EMPIRE: Investigation

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Some records are made public here, rather than on the system, due to their size and how recent they are.”

  “Ah. Very good. I want access to those records.”

  “Which records in particular, sir?”

  “Arrest records for the past five years, and jail records for the past five years. Particularly the records for those who died while incarcerated. Their arrest records, jail records, and autopsy results.”

  “Let me call someone who can help you.”

  “All right.”

  The clerk disappeared into a back room. A few minutes later, a man in his forties came out to the counter.

  “I’m the records supervisor. You want arrest records, jail records and autopsy results?”

  “For those who died while incarcerated. Correct.”

  “And your position? Why do you need these records?”

  “Private citizen,” Culligan said. “And why I need them is none of your business.”

  “Those are not public records, sir.”

  “They should be. On what basis are they being withheld?”

  “Privacy concerns,” the records manager said.

  “Imperial law is explicit on this point. You must make those records available to the public.”

  “We disagree on the interpretation of Imperial law on this point, sir.”

  “Very well. I’ll take it to an Imperial judge, then. Thank you for your time.”

  Culligan turned and walked out of the office.

  Purny watched the video recording of Culligan’s conversation with the records manager.

  “So are you taking it to an Imperial judge?” Purny asked.

  “Of course. Did you do that research for me?”

  “Yes. But how did you know it would come to this?”

  “It fits the pattern. Break the law, and then hide behind it,” Culligan said.

  “And you’ll submit the recording to the court?”

  “Of course. Nothing against recording a public official in a public building carrying out his duties. The only exemption is in the john. I’m completely good there.”

  “OK,” Purny said. “Well, of the judges on the Imperial bench in Stolits, here are your most likely bets. They’ve all had recent run-ins with the local cop shop, and are vocal on the subject of citizen rights.”

  Purny pushed him the list in VR.

  “Excellent. And your favorite?”

  “Judge Kamakshi Anand. She writes very tight decisions, and is one of the judges most sustained on appeal.”

  “Perfect,” Culligan said. “I wanna put some real fear into these guys. So what are you up to?”

  “I’ve been submitting interview requests to the attorneys for the people who caused these political scandals with some pretty weakly supported accusations against the other party’s politicians.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “A lot of ‘no comment’ and ‘no interview,’” Purny said. “No takers yet.”

  “I don’t think you’ll get any. They’re purpose complete in trashing the other politician, there’s no positive for them in reopening any of these issues.”

  “The other thing I’ve been doing is taking the public statements they made – in some cases, sworn testimony – and subjecting them to some good, old-fashioned cross-checking.”

  “And?” Culligan asked.

  “What you’d expect. They don’t hold up. Dates don’t check out. So-called witnesses don’t corroborate their accounts. They’re full of holes.”

  “None of which came out at the time.”

  “Of course not,” Purny said. “Though a lot of it was available at the time. The local media didn’t follow through on it. They were too busy repeating the allegations.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Go after the local media. Talk to these reporters. Find out if they were getting directives from above.”

  “Do you think any of them will talk to you?” Culligan asked.

  “They might. Getting noticed by GNS is a big deal for a local political reporter. They might hope something comes of it. And I’ll be very polite and understanding about it all. Another reporter, understanding editorial pressure and such. You know.”

  “You’re going to treat the media with kid gloves?”

  “Oh, not their bosses, but the reporters?” Purny asked. “Sure. Who knows. We might need a sympathetic press at some point.”

  “Ah. Good point.”

  Gerry Conner sat in an Adirondack chair on his porch overlooking the lake, but he was logged in to Section Six. He was monitoring Gulliver’s and Turley’s reports closely. In the latest report, Gulliver noted he needed a law firm that practiced Imperial law in the Earth Sector.

  Conner sent a note to one of his contacts, a senior partner in the Earth headquarters of KirkSelden.

  “I don’t think you’re going to like this much,” said Mitch Golden, Timothy Dennler’s assistant director.

  Golden was the contact who had ordered Ralph Jurgens to put Culligan and Purny in the bugged hotel suite.

  “I don’t like it already,” Dennler said. “What is it now?”

  “Howell Culligan went to the Stolits PD and asked for records on people who died while incarcerated. Arrest records, jail records, and autopsies.”

  “They turned him down, I hope.”

  “Oh, yes. He maintained they are public records under Imperial law, but the SPD’s records manager said he was wrong on the law.”

  “That sounds good. So why are you so worked up?”

  “Culligan filed a motion for an Imperial compliance order in Imperial court.”

  “Well, that still might not go anywhere.”

  “KirkSelden is handling the filing. They filed it in Judge Anand’s court. And Culligan has video he secretly took of the encounter. They attached it to the filing.”

  “Shit. This gets worse and worse.”

  The City of Stolits’s rather perfunctory response to the emergency motion was not viewed favorably by the court.

  “This court will not entertain or allow a response to movant’s claims that basically says, ‘We can do whatever we want. Go away.’ Respondent has three business days to file an amended response that substantively addresses the issues brought forward by movant or suffer default judgment against it. A court order to that effect will be filed today.”

