Shattered Truth

by Michael Anderle

  Jia smiled softly. “That’s true. There’s at least something to recommend my home, despite the corruption. I try to keep that in mind at times, but sometimes it’s difficult.”

  “Oh, don’t take it too hard, Jia.” Erik shrugged. “Most places are corrupt, but most places don’t have as good of food. Like I said before, it’s weird when I think about that and the implications, but I’m not going to question it. I only worry about things I don’t like. That said, I don’t get why they don’t have a good beignet place close to the station here. They’re closer to the original source.” He eyed the donut with the disdain he usually reserved for terrorists and people who talked too loudly when making calls. “Maybe they’re just screwing with me.”

  “I doubt that. And remember what Captain Ragnar said when we talked to him last night. He wants us to play nicely with the locals and CID. Antonio might be on our side, but his partner keeps avoiding us.”

  “His partner just doesn’t like to talk, from what I’ve seen,” Erik suggested. “Fine by me. One less person to deal with, and we’re not locked up yet.”

  “There are failure states other than being arrested,” Jia noted. “I know this sounds odd coming from me, but we do have political considerations.”

  Erik waved his donut in front of him like a shield. “I know. I know. I heard what Ragnar said. ‘I’ve got a good relationship with CID, Detective Blackwell. I’ll have your back, but the less we annoy them, the better it’ll be for us in the future.’” He snorted. “Not that I care much. If they really thought I had anything to do with the terrorists, they would have arrested me and tossed me into a cell. I don’t care if someone is suspicious of me. I only care if they mess with my ability to do my job.”

  “At some point, you’ll have to develop a better protocol for how to deal with people when it comes to me,” Emma offered, her voice going directly to their ears. “Although I do admire your almost-true ‘enhanced sensors’ dodge. I can imagine this sort of scenario reoccurring in the future, and I would hate to have a high-speed chase where I’m fleeing from other police.”

  Jia finished her donut and chased it with a hearty swallow of coffee. “Good point.” She grabbed a napkin to get the sticky glaze off her finger. “But the enhanced sensors thing is true. It just so happens you added more analysis on top of them.” She looked around to confirm no one else was in the room. If someone entered, it’d be easy enough to explain being on a three-way call if it came down to it, but answers often invited more questions. That concept had been seared into her soul over the last few months.

  “You know who probably doesn’t have good beignets?” Erik asked.

  Jia laughed. “You’re still stuck on that? There are more important things in the world than beignets.”

  “I didn’t spend thirty years out on the frontier to not come back to good beignets. I’m serious, though.” Erik’s smile turned merry. “This isn’t me being stuck on it. It’s relevant to the case.”

  “Terrorists don’t make good beignets,” Jia guessed. “Or specifically, the Evolved Six? You think they prefer mere donuts?”

  “Maybe. Probably, even.” Erik smirked. “But it’s their gods I’m talking about.”

  Jia laughed. “Aliens? Are you seriously thinking about whether the other races have beignets?”

  Erik nodded. “Those are the kinds of links that will prevent an interstellar war in the future. Do you think any of those alien races can make a halfway-decent beignet? I’m having a hard time imagining it.”

  “Most of them don’t even eat the same kinds of things,” Jia replied, still chuckling. “Or don’t even eat in the same way we do. I’m trying to picture an Orlox consuming a beignet. Everything I’ve read suggests the Zitarks are obligate carnivores, and the others…maybe the Leems? They are arguably the closest to humans.”

  “Leems don’t have good beignet tech.” Erik tossed his donut on the table. “All those aliens are too different from us. There’s no way they could make a quality beignet even if they understood all the steps because they don’t understand the soul of the food.”

  “Presumably that extends to other baked goods.” Jia took another sip of her coffee. “Is this the grand advantage of humanity in the Local Neighborhood? The Baking Goods Gap? Right now, alien intelligence agencies are probing the frontier, trying to master the techniques passed down for thousands of years.” She smiled at him, a glint of humor in her eyes.

