Chapter 23 - The Secret of C-Sec's Secret Stash

Illium Entertainment News Update - 6th Dimension Vids is in talks to purchase the rights to a 21st century human intellectual property called "Dragon Age" and update it for modern galactic audiences. "Cautious optimism. The property is about a subterranean Earth race that tries to rise up against the humans that selfishly dominate the surface and hoard its resources," explained producer Mlax Ventkad. "The humans and other surface Earth races use a death cult called the 'Grey Wardens' to subjugate the subterraneans and massacre them whenever they reach the surface. This time, a schism among the humans and other surface races gives the subterraneans new hope. We think this is the rare Earth-originated property with serious crossover appeal throughout the galaxy."

Officer Detrius Selturn viewed his job as Citadel Security's front-desk man with the utmost seriousness. For many on the Citadel, this turian was the public face of C-Sec, so it was on him to uphold the agency's image and maintain good relations with the common rabble. He took great pride in his work. That meant, counter-intuitively, not seeming quite so serious. Selturn was there to help and he made a point of acting affable and friendly to everyone who approached him.

This was easier with some people than with others. One such case was the human woman that approached his desk that morning. Her smile lit up the room and she seemed to be positively giddy to be at C-Sec headquarters. The human was small by her species' standards, wearing a cap, sunglasses and a jacket emblazoned with 6th Dimension Vids' logo.

"May I help you, miss...?" Selturn asked, flashing his brightest smile in response.

"Wow..." the human muttered absent-mindedly as she stared up a large wall mural dedicated to the C-Sec officers who died fighting the geth attack two years ago. She gasped slightly when realized Selturn was waiting on her response. "Oh, sorry!" she blurted. "Hi! I'm Jenny! I'm here from the Blasto vid to pick up the latest shooting permits."

Selturn forced a chuckle. It was deliberate effort to make what he was about to say sound more casual and less official. "Really?! Usually, the studio sends a turian woman," he noted. "I'm afraid I'll need to see your ID first."

"Yeah, Savara's out sick, so I'm filling in for her," the human explained as she pulled up her omni-tool. "Anyway, here's my studio ID and the official request from the producer." The human sheepishly grinned and added, "To be honest, I jumped at the chance to go to the legendary C-Sec headquarters. This is my first time here." She gazed up at the mural again. "So much history in this building... I can't even begin to imagine what you guys went through fighting off the geth..."

"As you humans say, 'To protect and serve.' It's just what we at C-Sec do, ma'am. And damn proud of it," Selturn replied as he ran the data through C-Sec's screening system. A mild frown appeared on his face. "Hmm, well, there is a slight problem, Miss Naka- No, I mean, Miss Nama-..."

"It's pronounced 'Nakamura.' It's okay. Even some humans struggle with it. But you can just call me 'Jenny,'" the human pleasantly chirped, then leaned in to read the name off his badge. "Anyway, what is the problem... Officer Selturn?"

The C-Sec officer scratched his mandibles. "Well, your studio ID checks out and I see we did get a message from the producers that you would be filling in for Savara temporarily. I'm just not sure why you are here right now. The current filming permits are still in effect. You shouldn't be needing new ones."

"What?!" exclaimed Jenny. "Don't tell me those twits at the studio didn't also send over the updated shooting schedule!"

"I ... guess they didn't," Selturn replied. "We have no new request on file."

Jenny threw her head back and groaned. "Great, just great! Now I gotta go back to the Blasto set, find the lazy bum that didn't push the 'send' button, yell at him, then come back here a second time to get the permits from you. And after all of that they're going to say the delay is my fault! No fair!"

"That's bureaucracy for you," Selturn sighed.

Jenny drummed her fingers on the counter as she thought for a moment, then the smile re-appeared on her face. "Could you do me a huge favor, Officer Selturn?" she asked. "I happen to have a copy of the data disc with the updated schedule on me. I know C-Sec is supposed to get the schedule directly from the producers themselves, but could you just enter the data from the disc that I have? We'd only be skipping one stage in the process and it would save a lot of time and hassle."

"Hmmm..." Officer Selturn muttered as he pondered the request. It was against protocol to do it that way, but he didn't see what the harm would be. It would take time to process the new permits anyway and any irregularities would surely be spotted by the clerks that handled the processing. "I think we can do that. You'll have to wait here in the lobby for a bit though."

