Monday
September 22, 2009
10 am

Niobe was an early riser, but on this occasion she hadn't yet gone to bed.  She was owl-eyed and bleary as she trudged up from Hogsmeade.  Her long cloak skirted the mossy road, and a curling tail of steam wafted behind her from the warm cup of coffee in her hand.  It was her fourth since dawn had broken in London.  Barnabas Cuffe, the Daily Prophet editor, had the whole paper running around mad.  There was just too much going on.  Among them, the line on Colonel Kabir Ahmed had gone bone dry! No one could find the man! Her contacts at the Ministry and St. Mungo's were all completely flummoxed, and the other people she cornered either genuinely didn't know or were excellent liars.

But a quiet smile touched her lips.  She had a lead.   She'd come to Scotland by Floo Network this morning to see if she couldn't get the interview the Colonel owed her.  (Her apparition skills were horrible when she was this groggy.  It was obnoxious with the price of floo powder in this economy.)

The nearer she got to the castle, the more students she saw, still peppering the lawns.  There was a class near the edge of the woods, she could see brooms on the other side of the lake, flying formations.  Hard to believe this was where they might be hiding the nearly assassinated Colonel.

She looked over her shoulder as she veered off the main road towards the Forbidden Forest where the old hut was.  In her days at school, the old half giant Hagrid lived there.  Now the Infirmary was there, and the enigmatic Native American Healer residing.  Niobe'd only heard of her some, when getting directions from Rosemerta at the Three Broomsticks.

She didn't knock at the door.  Instead, she tried the handle and opened it a touch.  Then when there was no noise from with in, she opened it more.  Enough to see inside.  It was bigger than it looked on the outside, in typical wizarding fashion. 

"Hello?" she called softly.  "I don't mean to intrude, but I think the Colonel was expecting me sooner or later," she said with a grin to whomever might be inside. 

Ahmed peered around the shower curtain, hand on his wand. It had been tempting to just pretend there was no one home, especially since it wasn’t his home and Tulo was away on some mysterious errand.

“Ah,” he said, recognizing Niobe. “So it’s you, is it?” Throwing on a bathrobe he saw…and smelled…the coffee in her hand. “Where’s mine?” he asked, grinning down at her.

Odd that a man from the Himalayas…one of the prime tea-growing regions in the world...had a fondness for American coffee, the stronger the better. But no matter. Tulo always had some around and he had just finished brewing a pot. Picking up his mug, liberally laced with cream and sugar, he said, “Come. I was just going to sit outside and enjoy the morning.”

True, he’d been planning on getting dressed first. But he did not want to leave Tulo’s place unmonitored, with someone there that he didn’t know. So, tying the belt on his bathrobe, he led the way barefooted to a table and chairs outside…where they could not be observed from the campus.

He pulled out a chair for Niobe as a raven flew overhead, laughing raucously. “So,” he asked with a smile. “How did you find me?”

There he was! Colonel Ahmed was here!  Niobe didn't hide her delight and surprise, grinning at the tall wizard in a bathrobe.  Even better, he seemed pleased to see her as well.   Their connection at St. Mungo's all that time ago hadn't been short lived.  Part of her hoped he'd seen her article, but she wasn't sure if he took the Prophet.

She stood and watched as he gathered his own coffee and led her outside.  'Enjoying the morning' wasn't something Niobe was ever interested in doing.  She wasn't very outdoorsy, but whatever the Colonel wanted. 

"Lead on," she said with a happy sigh.  She still couldn't believe she'd found him.  Last anyone had seen of him, he'd been in London, likely Diagon Ally and then he was missing without a trace.  She followed him out, sipping her own drink, considerably sunnier than the dark circles under her eyes seemed to characterize.

She took a seat next to him and didn't immediately take out quill and notepad as she normally did.  She wasn't going to have to fight him. And she needed a moment to relax.  Warm coffee in her hands, she responded to his query with a theatrical cringe.

"Oooh, you don't want to know that.  It's entirely unflattering.  I might respond in kind and ask why you've hidden yourself so well.  Hogwarts isn't exactly inconspicuous, though it does have two very telling advantages: no Apparation in or out, and muggle repelled."

