Campbell- The Problem With Bliss

by Richard F. Weyand

  Campbell went back to his office.

  “How did your interview go, Sir?” Acheson asked.

  “Oh, it went well. Another dry hole, but that’s what I expected. I’d be surprised to find anything unusual in any of these interviews, actually. But one has to do the work, check the boxes, to be sure.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Campbell sat in his office and pretended to work spreadsheets as he thought back over the interview. Laterza’s chain of coincidence wasn’t as thin as he made it sound. How did you arrange for the substitute to go to the party? Simple. Have someone inside the counter-intelligence group check Laterza’s calendar to find out when to schedule the consulate party. How do you get the substitute guy to over-drink? Simple again. Spike his drinks.

  How do you get him to just happen to go out for a walk? Why, you could suggest to him he doesn’t look well, maybe he should get some air. If he doesn’t do that, you could offer him a ride home. They found his body down the street and around the corner, but nothing says he got there on his own. The initial contact could have been almost anywhere. They just dropped him at the other end of the block from the consulate so the ‘walking around the block for some air’ story held together. Hell, they could have bagged him in the restroom and dragged him out the back door of the consulate.

  No, it was a setup and murder.

  Campbell still needed to figure out who the consulate contact was. That evening he checked the intelligence files on the Duval consulate staff. Apparently these were being kept updated, likely so they didn’t look different from other consulate intelligence files.

  You have the consul and his wife. The deputy head of mission. The consul’s social secretary. The trade development office staff. The passport/visa/migration office staff. The political, economic, and cultural affairs staff. The household staff – those were mostly Bliss natives, except for the butler and the head of the household staff.

  No naval attaché. Hmm. He was more used to embassy staff on Jablonka. There was always a naval attaché, and maybe an assistant or two, in an embassy. But that was on Jablonka.

  Campbell started with political, economic and cultural affairs. Communication Officer. Could be. Security Coordinator. Definitely could be. What were their profiles like? The Communications Officer was professional staff, had prior postings, either in the Commonwealth or that intelligence knew about from embassy and consulate parties on other planets. The Security Coordinator was a different story. Intelligence Division had no prior postings information on him at all.

  He went back through all the non-local staff at the consulate. Every one of them had a back story, a history of embassy and consular assignments, that intelligence knew about. But not the Security Coordinator. What stood out about him was not what they knew about him, but what they didn’t know. No priors on him at all. Which meant John Schmitt was most likely an alias.

  Ha! John Smith. OK, so he had a sense of humor.

  Campbell had some photos of the man, and ran them through facial recognition on the Intelligence Division’s files on known Duval foreign service staffers. He got three solid hits, at the 95% level of confidence. Three different names. Three different assignments. Three different planets. That was curious. He dug deeper. They were non-overlapping assignments, so it could all be the same guy.

  When did he get to Bliss? Almost four years ago. Well, that fit all the timing parameters Campbell had turned up. Figure a year or more to start turning people, to compromise them enough they were stuck. He could threaten to turn them in, then simply leave the planet on his diplomatic immunity.

  Except operating on Bliss under an alias meant he had no diplomatic immunity. He was a spy, and he had conspired in the murder of two CSF officers.

  And he wasn’t going to get away.

  Campbell came into the office late Thursday morning, per the pattern he had established. He had spent all morning at the gym. He was getting his edge back, which he had lost in the reduced sparring time on ship and the reduced variety of sparring partners. Every sparring partner had different moves, different style, different tricks. The best way to hone your edge was to keep changing it up.

  “Good morning, Sir,” Acheson said as he came into the office.

  “Good morning, Commander.”

  “Two interviews this afternoon, Sir, one in Fleet Maintenance and one in Housekeeping.”

  “Excellent, Commander.”

  Acheson drove him over to the Fleet Maintenance Center, which was on the other side of the large shuttle landing field. They had their own portion of the field, because they had so many flight ops to and from ships in orbit, and they maintained their own shuttle fleet. They also performed major repairs at an orbital space dock.

  Five members of the facility staff had been killed in a car accident. A group of twelve spacers on liberty had gone up into the mountains south of Joy for a long weekend at a resort. They had rented three cabins, and borrowed a van from base. On the morning of their return, rather than wait for the inevitable morning storm to be over, they had driven back down out of the mountains. That morning storm could bring some pretty heavy rain, especially in the mountains. In one particular downburst, the driver had lost sight of the road and missed a curve. The van went off the road and tumbled down the steep slope. Five of the twelve had been killed when they were thrown from the van as it tumbled. The driver was belted in, and had been one of the seven survivors. Unhurt, in fact. The other six had been ejected behind the rolling van, and not crushed by it, or had managed to remain inside it as it rolled.

  The entire department had been shocked by the deaths. With all the dangerous environments and hazardous tasks they dealt with every day, to lose five of their own to something like a car accident seemed, well, unfair. The worst sort of irony. Campbell didn’t even ask his last question, about whether this might not have been an accident. Feelings were still too raw about the recent accident, and it was clear it had not been a setup.

