Conspiracy Theory

A few miles outside Memphis

New Year's Eve 1972

Whenever Cassius Scrimgeour looked back on that evening, he would never quite be able to tell if the whole thing had been a bizarre dream, resulting from too much Old Clabbert-Horn Tennessee Whiskey and not enough sleep. It simply seemed too far-fetched - even for someone from the magical world, where bizarre happenings were normal everyday occurrences, and even for an Auror, for whom coping with such things was part of the job description.

On the other hand, his recollection of what had been said was very clear - surprisingly so, given the amount of Old Clabbert-Horn that had been consumed by both parties. It was, in fact, etched in his memory, and he didn't like to think that he could imagine things quite so strange in such vivid detail. He wasn't a Seer, after all, nor a Visionary, nor a Diviner. Dammit, he wasn't even a writer.

On the other other hand, always supposing that he had heard what he thought he'd heard - it was surely something that he should never have been told. That consideration made him feel slightly reassured that it was in fact untrue, because it sounded like ... well, frankly, it sounded like a load of the stuff that fell out of a Hippogriff's rear end. After all, if by some horrible chance it was true, and if the details should ever became common knowledge ... well, large amounts of said stuff would be hitting the fan.

On the fourth hand (and even Cassius had to admit that he had now stretched this metaphor beyond its useful limit) Agent Redderton was a notorious gossip when in his cups among colleagues. So assuming, purely for the sake or argument, that it was true, and that he had happened to know about it ... then it would be just exactly the sort of thing that he would be dying to tell someone about.

It was all very unsettling.

The evening had started pleasantly enough. After the successful conclusion of their case (a complex investigation into the international trade in a particularly dangerous Haitian potion) Bill Redderton of the US Magical Investigation Bureau had invited his British colleague to stay with him over Christmas and New Year.

"No, no, y'all must come and stay in my little place, Cassius my boy," he'd said expansively. "Why go all the way back to England when you have some time off? Bring your good lady wife along and enjoy some real Southern hospitality."

That had sounded pretty good. So he had. It had been a very pleasant few days. Cassius had to admit that young Redderton (well, all right, maybe not that young really, but once you were over eighty all law enforcers seemed to look young) was an excellent host. His 'little place' had indeed turned out to be quite small ... as mansions went, anyway. It probably had less rooms than the Department of Magic in Washington, and Cassius supposed that it would barely have been possible to build more than half-a-dozen Quidditch stadia in the garden.

Immediately after dinner on the last evening of their stay, Redderton had winked at Cassius, informed their respective wives that the gentlemen would join them in the main lounge a little later, and invited him to give an 'expert opinion' on a recently acquisition. Cassius, who had a shrewd idea what sort of thing that might be, accepted with alacrity, and followed his host into the study.

The American MIB agent pointed his wand at a section of the wall and muttered a complicated-sounding little spell. A small hinged panel appeared, and from behind this he extracted a bottle and placed it on the desk with great care.

"Old Clabbert-Horn Tennessee Whiskey," he said with reverence. "When my pappy introduced me to this, he said, 'Son, let me tell you that this is the finest beverage ever created by wizards, bar none. It is three parts nectar, one part Sleeping Potion, two parts Veritaserum, one part Memory Charm, and one part death wish. It bewitches the mind and loosens the tongue. Enjoy and learn.' And let me tell you, Cassius, my grandpa didn't raise him to be no liar." He gently teased the stopper out of the bottle and poured two generous measures. "Sip with care, my friend. This is something you'll want to savour."

Cassius sipped with care. The golden liquid tasted very much like any other whiskey on the tongue. Its searing effect on the throat gave a hint of what was to come, however, and it was when it hit the stomach that the full consequences of drinking it started to become clear. Cassius sat bolt upright as the aftershock from the stuff first flooded through his veins, then seemed to rattle around in his head like a stray Billywig.

"Gosh," he said. It was about all he had the breath to say.

Redderton smiled broadly. "Top-up?"

"Please."

Naturally, after several glasses of Old Clabbert-Horn had been shared, the conversation had started to ramble. And equally naturally, they had begun to compare war stories, as often happened when Aurors, or their foreign equivalents, got together over a drink or six.

"Tell me about this guy I hear's been starting to cause you trouble recently," said Redderton, waving his glass expansively. "The Lord Volauvent or whatever he's called. He sounds Continental."

