Angelinus

Chapter 17

The Spying Game

Remus took Angelinus into the kitchen and sat her down at the table with a sandwich and a drink while Severus installed their captive in the parlour, firmly attached to a straight-backed chair with stick-it spells. A long, black robe came downstairs and followed Severus into the parlour, Remus imagining it snuggling around his mate's long lean form as he prepared their catch for questioning. Severus wasn't a cruel man; he was simply efficient and went about seeking information in a businesslike way, which was quite terrifying to watch. He used torture; terror and intimidation the way a surgeon used a scalpel and forceps, no emotion, no waste of movement.

Angelinus looked a little upset when a low, pitiful moan sounded from the parlour but she didn't say anything, instead eating her sandwich from the inside out as usual. Remus didn't say anything about her deconstruction of the food, allowing that it was not the time for....

The sound/word 'hraulss' suddenly echoed through his head and Remus did not stop to think. He flung an arm around the little girl and disapparated instantly, picking a destination at random. He disapparated three more times, each randomly, just in case a tracking charm was seeking him out. The code word meant nothing in English or even in human but in wolf it was the equivalent of a life order to protect the pack. He had taught it to his friend many years before and had assumed Severus would have forgotten it. Severus would never have said or broadcast the code word unless it was direly necessary.

Angelinus clung to him with arms and legs, her face buried in his chest as she whimpered a little. She didn't understand what was going on and was plainly terrified. Taking a moment to sooth her, Remus made a decision and very gently lulled her mind to sleep with a lullaby and sweet dreams charm. They didn't use such devices very often so she had absolutely no resistance and smiled a little in her enchanted sleep. Sighing, Remus decided he had to stash her away safely and had the perfect spot, the only spot he could come up with in an instant.

Liz and Gail Albright had been running the Cafe Del Lobos for four years. They'd seen wizards come and seen wizards go and knew who was who in the community. When Remus Lupin apparated into the rear yard of the Cafe and peered around the door, the limp child in his arms, Liz simply closed the kitchen door for privacy and pointed to the back stairs. She followed him up and indicated he was to lay the child on the white coverlet of the spare bed.

"Trouble?" she asked softly, meeting the lambent amber gaze without fear or favour.

"Probably."

She sighed and rolled down her collar exposing the back of her neck. A faint blue design appeared as soon as Remus put his finger onto the top knuckle of her spine. "French underground," she murmured. "We were warned you would be in the vicinity and to give any support you might need."

"Support? I - thanks." Remus nodded once. "Can you keep her safe? I have to go fetch Severus."

"No problem, put up your own wards and charms inside ours. Good luck." She disappeared back down the stairs leaving him to it.

Leaving Angelinus secured and safe in her charmed sleep, Remus took stock of his resources, a pair of board shorts, a pair of sandals, a pair of sunglasses still stuck to the top of his head, and his wand. 'So well equipped for a rescue,' he mocked himself silently and apparated back to the public road leading to the cottage's private access. Easing away from the trodden path, Remus thought carefully then cast a very old but very familiar charm over himself. The chameleon spell did not make the wearer invisible but it did allow them to blend with the background. If used properly it was even more effective than a 'no-see-me'.

Gliding off through the sand-hills, Remus worked his way downwind of the cottage and anyone else that might be there. His superb nose, hearing and eyesight gave him a distinct advantage over any other wizard in the neighbourhood and he used all three enhanced senses to the utmost as he located the first of the intruders by scent. He was ensconced in a fold in the sand, commanding a good view of the cottage's rear and side windows as well as a stretch of the private beach. Remus drifted to a position slightly above and behind him and picked up a small rock tossing it lightly off to the left and in front. A wave of the hand and the lookout thought he saw movement, craning his head up to get a better look. Dropping onto his back, Remus clubbed him insensible and only just stopped himself from breaking his neck. A quick pat down brought to light a grubby, empty wallet, a wand of some sort of hawthorn, which broke satisfyingly over Remus' knee and a Muggle device for contacting people, a radio.

Cursing silently, Remus carefully filled the device with sand and hoped he remembered correctly. He knew water would have been better but he didn't want to use magic if he could help it. If it were he setting up this ambush, he would have put out wards to detect any use of hostile magic in the area. Taking stock, Remus scented the breeze again and found another faint trace coming from further around the bay where logically another lookout could watch the other side of the cottage. A third trace came from the seaward side and even as Remus watched a guard moved into view on the beach itself, eyes turned to the sea.

Narrowing his eyes for better acuity, Remus watched the guard patrol then turned to look at the back windows of the cottage. There was no movement but even from here he could feel Severus in there, feel the odd spark of intensity in his chest. Merlin, this was so like old times, it wasn't funny, but it did get the adrenalin popping, Remus acknowledged ruefully as he slid over the dunes on his way to take out the second guard.

