.”

  “No positive results yet?”

  “Nope. None at all,” Nowak said.

  “Well, that’s sort of what we expected, right? That we would have to monitor them for a while and see if they slipped up, see if someone communicated only at long intervals or something? So it’s not particularly surprising. We’re just going to have to watch for a while.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What’s this group over here?” Schneider asked.

  “Those are the unlinked aliases.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Schneider considered the map.

  “Hmm. I wonder....”

  “What are you thinking?” Nowak asked.

  “I wonder if the families are using non-family middlemen to relay communications with their hidden assets. With those unlinked aliases. We’d miss them in this analysis.”

  “You think maybe they have correspondents in common?”

  “Maybe. They have to have some way to communicate,” Schneider said.

  Schneider thought about it a bit longer.

  “I need to talk to Olivia.”

  “OK,” Houseman said. “The price of success. We have an enhancement request out of Investigations.”

  “Oh, no,” Denise Coutard said.

  “No, it’s not bad. They’re wondering if we can cross-check the correspondents of the family members and the unlinked aliases, and turn up any common correspondents. Both over the data already collected and going forward.”

  “They think they’re using middlemen to relay their communications,” Lois Costa said.

  “Apparently so. If they are, it’s already in the data stream. We just have to surface it. Tom, can you add that to your code?”

  “Sure,” Tom Mayall said. “Again, easy.”

  “You called, Stan?” Lina Schneider asked when she appeared in the investigation map room.

  “Yes. Look what we found,” Stanley Nowak said.

  He waved to a section of the investigation map. Between the unlinked aliases and the family members, there was a new list of names. It was short, but the map showed links from those names in both directions, into the families and into the unlinked aliases.

  “Jackpot,” Nowak said.

  “Is this the output of the update I asked Olivia for?”

  “Yes. They turned it around within hours. And there are common, non-family correspondents. So you were right. They are using middlemen to relay communications, and we can see them now.”

  “Excellent,” Schneider said. “Start surveillance on the middlemen.”

  “Does the Imperial Warrant cover that?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s about all it covers, though. If we find other correspondents of these middlemen who are of interest, I’ll have to go back to the Emperor to expand the warrant. I can’t go two jumps.”

  “Got it,” Nowak said. “I’ll let the NOC know.”

  “Investigations just gave me additional names for the surveillance list,” said Kana Miura, the head of the Imperial Network Operations Center.

  “Are they still within the bounds of the Imperial Warrant?” asked her assistant, Marybeth Harris.

  “Yes, if just barely. But definitely within the scope. So let’s get these added.”

  Miura pushed Harris the short list of names, and Harris added them to the surveillance list.

  “I wonder if they’re getting any good intel,” Harris said.

  “I would assume so, given the request for additions, but I don’t know,” Miura said. “I don’t even know what intel they’re looking for.”

  “OK. Well, they’re in there now.”

  It was a couple of days later before Lina Schneider was able to get back to the investigation map room to check on progress.

  “Ah,” Stanley Nowak said when he saw her. “Good. You need to see this.”

  Nowak walked over to the map and highlighted a new list of names, between the previous middlemen and the unlinked aliases. They were linked to the left to various of the previous middlemen, and to the right to some of the unlinked aliases.

  “Two stages of middlemen?” Schneider asked.

  “Yes. But some first stage middlemen were also being used as the first stage of two-stage middlemen. Sloppy. What I wonder about is how many two-stage middlemen we have who aren’t hooked up that way. We can’t see them with this method.”

  “What would we have to do?”

  “Put surveillance on everyone these remaining unlinked aliases communicate with, then do the common connection search of them against the families,” Nowak said.

  “All right, I see that. Get me the list of names. Better would be a list of the remaining unlinked aliases and a description of the people we want to run surveillance on, in terms of their relationship to the unlinked aliases, in case new ones turn up.”

  “I anticipated you.”

  Nowak pushed her the description.

  “Excellent.”

  “Investigations just gave me another round of additional names for the surveillance list,” said Kana Miura.

  “Are they still within
the bounds of the Imperial Warrant?” asked her assistant, Marybeth Harris.