Cassius snorted. He tried waving his glass in the same way, but that risked spilling the contents, so he put it down carefully instead. "No, he's probably one of ours, unfortunately, whoever he really is. 'Lord Voldemort,' he calls himself. I suppose he must think he'll terrify people merely by the sound of his name."

"Gee. Is he, like, a real English lord? With ermine on his robes and a crown and everything?"

Cassius shook his head - a mistake at this point in the proceedings, as it made it swim alarmingly. "That's a Muggle thing. Some of our families are connected to their old aristocracy, but we don't really have one of our own. Not ones with titles, anyway." A nagging thought at the back of his mind caused him to add, "And I don't think even theirs actually have crowns. Wouldn't that just be the Queen?"

Redderton laughed. "You're asking me, buddy?" He gave his British colleague a look which was surprisingly acute under the circumstances. "You think this guy could be a problem? My daddy was over your side of the ocean in '45 to help out when that crazy German was causing trouble. He said things got pretty bad back then."

"Yes. Yes, they did." Cassius sobered up very slightly as well. "He took advantage of the chaos in the Muggle world as a distraction to make his bid for power in ours. I fought in some of the battles too ... please tell your father we were very glad of the help from the overseas volunteers, because Grindelwald had an extremely strong force of dark wizards allied with him."

The American looked at him thoughtfully. "Sometimes I forget how far back you go, my friend. How do you see the threat from this new guy?"

"Nothing we can't handle, I hope." He sipped the whiskey slowly and gloomily. "But when something like this comes along, you can't help suspecting that he has allies inside the Ministry. It's so easy to see conspiracies when they aren't there in our line of work. The trouble is that sometimes they actually are there, aren't they?"

Redderton's eyes lit up, and he poured himself another glass, albeit a little unsteadily. "Oh they certainly are," he said. "We've had to cope with more than you would ever believe over here, so many they all seemed to blend into one another at the time. Did I ever tell you all that happened after Lawrence Hackenbacker decided he wanted to fly to the moon?"

Cassius pondered this for a moment. The part of the old Clabbert-Horn that was Memory Charm might or might not be working on him, but he was sure he would have remembered a tale like that. "I don't think so," he said. "Do tell. He wasn't anything to do with the Muggle space race, was he?"

"Only indirectly." Redderton sat back, wearing the kind of contented expression seen only on the faces of confirmed raconteurs who have, entirely unexpectedly, been invited to tell one of their stories. A couple of family portraits on the wall actually rolled their eyes. He paused briefly, possibly in order to gather his thoughts from wherever it was the bottle had scattered them.

"Well now, Lawrence Hackenbacker. A young wizard from a good family, a very good family, but he was obsessed with Muggle pulp literature. This was back in the late Thirties, Cassius, y'see, when they were starting to write those, er, 'sconce fiction' stories about alien creatures and space flight and things like that. A lot of our young people got caught up in the craze as well, as if magic just wasn't exciting enough for them."

He looked faintly disapproving; Cassius briefly considered pointing out that he remembered all this happening with his own family, but decided to let it go. He wasn't really in a good condition for strenuous mental activity, such as thinking.

His friend, oblivious to this, carried on talking. "Lawrence, now, well he wanted to explore the moon like the, uh, spacenauts or whatever they were called in the stories, so he'd get to see all the giant tentacled pod monsters and the three-headed people - and the scantily clad space maidens, of course."

"But there aren't any scantily clad space maidens on the moon," said Cassius with slight puzzlement. "Or at any rate, I don't think the Muggles have seen any. Were they hiding?"

"No, no, the Muggles wouldn't have seen anything." Redderton's face took on a secretive look. "But that was what they liked to write about in their stories. The writers weren't in it to make money, and stuff that appealed to lascivious adolescent fantasies found the biggest audience." He smiled briefly, perhaps remembering his own teenage reading. "Certainly would have with me at that age. Unfortunately, Hackenbacker thought it was real, y'see, and he figured it couldn't be that hard if Muggles were building machines to do it. So he tried to make his own space craft. Taught himself flying charms, and started putting them on all sorts of things. Seem to recall from the file that his first attempt used an Engorged saucer, for some reason, but he soon moved on."

