Chapter 2

In Chicago, I made a point of being the last one off of the train that early morning. My two small bags were all ready to go, as was Sean. How and what he packed, if he packed and where he packed it, I'll never know and probably don't want to know. After my recent adventure in the sky, I wanted to make good and certain that some Deseret B-Team wasn't now lining up to take their turn at a shot at me. Sure, I had significantly inconvenienced them back home, but I just couldn't figure that they'd already have organized up a horde or two of suicidal missionaries just to take me out. The kooks at Deseret were bat shit howling at the moon crazy, make no mistake about it, but they didn't tend to be stupid. Some of my bosses, superiors and acquaintances back home over the years tended to forget this, but then again a lot of them misunderstood me as well.

Really, I couldn't be that important to them. One lone bomber hitting a target of opportunity, sure ... gaggles of backup hit men, not so likely – unless the local Federal Bureau of Magical Regulation had been infiltrated or suborned, which sudden wasn't really such a totally outrageous or preposterous notion to me.

Face it, when you think of FBMR, you can't help but think of that old Charlie Chaplin silent short where he's a two-bit street magician being hassled by some useless Keystone Cops. You know the type, fat incompetent buffoons with walrus mustaches all running around blowing their whistles and waving about their truncheons, but never actually getting anything useful done. Incompetent, sure. Always have been, and likely always will. It's no secret they've been in a turf war for power with the FBI for years and they never share information between each other. Someday, especially concerning the terrorist activities of Deseret, that inability to share and play nice is going to hurt them badly.

The more that I thought about it, the more I gave myself internal odds that it was already a coin flip that more folks than the local FBMR office would know that I was in town as a consultant, and probably exactly why. Maybe this could work for me ... or else it was a certainty that I was already being set-up to fail – badly, loudly, publically and very politically ... probably with a maximum of anti-GWA diplomatic fallout and undoubtedly involving at least one unfortunate conflagration, such as a second Great Chicago Fire. What a cheerful thought! I was sure that my dossier positively screamed out 'Firebug!' and that whomever wanted me to fail would be certain to find something expensive and irreplaceable for me to burn down!

I made a mental note to myself to avoid thinking before 9 a.m. in the morning or before at least half a pot of coffee; it had never done me any good before, and Sean always warns me that I'll hurt myself trying to think someday. I could hear the little bastard giggling inside of my head.

The other benefit of being the last person off of the train was it was quite clear who my welcoming committee was. A lone woman remained on the platform apparently waiting for me and I decided I shouldn't keep her waiting any longer. I didn't sense any lurking snipers, but then again I had zilch ability as a procog. I did trust my protection and Arc-Tec abilities and I was pretty sure my suit could take a rifle round or two. If the bastard was good enough for a head-shot I'd be screwed, but there is no point in worrying about things that I have zero control over.

My receptionist was quite pretty actually, right from the first glance, in sort of a whipped dog sort of way. Her figure was pretty good but most of the effect was ruined by the way she slouched. Her head seemed to look down towards the platform floor more than it did scanning the train. I guessed that there were probably a couple of dozen places that she'd rather have been than standing around waiting for me this chilly morning. As I walked over to greet her, the view somewhat improved, but her mood remained apathetic at best.

She was tall and fairly slender, even with the dark heavy coat on to ward against the autumn chills of the Windy City. She wore dark boots with heels that came to a bit over mid-calf, but I guess tell that she wore them for comfort, rather than sexual effect. Her hair was a long dark mousy brown that fell haphazardly halfway down her back, quite straight and a bit silky, secured with a silver clasp behind her neck. Even from the train doorway I could sense a few subtle protection magic's from the clasp, but I doubted even another strong Adept could, but then again protection magic is one of my specialties. As was quite the typical fashion, her heavy dark brown skirt was quite long enough to cover the tops of her boots but they didn't quite come down to her ankles. Her outfit was prim, proper and professional, apparently complete with the typical narrow neo-Victorian corset that emphasized her quite good hourglass figure. She might have been well bundled up but you could still tell that she might be a real looker once all of the layers were removed. With the bit of heel on her boots her ass had a very nice swing to it as she walked to greet me and I wondered what she'd look like in just a micro T-back swim bottom on one of our hot Texas beaches, where nearly every woman went bare chested in season. Up here with the current ultra-conservative styles of fashion, I'd be lucky to ever catch even a hint of her bare lower throat, let alone even a hint of cleavage. Doing so wasn't technically against any law, but naughty women that habitually and wickedly exposed their bare ankles, arms or cleavage had a tendency to be arrested off of the street for suspicion of prostitution.

