Chapter 8

It was just a few minutes after 3 a.m., the hour that tries men’s souls ... and their empty stomachs. Of course the DC central bus station restaurant was closed. We were both famished but there was no helping it. Dixie didn’t have a cousin or other distant relative with an all-night chili joint here. More’s the pity.

To complicate matters, there wasn’t a single taxi to be found at the taxi stand, nor would there be any until sometime after 6 a.m. One of the locals told me that an alleged austerity ordinance banned motor vehicles from the streets after dark, except for, of course, the incessant parade of government vehicles on ‘official business’. We got to watch an endless parade of them. By official, they of course meant porting about intoxicated high level civil servants and legislators from illegal nightclubs and speakeasy’s along with their mistresses and rented escorts, all whom appeared to be young enough to be their daughters. What a surprise ... government officials enact insanely stupid laws and then violate them with utter impunity... ‘Do as I say, not as I do!’

I supposed I could have asked any of my dozen or so fellow travelers, or any of the additional two dozen or so con-men, public informers, pimps or independent bootleg liquor salesmen all hanging around the station this early morning for directions to the GWA Embassy, but that would have attracted way too much attention. Even more than Miranda’s short skirt was already generating. Saucy wench! Her naughty sinful ankles and knees were on display, along with at least six inches of soft young virginal thigh! The first morality patrol that passed us was going to get the shock of their lives!

At least two of the pimps had already approached Miranda about offering her a lucrative part-to-full time job opportunity with their stables of whores. This was happening despite the fact that I was standing right next to her and scowling at anyone that looked at her twice. We also seemed to be attracting the attention of a fat dumpy looking balding guy who was trying, but unable to blend into the haphazard stonework of the bus station. He was furiously scribbling into a notebook, no doubt a paid peeper, probably working on spec for one of the alphabet soup agencies. I mentally put the odds at better than 2-1 that he’d be in the next taxi cab following us.

The leys were strong here in DC, with all five elements being amply represented in a wondrous magical buffet spread, rich and ripe for plucking at will. The Founding Fathers weren’t stupid, and collectively a majority of them belonged to at least one magically influenced secret society. Being a ‘magician’ was technically illegal under British law, even in that era, but it is generally accepted with a wink and a nod that at least four of the first five US presidents could channel magic. Good old Ben Franklin, when he wasn’t banging innumerable girls young enough to be his grand-daughters, wrote at least three popular works on the science of magic and one masterful textbook, ‘The Practikal Scientific Application of Magick‘, which remains in print today.

Almost heady with the rich scent of magical energies, I resisted the rather pleasant thought of turning the cement to mud underneath the feet of the resident watcher and letting him sink right up to his oversized furry eyebrows. As amusing as that thought was, it just would have attracted even more attention. Reluctantly, I parked my butt on top of my suitcases to wait until dawn and I left my watcher unaltered and otherwise unsoiled. Miranda, with a loud bored sigh, did the same, seating herself on top of her two steamer trunks and she began to fidget with increasing enthusiasm.

Being a bit short of the local (nearly worthless) currency, I sidled over to the least dodgy of the three apparent bootleggers and sold off two random bottles of some good stuff from Sebestyen Dénes private railcar liquor collection. Miranda’s father had exquisite taste and had stocked his private railcar with nothing but the best. Trust Sean to save all of the near priceless booze rather than most of our personal items! It made for a nice wad of the old ready for walking about (and taxi fare) money, and meant that I wouldn’t have to cash in any money orders anytime soon.

We’d made it to DC, and for a rather pleasant but dull four hours no one attempted to kill us. I could get used to that ... but the fucktards would (and did) figure out that trouble was in town quite soon enough!

The cabbie was another dodgy sort that, like the bus station resident watcher, more closely resembling a race track tout or a ferret than a cab driver. He had twice the usual allotted amount of nose and sharp beady eyes that didn’t seem to miss much, and the moment I gave our destination I could hear the gears starting to whirl in his weasel like skull. It was going to be a race to see who could report us to the authorities first. The first watcher had indeed taken the cab behind us and was following, but he had competition now for the rights to rat us out. Our cabbie had a radio and thus, the advantage!

