Star Whacker-08

I had the in I needed, and got the information I needed from that source, to begin a serious set of inquiries on the sly as I went about my day job business. The public records regarding my target did turn up plenty of previous history, most of which did not point towards possible suspects for pulling the trigger. Instead, I found plenty of possible fallguys, and that’s not to be discounted; having a fallguy is what made my first hit so successful.

I put aside that list of likely suckers for now, and instead focused upon hitters, which meant a turn towards who would put those hitters into the field, and that in turn meant digging more into the target’s life and past. That was right up my alley, so I met several of my contacts familiar with both the occult and the celebrities that deal in it. We took a backroom at one of our favorite coffee houses, and to keep the owner happy we splurged on lunch as well as drinks; he’ll not complain about us when we’re dropping $50 per head.

Informally, we’re called “The Coffee Crew”, and we meet for talking about more than this, but I got them focused through emphasizing my target’s coming to town and the curious practices that this celebrity is known for. Since we’re all a bunch of odd ducks, one way or another, we got away with this by taking collective refuge in the audacity of our unabashed eccentricity. (Yes, being a straight man that deals heavily in celebrity gossip without being a metrosexual makes me quite eccentric before taking the psychopathy into account.)

The bulk of our meetings are easily dismissed as shallow coffee talk about famous people and the rumored weird things that they’re said to do, which is why I can get away with talking about this in a public location, and they are reliable sources within their areas of expertise so I nurture these ties with a steady stream of inside information. Again, I know what they want so I know that I can always get what they want by giving it to them.

Because our meetings tend to be meandering affairs, I won’t go into details. Instead I will focus on this one exchange:

“Some of my sources in the boardrooms on the coasts, backed up by my contacts in Europe, tell me that they’re looking to force our fading famewhore into retirement.”

“Retirement, or ‘retirement’?”

“The latter, and it’s said that the ones pushing that are encouraging her spiritual practices.”

“You’re going to want to pay attention to people connected to Bohemian Grove as well as being a regular for Bilderberg. That’s where the confluence would be in the United States, and anyone that’s on about making that famewhore into a sacrifice has to have European ties because it’ll need to be signed off by the top men- and they’re in Europe.”

Intelligence ties, connected into the Trans-Atlantic network, means that I’m looking for very specific sorts of spies- and because any hitter will be a disposable asset, I’m looking for a burned spy for certain. The crooks, as I figured out here, will be just a dangerous distraction.