Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 02

No one wanted a war right now. Particularly since no one had even certainty regarding who would win. Deseret and the GWA were just a bit too evenly matched and no one counted the US as being an especially helpful or useful military ally. Many even thought that with the USA as a war partner they would proof nearly worthless in battle, leaving the GWA to weaken themselves fatally to defend thousands of extra miles north on the American front, while our allies slowly collapsed. As far as my bosses in the BMA were concerned, the status quo was a lot safer than several other uncertainties. Unfortunately, we couldn't count at all on Deseret to make those same calculations. Creating anarchy in the American west might be sufficient to collapse the weak US government all on its own, allowing perhaps several entire states to be absorbed before the GWA could be enticed into reacting... and with less than favorable odds.

What a ratfuck! Bel's boss might not want those weapon smugglers found, but for the security of the GWA it really had to be done!

**********

"So," I inquired while she drove, "assuming for amusement value only that if the big boss took a sudden and rather violent dislike for me and my consulting efforts, just what sort of top shelf magical disruption attempts would I be likely to face? If I can put it delicately. I know that's sort of a taboo subject up here. Down south, we're a bit more casual about it, and deciding what I can do, and who is liable to try and stop me, are definitely survival concerns for me."

"So I've heard. No, talking about it doesn't bother me. You're technically a very strong Adept, right? Or were? The briefing doc said that you might have had a burn out." This was technically true, or at least on paper. My last official test showed I had a Score of 0.0. Dead normal mundane -- powerless. On the other hand, I hadn't bothered to inform them that after a bit of rest, and internal reorganization and recovery, my magical skills were now significantly greater than they had been before. By a rather large order of magnitude greater.

Some of it was undoubtedly due to my new absorbed Incan artifact, but even more might be due to my old flame Henrietta and her sister, merged into some new composite uber-magical ethereal being, poking her fingers around into my brains and adjusting it for her amusement... and self-preservation. Also I had Sean, a very definite wild-card by my side. Did he have a finger fiddling around in my brain too? Now that was a scary thought!

In any case I was absolutely Wizard-class ability now, well into the 9+ Score at least I guessed, but the more people that thought I was still a harmless burnout, the safer I'd probably be.

"Was. Most definitely. I'm suspended and unrated for the moment, and probably for the better. Still, I don't think I'll be helpless and completely dependent upon your skills, and hopefully my visit will turn out to be useful for everyone... or mostly everyone. Yourself?"

"Weak Sorceress First Class, some offense, some defense, and I'm a halfway decent psychometric. By touching things I can tell what they do, or who last did something with it. Nicely useful for figuring out who fired a gun or used a murder weapon that the local police have discovered. In fact I seem to spend most of my time spend on loan to CPD doing forensics for them. Juries don't trust magical forensics though, and half time being called as a Witch for the Prosecution does more harm than good for the case and they'll let the dirtbag walk scott free just to spite me. It's a culture of mistrust and suspicion up here, and even back east I'd still get dirty looks out in the street. The laws and regulations say I have to be in uniform while on duty, except for extremely specific legal exceptions and exemptions. This case theoretically warrants one, and I've got a judicial writ allowing me to work undercover as a mundane civilian. That's at least some small favor if we want to do anything resembling a low-key but intensive investigation. I guess things could be worse."

They certainly could! They used to call female Adepts and Wizards in the GWA, witches and sorceresses back home too... and some of the older government folks still do. Most of the gals hate it, but they don't have quite the same sort of glass ceiling back home that they did here. In the GWA, it's theoretically all about talent, a meritocracy, but it does help I admit (sometimes a lot) who you know, and what if any Imperial connections you have. Still a common birth is by no means a deal breaker to climbing the ladder of power. Up here, it often was -- it's all about money, preferably older money.