Being a clever sort of the Mustalid species, he noticed the tail behind us almost immediately and grinned a rather nasty sort of smile displaying a fine row of rotting teeth. Deciding that he had unwelcome competition for getting the first claim in on the proverbial thirty pieces of silver for ratting on us, he picked up radio right away and made a preemptive strike.

“Control, Unit 10-59, traffic check please. What’s the thirteen on traffic at the GWA Embassy on Mass?” Control didn’t reply back for over a minute. I already knew that we were being set up for trouble.

The taxi control radio dispatcher eventually responded, with a tone that suggested she was issuing an order, rather than a suggestion. “Unit 10-59, this is Control. Suggest that you detour along Connecticut and take Kalorama. Rock Creek Bridge is blocked by demonstrators as far south as California so be advised of delays in the area.” Ah ... an excuse for a long pointless detour then. This meant that company was coming but they wanted a few extra minutes to set up a proper reception for us. How thoughtful!

I hadn’t burned down large portions of a city in what seemed like forever! Unfortunately, I was fairly certain that my Embassy wouldn’t accept ‘self-defense’ as a suitable excuse for exploding or imploding another nation’s capital. This meant I’d need to use tact; a concept that had never quite gotten beaten into my head in school, although Mrs. Gomez in 6^th grade had made a concerted effort.

From here on the pace distinctly slowed down. To avoid the ‘usual traffic’ the driver made a series of ‘shortcuts’ that weren’t, usually involving roads partially shut down for repaving. Also, since I got the impression that our destination was somewhere to the northwest of the city, this meant that the driver’s tendency to drift further to the northeast to pad his time was intended to do more than just earn a bigger fare meter.

Radio codes are pretty much universal everywhere; I think there’s an international standard. From my BMA training and a few years of grunt work with both the GWA military and the Austin police and fire departments, I’d learned the basics. 10-59 was one of the ‘trouble’ codes, meaning that a suspect needed a security check. In DC, that probably meant being hauled forcefully out of the car and beaten until you piss blood for a week before being hauled off to some dungeon for lots of direct questioning.

Eventually, about forty-five minutes later I knew we were getting close to our destination when we hit Connecticut, and when we shortly turned off onto Kalorama a few minutes later I was already raising shields. Miranda, sensing that I was gathering magic, did the same and gave me a very tired look of concern. She’d been dozing in the cab for most of the trip, exhausted and relieved that our trip was apparently nearly over. Now, she was beginning to sense approaching trouble too.

“Brace yourself and get ready,” I whispered to Miranda, “we might be coming to a very sudden stop and more than a bit of bother.”

“Sooner than you think,” Sean advised into my left ear. “They’re setting up a roadblock at the circle just up ahead, stopping every taxi. Shall we have Trixie give them a surprise?”

“Too early in the morning for a nice bonfire and I forgot the marshmallows anyway,” I muttered, probably loud enough for the driver to hear, but I didn’t care. I mentally added a few wishful thoughts about peacefully resolving any confrontation, and Sean derisively snorted. No ... I didn’t believe that anyone would be interested in just talking either.

“Security checkpoint up ahead,” The taxi driver helpfully announced, with a bit more gleeful interest than anyone ought to have possessed. “I’m sure there’s no problem, just have your papers ready to be presented and we’ll be there at your Embassy in just another minute or two.”

“Sure we will ... now tell me the nursery story of the Three Bears”, I muttered under my breath.

The police roadblock was efficient and even from a distance it seemed nothing like a mundane checkpoint. Three police cars with a total of five officers were present and I could sense a couple of other unfriendly eyes staring at our cab the moment it arrived in line at the traffic circle.

“Taxi 10-59!” The driver chirped, passing over his permit to the officers. I could see the slight head shake to the right side, indicating us. He probably winked at the policemen too.

I had my GWA/US countersealed orders ready in hand, but they were not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. We didn’t have diplomatic immunity ... and this time it was going to be an issue.

“Snipers at three of the buildings surrounding the circle, one ahead and two with side/rear shots. Strictly mundane stuff. Want Trixie to smoke them out?” Sean enquired with a slight giggle.

“If they shoot, she can take out the front one, but I want to practice some more with using magical reverse parabolic trajectories. I want to see if I can handle the rear two at once with little advance warning ... but with shields.”

