Jocasta Returns
Leonard
Jocasta comes staggering into the URIEL common area, looking shaken and nervously pulling at a cigarette (if smoking is permitted in the office) or gnawing on a pencil stub (if it's not). She's even paler than normal, as if she's seen a ghost, but tries to steel herself. "We need someone on Sebastian Keiner. Right now, if not sooner. He's … compromised."
Brant
(It’s 1973, why wouldn’t smoking be permitted in the office?)
“What happened?”
Leonard
"I went to his first lecture and got him to notice me. He was receptive and open, so I tried to draw him out with some trigger phrases, and his reactions were all wrong. There were Anunnaku memetics all over his work and he knows it," she rushes out. "He'd been pulling me different ways the whole time, but he invited me in to see that installation, that Beth-El, and … I thought the world was disappearing out from under me. I was trying not to … to lose myself in there. He reached out to me somehow, empathically or … I don't know. I can't really explain it but I was barely able to shake it and skip out of there. I don't know what his intentions were, but he reeks of something … otherworldly."
Rob
Archie hears Jocasta's voice in the common area, comes out of his office: "Jocasta, I'm glad you're here. I don't think you should go meet with this Keiner character after all. Not alone, anyway." He holds up the Mansa album cover. "We've got this sample of his artwork and it's pretty clear he's … compromised."
Michael
(authentic lol there)
Leonard
Jo lets out a tension-relieving laugh. "Thanks, Archie," she says with a wry smile. "I'll get the word out to myself four hours ago."
Brant
Marshall pours himself a cup of coffee and offers some to Jo by holding out the coffee pot. “OK, so we need eyes on Moore, and now this Keiner dude. Do we have access to an asset who could monitor Moore? I feel he is less likely an immediate risk than Keiner, given Jo’s description.”
“Sophie, do you know — can you find — Keiner’s home address? If Keiner is compromised and an active threat, I’d think we need to, uh, extract him very soon, perhaps tonight, if we can get to him.”
Leonard
Jo gladly takes the coffee and throws in a little chemical cream. "I can reach out to Padden and Hall and see if the FBI has anything on Moore," she says. "But that Beth-El's gotta go. It was like being in an incubator for negative energy. I wonder who else he's drawn into that thing. How was the record?"
Brant
Leans against the coffee counter and stirs his coffee with an air of distracted thoughtfulness. “Strange. It has that whiff of History B — a hint of memetic taint. The music itself, well, I should say, some of the music has a sort of, I don’t know, benzodiazepine quality to it. Makes you suggestible. Receptive. But it has no hit. Anyway,” gesturing to Roger, “Roger didn’t like it.”
Michael
(Temporary home address for Keiner in San Francisco will likely take a little bit of research. FBI records on Moore don't go much beyond what Sophie got for her own dossier, but perhaps Padden and Hall could find the name of the redacted Afro-American asset who tried to turn Moore back in '69. Getting Beth-El removed will take some pull with the museum. It's a major exhibition drawing a lot of visitors. Sophie can do some quick intelligence analysis/esmology to see if there have been any weird happenings at the museum in the past couple of months the Keiner installation has been up.)
Brant
Marshall will ask Sophie how quickly she thinks she can get his address.
Michael
"I'll do my best. Shouldn't be too difficult. There has to be an address on file with State for his visitor visa."
Brant
“Keiner and his exhibition are separate problems, in my opinion. We need to get ahold of Keiner, get him somewhere safe, to isolate him — and quickly. An ambush at his pad would be my recommendation. But the exhibit is more complicated. Like the album. How do you deal with dangerous art? The exhibit we could perhaps torch, but very risky. Make it look like a white nationalist, uh, terror attack?”
Marshall is mostly just talking to hear himself talk at this point. Anyone in the office familiar with cocaine will prob pick up that he seems sort of coke-manic, though he’s not talking rapidly.