"I see what you mean," murmured Cassius. He did so out of pure politeness - he actually hadn't the foggiest idea where Bill was going with this. "Um ... so where did the conspiracies come into this then?"

"I'm getting to that," said his host, with slight reproof in his voice. "Y'see, by the late 40s he'd got himself as far as a prototype. Now his parents finally talked some horse sense into him, and told him to find somewhere out of the way if he wanted to try it out. Didn't want the family embarrassed by their son breaching the Statute of Secrecy, now did they? So in the summer of '47 after he finished school, he took it down to New Mexico where there was a nice lonely bit of desert, and tried a test flight."

"New Mexico?" asked Cassius, a dim recollection of something nagging at the back of his mind. He was sure the whiskey wasn't helping in this respect.

"Yep. Of course, the boy was only eighteen, and though he was a fairly good wizard, he didn't know anything like enough to make proper flying transport. The contraption he built actually got up a fair way - but then the charms slid out of sync, and the whole thing came crashing down on the outskirts of a small town called Roswell."

"So he was killed, then?" asked Cassius sombrely.

"No, no, he wasn't flying the thing personally. Of course, the local Muggles saw it come down, and as luck would have it there was an army base nearby. Soldiers arrived very quickly and took charge. Ironically, if the boy had done his damned experiment anywhere close to civilisation, our people might have been able to get an Obliviation Squad there in time to do something about it. But by the time young Lawrence managed to find a fire and a box of Floo powder and call in to the Department for help, it had all gone too far. Too many people had seen the little alien bodies and we didn't know who they all were."

Cassius blinked. That last bit hadn't made sense. "Alien bodies?" he said in a puzzled voice. "I thought you said it wasn't a real space ship?"

Redderton shook his head. "House elves," he explained laconically. "Hackenbacker's family were rich enough to have a number of them, and he borrowed some for crew. Silly young idiot, he should have known they don't like heights! Naturally, they panicked and completely lost control when things went wrong."

"But ... how did we get away with it, then?" asked Cassius in bemusement. "I mean, the Muggle doctors must have examined the bodies, and they're not stupid."

Redderton smiled. "Well, the boys in Concealment Operations went straight to the top - no choice by then. They Apparated into the Oval Office, explained what had happened to the Muggle President, and between him and the Emergency Plausible Explanation Committee they cooked up a plan to keep it quiet. Of course, they couldn't prevent the good people realising that something was being covered up, but they spread the rumour that it was because aliens had landed, so naturally everyone believed that. Of course, it helped that the Hackenbacker boy had made up his flying machine so it looked like something out of his magazines, all flashing lights and buttons and funny shiny things. It was what people expected to see, you know?"

"Ah, I see what you mean about a conspiracy now," said Cassius knowledgably - or as knowledgeably as an intoxicated British wizard could reasonably manage to be about American Muggle history. "Good of their President to play along. Decent fellow, obviously. Wasn't he called 'True Man' or something?"

Redderton snorted. "Well, he was true to himself. He was a politician. I've a pretty keen idea that part of the deal might have been for our people to help him win the election the following year, because he certainly confounded their pollsters. A few judicious Duplication Charms on the ballots - well, you can see the possibilities. And you don't see half of what I mean yet, Cassius. Y'see, once he was back in office, the guy double-crossed us."

"He did?" said Cassius with surprise. This didn't sound good. He sipped his drink thoughtfully. It didn't seem to burn quite as much now. Maybe he was getting used to it. Maybe the alcohol, and most likely the magical enhancements, were numbing his senses slightly. Or maybe the stuff had simply cauterised his throat.

"Oh yes. He didn't trust us at all. And then while we were working together to set all this up - you know the sort of thing, writing misleading memos about where things had been taken, issuing implausible press releases about weather balloons, ordering people not to discuss aliens in order to make them suspicious - some fool told him about the Nevada Nexus."

Cassius blinked. "The Nevada what? I've never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. We don't like to publicise the Nevada Nexus. It's a place with natural barriers preventing magical access from outside. So when he heard about it, this Muggle President ordered a military base built there, and in one area of it - the fifty-first I think - they set up a top secret research station into magic! Then they used our own damn cover stories against us, to spread the rumour that it was really studying aliens! Must have been the biggest Statute of Secrecy disaster we've ever had in this country. Oh sure, we knew about it at the MIB, but there was no way to close it down without drawing even more attention to ourselves." He paused. "I'm sorry to say they even had some traitors helping them out - Muggle-born wizards and witches mostly, of course."

