Executioner's Lament

by Justin Rishel

  Aubrey’s employer, OWG Insurance Inc., was naturally upset at the Chief’s reluctance to recognize Aubrey’s contributions. They did after all, continue to pay Aubrey and provide him benefits while he was working for the police under the assumption that the company would be recognized for going above and beyond in the city’s war on terror.

  It was Aubrey, OWG’s employee, who used his investigative skills and the company’s proprietary technology and resources to find the bombers and put an end to the weeks of carnage.

  The Chief reminded OWG’s Board that Aubrey had no business engaging in any violent confrontations and the only reason he wasn’t on his way to the Keep instead of recovering comfortably in a hospital bed was the fact that he saved the lives of several officers. She made it clear that her sweeping the incident under the rug and erasing Aubrey’s presence at the firefight from the official record was thanks enough.

  Eventually the two parties reached a compromise: the Chief thanked OWG for contributing a “consultant” to the investigation and for the technology that led in part to the raid that killed the terrorists.

  No mention of Aubrey’s name would ever be in the press. His part in the firefight that saved hundreds of lives and ended the worst reign of terror in memory would never be told.

  All of that was fine with Martin Aubrey. He cared little about receiving credit because, in his mind, the brutal fight that sent one cop, eight terrorists, and a would-be suicide bomber to their graves plus a half dozen more cops to the hospital was only the beginning of the story.

  Key players in the whole mess were still unaccounted for. Although OFP claimed credit for the havoc wrought on the city, Aubrey had his doubts. He had good reason to believe the terrorists he fought and killed had nothing to do with OFP at all. He believed they hijacked the OFP mantle to hide the real puppet master behind all the killings and BSS. Prior to the bombings, OFP had been vandals and protestors who never once engaged in any violent acts against the public.

  And then there were the scientists. Four former Ventana scientists had been arrested and sent to prison for financial crimes unconnected to the bombings. While at the Keep, the four of them were put to death by the state sanctioned group of executioners called the Order of the Coppice for reasons unknown. Their executions came a day after Aubrey and his partners, Liz Reynolds and Ryan Grant, made an unheard of visit to the Keep to question the scientists on their possible connections to OFP, the bombings, and BSS. Before their execution, Aubrey saw the four scientists as having an obvious vendetta against their former employer, Ventana, Inc., and its CEO James Sarazin.

  Aubrey had discovered that the scientists, led by Dr. Leo Alkorn, had once been the chief minds behind the Zentransa pill and had worked for Sarazin for nearly three decades. Then, mere weeks before bombs began exploding throughout the city and children were struck down with Boarding School Syndrome, police arrested Alkorn and his team. Shortly after, the courts found them guilty and they were sent to prison. They had motive, opportunity, and expertise.

  The Ventana four, as Aubrey called them, were the world’s foremost experts on sleep and, without question, the Zentransa pill. Aubrey felt they must have known how to re-engineer the properties of the pill in order to weaponise it in the form of BSS and administer it to the children of Ventana’s most powerful players. As they were also chemists, Aubrey didn’t feel it was much of a stretch to assume they would have had a hand in the bombings.

  Shortly after Aubrey interviewed Ventana four, however, they’d been executed. Someone had ordered them killed. Anyone who could force the Order to murder four people had vast reach and innumerable resources. This made them formidable beyond measure.

  After Aubrey’s firefight, police discovered a burner phone at the scene with dozens of incoming calls from a single caller. The caller, the voice, was the one behind it all, he felt certain. Whoever called that phone was his man. He just had to find him. He hoped the now dead scientists could lead Aubrey there.

  A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. His brain still foggy, he sat up as the door swung open and Detective Ryan Grant rolled in on a wheelchair pushed by Deputy Inspector Liz Reynolds who had one injured arm wrapped in a sling.

  “He’s awake,” Grant said. “Look at that Liz, he’s part of the land of the living again.”