  The court case was on Planetary Governor Hugh Knowlton’s mind when he finally got a chance to speak with Provincial Governor Vincent Pearson. They met in person rather than use VR, which both men feared could be traced or recorded.

  “So that’s where it stands right now,” Knowlton said.

  Knowlton ran over the week’s events in his mind. Had it really been only a week since Culligan and Purny had arrived on Dalnimir?

  “Oh, one other thing. I got several calls from law firms saying this Purny woman has been requesting interviews with their clients who had alleged corruption or other improprieties against opposition politicians. They’ve refused interviews, and she’s started talking to the reporters who covered the stories.”

  “Have the reporters been meeting with her?” Pearson asked.

  “Yes, off the record and in private. We have no indication of what was said.”

  “This is all very troubling. Very troubling, indeed.”

  “What should I do about it?” Knowlton asked.

  “That is a difficult question.”

  Pearson stared down at his hands for several seconds, then looked up.

  “You’ve checked their backgrounds carefully? These investigators?”

  “Oh, yes. They’re from Annalia. They have a place there. Have had, for years. He’s retired from the university, and she’s been with GNS for quite a while.”

  “No Imperial connections? No hint of anything like that?”

  “No. What are you driving at?”

  “I just think we need to be sure they’re not more than they seem. Imperial Police or the like.”


  “I think the provincial head of the Imperial Police, Dalnimir Province, would have given us a heads up.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he would have, if he knew. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid. Still, it pays to be sure.”

  “We did check thoroughly. In Imperial records. Those can’t be faked or tampered with.”

  “By us, in any case. True enough.”

  Pearson sighed.

  “Very well. Thank you for consulting me. Let me think about it. We may have to do something about them, after all.”

  “They have a lot of visibility already.”

  “Yes, and it will only get worse over time. It may be best to catch it sooner rather than later. As I say, let me think about it.”

  Captain Daniel Parnell was also considering his situation. The twenty-seven-year-old Imperial Guard Captain had been deployed to Dalnimir on detached duty almost a year ago. He commanded a company of Imperial Marines charged with base security, and as such he had kept an eye on the crime situation in the capital city of Stolits nearby.

  What he had seen troubled him greatly. As an Imperial Guard on detached duty, he filed reports with the Imperial Guard as well as with the Imperial Marines. He had included in his reports to the Imperial Guard his concerns about what was going on here on Dalnimir.

  Parnell did not, any longer, include those concerns in his reports for the Imperial Marines. The first time he had, his commanding officer had bounced his report back to him ‘for correction,’ because the local situation was not ‘in his purview,’ in the major’s view. He had been told that only items ‘immediately relevant’ to base security were appropriate. He had since left such concerns out of his Imperial Marines reports.

  What had originally concerned Parnell was the high crime rate on Stolits’s streets. Were Marines going into town on leave safe? That seemed a reasonable question for someone concerned with base security to ask, but his command structure in Dalnimir didn’t seem concerned about it. There was no guidance to Marines going on leave about safety measures to take, or hot zones to stay out of. It seemed curious.

  When Parnell looked into it further, it got more curious. The hot zone for violent crimes wasn’t in the rougher bar areas Marines frequented, but in the nicer parts of the downtown. And the victim profiles were all wrong. Instead of the lower-class victims one would expect, the victim profile was skewed toward white-collar middle class compared to the victim profiles in other provincial capitals.

  The victim profile was different in another way. They were journalists, politicians, people of influence. And always people on the other side of the planet’s politics from the current planetary governor. That was so unexpected, he checked it three times, but there was no getting around it. When one editorial writer asked if the current regime was using street crime and political scandals to cow its political opposition, he himself was mugged. He didn’t write editorials like that anymore.

  With the tip about political scandals, though, Parnell went off into researching that. The majority of scandals were also against Knowlton’s opposition. Looking into the allegations, they were thin. Paper thin. But the press ignored that and ran with the stories, while pooh-poohing more credible stories against Knowlton’s allies.

  Parnell had been reporting his findings to the Imperial Guard throughout the last nine months. His most recent findings – that Knowlton’s most dangerous political opponents were sometimes arrested on minor charges and then ended up murdered in prison – had just been reported.

  Parnell had been born and grown up in the Garland Sector. He remembered when Sector Governor Schmitt-deVries had died ten years ago, just before Parnell went off to the Imperial Marine Academy. The former king of Garland, Schmitt-deVries had been the epitome of the ethical ruler, and he brooked no less in his subordinates. That there was corruption of the sort he saw in Dalnimir left Parnell shocked to his core.

  But General MacFarland’s message implied there were Imperial investigators at work on Dalnimir. That wouldn’t be in the Imperial Navy or Marines. Not in the Imperial Police, either. His researches had led him to believe all these institutions had been subverted to Knowlton, and perhaps to Pearson, for years. At the top at least.

  General MacFarland’s caution about who he could trust was another matter. MacFarland had mentioned possible activation of Imperial Guard reserves. Well, as every member of the Imperial Guard knew, their reserves were the Imperial Marines. But if the Imperial Marines themselves were corrupted, how would that work?

