“Congratulations, gentlemen,” Bradly murmured then, in intense satisfaction. “Objective obtained.”
“What now?” Carr wondered.
“Simple,” Bradly replied, calm. “We all drink up, enjoy ourselves a while longer, then go home and to bed. After all, we were nowhere near the scene of the dreadful accident, and we’ll have to pick up the pieces at work tomorrow, from the unexpected decease of our dear director and the head of Investigations.”
They raised various libations, ranging from beer bottles to old-fashioned glasses, clinked them together, and drank.
“WHOA! That fairly rattled the house!” Maia Peterson said, startled, as they all sat in stunned amazement over their dessert.
“It was supposed to,” Lee Carter noted with a grin, digging into a large bowl of mango ice cream smothered in mango slices and syrup. “It had to mimic an entire house blowing up, and our house isn’t small. I told you to secure all the cabinets, while I safed the windows, earlier. You did it, didn’t you?”
“Sure, I did it,” Maia said, as Nick Ashton and his wife, Callista Ames, stifled snickers. “I just didn’t know it would be that big!”
“That was the concussion munition, back on the lake, right?” Nick asked then.
“Yup,” Lee confirmed. “We made sure it would be plenty big, and Stefan and Gene helped us set it up about midnight, last night. The Emperor’s staff helped us get it, so we could do it with nobody in the IPD structure the wiser. The Emperor’s secretary said something about Trajan’s old Imperial Marines contacts, and training munitions…”
“Wow,” Cally murmured. “Then it really was a big boom.”
“Yup. The Team will be outside in about two more minutes,” Lee continued, “running crime scene tape around the outside of the fence, and setting up screens to keep curious buggers from being able to see inside.”
“What about drones, and flying craft?” Cally wondered.
“About now, Gene and Stefan should be setting up a hard no-fly zone over the property,” Maia said with a grin. “Just in case there are more explosions, you know. Can’t know for sure something won’t go blooie again until you find out what caused it, and all that, after all.” They chuckled.
“What about fire and ambulance and whatnot?” Nick asked.
“All from our people, or run by our people, through the local precincts,” Maia replied. “We’ll hear the sirens any moment now.”
“And there they go,” Cally noted, as sirens sounded in the distance, growing closer.
“Now, did you two bring overnight bags like I told you in that VR message?” Lee asked the young newlywed couple. “You’ll have one of the guest bedrooms tonight. It won’t do to have someone see you sneaking back home. Not tonight. We’ve all gotta be ‘dead’ until further notice.”
“We did,” Nick confirmed.
“We’ll have to deal with the flashing emergency lights through the windows for a while, not to mention the occasional bullhorn announcement and such, to make sure it all looks legit to anybody who might be watching, never mind the media,” Lee said, “but in a couple hours or so, The Team will send ‘em all off so that they can set up the ‘crime scene,’ and then we can all go to bed.”
“Are the windows all set to one-way viewing?” Maia asked. “We don’t need anybody – like the media – accidentally getting a video shot in here.”
“Yup,” Lee averred. “Did that when I secured them against the blast. And closed most of the shutters anyway. That said, if anybody in the media gets a shot of the house still standing at all, it’s ruse over, whether they see us through the windows or not – but The Team isn’t gonna let that happen, anyhow. We’re good. Nothing will give us away before we’re ready.”
“I have a wonderful husband,” Maia declared then, and they all grinned.
“Now what?” Nick asked.
“Relax and finish dinner. Then we’ll go in the den with drinks and chat for a while, and show you two around the house after that,” Lee said. “After all that, we can probably go on to bed.”
“Good,” Nick said. “Sounds like a wonderful, quiet, enjoyable evening of being dead.”
“Yup,” Lee and Maia said in unison, nearly identical smirks on their faces.
“In that case,” Cally decided, looking intensely satisfied, “I’m gonna kick back and just savor this delicious ice cream.”
“There’s plenty for seconds for everybody, if you want it,” Maia said with a grin.
“That sounds positively decadent, and yes, please,” Cally declared, and they all laughed.
Outside, the entire Team – minus their lost member and his injured compatriot – organized the emergency responders… in a special, restricted VR channel.
“…And you’re sure no one’s dead or injured?” one of the ambulance crew asked in that channel.
“Positive,” Detective Rassmussen informed them. “This was a carefully planned event, people, intended to fake the assassination attempt you were told about this afternoon. The explosion was caused by a concussion device set well away from any structures, on the shore of the lake to the rear of the property, and protected to ensure no one wandering the area could get near it.”
“And no fires?” the fire marshal asked.
“No,” Rassmussen noted. “That’s why we positioned it on the lakeshore – our team members put down a special pad in the mud, pretty much on the edge of the water, and set the device on it. If we could have gotten it on a raft in the lake proper, we would have, but we didn’t have quite enough lead time to arrange for that. I’ve already checked the statuses of everything in a classified VR telemetry channel, and everything went off exactly as planned. No fires, no injuries, no problems. And most of all, no legitimate police personnel blown up.”
“Understood,” the fire marshal said, then grinned. “But I bet there’s a helluva hole in the beach!”
“Most likely,” Rassmussen said with a