“Roll down your windows and let’s see your papers, slowly ... troublemaker!” The nearest officer to the cab demanded, with his revolver already out and pointed at me. Troublemaker? I’d only been in town for about four hours! The other four officers had their revolvers out of their holsters and pointed at us now too. Strike one. My spirit of cooperation, limited at the best of times, was quickly evaporating.

“Papers ... you don’t need to see our papers!“ I mentally suggested, as I channeled a little of the local ambient spirit energies. Have I mentioned that I suck at mentalism magic? This was pure schoolyard playground level magic and I wasn’t any better at it now than I was then. An older kid named Frankie Blake used to enjoy making me duckwalk while making quacking sounds and I never once could get back at him. Well, so much for my attempt at tact!

The officer didn’t even blink and his gun was nearly pressing at my skull. No sense of humor at all. Besides, the recent movie ‘Star Wars’ had never been approved by the national censors to be shown in the USA ... too much favorable depiction of magic, not to mention the hero’s being rebels against a lawful government. Idiots.

“Flowing waters... you need to run and take a piss, urgently!” Miranda helpfully suggested to the pair of cops on her side of the taxi. “Badly ... like a rippling stream flowing from a gentle waterfall, flowing, smooth, fluid and flowing irresistibly... flowing! You have to go... now!“ She commanded, and the pair of officers ran off immediately, desperately trying to hold their overstrained bladders in check until they could reach the distant row of bushes to relieve themselves behind. Well, that was sort of embarrassing. Sometimes I think that Miranda was teaching me nearly as much as I was trying to teach her!

That just left the two on my side and the guy standing in front of us.

“Fuck your papers!” I muttered as I grunted and melon-charmed the pair, knocking them silly onto the pavement with bleeding noses and perforated eardrums, but skulls left intact. “Driver,” I then added, grabbing his right shoulder hard, “unless you want to get turned into something small, green and very squishy, take your foot off that brake and get us moving. The idiot in front will move once you start trying to run him over ... and if you even slow down before you reach the Embassy gate you’ll be catching flies on a Lilly pad for your next career!” To give him a touch of extra motivation I summoned up a bit of cool green flame that looked spooky and malevolent but couldn’t hurt a fly. Probably.

He floored it and did ram the officer standing in our way and bounced him off of the front grill, but he fortunately didn’t quite actually run him over. The snipers started shooting but missed twice so wildly that I didn’t even bother to try and shield or reverse the bullets. The next two shots were more accurate and I sent them promptly back COD, return to sender. One return hit a sniper in the shoulder and the other one landed just short, striking the edge of the concrete about two inches below their chin, and neither shooter felt good about trying their luck a third time. The sight of the front-most sniper, falling off of the rooftop engulfed in flames deterred them quite nicely.

I’ll say this much for our taxi driver, he could put down the pedal to the metal with the best of them once he was sufficiently motivated. I’d scared the guy enough that he didn’t even start to slow down once he saw the throng of demonstrators in the street ahead of us. The GWA Embassy was apparently the last big building on Mass Ave. just before the river bridge, and street access to it was almost entirely blocked by hundreds of demonstrators. It was also big, taking up an entire small city block. Our driver was too scared to even think about braking, but he just leaned on the horn as he barreled towards the corner, and without even slowing he took it on two wheels before then slamming on the brakes, still mashing the car horn until he skidded to a complete stop less than ten yards away from the main Embassy gates.

Our arrival had not been unnoticed. The loud car horn and burning tire rubber had cleared a small path of safety around us, but we needed time to get our suitcases and trunks and drag them inside to safety. Sure, we had big unfriendly Marines at the gate to help ... once we were inside, but they weren’t going to fix bayonets and repel all boarders for us out here. Some of the better prepared protesters had close access to supplies of large rocks and bricks piled up on the sidewalk opposite the Embassy gate and I was sure that more than a few of them were itching to try out their throwing skills, and start pelting us.

