Pick-Up Artists
Michael
The LA Safehouse: URIEL puts in a request to Granite Peak for a fully-bugged, fully-camera-laden Project safehouse in Black LA and the Project delivers on Thursday. A small "family" home just south of the rough border between Compton and Watts, on a fairly large lot for Compton (no outbuildings out back, just a vacant lot with alley access and room for lots of vehicles) a half-mile south of Imperial, a block or two west off Willowbrook, and a few blocks east of Martin Luther King General Hospital (the reasons for this location will soon become apparent) has been used over the past year or so by a Project-and-Agency-adjunct research project on psychoactive drugs.
At this home, a young UCLA psychopharmacology researcher named Ronald Siegel has been working in the guise of a narcotics social worker working out of MLK General, interviewing and testing "flyers" or "psychonauts" who have been deep into hallucinogens, heroin, and cocaine about their emotional and behavioral reactions to these drugs. All the rooms of the home are bugged and each has a hidden video camera for the use of Siegel's research; he wants to be able to see and hear what his psychonauts do and say during and recovering from drug experiences.
SANDMAN has seconded the house for this op to URIEL with the knowledge and agreement that it will revert to Siegel's (secret) control once the SLA are dealt with. The neighborhood considers it a squat where drug-addicted young people congregate; it would make perfect sense for the SLA to end up there.
Planning for the SLA pickup: I think it makes sense for URIEL to grab one of the rooms at the Bayview Motel in Hunter's Point on Friday as a covert surveillance point. After all, this is just a grim motel in a run-down port-side part of San Francisco, so there's plenty of cover and protective coloring. The vans are going to come from elsewhere, though, at 20-minute intervals as Jo described in her communique.
Jo demanded we use three undercover Project commandos with a "counterculture appearance" as van drivers. I know Jo didn't want to endanger Roger (or Mitch) as drivers on this run, but that's an operational decision for y'all to make. Whatever the case, Jo will meet the SLA at the motel and ride with Patricia in her van.
The SLA, Jo will have learned from osmosis (and continued psychic/empathic contact with Patricia), is also being re-organized into three teams, as I posted in meta-discussions a few days ago. Cinque, upon realizing his goal to resettle in Los Angeles, has taken Nancy Ling Perry out of the second-in-command position and installed Bill Harris, nom-de-guerre Teko. (Jo won't know about the reasons behind or ramifications of this sudden team reassignment until she's had a chance to physically and sociologically get comfortable again with the SLA on the van ride down. All told Jo's been around the SLA for less than an hour physically in the same space, so she'll need far more data than she has now to try to understand all the social dynamics not through Patricia's eyes.)
Team 1: Donald "Field Marshal Cinque" DeFreeze, Nancy Ling "Fahizah" Perry, Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysik
Team 2: Willie "Kahjoh" Wolfe, Angela "General Gelina" Atwood, Camilla "Gabi" Hall
Team 3: Bill "Teko" Harris, Emily "Yolanda" Harris, Patricia "Tania"/"Fancy" Hearst
Bill
Jo may have expressed she does not want to risk Roger, but given the risk to her, he sees her probably underestimating her own worth again, and would work convince Archie (if he objected). Marshall already assigned him, anyway.
His argument would go that putting two senior agents who’ve already worked field together lowers the risk such that it’s not doubling the risk of senior agent loss, but reducing it.
Hmmm. Roger should have another advantage on mission as a native Angelino, but I don’t think I ever bought him any Area Knowledge: LA. A mismatch of sheet to background, since I put him raised in East LA by a Compton mother, and had him in at least a couple LA-based missions pre URIEL.
Michael
I'll definitely be willing to use Bay Area AK during this mission with a very minor penalty to simulate Roger's having gotten rusty at knowing the wheres and whats of South Central and East LA over the past five years or so, but it might also be worth it to put a few points of Southland AK on your list for post-Mission 9 expenditures. Sadly I think the 9 points you're holding in abeyance right now are all earmarked for The Phreak.
There's also always Renshaw!
Download those post-Watts rebellion maps right into your brain
So given we made the decision to take three different routes for the three vans, it makes sense that Cinque and Roger take the Interstate; they want to arrive first, secure the safehouse, and finesse our arrival in the neighborhood. Our commando (whose background I will flesh out ASAP) took the 101 with Van 2 and so did Van 3 with Patricia and Jo, at least, before the detour to Carmel.
Where everyone is at when Van 3 carrying Jocasta, Patricia, Bill and Emily arrive at Elsie Whitaker Martínez's house (at 1:40 am, Sat Apr 20):
Van 1 with Roger, Cinque, Nancy, and Patricia: left at 11 pm, have been driving for 2 hrs 40 mins on I-5: this would put them right around Fresno; on the area of I-5 in the Central Valley that still follows US-99 in 1974. Roger will likely need to gas up once and doing it on the Interstate (and not a small town full of shitkickers in the Central Valley) makes the most sense.
Van 2 with our commando, Willie Wolfe, Angela, and Camilla (being trailed at a discreet two-mile distance by a car driven by ???? (did we decide if we brought Dave back from Shasta to be Mitch's partner here? I'm fine with it) with Mitch meditating in the back seat) has been driving around 2 hrs 20 mins on the 101: they drove south through South San Francisco, then Silicon Valley, and by 1:40 am are just southeast of Soledad, coincidentally enough, only about an hour southeast of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
And yes, Van 3 is currently parked outside Elsie Whitaker Martínez's very-close-to-seaside home in Carmel-by-the-Sea.