Witch, and not used in a respectful or endearing sort of manner, was pretty much a curse word as well as being a rather discourteous title. Still, things were slowly changing for the better up here. Until the Civil Rights movement of Kennedy's second term, Witches and Wizards had to wear their official robes at all times out in public, very much like the proverbial Scarlet Letter, or the yellow marks of the old medieval Jewish ghettos in Europe, and they were subject to severe governmental monitoring day and night. Change was still occurring, sometimes even for the better... but up here it was glacier slow. It was no wonder that most of the local staff, the ones not bucking for promotion, frankly didn't give much of a shit about anything! Apathy I could deal with or manipulate.

"Well that's better than I had hoped." I agreed, and she nodded as well. "Tell me more about the prostate lickers and other talent likely to be on the opposing team?" I reminded her.

"Concerning the possible local staff that might have an adverse interest in any positive outcome, I'd say that two of the louder ass-feltching Wizards, Norman and Desmond might jump in any direction the boss hinted at. They're both shoot before talking types with an even bigger history of collateral property damage than even your record indicates. There are a couple of Second Class staffers, you'd call them mid-level Adepts, that are in that camp too, with another three or four staffers on the fence. If they thought they were doing their lawful duty, such as if the boss declared that you'd gone rogue, they'd hop over as well. I don't have much pull with them, or much of anyone for that matter. However, if the local FBI unofficially got word of your inquiries, they'd be disturbingly helpful. Their boss doesn't get on with our boss, and any minor coups or significant confirmations of Deseret activities would float their boat nicely. That would be ok with me, if we could keep it quiet.

"Any outsiders with an interest in the current status quo, for or against?" I enquired.

"There are also a few crime lords that might know a thing or two about Deseret smuggling activities. Sebestyen Dénes is the top mob boss, both north and south side, at least for now, but he's enough of a patriot to never willingly trade guns, or anything else to Deseret. He served in the Army and also lost his kid brother on the border about fifteen years ago, back when we still had the draft and compulsory military service. Some of his underlings, not so much, but Dénes runs a very tight ship. There's always an upstart or two willing to cut corners and take a shortcut to building up a fortune. Probably just like the local southern muscle you found down south. Ignorant, but willing to take a shady dollar. Dénes would know. He's got ears to the ground, and well above and below ground too. With a careful introduction, I think he'd be helpful. Between you me and the next lamp post, I've taken a dollar or two from him. Hell, everyone up here has... or from one of his competitors. If you don't pick a side, then no one trusts you out on the street. You won't make busts and sooner or later you're bound to have an unfortunate 'accident'."

Chicago corruption is a stereotypical feature of fictional detective and political action-adventure novels, and already I could tell that I was going to get a lot of first-hand experience. Unions and organized crime seemed to go hand in hand. No surprise for a country that still had federal prohibition against hard spirits. A late Teddy Rex reform theoretically legalized 'non-intoxicating spirits' such as beer and wine, but both were nearly as tightly regulated as weapons sales.

Like any other kind of prohibition however, if Sean or I wanted to find a decent single-malt Scotch or well-aged southern Bourbon, I could probably find an acceptable speak-easy in less than ten minutes. Probably a helpful hotel employee could even provide us with room service for all of the delights of nature, a good medium-rare steak, a nice bottle of red wine and a box of fresh stogies with some sipping whisky or scotch for afterwards. Besides, governmental enforcement of delicious and pleasant social vices took time, tax money and political motivation away from more pressing issues, like Deseret encroachments, or western civil unrest.

In fact, once Bel dropped me off at my hotel, I had no problems at all getting my local favorite Tex-Mex dark beer right out of their bar cooler and finding a tolerable hunk of beef right in the hotel's dining room. A hint that a good top-shelf chaser (for Sean) was instantly rewarded, even without a hard silver encouragement (cough) bribe (cough). If he didn't care about enforcement issues, then I certainly didn't. For a quite reasonable price, a Scotch bottle even accompanied us up to our room, mostly for Sean, but I'll admit to having a little nightcap before I dropped off to sleep for the next twelve hours. It was empty by sunset, and mostly not of my doing. How that little bugger can put it away! He needed some respite from his non-existent labors, especially since American cable TV seemed to be a wasteland, without a single porn or home shopping channel to be found!