The demonstrators were a motley crew, a mix of welfare program recipients and gutter sweepings of homeless street people and useful idiots that had been undoubtedly bused in wholesale with the promise of a box lunch. Leavening the crowd was a smattering of low-end civil service professionals that had been ordered by their bosses to attend ... and pretend that they cared. Mostly they didn’t. I guess those folks weren’t getting the catered lunch. It was by every definition a manufactured protest crowd, complete with nicely printed protest signs and banners. There was hardly a single genuine ‘concerned’ haus-frau or organized ‘professional’ bleeding heart present at all. At a glance, you can tell that some government minister had picked up the phone and ordered a ‘protest to go’, to further some foreign policy aim. The signage bore mixed messages, most obviously stuff left over from yesterday’s protest or last months. Mostly it was generic, non-specific stuff like ‘GWA – Hands off the Commonwealth’ and ‘Fair Play for Deseret’, and the like.

I’d heard that the USA had shifted its interest towards the Commonwealth of Virginia and this seemed to indicate that my government had at least nominally backed our rather inept and bungling British ally, at least for now. The CoV was a messy lingering after effect of the second American Civil War of the 1880’s. Having suffered the brunt of fighting during the first war, the state of Virginia seceded this time from the Confederacy, but rather than rejoining the Union, they instead petitioned Great Britain to join its Commonwealth. This was actually a very clever and politically astute move. What Virginia really wanted was semi-independence, but militarily or politically it stood zero chance of survival if left all on its own. By joining the Commonwealth, it sacrificed foreign policy and global trade powers, but it gained the benign protection of what was then one of the premier world powers. While the fortunes of Great Britain ebbed considerably during the 20^th century, the CoV managed to prosper in its role as a neutral buffer between the CSA and USA.

After nearly a century of military defeats, retreats and political reverses, Great Britain was a hollow shell of its former glory and considered by most political analysts these days to be the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. This had left Virginia increasingly vulnerable, militarily and politically. An easy and nearly bloodless victory for which ever nation had the will to seize her first. Facing defeat against Deseret in the west and without the political will to either adapt or commit to total war against their old enemy, the USA was searching for a quick painless (and cheap) victory somewhere ... and the weakened CoV seemed to fit that bill!

Like in Texas, the weather in DC can change on a dime, or so they say. The USA wanted peace at any cost in the west ... and their ambitions now looked southward.

There wasn’t much point in further subtlety anymore, so I just went Johnny Cash on the crowd, who now seemed likely to want to try and lynch us. Already the shock of our sudden arrival had worn off and a few of the quicker thinking protesters were starting to run for the brick and rock piles.

“I fell into a burning ring of fire!” I shouted out as I generated a circle of fire around the taxi and expanded it just enough outwards to allow us enough room to grab our luggage and drag it and ourselves to the gate. The crowd decided then and there that they weren’t being paid nearly enough to deal with a wizard and they started to scream and flee from us.

“Get running too, weasel!” I growled at the terrified driver. “Run fast and maybe the flames will only burn off your hair and eyebrows ... and if I hear that you’ve ever ratted on another GWA passenger, I’ll make sure you become a human torch!” He didn’t need to be told twice. His clothes and hair caught on fire and stayed that way for at least half a block, as he was too terrified to stop and pat the flames out. Good riddance.

“Zak Zephyr, Republic of Texas Licensed Adept!” I shouted, unable to get my papers out from my briefcase again with my hands overloaded, as I dragged my suitcase and one of Miranda’s overstuffed trunks up to the gates. Now by law we were on GWA diplomatic soil, and safe. I think the ring of fire had presented my bona fides adequately; the gate opened right up and the quartet of armed marines gave me a really snappy salute.

“Nicely done, sir!” One of the young sergeants exclaimed as he took care of Miranda’s trunk for her as one of his corporals took care of mine. “Are you expected, Sir?”

“Probably. Need to see the Head Wizard and present my orders, hopefully before anything else goes humorously and horrifically wrong this week.”

“Best kind of wrong Sir!” He grinned. “Wizards have the entire third floor, so that’s where you’ll want to head, Sir. I’ll just take you to the main desk and some assistant commissioner responsible for daily counting the pencils will get you settled. Be loud and rude, that way they’ll know you’re important and not some career bureaucratic lackwit. Ah, main desk just up ahead, Sir ... a pleasure to be of assistance to you, Sir!” The sergeant saluted me again and gave his overly polished boot heels and impressive click together for emphasis. I took note of his name and thanked him. It’s always useful to have a Marine on your side!