  Parnell thought about who he could trust. His own men he was sure of. He trusted his fellow captains in the Fourth Battalion, Second Regiment, Sixty-Fifth Division, Twenty-First Field Group of His Majesty’s Imperial Marines as well. He wasn’t so sure about the Fourth Battalion commander, Major Patrick Hume. He did not understand the major’s censorship of his reports, and didn’t know the motivation for it. Was it orders from above, or was he part of the problem?

  Whatever happened, Parnell was pretty sure it was going to get messy. How messy, he couldn’t know.

  Preparations

  The tradition of the Co-Consul and his spouse living on the upper floor of the two Imperial Residence floors at the top of the Imperial Palace had remained intact for the next two Co-Consuls after Geoffrey Saaret. So had the use of first names only in the Imperial Residence, and the Sunday brunch between the Emperor and Empress and the Co-Consul and his spouse. And, even with Suzanne Saaret gone these many years, there was still no talking business until after coffee was served.

  Sitting out on the balcony this pleasant morning, looking down Palace Mall, were Bobby Dunham, Amanda Peters, Darrel Hawker, and Andrew Forsythe, Hawker’s husband and the Emperor’s Personal Counsel.

  “So what is going on with Dalnimir now, Bobby?” Hawker asked.

  “Some people are looking into it. A couple of people are there undercover. I don’t like what they’re reporting.”

  “Is it as bad as we feared it was?”

  “Worse, I think, Darrell.”

  “That sounds dangerous, Bobby.”

  “It is. They’re as much as inviting an attack.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then we can track the money. Whoever is hiring the criminals is making payments. Once we have the identity of some of the criminals, we can go looking for where the money is coming from.”

  “Can’t you just riffle through the bank records of the big shots and look for transfers like that?”

  Forsythe stirred.

  “No, Darrell. That would be a bad precedent. The Throne needs probable cause to do that kind of financial snooping. Better, I should say, is the Throne prefers probable cause to do it.”

  “Correct,” Dunham said. “I could do it, but that’s dangerous, too, in its own way. The Throne has traditionally respected privacy of that kind.”

  “Privacy of criminals?”

  “Unproven,” Forsythe said. “Conjecture only.”

  “I don’t like it,” Hawker said.

  “I don’t like it, either,” Peters said. “Isn’t there something we can do to better their odds, Bobby? Have things more ready or something?”

  “We could warn the Imperial Guard, I suppose. Let the local fellow know more about what might be coming. That would probably speed up any response.”

  “And let them know, too,” Peters said. “Turley and Gulliver. Let them know the Guard has their back.”

  “That’s probably even a better idea,” Dunham said. “That we can do.”

  “I would feel better about that,” Peters said.

  “I would, too,” Hawker said. “So they have someplace to send the alarm rather than here.”

  “I have no problem with that,” Dunham said. “Once an illegal attack has occurred, taking the gloves off is justified.”

  Culligan and Purny were out on the balcony of their hotel room looking down Stolits Mall to the glittering planetary capitol building two miles away.

  “It’s still a nice view,” Purny said.
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  “Yes. Yes, it is,” Culligan said.

  Culligan got an incoming mail alert.

  “Did you just get a mail?” Purny asked.

  “Yes. You, too? I wonder what it is. I wasn’t expecting anything.”

  Culligan decrypted his mail.

  To: Paul Gulliver

  From: Gloria Steadman

  Subject: Back-up

  Imperial Guard stands by to activate reserves. On your authority. Contact is Captain Dxaniel Parnell.

  “That’s pretty remarkable. Just three sentences, but, my, the implications.”

  “Three sentences? Mine has four,” Purny said in a soft voice.

  “’Imperial Guard stands by to activate reserves. On your authority. Contact is Captain Daniel Parnell.’ Oh, and it has the -dxa- in Daniel. That’s not what yours says?”

  “No. Not quite,” Purny said softly. “Mine has one more sentence: ‘IG LG Ann Turley to assume command IFB Dalnimir.’”

  “IFB Dalnimir?”

  “Imperial Fleet Base Dalnimir.”

  “And IG LG?”

  “Imperial Guard Lieutenant General.”

  Culligan collapsed back in his chair.

  “That’s the Emperor,” Purny said. “No two ways about it. He has to sign off on general staff at that level. And membership in the Imperial Guard is solely at his invitation.”

  “Imperial General MacFarland as well. And Imperial General Trujillo, to activate the Imperial Guard reserves. And Imperial Admiral Novetsky.”

  “The commandant of the Imperial Marines I understand. But why the Navy Chief of Operations? Why Admiral Novetsky?” Purny asked.

  “It doesn’t say you take command of the Imperial Marines on Dalnimir, it says you take command of Imperial Fleet Base Dalnimir. That includes more than a million Navy guys, too.”

  “Oh, yeah. Shit. Can the Imperial Guard even do that?”

  “If the Emperor wants to, he can have everybody report to the janitor,” Culligan said. “But, yeah. The Imperial Guard can do that.”

  “Wow.”