Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  Two hours later, the trio had purchased three hundred rounds of 9mm Parabellum ammunition—there was a reason why they all carried the same caliber handgun—and checked into their lodgings at the Highway Motel, near the intersection of Jackson Avenue and I-240, the beltline that ran around the city. Based in midtown Memphis, they asked the desk clerk for lunch advice and drove out to Payne’s—a tasty little joint, it turned out, located in a former gas station—for barbecue sandwiches and planning; as Abe said, this town had to be famous for some kind of food, and barbecue was it. Vic was the senior DG agent of the three, with eight ops under her belt across five years. She conducted the briefing quietly between bites of saucy pork and cole slaw.

  “Agent Shasta vanished two weeks ago from his home in Langley, Virginia,” she said. “The cops and the CIA, his employer, are conducting investigations, but they don’t know what we know—that he was in Memphis for three days last month on a DG op. Since the legit investigations aren’t panning out, Alphonse wants us to re-open Shasta’s last op and see if there are some leads there. The other members of Cell S are excluded from this op, in case they’re already compromised.”

  “So why was Shasta here in podunkville?” Abe asked. Agent Shasta was Cell T’s superior contact in the Delta Green chain of command. DG’s cells were arranged in an alphabetic hierarchy, with code names assigned beginning with the letter of the three-person cell. Cell T, therefore, was comprised of Agents Terry, Thomas, and Tonya: Dr. Stephanie Park, Abraham Mannen, and Victoria Winstead, respectively. Agent Udall, of Cell U, reported to Agent Tonya of Cell T. In turn, Tonya reported to Agent Shasta of Cell S. And so on, all the way up to Cell A, headed by Agent Alphonse, the nominal leader of the Delta Green conspiracy, who often circumvented the hierarchy and spoke directly to the cell leaders. Real names were a premium currency, usually traded only within a cell—though Alphonse knew everything.

  “His cell was re-investigating a DG op that they ran in Groversville, Tennessee, a couple years ago,” Vic replied. “Some sort of alien-abduction deal. The townsfolk apparently cleared out and the land reverted to the state, who eventually sold it to some developers of a planned community, one of those new corporate-managed urban-village deals. Only Cell S couldn’t trace the original townsfolk—their records trailed off into nothing. A few weeks ago, Shasta found a Groversville native here in Memphis and brought Cell S to investigate. They wrapped up in a couple days and bailed with nothing. The contact wasn’t talking.”

  “And then Shasta disappeared?” Abe asked.

  “Two weeks later,” Vic replied. “He left work, went home, and was never seen again. No witnesses. No signs of foul play. No wife, no kids, no gambling debts, no questionable investments, no large cash purchases, no family trouble. He was a loner, except for Delta Green. Someone else did this to him.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “We all knew Shasta. He wouldn’t just vanish, would he? It must be some past op catching up with him.”

  Abe looked rueful. “Yeah, but which one? He’s been an agent for more than a decade and at least half of that was pre-Alphonse, so there’s jack-all for records. Any number of fuckos could’ve popped up and done him in, and that’s not including any enemies from his day job. The guy got kicked out of China as a spy back when he was a military attaché in the ’80s. I heard he was even in on the Cambodia fiasco in ’69. Hell, he once told me his dad was in the Flying Tigers and fought to free Tibet after the war. Shasta had a serious track record, ground up. He could’ve made enemies from Vietnam onwards. This is a big wishbone we’re pulling on.”

  “I didn’t know he was in that deep,” Stephanie said thoughtfully. “But he must have done something to trigger this, assuming he just didn’t vanish on his own.”

  “Well, the only recent action we’re aware of is his cell’s investigation into that Groversville survivor here in Memphis,” Vic said, pulling a notepad out of her purse. “That was eight months since his last op. So we’ll start with her.” She put the fork down and flipped open the pad. “Joan Blackwell, 45, 1281 Stonewall, apartment 23. Rented the place six months ago. Single, no kids. Employed at Federal Express as a package sorter, an entry-level position. No car, takes the bus. No criminal or military record. She’s clear with the IRS—tax returns filed all the way back to age nineteen. Service jobs, assistant-manager crap. Krystals, Dairy Queens, Wal-Marts, that sorta stuff.”

