01-27-2020, 01:41 AM
Althea, Laeral
January 25, 2020
Espoir Landais, one of the Bureau of External Action agents investigating Auroras in Laeral, was sick and tired of papers. On the desk in front of her at the BEA house in Althea were stacks of relevant information regarding the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative, a non-profit human rights organization headquartered in the city of Althea. Immigration records. Naturalization documents. Employee evaluations. Transcripts of over a dozen interviews she and her partner, Joseph Wu, had held with various employees at the KHRI. She'd been working with Wu in Althea for around six weeks, even longer than usual for an operation of this magnitude. She'd heard horror stories of BEA agents spending months and months working to investigate a single target, only to find that there wasn't the evidence to prove them an enemy spy.
By those standards, this job wasn't bad. She'd just hardly spoken with anyone but Wu for the past six weeks, besides the three days she'd been able to take for Christmas with her family. Wu had just gotten back from Lunar New Year with his parents in Hanshui himself.
Over the past six weeks, they'd spent hours talking with the various Kerlian defectors and Laeralian analysts working for the KHRI. Espoir herself had gotten to know Hannah Sinclair, the former Kerlian diplomat who'd defected to Laeral in 2008 and now knew seemingly everyone within the Kerlian expat community. After hours of discussion over many cups of tea with Ms. Sinclair- Espoir could never seem to get herself to call her Hannah- she'd come up with a list of various dissidents and staffers at the KHRI who might have been tied to the Aurora Program.
Isabella Monaghan, the Executive Director of the KHRI, had been quite willing to help as well- as it turned out, she had been expecting Kerlian spies in her organization for a long time, and she'd reacted to the news of the Aurora Program with grim acceptance, before providing Wu and Espoir with a list of names and a promise of full access to the organization's employee records. For weeks, they'd been poring over these records, interviewing various employees and contacts in search of any sign that someone they knew might not be whom they claimed. They'd been able to eliminate many of the names on their list, until just a handful remained, ordered by Wu and Espoir's assessments of how likely they were to be Auroras. It was this list of three names, sitting on the desk in front of her, that Espoir was staring at by the light of a desk lamp.
There was a knock at the door, and Wu walked in. Espoir's senior partner had a grim expression on her face, telling Espoir all she needed to know.
"The judge denied the warrant," Wu said.
"Shit!" Espoir said. "Shit, shit, shit! You're serious. Nothing at all?"
"They said we don't have enough evidence to constitute reasonable suspicion on any of them," Wu said. "Nothing but conjecture. Turns out Judge Sylvain wasn't as friendly to the investigation as Command thought."
"So are we done?" Espoir asked. "What do we do next? Do we have to just give up the investigation?"
"Command wanted all four of them brought in for questioning," Wu said. "I just got off the phone with Command, and they still want us to bring in as many as we can without arousing suspicion. I think that's one."
"One of these people that we can arrest for questioning?" Espoir said. "I assume you have a plan to bring them in without the judge's warrant?"
"There's a plan," Wu said. His gaze drifted to the first name on the list. "Sharon Quan," he said. "That's who we're bringing in, then."
Sharon Quan was a fairly high-ranking employee of the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative. As Assistant Director for Dissident Assistance, her role was less involved with the lobbying and publication work done by the rest of the organization, instead working to help Kerlian dissidents who had fled to Laeral adjust to their new home. She had come to Laeral with her grandparents in 1995, both of whom had since died of old age. The evidence to prove that she was an Aurora was fairly slim- a few suspicious interactions with dissidents and KHRI employees, a well-known interest in meeting policymakers and members of the dissident community, and a tendency to involve herself in projects- such as the 2019 Kerlile Human Rights Annual Report- that were outside of her area of expertise. Nevertheless, she was the most likely suspect Wu and Espoir had, and so her name was at the top of the list.
"Do you really think she's an Aurora?" Wu asked. Before Espoir could figure out what to say, he amended his question. "If you had to give me a percentage chance she's an Aurora, what would you say?"
