Session 13: Primetime

New Agent: MITCH, of the National Parks Service, stationed at Palomar Forest National Park, San Diego County. M-Cell’s long awaited third member, recently installed.


The next morning, Tuesday, the agents decide to surveil the BioGenesys building, with the intention of acquiring a security badge, having Harley O’Brian modify it for them, and using it to explore the building unhindered. HECTOR arrives early and walks through the parking lot looking for a stray badge that might have been left in a car; he has no luck, and eventually a private security guard approaches him and demands to know his business. HECTOR flashes his FBI identification and departs. The security guard goes to report the incident to his superiors.

At lunch time HAROLD and HANNIBAL trail an employee to the local YMCA. Once he leaves the locker room they both take turns trying to pick his lock but are unsuccessful. HECTOR, meanwhile, follows a pair of employees to Rubio’s. He is discouraged to find that they don’t become inebriated on Margaritas, and decides he will be unable to abscond with their badges unnoticed.

The agents convene at Oggi’s Pizza for lunch. They are resigned that they may have to stake out the building for several days. In the meantime, O’Brian notices that one of the Escalades on the DMV report is registered to a holding company, Danforth Holdings. It’s the only company whose business is not readily evident. They visit its office building downtown. O'Brian sends them some legal information about the company's formation that he can't untangle. HAROLD and HECTOR deduce from this that Danforth Holdings is an umbrella company that owns, among other things, BioGenesys and JRD Research.

The agents return to stake out the BioGenesys building. At around four o’clock in the afternoon a black limousine pulls up to the front door. A dark-skinned bald man with a flowing sherwani-style shirt steps from the back seat and enters the building. The limo drives off. The agents take pictures of the man and note the limo’s license plate. They send it to O’Brian who is unable to get any information on it. (“Uh, the server’s down.”)

HAROLD immediately visits Mildred Castaigne, Horvath’s neighbor, with the picture. She confirms that he is the man that she saw last week, and agrees to testify to this in court.

“We can’t have people disappearing from their homes. It drives the housing prices down,” she explains.

The agents decide that this is probable cause and hastily arrange for a search warrant. By seven o’clock the BioGenesys parking lot is mostly empty but the bald man has not come out. They call for backup: police can arrive within minutes, an FBI detail in about an hour.

They find the door locked (it is after hours) and contact the security guard on duty. He lets them in and they begin their raid. They search the building and find no sign of the bald man or Dyer. They question several late-working employees, showing them the man’s picture. They recognize him but they don’t know what his job function is. He doesn’t appear in the employee listings, and he has no office.

They call MALCOLM and tell him to get there as soon as possible. If there's any biological agents present they will need his expertise.

HANNIBAL happens to notice a seam in the wall in a ground floor hallway. Suspicious, he gets a prybar from his car and pulls back the paneling. There is a contactless smartcard target behind the wall that is invisible from the hallway. He tells the security officer to release the door, but the officer has never seen this before. It’s not even on the same system as the rest of the building’s security.

They call O’Brian. He arrives in paintball-splattered camos. He removes the smartcard target and rewires the locking mechanism. There is an electromagnetic click as the door unlocks. They pry it open and see a long staircase descending into the ground, perhaps three floors down.

HANNIBAL leaves the police-band walkie-talkie with O’Brian, and tells the police outside to make sure no one leaves the building. H-Cell descends the staircase.

They enter a long hallway, with a junction half-way down. At the end is a closed door. They head down the hallway, but HECTOR and HAROLD notice something sliding silently around a corner down the passage to their left. They alert HANNIBAL and go back to investigate.

Around the corner, they are confronted by a blasphemous, shapeless black monstrosity. As they come upon it several eyes pop out of its amorphousness and regard them. It begins to slide towards them. It is very large and surprisingly fast.

The agents begin blasting away. The thing extends a vicious pseudopod at HAROLD, but narrowly misses. HAROLD panicks and flees down the opposite hall. He meets a locked metal door and tries to blast his way through. He expends all the bullets in his gun, bloodying his face with ricocheting metal. He turns and races up the stairs, knocking O'Brian down, and ends up in an empty lab upstairs, cowering under a lab bench.