She cocked her head. "Is this telling?"

There was an empty bench in front of them. Ahmed put up his feet, damp from the dewy grass, leaned back and took a sip of coffee. He had seen the article. He could imagine after reading that bare-bones account that Niobe Thursby was chomping at the bit to know more. However...he had talked to Adon Eleor again before escaping from St. Mungo’s, and they had agreed on what should be held back, at least for the time being. Which meant there was little more he could say.

Ahmed felt bad about that, though he understood the necessity. If a suspect knew too much about something that was not in the papers, that would be almost as strong a piece of evidence as the clichéd smoking gun. But Ahmed was not by nature a secretive person, nor was he accustomed to dealing with reporters. He pictured the men who had sent him here, sitting in their offices smirking.

He did not know why he felt such an urge to talk to Thursby. Perhaps it was that when he woke up in St. Mungo’s, and his law enforcement colleagues were expecting him to be sensible and reasonable when he was still dazed from the attack, she had been a friendly face. Perhaps it was that like himself, she was a product of British colonial adventuring, and would know how it felt to be always the outsider. And perhaps it was nothing more complicated than that she wasn’t Rita Skeeter...

He saw the dark circles under her eyes and guessed that she hadn’t slept the night before. He wondered if she had spent it tracking him down. He also guessed that sitting outside to drink coffee was not her normal practice; but there was actually quite a nice view of the Forbidden Forest from here. Sometimes a deer or other creature would cross the glade, and once, early in the morning, he thought he had seen a unicorn.

"Oooh, you don't want to know that.”  

Ahmed smiled at the theatrical cringe. It looked like she had practiced that quite a bit...“It's entirely unflattering.”

“Unflattering to whom?”  he asked. “To you, for using such a mundane source as simple common sense? Or to me, that my friends would give away my location...” Vlad might easily have done so, just to get the inevitable in-depth interview over with.

“I might respond in kind and ask why you've hidden yourself so well.  Hogwarts isn't exactly inconspicuous, though it does have two very telling advantages: no Apparation in or out, and muggle repelled."

"Is this telling?"

Ahmed smiled. “Telling, Miss Thursby? I suppose that depends on who does the asking. Because you see...I did not ask lightly how you found me. I am here...hiding in plain sight as you might say...because conspicuous or not, I feel reasonably sure that while I am here, no one else is going to come after me with a dart gun. I trust you, or we would not be sitting here right now. But...if you found your way to me, I cannot help wondering who else might...”

Niobe held the warm hot coffee in her nine interlaced fingers, peering through the steam at the Colonel, who looked less than stately in his bathrobe.  Last she'd seen him, he'd been in full uniform, pallid as a corpse and surrounded by some of the most important law enforcement personnell in the country.  Foot-on-a-bench, in-a-bathrobe Colonel Ahmed- it was a sound disguise.  He belonged out here on the patio.  Niobe, who was a very urban witch, looked a little bit incongruous.

But Ahmed seemed to be as interested in getting information as she was.  What could that mean? She knew it must be terrible to have almost been murdered and not know when the next attempt might come.  But why was he hiding, and why was he asking her for information.  Wasn't the Ministry taking care of him?  A question for a little later perhaps. 

Instead, she decided to respond.

"Was hard to find you," she admitted, "I've got friends in all corners of this country, and they tell me what they know when they can.  They also tell me if they can't tell me what they know.  But not a single one of them could even tell me there wasn't anything they could safely reveal.  So when my web fails, I needed to turn to the gaps I had in the first place.  And frankly - that's Hogwarts.  Breaking news doesn't exactly pour out of this place."

"No one gave you away, if that's any comfort.  Hogwarts was the last place I was going to look."

As she spoke, she set her coffee down and took out her quill.  But she didn't yet liven it up.  It just sat dead in her lap for the moment. 

"Colonel, has anyone ever tried to kill you before?"

Last time she saw him, Ahmed had just awakened in Saint Mungo’s. Thank Ganesh, they hadn’t had time yet to dress him in one of those hospital gowns where your butt hangs open to the breeze. That would have looked far less stately than his red flannel bathrobe, which only came to mid-calf and left his long hairy legs bare. And yes...his color was back to normal though he still had dark circles under his eyes. He had not slept well since the attack.

