Operation Haystack - Preparations

It all starts with an email looking insignificant enough, but it is sent from the address all the agents had burnt into their minds. It leaves two days until briefing, just enough to make some excuses and travel to the specified location.

Daren had never worked for pseudo-governmental or pseudo-legal agencies. Part of him was questioning himself, telling him to give up on all this and just return to his normal work in Naueve. But he had lingering suspicions, which he had to witness to the end. He was half done typing his medical leave notice, citing his occular migraine and hypertension, requesting time to undergo health checkup and work from home. All of this was to arrange sometime in order to attend this peculiar event where he was summoned. What or who are this Delta Green? It was time to find out.

He completed typing the email, as his alarm clock buzzed at 10 P.M. It was time to retire for bed but he looked at his wardrobe instead. Was it really the right decision to follow these bread crumbs? Is it going to be a scam? Taking a deep breath, he went back to check his unzipped bag, going through it again for all the contents he had packed. Anna will call soon, and he had to make another excuse to her.

10:15 PM, the phone rang, and it was Anna. Daren sighed and took the call as he stood on the balcony, talking to her and waiting to end the day.

Deep in the stacks of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, in the backroom and archives where even the researchers rarely went, the smell of must and dust was overwhelming. Shelf upon shelf of crumbling incunabula and manuscripts towered over the desk where Link Morrow hunched under dim light designed to preserve the onionskin paper of the books – though it had quite the opposite effect on his eyesight. He squinted through a massive pair of magnifying goggles at the copy of Philipp Melanchthon's Initiae Doctrinae Physicae, a 500-year-old natural philosophy text that a donor had recently adopted for restoration. With painstaking slowness he daubed a cotton bud covered with a very mild solvent across the leather bindings of the book, which had been replaced sometime in the last hundred years and contained preservatives that were slowly damaging the older pages within.

His laptop, pushed to the side of the desk, chimed. Link glanced to the side, recoiling as he realised he was still wearing the goggles – the screen was a blur of indistinct pixels at their magnification. He pushed the goggles up his brow and slipped on his steel-rimmed glasses, blinking at the new email. He was about to mentally send it to the 'deal with this shit later' pile when he saw the sender's address.

His heart punched him in the throat. He gently slid the tray the book was on aside and grabbed for the computer. The email was short, agonisingly cryptic. A night at the opera – he'd heard that phrase from the agent that had recruited him. The strange, the outsider – what the hell did that mean? How did you get ready for something they refused to articulate? He sat for five minutes, reading, re-reading, fretting, before he realised what he was doing.

"Okay, think it through," he murmured to himself. Detroit. His father lived in Detroit. That was a good excuse. He started compose an email to Director Evangelista-Doughtery, explaining that his father was in the hospital and that Link needed to go and be with him. How long would this operation take? He had no idea how these things worked, so he requested the rest of the week off, to be safe. He had leave and personal days owing, and one of the good things about working in book conservation was that, barring fire or flood, it was rarely urgent. Philipp Melanchton's text had survived five centuries – it could wait until Monday for him to finish the restoration.

As he waited for a reply, Link glanced down at the covers of the Initiae. The front was stamped with a scene of the Crucifixion, the back cover with a glorious Resurrection, symbolically placing all the laws of nature and science, as understood by the early Lutheran theologian, within the scope of Christ's sacrifice. How limited that seemed, if anything Link had seen so far in the service of the Program was to be believed.

Washington DC to Detroit was about 520 miles, maybe a nine hour drive through Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Link grinned despite his unease – it had been a while since he'd taken the Death Machine, his 1959 Cadillac hearse, for a road trip. It'd be a homecoming for the old Detroit-built chassis.

Link opened Google and began poking around for the Hotel Engine. There seemed to be an app by that name, so he had to look deeper. He was curious if there was actually an opera, a play, a book signing or something like that being hosted at the Hotel, or if the talk of 'authors' and 'actors' was an oblique reference to the operation.

"You hear that, Shirley? I've been invited to the opera." Shirley was Bob's barrel cactus. His ex, Leslie, liked to say it was round and prickly, just like him. Or maybe that's what he told Leslie.

"Opera, my ass."

Bob looked at the email on his phone again. "Sharp mind and healthy physical state?" Bob slapped his belly. "They'll have to take what the get, ay, Shirley?" He paused as if listening for a reply. "Yeah. Guess I'll sober up for this one."

