Conceal Me What I Am

********** CHAPTER THREE

Our first day of interviewing witnesses and a parade of increasingly dubious suspects was quite uneventful, and wholly unproductive. Even with a bit of subtle magical nudging, giving myself a heavy duty 'Trust charm', so that strangers would tend to like and trust me, right from our first meeting, didn't turn up anything particularly interesting or significant. Our gut instincts were spot on, our 'Action List' we'd been handed with names of smalltime stool-pigeons and grade Z street thugs was indeed a bunch of fabricated twaddle designed to keep me running in a circle chasing my own tail for weeks. Even with my unnatural charming personality, our interviewees kept tight to their scripts, enough so that even an idiot could sense the same patterns being repeated ad-nausium. It was quite true that none of these alleged witnesses honestly knew a thing about any weapons violations, let alone smuggling... and it was even more patently obvious that most of them didn't have much of a clue about why they were even involved in our investigation in the first place... but they'd all been impeccably coached and rehearsed in advance to the extent that each said the same nothings in nearly the exact same sort of way.

Right off the bat, I also suspected some memory tampering had been used on a few of these alleged witnesses. A few of these very minor street lugs just acted too calm and smug, getting an obvious kick out of jerking us around. They knew that we'd be paying them a visit and now it was like payday! If I'd had to have guessed, a few had probably been used as part-time muscle or security for some previous past operation and had then received very adequate memory erases. That sort of grunt job wasn't unusual even back at home, something along the lines of:

"Do this easy and quick security gig, two gees cash for a few hours work, plus they've got a mage who can clean your memory of the job -- no witnesses, loose ends, or loose lips for them, and easy money for everyone, with no need for anyone getting hurt from seeing something they shouldn't have!"

Or something like that. Actually probably something a

lot

like that. Memory spells were tricky, usually only doable by a Wizard level Mentalist. I wouldn't have wanted to try one, it's not something you can learn from a book, you either have the talent or you don't. Done wrong (easy to do) there are literally dozens of things that can go horrifically wrong. I asked Bel to see if any of her local staff were up to that sort of fun and from the immediate reaction on her face I thought she knew right off of the bat the name of an excellent local suspect. One of the staff Senior Adepts, a bitch of a witch named Ingrid, was an unusually talented Mentalist, and also quite close with the boss and the feltching wizard lads. I had not met her at the office and Bel admitted that Ingrid kept odd hours and was often on private missions for the boss. That put her up nicely right at the top of my suspect list; already I was suspecting an inside job.

***********

The next day was a bit of an improvement, largely because I was getting a clearer idea about the sort of blank spaces that our smiling gunsels erased memories might be covering. With a little late night tangential thinking, accompanied by a few sips from a bottle of adequate bootleg Canadian whisky, I started coming up with a few ideas for some other questions that one or two of our innocent bully boys just might accidentally answer.

Our next likely suspect for further probing revealed himself just after noontime, a weedy sort of low-level gangster wannabe that just looked far too happy to meet us and was just dumb enough to dance and hop like a circus dog when put to the question. We could both tell right away he knew a few things he shouldn't and he was just sharp enough to realize he'd wandered off the safe and narrow interrogation path he should have been on, so he tried his hand at some unplanned free-style lying and prevarication, but he wasn't fooling anyone. When cornered, my final probing question finally made him spill his guts... 'Who do you think I

should

talk to that might know the answers to these questions?' Simple, direct... and apparently not covered by the memory spell.

Even with the Trust spell up, I still needed to pass my hapless victim a charmed silver dollar to slowly pry the rest of the information loose. Now, with my coin clenched tightly in his fist, subtly urging him to trust and help me yet further, and speak the truth without evasion, we now learned the name of an organizational higher-up, a certain local Bureau of Firearms taxation agent who, quote, 'was the fixer we wanted to see if we needed any illegal guns'. Naturally, we couldn't report this back to Bel's boss, but we decided that with a second more innocent and less pointedly revealing interview recorded for evidence early tomorrow morning, we could give ourselves a clear quasi-legal breakthrough in the investigation that Mason Probert couldn't squelch instantly, and probably also provide a suitable introductory welcome gift to take to the FBI.