HANNIBAL empties his gun into the thing and then throws it towards it. It is enveloped and disappears ("You bastard! I bought that from the Sears catalog!"). He sprays pepper spray into one of the thing's eyes. It blurs up and vanishes, and three more appear in its place. HECTOR gets the sense that HANNIBAL has lost his mind and grabs his belt to pull him away. HANNIBAL grabs at HECTOR's gun and tries to help aim it at the creature. He breaks free from HECTOR's grasp, mumbles something about "more weapons" and darts up the stairs. The blob continues to strike at HECTOR, who backs up the stairs himself, continuing to shoot, and closes the door. The thing does not appear to follow them.

Out in the parking lot, HANNIBAL begins amassing an aresenal of weapons from his car and the waiting police cruisers. MITCH has arrived, after receiving a call from MALCOLM who is on his way. "Gasoline," says HANNIBAL. A cop starts to siphon gas from his car into a 2.5 gallon gas can. HANNIBAL returns to the staircase with an armload of shotguns, tear gas and the gas can. As his senses return to him, he distributes the surplus weapons to his teammates. Sheepishly, HAROLD returns to the line of duty.

Now better armed for what awaits them below, they descend again.

"What's down there?" asks MITCH.

"Uh, drug dealers," says HANNIBAL. When they are out of Harley O'Brian's earshot, he adds: "with pseudopods."

The hallways are now clear. There is a faint residue along the floor where the creature was. They go to the end of the hall it had been in, which ends at a door. There is no handle on this side but there are bars along the bottom of it. Presumably the creature oozed between these bars. They douse the hallway with gasoline and light it on fire.

They go to the door at the end of the main hallway. There is a reinforced window in it, which looks into a large, dimly-lit room. The door is locked. They blast it open with their shotguns.

The room beyond is a lab of some kind. In the middle of the room is a large mechanical device. About 25 feet above the floor is a metal walkway with a railing around it. They can make out five figures on it, though they are obscured by darkness, but a glow emerges from a view window at the same level. The ladder to this walkway is across the room.

HANNIBAL strides into the room and orders the figures to come down with their hands up. He tells HAROLD to investigate the machine. As these two enter the room a volley of darts is loosed from the figures' dart guns, and HANNIBAL and HAROLD are both hit. They feel no effects.

Now the agents start firing. They quickly take out four of the five men, and the last one escapes through a door beside the view window. HANNIBAL is at the ladder. He sees in this wall of the lab there are bars, with a half-dozen Hispanic men and women looking fearfully through them.

Suddenly the machine begins to whir. The agents begin to experience strange visions. The room gets indistinct and becomes a kaleidoscopic jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions. Huge alien things brush past them and occasionally walk or drift through their own bodies. All these visions they see, as though the lab itself was merely projected upon the painted curtain of a movie theater. HANNIBAL and HAROLD are wracked with pain.

MITCH begins blasting the device with his shotgun. He tries to keep his eyes closed, but the visions are present in his mind.

H-Cell climb the ladder. HANNIBAL notices something growing out of his neck: it feels like an eyeball. He doesn't recall that being there before, but he can't recall a lot of things. HAROLD sees strange lumps roiling around inside his jacket, extending and then withdrawing. Something is clearly happening to these two.

They get to the door and blow the doorknob off. In the view window they can see the figure from the walkway, as well as the bald man (who seems to be deep in thought) and a well-dressed, well-coiffed man in his forties. This man they recongize as Joseph Dyer. HANNIBAL throws a tear gas grenade in the room. They quickly dispatch the security goon.

HANNIBAL and HAROLD feel their transformations continue. HAROLD's is progressing faster. He is fast losing his human shape, as well as his mind. Strange organs and appendages form and unform across his body.

HANNIBAL shoots the bald man and then rushes him, hauling him into the hallway. The man is wounded but looks into HANNIBAL's eyes with a disarming look. His gaze is hypnotic. "Let me go," he says. HANNIBAL finds himself complying.

HAROLD, meanwhile, sees this and shoots the bald man. He collapses.