Espoir thought for a moment. "40 percent."
"Even after all the research and interviews?"
"40 percent," Espoir said. "But the people further down the list are probably somewhere around 25."
"We'll bring her in, then," Wu said. He seemed to sense her discomfort with arresting someone without a warrant for a chance of less than a coin-flip. "I don't like this much more than you do," he said, "but it's not like she'll be thrown in jail forever. We'll have maybe two weeks with her in custody before the judicial system springs into motion and we're forced to release her- assuming we don't get any evidence out of her before then."
"So when do we take her in?" Espoir asked.
"Tomorrow," Wu said. "I've made the arrangements. Let me explain the plan..."
[/hr]
Althea, Laeral
January 26, 2020
Wu sipped the cup of cheap coffee he'd gotten from the cafe down the street, and looked at the entrance to the classical French-style building that housed the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative. He wore a coat to ward off the early morning chill- it was around 9 in the morning- underneath which he wore the stab-proof vest of the Immigration Enforcement Agency. Behind him, four officers of Immigration Enforcement were standing, looking uncomfortable in civilian clothing.
"Are you in position?" Wu said over the radio.
"I'm here at the back door," Espoir said. "Ready on your word."
"Good," Wu said. "Van's in position, and the team's ready. We're going in."
With a word to the four Immigration Enforcement men behind him, Wu and the others set off across the street towards the KHRI offices, pulling a baseball cap with Immigration Enforcement's initials onto his head.
"Can I help you?" the receptionist at the desk asked in French.
"Immigration Enforcement," Wu said. The man behind him flashed his badge. "We're here on official business. Executive Director Monaghan was made aware of our operation."
Without waiting for a reply from the receptionist, Wu set off across the KHRI's lobby, stepping into the elevator and pressing the button for the second floor. An outside observer might wonder why an Immigration Enforcement team knew the interior layout of the building so well, but Wu had spent time planning the route he and the Enforcement officers would take. They couldn't afford to let their quarry slip away.
The elevator doors opened onto a large room full of cubicles, with doors leading to conference rooms and individual offices off to one side. Wu and the officers stepped out, walking quickly across the carpeted floor and past the water cooler. The team was about halfway through the room full of cubicles when the various staffers started to notice them, and he could see them giving the Immigration Enforcement men sidelong glances. Immigration Enforcement wasn't popular, especially in a workplace made up of human rights advocates and numerous refugees from Kerlile.
They reached Sharon Quan's office, and Wu pulled the door open, letting the Immigration Enforcement men flow inside, nightsticks in hand. Behind the desk, typing on a desktop computer, was Quan herself, a middle-aged Rén woman in a business suit with a horrified, stricken look on her face as she saw the officers.
"Immigration Enforcement!" Wu said. "You're being taken into custody on charges of being a resident of the Allied Provinces of Laeral illegally and under false documentation." One of the Immigration Enforcement men came around behind her desk, forcing her out of her office chair and cuffing her.
"I'm a Laeralian citizen!" Sharon said. "What are you doing?"
One of the immigration officers began reading Sharon her rights as the others began to escort her firmly out of her office.
"Get her computer and any personal possessions," Wu said to the fourth officer. He himself picked up Sharon's smartphone and slipped it into his pocket before following the immigration officers.
"I have a husband and a kid!" Sharon said. "I've lived here for 25 years! I've done nothing wrong!"
"That's for the courts to decide," one of the immigration officers said. Two of them were bringing her along by the shoulders as they walked down the hallway towards the elevator. Wu turned a corner to see one of Sharon's coworkers with a smartphone, recording the arrest. There was an expression of impotent fury on his face as he watched the immigration officers frog-marching Sharon down the hall. Wu brushed past him, as did the others, as Sharon kept protesting the sudden arrest.
There was a long stretch of cubicles before they could reach the elevator, and as Sharon kept shouting, Wu saw her coworkers standing up from the desks around the room to look on, angry and outraged expressions on their faces. A few of the others had started recording the whole spectacle on their phones, the well-dressed professional woman being escorted out in handcuffs by Immigration Enforcement.