The preachers up here took their moral guideance duties up here pretty darned seriously. If anything even hinted at being 'fun', it was either outlawed or socially frowned upon. Even smiling on a cold cloudy day like today was probably criminally suspicious to most of the kill-joys, who were all perpetually mortified beyond words that somewhere, someone was probably having fun.

As I approached closer, I could tell that it was the eyes that really put their mark upon the young lady. They were dark with even darker circles around the eye sockets, the look of perpetual tiredness of someone who got up every morning out of bed nearly as exhausted as when they went to sleep, but did it anyway because they needed to, not because they wanted to. It was definitely the face of a career police officer whose career was going absolutely nowhere ... but was still too stubborn or proud to quit or admit defeat. The head and posture belong to a woman beaten and defeated by the world, but her eyes had just a bit of life left in them and showed me that she still had a bit of spark left and the will to fight. That gave me a bit of a smile to my face as I greeted her.

I liked her already even before she said a word. I'd seen that face before in my own bathroom mirror in the past from beating my head against the wall fighting idiots in the bureaucracy I knew I could never convince, but I could sometimes instead confound ... and often did.

"Darlene Belanger." She said by means of introduction. "You must be Zac Zephyr I suppose? I'm your FBMR associate and assistant for your visit." This admission didn't seem to thrill or excite her in any way. At least as far as she was concerned, my appearance was probably an ill-wind indeed.

"Spot on. The big Texas windbag has blown into the Windy City! Was it the cowboy boots that gave me away? I know it's over the top, but I couldn't resist ... and they are comfortable. I did omit the big cowboy belt buckle so that I wouldn't look like too much of a tourist ... or a lout. Should I just call you Darlene, or something simpler?"

She glared at me for a moment, but cautiously replied, "Just call me Bel. They call me 'Darling' at the office, or at least my boss does, and I hate it, so don't!" Her eyes glared to show me that she meant it. She must have had a lot of practice with that glare – it positively radiated 'You will know fear and then you will know pain!' Since I needed at least one friend up here, I was more than willing to meet her more than half way.

"Will do – Bel it is. So, what sort of rat-fuck am I walking into? And, just by the way, did you hear about the fun and games that occurred during my airship trip? I swear by St. Lovett they're never getting me on another fat turkey of a sitting duck blimp ever again!"

"Enough of the details for me to want to keep my ass of airships for awhile too. Figures you'd be the lucky one ... my boss did hint loudly to everyone that you were the top GWA fuck-up and a trouble magnet! They're calling it a purely mechanical accident in the papers and my boss has been laying it down heavy on any witness or newspaperman that even wants to hint around the words 'Deseret' or 'explosives'."

"Ouch! So I take it all of the important heads have remained tightly stuck into the sand for the duration? What are they going to do then if I do manage to track similar Deseret mischief happening up here?"

She laughed, but a tone that suggested that she thought the situation wasn't actually very funny at all. "Officially, you're already trouble ... more trouble than my boss wants to deal with. I think he'll let you look around and start doing what you came up here to do, but you're going to remain on a short leash and definitely with no touching allowed. Unofficially, I'm supposed to take you around, hold your hand, baffle you with bullshit, and make certain that you don't poke your fingers into any unfriendly dark corners ... or accidentally find any evidence that would make our bosses look bad, or worse, utterly and blindly incompetent."