  The three of them laughed and exchanged greetings as Grant and Liz settled in on either side of Aubrey’s bed. Both wore hospital gowns with sweat pants underneath. Liz had her straight dark hair pulled back while Grant had allowed his blonde buzz cut to grow a tad shabby over his hospital stay.

  It had always amazed Aubrey how quickly people could bond when put in extreme circumstances. The three of them had only known each other for a few weeks while investigating Boarding School Syndrome and the connected bombings. The day he walked into the Command Center at Police Headquarters and met his new partners felt so long ago.

  Spending every waking hour with people had that affect, he thought. Then, there was the firefight. Bloodshed and extreme danger tended to compound the swiftness of the bonding time. Moments before Aubrey jumped into the fray at the firefight, Liz and Grant had both been wounded in action.

  “How’s your belly?” Aubrey asked, pointing at Grant’s midsection.

  “Not shitting in a bag anymore.” He shrugged. “So, there’s that. They’re letting me go home tomorrow.”

  “They’re letting you go home tomorrow?” Liz looked confused. “Why are you still in a wheelchair?”

  Grant smiled sheepishly. “I don’t exactly need it, but you offered to push me all the way here, so …”

  A tissue box flew over Aubrey, catching Grant in the forehead. He yelped.

  “I felt sorry for you, ass.” Liz smiled and Aubrey smiled with her.

  Both of his former partners seemed more upbeat than usual. Laughing and good-hearted pranks weren’t commonplace when the three of them were working in the Metro PD Headquarters.

  The heaviness of Aubrey’s frustrations subsided for a moment. The three of them together was a distraction, to be sure, but more than that, they were friends. He’d developed real affection for Grant and Liz, who were both excellent detectives and good, honest people.

  He sincerely hoped he’d get to work with them again.

  “How long are you two on light duty?” Aubrey asked.

  “Six more weeks for me, at least,” Grant explained. “They have to make sure all my insides stay sewn up. Liz here is about the same.”

  She nodded. “Whenever I can move this thing normally.” She raised her right arm about shoulder height, like a chicken wing. “Then, it’s back to work.”

  Grant gave Aubrey a half-smile. Aubrey knew what it meant, and he felt the same way. He’d give nearly anything to go back to work with them.

  “Speaking of …” Grant leaned in toward Aubrey and spoke in a low voice. “We saw Lewis yesterday. You really don’t think it’s over?”

  “No, I don’t.” Aaron Lewis was Aubrey’s longtime friend and former partner. The two of them had come up in the police together since their academy days. Aaron helped lead the investigation into OFP, the bombings, and Boarding School Syndrome. At the battle seven days ago, Lewis had been the first one in and got wounded in the melee. During his hospital stay, he’d kept Aubrey up to speed on developments as the case wrapped up.

  “You’ll keep it going, then? Where are you going to start? What can we do?” Reynolds said, leaning in now.

  He had been afraid this would happen. His old partners would want to help him, and he’d have to tell them no. As far as the Metro PD was concerned, the case was solved and closed with the deaths of the terrorists who carried out the bombings. Aubrey knew what it felt like to lose his badge and he wasn’t about to let Liz and Grant take a similar path.

  He held up a hand to slow them down. “Listen, I know you want to help. I know you want to see this through as much as I do, but I can’t be responsible for you getting into trouble with the Chief.” />
  Reynolds and Grant both leaned back, looking deflated.

  “Told you,” Grant said, looking across at Reynolds.

  “You knew I’d say no?”

  “Of course,” Liz said as she leaned in and rested a hand on Aubrey’s forearm. “But we thought we’d ask anyway. I know you don’t want us to get in trouble or get fired, but seriously, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  * * *

  If it hadn’t been for a throwaway comment from Aaron Lewis, Aubrey wouldn’t have known where to start digging on Alkorn and the rest of the Ventana four.

  The day before Grant and Liz’s visit, on his last day in the hospital, Lewis came by Aubrey’s room to visit. They two men were watching the news on the television when a story came on covering the latest celebrity scandal. An actor called Shaul Waters had recently been hacked and every detail of his life online scattered to the four winds. Shaul also had a major motion picture releasing in the coming weeks.