"Shame!" someone shouted, and Wu kept his gaze forward, focused on the elevator. "Shame!" they shouted again, and then more and more voices started joining them. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
They were almost to the elevator when one woman, an expression of hardened defiance on her face, stepped in front of the elevator doors. "Don't you take her away," she shouted. "Don't you take Director Quan away like this!"
"Ma'am, get out of the way," the Immigration Enforcement officer behind Wu said.
The woman, who might have been in her late forties, shook her head. "This isn't Kerlile. You don't get to take someone away like this."
"This is a law enforcement operation," the officer said. He pulled out his baton from his belt, and held it in his hands. "Step out of the way, or you'll be arrested for obstructing law enforcement."
"I was in Kerlile," the woman said. "They took me away once, to a camp. There's nothing you can do to me that would compare to that. But you can't take one of us away like this. Not Sharon."
Wu stepped forward before the immigration officer could say another word. "Ma'am, Ms. Quan is being taken for questioning. She'll be given a fair trial or released within two weeks." The woman's fierce expression didn't change. "Ma'am, my name is Joseph Wu. Let me write down my phone number-" he pulled a scrap of paper and a pen from a nearby desk, and wrote his phone number on it before handing it to her. "That's my personal phone number. You can call me to make sure that she's being well-treated. You don't need to get arrested today. Just step aside, and you have my word that she'll be treated well. You can even call me, using that number, to make sure."
The woman stared him in the eye for a moment, her gaze flickering to the nightstick in the officer's hand, before accepting the card and slowly stepping aside. Wu nodded to her and pressed the elevator button. The elevator came a second later, and the officers stepped inside, Wu waiting until the last second possible to break eye contact with the woman. They rode downstairs in silence- even Sharon Quan had stopped protesting- and marched her out of the front lobby to the waiting Immigration Enforcement van, before putting her in the back and driving away from the scene.
January 25, 2020
Espoir Landais, one of the Bureau of External Action agents investigating Auroras in Laeral, was sick and tired of papers. On the desk in front of her at the BEA house in Althea were stacks of relevant information regarding the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative, a non-profit human rights organization headquartered in the city of Althea. Immigration records. Naturalization documents. Employee evaluations. Transcripts of over a dozen interviews she and her partner, Joseph Wu, had held with various employees at the KHRI. She'd been working with Wu in Althea for around six weeks, even longer than usual for an operation of this magnitude. She'd heard horror stories of BEA agents spending months and months working to investigate a single target, only to find that there wasn't the evidence to prove them an enemy spy.
By those standards, this job wasn't bad. She'd just hardly spoken with anyone but Wu for the past six weeks, besides the three days she'd been able to take for Christmas with her family. Wu had just gotten back from Lunar New Year with his parents in Hanshui himself.
Over the past six weeks, they'd spent hours talking with the various Kerlian defectors and Laeralian analysts working for the KHRI. Espoir herself had gotten to know Hannah Sinclair, the former Kerlian diplomat who'd defected to Laeral in 2008 and now knew seemingly everyone within the Kerlian expat community. After hours of discussion over many cups of tea with Ms. Sinclair- Espoir could never seem to get herself to call her Hannah- she'd come up with a list of various dissidents and staffers at the KHRI who might have been tied to the Aurora Program.
Isabella Monaghan, the Executive Director of the KHRI, had been quite willing to help as well- as it turned out, she had been expecting Kerlian spies in her organization for a long time, and she'd reacted to the news of the Aurora Program with grim acceptance, before providing Wu and Espoir with a list of names and a promise of full access to the organization's employee records. For weeks, they'd been poring over these records, interviewing various employees and contacts in search of any sign that someone they knew might not be whom they claimed. They'd been able to eliminate many of the names on their list, until just a handful remained, ordered by Wu and Espoir's assessments of how likely they were to be Auroras. It was this list of three names, sitting on the desk in front of her, that Espoir was staring at by the light of a desk lamp.