  “I’m just saying…” Erik’s voice trailed off as Antonio entered. The other detective looked nervous, but after spending a couple of days around him, Erik realized the man looked that way by default. Whether that was a reflection of the current unusually serious case or just his basic nature wasn’t clear. At least Antonio had pushed back against CID suspicions. Erik appreciated that.

  Jia nodded to the new arrival. “Here for some coffee? Or non-Zitark donuts?”

  “Non-Zitark donuts?” Antonio blinked. “I don’t think the Zitarks eat donuts.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  Jia waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it. Long story. Just us blowing off some steam after everything we’ve been through since arriving.”

  Antonio chuckled weakly. “It sounds interesting, and I’m glad to see you’re both handling it well. No, I just got done chatting with the lead CID agent, and I wanted to bring you up to date.”

  “And?” Erik asked. “What’s the word?”

  “Nothing. They are firmly convinced you’re not involved now, except as a potential target.”

  “That’s good.” He looked at Jia, whose eyes had narrowed. “Or at least good-ish.”

  Antonio shrugged. “But Caron’s disappeared. CID thinks she might have left the CFM. They intercepted some terrorist chatter that points that way.” He sighed. “Maybe you two should head home. I appreciate everything you’ve done for us, but I see no reason for you to stick around and eat donuts here instead of eating donuts back in Neo SoCal.”

  “I’d be eating beignets there.”

  “Okay…” Antonio furrowed his brow.

  Erik shook his head. “I don’t buy it anyway. Caron’s not gone, and I don’t need some fancy CID investigation to know that.”

  Jia set her coffee cup down. “I agree.”

  Antonio looked at the two detectives, relieved. “You do? I argued that with CID, but they didn’t seem convinced, and I wondered if they knew more than I do. It all just seems too easy.”

  “They think they know more,” Erik replied. “But that’s not the same thing as knowing more, and I agree with you. Caron splitting doesn’t make sense. All the evidence points to her getting caught on purpose, but then they broke her out, and I think I know what her big plan was.” He’d discussed this briefly with Jia the night before.

  “What?” Antonio asked. “If you know her target, let us know, so we can make sure it’s defended.”

  Erik slapped a hand on his chest. “Me. Their plan has always been about assassinating me. Everything else was a smokescreen.”

  “You?” Antonio shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. I know they tried to kill you, but you’re just the distraction. They might have picked you as the distraction for whatever reason, but why would a terrorist group be interested in assassinating an individual cop? If it’s about them hating vets, there are tons they could target, not just you. There has to be something more.”

  “Think carefully about everything that’s happened,” Jia insisted. “Caron obviously let herself get caught, and when she’s caught, she makes her ridiculous demand for Erik to come from thousands of kilometers away. When he shows up, she feeds him nothing but standard Grayhead propaganda.”

  Erik snorted. “That’s right. The woman might be deluded, but she was smart enough to avoid the authorities until recently and talented and ruthless enough to rise to the top of a murderous terrorist organization. If she wanted to groom me for recruitment, there were lots of ways she could have tried that don’t involve getting caught by the cops, but she
picked the most obvious way possible. The more I think about it, the more I think she had to.”

  “Had to?” Antonio asked.

  Erik nodded. “It’s not like I go looking around for other jurisdictions to go solve crimes in. It had to be a high-enough profile scenario to get me there, but not too crazy that CID or your bosses would want me to stay away.”

  Antonio sighed. “No offense, Erik, but are you sure you aren’t letting this go to your head a little? I’m thankful for what you’ve done, but the idea that a terrorist group is obsessed with killing you in particular is a bit much. You’re a good cop, but you’re just one cop. You can’t single-handedly stop all terrorists, even all of the Evolved Six.”

  Jia rolled her eyes. “She tried to blow him up with a missile, and she tried to force him to surrender himself for slaughter by threatening hostages. It may or may not be going to his head, but the evidence all points to him being the primary target.”

  “But Jeanne Caron didn’t do that,” Antonio insisted. “The others did it as a distraction on her behalf.”

