The Reveal
Michael
In the midst of the general drinks and conviviality of the dinner at Victor's, Uri takes Andrija aside for a minute or so. Andrija nods as the two men confer, and Jocasta can see Andrija give Marshall a quick but significant look.
As the cars swing by the entrance to the St. Francis annex after dinner, Roger lets Marshall, Jocasta, Mitch, and Andrija into the Rolls. Andrija, who's had a few Old Fashioneds with dinner, smiles broadly and reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes as he settles into the plush luxurious leather of the Rolls. "So!" he says to Marshall. "Are we gonna talk turkey now? Uri said you wanted a chat."
Brant
Marshall gives Jocasta the sign to do her thing, same as with Uri, while he says: “So why collect them?”
Michael
(Leonard, same deal as before, you can roll the Psychometry at IQ-14 yourself and I'll assess time and other penalties as needed.)
Thinking back to Andrjia's one big monologue at dinner, Marshall remembers how Andrija talked about Arigó and Hurkos and Vinod and the Nine and Hoova and the entire tapestry of his life working with the parapsychological. Maybe there was a little teasing at this, and maybe Marshall called Andrija a "butterfly collector" in passing.
"It's not just to satisfy my own intellectual vanity, you know. There are bigger issues at stake. Issues of keeping up with the Soviets."
Leonard
Still not 100% sure how this works as a game mechanic, but Jocasta is going to steel herself beforehand and push her psychometric read, even if it means Corruption.
Michael
So I think the way I will do this is that yes, you can always spend Corruption after the fact to boost your skill roll, but I've been thinking and I think I'd prefer it if we did some expenditure before the roll to sort of "open the door" for the Corruption. Take this roll for instance. You're rolling against a 14 but to find the most important moment in Puharich's life (between 30 and 300 years), you'd assess a minus 5 penalty, which would leave you with an IQ-9 roll. To ensure that you'll succeed on anything but a 17 or 18 on the dice, you'd need to spend 7 Corruption (9 plus 7 = 16, the maximum needed skill rating to guarantee that on an unopposed roll). Now, whether Puharich has any kind of defense that needs overcoming is not known, so if you needed to spend more than that 7 Corruption to overcome it, I would obviously let you.
Leonard
I’ll spend 5.
>>>> SUCCESS by 6.
Rolled an 8.
Michael
Jocasta puts out her hand and allows Andrija to help her into the Rolls as the dinner party gathers together for pickup.
Brant
"Keep up with the Soviets? I hadn't realized we were in a competition with them over charismatic con-men and phony psychics. Andrija, this conversation is going to go differently than you might have expected. Uri told me about the tricks. With the spoons. The substitution. The device in his tooth. His ability to use the Language."
Jeff
As this is a different scene and a couple of hours later, I'd like to try Detect and Aura Sight again. I can do that, right?
Assuming I can I'll paste in a couple sets of rolls. Detect first.
>>>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 8
>>>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 1
>>>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 8
Aura Sight
>>>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 1
>>>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 0
>>>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 4
Michael
When Jocasta finds her seat in the Rolls, she has an overwhelming sense of the Most Important Moment in Puharich's life. The specifics of the memory are surrounded by a fog, a blank where the most traumatic element is. But what happened afterwards, Puharich will remember forever. In the vaguest psychometric outlines, Jo sees Puharich, shakily, take a seat across a table from a few white men in suits.
"Why would you show me that, Sidney?" Puharich says to the man in the rumpled, 1950s-style suit sitting directly across from him.
"What you've seen, not many men have, Henry," Sidney says back to Puharich. "When those men come back from across the threshold, once the drugs wear off, they've seen what's on the other side. You needed to as well. You need to know what's at stake.
"What is at stake, Sidney?"
"Our entire existence," says Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.
In the present, Puharich shrugs non-committally, even at Marshall saying something as portentous as "The Language."
"First of all, whatever might happen from here on out, I'm fuckin' running Uri and I don't have to technically tell you anything about that op. As a courtesy, of course, I'll fill you in, but second, before I get too deep into that … " He considers Jocasta and Mitch for a moment while taking another puff on his cig; as Mitch looks back he can see Andrija's aura is a little heated, a little nervous, a little drunk, but otherwise his aura and History B energy are clean and he's not activating anything.
"What would happen if that there King was to wake?"
Andrija looks meaningfully at Marshall for confirmation of the second half of the Sandmen-identifying-each-other-in-the-field code phrase from Lewis Carroll, "I shouldn't go out like a candle."
Brant
Marshall turns to look at Andrija. He responds: "I — I shouldn't go out like a candle."