Bob gulped down the rest of his glass of whiskey, then walked over to his laptop. Doing anything more than reading websites and emails on his phone was a pain. In fairly short order he had plane tickets and a hotel room lined up.

"I'm gonna be gone a little bit, Shirley. I'll have Leslie come in and check on you." Hopefully I'll come back, he thought to himself.

Jim sat at his slightly outdated desktop in the dark of his apartment, and read his e-mail. He chuckled to himself.

"When the government tells you that you don't need a gun, you need two."

He didn't reply. He knew better. He closed out of the correspondance, closed the browser page, and opened a new one to book a plane ticket and a room. When the confirmation came through, he saved it on his phone. He had two days, but he figured he'd fly out tomorrow... may as well get to Detroit a day early. Do some sightseeing, be a tourist for a minute. Why not, right?

Then he set about packing a bag. The primary order of business was his hard case. The SIG P320 chambered in .40 S&W, a suppresor, the laser/light unit, three loaded 14 round magazines, and one box of ammo. It all fit neatly into the foam cut-outs. Oh! Cleaning gear gets tucked in as well. He locks both locks on the case, then slides the hard case into his bag.

A sturdy pair of boots, all the usual articles of clothing -- business and casual -- and his light vest. Oh... and his gloves. Again, both business and casual. A small pouch with the standard hygiene supplies get tossed on top, and James is packed and ready to go. He locks the back, a different lock than was on his hardcase, and puts his keys in his pocket. He calls a taxi, sets up a pick up in the morning, and smiles.

At least this will be interesting.

Stonefish
Not much was revealed about this Delta Green people from the email itself, aside from them being extremely secretive and paranoid to a fault. Yet, it was a possibility to find out, indeed, their credibility in their communications about the supernatural, or as they called it, the hypergeometric phenomena.

Anna called with clockwork precision at 10:15, and she had the same hidden worried tone as usual, something bothering her as a rule of thumb.

Geier
As he was contemplating the details of the task and how to proceed, his phone started to vibrate and show the icon of the caller: his niece, Claire. What did she want at that moment when he had to focus on something he'd never done before? She did find the way to get everyone's attention around her, with her exploding enthusiasm and loud, fast speech.

Sienna
Shirley, like always, kept silent and didn't stoop down to argue with Bob. That's one smooth side of a cactus, it never talks back. Whatever her opinion was on the email and these weird creepy guys, Bob could only guess. However, the text message that chimed from Mickey was probably much more informative, though he got the tendency to blabber long about simple things since he'd retired. Well, he could afford that, now being only his own boss.

Torino
As Jim smiled to himself, another smile greeted him on his phone's screen: Danny. His infectious smile. His lady-killer smile. Truth to be told, his smile was a killer with most people, but those close to him all had wished at least once in their lives to clear that ever-optimistic smile from his face. He could never comiserate, only try to force happiness on others. He would be pushing this, sending message after message, calling again and again, until Jim answered.

Text messages
Mickey: hey, bobs. missed ya at the bar last night
Bob: yeah. sorry
Mickey: you ok?
Bob: yup. but busy. gotta run
Mickey: k. rain check

Bob left things there. He wanted to chat with Mickey, but he couldn't. Mickey had a way of picking up on things, and Bob didn't want to have to lie about what was going on. And... well, Bob was getting into something he might not get out of. Better to keep Mickey at arm's length right now.

Bob set left his phone on the table and left the room to go pack.

Link leaned back in his chair, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. He'd started to get lost down the rabbit hole already, and changing mental paths left him feeling disoriented. But he smiled as he saw Claire's icon. She and her twin brother Lucas, his older sister Malina's kids, were just about the best thing in his life, and since their dad was out of the picture he was usually more than glad to lend a hand.

"Hey, what's the word, kiddo..." he just had time to begin before Claire steamrolled him with her infectious energy.

"Hiii! How's my favourite uncle? Oh em gee, listen, you know mom was going to take me and Breeana and Samara to the movies tonight to see Challengers? With Zendaya? But she totally had to curve us 'cause she got an extra shift at the hospital. So can you, like, take us? Even in that (theatrical sigh) gross, unsafe corpse wagon? I looked it up, bee tee dubs, and you're totally supposed to have seatbelts in the back when you're carrying ALIVE people. But if you're gucci I won't have to tell anyone (wink)." Claire liked to append stage directions to her conversations. Must have been the drama kid in her.

