V-Cell: A Roadside in Oklahoma.

 

30 JANUARY 2000

On a roadside in rural Oklahoma, Lt. Avery Fields trudges out of the brush. On the highway, a range rover sits idling, its doors are open, most of its windows shot out. Inside, and scattered around the vehicle, are a number of dead men, before the vehicle are two cruisers of the Oklahoma State Police. Lieutenant Fields approaches the vehicle and confirms the kills. Four men, former affiliates of the Aryan Union, later connected to the "Aryan People's National Resistance" (APNR), a white supremacist militia the operated in Oklahoma since in the mid-1980s, and which in only the last two days, and almost totally dissolved. Further up the road, on the other side of the barricade, an FBI cruiser parked, and Special Agent Emerson Copeland stepped out. 

For nearly fifteen years the APNR sat on the FBI's secret list of "impenetrables", this was a brief, unofficial list of organizations which the FBI had failed numerous times to insert undercover agents into and cultivate confidential informants in. Almost all of these organizations were white supremacist groups, though the FBI were baffled for many years how these groups were so keen to sniff out spies. Officially, they still didn't have an answer. Privately, a few agents of the FBI's PATCON Task Force (and who were also Agents of Delta Green) knew the real reason: The Karotechia. For years the Karotechia had relied on Aktion HARUSPEX, an obscene and bloody operation in Mexico that utilized an abominable ritual of child sacrifice in order to commune with an alien intelligence that was able to accurately identify threats to their conspiracy. But ever since Aktion HARUSPEX was disrupted, and its research undone by Delta Green, the Karotechia no longer had that crutch, and within a year, assets had been cultivated in almost all major white supremacist militia movements that had once sat content on the impenetrables list. Anthony Key, one of the APNR's senior members, was caught on a drug charge in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was looking at life - he had been found shooting heroin with a teenaged girl. PATCON threatened that while they might not be able to prove he had done anything "naughty" with her, they could spread the rumours, and in prison, that'd be enough to earn a shanking. He complied. 

PATCON was intersted in the APNR for a laundry list of reasons, primarily that several APNR-trained men were killed by a Border Patrol BORTAC team in El Paso the year before during an operation involving a school bus full of children being kidnapped and held for ransom. Delta Green shares their interest, as they suspect APNR represents a major Karotechia stronghold in the Southwest United States. Early analysis indicates that the group's chief "instructor", ex-US Army Paratrooper Willem Lipton, who worked under the pseudonym "Wilhelm Lichter", was the Karotechia contact. 

Emerson approached Lt. Fields and they conferred quietly away from the police. They were chasing Lipton across the state, and they were tightening their search. a phone call from an isolated cabin south of Stroud, Oklahoma to Lipton's few remaining contacts in the APNR indicated where he was hiding. Lipton's contacts were, at that moment, bleeding to death on the asphault. No one was exactly rushing to save them. The two were chasing Lipton not just because he was the Karotechia's man, but because of what he carried. The APNR had robbed a private collector in New Orleans and stolen a mesoamerican mask known as the Hunahpu Mask, which had been on a list of "items of interest" for Delta Green from the 1960s. The alien intellect in the mask was occasionally able to exert control over its wearer for brief periods of time. The first time it did this was when the FBI, with the help of the Adair County Sheriff's Department, raided the APNR compound. Lipton, wearing the mask, conducted a ritual that summoned enourmous, chitinous worms that swallowed the FBI's armored cars, and whose barbed tentacles killed indiscriminately. By the end of the ordeal, all but a handful of APNR and FBI men were left standing, and among them, not one was sane enough to recount what had happened. In the chaos, Lipton made a break for it. 

"I saw him again" Copeland said, drinking from a plastic water bottle. 

"Saw who?" asked Fields.

"You know. Him. From New Orleans."

Immediately, Fields recognized her meaning and swallowed. 

"I'm alright, but I figured you aught to know."

"No, this is good."

Ever since the operation at the Macallister Building in New Orleans, Copeland was afflicted by occasional "visions" of lavish ballrooms, turn-of-the-century concierges and dandies, and of other things too: war, murder, madness, and a surreal, alien king. Earlier in the operation, while arresting an APNR contact at a post office outsie of Tulsa, they had caught a brief glimpse of "him". 

"I have to tell you something, VICTOR", said Copeland, addressing Fields by his Delta Green codename "They think you've got it bad. They wanted to me to watch you, but I think I must have it just as bad, in fact I think I've got it worse. They told me that if you start showing 'symptoms' I have to tell them. They told me that if it got bad, it'd be up to me to put you down."

The confession struck Field, and without thinking, he rushed forward and hugged Copeland. 

"Alright. Well, if we're being honest. I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"I summoned one of the demons of the Ars Goetia after New Orleans. Bune. He told me the future."
Copeland swallowed. "fuck" she thought. "What'd that cost you?"

"My class ring. But I think it was worth it. He told me things. Important things. I got good intelligence from it. He told me the Karotechia would make a move after this in California. Don't know when. Said I'd know. But he said they'd use the book, again, the King in Yellow. He said the Karotechia don't understand it, they imagine it can be controlled, used like a weapon. He said it would be bad."
"Alright. So what do we do."

The question stuck Fields, and he took a moment to think. 

"I don't know. Prepare. Wait. See what shape it takes."

9 JUNE 2000

At his home at Fort Bliss, and at her home in Lexington, Kentucky. Lt. Avery Fields and Special Agent Emerson Copeland are notified by PATCON of an emerging situation in Sacramento, California. They're booked on the next flights to Sacramento, and are to be the Task Force's point-of-contact with local law enforcement. The situation is at least 15 dead and more wounded at a shooting at a synagogue in sacramento. A group of three men armed with automatic weapons and an explosive device stormed the synagogue and started killing. Early evidence indicates the shooting to be the work of the Bear Flag Republic, a Neo-Nazi separatist militia.

VICTOR knows that this is the time Bune warned of. On the flight from Fort Bliss, he pens his death poem. A little ritual he's done everytime a new Opera begins. He believes when he pens the perfect poem, god will allow him, then and ONLY then, to die. It is not perfect. He folds the poem and keeps it in his breastpocket near his heart. He will not die in California. Not yet, anyway.