Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  James listened to one such show on the radio in the land rover, hearing his name dragged through the mud, until Stephanie turned it off. James did not object. It was not because they couldn’t bear the senseless rage of the callers; it was because the callers—ignorant and ill-informed though they may be—were to a great extent right, and they both knew it.

  At the airport, Stephanie walked with James until they reached the gate from which his plane would depart. They stopped when they could walk no farther. They embraced again, a final time, wordless. Then James turned and walked into the gate to board the plane.

  Stephanie watched him go, then began the walk back to the parking lot outside the little terminal. She put her hands in her pockets. They contained a piece of folded paper which had not been present before.

  She stopped and took it out. James must have slipped it in there when they embraced. Her mouth was dry. She unfolded the paper and read what he’d written:

  You are the rock and I am the wave—and when I touch you, I break.

  She folded the paper back up and returned it to her pocket, then resumed her walk to the car, and beyond.

  Dr. Joseph Camp read through Dr. Stephanie Park’s report for Delta Green. It was proper, clear, and informative. With it was the cassette tape of the calling song that Captain James had recorded, something that Dr. Camp hoped would have the same effect in other circumstances.

  There was something in Park’s report, something that Camp couldn’t put his finger on. Something between the lines that she hadn’t stated flat out.

  Carssandra Buie, leaning against the doorway, said, “Knock, knock.”

  “Oh, hello. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m heading to lunch, Dr. Camp. Would you care to join me?”

  Dr. Camp looked at the report a final time. Whatever it was that he couldn’t quite catch wasn’t important—not nearly as important as the prospect of lunch with Carssandra, certainly. “I’d be delighted.”

  He stood up gracelessly, approached the door a little unsteadily, and then made up for all his infirm years by gallantly offering his arm. She smiled and took it, and they walked pleasantly down the hall.

  There are worse things in life, he thought to himself, than to be in love. Even if it’s not returned.

  The Rules of Engagement

  Dedication: For Damon, for Kim, and for Mom & Dad, this valentine of doomed romance.

  Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

  —The Gospel of Luke 16:27–31

  Fiat justitia et pereat mundus.

  Let justice be done, though the world perish.

  —Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor

  Prologue

  ∞

  There’s a room as big as all outdoors. I rise from the still body in the bed and stride forward purposefully, embracing my future. As I near the far wall, the plaster ripples and parts like a curtain of obedient water.

  Beyond? Beyond is everything. The cosmos in its strange null entirety, the mad planets whirring in space, the expansion and contraction of the universe, the dancers at the soul of time, the lint in the giant’s navel.

  I step through the wall, and it all starts to happen. This is the end and the beginning.

  Chapter One: The Violet Hour

  Sunday, February 14, 1999

  Dr. Stephanie Park stepped naked into the clawfooted bathtub and slid slowly into the water. The bathroom was dancing with steam—she’d begun running hot water into the tub half an hour ago, and had opened the drain several times to get the water down to a useful level, since she kept putting off actually getting in. Finally, though, she was in the thick of it. Candles burned on the counter around the sink, sputtering slightly in the damp air. Her cat, Clotho, scratched fitfully at the other side of the door.

  It was one o’clock Sunday morning, and Stephanie was about to commit suicide.

  She picked up the scalpel from the white plastic soap tray that was clipped to the shower pipe. The surgical steel was damp with humidity. She lowered the scalpel into the warm water to heat it up, so that the surface of her skin, the water, and the cutting tool would all be at roughly the same temperature. When she opened the arteries of her left arm and thighs, she wanted it to feel like she was slicing through butter. Gently, as if to say hello, she stroked her calves with the back of the scalpel, getting used to the motion and the feel of the metal on her skin. It was also a way of saying goodbye.

  No more of this shit. No more of this pathetic excuse for a life.

  Stephanie was tired of how things were going. She was tired of her work, tired of her parents, tired of her relationships, tired of her pseudo-friends. She was so very tired of it all. She wanted it to stop.

