A half-empty section of a parking garage. JFK International Airport. Early January, 2025.
The three members of T-Cell stood around a rental car.
- Agent TESSA - ICE Homeland Security Investigations, K9 Handler.
- Agent TULLY - NSA Remote Device Activities Unit, Surveillance Specialist.
- Agent TYSON - CIA National Resources Division, Case Officer.
TULLY, being Cell Leader, relayed the briefing she'd received from A-Cell a day prior.
A team of American archaeologists dug up an old Roman estate in Tuscany, Italy. They shipped the artefacts to the Museum of Natural History for an exhibition. All their finds were digitally categorised prior to transport. Our people intercepted their communications and flagged several items as being potentially hazardous.
Broken pottery with furry toad-gods on them, papyri making reference to hypergeometric formulas, old glassware covered in exotic chemicals, the list goes on.
Homeland Security already has a man on scene, Special Agent Hassam Abdullah, due to reports of artefacts going missing. Some of the papyri scrolls and a fancy glass cup. This whole situation reeks of trouble. Get yourselves involved. Get us answers.
Along with their briefing, the Agents had a slipcase of preliminary intelligence prepared by C-Cell. It wasn't extensive, but it'd be enough to hit the ground running. Initial police reports, shipping manifests, personnel records for AMNH staff. The Agents took the time to examine the list of artefacts taken from the dig site. Delta Green had been kind enough to highlight flagged items in red.
1. A collection of Roman coins, a mixture of silver and gold.
2. Pewter dining plates, cups and cutlery.
3. Copper dishes and broken glassware, likely used for ancient alchemy. Samples of unidentified chemical residue were found on several of the items.
4. Three life-sized marble statues. All are naked. Two adult males, one (castrated) adolescent male.
5. Incomplete skeletal remains of two large dogs and a lion.
6. A trio of broken amphora, each marked with different depictions of a grinning toad-thing covered in thick fur. It has an elongated tongue and engorged penis.
7. Evenly-cut pieces of pottery marked with Roman numerals and messages in Latin. Untranslated, but believed to be the estate’s financial records or tax receipts.
8. Papyri manuscripts including magical formulae of a mixed background - Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Semitic. AMNH hoped to add them to the Greek Magical Papyri once translated. Several missing.
9. A glass “cage cup”. These ornate drinking vessels were the pinnacle of Roman glassblowing. Missing.
They had their work cut out for them. Sifting through the other documents, they discovered a few more salient facts. The artefacts had been shipped over from Tuscany by an Australian merchant mariner - the Greensky. Upon their arrival in the Port of New York, the Stevedore Union reported that the container had been "accidentally" opened during unloading.
When TESSA tried to question the dockworkers over the phone, she got stonewalled before she could even finish saying "Homeland Security". The stevedores were on siege mode. Perhaps unsurprising, given priceless artefacts on loan from a foreign government had gone missing.
T-Cell took a two-pronged approach accessing the exhibit. With a day job recruiting American intelligentsia to spy on foreign adversaries, TYSON had no problem acquiring an appropriate cover identity. He'd infiltrate the museum under the guise of a charitable organisation looking to bankroll the exhibit. TESSA did things by the book, contacting ICE's New York SAC and getting permission to work with Agent Abdullah. One phone call later, she'd organised to meet the investigator and compare notes.
Meanwhile, TULLY started working on the operation's logistics. New York was flush with decades of Friendlies and Green Boxes, it'd take time to sort the wheat from the chaff. She started off securing a stash of deniable weapons and gear for T-Cell to use, if things came to it.
Abdullah had a nice suburban house in Queens. His wife Laura made coffee for the two feds before heading to pilates, giving them the house to themselves (barring the bull mastiff that tried to lick TESSA to death). Sitting down in his office, Abdullah laid out the current avenues of investigation:
- Reviewing the AMNH's security footage for anomalies.
- Individually interviewing the staff.
- Examining the exhibit for any other missing artefacts.