About what I'd already figured. "So, I'll get planted into an inconvenient hotel sufficiently apart from the main office, with no particular plan of action and carefully sanitized intelligence leads, and instead offered a comprehensive tour of scenic locations, museums and frivolous night hotspots? A week or two later some memo will be produced suggesting that I'm a complete waste of consultant funding and I'll be shipped back home pronto with a third class train ticket. Something like that?"

"About that ... pretty much spot on." She admitted.

"Fair enough. How much overt resistance to my presence then by the rank and file? Any chance of getting a real lead or two, or is everyone kissing your bosses ass? Or is the real problem his boss, as well?"

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose." She thought. "There are few guys with their tongue so far up his ass that they could taste his prostate, and more than a few that just don't give a shit about anything either way and are just hanging in for their retirement. The rest? Who knows. I think I know one or two that might take a risk for you, if the results warranted it ... and the blowback from management wasn't too open." She shrugged. Also about what I had figured.

"What about plain vanilla corruption, or is it all, as I've heard, just an accepted job benefit?"

She glared at me but then shrugged. "It takes connections and money to get promoted to any position that has any sort of meaningful authority. That goes double for the Chicago PD officers. By the time anyone makes Sergeant, let alone Lieutenant or Captain, they're in the pay of a least one street gang and on the payroll of a major bootlegger, rumrunner or narcotic distribution organization. Not to mention getting freebies at that one local knocking-shop."

"And probably the smarter ones are in with the local gunrunners too." She knodded.

"Fair enough. It's good to know where you stand right from the get-go, so that we have as few misunderstandings as possible. I discovered a major Deseret gun smuggling ring working out of Austin, not even half of a mile from the Republic capitol building. Once the word got out the other BMA and GWA officials found similar rings working most of the other major citys, all of them moving a frightening amount of guns. To Deseret, obviously, but we missed the final links in the chain. Up here I'm sure the same organization is equally hard at work."

"But guns are almost totally illegal for civilians to own up here." She stated, as if by rote. "They couldn't possible find many on the black market and the only gun dealers have extremely rigorous paperwork tracking each and every gun."

"Put not your trust in Princes, or mountains of administrative paperwork and red tape. The more paper and regulations you push on something, the easier it is to forge and work the system. True, probably most of the guns are coming from across the Canadian border, where the gun laws are virtually non-existent, or smaller amounts from Texas and the rest of the GWA, but I've heard rumors that organized crime up here has gotten into the gun manufacturing business as well. This gives me several angles to investigate. Undoubtedly your boss swears that the local legal gun dealers are clean, so we'll look at them first, but I wouldn't be surprised to find them handling a lot more firearms than they are supposed to be."

"He's already put a team on them and they didn't find a dotted 'i' out of place." She insisted.

"Of course not, because they weren't supposed to. They probably even politely called first to say that they were coming and the official logs were all neat and tidy waiting for them. It's the other set of books that might have been interesting."

"You're a suspicious bastard." She commented, in a fairly approving tone of voice.

"Darned tooting! I was given this job by some of your Washington fed boys, but clearly the local office sees things otherwise and wants me either gone or minimized. So let's just go into your office like good obedient troopers, smile and nod our heads a lot and then ignore anything we're ordered to do ... or rather not do ... and then go turn over some big rocks until something nasty crawls out."

"Sounds like a plan to me!" She actually smiled, and I liked that look on her a lot. It was a crooked sort of smile, sort of like those muscles were atrophied and not used a whole lot. Like a dog who had been kicked a bit by an old master that was suddenly now finding itself in a new house and new rules, but not quite yet at all certain of a kinder outcome.

She'd been given one of the scarce agency cars, and already I was devising various schemes for racking up some mileage. It was small, almost cramped inside but Bel assured it that it was non-polluting and had exceptional fuel efficiency running on about 90% ethanol. Up here, this car model was a best seller, but the vast majority of Chicago's citizens took the Metro system of streetcars and electric trolleys. You could get pretty much anywhere you needed to within the city on the system, if you were in no hurry whatsoever to get there. Even non-polluting and high efficiency cars were borderline politically incorrect up here, largely being perceived at elitist and wasteful. Still, the elites in government love to have their perks, and cramped as I was, this still beat taking trolleys or walking.