Jenny grinned. "I was kind of hoping I could hang out anyway! This is such a cool building. Who did the geth mural?"

Selturn's eyes lit up at the question. He loved telling the story about the eccentric elcor artist who had created it. He launched into the lengthy tale, only half-paying attention to the reaction by his desk monitor as he fed it the human's data disc. He missed the brief flash of 'anomally detected.' Ten minutes later, he was just about to wrap up the story about the mural when his monitor announced the updated permits had been processed. No sooner had he provided them to Jenny than a quartet of turian workmen and their mechs entered the lobby and approached the front desk. The work order they handed Selturn was a bit strange. The officer didn't recall being told that any contractors would be coming by to haul out some equipment from the seventh floor. Yet his monitor's daily calendar did show that they were scheduled to arrive, so he waved them through. It was only after the workers and their mechs entered the elevator to the seventh floor that Selturn noticed that his new human friend had also left. He had hoped to chat with her some more.

"Oh, well..." he muttered and settled back into his chair.

Commander Bailey had just begun to re-watch his favorite part of Vaenia when his desk monitor announced an incoming message. "Dammit to hell!" he sputtered as he opened the line. "This had better be important!" he declared.

"Umm, yes, commander, this might be," Officer Quetzal replied. "Did you sign a requisition order to have some new tech equipment installed in the seventh floor's evidence rooms?"

Bailey's response was immediate. "No, I didn't. What are you talking about?"

Quetzal cleared his throat. "Yes, well, then we may indeed have a problem. Somehow a requisition order was entered into the C-Sec mainframe for some new tech for Room 715. Some contractors came by today to remove the existing tech in that room. I was just doing some cross-checking when I discovered that there's no record of the requisition order going to or from your office."

The commander recalled that Room 715 was used as temporary storage for any overflow from the other evidence rooms and was otherwise nearly empty. Any tech that was in there was of little consequence. So if somebody had made off with the room's contents, they'd managed to steal some of the least useful stuff in C-Sec Headquarters. "Putting aside for the moment that you've been monitoring the message traffic to and from my office without my say-so, what is it about this admittedly weird situation that made you think you needed to relay it to me on a priority chanel?"

"Oh, was I not supposed to include your office in my scans for security anomalies at headquarters? Honestly, commander, how am I supposed to keep up with all of these new rules you keep springing on me?" Quet huffed. "In any event, I thought you should know that not only did the contractors remove items from Room 715, but they appear to have removed a section of the wall between it and the room next to it: 717. They carted out that section of wall too. That particular section appears to be the part of the wall that that special, high-security safe in Room 717 was attached to."

"What?!" shouted Bailey. It was the same special safe that he had used to store the hard copies of the photos obtained from the incident inside the Council Chambers.

"Yeah, I've accessed the security camera for Room 717 and the safe itself appears to be, well, missing," Quetzal explained, adding, "Along with part of the wall."

"Sonuvabitch!" Bailey hollered. He had no time to ponder how the supposed "contractors" had managed to remove the safe without tripping any internal alarms or anybody raising a question as the bulky item was carried out of the building. Bailey opened a new line to the main communications desk. "Tell all available units to track down the civilian contractor truck that carried off the items from the seventh floor. And let me know the moment they find it! I want to be there to question those thieves myself!"

The situation was tense enough for the four turian contractors as they waited on the side of the street, their wrists shackled in special mass effect energy handcuffs and several armed C-Sec officers watching their every move. One look at the snarling face of the human C-Sec commander as he strode up to them revealed that the unpleasantness had only just begun.

"Officer, I swear, there has been some misunder-" one of the contractors stammered to Bailey.

"You'll speak when you're spoken to!" Bailey shouted. The commander turned to one of the C-Sec officers. "You've checked and you're certain it is in there?"

"Yes, commander!" affirmed an asari officer. "We haven't touched it though. Our orders were to wait for your arrival."

"Well done," Bailey replied. The C-Sec commander hopped inside the back of the contractor's truck and soon found the safe amid several large sections of outdated computer systems. Did it still contain the evidence from the Council Chambers break-in? There was only one way to find out. Bailey knelt down and began to enter the code for the safe. It refused to open. Bailey tried twice more without success. He could not open the device.

Bailey discounted the possibility that the code had been cracked and then changed. The mechanism was too sophisticated for the thieves to have figured it out in the time since it was removed. That left only one explanation for why he couldn't open it: this wasn't the same safe as the one from C-Sec headquarters.