  The second interview Thursday was in Housekeeping. Commander Vilis Schenk had been promoted from Lieutenant Commander and succeeded Commander Jukai Clark. Clark and Schenk had been inspecting the scaffolding for a recaulk and repaint of the exterior of a building when the scaffolding had collapsed and killed Clark. Schenk himself had been injured.

  Campbell asked his last question in a dry, matter-of-fact tone.

  “Was any thought given to whether this might not have been an accident, but had been a purposeful action by someone?”

  “I don’t see who could plan such a thing, Captain. The scaffolding wasn’t properly anchored to the building yet. The crew had just gotten it up and broke for lunch. The ultimate mechanism of the collapse was that the legs away from and slightly down slope from the building sank into soil that was softer than expected, and that precipitated the collapse. There was no notice that Jukai and I were going to stop by during lunch to check on progress.”

  “Ah. I see. And the crew was on lunch break?”

  “Yes. They were out on the lawn at the front of the building. No one else was anywhere near the scaffolding, which was along the back wall.”

  “Very good. Thank you, Commander.”

  Back in the office, Campbell thought back over the situation with the scaffolding collapse. The crew was all around the front of the building. The back side offices in the building had been emptied for the week to make sure there were no injuries inside the building during repairs. Some tool dropped, which then bounced off the scaffolding and through a window, for example. So there had been no witnesses.

  Schenk was a big man, with powerful arms. Clark and Schenk were probably never up on the scaffolding at all. Safety rules would have prohibited it anyway, since it was not yet anchored. One heavy blow to the back of Clark’s head with a scaffolding pipe or wrench, then Schenk could just shove the scaffolding over on top of the body. He would then lay out on the ground past the collapse and call for help on his comm. Lucky break he had been thrown clear of the collapsing str
ucture. The sprained ankle was his only injury.

  With no witnesses, it was not something that could ever be proved up in court, so Schenk would never be tried for the murder. But espionage was a capital crime under the military code of justice, so Schenk would not escape the firing squad. The ‘accident’ that killed Commander Jukai Clark had been over two years ago, so it would be justice delayed, but justice would come to Commander Vilis Schenk.

  Thursday evening Campbell was back in the Planetary Operations Headquarters. He added the consulate staff to the dataset, and tagged the Security Coordinator. He also pulled in what data the Intelligence Division had on the Security Coordinator’s other assignments, under other names. He made sure he had all the other marks and highlights in his view: the mail traffic links, the reporting links, the names of the people scanning the compromised locations, the people with sudden financial upturns, the people with Duval origins or connections. All of it.

  Campbell loaded another piece of software from a memory chip. This one, called the Correlation Engine, was relatively new and untried, but he had found it useful. He set the software running in background mode, because it was a resource hog and would tie up the whole machine if he let it. In background mode, it would run at a lower priority than any other user requests.

  With that done, he walked back to the townhouse and turned in for the night.

  Campbell spent Friday morning at the gym. He now had people asking to spar with him. You learned more from sparring with someone new, as long as he was at or near your own level of ability, than you did sparring with a regular partner. So as a new guy at the two-knot black-belt level or so, he had all the black belts on base hoping for some time with him on the mat.

  He got to the office late in the morning, his usual time.

  “Good morning, Sir.”

  “Good morning, Commander. What have you got for me today?”

  “The last of the interviews, Sir. With the deputy chief of police for Joy. He’s the head of their Homicide Division. We’ll need to leave here at 13:00.”

  “Excellent, Commander. Sounds like I should grab some lunch first.”

  Campbell looked around with interest as Acheson drove him into Joy. It took them quite a while just to get off the base. Bliss Fleet Headquarters had over two hundred thousand CSF permanently on base, and another two hundred and fifty thousand dependents. He had been spending all his time in the center of the base concentrated around the Planetary Operations and Intelligence Headquarters buildings and their various satellites, like Flag Row and the central Officers Mess.

  That said, Joy was the planetary capital of a Commonwealth planet first settled two hundred and seventy-five years ago. Its population of twenty-some million was dwarfed by the cities of Earth, but it was a major city by colony standards.

  The downtown was off-center in the urban sprawl, closer to the fleet base – the city had grown up against the sprawling CSF property, then continued to spread in other directions – so they didn’t have to drive far into downtown. Acheson was waved to a parking spot that had been reserved for them in the police headquarters parking garage. Acheson accompanied Campbell into the building, but Campbell left him in the outer office when he went in to meet with Demyan Tsukuda, the deputy chief of police.

  “Thank you for meeting with me, Chief Tsukuda,” Campbell said.

  “No problem, Captain. What can I do for you?

  “I had some questions about the murder of one of our spacers.”

  “Yes, your aide mentioned that. Michael Chey. Is that right?” Tsukuda asked.

  “Yes. I’m looking into various deaths of CSF personnel on Bliss over the last several years. Some seem more preventable than others, and that’s my focus. I’m something of a loss prevention guy.”

  “Not drinking so much would be one way to prevent problems. Mr. Chey had a blood alcohol level approaching point-three percent.”

  “Wow. That’s high,” Campbell said. “The police report said he was out bar-hopping. That’s not quite so, though, am I right?”

