Out of Chars and Ashes Part One

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// AFTER ACTION REPORT //

OPERATION PLATEBREAKER

TO: ALPHONSE. FROM: I-CELL

// BEGIN MESSAGE //

IMPORTANT PERSONS

// DELTA GREEN

- Agent IRENA, FBI Special Agent MARY BRYANT
- Agent IMOGEN, IRS Special Agent SYLVIA PONTECORVO
- Agent IAGO, Department of the Treasury Division Director EDWARD DONOGHUE
- Agent ISAAC, Adjunct Professor VIKTOR MOROZOV
- Agent INDIGO, SABINA VASSATOU

- Agent OMAR, Identity Unknown

// THE SKOPTSI

- FEDOR BEREZHKOV aka VASILI KARPOV, Ex-SMERSH Agent, Skoptsi Troubleshooter

- JERMIJA BOGDASHKAVICH, High Priest of the Skoptsi.

- NATALIA CHERMENINKO, Ex-KGB Agent, Organyzatzia "Vory".

// CIVILIANS

- EARL ASA SHARANSKY, Manager of Shine! LLC., owner of the last 3 Black Icons. 

- ESMERELDA SHARANSKY, E.A Sharansky's separated wife.

- LIA SHARANSKY, E.A Sharansky's estranged daughter.

- ALYONA "LONNIE" KUKLEVA, E.A Sharansky's mistress.

- PAVEL "PASHA" BOK, Russian Crime Boss, owner of Club Vladivostok.

- ROMAN VERESCHAGIN, Head of Security at Club Vladivostok, FBI informant.

// FRIENDLIES

- DR. JENSEN WU, Director of Antiquities at the American Museum of Natural History.

- TARAS DZUBENKO, Ukrainian Criminal Cleaner, Owner of Coney Island Carpets.

// GRU SV-8

- GEORGE AND JULIAN, SV-8 Operatives running an espionage ring on the Plateau of Leng.

- NEIL AND FRANCIS COOPER, Elderly SV-8 "Illegals".

- PAPA BEAR, THE RHINO, BIG BLACK, Propavsheye "Officers".

On the 30th of May the Skoptsi made a move we previously believed was out of their reach. In Washington, D.C., Sylvia Pontecorvo, Delta Green's Agent IMOGEN, was attacked at her home by a gunman who had attempted to shoot her dead in her porch, meanwhile in Phoenix, Arizona, the husband of fellow I-Cell member Mary Bryant is beaten unconscious outside a post office and must be placed in a medically induced coma. While being questioned by Phoenix police, Bryant is shown a scrap of paper that had been put into her husband's pocket during the attack, and is asked if it means anything to her. The paper reads: 

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! Remember, O Lord, against the E′domites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Raze it, raze it! Down to its foundations!” O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

She lies, and tells them it is meaningless to her. Meanwhile in D.C., the attempt on Pontecorvo's life attracts the attention of FBI Counterintelligence Special Agent Ed Collins.

Collins was someone I-Cell had a brush with a year prior for interfering in court proceedings to have 'Vasili Karpov' tried for colluding with the Russian Mafia. The case suffered from a gross lack of sufficiently damning evidence, Collins' pressure for the prosecution to stop looking into discrepancies in Karpov's identity sunk the nail in the case's coffin. All for the sake of national identity, and saving face for the FBI and especially the CIA. A follow-up from I-Cell with Collins to figure exactly why Karpov was let off the hook earned them a piece of very sensitive information: Vasili Karpov was the assumed identity of NKVD defector Fedor Berezhkov.

Collins' visit was unexpected, and his life of inquiry only served to infuriate Pontecorvo; probing questions about her husband's potential connections to La Cosa Nostra and whether Pontecorvo had colluded with foreign intelligence to harass Berezhkov. The inquiry was baseless and served only to annoy Pontecorvo, who was released not long after.

07JUN1999

IAGO re-activated the tax-laundering task force he had organized I-Cell under during BLUE ISTHMUS and ordered them to muster to the Marriott hotel in Chicago for briefing. They arrive and he does not turn up. Concerned, they go to his room and find the man in a sorry state, sweating, pale, shivering on the floor. IRENA recognizes it immediately: Delirium Tremens. The quickest way to fix the problem is for IAGO to be given liquor, and so he is. He orders them to speak nothing of this, then joins them at the bar for their briefing.