"No one gave you away, if that's any comfort.  Hogwarts was the last place I was going to look."

He nodded. There were only three people who might have guessed where he went. He was reasonably sure Moira and her minister would not have told a reporter anything, as no doubt they would  rather their names were not connected to his escape. It would not have disturbed him if Vlad was the one who told her. What would have disturbed him was if Vlad himself was here, and hadn’t come to see him...

"Colonel, has anyone ever tried to kill you before?"

“Miss Thursby, the place I come from...Kashmir...is at the heart of some of the highest and most rugged mountains on earth. Smugglers have made use of those passes for thousands of years, trafficking in everything from jade to opium, slaves to...various magical items, none of them legal. Then besides the bandits and smugglers...there are the Pakistanis and the Chinese...who both lay claim to the same area, hoping to control the trade themselves. So...as you can imagine…the Border Security Force is far from welcome there.”

Unless they can be bought...

The thought caused him to frown; but he caught himself and gave her a rueful smile.

“A time or two…”

Niobe listened, but then shook her head.  "No no, Colonel - I wasn't clear," she said more firmly, the prying tone of a Daily Prophet reporter never far from her, even though she was trying to be more... informal.

"No, sir, I mean have you ever been targeted personally.  It seems a little outside of the bounds of normalcy that a distant Kashmir smuggler would come all this way to just take out some random Border Patrol wizard.  Have you be targeted personally?" she said repeating herself.

Regretfully, Niobe was not really up on international affairs.  When she needed to be, and she had time, she did her homework.  Like she'd done with the newly placed Duna Gazini from South Africa in the Department of International Magical Cooperation.  But she'd spent so much time looking for the Indian wizard that she hadn't had the spare sickle to find out about how things worked in that region of Asia.

If Ahmed was the victim of some random act of violence, that was one thing.  But him being the specific target of a measured assassination: quite another, indeed! 

"No, sir, I mean have you ever been targeted personally. It seems a little outside of the bounds of normalcy that a distant Kashmir smuggler would come all this way to just take out some random Border Patrol wizard…”
  
“Well, first of all,” said Ahmed, smiling faintly, “when you are the random Border Patrol wizard, it always feels personal. But I know what you mean, and yes, this is beyond the bounds of normalcy. We are unpopular…but I would still not expect some fanatic to follow me all the way from Srinagar to Heathrow, just to have a go at me. After all she’d have plenty of chances to do that without ever leaving home…”

“And no…at least so far as I know of…no one has ever targeted me in particular before. There have been times where my patrol came under attack and there were casualties…but again, if it was about eliminating me, there would be far more efficient ways to go about it. Ways that would not be so likely to backfire on the attackers…”

Though it was hardly a secret that some members of the Border Patrol were susceptible to bribery, the one sure-fire way to bring the whole force down upon one’s head like a nest of angry hornets was to harm one of its members .

At least up until now. Since the attack, so far as Ahmed knew, not one of his superiors had even asked after his welfare…

But the sense of abandonment he felt was sidetracked, as for the first time he noticed that Niobe only had nine fingers. He tried not to stare, feeling it must be all too obvious that he was trying not to stare.

Dared he ask?

Niobe immediately zeroed in on the new information.  "She? You saw your attacker, then?"  

A more socially deferential reporter might acknowledge how callous it was to imply that it wasn't personal when someone tried to kill you, be it seemingly random or a deliberate assassination.  But scintillated by the new information, however minor, thrust Niobe forward into the interview.

"What did she look like? Had you ever seen her before? How did she poison you? They're saying Runespoor at St. Mungo's." 

She was leaned forward on the lawn chair now, her fingers cathedralled out in front of her.  Three peaks, but her single ring finger folded over the space left by her own brush with a Runespoor. 

Then, after that short barrage of questions, Niobe noticed something on the man's face.  She squinted at him.  Was that sorrow? Regret? The man looked... betrayed somehow.  She kept that in her pocket for the moment.

"She? You saw your attacker, then?"  

