Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  “Hello,” she replied with a wide smile. “How are you?”

  “I’m pretty good. Nothing a week of blue sky and sunshine wouldn’t help.”

  “You look good.”

  “So do you.”

  They sat for a moment.

  “You just passing through town?”

  She laughed. “Not hardly.”

  “Still with the EPA?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet. I guess I should have shown up for work this morning, actually. But there didn’t seem to be much point. All they would have done is fired me.”

  His brow furrowed. “What’s up?”

  “You watch the news this weekend?”

  “Good God,” he said. “That was DG, wasn’t it? I smelled it all the way out here.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Damn. So you’ve signed on to the opera?”

  “Yeah. It’s been . . . well, it’s been interesting.”

  “That sounds like an understatement.”

  “Look, I . . . I’m taking a trip. My Cell is. We’re being very positive about it, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “But you don’t think you’re coming back.”

  “No. No, I don’t. I think this is a one-way ticket.”

  “Then don’t go. Tell Alphonse to blow.”

  “We’re going on our own. It’s kind of a long story. Alphonse is in the hospital. He’s been shot.”

  “Jesus. I go away for a couple years and it all goes down the toilet.”

  She laughed at that. “Yeah, that’s right. Things fall apart.”

  “The center cannot hold.”

  “Yeah . . .” She looked at a nearby prisoner, his hand cupping a woman’s face. They kissed.

  “So where are you going?”

  “Puerto Rico. A place called OUTLOOK Group.”

  A shadow passed over his face. “Don’t. Don’t go there.”

  “You know it?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Really? When?”

  “A few years back. I wasn’t supposed to know what it was or where, but I had some buddies on Vieques that filled me in afterward.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “I was being recruited. There’s this group of people, called SECTION DELTA.”

  Stephanie blinked. “The National Reconnaissance Office.”

  “That’s them. They offered me a job with DELTA. Alphonse thought it might be a good idea. Someone on the inside, you know?”

  “What happened?”

  “I washed out. I didn’t make the cut.”

  “Why?”

  He laughed grimly. “I passed the psych eval.”

  She smiled at him. “You old softie.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Anyway, that’s why I was at OUTLOOK. For the test. That place is bad, bad news. Why do you have to go there?”

  “Do you know Agent Shasta?”

  “Not well, but yeah.”

  “He’s down there. They’ve got him. Doing experiments, something with the neo-tissue from Groversville.”

  James leaned forward and put his hand on her knee for a moment. “Then you really can’t go there. You don’t want to fuck with those people.”

  “I already have. Last weekend. They got back at us by shooting Alphonse.”

  “So it’s war. Damn it! I can’t do any fucking good in this place.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “It’s okay. It’s my war now. I’m going to see it through.”

  He looked at her warily. “So you’re in? No hesitation?”

  “Nope. I’m in.”

  “I wish I could say I was glad to hear that.”

  She smiled and took his hand, holding it tightly in her own. Her eyes were moist. “I need to go. I’ve got to catch a plane. I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

  They stood up, still holding hands, and drew close. They kissed. For a moment, Stephanie’s trip to Puerto Rico didn’t seem very important—not nearly as important as the prospect of staying here, in this moment, for all time. For infinity.

  Then she left.

  James stood, watching her leave, as the guards approached to lead him back to his cell. He looked at his hand, the one she’d been holding. There was a piece of paper there. It was dingy, and badly creased from being folded and unfolded a thousand times. He knew what it said, knew it was his own handwriting on the note, but he opened it and read it just the same:

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

  Vic and Abe arrived at Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport in San Juan that evening, just after sunset. They took a meandering publico from the airport and a fellow passenger recommended a hotel, Casa del Caribe in the Condado district. They’d decided against renting a car just yet, so they could avoid using credit cards.

  The hotel was a renovated old guest house, with just seven rooms. It was a Monday night, though, so one was available. They checked in with cash and fake ID and sprawled on the generous bed, reveling in the welcome warmth of Puerto Rico beneath a slowly oscillating ceiling fan.