With decent Arc-Tec, flyvers were equally non-polluting and environment friendly, as long as one didn't crash into too many birds. Austin, like most big metropolitan cities within the GWA, also had very functional mass transit systems but autos were still far from an uncommon site, even ones burning pure original refined gasoline. If you could pay the heavy taxes for a polluting auto and its fuel, so what. The taxes encouraged and subsidized greener and more efficient technologies, mostly Arc-Tec, reducing government costs for 'greener' drivers. Proper 'conservatism' protects the environment for future generations but allows freedom and choice. Up here someone in power long ago had decided that the concept of individually owned motor vehicles wasn't quite in fitting with their concepts of a socialist utopia, so even with federal government stickers and plates we received a lot of nasty looks from tram and trolley passengers and pedestrians. Funny how 'socialism' always seem to mean bringing everyone to be equal at the bottom, instead of finding creative ways to lift the bottom elements of society up.

The Republic of Texas and the rest of the GWA aren't perfect, but we try and stick with the governmental concepts of interfering in our citizens lives as little as possible. No one should be guaranteed happiness, but we try our best to avoid creating misery in society. Quite unlike our dysfunctional northern cousin.

With bans on liquor, and stimulating drugs (including caffeinated or sugared soft drinks and tobacco), 'unhealthy foods' (randomly defined as anything that particular judges or inspectors don't like but especially including most red meat or anything with fat), sex outside of marriage (or a locked bedroom), public dance halls (it might lead to fornication), virtually any weapon of self-defense, and so forth, I'd say that it would be difficult in the extreme to create another society with more misery than the USA had done since the days of Teddy Rex. If the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution had not been repealed during the Kennedy administration, I'd have bet some serious silver that most of these other social 'remedies' would never have been enacted ... and that by now a lot of very angry and well-armed citizens would have congregated in front of their congress to do something about it!

"Just how attached are you to the theoretical prospect of someday actually receiving your pension?" I casually enquired as we drove away from the station.

"Not terribly. I'm not going to make Senior here at this office, let alone ever become a Chief. It's strictly old boys club around here despite all of the Equal Rights, Affirmative Action, and 'glass ceiling buster' laws. I don't drink with the top boys, or golf, or drop my panties in the staff lounge ... and I definitely don't make their coffee. I've been quietly trying to get a transfer back east, but it's all 'old family friends' instead back there. I figure in another year or so, they'll be packing me off somewhere west, either the borders of Deseret, or the border of the British Columbia Territory, or worse, the separatist states."

I cringed with her. Most of the far western border US states west of the Mississippi were hotbeds of secession, and had been for decades. Federal authority there was minimal at best five minutes outside of the Minneapolis city limits. If the westerners had possessed arms in any numbers, this entire region would probably be in active revolt. Certainly Deseret was stirring the pot there, and rather successfully, and every federal officer, wizard or soldier tied down keeping the peace was one less defender along that weak mountainous Colorado, Wyoming and Montana border.

In principle, most of the GWA tended to agree with the conservative complaints of the secessionists – lower taxes, more liberty, less federal interference in strictly local affairs, not to mention legal booze, broads and guns. However, most of the more sensible libertarians could agree that yet another American civil war would only weaken everyone, and make the western pickings just that much easier for Deseret. The CSA had a more aggressive attitude, but then again they didn't have a border with Deseret. Against the GWA, Deseret hadn't gained a foot of territory in over twenty years, but their increasing encroachment against the western American states and the British Colonial Territory of Columbia has been slow, methodical and relentless ... and alarmingly effective. For better or worse, the western state situation needed to remained stabilized or they'd wake up some day to find that another hundred miles of borderline or so had suddenly changed into very unfriendly hands.

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.