This one was more nervous and wary than the first, his head moving, and his eyes never still. Remus lay concealed behind a straggly bush and observed him for a few moments, not liking the strange weapon slung over his shoulder. Remus was no expert but the contraption looked like a Muggle rifle, one of the ones that shot out lots of bits of lead very fast. He had occasionally come up against one when he had been a security guard in Muggle London quite some years ago. Questing for a spell, Remus blinked when he realised the idiot was a Muggle but he didn't lose his caution. He was not as contemptuous of Muggle thugs as many of his counterparts, and knew just how dangerous and indeed inventive Muggles could be when it came to this sort of situation. A row of thorn bushes gave Remus an idea and he carefully picked up one of the spiky seedpods that had dropped onto the sand. By using a tiny trickle of magic, he animated the pod and set it off in the Muggle's direction. By tiny finger flicks, he had the pod work its way up the man's leg and under his t-shirt. The man jumped and scratched at the spiky thing, making the radio at his side crackle a query.

"Nah, nothing, just laid on a bloody burr that's all, out!" he muttered into the handset then spent a few seconds picking the burr out of his shirt. They were his last few seconds of consciousness, Remus' chokehold on his throat and Remus' bared teeth in his face were his last sensations for quite some hours.

Lookouts taken care of, Remus drifted down to the cottage wall and listened carefully. He could hear movement in the kitchen as well as movement in the parlour, making both rooms unsuitable for entry. Looking up, he smiled grimly when he saw the bedroom window was still open. Even in human form, Remus was a werewolf and made the jump easily, landing lightly on the windowsill with superb balance and little noise. Ghosting into the room, he glanced around sniffing and found nothing had been disturbed. So far, so good.

Moving silently across the hall, he entered Angelinus' bedroom, which was directly above the kitchen and knelt on the floor. Taking his wand, he very slowly and carefully built a spell to cut a hole in the floor. He had hoped to cut through near the light fixture - which he did - but it constricted his field of view. Looking around vaguely, his eyes fell on one of Angelinus' toys, a cardboard periscope, and he grinned. The Muggle device was crude, primitive and non-magical, perfect in fact.

Pinpointing the lookout in the room below, Remus was slightly outraged that the thug was eating his sandwiches. By angling his wand just so, Remus cast a perfect stupefy, the man slumping deeper into the chair without a sound. Baring his teeth in a feral grin, Remus moved back into their room, taking the useful little carnival souvenir with him.

His luck was not quite as brilliant this time, two men standing facing a third with Severus strung up by his thumbs between them. The reporter was off to their left, still tied to his chair and looking horror stricken as the man behind Severus threw another short, sharp right into his kidneys. Remus knew he couldn't take too much of that, having been badly injured in the war. They had obviously found that cutting Severus just made him more stubborn if the myriad of bleeding lines on his chest and belly were to be believed. It struck Remus that these boys were only using Muggle methods of interrogation and he quickly murmured Acclaro with a magical detection suffix.

Both the reporter and Severus were wizards but the three intruders were Muggles. They had potions with them, both wizards showing signs of veritaserum although both slightly different. One of the men showed up traces of the Imperio curse so they weren't completely in ignorance of magic, probably. Decision made, Remus moved off to the far corner of the room and dissolved a section of the ceiling away, leaving a hole big enough for him to slide through head first. Before he moved, Remus bared his teeth and cast a glamour charm over himself. Now he looked like a wolf as well as felt like a wolf.

Sliding head first through the hole, Remus took his weight on his hands on top of the solid wooden cabinet against the wall. He ended up crouched on the narrow shelf while he surveyed the situation silently then flowed down behind a wing-backed chair. Moving as silently as his wolf counterpart, he waited in ambush until he had a clear shot at all three men, his spells firmly in mind. Silently apologising to Severus, he sent the first spell over his shoulder and took the man behind him in the head with a conjured bludger. The other two saw the ball fly past and yelped but it was too late, even as they turned the stockier of the two caught petrificus totalus in the chest and fell over backwards. The third screamed as a huge grey wolf flew at his chest, and turned into a narrow eyed, vicious human with his hands around his throat.

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't rip your head off?" Remus growled in his face.

"Because we need to ask him some questions," Severus muttered from above, his smoky voice penetrating Remus' killing rage and cooling it instantly.

"Oh Merlin Sev, are you alright?"

Severus snorted, allowing the veritaserum in his system to do its work. "I'll be pissing blood for a week unless there is some fancy spell work done on my kidneys but apart from that, no real damage. Get me down now! I do not appreciate being left hanging around in the altogether while you are playing with your food!"

Remus swallowed a snort of slightly hysterical laugher as he obligingly finished the spells holding his bond mate up and caught him as he slumped limply. "Hold still; let me cast an analgesic charm. Where are your potions? Here, drink this. How big a dose of veritaserum did they give you?"