  “No. They sent me a new Imperial Warrant as well. They’re within the scope of the new one, though.”

  Miura pushed Harris the list of names, as well as the Imperial Warrant, and Harris added the names to the surveillance list.

  As Harris entered the names and set up the surveillance, she spoke over her shoulder to Miura.

  “Boy, somebody’s really got it in for somebody. I wonder what’s going on.”

  “I was told not to ask. Actually, I was told to not even think about asking.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we’ll read about it in the newsfeeds when it’s all over.”

  “That would be something, huh?”

  Over the following months, the surveillance continued. The software continued to track who communicated with whom, adding names and links to the investigation map as required.

  But the families who used a double-middleman isolated communications path were careful, and the double-middleman columns remained empty.

  So far.

  Waiting And Watching

  Little Stevie had been nursed and burped and taken off to his nap by a staff member. The two-month-old had been out of the NICU a month, and had put on weight satisfactorily. That also meant the hard first eight weeks of three hours between feedings was over. He was tanked up for hours now.

  Burke had not told her parents about the communicating door between the first and second family apartments that she and Ardmore had used to good effect in the last years of the reign of Augustus VI. Gregory Posten had found it in his VR controls for the room. Burke wasn’t sure whether he or the nurse on station in the living room of the first family apartment had been more surprised when the wall at the back of the alcove slid open.

  The new grandparents thought it was wonderful, however, and used it often to go and coo over Stevie when he was in the incubator in the bedroom of the first family apartment. Now, with him out of the incubator, the doting grandparents spent even more time over there, holding the baby or singing him to sleep.

  The feeding done, Burke swam several hard laps in the pool. She had missed it for the six weeks after the birth when she was advised to stay out of the water or risk a nasty infection. She was fighting her body back into shape, and needed the pool. She was still short of her full dose of laps, after only two weeks back in the pool, but her numbers were coming up slowly.

  Burke got out of the pool and cuddled up to Ardmore on the double chaise on the pool deck.

  “Brrrr. Hold me, Jimmy.”

  “Ahhh. You’re just in time to cool me off from the sunshine.”

  “Mmm. You’re so warm.”

  They lay like that for several minutes, then Burke stirred.

  “We have some time alone, Jimmy. So what’s going on with the Zoo and Investigations?”

  “They have the surveillance under way, and they’ve gotten some results. They’ve found some more hidden agents. They also had a brilliant breakthrough – I think it was Lina Schneider – about how to find middlemen. They’ve found a few of those. Even some double middlemen. That’s what they’re looking for in earnest now.”

  “So are you going to arrest them?”

  “Not right away, Gail. If we do – if they know we’re onto their next tier – the ones we haven’t found yet will get away. I expect the ones with the double middlemen to be the most dangerous and the most hidden. We’ll never catch up with them if we warn them.”

  “You run the danger of waiting too long, Jimmy.”

  “Yes, I know. We also have them watching traffic levels. If there’s a sudden flurry of activity, it could signal they’re coming up towards whatever they’re planning. If we arrest them then, we get as many as we can, but we also maybe catch them in the act of whatever they’re planning.”

  Burke considered.

  “We’re just tapping the header right now, aren’t we, Jimmy?”

  “That’s right. We’re just tracking traffic, not tapping into the messages themselves.”

  “You know, those middlemen are acting as go betweens between the families and people operating under an alias. I think for those we should be tapping into the messages themselves. That’s not a privacy issue, as those messages are part of the subterfuge.”

  “I see. I think you’re right, Gail. I’ll change that with respect to the middlemen only. That should give us more information about what they’re up to. I’ll talk to Ms. Schneider, and issue a separate Imperial Warrant for that.”

  “OK, Jimmy. Anyway, it sounds like you’re on top of it. Sorry I haven’t been much help the last couple months. I’m starting back in Monday, I think.”

  “If you can, Gail. This is just another reason why it’s good there are two of us.”

  Burke nodded.

  “You know, Jimmy, you probably ought to have our friends looking up those people they’ve discovered, so they’re ready to move on short notice when it all comes down.”

  “That’s a good point, too. No reason we can’t have them starting to figure out their schedules and habits a bit. Get ready to take action when the time comes.”