  “Well, that’s what the report says, as you say. But he actually attended a consulate party. We don’t like to drag the diplomatic corps into things like that, though. We’re concerned about appearances and interstellar implications. So, once the investigation was done, we attributed it to a mugging gone wrong to keep the consulate out of it.”

  “Ah. I see. Which consulate?”

  “Duval,” Tsukuda said.

  “And the bar-hopping part of it?”

  “We were told Mr. Chey had a drinking problem. That he had been a problem at consulate parties before. So saying in the report that he was bar-hopping seemed reasonable, rather than bringing the consulate into it.”

  “And who told you he had been a problem at consulate parties before?” Campbell asked.

  “The consulate security coordinator. John Schmitt.”

  “OK. Well, that’s all my questions, Chief Tsukuda. I appreciate your time.”

  “No problem, Captain. Glad I could help.”

  “Commander, is the Duval consulate near hear?” Campbell asked once they were back in the car.

  “Yes, Sir. Do you want to go to the consulate?”

  “No, I want to go to the other side of the block. To where Chey’s body was found.”

  “Yes, Sir. Is there something you’re expecting to see?” Acheson asked.

  “The chief said Commander Chey had a blood alcohol level approaching zero-point-three percent. I’m not sure he could have walked very far being that drunk. I want to see.”

  The diplomatic consulates were in a non-high-rise portion of the city close to a large city park. It was a pretty area. The Duval consulate itself faced the park across the street. Acheson pointed it out as they drove past it, then took a right and another right to go around the block.

  “I believe it was right here, Sir. In the middle of the block.”

  “Right next to that alley?” Campbell asked.

  “Yes, Sir. Maybe they jumped him from the alley.”

  “Could be. OK, Commander, continue around the block.”

  Acheson made another right, then another. They were back out in front of the Duval consulate, on their right, with the park on their left.

  “Not very far,” Campbell said.

  “No, Sir.”

  “Yeah, he could probably have walked that, even that drunk. All right, Commander. Let’s head back to the base.”

  Campbell brooded on the way back to Bliss Fleet HQ. No way someone that hammered, who wasn’t a big drinker, could have made that walk. But the second time past the front of the Duval consulate, he noted the alley went all the way through the block, right along the consulate garden wall. There was likely a door in that wall, toward the back corner, for taking out the garbage cans or accessing the garage or whatever.

  No, they spiked his drinks, bagged him in the consulate, beat him to death in the back corner of the consulate grounds or in the alley, and then dragged his body out the other end of the alley and dumped it on the sidewalk.

  They killed him like a mad dog. To get Veronica Kinley promoted.

  Someone was going to pay for that.

  “That’s all the interviews, Sir,” Acheson said from the driver’s seat.

  “Excuse me?” asked Campbell, stirred from his thoughts.

  “I said, that’s all the interviews, Sir. Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Oh. Well, I verified there was nothing there. I suppose that’s good, right? We know now that these were all accidents or mischance, that there wasn’t foul play involved. That was my goal, to know for sure, so I accomplished it. But it’s nothing exciting. Just staff work. Checking all the boxes.”

  When they got back to the Planetary Intelligence Headquarters, it was almost 17:00. Acheson would have dropped him somewhere, but Campbell wanted to stop in at the office and pick up some things. Mostly, he wanted to dump Acheson.

  He walked over to the Planetary Operations Headquarters and c
hecked on the status of the correlation engine. It was over half completed. It would probably complete overnight.

  He sent a note to Jan from the secure terminal.

  FROM: 2C68B1AB7218890C0483C993C600FDF4

  TO: CHILDERS

  SUBJECT: ARRIVAL?

  JC:

  When do you arrive Bliss Fleet HQ?

  WC

  Campbell was sitting there contemplating the week’s events when the message chime surprised him within twenty minutes.

  FROM: CHILDERS

  TO: 2C68B1AB7218890C0483C993C600FDF4

  SUBJECT: ARRIVAL?

  En route. Arrive orbit approx 60 hours. Admiral goes ashore.

  That’s right. As captain, she had lots to do before she went ashore, but as admiral, she would come ashore to report in right away. So that would be what? Orbit about 07:00 Monday, then the shuttle ride down? Call it 08:30. Reporting in here to Admiral Rao first.

  Hmm.

  Correlation

  On Saturday, Campbell went into the gym after a light breakfast, and either sparred or worked out with weights all morning. He was doing light weights and multiple reps to get the blood flowing, which actually helped his sparring.

  After a bigger lunch, Campbell went in to the Planetary Operations Headquarters. The correlation engine had completed over night. He checked the lock on the door, and then went into full-immersive VR.

  The visualization of the correlation output was the same as that of the dataset. What the correlation engine did was suppress the uncorrelated elements and rearrange the correlated ones. It also drew in new correlations from the Intelligence Division database. Not just the upper levels of that database, but the highly restricted eyes only data, accessible to his NOT LIMITED security clearance. Even more, the data he had brought along on the Grand Tour, which was only loaded onto the system when you were using it, and only into your own secure account.