  Sitting in the tub, naked, with a brilliantly sharp scalpel clasped in her right hand, Stephanie began to sob. The first shudders came suddenly, haltingly, then were amplified and regulated into a steady motion that shook her body and wrenched her soul. Tears poured from her eyes, running down her face before falling through steam and splashing small into the water of the bath. The hard clench in her guts seemed to well up like bile, but emerged as a voice rather than an eruption of stomach acids; the feeling was the same, however. There were no words. She had run out of words. She had nothing left but a wail of terrible anguish.

  The phone rang.

  Stephanie sat in the tub and sobbed. The phone rang again. And again. And again. She began to feel slightly ridiculous. Here she was, minutes from death, and the damn phone was ringing.

  Fuck it, she thought. It’s not my problem anymore. I don’t have any problems anymore.

  The phone stopped ringing and the answering machine picked up. Her own voice came through the bathroom door, muffled: “You’ve reached Dr. Stephanie Park. Leave your name and number at the tone and I’ll get back to you.”

  Beep.

  “Hello. You are cordially invited to a night at the opera.” The caller hung up the phone.

  Stephanie sat in the tub, frozen by the voice. A long minute went by as her mind raced.

  Finally she lifted her right hand up from the water and carefully, almost reverently, laid the scalpel down in the soap holder again. Then she placed her hands on the edges of the tub and lifted herself up from the water. She stepped out onto the cool tile floor and put on her white terrycloth bathrobe, then emerged into the living room. Clotho meowed at her feet and followed her. When Stephanie sat down in the armchair and picked up the phone, Clotho jumped in her lap. Stephanie began scratching the grateful cat’s head involuntarily as she dialed a long series of numbers into the headset. By the time she was done, the cat was purring.

  The phone rang. There were a series of clicks as the call was switched through encryption routers, then the phone rang some more. Finally someone answered “Hello,” with the same voice that she’d just heard on her answering machine.

  “This is Agent Terry,” she spoke carefully. “I’m accepting your invitation, Alphonse.” There was a pause while her voice print was checked.

  “Hello, Terry,” said the voice finally. It was the voice of an old man, but a vigorous one. “We need you.”

  Stephanie took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m here. I’m here for you.”

  The voice chuckled, then spoke. “That’s good.”

  She listened for a while, then soon after went to bed. In the morning she took a taxi from Georgetown to the D.C. airport and boarded a plane. When she left, the tub was full of cold water and the cat’s dish was full of food. Dr. Stephanie Park did not die that night.

  Special Agent Abraham Mannen of the F
ederal Bureau of Investigation hustled down the basketball court. Rick Snyder from legal support was in front of him the whole way, bucking and dodging, trying to steal the ball from him. Abe let the ball bounce wild off to one side. Rick lunged for it, but Abe brought it back into the inevitable arc of his long arms and blew past the off-balance Rick, who hit the ground on one hip and cursed. Abe came to the end of the court, the nearest defense ten feet away, and he lifted his tall, athletic frame into a graceful leap up in front of the goal. The ball spun out of his hands, arced narrowly across the backboard, hit the rim, and bounced out and off towards the stands. It landed on a bench and rebounded towards the exit from the gym. Out of bounds.

  Abe, having hit the ground before the ball reached the bench, looked and then ducked his head in a silent expression of frustration. That shot was gold, he’d been sure of it. Then bam, out of control and beyond his influence. No score.

  “Brick!” Rick called out cheerfully behind him.

  Abe leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees, and breathed heavily. Damnit, he thought. I had that bastard and off it went.

  The other players clustered in mid-court. Rick was high-fiving his partners while Abe looked ruefully at his colleagues. “Sorry,” he said.

  Tom Patterson shrugged. “No sweat, man. We’ll get those losers.”

  The two teams took up positions as Rick sidled up towards the edge of the court with the basketball in his hands. He threw the ball into play.