  “Good, Jimmy. That would be good.”

  Burke shifted position, cuddled into him even tighter.

  “Jimmy?”

  Ardmore caught the tone of her voice , but he hesitated.

  “Where are your parents?”

  Burke considered her security tracking in VR.

  “Downstairs in their living room. Why so shy? We’re both nude anyway.”

  “That’s different than being caught ‘dans un couplage.’”

  Burke adjusted the Residence controls in VR.

  “OK, I’ve turned off the escalator. How’s that?”

  “Much better.”

  “Good.”

  Sunday brunch with Paul Diener, the Co-Consul, and his wife Claire was one of Their Majesties’ enjoyable diversions on the weekend. Although Burke’s parents were in residence in the Imperial Palace now, they were not invited to the long-standing tradition because, well, it wasn’t part of the tradition.

  As always, serious conversation waited until after the meal, once coffee was served and the staff and the Imperial Guard dismissed.

  “So you seem to be fully up and around now, Gail,” Claire said.

  “Yes,” Burke said. “I’m even getting most of a night’s sleep now. Stevie tanks up, and then he’s happy to go down for five or six hours. I’m planning to start going back to the office tomorrow and see how that goes.”

  “Good,” Diener said. “I’ll be glad to have you back. I don’t like the way this investigation into the DP plutocrats is going. I’d prefer to have all our assets on line.”

  “You don’t like that we’re finding these people, Paul?” Ardmore asked.

  “I don’t like that there are so many to find. Before, we could kid ourselves that these unlinked aliases were other people, working under an alias for their own purposes. Now, though, we know that most of them are likely hostile agents.”

  Ardmore nodded.

  “I understand,” he said. “But we are finding them. And Gail suggested yesterday that we start pulling the message contents on the middlemen, too.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Diener said. “We know these people who the middlemen are talking to aren’t using aliases for innocent purposes. They’re conspiring with the plutocrat families against the Throne. I think you’re on solid ground there, Jimmy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Claire said. “Can’t the Throne monitor whoever they want? The only rules against it are the Throne’s rules, after all.”

  “Yes, but we don’t like to do that, Claire,” Burke said. “To act in the best interests of the people. That’s the oath we took. If we think people’s privacy is important enough to put safeguards in the law, then we should respect it as well.”

  “I see,” Claire said. “But this is an exception?”

  “Yes, because we
know the plutocrat families are conspiring against the Throne, so there’s sufficient cause to think people connecting them to these unlinked aliases are potentially aiding that conspiracy.”

  “And I agree with that completely,” Diener said.

  “Another idea from Gail,” Ardmore said. “We’re going to have assets begin to track these people down so we can move against them if and when we have to.”

  Ardmore didn’t mention the Department, the Throne’s private intelligence service, in front of Claire, but Diener knew who he meant.

  “How to even do that is an interesting question. These are the unlinked aliases, right?” Diener asked.

  “Yes, but they’re operating under their alias, so a database search will tell you where they live and work and the like. They’re unlinked only in the sense of being not linked to a family.”

  “Unless they’re multiple-alias people, like the other ones we caught,” Burke said. “They might have one alias to the family middleman and another they operate under.”

  “Urp. That’s true,” Ardmore said.

  “We need the location data, Jimmy,” Diener said. “So our people can track them down.”

  “OK. I’ll add that to the Imperial Warrant.”

  “I don’t think you need to, Jimmy,” Burke said. “Paul, isn’t location and path in the header data?”

  “The extended header, yes,” Diener said. “You need to make sure we’re getting the entire header, Jimmy.”

  “OK, I’ll check with Ms. Schneider.”

  “I still have a hard time believing anyone would want to bring down the Empire,” Claire said. “These are tremendous times, for everybody. Don’t they know any history? All the wars, and famine, and disease?”

  “They don’t care, Claire,” Diener said. “It’s all about winning. Winning, and money, and power.”

  “Mostly power, I think,” Burke said.

  “But don’t they understand? If they lose, they lose big, and if they win, they still lose,” Claire said. “Once they break it, they’ll be ruling over the debris.”