There was a knock at the door, and Wu walked in. Espoir's senior partner had a grim expression on her face, telling Espoir all she needed to know.
"The judge denied the warrant," Wu said.
"Shit!" Espoir said. "Shit, shit, shit! You're serious. Nothing at all?"
"They said we don't have enough evidence to constitute reasonable suspicion on any of them," Wu said. "Nothing but conjecture. Turns out Judge Sylvain wasn't as friendly to the investigation as Command thought."
"So are we done?" Espoir asked. "What do we do next? Do we have to just give up the investigation?"
"Command wanted all four of them brought in for questioning," Wu said. "I just got off the phone with Command, and they still want us to bring in as many as we can without arousing suspicion. I think that's one."
"One of these people that we can arrest for questioning?" Espoir said. "I assume you have a plan to bring them in without the judge's warrant?"
"There's a plan," Wu said. His gaze drifted to the first name on the list. "Sharon Quan," he said. "That's who we're bringing in, then."
Sharon Quan was a fairly high-ranking employee of the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative. As Assistant Director for Dissident Assistance, her role was less involved with the lobbying and publication work done by the rest of the organization, instead working to help Kerlian dissidents who had fled to Laeral adjust to their new home. She had come to Laeral with her grandparents in 1995, both of whom had since died of old age. The evidence to prove that she was an Aurora was fairly slim- a few suspicious interactions with dissidents and KHRI employees, a well-known interest in meeting policymakers and members of the dissident community, and a tendency to involve herself in projects- such as the 2019 Kerlile Human Rights Annual Report- that were outside of her area of expertise. Nevertheless, she was the most likely suspect Wu and Espoir had, and so her name was at the top of the list.
"Do you really think she's an Aurora?" Wu asked. Before Espoir could figure out what to say, he amended his question. "If you had to give me a percentage chance she's an Aurora, what would you say?"
Espoir thought for a moment. "40 percent."
"Even after all the research and interviews?"
"40 percent," Espoir said. "But the people further down the list are probably somewhere around 25."
"We'll bring her in, then," Wu said. He seemed to sense her discomfort with arresting someone without a warrant for a chance of less than a coin-flip. "I don't like this much more than you do," he said, "but it's not like she'll be thrown in jail forever. We'll have maybe two weeks with her in custody before the judicial system springs into motion and we're forced to release her- assuming we don't get any evidence out of her before then."
"So when do we take her in?" Espoir asked.
"Tomorrow," Wu said. "I've made the arrangements. Let me explain the plan..."
[/hr]
Althea, Laeral
January 26, 2020
Wu sipped the cup of cheap coffee he'd gotten from the cafe down the street, and looked at the entrance to the classical French-style building that housed the Kerlile Human Rights Initiative. He wore a coat to ward off the early morning chill- it was around 9 in the morning- underneath which he wore the stab-proof vest of the Immigration Enforcement Agency. Behind him, four officers of Immigration Enforcement were standing, looking uncomfortable in civilian clothing.
"Are you in position?" Wu said over the radio.
"I'm here at the back door," Espoir said. "Ready on your word."
"Good," Wu said. "Van's in position, and the team's ready. We're going in."
With a word to the four Immigration Enforcement men behind him, Wu and the others set off across the street towards the KHRI offices, pulling a baseball cap with Immigration Enforcement's initials onto his head.
"Can I help you?" the receptionist at the desk asked in French.
"Immigration Enforcement," Wu said. The man behind him flashed his badge. "We're here on official business. Executive Director Monaghan was made aware of our operation."
Without waiting for a reply from the receptionist, Wu set off across the KHRI's lobby, stepping into the elevator and pressing the button for the second floor. An outside observer might wonder why an Immigration Enforcement team knew the interior layout of the building so well, but Wu had spent time planning the route he and the Enforcement officers would take. They couldn't afford to let their quarry slip away.