  “All those records could have been faked,” Abe said.

  “True. She might be a plant,” Stephanie added.

  Vic nodded. “It’s a possibility. But there are property records showing that she owned a doublewide in Groversville for six years. Alphonse even found credit-card records showing her purchases in Groversville from before the original op. If someone set this woman up with a paper trip, they did a really good job.”

  “So let’s go talk to her,” Abe said.

  “What’s our cover?” Vic asked.

  The trio sat in silence for a minute and munched on their barbecue.

  “We’re private investigators doing property research on legal claims related to Groversville,” Stephanie said. “We’ll say there’s a class-action suit from former residents alleging some kind of deception on the part of the company that bought the town.”

  “Hold on,” Abe said. “If she’s legit, that’s fine. But if she’s a plant, she’ll know that’s bullshit because there wouldn’t be any class-action suit for a situation that was faked from the ground up. Far as I understand, not a single Groversville resident has been found except for this lady. Big-time fishy. So fishy the media didn’t even blink twice.”

  “Except for Phenomen-X,” Vic snorted.

  “Then we’re looking for someone,” Stephanie replied emphatically. “Ask Alphonse for the name of a Groversville resident—maybe an older one, some old lady whose relatives might be looking for her—and say we’re tracking down former residents to find this person.”

  Vic and Abe nodded. “That could work,” Vic said. “We’ll need a Memphis P.I. permit in case she checks.”

  “Call it in to Alphonse now and we’ll have it in a day or two,” Abe said between mouthfuls of food.

  “Okay,” Vic said. “We’ll proceed as P.I.’s. Maybe we can use the class-action story if we need it. Stephanie, I know you’re not a lawyer, but you’ve done a lot of testifying for the EPA. Can you fake being our attorney with this woman? Bogus or legit, she’ll spook better if we have a lawyer.”

  “Sure,” Stephanie answered. “I’ve got fake ID from Alphonse. I’ll get a P.O. box and voice mail first to get the front set up, then get some business cards from a copy shop. I’ll make P.I.-branded dupes under your fake ID’s. Memphis Investigative Services or something. We’ll be all set.”

  “All right,” Vic said. “We’ve got our cover. Steph’ll get the identity stuff started this afternoon and we should be ready to roll hard by mid-week.” Abe and Stephanie nodded during fork-fulls of beans. “In the meantime, let’s set up a surveillance on Joan Blackwell. I’ll take the afternoon at her house while you two run errands, then you’ll split the evening between her work and her home. But first, Steph, you call Fed Ex and ask for Joan. Let’s make sure she’s still there.” Stephanie nodded and headed off to the pay phone by the entrance.

  Once Stephanie was gone, Abe looked at Vic candidly. “Do you think she’s okay for this? She seems twitchy to me.”

  Vic looked at Stephanie, who was nearing the front doors and heading for the pay phone. “There’s something about her I can’t read. I think she’s kinda spooky. But that’s par for the course. I mean, she and Alphonse both gave us the run-down on her past ops as a friendly, and they didn’t sound too rough, though I dunno what was up with her and Agent Darren on that Roscoe op. He got busted around then . . . still, I think she’s okay. Just keep an eye on her.”

  Abe nodded. “Yeah. I hope she works out.”

  Vic frowned. “If not, we may have to put her down.”

  Abe sipped his coffee. “S
he’s not a mad dog, Vic.”

  “Not yet,” she replied.

  They nibbled on the remains of their food, but neither had much of an appetite now. Stephanie returned after a couple of minutes. Her eyes were bright. “I called Fed Ex. They have no record of a Joan Blackwell ever working for them.”

  Vic boggled. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. They’ve got nothing. No such person.”

  “But Cell S found full confirmation,” Abe said. “Up and down the line, she checked out!”

  “Not any more,” Stephanie said, excited. “I called her home number, just to be thorough. I got some guy named Ray Moore, said he’d had the number for years. Didn’t know our Blackwell.”

  “Damn,” Abe said. “If that’s all straight, this is a serious plant. Cell S was duped.”

  “But why?” Stephanie said. “Why would someone have faked this?”

  Abe and Vic looked at each other. Finally Vic spoke: “To flush us out. To bring one of us in and tag him, like a migrating goose. That’s how they got Shasta.”