Tomorrow was going to be a rather interesting day!

***********

There was really no escaping it, but we had to start our day off at the local Federal Bureau of Magical Regulation, and an extended hour long meeting with all the various pismires, non-entities and blatantly obvious lackwits and fucktards that were going to soon make it their duty in life to piss upon every stage of my, or rather our, investigation.

Bel was spot on in her evaluation of the local staff and I could easily pick out the potential troublemakers. Former frat-rats and country club boys with connections, and perhaps a bit of actual magical ability for the irregular times that they actually had to earn their paychecks. I checked over Norman and Desmond extra closely and didn't note a single bit magical protection that I could slice, dice or julienne with half of my brain turned off. The collection of aggressive Adepts aspiring to middle management didn't impress me either, and even the apathetic drones didn't radiate anything that I couldn't handle.

Just on principle I gave an extra look-over towards the few 'duty' types that were still heavily in denial that hadn't quite figured out that they were riding an endless merry-go-round to nowhere. From what I could tell, they still genuinely believed that that being a magical shunned leper someone made other folks lives somehow better. A few of these folks might actually have a clue and I hoped that Bel could swing a couple of the remaining true believers to my side, assuming I could find some cold hard evidence to entice them to leave the safety of the reservation.

Last there were the slightly greater cohorts of lapsed believers well now into the remorse stage of things, that either couldn't much be bothered by anything other than an actual state of war, or just didn't care, and were now sulking in the corners and biding their time until happy hour or retirement, whichever came first.

More or less exactly what I had expected.

Her infamous boss, Mason Probert, looked exactly what I had imagined from the sound of his name -- a short, balding, middle-aged civil servant gone physically completely to seed, with an unwholesome interest in generating bureaucratic paperwork and other petty bullshit, and a master political artist at jacking around with the careers of anyone who didn't kiss his divinely holy ass. The sneer on his face as he took my hand spoke volumes. This was a nasty little fuck if I'd ever seen one, and he was very definitely a certifiably dangerous cock-bite that could (and probably would) fuck over every single aspect of this investigation. The glint of bullshit that filled his eyes quite frankly spoke volumes that he just couldn't wait to start making our lives a living hell.

I'm darned good at reading people and tell the truth from a bald-faced lie usually at least four times of out five, but this assclown was good. I knew that every word that emerged from the reptiles mouth was pure crap, but he was so good and experienced at spewing it that I couldn't see under his façade to figure out exactly what his angle was. Was this interference personal, political, treasonous or just some sort of internal turf war? Or was he just a conscienceless sociopath completely with scrupples quite willing and able to burn down the entire house before he'd let an outsider touch, let alone set foot inside his domain and play with his toys? My first gut reaction after shaking his hand was that I now felt dirty and needed a bath.

Trust your first gut instinct -- always... mine is about a hundred percent faithful for warning me about forthcoming trouble. Now if I only always listened to it, even sometimes, that would be a distinct improvement.

"Aye, that one's a right menace, he is. Full of webs like a spider or better a serpent down in a hole scheming, and all for woe. He'll not be your friend, so watch him close, before he can bite... and surely he will when he is ready!" Sean murmured. Spot on as usual. He can read my mind like an open book, but he says he can only skim the top surface thoughts of others... supposedly. Still, his advice has never, ever been wrong.

Oh yeah, definitely. As the saying goes, keep your friends close... and your enemies even closer.

*************

After our formal introduction and the snake oil sales presentation was over, I was handed a briefing packet that was nearly feather light and its lack of significant contents more than hinted that anything genuinely useful had been omitted, extracted or purged. Alleged the fucktard twins Norman & Desmond had performed a complete and exhaustive investigation... but all six pages of the report suggested loudly otherwise. Even at a glance, the 'suggested' avenue for further enquiries looked like a laundry list of blatant dead-ends, or else indifferently fabricated witness statements. I'd put my odds on mostly the latter. Names of witnesses that couldn't be currently located, incorrect addresses, or else well-paid and prepared professional informants, ready, willing and able to send me on an endless wild-goose chase, like a puppy chasing its own tail. Yep, this screamed misdirection every step of the way.