"Okay, when did you pull the switch?" Bailey asked as he exited the truck's trailer.

"Switch?! I have no idea what you are talking about," declared the contractor who had spoken up earlier. "Would somebody please tell us what this is all about?"

Bailey grabbed the contractor by the collar. "This is about how you somehow entered C-Sec with a phony work order, hauled out a safe containing highly classified information and then swapped that safe with another identical one from the same manufacturer! Believe me, you will save yourself a world of hurt if you tell us right now who you handed the safe off to and where they are headed," he growled in his best "bad cop" voice. Bailey left out the part about the "highly classified information" consisting mainly of nude photographs of a human male posing amidst the landmarks of the Council Chambers. He figured that information might undermine his attempt to be intimidating.

"What?! We didn't hand anything off to anybody!" the turian claimed. "We hadn't even stopped driving after we left C-Sec until your people pulled us over."

"So we're gonna have to do this the hard way, huh? You will regret it," Bailey sneered. He turned on his omni-tool. "Headquarters, this is Bailey. Put out an APB that officers are to search every vehicle in the vicinity that has the space to carry the stolen safe. Also, do checks on these four contractors we have detained and all of their known associates. Make it a priority to find any associates who may be in the vicinity."

"Sir, the amount of manpower those orders would require-" began the C-Sec dispatcher before getting cut off.

"Will require all available officers, plus everyone not currently on duty. Yes, I know," Bailey replied. "Well, I don't care if the officers are on break or whatever else they're doing." Bailey glanced over at the turian contractors. "These punks waltzed right into C-Sec headquarters, took a safe and waltzed right back out! I'll be damned if I'm letting them get away with it. So this is an all-hands-on-deck situation, got it?"

"Yes, commander!" the dispatcher replied. "Sending the order out now."

Officer Quetzal leaned back in his chair at C-Sec headquarters and stared at the videocamera feed from Room 717. It showed a mostly empty room with a section of its wall missing, creating a makeshift door into the next room. There was something off about the image, the salarian thought, but what precisely that was, he didn't know. Still, he figured that staying behind and studying the crime scene was a better use of his skills than joining one of the teams of officers being sent out in accordance with Bailey's recent order. The fact that it also meant he could remain seated in his comfy new chair and enjoy a bowl of popcorn was a mere coincidence.

On a hunch, Quetzal decided to run a diagnostic on the camera itself. The result prompted him to hop up out of his chair, brush the bits of popcorn out of his lap and hurry over to Room 717 itself. There was something he had to see with his own eyes first before he relayed his findings to Commander Bailey. A minute after entering Room 717, he made the call.

"What is it this time, Quet?" Bailey barked over the com line. "I'm in the middle of an interrogation."

"Umm, commander, I might have made a tiny, but completely understandable, mistake earlier," Quet began. Bailey responded with a growling noise but said nothing further, so Quet continued, "When I told you that I accessed the security camera for Room 717 and the vault was missing, I was being truthful. It's just that, somehow -I'm still trying to figure out how this happened- the feed for the camera in Room 717 was switched with the one for the camera in Room 713, which is another empty overflow storage room."

Bailey was confused but he knew instinctively that this wasn't good. "Ok, but what does that mean?"

Quet cleared his throat and continued. "I was a bit premature in telling you that the vault had been removed from C-Sec headquarters. The contractors removed part of the wall, yes, but it was part of the wall seperating Rooms 715 and 713. Room 717, the one with the safe in it, wasn't touched. In fact, I'm in it now. Well, not completely untouched. It appears that someone was in here a few minutes ago because the safe is now open, and, umm, empty."

There was no response from the other end of the line, just a long, heavy sigh.

Bailey turned and pointed to the contractor who was the apparent spokesman for the group. "You. Where did you get the safe in your truck? Leave no detail out."

"We got an order from a customer, a human named 'Bloam,' I think, to pick it up from a warehouse this morning," the turian explained. "We were supposed to deliver it to an office building later this evening. We haven't done anything with it since picking it up. It's just been taking up space in our truck. Honest."

Bailey slowly nodded. "Anything else odd about this gig?"

The turian thought for a moment and answered. "Well, the instructions were real particular that the spot we placed the safe in our truck had to be well-lit. No idea why that would matter, but it wasn't a hassle either so we just went along."

