NationStates Jolt Archive

Some say the mark of a good leader is to have no illusions about how his or her people see them, and in this age of political columnists and the "blogosphere", with everyone broadcasting their opinion at large, that's no longer a hard task if you know where to look. That said, in order to know you have to look to begin with, and Erik Strong was simply not interested any more. He had the support of his party, thus ensuring he couldn't be ousted through a recall election, he had four more years in office and above all, he had his faith. If he wasn't doing the work of God, God would have sent him a sign by now - it was this piece of twisted logic that kept him satisfied with life. A man with more of a conscience might have stepped back and marvelled that, in an era of tolerance and acceptance, the Prime Minister had done more to reduce the freedoms his citizens enjoyed than ever before.

The drinking of alcohol was outlawed. The smoking of tobacco was outlawed. Sex outside of marriage had become an offence punishable by prison time, and woe betide the woman caught in an adulterous relationship. And yes, the blame for adultery and even for rape fell squarely on the shoulders of the woman involved. As is the wont of megalomaniacs, these changes were not subtle; there were riots and many, many arrests when the ban on alcohol was announced. But while history is resplendent with tales of an oppressed populace that rose up and overthrew their tyrannical leaders, there was little that could be done against the military, especially with the always-unspoken threat of instigating martial law. Maybe the lowly citizens found themselves growing ever more disgruntled, but for the higher class, life was good.

And so Prime Minister Strong was to be found enjoying the opulence his title brought in the Royal Colony of Eborall, a guest of the Dominion. The official line was that he had made the trip himself to deliver a present to the new-born Prince Lawrenzo, while the semi-official subtext was that he intended to open diplomatic relations with the Dominion on good standing. The truth, as always, was neither - the birth of the young Prince was merely a convenient excuse for a holiday, and he had no intention to deprive himself of the comforts he had come to enjoy. Standing at his hotel suite's French windows with a glass of good wine, staring out at the rain pouring down from on high, not even the threats on his life gave him pause.

Suffice to say, it should have.

"We have a male, Caucasian, dead from a bullet wound to the head. From the state of the victim, it appears to have been a large-calibre bullet, possibly from a rifle. He appears to have been standing near the windows when he was shot from the position of the body."

As the white-suited team of forensic scientists flitted around the hotel suite, Agent Kyle Ballard stood by the broken window, arms crossed and eyes almost screaming from boredom. It didn't particularly matter to him that the dead man was his own Prime Minister, all he saw was an iron-clad unsolvable case - unless somebody turned themselves and claimed to have committed the assassination, it was going to be nigh-impossible to make an arrest, although doubtless the Deputy would order the case to be pursued. Across the room, his partner Roger Dalton kept up the quiet muttering into his tape recorder; he had originally been part of Forensics before being promoted to the Polit, and this was more in his area of expertise.

"The window has been broken by some sort of projectile, almost certainly the bullet that killed the subject; the object destroyed a pane measuring approximately fourteen inches by eight. This is commensurate with the effect of a high-calibre rifle round on standard window glass.”

“Barely seems worth it, does it?”

Roger covered the recorder with his hand and shot his partner an annoyed glance. “What?”

“This whole charade is just a waste of men, a waste of hours,” returned Kyle, gesturing at the ardent efforts of the forensic team. “You and I both know exactly what happened, the only thing missing are the details.”

“In that case, Hercule Poirot,” broke in one of the forensic scientists, anonymous behind his mask yet obviously angry at the casual dismissal of his team’s efforts, “Talk us through it.”

“Fine,” retaliated Kyle, happy for a challenge. “Our boy was enjoying a little of the local culture and decided to take in the view through the windows. Somebody on the roof of the hotel over…” he searched for the block they’d noted when they’d first arrived on the scene, picking it out through the growing gloom. “…there had a rifle with a scope, probably something high-powered, probably something responding to heat. The PM stood in the window, the shooter perforated his head. He wouldn’t have left his door unlocked and there’s no sign of a forced entry, nor is there any on the window. This is the only sensible option, it’s the only thing that explains it all. Undoubtedly, he could have been poisoned or sedated then shot, but I really doubt it. There, I just made you obsolete.”

