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.