  “Are we doing the right thing?” Vic finally said.

  “If not, it’s still a heckuva vacation.”

  Vic smiled and propped herself up on one elbow to look at Abe. “Well, there’s that.”

  They looked at each other for a while. Eventually, Vic sat up. “So tonight we’re on vacation. Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Take me out, Abe. I want wine and food and dancing.”

  “Dancing? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “Come on!”

  In five minutes they were changed and out the door. On the desk clerk’s advice they took a taxi to Old San Juan, a centuries-old walled neighborhood frequented by tourists. After arriving they wandered on foot, navigating the steep streets of blue adoquine cobblestones and marveling at the Spanish Colonial buildings on every side. Eventually they selected a restaurant more or less at random and ended up with a brilliant meal at Amadeus—and plenty of wine—then left quite tipsy. Passing through the crowded Plaza de San José just afterwards, they drunkenly saluted the huge statue of Ponce de León.

  Abe insisted on dropping into a small casino for an hour of blackjack—“For you, we’ll dance; for me, we’ll gamble”—and Vic hung on his arm, play-acting a smartass gangster’s moll from an old movie. She was good at it. They left the casino bright-eyed and happy; Abe had won fifty dollars.

  Up the street, Vic spotted a nightclub and dragged Abe inside to dance. He did his best, which was frankly terrible. Eventually, they settled on Abe sort of dancing in place while Vic bounced around him, happy as a lark, to the rhythms of a live salsa band.

  They left the club and hailed a cab, which ran them back to Condado and the Casa del Caribe. Vic danced all the way to the door, snapping her fingers as Abe fumbled with the key. Inside, they fell on the bed, laughing—and then Abe kissed her.

  She touched his face with one hand, tracing a line with her fingers, and he kissed her again. Vic wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. They made slow, sweet love in the warm and the dark, flush with the aroma of the tropics, as the ceiling fan traced lazy orbits deep into the night.

  San Juan City Hall was beautiful in the noonday sun, a two-hundred-year-old replica of its counterpart in Madrid. Vic and Abe loitered out front, taking in the warmth of the day. They hadn’t spoken of what happened in the night, but they hadn’t been regretting it, either.

  Stephanie got out of a taxi and waved. They walked over to greet her, bringing their bags to join hers in the cab.

  “God! It’s beautiful here!” she said brightly. “I’d forgotten what the sun looked like.”

  “Me too,” Abe said, glancing at a smiling Vic.

  Stephanie cocked a suspicious eyebrow at them. “Well, it’s about time,” she said, which was the entirety of their discussion on t
he subject.

  Vieques Island was a footprint eight miles off the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico, twenty-five miles wide by four miles deep. It had once been home to Arawaks, and served as a pirate enclave in the 1600s. Today the western and eastern thirds were under the authority of the U.S. Navy and Marines, respectively, who used the land for training exercises, bombardment ranges, and storage. But the center third still boasted a low-key, low-glitz tourist trade and a population below ten thousand. Architectural landmarks were in short supply; Hurricane Hugo had obliterated most of the civilian structures in 1989, and they’d been rebuilt out of modern brick and stone.

  Cell T had taken Stephanie’s taxi right back to the airport. There was a quick flight to Vieques on Isla Nena Air at half-past noon, and they barely made it. After the flight, they decided to take a chance and rent an SUV on Vic’s credit card; of the three of them, she’d left the fewest footprints on the op to date. They found a small pawn shop that also carried ammunition, and they bought plenty. From there, they went to a small tourist store and bought several oversize, floppy outfits—tropical shirts, khaki cargo pants, and the like. At a gas station restroom they put their bulletproof vests on beneath the loose-fitting clothes, and hid their firearms and extra magazines in the bellows pockets of the pants. They were ready as they could be, under the circumstances, though Vic made a point of saying that they looked like geeks. The huge green Island Rent-A-Car logos on the SUV certainly didn’t help.