The plan was simple but diabolical. Today, or rather immediately, we would ditch our tails and then rush over to see our new witness, but not report that we intended to interview him later on until our telephone status update first thing tomorrow morning. Then, hidden in watchful surveillance, we could wait to see if anyone rushed to close that loophole, probably permanently and lethally... and exactly whom. Springing our ambush, we would nail ourselves at least a nice mid-level criminal, and not some low level flunky. This would be a job the bosses would want done

right

.

Our new key witness, the local allegedly bent BoF agent lived in a nice part of town that certainly didn't seem compatible with life on a government civil service salary. He, naturally, wasn't at home but his helpful wife gave us his business card, and informed us that he should be in his office all day. That would do. I refreshed my Trust charm and then took the half hour or so that I needed to securely implant a rather strong truth charm upon another of my silver dollars. It was probably even a bit too strong of a spell artifice, especially on a solid silver dollar that the victim, I mean our witness, would be holding. The risk of mental blowback was fairly considerable, leaving a witness, or rather maybe a victim, incapable of lying afterwards for days, weeks or perhaps even permanently. Technically, evidence given under truth-spell was extremely illegal up here. Heck, it was only slightly less illegal back home, except under direct Imperial order. Still, we weren't going to record this interview for official evidence. Already I had a pretty good idea that we wouldn't like what we'd learn.

Trapped in his office and trusting me like an innocent child and now pathetically eager to do the right thing, our bent civil servant, David Stout, sang like a canary for the next three hours. His story was so spicy that Bel couldn't resist backing up and recording his testimony under oath, but even she realized that the odds of anyone other than us seeing his confession were about nil. Our crookedly little bureaucrat knew most of the mid and low level players in the gun smuggling game, and the sorts of shadowy high octane political power that protected them. Lots of senior political clout at both the FBMR and the local police, he was certain... but he couldn't name names other than that he was positive that 'very high ranking individuals' would protect the smugglers, and taking the lion's share of the illegal proceeds. Apparently, his motive for involvement was plain vanilla greed, but he had known about alleged Deseret involvement, enough so that I'd unquestionably brand him as a willing traitor to his country. Bel was even less generous and washed her hands of anything regarding his fate.

Stout could and did willingly identify the two primary middle men that he directly knew about, namely the pair of major arms dealers primarily involved and also the minor local crime boss that currently handled most of the transportation and security arrangements for the operation, at least within this part of northwest Chicago. The top rotten apples remained hidden up in their trees. Our pigeon was smugly certain that no evidence against them would ever make it to trial, and even the mid-chain links, these names he had provided, were not invulnerable to removal, or just plain unfortunate accidents. Immediately, if not sooner. He was dead positive that the ladder of evidence would be cut off right at his knees and any investigation would die right along with him. Forced to speak only the truth, he was already convinced that he was already a dead man taking his final breaths.

I thought, twice even, about adding a few extra compulsions to his charm, but I decided that I'd really rather wait and see who showed up to clean out his clock... and silence his loose wagging tongue. We weren't going to get any prosecutable evidence this way, but Bel admitted she'd also be a dead woman walking as well if anyone got a hold of a copy of her confession interview. For lack of a better idea, we decided that we'd stick with the existing plan, and if necessary just take that jump off of the reservation in order to bring in indisputable evidence the hard way, enough so that disgracing us or otherwise trying to further muddy the investigation probably wouldn't succeed. Any way we sliced the problem, we both agreed that we were going to need the help of the FBI.

The more we considered the mess that we were now in, the more we were certain that we were going to need outside help to punch open this case. With the restrictive media laws that pretty much hamstrung (if not eviscerated) the 1st Amendment, at least involving any government related crimes, no editor was going to touch our story without external independent confirmation that would hold up in a federal court of law. That again meant that we needed to make an ally of the FBI, but in order to get them involved, I needed something resembling some strong hard physical evidence, like a crap load of stolen or smuggled guns, or the probably location of a Deseret security squad protecting the operation... preferably both.

