"Have a seat first Leon." Chief Bear said. "How's business lately?"

"Doing alright Chief Bear. Keeping my head above water."

"Oh, doing alright you say?" said a fuming David Longmiles. "I'd bet the reason you're doing alright is because of getting a nice little payoff for that corp suit you killed!"

"Are you accusing me of something, Mr. Longmiles?"

"Hey, you two-"

Chief Bear tried to intercede, but was cut off by an enraged David Longmiles.

"Damn right I am! I know you killed Koki Ishimura, and you used magic to disguise yourself to the cameras!"

"I can't use magic, Longmiles." said Leon, pointing towards the datajack embedded in his head. "If I were capable, I wouldn't be using cyberware like this."

"Then it was Brandon Rivers, or that elven squaw you have!"

"......She is not an elven squaw. She has a name, and it's Sylvia. Also, from what I've heard on the street, an Aztechnology Strike Team took care of Koki Ishimura because of a corp dispute."

Longmiles smiled viciously.

"See? He's shown his true colours, he's shown that hes a liar, a snake in the grass looking to bite the Council. Leon wants Aztechnology to be slandered with murder to weaken their position, all to hide his crimes!"

"David-"

"After all the good things Aztechnology have done for us! This shadowrunner has no right to be here, no right to be a part of our Council!"

"DAVID-"

"We should execute this pinkskin on the spot, not embrace him into our inner circle. What has he ever done for the Council!"

"Oh, I don't know Longmiles." said Leon, trying mightily to keep his cool. "Why don't you ask Adrienne Silvermoon and Derek Highsun what I've done for the Council?"

A strong and persuasive argument. In this very room, in the early 2050s, Leon was summoned to perform two vital shadowruns for the Council, contract killings of Adrienne Silvermoon and Derek Highsun. Adrienne Silvermoon was a shaman that had been leading the elven Manitou tribe in the north of the Council lands to perform eco-terrorism, blowing up suspected pollution sites and nuclear arms producers. Some vital buildings for essential production were caught in the crossfire, and the kill order on Silvermoon was put out.

The public story was that Silvermoon peacefully retired. The story in the shadows was that Silvermoon was accosted by members of the Manitou tribe that were against her beliefs, and died when a spirit she summoned to fend them off turned against her, eating her alive.

The actual story was that Silvermoon faked her own death in the spirit incident, and was attempting to flee southwest to the elven kingdom of Tir Tairngire, travelling with three elven backers in a truck. Leon killed all four via a roadside trap, detonating high-grade plastic explosives to disable the truck as it drove by, and then gunned down any surviving passengers. A messy hit, but a successful one, although flimsy rumours of Silvermoon's resurrection as a spirit persisted in certain shadow channels.

Derek Highsun had taken over leadership of the Manitou tribe from Adrienne Silvermoon, and despite bringing a more civil voice to the proceedings, the Council chiefs had been tipped off to Highsun's involvement in a potential bombing plot. Leon killed Highsun from half a mile out with a sniper rifle, dropping him in the snow behind a barn on his private farmland. After a severe blizzard the next day, it took months for the snow to thaw enough to reveal Derek Highsun's body. A perfect crime, clean, no witnesses.

There were some other jobs he had done for the three Chiefs in the Council, some reasonably high-profile, some so unknown that not even the best shadow sources in North America knew about them. None of them could be traced reliably back to him, and doing these jobs had brought him a ton of goodwill amongst the three Chiefs.

David Longmiles seethed.

"He confesses to murder when it's convenient for him. He performs crime on your behalf to escape his heinous crimes! This is disgraceful behaviour from all of you! You should be ashamed to call yourself Chiefs! There is no reason why my agents at Long Arms cannot handle these requests! We need to purge the shadows, not encourage them with work!"

"DAVID, SHUT UP!" Chief Bear thundered. "I agreed to have you here if you could conduct yourself with civility! You have failed!"

"I'm here for your protection Chief! Against a known criminal you invited here!"

"We can protect ourselves fine." piped up Chief Hawksford. "You are not needed here."

"I take orders from Chief Bear, not the likes of you!"

"Then get out." said Chief Bear, burning with so much silent rage that visible magical particles were leaking from him.

Longmiles looked incredulously at Chief Bear, his right eye twitching murderously, before grabbing his coat and preparing to leave.

"Fine, I will suffer this. But you will suffer for having Leon Eagles in your inner circle. I intend to report this meeting to the press."