Delta Green has identified the holder of the last Black Icons with a little help from GRU SV-8. The man's name is Earl Asa Sharansky, a Polish-Jewish Jeweller in the Manhattan Diamond District. Sharansky manages his father's diamond import and retail company: Shine! LLC., a family-run private company. Sharansky is also engaged in the trade of highly prized religious artifacts adn antiquities, primarily Jewish ones, but also Christian and Muslim items too. As of a year ago, he came into possession of the Black Icons, the profane relics the Skoptsi search for in order to unlock the secret of communing with their god. As a final note, IAGO mentions that SV-8 intends to lend support for the mission, primarily through their Dreamlands operatives "George" and "Julian" and other operatives that are en route to meet the Agents. He then gives them methods to contact him and the keys to a green box at a storage space in the city.

E.A Sharansky, Manager of Shine! LLC. Jeweller, Gambler, Philanderer, Antiques Dealer.

The profile on Sharansky is extensive. He's a gambling addict and is separated from his wife of thirteen years, Esmerelda Sharansky (nee Rivkin) and estranged from his twelve-year-old daughter Lia, who live in Chicago. He has no connections to the Skoptsi, the Fate, or any other groups of interest. On advice from SV-8, IAGO orders I-Cell to begin by quickly investigating Esmerelda and Lia Sharansky in Chicago to assure that the Skoptsi's allies in the Tadjbegskaya Bratva don't attempt to compromise them (a tactic SV-8 warns I-Cell the Bratva regularly uses to turn enemies against each other). The agents first hit the Chicago green box and are struck by an item they think will be of particular use: a donkey's jaw with an inscription in Aramaic. They take it for later. A brief investigation reveals much about E.A Sharansky and his relationship to his wife and daughter, but more importantly, reveals the Bratva's harassment of the Sharansky family through a cursed idol similar to those the Agents found in Kostya Bekhterev's apartment.

One of the Bratva's nightmare idols

The Agents take the idol and warn Esmerelda to take her and her daughter to live with relatives in Florida, and that they are potentially under threat from people angry with her husband. They promptly break the idol before meeting at a motel with SV-8's operatives in the United Stated, an elderly couple going by "The Coopers". I-Cell asks the Coopers to follow Esmerelda and Lia to Florida to see if they can't catch the Bratva's operatives while they break off to New York to investigate Sharansky. The Coopers agree, with INDIGO tailing behind to monitor them for IAGO. 

Neil Cooper, SV-8 operative.

With matters seemingly in hand in Chicago, the agents relocate to New York City to begin the second stage of their investigation: Investigating Earl Asa Sharansky and devising a method of getting the Black Icons from him. They start with a visit to Dr. Wu. They have a plan for the donkey's jaw; believing that Sharansky would be willing to trade for it as long as they can convincingly falsify the paperwork for it, but before they can trade it, they want to make sure it doesn't have any significant unnatural power or providence, and so they ask Wu to make an appraisal. They then go to Coney Island Carpets to run a few names past Taras Dzubenko. They learn from Taras that there's a man fitting Sharansky's description that gambles with the Russian mafia, specifically with a small group of Dagestanis that run sports betting and illegal card games. They ask if he's heard anything pertaining to Natalia Chermeninko: He claims to know nothing, but assures them he'll keep an ear out.

While at Coney Island Carpets, I-Cell checks in one three of Dzubenko's workers who had done a job for them. After destroying the Brooklyn Priest-Cult during Operation STOKER, I-Cell paid CIC to send a trio of men into the cult's lair to dispose of human remains and to pave over the enourmous "plug" in the floor of the lair. The debrief is slow-going, and immediately IRENA detects that details are being witheld. Eventually two of the three workers explain that a third stayed behind to finish cleaning blood off the walls of the cult's sacred cave, and that when they returned, he had disposed of the corpses but refused to explain how. 

The other two men are dismissed and the third men, a young Russian named Leonid Ubysh, is pressed for details. At last, he confesses to I-Cell what happened, explaining he was preparing to leave when a woman entered the chamber. She was pale, with red dreadlocks and piercings. She said something to him and he felt a "buzz" pass over him, like his entire body went numb. She touched him, then he woke up on the floor. The corpses were gone, the "plug" in the floor was ajar, and she had carved something into his leg. He showed the scar to I-Cell, which they instantly recognized as the stylized "Eye of Ra" used as a calling card by agents of The Network. They leave the interview and quietly resolve to be more judicious about sending their friendlies on jobs unguarded. 

Extensive research is done by I-Cell on E.A Sharansky and his family, including their intrafamilial drama and financial problems, as well as the major Russian criminal operations at work in New York (as I-Cell figures Chermeninko will pull from them for assistance). 