- Talking to the crew of the Greensky. They agreed to be interviewed, so long as a Border Patrol or Coast Guard vessel could be requisitioned get out to them.
- Negotiating with the Stevedore Union's lawyers.
Before she left, TESSA handed Abdullah a thumb drive with "potentially relevant intelligence" she'd dredged up. In truth it held nothing useful, just criminological technobabble concealing a full suite of military-grade spyware. After the special agent plugged it in, TULLY pwned his computer, work email and webcam.
TYSON arrived in Subbasement 3B of the Museum of Natural History, ready for a meeting with Dr. Gallagher - the curator in charge of the exhibition. For a man ostensibly responsible for several missing artefacts, the academic certainly defied expectations by lazily napping in his temporary office. Even as TYSON launched into a spirited pitch about funding the exhibit, Gallagher barely seemed to pay attention - staring into the middle distance and scribbling something into an old moleskin.
The disaffected demeanour quickly shifted when he caught TYSON peeking at his notebook. With a cold expression, he ejected the "philanthropist" from his office and told him to go bother someone else. Spying on the academic hadn't been worth it - he'd written all his notes in Classical Latin. Fucking nerd.
Switching tacts, the spook went looking for Amanda Webb, a professional appraiser hired by the AMNH to examine the artefacts. He found her in a side room, but not before overhearing her having a hushed discussion. To herself. Also in Latin. TYSON entered to find Webb taking photos of the marble statues in a climate controlled compartment. He tried to ingratiate himself, but fumbled the ball after accidentally revealing he'd been eavesdropping on her "conversation". Scratching the palm of her black-gloved hand, the chubby valuator responded with a surprisingly dead-eyed stare.
Having been told to kick rocks yet again, TYSON gave up on chatting with the staff and started rooting through the artefacts. He began by examining photographs of the missing cage cup. A dabbler in archaeology, he knew the only other intact reticulated cup known to exist was the British Museum's "Lycurgus Cup".
The images before him were decidedly more lewd. The cage cup had three scenes spread across its ornate surface. The first was a grinning bearded man jerking off into a cup. The second was of another man, drinking from the cup. The third was the same man, this time in shackles, fellating to the bearded man.
Stewing on that development, he moved to reading digital scans of the stolen papyri. Without fluency in Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Latin or Egyptian Coptic, there wasn't much to learn. With more suspicions than actionable intelligence, TYSON called it a day.
Disembarking the Border Patrol interceptor, TESSA climbed aboard the Greensky with practiced ease. After assuring the crew she wasn't here on some last-minute narcotics sweep, she met with the boat's captain - Beau Miles, retired lieutenant with the Royal Australian Navy. Though suspicious of her intentions, Miles eventually divulged there had been an "unusual incident" during the voyage.
A sailor, Finley Gill, had tried his darnedest to pry his way into the artefacts' shipping container with a crowbar. He'd suffered a violent psychotic break, nearly hospitalising several of the sailors that moved to restrain him. When the madman calmed down, he professed no memory of the incident and was eventually released back to normal duties. To his credit, there'd been no further issues for the rest of the voyage.
Upon interviewing Gill, the man admitted to being a recovered alcoholic - 4 years sober after a nasty bender cost him custody of his kids. Miles backed up the man's story, but added he'd been screaming about "being able to smell the wine" during the attempted break-in. TESSA thanked them for their time, reboarded the Border Patrol vessel and set up a meet with Abdullah.
The special agent had a similar story. Over drinks (which Abdullah barely touched, being a semi-lapsed Muslim), he explained the two men who'd opened the shipping container had both suffered auditory hallucinations. They claimed to hear voices crying out in rage and fear in a foreign language that sounded "vaguely European". The incident could be explained by one of the men, Sage Finch, being a medicated schizophrenic. But that didn't elucidate why his companion had swore up and down he'd heard the same thing.
TESSA encouraged Abdullah to chalk it up to a folie imposée, keeping her growing suspicions private. The pair parted ways for the day, agreeing to meet up the following morning to interview the AMNH staff.