"You do that and they'll never find your body." said Chief Hillborn, with a voice full of ice. "This is the Seales Room, and you made an agreement before coming that whats said here, stays here."

David Longmiles looked at the three Chiefs with all the venom he could muster.

"You should be ASHAMED of yourselves!"

~~~

Longmiles had finally left with that parting shot. The Chiefs took a moment to exhale and stew over what just happened. Leon was calm at first glance, but was actually breathing sighs of relief inside. He may have been forced to kill Longmiles with his bare hands if things went further, and a body in this place would be inconvenient, to say the least. Longmiles felt particularly insane today, and Leon wondered for the twentieth time if killing Koki Ishimura was a good idea, as that may have been a tipping point for the Long Arms leader to take his grudges further......

"We need to replace Longmiles." said Chief Hawksford. "He's outlived his usefulness, and a new CEO would help us deal with all the problems in Thunder Bay."

"The Manitou is the bigger issue." said Chief Bear. "Right now Longmiles is adequate. We need a wolf leading our law enforcement, not a lamb."

Chief Hawksford sighed in frustration. Leon would bet that she had made that request many times before, but Bear and Longmiles went way back, and Bear would always give Longmiles chances. Whether he deserved them or not.

"Now, I believe we had an important issue to discuss, before being interrupted. Leon...... your assignment is to commandeer a truck containing illegal goods."

"Where is it?"

"Currently in the middle of Quebec, according to our latest satellite data from our friends in the Sioux Wildcats. It will breach our border later today at its current pace. We know from intelligence obtained that its current destination is Lynn Lake."

Ah, another Manitou job. Lynn Lake was the unofficial capital of sorts for the Manitou tribe, a mostly frozen town way to the north of what used to be the province of Manitoba.

"The truck contains some pricey goods." explained Chief Hillborn. "We viewed the shipment coming off from their contacts across the Atlantic, and found that several crates of BTLs were loaded on. There was also various other high-tech implements, some winter tactical combat armor, and possibly some explosives."

"I thought the people up there hated technology?" Leon said quizzically.

"We suspect the smugglers planning on trading goods with contacts in the Athabaskan Council. In exchange, well, who knows what they're getting. Nuyen, talismans, spell grimoires, ritual materials, food...... who knows? We don't, and we don't want it used against us. The Manitou are gearing up for something big, I can feel it. And even if they aren't, the BTL shipments are a crime, and we must punish these smugglers for it. We have a light copter on standby for you and your colleagues. Pick out an ambush point, do whatever you want to do, and get that truck."

"What are the looting guidelines for this job?"

"Destroy the BTLs." said Chief Hawksford. "I will not have our people become slaves to addiction."

A fair concern. BTL chips (known as "beetles" to anyone in the smuggling trade), were specialized SimSense computer chips, with the BTL acronym being short for "Better Than Life". They were inserted into your head through a chipjack, and could allow you to see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and feel everything recorded onto the chip by an actor who experienced it. The most common use of BTLs were to record sexual activities between porn actors, enabling the average loser with a chipjack to experience something similar to actual sex. The chips were very addictive, and the side effects could be very nasty, depending on the quality of recording and if any bad emotions were "accidentally" included in the chip data.

Leon did not deal in BTLs and disliked most of the people who did. Leon had seen far too many addicts sprawled out in every shadow he'd ever ran, had killed several of them who did bad things in exchange for their next hit, and Leon was so paranoid of addiction to them, that he'd never even had a chipjack installed to play any chips of any kind. Of course, he had probably delivered BTLs during a courier run without knowing what was in the package, but that was how shadowrunning worked sometimes.

"I'll want some of the body armor and weaponry for the military. Anything else is fair game." said Chief Hillborn. "Also, I want you to bring us the riggers driving this load for interrogation if you can."

"......Why use me instead of making this a military op? Or why me instead of some people from Long Arms?"

"We've got leaks." said Chief Bear. "The Manitou have some agents within our government. The less people who know about the op, the better. It'll be us, you, and the helicopter pilot. And even the pilot's in the dark a bit about what's going to happen."

"Fair enough." said Leon. "I'll get my team prepped and ready for the air. I'll need some good maps to mark out an ambush point."

"I'll have Carl provide those for you." said Chief Bear, going over to shake Leon's hand. "I'll make sure you're fairly compensated for this."

Leon generally wasn't fairly compensated for government runs. Not financially, at least, but Leon accepted underpayment in exchange for the Chiefs continuing to protect him from Longmiles. Fair trade-off, and sometimes, thats the best you could hope for when running the shadows......