For the moment we didn't have any of that. Instead, to better portray an attitude of frustration, we nonchalantly made our way to the zoo to spend the rest of the afternoon. Re-locating our tail and letting them trail us again was fairly easy, two low level FBMR drones were handling the car surveillance detail, and then another pair of rather obvious minor league gangland gunsels with yellow striped jackets spent the next three hours shadowing us in the park. Bel thought that yellow was the gang color of the Clinton Street gang, but she wasn't sure. She also didn't have any police friends that worked gang-crime, so she knew no one else to ask, but she thought one of her other gangland contacts might know, but it would take a day or two. No hurry, at least yet.

With our audience pegged, it was simple misdirection to send a pre-prepared simulacrum made from a bit of Miracle Putty depicting an illusion of me walking off alone late that afternoon into my hotel. Until I met Sean and discovered his fetish for the magical silly putty, I'd never worked much with illusion spells, but after a bit of practice (and some practical 'how-to' hints from Sean) I was now getting pretty good at them! No one followed my doppelganger inside, a sure sign that our campaign of appearing to follow their misdirection agenda was working smoothly. I silently hid myself in the back seat of the car while she drove to her house and then we repeated the illusion of her walking inside. Certain that we were done for the day, our tails quickly became bored and drove off, and soon so did we, after leaving another of my putty simulacrums that duplicated the departmental car parked out in front of her apartment building. Sean, as usual was right... there is almost nothing you can't do with a handful of Miracle Putty, and I'd brought along quite a lot of the stuff!

Bel cast an intricate nullification spell that we hoped would jam, or at least mute down the magical tracker and/or voice recorder that we were pretty sure had been implanted inside of the car, but just to be safe we stayed as quiet as possible during the drive and we parked a full five blocks away from the gun store, next door to a popular nightclub. Hopefully, even if the tracker was still active and someone decided to check up on us, they'd assume we'd gone in for a tot. Bootleg liquor was indeed easily obtainable there, and we decided that we'd stop here after our visit to the crooked arms dealer.

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

It was getting late and almost near dark, but we were just in time to catch the city's top weapons dealer, and the number one culprit that Stout had fingered, right before his shop closed. From what our snitch had strongly intimated, our rogue arms dealer, Jesse Hollaway, did a great deal of subterranean business in the tunnels underground beneath his shop and didn't care a fig where or to whom the goodies went as long as the cash was green, or even better yet, paid in gold or good silver.

I'd mentioned that private possession of gold or silver coins or bullion was a Class-B felony up here, far away from civilization and my own land of limited non-intrusive government, but so was selling guns to your national enemies. Jesse just probably didn't care, and keeping your loot in precious metals was always a safe way to plan for an extremely uncertain future, possibly even as an international fugitive. I mentioned to Bel that it was more than likely that he wasn't going to be as easy of a cookie to crumble into obedience, and that we might need to take some risks. We needed to find those hidden guns, or at least a reasonable stash of them, to bring in the FBI to join our private party and that probably meant gunsels or other security, maybe including another wizard or two.

Bel thought she was good for that sort of party. The way she smiled to me more than hinted she thought it was long past time that she'd whooped up upon some seriously bad guys while getting a chance to shove her boss's pig snout of a nose into the shit. Just to add to the fun, there was a decent Earth Ley Line almost directly under our perp's gun shop. Of the elements, Earth is really my better fortes (other than Fire) and it makes excellent protective magic, but I rarely ever used it for offense. Still I could metaphorically speaking grab both hands into it to juice my shields up and even keep them going, hopefully for as long as was necessary, but the last thing I wanted to do was bring down the building (and the alleged underground tunnels) with a small earthquake. On the other hand, if things started to get dicey, a solid earthbolt or two shouldn't damage things too much. I felt Bel tap into the ground source as well, and maybe with an even smoother touch than I had done. A quick mental check assured me that her shields were well up to a few random gunshots now and hopefully even a magical bolt or two, if we were very unlucky.