  “A trap?” Stephanie asked.

  Vic nodded. “A trap for Delta Green.” She glanced at Abe, who nodded worriedly. “The question is, who was the target?”

  “What do you mean?” Stephanie asked. “They got Shasta, right?”

  “Cell S might have been the target,” Vic acknowledged. “But maybe Joan Blackwell was for real, and someone erased her because Shasta found her.”

  “Then what?” Stephanie asked.

  “Then now we’re the target,” Vic replied.

  None of them knew what to say to that. They sipped their coffee in silence.

  Dr. Joseph Camp of the Library of Congress Research Division sat down slowly and somewhat heavily in his living-room armchair. He’d arrived home from a grocery run an hour ago, and had been puttering around in the kitchen when the phone rang.

  The milk he’d been heating on the stove for chai had boiled over and then burned. He didn’t put his caller on hold until the smoke alarm in the kitchen went off.

  His tea ruined, he’d simply settled for a beer and took his chair to await the pizza delivery man. This was no sort of meal for a man of his age and physical condition, but he couldn’t be bothered to deal with the mess in the kitchen right now. The smell of scorched milk reminded him of things best not brought to mind. He took a long gulp of beer, set the bottle down, and lit up a Nat Sherman cigarette. Smoke swirled in the air above him as he sat, deep in thought. He was thinking about Agent Shasta.

  Dr. Camp was also known as Agent Alphonse, the leader of the Delta Green conspiracy. Sitting in his threadbare tweed suit with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he looked like nothing more than a tired old pensioner, collecting Social Security and wondering why the kids never called anymore. He sagged in his clothes, his face long, his white goatee—worn to hide a double chin—flecked with moisture from the beer. Reaching deep into himself, Dr. Camp summoned up a gargling cough and spat a wad of phlegm into the ashtray. A small cloud of gray dust rose in a short-lived flurry.

  The phone call had been from Agent Tonya in Memphis, calling to report on Cell T’s findings in the disappearance of Agent Shasta. The news had been disconcerting. Dr. Camp sat and pondered this mystery, and wondered what to do next. He also wondered, sarcastically, who died and left him in charge. Oh that’s right, he thought to himself harshly. Reggie. Reggie Fairfield. Saint Reggie, the martyr to our cause. Major General Reginald Fairfield, U.S. Army (Retired), had led Delta Green in its illegal incarnation from the day the Joint Chiefs of Staff disbanded the legitimate agency in 1970 to the day that he died: February 25, 1994, murdered in his ancestral cabin in Vermont. The fifth anniversary of that event was a couple weeks away. I didn’t know what a job you had, Reggie, until you were gone. Damn you.

  Dr. Camp finished the beer and the cigarette at about the same time. The pizza arrived, and he made a sorry dinner of it—dipping the ends of the slices in a bowl of non-fat ranch dressing he took from the fridge—while watching CNN. The news was par for the course: government scandals, foreign agitation, on and on. For a man who’d served in WWII and worked in federal service for the fifty years since, the news was old news at best; they just delivered it faster.

  Finally he rose and put the leftover pizza in the fridge, using the box it came in. Then he padded in sock feet to the spare bedroom, the one he kept locked with a system that read his body’s magnetic field through the key and would not unlock unless it recognized him. A retina scanner would have been simpler, but also too obvious.

  Inside was a technological marvel. The room was soundproof and shielded against surveillance via broadcast transmission. The windows were shuttered and the glass dampened to prevent audio surveillance via laser-scanned vibration. The walls, floor, and ceiling were completely lined with two layers of steel separated by a gas. If someone drilled through with a micro-camera or some other device, the gas would be released into the room, triggering a silent chemical alarm. The airtight room’s ventilation was piped in from the basement, and passed through a variety of filters and chemical sniffers to detect and block contaminants. The only communication to the outside world was through a digital fiber-optic cable that Dr. Camp had run himself, down through the building’s walls, into the basement, out through a storm drain, and eventually into a Department of Works utility tunnel beneath the street, where it was cleverly patched into the phone company’s trunk lines through a custom encryption unit. The degree of security was excessive, except for one important and unusual respect: the fact that this cutting-edge installation, which had cost more than four hundred thousand dollars, was in the spare bedroom of Dr. Camp’s house—the one whose address appeared in the phone book next to his name for all to see. He figured that if someone got to him, Delta Green was screwed anyway; might as well have the op center be convenient, right? It was, perhaps, the only real piece of recklessness he had left in him. Or so he liked to think.