  “I swear they do this shit on purpose,” Lewis had said. “Personal cyber security is so cheap these days and even the free stuff out there is damn good. No one with that kind of money should ever get hacked.”

  “Hackers are good too,” Aubrey replied with no real stake in the argument.

  Lewis turned toward Aubrey. “Do you remember that guy years ago … what was his name?” He rubbed his chin and glanced at the ceiling. “The guy who swindled all those old people out of millions and would have got away with it, but he killed that one lady’s dog. Remember?”

  Aubrey thought briefly, then said, “Yeah, I do.” He could picture the man, tall and gaunt, wire-frame glasses and a pencil-thin mustache. “Uniforms were called in about the dog, then found a bunch of evidence connecting him with the fraud cases.”

  Lewis snapped his fingers. “Crowder. That was his name. Anyway, they found enough to connect him with at least one of the fraud cases, but we thought he had to be connected to more. We got a warrant to search his cloud drive and do you remember what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Every damn cyber security geek at police headquarters tried to break into that drive and they got nowhere. And it was just basic security on his account—nothing special.” Lewis shook his head. “My point is nowadays if you don’t want to get hacked, you can avoid it easily. Someone has to be damned determined to break into even the simplest security.”

  Aubrey thought about it. An individual’s entire life was online which meant everything was out there all the time. He’d lived with it for his entire life, so he had no real thoughts of paranoia. The way he saw it, everyone was in the same boat.

  “What did you do to get into Crowder’s drive?” Aubrey asked.

  “You’ll like this. We hired a consultant.”

  Aubrey felt a smile cross his face. “Except, unlike me, I bet you paid them.”

  “We did,” Lewis said. “Brought her in and she cracked that cloud drive like a damn coconut with a sledgehammer. Only took her two hours using some programs of her own design. And she hunted down a half dozen other accounts of his that linked him to about ten more victims.”

  “I remember her.” Aubrey shifted in his chair, picturing a small woman, mousy haired, somewhere near his own age. “She got caught for that whole thing with the last mayor, all those documents that got leaked. Wait, didn’t you and she have a thing?”

  Lewis looked at him with a slight grin threatening to go full Cheshire. “Yeah, we did for a while. We met on that case, actually, and … well the details aren’t important. Let’s just say it didn’t last.”

  Aubrey noticed a distinct faraway look in Lewis’s eyes and guessed he was recounting some tryst the two of them had.

  “You’re right about her record. She leaked a bunch of stuff on Mayor Cosroy and exposed his long history of duplicitous behavior. Cost him re-election. Only she wasn’t caught by us, someone turned on her and snitched. She only avoided prison time by working with us on a couple of cases, including the dog killer one. A few high-ranking people at PD headquarters with ties to the mayor didn’t like it, but we needed her.” Lewis rested his chin on his fist and closed his eyes. “She was damn good.”

  “I bet.”

  Lewis opened his eyes and in an obvious attempt to look innocent, he said, “At the black hat stuff, I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “Like I said, it’s hard to get hacked these days, but she’s one of the few that can do it. I mean it. If she’s after you, good luck because you can’t hide anything from her. She’ll find you and expose all your skeletons. That’s the other thing about her, she’s righteous. She hates evil people, which is why she took down our thoroughly corrupted mayor.”

  Aubrey’s interest piqued, an idea forming in his brain like two storm fronts colliding. “What’s her name again?”

  “Her name is Malina. Malina Maddox.”

  6

  Malina Maddox

  May 7, 2043

  Martin Aubrey left the hospital dressed in gray sweatpants, white t-shirt, and flip flops courtesy of the hospital. In his hand he carried a plastic bag containing a small hygiene kit and a new mobile phone, his having been destroyed in the raid on April 28. The clothes he wore to the hospital nine days ago were cut from his body in a hurry as doctors and nurses worked to patch his wounds. Looking back on that day, he doubted that he would have wanted the blood-soaked, scorched rags back.