"Traitors?" said Cassius, startled. "That's a bit strong, isn't it?"

"No, no." Redderton shook his head sadly. "Don't you know your history, my friend? There was a very strong movement over here in the 50s to purge 'unreliables' from positions of responsibility - Muggle-borns, half-bloods, people married to Muggles."

"That's ... terrible." The British Auror sounded deeply offended. His friend looked at him sympathetically.

"People were scared, Cassius. They felt threatened. You have to remember that the immigrant wizarding community in this country was founded by people who were fleeing persecution. We've always been sensitive to threats over here. It's a sort of paranoid style, comes with the territory. And the Muggles were making weapons that could destroy whole cities. Even your guy Grindelwald didn't have a spell that could do that, did he? People didn't trust anyone who might have divided loyalties."

"Maybe so. But if you pushed them out, I'm not surprised some of them turned against you. It sounds exactly like the problems we're having. I don't like it," Cassius said mutinously.

Redderton shrugged. "You could be right, my friend. It didn't work very well here either. But when something like this Area 51 came along - well, let me tell you, it just proved the point for most of the people in the know at the Department of Magic. Of course, we had to keep it from the ordinary wizards and witches in the street. At the time, we had enough trouble trying to cope with the Illuminati. Who knows what could have happened if this Area 51 had become public knowledge?"

"But ..." Cassius had a feeling there was something very wrong here, but in his current state he couldn't quite put his finger on it. His head was starting to throb slightly, in a way that suggested that he'd learn about the 'death wish' aspect of the Tennessee Whiskey in the morning. He focused on one thing Redderton had said. "The Illuminati? Who the hell were they?"

The American smiled, clearly enjoying being able to tell the tale. "Ah yes, I forgot to tell you about them. A Wizardkin organisation - like your purebloods - with contacts inside and outside the Department. Very secretive, they thought they were the only ones who could see the threat. They were determined to defend wizards against Muggles, and we didn't know who was and who wasn't a member."

It was Cassius' turn to snort. "'Wizardkin'? Sounds like this ... Voldemort fellow's Pureblood Movement. Were these 'Illuminati' trying to seize power as well?"

"Yes, but this may have been worse, I think. Our version tried to get wizards in positions of power in the Muggle government too. Completely against the Statute of Secrecy. It was almost a complete disaster."

"But ... you broke it up, of course? Put them in jail?"

Redderton grimaced. "Of course not. I thought you'd understand, Cassius my friend? Many of them were prominent wizards in the community. A lot of people here approved of their agenda. The Secretary of Magic himself couldn't have kept his job if he'd had them arrested, there would have been a public outcry."

"So what did you do?" This was sounding uncomfortably close to home for Cassius. He took another swallow of the Old Clabbert-Horn to distract him.

The MIB agent settled back into his chair with pleasure to tell his tale. "We had to take an indirect approach. As it happened, one of their senators saw some White House briefing papers about Area 51, found out there were wizards, and took objection to us. So, for a few years we leaked information to him anonymously so he could publicly hound out any Illuminati plants in significant Muggle jobs. Once they were openly accused, it wasn't something they could fix by a simple Memory Charm, y'see?"

Cassius blinked at him. He was too far gone at this point to remember Muggle history in any detail, but this rang a bell - a very quiet bell, one on which the clapper had been padded so as not to disturb anybody. "Hound out wizards? But that would be a major Statute breach in itself? And I thought he was trying to get rid of, er, people from red states or something?"

"That was his cover story, wasn't it?" said Redderton patiently. He grinned at his colleague's confusion. "Reds under the beds, Russian commuter influence - I mean, he couldn't have stood up in public and said that wizards were infiltrating the government, could he? People would have thought he was crazy."

"Ah." As Redderton leaned over to refill his glass, Cassius was struck by a thought (no mean feat, given the number of times that the glass had already been refilled). He added suspiciously, "I don't suppose your Illuminati took that very well."

Redderton shuddered. "You could say that. It took time, but we managed to keep control of things. It must have frustrated the living heck out of them. So that was where it got really bad."

