Date Played: 22 July 2001
Game Date: Saturday, 18 November 2000
While the cell's new HERMES terminal is being installed in the second floor of their doctor's surgery front operation, the team have biometric data taken from them for their HERMES authorizations. Flex declines claiming she'll never use it. Then Alisa outlines a small task for them. The Black Book's top negotiator and telepath, Emma Coloris, is in town. Aegis wants to know why. She is accompanied by two bodyguards and is staying at the Watergate Hotel.
The team discuss how one gets a surveillance device close to a psychic without being detected. They settle on two options: sewing a bug in her clothes when they are returned from the laundry, and having a hotel staff member set a bug in the room next to Emma's. Malachi comes close to selling his soul to the Mafia to get a concierge with gambling debts to do the team's dirty work. Osborne's low-tech approach -- a stethoscope from the office with one end KY-jellied to the adjoining wall, the other taped to the mouthpiece of a telephone in the room next door -- wins out and they hear Emma finalize a meeting the Dr McDonald before a conference.
Purely by luck, Flex hears and records the tones of Emma's modem dialing another computer system somewhere. The team believe she's dialing the Black Book.
Emma and her minders leave the hotel in their rental car. The team follow: four in the surveillance van and Malachi on his motorcycle. Emma's entourage pulls up outside a small fundamentalist church.
Flex, in the van, during the trip, follows Emma's path on the map and phones every conference centre along the route asking to speak with Dr McDonald. She finds none then phones CNN and asks if they are covering any conferences where a Dr McDonald is speaking. Yes, CNN replies, Dr James McDonald is speaking at a conference on the Human Genome Project tomorrow.
The team use their laser eavesdropper on the church windows from a block away. They can only catch snippets of the conversation: "$7 million to assist", "prime time in mainstream media only", "deny all knowledge", etc. Angela, using the NSA's supercomputer, extracts the conversation from the background noise. The Black Book are donating $7 million to the Reverend Isaiah Hayes to promote his fundamentalist, anti-evolution, creation science message on prime time TV and radio.
Emma and her bodyguards return the to hotel. While she takes a nap to prepare for a meeting she says they have tonight and the team listens to the bodyguards planning the best route to the Marriott Hotel, Marcus searches the internet and finds James McDonald, a professor at Edinborough University and a member of the Human Genome Project research team.
The team get in place before the meet: Flex is on a roof with an almost clear shot of McDonald's room, Angela and Marcus listen to a bug sent to McDonald in a basket of fruit, Osborne and Malachi train the laser eavesdropper on McDonald's window. Emma arrives and goes up to McDonald's room. They discuss an offer for him to world for the Black Book for large sums of money. When he hedges around this, she offers an even larger sum for all rights to his research. He says he'll think about it and she leaves. McDonald is straight away on the phone to his wife in Edinborough and, from the tone of the conversation, she is not interested in moving to the US and is over-ruling him.
At this point, the team notice that Emma has driven off with one of her bodyguards and the other is going back into the hotel.
Malachi runs in and, not patient enough to wait for the lift, runs up eight flights of fire stairs to McDonald's room. He makes level six before he pauses, out of breath. Osborne uses his FBI muscle to have the hotel interrupt McDonald's phone call and get him into the bedroom. The Black Book thugs knocks then kick down the down. Flex rushes her shot and misses him. The thug dodges into the room and into the bedroom. As Malachi reaches the door to McDonald's room, Sparkes, Osborne and Marcus listen to the thug put three silenced shots into McDonald. Malachi sneaks up behind the thug and kills him with a machine pistol.
The hotel operator must have called the police because the team hears the wail of sirens approaching. Flex calls them and claims that a DEA operation is under way. Complaining, the police agree not to get involved. Malachi hides the machine pistol and McDonald's notes before the ambulance arrives to take away the bodies. The local media show up as the team is leaving.
The team return to monitoring Emma at the Watergate. By midnight, she is concerned that the bodyguard has not reappeared. Her fears are confirmed when she switches on the TV to see CNN speculating on the reasons for two apparent gang-land style executions at the Marriott hotel.
The team, continuing the floral motif of this session, sent Emma flowers with a note expressing their sympathies. Malachi, however, sent his own bunch of flowers wishing her a safe flight home. Emma and her remaining bodyguard caught the next train out of town.
Unable to understand McDonald's notes, Marcus invites a secretive expert to comment. The expert points out that McDonald's research shows a Fibonacci sequence (where each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers) in the chemistry at the start of each strand of human DNA. This, the expert says, cannot be natural.
Unanswered Questions and Mysteries To Be Solved