HECTOR and Dyer are in the heat of a point-blank gunfight in the small observation room. HECTOR is shooting to subdue, not kill. HANNIBAL rushes into the room and lays the billionaire low with a massive haymaker.

HAROLD feels himself slipping away; the transformation is almost complete. He points his 9mm under his chin. Better to die a man than live as a mindless servitor.

“It’s been good working with you,” says HANNIBAL.

At that moment, the thundering of MITCH’s shotgun stops, as the lights on the strange device fade. The swirling visions vanish and the room is just a room again. HAROLD’s pain lessens and he cautiously lowers his gun. In the next few minutes, the eyes on HANNIBAL’s neck and the strange lumps under HAROLD’s clothes shrink and fade away. ("Hey look, this thing had a power plug," MITCH observes.)

They look in the cells along the wall of the laboratory. About half of the Mexicans are now motionless blobs, like the creature from the hallway. MITCH blasts them with his shotgun to be safe.

“Do you have green cards?” asks HANNIBAL to those remaining. They do not seem to. “Quarantine 'em, then deport ‘em,” he says.

They find another cell, with a lone blob in it. Could this be all that remains of Blayne Horvath? They also find some lab cabinets with various items in them: vials of chemicals; darts and dartguns; heavy, metallic devices with triggers; journals and notebooks, some old, some new; and a large, heavy conical stone with strange markings carved all around it. All these things they confiscate.

The agents emerge from the basement in the early morning hours and ward off the police detail, telling them that there is a biological weapons lab below that has been compromised. MALCOLM arrives soon afterward and orchestrates a quarantine. H-Cell and agent MITCH take Dyer out to the desert for some directed questioning and bring with them a healthy supply of sodium pentathol.

Over the next few unpleasant hours, Dyer tells them that his grandfather, Professor William Dyer, was one of the members of the ill-fated Miskatonic University Antarctic expedition of 1930. While there, Professor Dyer’s journal relates, they discovered a fantastic alien city, and a conical tablet describing a bizarre protoplasmic nanotechnology that the city’s long-dead inhabitants used to created a race of servitors. The tablet was useless to the human technology of the 1930s, but with his resources at BioGenesys he financed a top-secret project to recreate this process. It was Dyer's goal to create a race of powerful servitors that he could sell as weapons on the international black market to shady governments or terrorist organizations.

The process of to create one of these creatures involves injection of a mixture of organic chemicals (described by the tablets) to a human host. For a while he made little progress; something was missing.

He experienced a breakthrough following his acquisition of a journal by the late Crawford Tillinghast, a scientist and contemporary of his grandfather’s, although they never knew of each other. The journal was recovered by Tillinghast's heir following his death by "apoplexy." It mouldered in a travel chest for half a century until it was located by agents of Dyer, who had speculated on its existence during his research.

From this journal Dyer created the massive “Tillinghast Generator” which sat in the middle of his secret lab, as well as a number of smaller handheld models. His test subjects must be irradiated by this machine within 48 hours of the injection, otherwise the body metabolizes the chemicals and the radiation will only have its usual effects. Harv Cole's partner Ned was used as an early test subject, a test that obviously failed.

“What about Danforth Holdings?” asks HECTOR. Dyer tells him he named that shell corporation for another member of the 1930 expedition, a man who went insane. Henry Winkler is on the payroll as a consultant, as are men calling themselves Ted Danson and John Schneider (of an organization that called themselves "Primetime"). Dyer says that he uses them for their underworld/black market contacts and for other unsavory jobs.

As for the mysterious bald man (a sore subject for HANNIBAL, who is ashamed for almost letting him escape), he was a Bedouin mystic called Abdul Reis. The creatures are, for now, incapable of independent thought; they can only be controlled via hypnotic suggestion. Dyer's agents located this man who was famous among his people for his purported telepathic powers. Dyer put him up in a posh downtown penthouse and paid him through Danforth Holdings.

Now debriefed, they return Dyer to FBI custody.