"Nothing outstanding, it was a poorly brewed batch of the old style anyway, far too heavy on the loqulia syrup and too light on the jackoman."

"Only you would dissect the poison as you drank it," Remus muttered, as he helped Severus into a chair. "What do you want done with this lot?"

"I don't think the one you hit with the bludger is good for anything and the petrified one can stay that way. So, that just leaves him. Give him a three drop dose of this," Severus handed Remus a vial and the werewolf made very sure his captive had maximum pain as he swallowed the dose. "What is your name?"

"John Maddox."

"Well John Maddox, tell me exactly why you came after us, who hired you and why you want to know about Malfoy Industries, and any other matters you might feel are related."

The man swallowed hard but the truth serum was of Severus' own brewing and quite irresistible. "Two guys came to see the boss, they wanted us to come out here and find you two. They wanted to know what part you played in uncovering the cartel that was feeding the drugs into the British population. They wanted the recipe for the anti-direstium drug so they could manufacture a nullifying potion and they wanted to know why Malfoy Industries was muscling in on the action; how much of a cut they were willing to settle for and how much they were willing to invest to get a share of the new distribution of wealth."

"Who are your employers?"

"I don't know. The men who came looked to be Mediterranean types but then they changed and looked like Scandinavians then they changed into Africans so no-one knew who they were."

"Accents?"

"They had English accents but the 'not posh' sort but not Scottish."

"Who are your masters?"

"I don't know. We never see anyone, we just leave a message on a news group and another newsgroup sends back a reply within twenty-four hours. It's all computers these days, no really honest work for a bunch of fives and not to mention the death of tailing skills. One tiny electronic bug and that's the end of that, it's all done by satellites. Waste of a perfectly good family tradition, if you ask me." The man called John Maddox began to ramble.

Remus looked at Severus who shrugged with an air of faint embarrassment and sighed. "I can't seem to stop that happening as the damned stuff wears off. You never know what will set them off on their personal rant, but off they go, spilling their disgruntlement with the world as if they are owed an audience. I really must work on that. So, they use a newsgroup. John Maddox, what newsgroup?"

The man barely paused for breath as he rattled off the URL then continued to lament the losing of perfectly good thugging skills to random acts of electronics. If it hadn't been so serious, Remus would have been fascinated.

"What shall we do now Sev? I only stunned the guys outside and they were Muggles too."

Severus considered the reporter carefully before rising stiffly to his feet. "Obliviate the lot of them and let's get out of here," he said, carefully keeping an eye on the reporter who made a half-hearted protest against the sentence. Both men had a fair idea that he had some sort of recording device about his person so even if they obliviated him, he would still get his story. For a few moments, Severus considered finding and destroying the device but then he stopped. Perhaps it would work to their advantage for the events in the cottage to get out into the public eye. After all, the small coincidence that had poisoned his children seemed to be taking on a greater and more far reaching life than they had ever expected when they found their child had been accidentally poisoned.

While Remus packed and miniaturised their belongings, Severus worked on the thugs, noting various observations into his personal remember-crystal before performing the Obliviate spell on each man. Finally he returned to the reporter's side and sat down opposite him, crossing his legs comfortably. "I'm still not sure of your motives Mr de Santos but I think I will take a chance on them being purely journalistic. I am going to say this to you and you are not going to remember this until the right time." Severus leaned forward and put his lips close to the journalist's ear, speaking in a low, almost silent manner that would not be picked up by even the most sensitive charm.

Once he had given all the information he planned to, he sat back and smiled at the reporter who shivered in fear. What he had just learned hit at the very roots of his soul, resurrecting ghosts of the SVW that had almost destroyed the British wizarding world and spread its infection to Europe and beyond. "Do you truly think it may come to that?" he asked fearfully.

"Oh yes, all too easily. I saw Tom Riddle's plans from his first ascension, when he was a reasonably sane and charismatic leader. What he said made a seductive sense, still does to a certain type of mind. Believe me, if he had not have gone mad in the interim I have no doubt he would have won the war and we would all now be hip deep in Muggle blood and bombs. Magic is all very well but in comparison to these so-called inferior beasts, we are nothing, merely amateurs playing at being bad guys. It only takes a short flick through a Muggle encyclopaedia to verify that and try a history book for the really shocking stories of atrocities. Try the Second Muggle World War as a starting point and then go on to Korea, Viet Nam and Cambodia if you really want to kill sleep forever."

"Sev, are you ready? We have to get Angelinus, don't forget," Remus called from the hallway.

Rising, Severus pulled his robes around his thin frame and looked down at the reporter with a quizzical expression. "If you want to know the Malfoy connection, just remember that his wife is a Mudblood and they have children too. Obliviate!"