The elevator doors opened onto a large room full of cubicles, with doors leading to conference rooms and individual offices off to one side. Wu and the officers stepped out, walking quickly across the carpeted floor and past the water cooler. The team was about halfway through the room full of cubicles when the various staffers started to notice them, and he could see them giving the Immigration Enforcement men sidelong glances. Immigration Enforcement wasn't popular, especially in a workplace made up of human rights advocates and numerous refugees from Kerlile.
They reached Sharon Quan's office, and Wu pulled the door open, letting the Immigration Enforcement men flow inside, nightsticks in hand. Behind the desk, typing on a desktop computer, was Quan herself, a middle-aged Rén woman in a business suit with a horrified, stricken look on her face as she saw the officers.
"Immigration Enforcement!" Wu said. "You're being taken into custody on charges of being a resident of the Allied Provinces of Laeral illegally and under false documentation." One of the Immigration Enforcement men came around behind her desk, forcing her out of her office chair and cuffing her.
"I'm a Laeralian citizen!" Sharon said. "What are you doing?"
One of the immigration officers began reading Sharon her rights as the others began to escort her firmly out of her office.
"Get her computer and any personal possessions," Wu said to the fourth officer. He himself picked up Sharon's smartphone and slipped it into his pocket before following the immigration officers.
"I have a husband and a kid!" Sharon said. "I've lived here for 25 years! I've done nothing wrong!"
"That's for the courts to decide," one of the immigration officers said. Two of them were bringing her along by the shoulders as they walked down the hallway towards the elevator. Wu turned a corner to see one of Sharon's coworkers with a smartphone, recording the arrest. There was an expression of impotent fury on his face as he watched the immigration officers frog-marching Sharon down the hall. Wu brushed past him, as did the others, as Sharon kept protesting the sudden arrest.
There was a long stretch of cubicles before they could reach the elevator, and as Sharon kept shouting, Wu saw her coworkers standing up from the desks around the room to look on, angry and outraged expressions on their faces. A few of the others had started recording the whole spectacle on their phones, the well-dressed professional woman being escorted out in handcuffs by Immigration Enforcement.
"Shame!" someone shouted, and Wu kept his gaze forward, focused on the elevator. "Shame!" they shouted again, and then more and more voices started joining them. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
They were almost to the elevator when one woman, an expression of hardened defiance on her face, stepped in front of the elevator doors. "Don't you take her away," she shouted. "Don't you take Director Quan away like this!"
"Ma'am, get out of the way," the Immigration Enforcement officer behind Wu said.
The woman, who might have been in her late forties, shook her head. "This isn't Kerlile. You don't get to take someone away like this."
"This is a law enforcement operation," the officer said. He pulled out his baton from his belt, and held it in his hands. "Step out of the way, or you'll be arrested for obstructing law enforcement."
"I was in Kerlile," the woman said. "They took me away once, to a camp. There's nothing you can do to me that would compare to that. But you can't take one of us away like this. Not Sharon."
Wu stepped forward before the immigration officer could say another word. "Ma'am, Ms. Quan is being taken for questioning. She'll be given a fair trial or released within two weeks." The woman's fierce expression didn't change. "Ma'am, my name is Joseph Wu. Let me write down my phone number-" he pulled a scrap of paper and a pen from a nearby desk, and wrote his phone number on it before handing it to her. "That's my personal phone number. You can call me to make sure that she's being well-treated. You don't need to get arrested today. Just step aside, and you have my word that she'll be treated well. You can even call me, using that number, to make sure."
The woman stared him in the eye for a moment, her gaze flickering to the nightstick in the officer's hand, before accepting the card and slowly stepping aside. Wu nodded to her and pressed the elevator button. The elevator came a second later, and the officers stepped inside, Wu waiting until the last second possible to break eye contact with the woman. They rode downstairs in silence- even Sharon Quan had stopped protesting- and marched her out of the front lobby to the waiting Immigration Enforcement van, before putting her in the back and driving away from the scene.