“I only saw who I assume was my attacker," Ahmed said cautiously. "But when I collapsed, witnesses saw a young woman  fleeing the scene. As...” he added with a grin. “I assume you might have read in the Muggle newspapers.”

"What did she look like? Had you ever seen her before?”

“She was very young, no more than nineteen or twenty. I assumed she was Kashmiri because she was wearing our regional dress, but of course she might have been from anywhere.” He smiled. “She scowled at me most fiercely as we were boarding the plane.”

“How did she poison you?”

“I felt a sting; and saw a dart in my left arm, before I passed out. So I assume it was some sort of dart gun.” That it was a bonetipped dart, shot from a blowgun of the sort used in Papua/New Guinea, was one of the things MLE had asked him to keep quiet. Though anyone who knew a little about Muggle Airport Security should be able to figure out that an ordinary dart gun would not have made it through...

“They're saying Runespoor at St. Mungo's."  

“That is what I understand. Though why Runespoor I do not know, since India has no lack of venomous snakes...Unless, as I mentioned, this girl might have just been trying to pass as Indian, and the venom came from elsewhere...”

He noticed that Niobe had folded her ring finger over the empty place. So...she was not ready to discuss what happened to her missing digit. Ahmed was a chivalrous sort. Up to a point.

If she did not get too personal with her questions, neither would he...

The information kept coming and Niobe snapped her fingers.  The quill lept into action and seemed to scurry even more quickly than usual, as if it had been listening all along and needed to catch up with the conversation.  The Verbatis Quill was fair and Niobe considered herself very fair to utilize an annotation quill that copied speech as exactly as possible.  Sure, it was gobs of notes to rummage through after the interview when she was writing - but shortcuts? Bah!

Her hands still steepled in front of her, Niobe nodded her head and bit her lip, so intent she was on the Colonel's words.

Kashmiri? Ahmed's own countrymen chose to stage a murder only when he had left home? And a dart gun? Niobe knew muggle airport security was very strict, but wands passed through without a second look.  Why a weapon like a dart gun? Why not use a spell if you're going to murder and make a scene anyway?

Questions raced through Niobe's mind. 

But she had to rule out the obvious.  He wouldn't like it, but it would be a question everyone would be asking and if she could get it out of the way and into the proper facts it'd be better for the Prophet's rumor mills.

"You're not... hiding anything about a mysterious Kashmir woman are you, Colonel? I mean, perhaps it's not political at all.  Perhaps it's personal? You didn't know this woman, and you're sure? Not some..."  she paused. She felt like Rita Skeeter.  But it had to be asked.

"Not some spurned lover?"

In that hound dog reporter's mind there was a corner of it that always begged for the wrong questions, but those avenues had to be explored.  Sometimes the strangest things were true.  And what would be stranger than a foreign dignitary with a dirty love life covering up an embarrassing lover's quarrel with a political blanket? Niobe didn't know Col. Ahmed.  Seems almost no one in England did, or no one was talking.  She couldn't assume anything.  She'd make him say it - on the record - that it really was what it looked like.

Ahmed had used a Verbatis Quill himself once or twice, writing up reports. Words seemed to flow more easily when he was pacing with his hands behind his back, than they did when he was sitting at a desk. So he was not discomfited to see a floating quill writing down his every word.

Nor was he disturbed by the spectacle of the reporter, fingers steepled, gnawing on her lip as she listened so intently. He would not have been at all surprised if he could hear the questions racing through her mind. The same questions had been plaguing him ever since he woke up in St. Mungo’s. Why indeed would his own countrymen send him thousands of miles from home to be killed? And yes...why Runespoor?

Of course he had the advantage of knowing that the weapon wasn’t an ordinary dartgun.  The reed blowpipe would have made it through security as easily as a wand; under the scanner, to someone who didn’t know better, it would appear to be a simple wooden flute. But yes...why not use a spell if you're going to murder and make a scene anyway? This was one of the main reasons Ahmed assumed his attacker was a Muggle. An Avada Kedavra would probably have succeeded where the venom did not, and in that crowd no one would have known what took place or who did it...

So yes...questions were racing through Ahmed’s mind too, and he was so sure he could anticipate everything Niobe Thursby was going to ask him, that he was already formulating the answers.

