Calling on the Blackbird

Link to article: Calling on the Blackbird.

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[[include component:preview text=When the history of the 8th Occult War is written, there are many moments that will be cited as causes. This isn't one of them. But it should be.]]

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[[include :scp-wiki:component:author-label-source start=--
|name=GreenWolf]]
**SUGGESTED LISTENING**: [https://youtu.be/bofwBnikxxM?feature=shared "Different Strings" by Rush]

Here's my **[[[greenwolf-s-author-page|Author Page]]]**.

This is Part 4 of 7 of a tale series about the death of Florence Thorne, and the investigation undertaken by Robin Thorne. Florence previously featured as the main character of [[[florence-thorne-hub|The Phoenix, The Nightingale, and The Magpies]]]. Robin Thorne is one of the main characters of [[[unusual-investigations|The Unusual Investigations of Kenneth Spencer and Robin Thorne]]]. Sasha Merlo is one of the main characters of [[[those-twisted-pines-hub|Those Twisted Pines]]], and this tale follows-up on the events depicted in the ending of [[[the-blackbird-and-the-falcon|The Blackbird & The Falcon]]].

Friends don't let friends confront quasi-fascist international conspiracies on their own.

Part 5 will be released when I post it.

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[[=]]
**<< [[[memory-of-a-murder| Memory of a Murder]]] || [[[crowne-thorne-hub| HUB]]] || [[[where-it-all-ended| Where It All Ended]]] >>**
//the __Blackbird__ sings such strange music, but is it folly?//
[[/=]]

**May 31st, 2024**
**Merlo Family Residence, Portland, Oregon**

Sasha Merlo does not have a bad security system.

An Assistant Site Director for the Foundation already warrants the kind of protection usually afforded to federal judges and local politicians, but Merlo is the subject of special attention from internal security -- given her personal vendetta with a real-life Bond villain, it is more than earned. Since the last time Vincent Anderson decided to visit, her apartment building has become one of the hardest targets in suburban Portland. Every room in the house has at least one panic button that can summon a full combat MTF within minutes, and the closet of the master bedroom has been fortified into a saferoom strong enough to hold off a squadron of battlemages long enough for that to matter.

Unfortunately, it is still an apartment building in suburban Portland, which carries with it certain intrinsic vulnerabilities, especially when dealing with the American government and its agents.

She knew this better than anyone; knew that the UIU was far more capable than they chose to appear. She had been a UIU agent once, and had spent a considerable part of her Foundation career working with the Unit. It had long been her habit to act as if they knew where she lived.

So Merlo wasn't exactly surprised when she came home to find the federal agent sitting in her living room, chatting amicably with her husband, Gabe.

It even made sense. If ever there was a situation that would prompt a home visit by the FBI, the imminent shift in consensus normalcy brought about by her nemesis -- and by her failure to stop him -- was certainly one.

So although she wasn't prepared, Merlo wasn't surprised that the UIU agent was there.

But she was surprised that it was Robin Thorne.

Once upon a time, Merlo would have counted Thorne as her closest ally within the UIU. That was before she had betrayed their trust, of course -- left them in the dark so she could stage an illegal raid in Three Portlands in another failed attempt to capture Anderson. The two had barely spoken since, although Merlo had hoped that their cooperation on the final, finally successful raid on Anderson's headquarters might lead to some rapprochement. Thorne being in her house now made that prospect seem less likely.

"Perfect timing, honey," Gabe said cheerfully, although Merlo could tell that his smile was somewhat forced. "I was just telling Agent Thorne that you should be home any minute now."

Merlo pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. "Thorne, if you're here to give me another lecture about my Ahabian tendencies, you can save your breath. I realize that none of this would have happened if I'd just let the Unit arrest him for the Caldwell incident."

Thorne looked at her blankly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Merlo blinked. "You haven't heard?"

They shrugged. "I've been taking some personal leave. I haven't heard anything about anything since this weekend."

She frowned. "You aren't here about Anderson?"

They shook their head. "No. Why, did he escape?"

"I should be so lucky," she muttered. "No, [[[the-blackbird-and-the-falcon|he only just orchestrated the biggest shift in consensus normalcy since the atom bomb from inside his damn cell]]]. Figured you were here to chew me out about it. Seems like that's all anyone wants to do the last few days."

"Nope. I'll leave that to Spencer. Sounds like something he'll want to break out the special profanity for."

"Special profanity?" Gabe asked.

"He collects them," Thorne explained. "By his reckoning, he knows more insults, blasphemies, vulgarities, and curse words than anyone else alive. A lot of them can't even be used on this side of the Veil."

"Great, that'll be something to look forward to then." Merlo dropped into a seat across from Thorne. "Why are you here, Thorne?"

The other agent bit their lip. "I need your help, Sasha."

Merlo took a long, hard look at Thorne. There was something deeply off about the wizard's demeanor. Their eyes kept flitting about the room, even as their gaze lingered just a little too long on the exits. And there was a telltale tension in the air, a weight pressing down on reality that Merlo had learned to recognize from working with Navarro -- Thorne was holding an evocation in their mind, ready to cast in an instant, even as they fidgeted on the couch and tried to appear nonchalant.

Thorne was expecting a fight.

She glanced at Gabe, making eye contact for just a moment, and was gratified to see him tip his chin ever-so-slightly in silent acknowledgment. He had picked up on it too.