He pauses a second. "What the fuck, Andrija? Truly, what the fuck? This is a damn operation? Why didn't you contact us through the appropriate channels? My fucking team has spent the last … I don't even know how long — a long time, fucking digging into SRI. Uri in particular. Whatever you're doing, you're creating a fucking subduction zone at SRI, you know that, right? Fuck man. Fuck!"
Michael
"First of all," he looks at the URIEL team, "Call me Henry." He smiles. Mitch sees his aura cool, like he feels like he's in complete control. "I can't tell you how sick I am of dat Andrija craaap."
Andrija's serene mystic seeker persona takes a back seat as he gets more pragmatic and starts to talk about Soviet and Czech psychotronics, the threat of a KGB/Blue Star equipped with agents who can surveil our most secret sites, who can explode a man's head just by thinking. "The problem is, of course, that most of the people out there on our side of the Iron Curtain with real powers, with powers that can make a real difference in a tight spot, they're tied so deeply into a particular belief system as structure for their neurology to make sense of their own powers — whether that's UFOs or a council of Nine Immortals or Voodoo or mushrooms and acid or what have you. Sure, some of the Soviet agents believe in the workers' struggle enough to give their powers that same power and resonance. But you'd be surprised how few true believers in communism there are left on that side of the Iron Curtain."
"Belief — real fervent religious or some other kind of faith belief — makes a psychic stronger. It has to do with the parts of our brain They wired for worship; right next to the psychic centers. Some of the geeks at Granite Peak are calling it 'the God Module.'" Andrija scoffs. "That's why I go looking for faith healers and mystics, and that's why I'm trying to get Uri to buy all the UFO crap." Andrija's old-school street Chicago accent is coming out more and more as he shows Marshall how much of his dearly-professed mystical beliefs are a scam to attract and train "butterflies."
"Ego and vanity can only take you so far in this business. Of course the flip side to dat is true believers very rarely want to help their country out, on a purely political/psychological basis. It's always that 'the good of the planet' crap. So … you have to trick them into accepting a new belief structure sometimes." Andrija takes a long drag off his cigarette. "Uri's going to serve our purposes extremely well. He's easily controlled, broadly loyal to the US and Israel, and the back-and-forth 'is he or isn't he the Real Deal" will get everyone looking the other way for years, decades. His fame and this book I'm writing will make him look like a space cadet to most reasonable sleepers in the West plus it'll likely flush out a bunch of real believers in the Kings. Uri gets rich, we got memes out there to trap more butterflies and I continue to separate the wheat from the chaff, maybe even recruit a few of these folks to our side … everyone's happy."
"I've obviously got no problem with you running SCANATE, I know you're getting results with Price and so on, and you're local obviously so that's great. And hey, I'm sorry about your team chasing your own tails but hey … sometimes that happens." Another shrug. "I can't tell you how many times I've gone searching for a seer or a medium I've just heard of and it turns out they were already under surveillance or being lightly run by SANDMAN for years. But more importantly, what's this about a subduction zone at Menlo Park, anyway? I've not been briefed on this."
Brant
Marshall scoffs. "Well, hate to break it to you, Henry, but I ripped out Geller's wiring. He's useless to you now, though I suppose you may be able to reconstitute the component parts with enough, I don't know … work. But this is why we have fucking protocols! So we don't step on each other's toes like fucking amateurs. Christ!"
Marshall holds up a hand to stop anyone from talking. He closes his eyes a second and takes a deep breath. Then he opens his eyes. "There's something happening at the SRI facility. Our librarian — former librarian — put us on the scent and our taisher sniffed it out. Some sort of … ambient, I don't know, latent ontological poisoning. It's in the wires. Phone lines. Geller — fuck, your whole thing — something about the combination of him, the work those morons are doing at SCANATE, and a few other things, it all is coalescing into a pile of shit, Henry. You shit in our backyard and we spent all this time and all these resources — fuck! Do you think I want to run SCANATE? — cleaning it up and trying to figure out who did it and it was you."
Michael
"Uri and I haven't been to SRI since the winter, what are you talkin' about!" Andrija says with only a slightly raised voice. "Now just wait a second, we can solve this, we just need to take a look at all the contributing factors, how the confluence of people and events might be causing a subduction. I mean, sure, maybe SCANATE's part of the causality matrix — you always have to be careful with a lot of psychic energy around — but you don't throw da baby out with da bathwater if you can trim something else from the factors contributing to a subduction." Andrija squints at the URIEL team. "Don't you guys have an esmologist?"
Brant
"No, Geller is at the heart of this. Somehow. We didn't know why — hell, we still don't know why — but the signs all kept pointing to him. Something you were doing, with him, in combination with everything else at SRI. You have no idea how many goddamn meetings we've had about this."