  Tom lunged, leaped, and the ball was his. He rocketed down the court and before Abe could even get his bearings and move in to block the guards, the ball was airborne. Swoop, swish. Through the net. Two points. The team clustered and hooted. Abe gave Tom a high-five, thinking: This shoulda been mine. Rick cat-called merrily: “Gonna take it in the shorts this go-round!”

  The game ended twenty minutes later, Abe’s crew losing 24–28. Legal support prevailed over field agents once again. The running gag was that the lawyers spent most of their billable hours practicing on the court, while the agents were busy doing the will of the people. In truth, the lawyers just spent more off-duty time at the downtown gym—it was a good place for networking with the Milwaukee legal community. Both groups from the city’s office of the FBI worked hard days, every day.

  Abe came out of the showers and got dry and dressed. Fucking lawyers win again, he thought. They better win for us like this in court. He slid the Glock 17 into his shoulder holster without thinking twice about it.

  The cell phone in his gym bag chirped. Abe answered it and said hello. There was a pause while some distant computer checked his voice print.

  “Hello, Agent Thomas. You are cordially invited to a night at the opera.”

  Abe listened closely. When the call was done, he went home and got some sleep. In the morning, Abraham Mannen was on an early flight out of town.

  Vic Winstead—she disliked Victoria or Vicky—sat on the small platform in a corner of the little storefront coffeehouse. She had an acoustic guitar in her lap, and as she exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke, she wedged the filter end of the cigarette into the neck of the guitar. Through the smoke, she took a last look at the dozen or so people present, none of them particularly there to see her. Some were reading, some were jotting notes onto a pad, and some had stopped talking to their companions just long enough to listen politely to the first few seconds of whatever song she was about to play to open her act. Those folks, she knew, she could write off now; her music wasn’t going to change their lives, so it was hardly going to make them stop yakking with their friends.

  Vic tapped her right foot on a rung of the stool: one, two, three . . .

  I didn’t know

  I didn’t know

  I didn’t know you’d fuck me like that

  I didn’t know you’d trick me like that

  I didn’t know

  I didn’t know you at all

  Boom. The talkers went back to talking. Another song that wasn’t going to stop anyone in their tracks. She kept on singing, thinking what the hell, a routine is a routine. Saturday nights she played at Noise Espresso in the Queen Anne district of Seattle. It wasn’t exactly a high-profile gig. Still, she figured she’d have enough material—enough good material—for a CD soon, and she could afford to have a run of 500 pressed. She’d send them out to local reviewers, clubs, give them away at gigs, whatever. Vic wasn’t exactly in this for a career, but it was something to do with her ample spare time.

  She was a park ranger for the National Parks Service, assigned to the Hurricane Ridge Visitor’s Center on Washington’s Olympic peninsula, a couple hours from Seattle. On her occasional weekends off she’d take the ferry into the city and crash with Sue, her old college friend, and on Friday they’d get drunk and talk and laugh and maybe once in a boozy blue moon they’d fool around a little, but it was just fooling around. Saturday Vic would go to Noise to play and hang out, and Sue would go off with her city friends to the Wild Rose in Capitol Hill, the neighborhood Sue campily referred to as “the theater district.” Sunday they might see a movie or go to the zoo or just hang around Sue’s apartment reading the weeklies, then Vic would pack up her car and take the ferry back out to the peninsula. Sometimes if Sue was dating, she and her girlfriend would leave Vic alone for most of the weekend, and Vic would watch television or take long, long walks down and around Eastlake. There were houseboat communities there on the water, and she couldn’t believe that people paid so much money to live in cramped, floating houses that were surrounded by more cramped, floating houses. Maybe there was a song there.