HANNIBAL spends the next several weeks poring over Dyer’s notebook and the notebook of his grandfather. Over the course of this period his coworkers at the Arizona US Marshall’s Office notice a change in his personality, but those who know him attribute it to his drinking, which has also notably increased.

Under the Patriot Act, Joseph Dyer is detained as an illegal enemy combatant and held in a military brig without trial. His prodigious assets are seized by the government. The media circus surrounding the arrest and imprisonment of one of the country’s wealthiest men is unprecedented. His legal team, funded by some high-stake BioGenesys shareholders, demands a trial for him. The Supreme Court assents and soon the trial begins. However, due to the artful maneuverings of A-Cell and others, the prosecution’s expert witness roster is heavily represented by federal agents from across the spectrum sympathetic to Delta Green’s cause, and a guilty verdict soon arrives. Dyer is transferred from the brig to a civilian federal penitentiary. He begins the lengthy appeals process but this is cut short when, ironically, he is stabbed to death with a sharpened toothbrush.

Session 12: Primetime

The San Diego FBI agents are assigned to a kidnapping case in the course of their day jobs. A local scientist, Blayne Horvath, is reported missing by his ex-wife Edith after he failed to show up to pick up their two children over the weekend. She went to his house in Carmel Valley and found the back door unlocked; letting herself in she found the house had been ransacked and his car still in the garage. She became frightened, fled, and called the police. The police showed up and searched the house. The man's computer was gone and the files in his office scattered. A run-of-the-mill kidnapping, except for one detail: the police lifted a partial fingerprint from the back doorknob, but the only likely match in the fingerprint database was a man who died in prison several years ago.

HAROLD smells a rat, so he sends a communiqué to A-Cell and alerts the rest of H-Cell. H-Cell’s leader, HANNIBAL, having spent a week or so in Groversville with nothing much to show for it, has been transferred to the Phoenix branch of the U.S. Marshall’s office. His agency-ordered psychiatrist suggested he take some time off, so he is en route to San Diego to visit his old haunts when he receives a call from HAROLD.

“I knew something about a guy who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t,” he recollects. He puts in a call to MALCOLM at the CDCP to see if Fish & Game ever turned anything up in connection with the strange blobs in the trunk of the car of Henry Winkler, an old perp whose continued appearances have a lot to do with HANNIBAL’s current affection for drink. MALCOLM finds that by the time the Fish & Game people arrived there was not much left but a strange algal slime, and this soon deteriorated to an unclassifiable scum. The report was inconclusive but MALCOLM requests a copy anyway.

HAROLD reads the police report. The fingerprint they lifted was a likely match with a certain Henry Winkler. He relates this information to HANNIBAL, who promptly pulls over at the next liquor store.

HAROLD looks into the Henry Winkler case. Winkler was a high-powered international drug/weapons dealer, with lots of customs and law enforcement agents on his payroll. Five years ago U.S. Marshall Harv Cole tracked him down. Winkler was in jail awaiting a court date when he was stabbed to death by his cellmate with a sharpened toothbrush. The death certificate was signed by a Dr Elias Hancock, who was the physician on duty at the prison.

HAROLD looks for information on Hancock. Not long after the death of Henry Winkler, Hancock was fired from his position for smuggling hydrocodone to inmates after accepting bribes from relatives on the outside. Following this his license was suspended, and he found work in a research lab called JRD Research LLC. HAROLD calls the DMV and finds that he drives a Chevy Cobalt. He goes to JRD Research and waits in the parking lot for Hancock’s arrival.

It is now around lunchtime on Monday, the day after Edith discovered her ex-husband was missing. HANNIBAL arrives at the local restaurant Godfather’s where he is met by HECTOR. HANNIBAL is on his second bottle of wine, and has ordered variously the Cannelloni, Cannoli, Calamari and Calzones. (“Hey, look… This menu has a second page.”)

Hancock arrives at work with a take-out bag under his arm. HAROLD approaches him and questions him concerning the Winkler case.

“Sure I remember it,” he says. “He had such a funny name.” He declines to say much more about it, giving no more information than the official report. HAROLD can tell that he is not comfortable with the line of questioning, and perhaps withholding information. He leaves the man his card and goes to meet with the rest of H-Cell.