Roger pinched his nose in exasperation. His partner was a decent agent, but he had the mentality of a child once someone challenged him – and a particularly petulant child at that.

“Unless our assassin was kind enough to leave his gun and a set of dental records on the roof over there, this will never be solved, and we don't even have a conspiracy to blame it on. It's not like the Americans and their ridiculous theories about how John Kennedy died, this is a cookie-cutter assassination.”

“So if you’ll excuse us, sirs, we have a roof to check,” interjected Roger, pulling Kyle out of the room. Once safely out of the range of their white dust and surgical scalpels, he hissed, “Is it really necessary to antagonise everyone you come into contact?”

“When a stupid case like this pulls me away from a nice, relaxing vacation, yes.” It was just Kyle’s bad luck that he was even in Eborall at the time; he’d been unofficially suspended for a fortnight with the request being that he take a “goddamned holiday”, as his superior had put it. He’d even been furnished with a credit card charged to the nation as a whole, and when the call had come in, he’d been relaxing in a ridiculously expensive penthouse suite – the logic being that if he was being forced to holiday, there’s no reason to skimp on anything. “But fine, let’s check the roofs, I don’t have anything more fun to do. Who needs an authentic Japanese massage when you can be dusting for fingerprints?”

---

“That a gun?”

“That’s a gun.”

That was indeed a gun. Sitting atop a milk crate with a portable tripod folded out from the bottom, it was as close as it was possible to get to incontrovertible evidence of an assassination; unfortunately, it was also nearly untraceable. The distinctive scope mounted atop the barrel and the five bullets clipped to the butt were enough to explain where the rifle actually came from – it was a D-7 Cobra Strike, one of the many high-powered guns sold by DMG Military Industries, and the worst part was that they sold to anybody. The Cobra Strike was DMI’s pride and joy, costing a round ten thousand dollars, and when it hit someone…they went down. The two agents just stood there, staring, almost at a loss for what to do.

“We have to get it dusted for prints, don’t we?”

Roger smiled slightly. “No, YOU have to get it dusted for prints. I have to make my reports to the head-shed.” Kyle pressed his fingers to his temples in annoyance as Roger tossed him a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s hope you didn’t annoy them too much.”

“Gloves? Wait, you expect me to march through a hotel with a fucking rifle?”

“Who said we have to do that? There are fire exits, there are trade exits and there are badges. And these badges authorise us to do whatever we feel is necessary to uphold the law. In this case, that’s marching through a hotel with a fucking rifle. Now git.”

“Hold on.” Kyle’s tiny PDA had been beeping insistently from the moment they’d identified what the rifle was, as it had provided the available information from the Force’s head office (that said, it wasn’t hard to get. DMI provided it to anybody who asked), and there was a serious discrepancy. “I think…I think I may have been wrong about this.”

Roger broke into a full-fledged grin. “Oh, this is good. How so?”

“This says the Cobra Strike has a range of about three kilometres. I can’t be sure, but with the angle of the shot, I don’t think anybody but Jesus could have made that kill.”

“So, the big scene about making the forensics team obsolete…what was that?”

“You’re loving this, aren’t you?”

“What can I say? Seeing people apologise always makes me smile.”

Kyle flashed him the finger. “Fuck you.”

The face on the screen was not a pleasant one to look at - indeed, if ever there were a face made for the radio, this was it. Major-General Samson Cowell was under no illusions himself, as he knew he looked like a wreck, but then such was the price of diligent soldiering in this world. He wore a glass eye to replace the one lost at the hands of an environmental terrorist more than a decade ago, but denied the chance of repairing his shrapnel-scarred jaw and cheeks; such was vanity, and as God saw not the body but the soul, vanity was the most pointless sin of all. Like many of his peers, Cowell was a staunch Christian with an even stauncher belief in fatalism – the theory that all events and everything that will ever occur is subject to predestination, something that cannot be changed. It left no room for a conscience, or for guilt over one’s actions – when your actions are all set in stone, how can you be responsible for them? Of course, conscience were thing on the ground among the higher ranks, so it was no real hindrance.