To make matters worse, in order to keep our heads down and keep our obvious watchers nicely bored, we were actually going to have to waste our time on this fabricated nonsense, and with smiles on our faces, at least for the start. Our oral instructions, which fortunately are always very subject to all too human accidental misunderstandings, were equally misleading and rather too indirect. Any new leads we uncovered needed to be immediately reported up the chain of command, clearly so that future suitable misdirection could be constructed to re-steer us back down the track to blissfull happy ignorance.

Probert wasn't even particularly subtle about it, he just overplayed the role of the idiot micro-manager boss, who mission was to stunt creativity and ambition at every step. We'd both had experience with this sort of thing before -- the trick is just to snow the asshole deep with bullshit reports that looked meaningless and harmless, then slowly sidle the whole investigation off on an oblique angle, vaguely hinted about buried in the very back of some excessively long update, ready to be used as a get out of deep shit card when the investigation was completed. Clearly, as the records showed, you had kept your ass of a boss completely informed during every stage of the investigation, and his failure to redirect your efforts elsewhere couldn't possibly be your fault. Rinse, wipe and repeat. Hee hee hee.

My final last impression of him was that I was certain that he didn't want us to succeed. I guess the discovery of a Deseret spy and smuggling ring operating in Chicago would be bad for his self-preservation, let alone any further promotion. He'd try and take all of the credit in a heartbeat if we found anything, though, and then with his cronies retroactively make it look like it was entirely by his own efforts and the in-house investigation that he had diligently supervised. Technically, it really was his investigation... and they obviously hadn't done shit about it in at least six months, if my flimsy briefing folder was any indication. Unless there was another hidden folder somewhere all prepared with Probert's version of the facts. Now that I thought about it, I was sure that there was a lot that he had to be hiding.

Bel agreed with these concerns, as we privately whispered over lunch in a busy restaurant just far enough away from the local office so that accidental interruptions, or eavesdropping, would be extremely unlikely. I had an Arc-Tec gizmo that did a sweet job on any pure techno, non-magical wiretaps, and it ought to be at least 95% effective against magical bugs as well. I usually used it at all of my private client meetings as it also contained a voice recorder good for about six hours. It looked like a fountain pen, and it could even write in a pinch, and with my permission Bel gave it a casual touch and then smiled.

"Very nicely made, I've never seen anything like it here. It's better by far than anything I can lay my hands on... your own work? It's probably unnecessary here, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if our fleet car didn't now have a bug or a few tracking devices in it. I'd grabbed the oldest and dirtiest car out of the motor pool, definitely not one of the two the garage boss first tried to offer me, so our ride yesterday was probably pretty safe and clean. Today, they'll have had time to fix that oversight. Probably your hotel room too, I wouldn't be surprised." That didn't worry me too much. Sean seemed to spend 99% of his time invisible hovering somewhere inches away from me and wouldn't be home alone much. Sean wouldn't need any advising to keep his own actions low profile. He always did. My uber-Brownie was more than capable of avoiding any detection, especially if forewarned.

Enough said and we nodded quietly in agreement. From now on we'd only hold 'safe' discussions in public places like this and leave the active misdirection for in-car discussions. Anything said in the car was assumed to be lie. Simple and easy. As for my hotel room, I'd already brought along with me any tools I thought I might need for work, either in my vest or jacket pockets. I make most of my own Arc-Tec goodies and I like to keep them small and very concealable.

For now I saw absolutely no reason to tell my willing co-conspirator and rather attractive partner that I had another bit of secret help on the side. Sean was an extremely valuable piece of long ranged danger radar and I wouldn't have given a copper penny for my odds on this case without him. Already he was family to me, and quite nearly becoming a true trusty friend I wouldn't want to be without. I felt already that I could trust Bel, but any knowledge about Sean fell into another privacy category entirely. Like my bonded Inca artifact, Sean was going to remain one of my hidden ace cards for as long as possible.