The police report states that Horvath was an employee of Inovio, a bio-tech firm that develops oncology equipment and gene therapies. It is not far from Horvath’s house, so they visit his work before investigating his home.

At Inovio they meet with Horvath’s supervisor who shows them to his workspace. His work email extends only back about one month. The supervisor says this is because he has only worked at the company for that long; in that short time, however, Horvath impressed his boss with his work ethic and abilities. They look at his web history and see that he was planning a trip to Puerto Vallarta with his two children in several months. He has a personal RoadRunner account, but his password is not saved. It occurs to them to call on the talents of co-worker and DG Friendly Harley O’Brian, who drives up from headquarters.

O’Brian manages to access his personal account and sees that many of the emails came from another biotech firm, BioGenesys. The supervisor corroborates that Horvath came to them from that company.

The agents head to his home, which is cordoned off with police tape. An officer is still posted here to make sure the scene is secure. The agents present their badges and begin an investigation. There is no sign of break-in or struggle, but Horvath’s home office has been ransacked. The computer is missing from the desk but all the peripherals remain; there are papers and file folders scattered around in the office and the living room. There is no sign of foul play in the bedrooms or elsewhere in the house, and they cannot find any suspicious footprints in the back yard (although the patio is paved and extends around to the driveway out front). The printer remains, and is still powered on. The agents call O’Brian again, who had gone to the vending machine and was inadvertently left at Inovio. He arrives some minutes later.

“Sometimes printers keep the last few jobs spooled on their internal memory,” he says as he examines the three-in-one printer. He connects his laptop and locates a diagnostic program on the internet, and suddenly the following message is printed:

July 15, 2007

Dear Mr Dyer,

I am sorry, but I cannot in good conscience continue with this work. I have secured another position elsewhere, and my resignation is effective immediately.

Sincerely,

Blayne Horvath, PhD

The date on the letter is about five weeks ago.

BioGenesys is a large company (about 1500 employees at its world headquarters in San Diego) with campuses in Carmel Valley and UTC. Its CEO, Joseph Dyer, is a high-profile San Diegan, regularly featured on the covers of business magazines and a well-known local philanthropist. He is among the Forbes 400 Richest Americans 2007 with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.

HANNIBAL steps outside for a cigarette, and sees an old woman appear briefly in the window across the street. She sees him, and shuts the blinds. HANNIBAL strides over and raps on the door.

The door cracks open and she peers at him from under the chain.

“U.S. Marshall, ma’am. Please open up, I have some questions.”

The woman, Mildred Castaigne, tells him that she saw Horvath last Friday leaving with two men. “It was around 4:30… My stories are over by three, and I had just got back from the beauty shop. Two men I had never seen before, and they got in one of those big Cadillacs. What do you call them?”

“Escalade?” suggests HANNIBAL.

“Yes, a big black one. The one man had a nice leather jacket on, and the other was a bald man, with strange clothes and darkish skin. The man in the jacket had a computer with him.”

“Did Mr Horvath look like he was… happy to be going with them?”

“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t look unhappy, I guess.”

“You didn’t happen to get a license plate number, did you, ma’am?”

“No, I don’t take everyone’s license plate numbers. Only people who are speeding.”

HANNIBAL thanks her for her time. HAROLD calls the DMV, and asks for a list of all the black Escalades registered to companies and individuals in the last two years. In San Diego, there are nearly 1100 black Escalades registered, with thirty of them registered to businesses, mostly realtors. HECTOR discovers that BioGenesys has some company cars as well, a small fleet of Lexus sedans.

“That’s a start,” says HANNIBAL.

The agents adjourn to the sports bar at the Carmel Mountain Doubletree Hotel to discuss their options. They agree to visit the BioGenesys office, but as it’s nearly 7:00pm they will have to wait until tomorrow.

“We could attempt a sneak ‘n’ peak,” suggests HECTOR.

“We don’t know what we’re looking for yet,” says HANNIBAL. “We may not even have a crime, if he left with them willingly.”

The agents decide to call it a day, and to reconvene in the morning.