"You're not... hiding anything about a mysterious Kashmir woman are you, Colonel? I mean, perhaps it's not political at all.  Perhaps it's personal? You didn't know this woman, and you're sure? Not some..."  

"Not some spurned lover?"

His mouth fell open. This was surely why Adon Eleor had cautioned him against speaking to the press...

He closed his mouth, opened it again, sure he must look like Tulo’s friend Shep, making fish-faces at the minnows in the glass.

And then he burst out laughing.

“Me?” he asked. “Do I seem like the sort a woman would go mad over?” And then he laughed some more.

“Of course there was the time my wife threw an inkwell at my head...”

Oh, why did he have to give her that look? Niobe tried not to slump too much.  The way he was laughing now made her feel like he and Rita and the whole Daily Prophet were going to rib her for life for asking such a question of such a wizard.  But it was a legitimate question! It wouldn't have been the first time that some politician had overstepped some moral boundary and brought down an international scandal upon their Ministry.

She found herself laughing as well, sheepishly. 

"Yes yes, I know.  Silly question.  But I can't help but notice you haven't answered," she said and waggled her finger with a jovial scolding.

"Nothing hides a secret so well's an invisibility cloak and a joke, my mother's always said, Kabir.  Clear it up and we can all laugh at my presumption, or keep taking the mickey and enduring suspician."

She shrugged and kept eye contact.  Silly, awkward, what-have-you.  She'd not shy away from the question until it was answered.

"Nothing hides a secret so well's an invisibility cloak and a joke, my mother's always said, Kabir.  Clear it up and we can all laugh at my presumption, or keep taking the mickey and enduring suspician."

He took a deep breath, as his laughter faded away. "Very well," he told Thursby. "But don't forget...you are the one who asked."

" The reason I know it was not a...woman scorned...who attacked me, is that I was happily married for almost twenty years; and during that time I never looked at another woman. Well...let me qualify that. I am a man, and of course we will all look at an attractive woman. But it never even occurred to me to do more than look."

"And then...three years ago...there was an earthquake in Kashmir. Perhaps you'll remember...it was in all the newspapers, Muggle and magical, and on the television as well. It was devastating. Twenty thousand people died, on the Pakistani side of the border. But there were over a thousand people on the Indian side as well..." His eyes were focussed on a place far in the distance, his voice vague and dreamy, as though everything he had experienced was not quite real to him. As often it was not, except in his dreams...

"The Border Security Force went to the area to offer what help we could, opening the border so that relief workers could get to the victims. There were so many roads closed by landslides that it took us two weeks to reach my home village, which was one of the border outposts and very near the epicenter." He sighed. "We arrived to find that an entire mountainaside had collapsed, burying the village and all the surrounding valley."

Looking at Thursby, he added, "I lost my whole family."  He did not weep as he finished the tale; he had wept in the darkness, alone, till he had no tears left. But he hoped he would not need to explain that even now, three years after that chilling discovery, he would hardly be interested in pursuing romantic adventures.

The cloak came down and the Colonel became grave.  And Niobe got what she'd asked for.  It wasn't proof.  But it was truth enough for her.  Niobe wasn't excellent at sympathy or showing it.  She liked to consider herself hard as nails, but she'd had to learn to show compassion; it made her interviewees more at peace.  She understood that.  And the Colonel had just shared something deeply personal and traumatic - she needed to respect that.

She kept eye contact with him, and nodded.  He folded her hands once again and leaned forward, allowing the quill to do its work.  But she knew that no matter how accurate the quill, there was some dialog that wouldn't translate.  But the Colonel's story wasn't for the article. Not this story.

Sooner or later, Niobe would learn.

"I'm so sorry," she said after allowing some silence to pass.  Not sorry for the question, of course, sorry for his loss.  It was immense.  But she had to press on.  But she did continue in softer tones again.

"To the topic of Runespoor," she continued, "is there any market for it in your area: the border? I know that here in the UK, the locus of controlling things like that are in our ports and portals to the magical areas.  As you know, the problem with the smuggling of this sort of thing isn't just in the types of potions it goes into.  The beasts are dangerous."