"'Well-lit'? Why would... oh, crap," Bailey muttered. He marched back to the safe in the back of the truck and scanned it with his omni-tool. It was just as he suspected: a micro-camera so tiny it was near-invisible had been fitted to the safe's door. Its lens was aimed right were Bailey had earlier tried to enter the code to open it. The camera also had a transmitter. The commander let out another long, loud groan.

"Um, what is going on, commander?" asked the asari C-Sec officer.

"I just realized what these contractors are: A red herring meant to draw us away from C-Sec," Bailey began. "They never got their hands -talons, whatever- on our safe. They were just there to make us think they had. The actual safe is still at headquarters. Who ever set this up used a computer virus to make two room's cameras switch feeds so when we saw the one listed as Room 717 as empty that was what we would think. And when we tracked these contractors the safe they were hauling around was meant to make us think we'd found the one supposedly stolen from C-Sec headquarters. Why not? They look identical. When I tried to access the safe in the truck here, my code didn't open it because it wasn't ours. What it did do was trigger that safe's secret hidden camera so it could record me inputting the code. That was sent over to somebody who snuck inside C-Sec headquarters - pretty easy since there's only a skelton crew watching over things there right now - and used my code to access our safe."

The asari officer noticed that Bailey chuckled a bit at the end. "Surprised you're able to see the humorous side of this, commander," the asari declared.

Bailey shrugged slightly. "I was just thinking about how much effort and ingenuity went into pulling this scheme off and what the person behind it got for their trouble."

"We may still be able to track the perpetrators down, commander," the asari declared, then spun around to the turian contractor. "I need all of the information you have on the person or persons that hired you for the C-Sec job and the job delivering the safe." The turian nodded and allowed the asari to access his omni-tool. She read through the information, then opened a communications line to C-Sec headquarters. "HQ, we need all of the information you have on a contract jobs brokerage. The owners of the firm, Bendover Contracting, Inc. are humans named, respectively, 'Heywood J. Blowme' and 'Ivana Humpalot.'"

Bailey sighed again. "Just a wild guess, but I think you'll find that Mr. Blowme and Miss Humpalot's business venture was only recently created."

"Operative Goto, report," thundered the heavy, electronically-modulated voice of the Shadow Broker through the computer monitor.

"Well, I have the evidence that C-Sec was keeping that you wanted. You know, the stuff that you said was so important that the 'fate of the entire Terminus Systems may hang in the balance'?" Kasumi Goto replied as she stretched her limbs in her chair. "Now that I have the data, I am a bit puzzled as to why you thought it was so important. Then again, I'm just the hired help. I'm sure this is all well above my pay grade. Anyhow, here it is." Goto hit the 'send' key on her computer.

A few moments later, the monitor began producing a low rumbling noise that Kasumi guessed was the broker's voice modulator translating "Umm..." A minute later the broker asked, "Operative Goto, this is everything that was on the data disc obtained from the Council Chambers?"

"That's all of it," Kasumi confirmed. "If you don't have a use for this data, I'm thinking I might want to do something with it that goes against my firm principle of 'finders keepers' but might still be the proper thing to do: give it back to its rightful owner."

"That... might be best," the broker agreed.

"Hey, Zaeed, you feeling better?" Kasumi asked the veteran mercenary as she emerged from the shadows behind him in an out of the way place at a Presidium park.

"Dammit, Kasumi, ya gotta stop doing that," Massani replied. "My physical health is better but being snuck up upon isn't helping my nerves, ya understand? Why'd ya need to see me in person anyway?"

"'Cause I wanted to give you this," the thief replied as she handed over a data disc. "Don't ask how I got it. And, don't worry, these are the only remaining versions that exist. Some copies were made but I destroyed those."

A puzzled Massani fed the disc into his omni-tool, then laughed as he started swiping through picture after picture of himself posing naked amid the stately splendor of the Council Chambers. "Bloody hell, thought these were lost for good. Nice, too, to see that they turned out better'n I expected... Thanks, Kasumi. Ya done me an, ahem, solid..."

The thief smiled. "Just between us, as friends, may I say: Woof!"

Both laughed for several seconds then Kasumi's tone turned more earnest. "If I could track him down and talk him into doing it, do you think your photographer friend would be interested in a nude photo session using Jacob Taylor as a model?"