  Then they drove to Luján, a small town near the main entrance to the USMC’s Camp Garcia. Following Agent Nancy’s notes, they found the whorehouse. The neighborhood was quiet and friendly. The building was a private residence, attractive in a bordello sort of way, with no visible security; Nancy had said things were pretty relaxed there, and that most of their clients were wealthy Puerto Ricans. A couple of spit-and-polish men with crew cuts were walking furtively into the front door; military personnel were prohibited from entering the civilian areas of Vieques, but it looked like these two were breaking the rules. Vic snickered. “Sailors. Go figure.” Cell T parked up the street and watched for a while. They had a description of Yrjo and his car from Nancy, down to the license plate. Although they didn’t really expect to see him today, they figured they might as well start the surveillance immediately and get used to the surroundings.

  Dr. Albert Yrjo drove up two hours later.

  It was him, all right. They checked the license plate to be sure. He was driven by two men in Wackenhut khaki uniforms, an unsettling sight in this warm and inviting land; the last such uniforms they’d seen had been on dead men.

  Yrjo’s car came to a stop in front of the whorehouse. The three men inside conferred for a moment, and then Yrjo opened the door and stepped out jauntily.

  The spring in his step didn’t suit him. Yrjo was a hunched little man, his skin wrinkled and dotted with liver spots. He had a ring of wispy white hair around his head, which fluttered unbecomingly in the breeze and made him look crazed. He wore a floppy tropical shirt and white beachcomber pants, rolled up above the ankles, and sandals.

  “Viagra,” Abe said. “Gotta love it.”

  Then the car drove away.

  “Jesus!” Stephanie exclaimed. “They’re just leaving him!”

  “I thought Nancy said they always came inside?” Vic asked.

  “Maybe they’re going to refill his prescription,” Abe replied.

  “Fuck it,” Stephanie said. “Let’s go.”

  The car was out of sight and Yrjo was inside the whorehouse. Vic cranked the ignition and whipped a u-turn, putting them right at the front door. Stephanie and Abe piled out of the SUV, guns tucked under their shirts, and ran inside. Vic kept the vehicle idling.

  The lobby was furnished in Early Cathouse: red plush velvet curtains, red plush velvet furniture, vintage oil paintings of Rubenesque nudes idling on divans, tall floor lamps shaded with gauzy amber fabric, the works. An ornate gilt staircase with red carpet made a graceful arc down to the floor, ending by a massive wooden front desk carved with frolicking nudes. The only people in the lobby were Yrjo and a dusky, voluptuous older woman speaking to him from behind the desk. She glanced at the harried-looking tourist couple that had just entered, no doubt mistakenly.

  “May I help you?” she asked sweetly.

  Stephanie and Abe walked swiftly over to either side of Yrjo and took him by the arms. Abe pressed a gun against his stomach.

  “You’re coming with us, doctor,” he said.

  “Oh, my,” Yrjo replied.

  The woman behind the desk raised her hands and stepped back, fearful.

  “Have a nice day,” Stephanie said. She and Abe wheeled Yrjo around and force-marched him right back out the door and into the sunshine. They climbed into the back seat, putting Yrjo in the middle, and Vic drove off.

  “Jesus!” Abe said. “That was easy!”

  “What’s going on?” Yrjo said in a pleasant voice.

  “You’ve got a friend of ours, doctor,” Stephanie said. She had her gun out now as well, likewise pointed at Yrjo. “David Nells. We want him back.”

  The doctor looked back and forth at the pair with him in the back seat.

  “How interesting,” he said.

  “We’re the ones who hit OUTLOOK in Maryland,” Abe cut in. “We know what you’re up to. We don’t care. We just want Nells.”

  “I see,” Yrjo said. “No warrant this time?”

  “No warrant,” Stephanie replied. “Nells alive or you dead. That’s the choice.”

  “Well,” he said. “This is quite the quandary.”