Meanwhile, TULLY was busy contacting a Friendly - Bull Bryant, crooked NYPD narcotics detective. Believing she'd eventually need to pull a blackbag job, she leaned on him until he agreed to source a staff keycard for her. After picking it up from a dead drop, she made contact with the rest of T-Cell. Upon debriefing her subordinates, she used the end of the workday to tail Dr. Gallagher home.
The man certainly had a unique commute back. Instead of driving directly to his brownstone apartment, the academic took a lengthy detour to stop outside of a pet store covered in police tape. After observing the crime scene for a few minutes, he drove straight home. Upon pulling the police reports, TULLY discovered the store had been burglarised a few days prior, the thieves making off with... snakes? Nine had been stolen, several of which were venomous.
Reconvening with the others, TULLY used their NSA contacts get backdoor access into the doorbell cameras of Dr. Gallagher's neighbourhood. TYSON also burned the midnight oil, performing an exhaustive background check on Amanda Webb. TESSA just went to sleep.
Thankfully, both late night investigations bore fruit.
During the night of the robbery, Dr. Gallagher was recorded returning to his brownstone and ferrying several suspiciously bulky duffelbags into his home. Hours later, he exited wearing a pair of blood-soaked kitchen gloves and clutching a pair of full trashbags. He dumped the gloves and garbage, before cautiously waiting for municipal trash collectors take them away.
For their part, TYSON discovered there was no "Amanda Webb". It was a well-designed legend, the driver's license alone was a brilliant fake. It even had a real social security number, which must have taken decades to set up. But her home address had been abandoned for years, the academic credentials she used were recycled from a dead woman and her contact details were all burners. Adding to the mystery - she wasn't AMNH's first choice of appraiser. She wasn't even their third.
Everyone else the museum contacted had "forgotten" to respond to their offer. How convenient.
With a reptile butcher and unknown intelligence asset in play, the two Agents turned in for the night. The following morning, TULLY used her SIGINT skills to triangulate the location of "Webb's" burner phone to a nearby motel. Packing up her surveillance gear, she made an early start of casing the joint.
Meanwhile, TESSA and TYSON made their separate ways back to Subbasement 3B. Abdullah was already there, in a confrontation with an enraged Dr. Gallagher. The man was nearly inconsolable, screaming verbal abuse at both his staff and the special agent."Well where the fuck is it?! Which one of you useless fucking cretins let this happen?! It's mine, mine!"
It didn't take long to discern there'd been another disappearance. This time one of the marble statues had gone missing, the carving of an adolescent boy with gelded loins. The archaeological team in Tuscany had identified it as depicting a puer delicatus, a type of underaged male eunuch used as sex slaves by the Roman elite.
Gallagher seemed to be taking it a lot harder than the prior thefts, only calming down when Abdullah and TESSA promised to dedicate their full efforts to recovering the lost artefact.
TYSON couldn't help but notice that "Webb" wasn't present. The security guard confirmed she hadn't come into work that day, so he decided to scroll through the CCTV footage for clues. Sure enough, late last night she'd waltzed into the subbasement, carefully packed up the statue and wheeled it out on a trolley. When the nightwatchman challenged her, she said something indiscernible and he promptly stared at the wall until she left, before resuming his duties.
Evidently he hadn't remembered the incident, as there was no mention of Webb in his log.
Parsing more of the footage, Webb could be seen entering the museum's parking garage and using her staff ID to buzz in a white van. Strangely, when the homeless-looking driver got out, he discarded a small mountain of bread to fit the statue in the back. The pair then drove off, making no effort to conceal the vehicle's license plate.
The Agents quickly moved to call TULLY and tell her to BOLO for the van. They had serendipitous timing - from her surveillance post opposite the motel, she was looking straight at it. She could even see the tramp who'd been driving the thing, shakily smoking a cigarette on the balcony.
T-Cell collectively cursed under their breath. Things were getting interesting.
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