Two game write-ups in one day, ain't you lucky. End of an op, even!
Last time, the agents went to Lithuania and wound up out in the woods (well, as we start, Ess and Gambone are in the woods, Hanover, Parker, and MacAteer are in the van, which is disguised as a hillock). Gambone and Ess sneak around and discover a pretty large facility with multiple radio dishes pointed at the sky, a barracks, and a central building. The agents took a bunch of pictures and then started to fall back, but got noticed by the guards at the jeep.
Gambone grabbed hold of Ess and pretended like they were a couple off in the woods for a hike, and managed to distract the guards. Ess then struck and disarmed one, Gambone the other, and now they had two captives. The clock, as Parker noted, had started.
They examined the photos and realized that these dishes were not dissimilar to the ones at Aricebo, sending messages into deep space. Where, why, what? They had no idea, but they figured the answers would be found in the central building. They did some recon and figured that this wasn't a government facility, though some of the guards were probably ex-military. They decided they needed to take it out, though.
Ess and MacAteer took the guards' uniforms and took up their post to buy some time. Parker and Gambone circled the compound in the woods and found a good spot to sneak up to the main building, while Hanover got up into a tree to snipe as necessary. They also loaded up the jeep with explosives, figuring it would make a nice distraction.
After dark, Parker shot the one guard by the main building and she and Gambone started moving up...but then they alarms went off. When they got back in sight of that back door, they realized Parker had just wounded the guard, and he was being tended. Deciding to press on, Ess and MacAteer drove into the compound (still disguised), while Parker shot the other guards and moved into the building and Gambone planted explosives on the dishes.
Inside, Parker found main servers and swiped a bunch of hard drives before the self-destruct mechanisms when off, burning the place. She got out just as the building went up. Ess and MacAteer parked the jeep with some other vehicles, got to a safe distance, and blew it up, and then faded into the woods. The agents also set explosives on the road to prevent evacuation (and pursuit), and they managed to get to the hillock and get the hell out before reinforcements arrived.
They fell back to the safe house, and then got the hell out of Lithuania and headed north into Latvia, stopping in Riga. They sifted through the data, and found that these dishes were sending a lot of information about vampire/human DNA into space...along with figures on population density and human cities. Hanover finally found a reference for a numeric code that he'd found on Lennart's laptop waaaaaay back at the start of all this: the astronomical coordinates that the data was being sent to, and a date. The date was July 3, 1903, which stumped the agents for a bit, and then MacAteer wondered about Nikola Tesla, since the conspiracy seemed to have an interest.
In 1903, Tesla was trying to get funding for his tower at Wardenclyffe, but the Tesla tower was functional, at least somewhat. Parker applied her knowledge of astronomy and figured out that a message from the coordinates they found would have hit Earth right about there.
So what was really going on? They did some digging into Tesla's life and figured out that there weren't any extant photos of him after about 1920 or so. He died in 1943 at age 86, supposedly, at a hotel in New York, and was then cremated. His belongings were shipped to Belgrade in 1952 at the behest of his cousin, but the agents couldn't find any record of his cousin dying and no photos after about 1955.
Hanover did some research, using the online library at MIT (where a lot of Tesla's research was taken after his death) and realized that the collars that Dr. Macan was working on, the dishes at the Lithuania site, all of it was natural extrapolation of Tesla's experiments. Was Tesla, then, the first vampire? The agents didn't know, but they needed to find out.
They took a boat north to Stockholm, and then flew to Belgrade. Ess made contact with an arms dealer he knows name Kurjak, and got explosives and weapons shipped over from Bosnia. The agents are going to break into the museum again, and check the archives, hoping to find something to point them towards the truth about Tesla.
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