  Jogging down the front steps of Metro General, Aubrey found his hired car waiting at the curb. The street was busy with vehicles whirring on their way under the benevolent control of the Metropolitan Traffic System. Like a multicolored river of water where the surface never broke, it flowed along gracefully with every stop, turn, and merge dictated by an artificial intelligence that knew where everyone was going and got them there quickly and safely.

  He slid into the back seat, the only seat in the driverless vehicle, and the car swept into the flow of traffic.

  Aubrey was on his way home, but he wouldn’t stay there long. He needed to change clothes, take a hot shower, and refill his pill case with a fresh supply of Zentransa. Then, he had to get to work.

  He pulled his phone out of the plastic bag and sent a text message to Aaron Lewis.

  Need a favor, he typed.

  While Aubrey waited for Lewis’s reply, he thought about the long road ahead. He had no idea where this investigation would lead, no idea how long it would take, no idea how wide his net would have to spread. He only knew the next step and that, at least, was comforting. He needed to find out as much as he could about Dr. Alkorn and the other scientists from Ventana. For that he needed someone who could dredge the deepest parts of the internet to uncover what the official case files had not.

  He needed Malina Maddox.

  Aubrey knew that if she couldn’t or wouldn’t help him, she’d point him in the right direction of someone who could. She was a do-gooder like him, he knew that. Do-gooders couldn’t help themselves.

  Aubrey’s phone vibrated in his hand.

  Anything you need, brother, Lewis replied.

  I need to find Malina Maddox.

  Aubrey stared at the phone, waiting. No reply came.

  He yawned and rubbed his temples. Leaving the hospital had been almost as painful as the wounds that landed him there. Paperwork, last minute checks by every doctor he’d seen plus their nurses took nearly all day. Passing the traumatic brain injury protocol had been more difficult than he thought it would be.

  But the mental therapy was the worst of it. Post-traumatic stress disorder was best treated before it occurred which meant directly after the causal incident. For Aubrey, this meant reliving the worst parts of the raid, the various dust ups he encountered as a cop in the last few years, and scraping what was left of his memory of his action overseas in the Marine Corps.

  He understood their tenacity. If he left the hospital only to freak out and gun down a crowd of innocent people at the grocery store, they could be held liable.


  Aubrey wasn’t too optimistic about Lewis knowing Malina’s whereabouts. Someone who made a living digging up dirt on people would not be easy to track down.

  * * *

  Malina Maddox sat at the bar by the front window of Le Grind, a busy coffee shop in what was considered the fashion district of New Aberdeen. People bustled in and out to get a coffee from a human barista, one of the few establishments in the city where one could get it. The shop was long and narrow with a counter that stretched almost its entire length. The quiet, jazzy music could barely be heard over the conversations around her and the baristas shouting for coffee owners.

  She assumed most of the customers in the shop were, like herself, taking Zentransa daily. She always found it ironic that even a person living a sleepless life couldn’t do away with their love for caffeine. The Z pill made sleep unnecessary, but it couldn’t give you the jolt of energy needed to get to your next pill. Much like a sleeping person grew physically tired hours before they actually slept, a zoner grew tired hours before taking the pill. Hence, the omnipresent need for stimulants like coffee.

  “Small decaf cappuccino for Joe, Joe Banks,” yelled one barista three feet behind her.

  She pretended not to hear the din through her oversized headphones and green hoodie pulled over short, spiky hair dyed dark brown. She moved her head to a nonexistent beat. Her work put her in the precarious position of being on many powerful people’s shit lists, so she made every effort to stay vigilant while appearing the opposite to onlookers.

  Her client had five minutes before she bolted. She didn’t like waiting and the information she was sitting on was the type that could take her from shit list to hit list. She wanted rid of it. Her days of fighting the good fight were behind her, but the money for this job was too good for her not to take it.

  Her coffee had gone cold ten minutes ago, along with her patience. Standing up to leave, she spotted the client pushing his way through the lunch hour foot traffic outside on the sidewalk.