Link's smile widened, then curdled. Taking his niece and her friends to see an R-rated movie wasn't his idea of a great time, but it wasn't about him. Frankly, based on the trailers he thought it looked too raunchy, but Malina had liberal attitudes about that sort of thing.

It's not like movies and plays and books can really hurt anyone, Lincoln.

Why did Malina's voice sound like Agent Quincy's, the woman who had recruited him into the Program, in his head?

"Ahhhch... I'm sorry, Claire. I've got to head to Detroit for..." he couldn't use the same excuse he'd given his boss. "...Work," he finished lamely.

"Oh, okay. You used to be the cool uncle. You really fell off. Totally cheugy. Whatever." He could hear the disappointment in her voice as she hung up.

"I'm your only uncle," Link muttered to the phone. "And what the hell is a cheugy?"

Daren could notice the palpable worry in Anna's voice. "Hey honey, how's everything back home? You are taking care of yourself? Are you worried for some reason?"
He wanted to look into Delta Green but his instinct said that he will meet a dead end.

With his excuse filed with the Director, and feeling vaguely like he was cutting class (something he'd only done once, on senior skip day, and felt wracked with guilt after) Link cleared and cleaned his workstation. He reverently returned the Initiae Doctrinae Physicae to its climate controlled storage area before leaving the early.

The Dibner Library was in the back rooms of the National Museum of American History, a concentrated shotgun blast of images and artifacts that tried to sum up the country in a tourist-friendly way. With his backpack slung over one shoulder Link strolled past dioramas and installations of Vietnam-era choppers; Michael Keaton's Batmobile; a draft statue of Lady Liberty with a Phrygian cap instead of a crown; the droids from Star Wars; a San Francisco tram; the first train to cross the continent from east coast to west. Pop culture, high culture, industrial culture all smooshed together. A pretty good summary of America, really.

Link nodded to the familiar security guard as he walked out into a crisp afternoon. The American History Museum was right on the Mall, between the Natural History Museum and African-American History Museum. Separate but equal, he thought wryly as he always did. Knots and lines of visitors filled the long park; student groups from all around the nation; tourists from all over the world, because while all roads lead to Rome, all superhighways lead to Washington DC, the new imperial metropole. Next year in Beijing. He turned away from the crowded Mall and headed up 12th Street, past the EPA offices, a block away from FBI Headquarters and Ford's Theatre, until he reached his Metro station. Behind the intricate heraldic floral facade was a long escalator down to the station with its hollowed-out concrete cells forming a wide oval arch ceiling and brick-red hexagonal floor tiles. Link fished a coin out of his pocket for a busker playing what sounded like a free jazz cover of Bob Dylan and weaved among the passengers with roller-bags who were standing stock-still in the middle of the way staring at time tables and maps with vacant expressions.

He took the Red Line, switched to the Green and rode it up to Columbia Heights, and from there it was just a long stroll to Sixteenth Street Heights. The 'Teenth was a largely residential area in the north-central DC metro area, just east of the sprawling Rock Creek park that wound its way through the edges of the city. The outer areas were mostly detached Craftsman and Foursquare houses tightly packed amidst small green lawns and shady trees, while the boulevards in the middle were denser rowhouses. One of those was the one Link rented, lined up among identical refurbished neighbours, the road lined bumper to bumper with cars and vans.

He didn't have much packing to do. Agent Quincy had advised him to keep a go-bag ready at all times. Two, actually; one for if the Program called him up, one if he needed to disappear in a hurry in the aftermath of one of those call-ups. He'd over-prepared at first, stocking his go-bag with canned food, compact tools and the like, before he realised it wasn't meant to be a disaster preparedness kit. A couple of changes of clothes (extra socks and underwear); a Lonely Planet travel guide for the US; some spare cash tucked in a hidden pocket; a back-up phone and batteries; a first aid kit. He thought about bringing his gun, but it was locked up in a safe at the shooting range. He didn't feel comfortable with it in the house. But this was probably just some translation work, identifying spooky old books and documents. He wasn't the kind of guy the Program called to shoot monsters.

He hoped.