But today, the face bore an expression even less pleasant than normal. An ordinary viewer might see him as being merely poker-faced, but his good eye told a different story; the Prime Minister and his Deputy PM had both been plucked from the mortal coil in their primes, and no matter how much he reminded himself that it was simply God’s plan the knowledge didn’t console him like it normally did. By all accounts, the Prime Minister was a devoted Catholic – as indeed most of the Eighth Star were – who adhered strictly to the moral rules and guidelines for living set down in the Bible. His only vice was the sip of Communion wine he took every day; he had even gone as far as taking a vow of chastity. And more than that, he was one of Cowell’s best friends.

For the first time in years, the Major-General’s faith was shaken.

“Citizens…” started Cowell, reading from his notes before faltering and breaking off. The Parliamentary Broadcasts had been a tradition since Andrew Gistedt, the third McPsychovillian Prime Minister, had delivered his first – Thursday, October the 23rd, or the day after Black Wednesday, when the stock market collapsed and a lot of people lost everything except the clothes on their back. The Broadcasts had gone out every Thursday since then, come hell or high water. With both the Prime Minister and the Deputy dead, controlling power of the nation fell to the Commander-General; he had simply delegated the task down the chain of command.

“Colonel, you’re live in ten seconds.”

He was the Commander-General’s second-in-command, and yet got no respect for it. Maybe it was that realisation that triggered his change.

“Citizens of the nation. I am Major-General Samson Cowell, and I apologise for the unexpected changes in your scheduled programming. Earlier today, our Prime Minister, Erik Strong, was assassinated while on a diplomatic mission to the Royal Colony of Eborall. A team of Polit Peacekeepers has been working on determining the cause of death and those responsible for this act – as it occurred within the boundaries of the Dominion of DMG, if they are ascertained to be responsible, it will be retroactively treated as an act of war. However, I have recently been informed that a source from within the Dominion has pointed the finger of blame at the Militants, a fundamentalist religious group who has been responsible for a number of terrorist strikes elsewhere.

“This is not all. The Leader of the Opposition, Ian Lapierre, was discovered yesterday at his home in Lebel Ridge; he was found in his swimming pool, having drowned sometime during the early hours of the morning. However, the Polit Peacekeepers who are investigating his death are treating it as foul play – according to the testimony of Lapierre’s family, he was an excellent swimmer. These events, coming in the wake of Deputy Prime Minister Gerald Roberts’ attack of anaphylactic shock caused by his peanut allergy, are a great cause for concern for all of us.

“As many of you already know, these events are occurring against a backdrop of growing danger within the Alliance. Three nuclear missiles were fired from various Gothrian military bases at three cities believed to be Camrose, London and Sawchuk City – after being directed to uninhabited spaces where even a nuclear blast would not cause casualties, it was found the nuclear material was, in fact, inert and unable to cause a detonation. Nevertheless, the reaction of Super Rome coupled with the obvious Gothrian aggression has justified certain actions; to begin with, the armed forces have been ordered to undertake Operation Steel Curtain, wherein our borders will be closed to everybody, in or out. Our forces have been ordered to shoot upon hostile actions, whereas our navies are under orders to open fire on anyone who moves into our waters.

The Major-General paused, doing his best to collect himself before delivering the final blow.

“Furthermore, I am sorry to say that this will also lead to temporary privations. There will be a universal curfew put in place in two days time on top of twenty-hundred hours curfew that already exists for those under sixteen; this new curfew prohibits anybody from being out of their domicile past twenty-one-thirty hours. Anybody found on the streets past that time who lacks the appropriate pass or identification will be detained indefinitely, and the police force have been given dispensation to shoot anybody who does not cooperate with them. There will be also be regular patrols in the city to suppress anything deemed as “civil unrest”. I must beseech you all to obey the police force – with the Steel Curtain in effect, their emergency powers allow them to shoot anybody suspected of being a terrorist on sight.