Marshall looks at his Rolex and lets out an extremely irritated sigh. "Roger. Turn around. Bring us to Archie's house."
Leonard
Jocasta, a great respecter of process and the chain of command, says nothing, but stares daggers at Dr. Henry Puharić.
Michael
Back at dinner, before Jo knew he was a SANDMAN, Jocasta had seen Andrija's carrying on about UFOs and the Nine and the rest of his bullshit as just more evidence of him as a New Age blowhard, just the kind of ruthless self-promoter that she was trained to watch out for in the Natural Guard. "Men who consider themselves gurus," said her commanding officer Colonel Reinhardt, "cult leaders, almost always are primed for seduction by agents of the Kings. They want power, and that desire for power over people makes them perfect servants of the Kings; overseers for their re-enslavement of us all." Of course now with the knowledge that the "Andrija" persona is just a put-on, Jo shouldn't still feel like he's a threat. And yet.
Oddly the person(s) Jo hit it off with best at dinner were Ingo and Pat. The two of them had a real odd couple vibe but they also played off each other and reflected two sides of the psychic "thing": self-serious and spacy (Ingo) and down-to-earth and grounded (Pat). The whole dinner Jo was, obviously, paranoid that Pat would see through her disguise and recognize her either as the weird mirage of a girl by his car that day or the Virgin Mary but not one bit of his attitude or body language betrays any kind of awareness, at least from where Jo was sitting. And whenever Andrija or Uri started off on UFOs or EVP or what have you, Pat would just smile to himself and keep quiet, like he knew more than these two goofs ever would, and was keeping his wisdom to himself.
"And you, Mr. Price?" Uri said over dinner to Pat. We know you have seen a lot in your day. What was the most stunning thing you've seen? I hear you too have spotted a saucer or two in your day."
"Oh, none of you kids want to hear me go on about that. No, I find that my most sublime spiritual experiences these days are just me out on the lake, with my fishing rod and a cold can of Coors. Just you, and the birds, and the occasional tug of a fish on the line." He smiles. "Retirement has its privileges. There's nothing like the scent and the sound of wind coming down off the Sierras, blowing through those huge Ponderosa pines. A vision of total peace." With that, Pat gives Jocasta just the slightest of looks before draining the rest of his glass of beer and picking at an appetizer.
Bill
Roger keeps quiet at first to maintain cover — mere drivers shouldn’t chime in. But now it’s clearly a matter for the brass, so he’s just keeping quiet and taking orders. Although he did tsk tsk just to himself over the comment about Voodoo believers. “Here’s another one who is so focused on the trees, he can’t see the forest spirit.”
Jeff
Mitch is silently sulking about how it's possible URIEL won't destroy Uri Geller after all.
Brant
Well, the phone at Archie's house goes ring ring ring a ding ding.
Rob
Archie takes the call in his den/office, for whatever privacy that offers. "Marshall, hello! What news?" And then: "Are you calling from your car?"
(he just thinks that's neat)
Brant
"Arch, hi. Look, the team and I are swinging by your place. We have sort of a situation with Geller and ... anyway. We're going to have another Sandman with us."
Rob
"You're coming here." He's not super enthusiastic, but ok. "Is Geller with you?" (What is it: Friday night? Thursday? After a fancy dinner, so fairly late in the evening, I guess.)
Michael
Yeah, Friday night, around 9:30 or so.
Brant
"No, not Geller — his manager. Or handler, I guess. Henry. He's been running Geller. When I told him about the situation with SRI and SCANATE, he asked if we had an esmologist which — anyway. That's you. Do you want Roger to park out front or stow the car away somewhere out of sight? It's the Rolls so, you know."
Rob
(Would it make more sense to pick Archie up or for him to meet the team somewhere else near his place, or is having a secure place to talk more important than the hassle of explaining this visit to his family? I'm cool either way, just wondering what makes sense)
Michael
(Well, given the recovered memory I mentioned in meta-discussions where we met at Archie's the night before blowing up Frank, I think it's been established that sometimes Archie has late-night meetings in his office. All the more grist for the eventual "I'm an agent of intelligence, dear" reveal, I feel. As far as parking goes, yeah, having the garage open for the Rolls might be a good idea. We can even say the garage connects directly to Archie's den to explain late-night visits in the past. Like, if I remember Meg Ryan House correctly, it had a garage on the bottom floor and we could say Archie's office is also on the bottom floor—surrounded by earth and foundation, it would end up a good place for secure communications.)
Rob
(Works for me!)
Archie tells Marshall the garage will be open. When he's off the phone, he tells Melanie someone from the office is dropping off some work he needs for the weekend — but he's standing outside Charley's room when he does so, loud enough that she can hear.