  I didn’t know what I could do if I had half a mind

  I didn’t know what to do with the love I did find

  I didn’t know where to go from where

  I didn’t know how to who to when to why

  I didn’t know

  I didn’t know you and I didn’t even try

  Vic played on, head nodding in the groove, doing a fifty-minute set before taking a break to scattered applause. She wanted a mocha, but milk was bad for her throat when she was singing so she settled for hot unsweetened tea. Sitting at a table in the back of the room, she stirred the tea absently. Her bag was on the table, a ragamuffin item she’d sewn from cast-off fabric ends. Inside was an address book, pocketbook, hairbrush, Altoids, a small plastic bag full of spiced sunflower seeds for snacking, tampons, tissue paper, a large paperback copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, some aspirin, a pager, a cell phone, and a sturdy Bulgarian knock-off of the Browning 9mm Hi-Power semi-automatic handgun with a full magazine of thirteen rounds (none in the pipe) and a second magazine of ten rounds loose in the bag. The Washington State Concealed Weapons Permit inside her pocketbook gave her license to carry the weapon almost anywhere she went.

  Five years ago, when she’d started at Olymic National Park, she’d never owned a firearm in personal life, let alone carried one concealed to also-ran coffeehouses half-full of zoning slackers. But five years ago she hadn’t joined Delta Green.

  The cell phone rang. Agent Tonya answered it. In the morning, Sue drove her to the Seattle-Tacoma airport and saw her off, exchanging a hug before Vic Winstead was gone.

  The three of them arrived within two hours of each other, congregating in a bar at the Memphis International Airport, down in the southwest corner of Tennessee. This was their third time on an op together, but it was the first time with Stephanie as an actual member of the team—the first two times, she was an advisor.

  “So,” Abe said. “You guys know anything about our hotel?”

  Vic nodded. “Alphonse PGP’d me. Looks like we got our choice of billing: daily or hourly,” she joked. PGP was the name of the email encryption software used by Delta Green to keep its internet communications secure. The organization maintained a high degree of paranoia in its tradecraft. Agents were given digital PCS cell phones with aftermarket encryption installed, all DG-related calls were passed through the group’s own secure router, and agents routinely sw
ept their living spaces and telephones for clandestine surveillance gear. Delta Green believed that not even the National Security Agency could compromise the group’s safeguards, at least under routine circumstances.

  Abe chuckled. Stephanie looked nervously around the terminal. They had exited the bar and were heading towards the baggage-claim area. Vic noticed Stephanie’s anxious look.

  “Don’t be so obvious,” Vic said, veteran of a thousand movies but only eight ops. “Pretend like you own the place. Quit scoping everyone in sight.”

  Stephanie looked at her, a bit tired. “Sure thing. Just jumpy.”

  “Lunch will fix that,” Abe said. “This town must be famous for some kind of food. Whatever it is, we’ll eat it.”

  “I’ll feel better when I’ve got my gun again,” Stephanie said quietly. “I hate plane rides. Feel so helpless.”

  Abe and Vic said nothing.

  The last time the three of them were together, Stephanie was not a full Delta Green agent. She was a friendly, briefed on certain aspects of Delta Green’s mission but unaware of DG’s status as an illegal, unauthorized conspiracy within the federal government. That was when Larry was still alive, still a part of Cell T; his code-name had been Agent Tim. Larry, Abe, and Vic were on an op in Baltimore. Stephanie arrived, officially on loan from the EPA to assist with an IRS investigation into corporate malfeasance in the waste-disposal industry. By the time the op was over, Larry was dead and Stephanie was a full agent, one of seventy-eight who comprised the functional entirety of the Delta Green conspiracy. That was three months ago.

  At baggage claim, the group picked up their luggage, including their firearms. Airline regulations prohibited the transport of ammunition without special arrangements, and so after conferring with a phone book and a map of Memphis their first stop would be a gun store. By the time their rented minivan was pulling onto I-240, Stephanie had her Ruger P-85 9mm handgun out and was checking the action, visibly relaxed. Vic and Abe looked on, mildly unsettled.