Going inside, I felt a couple of high energy magical protective wards covering the shop's entrance. This sort of magical security was not illegal, but it was certainly extremely unusual. Most of the wards were on standby, as the shop was still open during normal business hours. I only glanced over them for a moment as we entered inside, but I was glad we weren't making an after-hours covert inspection. I think I could have canceled most of them out and harmlessly tripped the rest, but the protections were quite good, nearly up to my own level of expertise, and I was glad I wouldn't have to press the issue. There was also very likely some remaining magical tripwire or two, well hidden in the background and designed to be overlooked that could cause some bad things to happen, like a very strong earthquake... at least that's the way I'd program them. The wards looked good enough that I decided not to underestimate the wizard or very talented Adept that had set them. We certainly didn't need our evidence going up in flames!

Our rogue arms dealer was rather unfortunately resistant to my Trust charm, in fact quite disturbingly so. I also disliked the man at first sight, probably largely due more to his fashion sense that his squinty beady eyes and oily smile. For a moment I thought we had all disappeared back in time as Jesse, with his severe Neo-Victorian suit and gold buttoned waistcoat, and complete with a rather authentic gunslinger mustache, wouldn't have looked at all out of place in a late nineteenth century frontier gun shop. Well, except for the dandified ruffles on the collar and cuffs of his stiffly starched white shirt, and the earring. Not to mention the white pancake makeup all over his face too! Oh, and the lipstick and the heavy black eyeliner.

The current cutting edge of men's fashion this year was the 'rake' look, and to basically look as effeminate as possible. While no respectable American woman would be caught out in public without her corset, bustle, boned bodices, pelerines, fans, gloves, hats, and parasols, this season's gentleman of quality was in turn decked out with enough frills, flounces, lace, braid, fringe, ruche and ribbons to decorate an entire Christmas tree. While roguish earrings weren't uncommon adornment for GWA men, these northern dandies tended towards more feminine styling's, and combined with an unfortunate overlaying of make-up that would even embarrass a circus clown this gave the wearer a distinctively effeminate appearance. Frankly it was currently impossible to tell the heterosexual men from the gay men, and they both tended to fashionably flounce and deliberately lisp equally.

I had been amused by some of costumes that I'd seen so far while in Chicago, but our crooked gun dealer was quite at the very peak of current fashion!

I suppose the original intent of feminizing men, when the trend started during the civil rights era, was simply more social 'equalization' of the sexes. One GWA social-historian commented in a magazine article I had read recently that part of this was also cultural psychology, due to the fact that the USA had a weak social culture and had been defeated in war, repeatedly, by all of its neighbors... even by Cuba. Other editorialists less kindly also attributed the new growing style as 'Look how manly we are, the more feminine we look and act the more masculine we really are!' Others trace some trends that emerged from the gay and lesbian communities after the passage of the 29th Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed sexual freedom (for just about everyone except for the oppressive heterosexual majority). Since the homosexual community was largely immune from the avalanche of sex restriction laws passed in the last two decades, including the insanely misguided one that makes it a federal crime (albeit a misdemeanor) for a man and a woman to engage in premarital sex, or any other sort of 'deviate' sex not intended for procreation, gays seem to now enjoy more rights and privileges that their straight counterparts. This relatively free lifestyle is perhaps being emulated... and now even socially encouraged.

I guess it's quite understandable actually. If a teen kid or unmarried adult wants to get their rocks off, legally, they can either masturbate or indulge in a 'legally protected' same sex relationship. With the recent political majorities espousing increasingly extreme environmentalism legal and judicial activism, same sex relationships are now being overtly depicted as socially preferable to school children, rather than 'traditional relationships and the reprehensible over-breeding and excessive exhaustion of Mother Maia's precious irreplaceable earth resources'.