"How much worse could it get?" exclaimed Cassius.

"Much. The final straw for them was when the Muggles stopped talking about exploring space and actually started doing it. Remember when their President declared he was going to aim at the Moon by 1970?"

Cassius made a genuine attempt to cast his mind back. "The one known by his initials, was it? JKR or something?"

"Close enough. When he announced that, it was big news even in the wizarding world. People were terrified. I mean, no-one had ever been to the moon. Who could possibly tell what kinds of new, unknown magic they might find up there? Of course the Wizardkin sympathisers weren't slow to take advantage of this and start clearing out people with Muggle connections again. So when they started a movement to stand up for their rights and protect their families, we practically had a civil war on our hands. It was a nightmare trying to keep a lid on it all. Then the Illuminati decided to stop Mr Initials once and for all, and that brought things to a head."

"You ... you don't mean what I think you mean ...?" Cassius had a horrible feeling he knew where this was going.

"I'm afraid I do. They found some kooky Muggle guy - name of Oswald Lees, I think - and set him up to assassinate their President. They even put the Less guy under Imperius to make sure."

"They what?"

Redderton shrugged. "Might as well be hanged for a dragon as an egg, eh?"

Cassius looked at his colleague in horror, seeming to see him through a haze. What he was saying seemed to be making his head swim. Or possibly these things were just a result of the whiskey finally taking full effect. He couldn't say which he was more appalled by - the idea that wizards had planned to assassinate a Muggle leader, or the fact that it had somehow been kept secret. "What ... what happened?"

"Well, as luck would have it, by that time we'd managed to infiltrate a MIB agent on the inside. One of the senior Illuminati who knew what was going down couldn't keep his mouth shut - there's always one - so when he started bragging about the plan to his subordinates, I ... er, our man learned about it too. Unfortunately, this was only a few minutes before it was due to be carried out." He shook his head. "It might have been better if he'd never found out."

"Because he didn't have time to do anything about it?"

"No, because he did. Just. All he knew was, their President was going to be shot while he was going through Dallas on some sort of parade. He didn't have any details, he didn't know who the assassin was, he didn't know where they would be hiding. He had to think quickly, and unfortunately he didn't even have time to check in with headquarters. He just Apparated to Dallas, and Transfigured his robes into a muggle police uniform so he'd blend in. He managed to catch up with the car part-way through the parade, and found a little grassy hillock where he could stand to point his wand at the car - the wand was disguised as a Muggle firelimb to avoid suspicion, of course - and cast shielding wards on it. Then he breathed a sigh of relief and thought, right, crisis averted."

"Bit it wasn't, was it?" asked Cassius. His brain was, admittedly, thoroughly fogged at this point from his colleague's combined assault by jaw-dropping revelation and Old Clabbert-Horn, but this didn't sound right. "I thought they got him?"

"They did," said Redderton sadly. "Smart little ... sons of a werewolf, those Illuminati guys. Y'see, they'd given this here Lees fellow a magic bullet to fire to be on the safe side. It was charmed to hit, and of course it would go straight through any wards. So m ... our guy's attempt to help only made things go from bad to worse, because the wards took effect after the bullet had hit. Made it do a sort of loop-the-loop, and of course it wounded someone else in the process so there was no doubt about the path."

Cassius gulped. "Oh s ... er, dear me."

Redderton settled back in his chair with the air of a man rounding into the home straight. "Exactly. Fat was in the fire then, my friend. I mean, there was absolutely no way they could fail to notice this was physically impossible. And half their news events were shown live on television, of course, so if we'd just leapt in throwing Obliviate spells right and left it would only have made things worse. It seemed like catastrophe. I saw some of the Department guys, they were running around panicking as if someone had put a Peripatetic Hex on them. I mean, just think of it - an event that could cause the Muggles to become aware of us, and maybe start a wizarding war at the same time! One group of rabid Wizardkin types with sympathisers all through the Department, another with Muggle connections who felt excluded! I really hope things with your Vole-mart guy don't go that way, because let me tell y'all that was trouble."

Redderton reached for the bottle again to pour the remaining contents into his glass and made a disgusted noise. It took a moment for Cassius to realise that the two events weren't connected. "Hell, we couldn't even get to the assassin in time to find out anything before they Imperius-cursed somebody else to knock him off. In public, dammit! Of course we eventually got a crack at that guy - one of our MIBs Apparated into his cell one night with a bottle of Veritaserum - but he couldn't tell us very much.."