  Reclining into the expensive task chair in the secure room, Dr. Camp tapped on the keyboard of his computer. He accessed Delta Green’s database system—it and the group’s main encryption routers were stored elsewhere—and pondered various screens full of information. The information concerned the missing Agent Shasta:

  Shasta was born in Taiwan in 1950. During the war, his father served as an Army transport pilot in the Pacific theater; afterwards, he worked for the CIA-owned Civil Air Transport, running airborne smuggling, surveillance, and civilian transportation flights out of Taiwan from 1946 until his death in 1964. Father was a Delta Green friendly and staunch follower of the Dalai Lama, and did personal work on behalf of Tibet against Communist China beginning in 1958. Father died in the 1964 crash of a C-46A transport he was piloting during a Delta Green op intended to assassinate PARIAH.

  Shasta grew into a skilled observer with excellent regional language skills. He was drafted in 1968 and the Army sent him to Vietnam as an interrogator and translator for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Acting in this capacity, Shasta did some brief work for Marine Colonel Satchel Wade, who later organized the Delta Green operation in pre-invasion Cambodia. In 1970 Shasta testified before the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the secret hearings that shut down Delta Green. Shortly afterwards, Shasta was recruited by the CIA. He has maintained a dual Army/CIA status ever since.

  In 1979, he was sent to the new U.S. embassy in Beijing, China, as a military attaché. In 1984 he was recruited by Agent Alphonse—a wartime friend of his father’s—into Delta Green, following an assignment to retrieve the Ghorl Nigräl. He remained at the embassy until 1986, when Chinese authorities exposed him as a CIA agent and ejected him from the country.

  Since his return, he has worked as an intelligence analyst for the CIA’s Office of East Asian Analysis, under the Directorate of Intelligence. Today, his work focuses on Chinese dismantling and re-deployment of ICBM launch stations, specifically those formerly or presently located in Tibet. He is unmarried and forty-
eight years old. He has participated in thirty ops since his induction into Delta Green.

  Dr. Camp read and re-read the profile. He accessed the meager files on Shasta’s past ops. Somewhere in there, he hoped, there would be a clue to Agent Shasta’s disappearance.

  Who would want to kidnap David Foster Nells?

  David Foster Nells slept. It was a deep sleep, brought on by medication. When the guard came to wake him, he was slow to rise.

  “Get up, Nells. C’mon, get up.” The guard shook him, then shook him harder. David mumbled something and began blinking his eyes. As the guard continued to berate him, David’s vision came into focus and he looked at his surroundings.

  He was in a jail cell—that much was obvious. He was lying on a bunk bed with a thin mattress, a bed suspended from the cinder-block wall by metal brackets. The walls were painted light green, a thick institutional coat. The wall he faced when he raised his head was not a wall, but a network of metal bars with a locking gate set off-center. The gate was closed, and another guard stood outside in a hallway painted the same color as the cell.

  David sat up groggily, confused by his surroundings. “What’s going on?” he managed to ask.

  “Get up. Your lawyer’s here. Move, move!” the guard barked angrily.

  David swiveled around and got his feet on the floor. He put on an unfamiliar pair of shoes, and then realized he was wearing an orange jumpsuit marked SAVANNAH CITY JAIL. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I don’t give a shit, asshole. Get up and let’s go.” He grabbed David beneath the arms and pulled him up until he was standing, then pushed him towards the gate. The guard outside opened it and jerked his head to one side, indicating that David should come out into the hallway. David complied, followed closely by the guard who had awakened him. The gate clanged shut behind them, and the pair led David down the hall.

  They entered a small conference room. Inside was a table, four chairs, and a metal cart containing a television atop a VCR. A security camera was mounted to the ceiling in a corner opposite the door, and a large mirror was set into one wall. Seated at the table was a small man in his thirties, wearing a dark suit. A briefcase sat unopened in front of him.