  “The whole thing’s a giant distraction,” Jia explained, spreading her hands in front of her. “Erik’s always been the target, but they were trying to make it seem like he was incidental to the other terrorist activity. I suspect they worried about him holing up in a safe house somewhere they couldn’t get to him.”

  “That can’t be right. They were going to kill hostages. You two stopped them, but if your plans hadn’t worked out or TPST had arrived a few minutes later, a lot of innocent people might have died. You guys are good, but we also got lucky. Don’t forget that.”

  Erik cracked his knuckles, a sense of satisfaction building.

  It wasn’t that he cared about being better than other cops, but he and his partner had already uncovered a big scandal in Neo SoCal, and seeing through the terrorists when they had hoodwinked the locals and CID felt good. He could be wrong, but he doubted it.

  The Lady could be capricious, but too many coincidences piled up. They pointed to the conspiratorial hand of man, not mere luck.

  “They didn’t kill hostages,” Jia noted. “And they had the opportunity. If anything, it would have made more sense for them to kill hostages indiscriminately at the hotel to sow the chaos they’re always shouting about, but they must have realized that slaughtering the hostages would mean Erik would come in guns blazing and they would lose people.”

  “But he did anyway.” Antonio looked at the two detectives, his face contorted in confusion. He obviously didn’t want to accept what he was hearing.

  “Because he had me backing him up,” Jia responded. “The Evolved Six miscalculated. It’s not the first time a criminal organization has underestimated the two of us. Some of that is luck, I agree, but none of it changes the fact that Erik was the target, and probably always has been.”

  Antonio took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Okay, okay. Let’s assume everything you’re saying is true. Why does a bunch of Grayheads care about Erik in particular? Why go through all that trouble?”

  “Who knows?” Erik asked. “We could sit here and come up with reasons all day, but it’d be nothing but guesses.”

  “If you’re the actual target, doesn’t it make more sense for Caron to run? She lost a lot of people and resources in that hotel, and you’re still alive. It’s time for her to cut her losses.”

  “How many terrorism cases have you worked, Antonio?” Erik asked, his tone polite.

  “A few,” the other man responded. “They just weren’t… They were more about people planning things who hadn’t yet pulled off terrorist operations.”

  Erik nodded slowly, his expression hardening. “I’ve fought a lot of terrorists in my day. They’re not like your normal criminals. They’re already motivated by ideology enough to kill innocent people, and when you hit them hard, they take it very personally because it’s not just their friends you’ve killed, it’s a slap in the face to the ideology that forms the core of their identity. If Jia and I are right and I’m the target, Caron won’t run. She can’t run.” He looked at Jia.

  “If he leaves this place alive,” Jia explained, “she’ll look weak, and that, by extension, makes her cause and ideology look weak. She’ll be deposed, and she’s got to be angry, too. She’ll want revenge.”

  Antonio managed to glance at Erik. “The one thing I don’t get is if this is all about you, why even come to the CFM? Why not do all of this in Neo SoCal?”

  “Because of what you just told us.” A scoff escaped Erik’s mouth. “You don’t have a lot of real experience with dangerous terrorists, and this place is a lot smaller than Neo SoCal. Our entire metroplex is in the middle of a big crackdown. They would have a lot more trouble pulling off their plan there. They might have been nailed by a suspicious traffic cop even when they weren’t trying.”

  “Why not pick a place even smaller, then?”

  “It’s still got to make sense as a viable target.” Jia gestured to the door. “And if they started skulking around too small of a place, they would stand out. The CFM is perfect. It’s large enough that it makes sense as a terrorist target and has enough people for new arrivals to disappear into the crowds, but it’s also a place that would be dependent on outside resources like CID for their counterterrorism investigation efforts.”

  Antonio stood there in silence for a long moment, processing the other detectives’ theory. He looked up and nodded. “If you’re right, then you should leave. If you go back to Neo SoCal, she’ll give up. If you are the target, that’ll make everyone safer.”