"What did you do?" said Cassius, who by now was feeling almost comatose. "Did you get them? How did you hush it up?"

"Well our inside guy was able to tell who plotted the assassination, so we locked them up, at least. But hell, a lot of the group are still at large. And as for hushing it up, we just had to go to their new President and practically beg him to help us find a way out of it. And let me tell you, it was lucky we did."

"Things had gone full circle, then?" Cassius was quite pleased with himself for still being able to make such a logical connection. Maybe he could now move on to more complex problems, such as sitting up straight without falling off his chair.

"Yep. Fortunately, he was willing to do a deal. He leaned on their enquiry to conclude that the bullet followed a perfectly natural path. Of course, a lot of people didn't really believe that, but between our guys and the Muggle government, we put out so many different rumours about what was actually being covered up that no-one ever got close to the true solution. According to the boys in Concealment Operations, that's always the best way. Everybody at the Department breathed one hell of a sigh of relief, Cassius, but let me tell y'all, their man struck a hard bargain."

"Oh yes?" said Cassius weakly. His attempts to sit up weren't being greatly successful.

"Yep. He insisted on a binding magical contract that we'd both stay out of each other's politics, except when their President or our Secretary of Magic made a specific request to the other. Fortunately, that's pretty much what both sides in our world wanted anyway, so some good came out of it. Calmed things down and prevented a war starting. Well, our war, at any rate."

"Not theirs?" Firmly, he eased himself into a semi-upright position.

"Well, one part of the deal as I heard about it was we had to conjure up some boats and make it look like their guys were being shot at. That helped them get a war started, I think. But of course the main thing they wanted was to help them fake the moon landings."

Cassius was so surprised he slipped down in his seat again. "But those were real! I saw the television pictur ... oh. That wasn't the moon then?"

"Of course not! I told you the Muggles wouldn't have seen anything. Anyway, why would they want to spend billions of their dollars on that when they could divert the money to the war effort? They had this perfectly good secret facility in Nevada that wasn't going to be used any more as part of the deal, so we conjured up a moonscape, and cast levitation spells on their asternuts to make it look as if they were walking in low gravity. I mean, no-one has ever actually been to the moon, so who'd know any different?"

Cassius shook his head, which by now was starting to throb alarmingly. He looked at his colleague imploringly. "Bill, tell me now, please ... you are, erm, kidding me about this, aren't you?"

Redderton shook his head. "No, no my friend. Every word I have told you is the exact truth as I have known or heard it, and even Veritaserum would not make me tell it any different than Old Clabbert-Horn." He inspected the bottle mournfully. "And speaking of which, we seem to have run out of Tennessee's finest. I guess we should go and join the ladies, Cassius ... Cassius?"

But Cassius was slumped in his chair, having finally succumbed to the Sleeping Potion aspect of the beverage.

The hangover was already setting up shop when he woke much later that evening and stumbled into the lounge. It was doing a brisk trade when he went to bed; and when he woke up in the morning its business was positively booming. It drove most other thoughts out of his head, and by the time the headache began to wear off he and his wife were already travelling. Keeping track of the schedule for Portkeys and international Floo links took all the concentration he could muster, and so it wasn't until he arrived back home that he had the chance to think over the details of what had been said. When he did, it was enough to bring the headache back again

He picked up a quill and a piece of parchment, with the intention of writing a report for the British Auror records, but quickly rejected the idea. If it were true, then the senior officials would hopefully already know about it - and he'd probably find a couple of Obliviators at his door the next day, if he was lucky. And if it wasn't true - well, he didn't really want to get the kind of reputation for paranoia that dear old Alastor seemed to be establishing for himself. No, much better to let sleeping Crups lie.

He walked back into the lounge where his wife was watching the Muggle news on television. By some curious coincidence, the presenter was discussing the inauguration arrangements for the current US President, returned to office a couple of months before. They seemed reassuringly magic-free.

Cassius smiled to himself. Well, if Bill had got it right, Muggle politics over there should be a lot quieter now. That had to be a good thing. At least there wouldn't be any more conspiracies coming to light over the next few years.