Page 39 of From the Noblest Motives
"Let's go back to the beginning of the crisis. How certain are you that you did not kill Minister Tapper? Or cause her death?"
"I've never even met her!" Shudder's expression had stuck between horror and defiance.
Cyril held up a hand. "I don't mean to upset you. I only mean to establish a factual chain of events. Are you capable of bringing down a single wall or partial wall without disturbing the surrounding ground?"
"I…" Shudder opened his mouth. Closed it. Good. He was thinking instead of reacting. "I could bring down a wall, but in a city? The pavement would be all broken and jaggedy. The adjacent walls would show cracks."
"As I thought. If you could, please, tell me precisely what you remember happening when you reached New Chicago."
"All right." Shudder settled back in his chair, his hands trembling on the armrests until he clasped them together in his lap. "I took the light underground in. If you start at certain stations, they're in poor neighborhoods and no one bothers to fix the security cams. I got off two blocks from the place where I agreed to meet the girl—an alley between a ramen place and a warehouse."
Cyril pulled up a still from security cam footage showing the brick walls and trash of a typical alleyway. "Here?"
"Probably." Shudder let out a breath. "It's not like I ever actually got there."
"What do you mean?"
"I got jumped, maybe about half a block away. Three big guys took me to the ground before I could react, and then…" Shudder stared into the distance. "I don't really know, until they were loading me into an enforcement van. They drugged me. Antribile, I found out later, and so much that I was still loopy and fuzzy when they were trying to get me to sign a confession."
"Do you remember anything else? Bits of memory? Images?"
Shudder shook his head, obviously frustrated. "Complete blackout until the van."
"This helps to explain things." Cyril tapped the interface to show a familiar vid, the one they'd used in Shudder's trial.
Damien finally spoke. "It's a doctored vid."
"Very much so." That almost-smile again. "But most likely not in the way you think."
The vid played, showing Minister Tapper arriving in the alley. Something made her nervous. She paced. Kept putting her hands in her coat pockets and taking them out. Cyril sped the recording up until movement showed at the mouth of the alley. Shudder, supposedly.
"Watch Shudder carefully, please."
Cyril zoomed in, and they all leaned closer. On the holoscreen, Shudder wavered and jerked upright again. He extended an arm toward the ground as he would when he was starting a quake, but something was wrong in the way he did it. His fingers were curled and his wrist too loose. The camera shook and the wall collapsed.
"Yeah. That looked all kinds of fucked up." Blaze leaned back again, eyes narrowed. "Like he's a puppet or something."
"Indeed. An astute observation." Cyril began tapping again. "Our original assumption, and, I'd wager, yours, was that Shudder's image was inserted into the video. This is incorrect. Shudder's image has not been altered."
"But—" Shudder's voice trembled and stopped on that single word.
"A moment, please. Watch."
This second time around, the image quality had improved. Not a huge shock, since they would've had to do any alterations really fucking fast to get it on the news that day. Sure wasn't the only change. This time, when Shudder came into view, he was being held up by two goons dressed head to toe in black, their features hidden behind opaque face shields. One held Shudder's head up by the hair, probably because Shuds was too doped up to do it himself, and the other moved his arm.
Again, the camera jumped and the wall fell, but Cyril stopped the vid while the wall was in mid-tumble.
"What do you see?" Cyril pointed to the crumbling wall.
Blaze put a forearm on the desk to get closer. "There's—shit—there's something behind the wall. Something pushing it?"
"It's an earth mover." Damien traced the line of the front blade with his finger. "Let the vid run."
As the bricks rained down and buried Minister Tapper, the outline and gleam of heavy equipment became clearly visible in the dark warehouse.
Blaze couldn't stop a growl from escaping. "You've known all along that Shudder didn't do it. Why didn't you send the real vid to the fucking courts?" Damien shot him a warning look, but Blaze ignored it. "You could've kept him out of that gulag! You could've stopped all this!"
"Hmm. Sending anonymous information is tricky at best." Cyril didn't even flinch at someone bellowing in his face. "No chain of custody. No provenance. And my techs only cleared the tampered data from the images yesterday. I do, however, have a suggestion."
