The Human Division #12: The Gentle Art of Cracking Heads by John Scalzi Page B

Prescott asked.
    “Something just happened to the building across the street,” Lowen said.She weaved her way through the still-crouching patrons of the doughnut shop and went to the door, opening it gently to avoid dislodging the shattered glass. She looked up.
    â€œI think I’m not going to get that meeting with Nascimento,” she said, to Prescott.
    â€œWhy not?” Prescott said.
    “The Brazilian consulate isn’t there anymore,” Lowen said. She disconnected the PDA, used it to take pictures ofthe wreckage on and above Sixth Avenue and then, as a doctor, started to tend to the injured on the street.

    â€œAmazonian separatists,” Prescott said. He’d caught the shuttle up from Washington an hour after the bombing. “That’s who they’re blaming it on.”
    â€œYou have got to be kidding me,” Lowen said. She and Prescott were in a staff lounge of the State Department’s Officeof Foreign Missions. She’d already given her statement to the New York Police Department and the FBI and given copies of her pictures to each. Now she was taking a break before she did the whole thing over again with State.
    “I didn’t expect you to believe it,” Prescott said. “I’m just telling you what the Brazilians are saying. They maintain someone from the group called in and took responsibility.I think we’re supposed to overlook that the specific group they’re pinning it on has never once perpetrated a violent act, much less traveled to another country and planted a bomb in a secure location.”
    â€œThey’re crafty, those Amazonian separatists,” Lowen said.
    â€œYou have to admit it’s overkill, though,” Prescott said. “Blowing up their consulate to avoid talking to you.”
    “I know you’re joking,but I’m going to say it anyway, just to hear myself say it: The Brazilians didn’t blow up their own consulate,” Lowen said. “Whoever our friend Luiza Carvalho was in bed with did it.”
    “Yes,” Prescott said. “It’s still overkill. Especially since the Brazilian ambassador is now down at Foggy Bottom giving your father everything they know about Carvalho’s life and associations. If their plan wasto intimidate the Brazilian government into silence, it’s gone spectacularly wrong.”
    â€œI’m guessing it wasn’t their plan,” Lowen said.
    â€œIf you have any idea what the plan is, I’ll be happy to hear it,” Prescott said. “I have to go back down tonight to meet with Lowen senior.”
    â€œI have no idea, Jim,” Lowen said. “I’m a doctor, not a private investigator.”
    “Rampant speculation would be fine,”Prescott said.
    â€œMaybe distraction?” Lowen said. “If you blow up a Brazilian consulate on American soil, you focus two governments’ attention on one thing: the consulate exploding. We’re going to be dealing with that for a few months. Meanwhile, whatever else these people are doing—like what the plan was behind Carvalho’s killing Liu Cong—gets put on the back burner.”
    “We’re still getting theinformation about Carvalho,” Prescott said.
    “Yes, but what are we going to do about it?” Lowen said. “You’re the U.S. government. You have the choice between focusing on a case of a foreign national killing another foreign national on a Colonial Union ship, on which you have no jurisdiction whatsoever and only a tangential concern with, or you can focus your time and energy on whoever just killedthirty-two people on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Which do you choose?”
    â€œThey might be the same people,” Prescott said.
    â€œThey might be,” Lowen said. “But my guess is that if they are, they’ve kept themselves far enough away from events that there’s someone else the direct line points to. And you know how that is. If we have an obvious suspect with an obvious motive, that’s where we go.”
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