09JUN1999

They take note of two high-rise condominiums bought and paid for under one of Sharansky's holding companies. One is leased out to Sharansky himself (evidently where he sleeps when handling business in New York, rather than from the comfort of his mansion in the Catskills), the other is leased out to a woman by the name of "Alyona "Lonnie" Yermolayevna Kukleva". They quickly learn that Lonnie is an employee of Sharansky's who works at "Shine! Manhattan" under Sharansky, and is likely a mistress of his. A quick visit to Shine! Manhattan under disguise quickly finds this to be quite true. While at Shine!, the agents take note of a group of girls, "old friends" according to Lonnie, from her time as a bottle girl at Club Vladivostok. They invite her out for drinks that night. 

I-Cell's early research on the Russian mafia's operations in New York named Club Vladivostok as a frequent hangout for Mafiya heavyweights. It occurs to I-Cell that the Skoptsi's minions in the Russian mob might try to get at Lonnie Kukleva in order to gain leverage over Sharansky. They quickly arrange a meeting with Roman Vereschagin, the FBI's informant within Club Vladivostok and the club's head of security. They instruct him to keep an eye out for Chermeninko and her crew and to pass along a message to Lonnie Kukleva warning her of what's happening. 

I-Cell's plan is for IMOGEN and IRENA to go into Club Vladivostok in the same disguise they used at Shine! Manhattan. Vereschagin will slip Lonnie the note telling her she's in danger and telling her to go to "Cindy", IRENA's persona. IMOGEN and IRENA will then move her to their car outside, with ISAAC as getaway driver.

At Club Vladivostok, things go smoothly at first. Lonnie sees the note and meets with IRENA, who informs her of what's happening. Chermeninko and her crew arrive and stake out the scene. IRENA takes Lonnie into the bathroom as Chermeninko's men make their move to try to get Lonnie, though IMOGEN is able to thwart this by faking shock and accusing one of Chermeninko's men of sexually harassing her, causing him to flee to avoid attention. IRENA and Lonnie head to the bathroom, with IRENA telling Lonnie to get to their car and wait for them before boosting her through a window to the alleyway. Natalia Chermeninko enters (obviously looking for Lonnie) before making idle small talk with IRENA. Her smalltalk suddenly disintegrates as she asks her "So, do the FBI pay for your wigs?". Knowing she's been made, IRENA resorts immediately to violence. The two women get into a knock-down drag-out brawl in the bathroom that's eventually discovered and broken up by club security. Chermeninko escapes and IRENA leaves with IMOGEN, both combatants severely beaten by the other. The agents drive across the Queensboro bridge to their safehouse, Lonnie quietly sobbing in the backseat all the while. They take IRENA to hospital for her injuries while IMOGEN contacts Sharansky. 

E.A Sharansky agrees to a meeting at Central Station where IMOGEN explains the situation, fraudulently claiming to be an agent of Customs Enforcement working on an organized crime task force, and that the Russian mafia is attempting to blackmail and threaten Sharansky into forfeiting the Black Icons. She explains that "Customs" is willing to work with Sharansky, they will trade him for an item of greater value in exchange for him allowing the icons to be taken into state custody. Presented with overwhelming evidence, Sharansky reluctantly agrees and takes IMOGEN and Lonnie to his mansion in the Catskills to do the trade. 

That morning, IRENA checks out from the hospital with ISAAC and they run to get the jawbone from Wu, who confirms its providence, but assures them he found nothing to overtly point to any supernatural quality. They take it to the Catskills and exchange them for the Icons. IAGO orders them to extract to an aistrip outside of Buffalo, NY. They're loaded onto a plane and taken to Chicago, IAGO explaining that they'll be temporarily moved from flight-to-flight disguised as classified cargo, constantly moving across the country. IRENA and ISAAC go with it back to Chicago while IMOGEN finishes falsifying documents (with the help of Dr. Wu) to prove the jawbone's providence. 

The next day, IRENA gets a phone call from an FBI agent at the Phoenix field office. She tells them she's in Chicago on assignment and they request that she check in at the Chicago Field Office. Meanwhile, in D.C., IMOGEN returns to her office preparing to submit a report to Specail Agent Collins proving Berezhkov's involvement with the Russian mafia when she's greeted by a letter on her desk addressed from the Teese building, home of Club Apocalypse. The letter appears to have been forwarded. Its contents are simply a newspaper clipping of a suicide of a father in Chesapeake City, Maryland, and an excerpt of Psalms 137: 

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Her heart sinks, she knows what they're doing. Meanwhile in Chicago, IRENA turns up at the field office and is greeted by Special Agent Ed Collins, who informs her that she is under arrest for espionage. PART TWO SOON.