"If you all obey these new changes, we will have our nation back to full efficiency very soon. Causing trouble, however, will only lead to problems for us all. The nation prevails."

As the red light atop the camera blinked off, Cowell took a long drink from the glass in front of him. He knew well enough that these changes were necessary to keep society running smoothly, but they still gave him some pause. There was always the horrible risk of someone being a little trigger-happy and blowing away a young man or woman with the world at their feet who made the mistake of being out too late; it was always the small things that would kick off the revolution.

“So it turns out I was…I was a little presumptuous in my crime scene analysis yesterday. The rifle on the roof couldn’t have made the shot because the roofs are too far apart, so we’re back to square one. My partner still thinks that the cause of death was something introduced into the subject’s system, and we’d appreciate it if you could run a couple of screens on the body.”

Kyle did his best to look repentant, but it wasn’t an expression he was used to pulling off. “They’ll never buy it,” he cursed, turning away from the bathroom mirror and drying his hair with the nearby towel; the rain hadn’t ceased in Eborall since the night the Prime Minister had arrived, something of an anomaly for the Royal Colony. After the revelation that the slug in the skull was not the result of being shot – or, at least, not the result of a sniper shot – the agents had become re-acquainted with their old friend, Square One. Everybody had their own theory on the murder, and the situation was not helped by the opulence of the Prime Minister’s surroundings; indeed, thanks to the shag carpeting, they had only recently become sure that he was shot post-mortem, as what had previously been believed to be blood turned out to just be the wine in his glass. Just about the only thing that was certain now was that he was still dead.

“Kyle, did you hear?”

“Hear what?” he shouted back, muffled by the towel still over his head.

“Cowell’s speech. They’ve put down a big curfew on everyone this time, and now the pigs get to shoot on sight.”

Kyle threw the wet towel at his partner as he emerged from the bathroom, rebuckling his armpit holster. “Not interested. Have you head back from the toxicologists yet?” Shortly after discovering the gun, Roger had returned to the crime scene and successfully convinced the scientists to test the bottle of wine the Prime Minister had been drinking from before he was killed, although he hadn’t had any luck convincing them to test the corpse yet; apparently, even the most intelligent of men turned into children when pressured into doing something for someone they disliked.

“Nothing so far. Maybe the bottle really was j-” The ringing of the phone on the bedside table drowned out what would undoubtedly have been a finely-crafted piece of a wordplay on Roger’s part.

“Agent Ballard speaking.”

“Agents, this is Dietrich. Whichever one of you it was who suggested testing the wine should take a bow, it turned up something big.”

Kyle stood up, slipping on his suit jacket deftly. “How so?”

“Well, there’s so much poison in there I’m surprised it wasn’t green.”

Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, Kyle turned. “Poison in the wine bottle.”

Roger smirked. “You owe me a Coke.”

“So the wine was poisoned. It’s not much more than a formality, sure, but HE was poisoned as a result, right?”

Doctor Dietrich was almost offended. “Please. I can do my job, you know. I could drain his blood and use that to poison a river.”

“So now what’s the question?”

“The question?” asked Dietrich, confused at the apparent non-sequitur.

“The question. If he wasn’t sniped, where did the bullet hole in the window come from?”

“One would assume,” chipped in Roger, now reading a day-old newspaper supplied by the hotel, “from a gun.”

“Fuck off,” said Kyle without candour, turning the mouthpiece away.

“If you want my opinion, I’d say somebody wanted to create the illusion of an assassination. They probably waited outside until your Prime Minister swigged from the bottle, then shot him. How you’ll prove that I haven’t the faintest, but that’s your job, not mine.” Dietrich hung up abruptly, leaving Kyle looking at the phone in annoyance. Huffing, he put the handset down and turned to his partner. “Suggestions?”

“I say order room service and go to bed.” Kyle’s stony face was not amused, and Roger capitulated. “OK, OK. We’ll visit the hotel, ask for any security footage they have of the times, go the whole nine yards. Are we paying for this? I think not.”