“Not much. The most important decision has actually already come down. The judge decided yesterday that, for purposes of these court actions, I am the de facto head of state of Arcadia. That gives me several advantages as defendant.”
“Ah.”
“The other advantage I have is that I have all the records of Kendall’s illegal payments to people throughout the government. His father’s, too, for that matter.”
“How is that an advantage?”
“The prosecutor and the judges are all in those payment records.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. They can either paper over everything and let the situation lie, or, as the acknowledged head of state of Arcadia, I can initiate a full-fledged corruption investigation into everything that went on under the Kendalls.”
“I predict they will let sleeping dogs lie, Chen Zufu.”
Matt chuckled.
“So do I, MingWei.”
Despite the cheering crowd outside the Chen-Jasic compound the previous Thursday, not everyone was happy with the Chen.
A total of two hundred and seventy-four people had been killed in his coup d'état against the Kendall regime: Kendall, his two bodyguards, his two limousine drivers, the twelve members of the council, the door guard of the council building, two hundred and forty-two members of the police special forces in the council building, ten other members of the police special forces, and four cleaning people working in the council building that evening.
The Chen authorized the acting head of the treasury department to make substantial wrongful death payments to the families of the four cleaning people, who had died at work while performing their jobs and had not been receiving illegal payments under the table.
A group of the remaining families brought a wrongful death suit against the Chen, both as the head of state and in his person. The Chen countersued for clawing back illegally paid tax dollars over and above the public salaries of all the officials and police who died. As these amounts vastly exceeded the amount available as damages in a wrongful death suit, the families filed leave to withdraw their suit, and the Chen withdrew his countersuit.
The complaint of murder against the Chen and his family members was more serious. The deaths of the bodyguards in the very act of attempting an illegal arrest was one thing. That was arguably self-defense. The systematic execution in cold blood of Kendall and the rest of the council and police special forces was another thing entirely.
Chen’s attorneys argued that the initial act of aggression was under the orders of Kendall, with the acquiescence of the council. It was therefore an affair of state. The reaction of the Chen family to this action was justified. That is, it was not so much an aggression by two people against another, but by one organization against another. It was more akin to war than a personal assault.
And, as the government had acted extralegally, it enjoyed no immunity or privilege against the counteroffensive launched by its erstwhile victim.
The Chen’s attorneys also noted that the Chen family’s actions against the government ceased immediately once the government was no longer able to continue offensive operations against them. They had put a stop to the aggression, made further aggression by the attacking organization impossible, and then immediately stopped their counterattack.
The Chen’s attorneys’ arguments were bolstered by a statement in a private meeting in chambers that, if charges were dropped, the Chen would not pursue corruption charges against the judges and the prosecutors of the legal department, and the clawing back of illegally paid tax dollars over and above their public salaries, for which he had all the accounting records. The Chen, as current head of state, was willing to close the books on the entire affair and carry forward from where the situation now stood.
This last, private argument won the day. The judge publicly found compelling the defense’s arguments that the entire situation was more akin to war than the actions of private individuals and threw out the murder charges. The killings had been a legitimate act of war, and not criminally judiciable. The prosecutors dropped all other charges, including the possession and ‘indiscriminate deployment’ of a binary nerve agent. The entire episode was allowed to stand as it was, without further legal action.
The coup d’état was over, a fait accompli. The reorganization of the government was just getting under way.
With the deliberations on the new government under way, and the court cases working their way through the courts, Matt Chen-Jasic was not content to sit and wait. With recognition by the courts of the Chen as head of state for Arcadia, he began reworking the government.
The document on an intermediate structure for colony government got Matt to thinking. What else was buried in those archives, sitting there unread and unheeded for fifty years, that would be a help now? He set a government group chartered with colony planning and infrastructure to the task of cataloging and reviewing those archives.
While that was under way, Matt got to work on the worst excesses. Some organizations within the government went away entirely as not being appropriate activities, in Matt’s view, for government. Most of these had to do with various attempts to monitor or control people’s individual choices.
The public relations department went away as well. With good government, you didn’t need one, and with bad government it didn’t really help solve the problem.
Matt had the list of managers who had been getting regular payments on the side from the Kendalls, and he sacked a lot of them. Most of these people had no technical expertise in the areas they were managing, and the people who got promoted into the now-empty positions were the ones who had been doing the work all along.
The salaries of government employees were all over the map. There had been no systematic pay-grade system, and one’s compensation was normally determined by how much of a favorite one was of