Michael
Sophie, who's reading about the exhibit, says, "What about a technical issue. One of the special lights illuminating the panels breaks and can't be easily replaced. Or better yet, the art gets accidentally damaged. Burst pipe, damaged art, flooded gallery, it needs to be taken down for repairs." Sophie's in her element now. "At that point it goes back behind the scenes at the museum and it's easily taken care of."
Brant
“Radical suggestion, Sophie. Excellent idea!”
Michael
Sophie says it's a no on anything Weird happening in or around the museum since Beth-El went up. No disappearances, no strange lacunae or gaps in the museum's history popping up, no strange behavior of visitors or students working under Keiner.
Brant
“A flooded gallery is perfect cover. We just need to get someone inside to do the job and someone in storage to swipe the thing and haul it back here.”
Leonard
"It shouldn't be difficult to shut down the museum or the concert; we could even just pull some strings and have the fire department shut them down for a code violation, or bribe the management into last-minute 'repairs'," says Jo, sipping at her coffee. "We could even trash the records and the masters, if we have to, without a ton of trouble. The question is, what do we do long-term? How do we keep them from just doing this again?"
Brant
“Assemble a special project of five or six former government agents and spies and soldiers and assign them to monitor local fringe culture?”
Leonard
"Cute."
"I meant these particular people, Doc, not in general."
Brant
Grinning. “There’s only two — easily dealt with once we decide on a course of action. Keiner we can pick up tonight. Once we have him, we have him. Problem solved. Moore, well, we’re still debating what to do there — consensus seems to be discredit him in some way.”
Michael
Sophie has Keiner's address: he's actually staying in a sublet apartment bungalow in Berkeley (very close to campus) for his six month sojourn Stateside. Given he's spending most of his time in The City at the museum, it's a little unusual.
Leonard
Jo will call the FBI boys and see if they can put a tail on Mr. Moore. She'll also ask if there's any way, if he has a plausible relative or partner, if we can fake Keiner getting sick and going on a 'leave of absence' with a phone call and maybe some forged paperwork. Finally, being as big as it is, it might take a little time to figure out how to dispose of Bethel, but we can at least come up with a quick and easy way of shutting down the de Young — a small fire, wiring issues, bribe a maintenance worker to flood the place, call in a bomb threat, anything.
Bill
Shutting down the whole museum also gives a reason why Keiner isn’t there. Small note to someone that he took a day off because the museum’s unexpectedly closed …
Michael
Leonard, give me a roll for Padden and Hall, 9 or less on 3d6 to see if they can get on the Moore surveillance right away. If you fail the roll, it just means they can't divert resources to Moore right away; you can try again later. Keiner's brought no one over to the States with him and he lives alone, so there's no one who can call in sick for him, but that's obviously of less immediate import depending on how the black bag and interrogation go. We can talk about our de Young/Beth-El plans in more detail tomorrow night in the live game but physical sabotage seems to be the best option.
a quick and easy way of shutting down the de Young — a small fire
Hmm.
I will remind the group that Beth-El's panels are illuminated from behind with state-of-the-art (and yet still ultimately wonky because they were installed by an artist and not a trained electrician) fluorescent bulbs that could be easily and plausibly be believed to "malfunction" thus triggering said small fire. I imagine all that we'd need to do is get a certain someone with newly-magnificently trained pyrokinetic powers into the museum after lights-out to stare at the installation for a few seconds and get things really popping off.
Bill
"If we grab this guy, what's the plan to release him?" Roger asks. Roger isn't that naïve, but it'd be wrong not to at least ask. "Singling out his art for destruction and kidnapping him the same day will look pretty bad." He thinks. "Wait, he'll sound paranoid and crazy and people will think he's secretly at fault in some kind of insurance scam. Jesus, my poor paranoid friends who've said this … Dammit, you people is wicked, wicked. Uh, I guess, us people." Roger shuts back up and decides to just shake his head.