  “It’s no quandary, doctor.”

  “No, it is,” he said, clearly intrigued by the situation. “You see, there are several possibilities here. First, this might be a stress simulation. Perhaps my own staff has drugged me and arranged this ridiculous scenario to see if I’m still reliable. If so, then I have no intention of complying with you and we can stop this charade right now because I won’t tolerate this indignity. Second, it may be that I’ve had a stroke in Maria’s boudoir. This could be some sort of hallucination, in which case I should comply so that I can resolve it successfully and alive, since it could be my mind’s way of recovering from the stroke and therefore success could be symbolically therapeutic to my life-threatening condition. Third, it may simply be that this is all real, in which case I should comply because I have every intention of living to an even riper old age than I already have.”

  Stephanie and Abe looked at each other, baffled.

  “Very well, then. I will comply. Under the circumstances, the odds are two to one in favor of compliance. And even if the first scenario is true, they can hardly expect me to play the hero given my present physical faculties.”

  The agents looked at Yrjo, still boggling at what he was saying.

  “Driver?” he asked. “Do you know the way?”

  “Sure do,” Vic replied.

  “Then let’s go.”

  They arrived at OUTLOOK in twenty minutes, Vic driving as fast as she dared. The facility was by itself at the end of a promontory between two bays, Puerto Ferro and Bahía Corcho, within the eastern third of Vieques owned by the U.S. Marines. The promontory was ringed with a thick band of mangrove trees, within which OUTLOOK was nestled.

  Just before they entered the boundaries of Camp Garcia, they’d moved Yrjo to the front passenger seat and Abe had taken over the wheel. Vic and Stephanie sat in the back seat, guns trained on Yrjo from behind. The Marine guard at the checkpoint checked their drivers’ licenses and let them through. There were several beaches within the Marine zone that the military allowed public access to, with only a cursory check to verify U.S. citizenship. OUTLOOK was near one such place, known as Red Beach.

  OUTLOOK was huge—a walled compound with many buildings, a small town unto itself. An electrified fence surrounded the entire place. At the entrance to OUTLOOK, a Wackenhut guard approached wearing a straw fedora. Yrjo waved merrily through the front window. The guard st
opped, nodded, and went back into the sentry post. The gate swung open and Abe pulled forward.

  Beyond the fence was another fence, with concrete posts in line with the gate to stop charging vehicles. They turned left and drove fifty yards, then reached a second gate. Once again, Yrjo waved to the guard and they were allowed through. They turned left once again before a twelve-foot stone wall with guard towers at the four corners, drove another fifty yards, and passed through a third and final gate before they were in the compound proper.

  Yrjo pointed towards a large building off to one side, a couple hundred yards from the residential areas. “Over there,” he said. “We’ll take the rear entrance. It leads straight down to the labs, and we’ll find your friend there.” Abe turned the SUV and advanced.

  A very bad feeling was settling over Vic. She’d seen the quick map Nancy had sketched out, but she was unprepared for the size and complexity of this operation. They were in very, very deep water here. She leaned over to Stephanie.

  “I don’t like this,” she whispered. “This has been way too easy.”

  Stephanie nodded, anxious. “Well, he is the boss,” she whispered back. “Maybe he’s just getting careless in his old age.”

  Yrjo sat, patient and smiling, hearing every word. His hearing was as good as it had been in his youth, a fact he credited to a lifetime of despising music and noise of every sort. He preferred silence, silence in which to think, silence in which to plan—and to execute plans already made.

  They reached the rear entrance, where there was a small auxiliary parking lot. Cell T climbed out of the car, helping Yrjo out carefully. No one was around.

  He led them to the door, and slid a key card through a slot. The door swung open and they walked inside, Abe taking the lead in front of Vic and Stephanie, who walked alongside Yrjo.

  “Hello.”

  Adolph Lepus and a dozen NRO DELTA agents were waiting for them. As the soundproofed door swung silently shut behind them, Abe raised his weapon.