  Erik shook his head, a grin growing. “We’re this close to taking down the head of a terrorist group. I’m not going to run and let her go to ground. I need to stay. We can end the Evolved Six.” He slammed a fist into his palm. “And I don’t run from fights I can win.”

  “How are we going to do that? You say she wants revenge, but she’s not stupid. This station’s reinforced, and we’ve got additional resources, including UTC Militia, who are now out in the streets.”

  Jia snapped her fingers. “You’ve been managing Erik’s presence with the media pretty tightly.”

  “Yeah.” Antonio’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “What about it? We didn’t want to cause a panic or make people think something big was going to happen here like the incidents that have been going down in Neo SoCal.”

  “Do the opposite.” Jia’s grin turned vulpine. “Announce that he’s done his part and he’ll be leaving soon.”

  Antonio frowned. “But he just said he doesn’t want to leave.”

  “Jeanne Caron doesn’t know that,” Erik explained. “Make a big show about me leaving, and it’ll force her to make her next move sooner rather than later. Then we take her out, and this is all over.”

  “You think so?” Antonio didn’t look convinced.

  “Yeah. If we’re wrong, then nothing happens, and we leave. If CID’s right, it won’t hurt either way.” Erik shrugged.

  Antonio walked toward the door but stopped halfway through it. “You do realize that if you’re right, some crazed terrorist is going to be even more obsessed with killing you than before?”

  Erik smiled. “Replace her with a gangster, and it’s just a normal Sunday for me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  A few hours later, Jia pored through data windows behind her temporary desk.

  The captain of the 7-8 had found an empty office for the NSCPD detectives while they stayed in town. She hoped to derive some pattern from the background reports that might be useful, but Emma had already been working on it for days. Jia wasn’t convinced she could outperform the AI when it came to basic data analysis, even with human gut instinct guiding her.

  “Do you think we’re wrong?” Jia asked.

  Erik lay back in his chair, his feet on his desk. He’d been doing nothing for the last half-hour but staring out the window at the lake with a thoughtful look on his face. “Wrong about what?”

  “This being about you
. I don’t want to feed your already well-nourished ego, but I do believe this is some sort of assassination scheme.”

  Erik dropped his feet to the floor and grunted. “It’s not going to feed my ego since I’m used to being a target. Terrorists going after counterinsurgency officers was a big part of my career. I don’t get exactly why the Evolved Six have such a hard-on about coming after me, but it’s obvious it’s no longer just about it being a distraction. My gut tells me it’s about more than propaganda, too. Maybe the reason doesn’t matter. We take down Caron, her group goes down, too.”

  “I’m just surprised by you,” Jia offered.

  “Surprised by what?”

  Jia tapped her PNIU and closed several windows floating around her. “Being a cop is always going to be dangerous, but that’s different than knowing someone’s targeting you, let alone someone with deadly training and resources. I understand you faced a lot of danger in your old career, and I understand the kinds of things you went through, but it’s still hard to believe. I don’t know if I would handle it as well.”

  Erik shook his head. “That’s garbage, and you know it.”

  Jia blinked. “Excuse me?”

  He pointed at her. “You know why none of those hostages died?”

  “Because we killed or stunned most of the terrorists before they could hurt anyone?” Jia responded.

  “Yeah, we did. If I had been by myself and charged down there, even with Emma’s help, I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. You trusted me, and you trusted yourself. You took the shot when you needed to, and because of that, a lot of good people are alive today, and many bad people aren’t. Yeah, TPST helped, but those terrorists would have gotten at least one good shot off at me if you hadn’t started blasting them when you did.” Erik smiled. “You’re a solid partner, Jia. There’s no one else at the 1-2-2 I would rather have at my back. Half the guys would have wet themselves and gone into a fetal position after the initial explosions. A lot of the others wouldn’t have the guts for a running gunfight on the stairs with the terrorists, let alone to specifically head to where there were more terrorists. It’s something I’d expect from one of my soldiers in the assault infantry, but not from a lot of the people I’ve run into in our EZ.”