"What seems to be the trouble?" Merlo asked.

"Maybe we could take a walk and discuss it?" Thorne suggested. As they spoke, they moved their hand to brush a strand of hair out of their face, but finished the motion by tapping their ear twice -- an obvious coded gesture.

Merlo watched Gabe's face as he motioned with his eyes towards the blue table lamp, which concealed the nearest panic button.

"Sure, there's a dog park at the end of the block we can walk to." She blinked twice, answering Gabe's silent question in the negative. "Gabe, honey, why don't you get started on dinner. I don't think we'll be long."

As soon as they were outside, Thorne began muttering under their breath, a long string of mixed Latin, Celtic, Greek, and Old English words. Merlo could only pick out every third word or so, but just from that it was fairly obvious that Thorne was casting obfuscation wards around them to prevent eavesdropping.

Once they were done, Thorne reached into their jacket and pulled out the semi-spectral form of an albino robin, which they gingerly held in front of their face with both hands. "Circle aloft and stay out of sight. If you spot anything that seems off, break for the second nearest Way immediately and wait for me back at the federal building."

The familiar twittered a question in Celtic.

"Then tell Spencer everything."

The not-bird tilted its head to examine Merlo, then chirped another query.

"Yes, even that." Without waiting for a response, Thorne tossed the creature into the air, where it hovered for a moment before remembering that it was supposed to pretend to use its wings to fly.

Merlo watched bemusedly as the familiar drifted up and out of sight. "Paranoid enough?"

"Never," Thorne said. "The Foundation killed my mother."

"That's impossible." The words slipped out immediately, before Merlo could even think about it. "I was at the funeral, Thorne. She was killed by a Lighthouse Mafia gunman. Everyone knows that."

"Just like everyone knows wizards aren't real?" Thorne retorted. "The gunman was an escaped convict operating under the compulsion of a homicide geas that killed him via auto-memetic Cuchulainn syndrome. Before he died he was able to tell my mom that he had been recruited and released from prison -- he thought by a three letter agency, but it's pretty obvious who it actually was."

"How on earth could you possibly know that?"

"Because before she died, she was able to record her last moments in this." Thorne held up a sunstone necklace that was hanging from their neck.

"And where's that been for the last 16 years?"

"Forgotten in evidence lockup. I had to break in to get it out."

Merlo studied the wizard with a new wariness, considering for the first time that they might actually be crazy. She was starting to regret telling Gabe not to call for an MTF. Her own personal panic button was in the front pocket of her jeans, but it might as well be on the far side of the Moon for all the good it would do her if Thorne decided to start throwing evocations around -- the federal wizard might not have their mother's talent as a battlemage, but even the younger Thorne could easily turn her skull inside-out with a few words and some willpower.

"Okay, let's assume that all of that is true. That doesn't mean the Foundation is responsible. There's plenty of groups that could have pulled that off -- the GOC, the Pentagram, probably a couple different CI cells."

"Oh please, Sasha, pull your head out of the sand for a second and try to think like a cop again. Means, opportunity, motive -- they're all lacking the third one."

"The Chaos Insurgency--"

"Oh, you mean the one that's just a Foundation false flag?"

"It is not!" Merlo whirled on the wizard, disregarding personal safety to get directly in their face. "The Foundation does not engage in assassination, and certainly not against its allies. It just doesn't."

Thorne stared at her, steely-eyed and unwavering. "[[[portland-vice|Tell that to Ross and Creed]]]. Or did you mean that the Foundation only tries to assassinate its own agents?"

Merlo recoiled as if she had just been slapped. "That's not the same," she hissed. "That was the work of a rogue Ethics Committee member."

"And how many rogue elements are there in the Foundation?" Thorne asked. "How many secrets and lies and conspiracies that you don't even know of? The Foundation is not a monolith, and you are far too smart to believe the party line bullshit you're spewing at me, Sasha Merlo."

Thorne reached into their jacket again and pulled out their badge. The Eye of Providence seemed to wink at Merlo in the evening twilight. "You used to carry this badge, just like me, just like my mother. Do you remember? Do you remember taking an oath to serve the interests of truth and justice? To defend the innocent? Do you remember why any of us do this in the first place? Or has the Foundation taken your honor too? Filled your head with so much nonsense about necessary evils and hard choices that you don't even know what's right anymore?"

"I remember!" Merlo shouted. She took a breath. "I remember," she said again. "But think about what you're saying, Thorne. Do you have any idea what the consequences will be if you're right? If the Foundation really is behind your mother's death, then there is almost nothing they won't do to keep that secret."

"I know, and I don't care," Thorne said. "All I care about is this: what are you willing to do to help me prove it?"

----

When the history of the 8th Occult War is written, there are many moments that will eventually be cited as proximate causes. This isn't one of them. But it should be. Unbeknownst to anyone -- certainly not to the two agents standing in an empty dog park in Portland, Oregon -- a fateful decision is about to be made that will all-but-guarantee a collision course between the largest single normalcy organization and the dominant global superpower.

Sasha Merlo decides to do the right thing and help the child of an old friend.

----

She sighed. "I can check our files for any corroborating evidence."

She reached into her jacket and pulled out her secure phone, a chunky, featureless phablet with a full physical keyboard. She took a moment to pop the battery out and flip it around -- a necessary precaution, as in its default configuration the phone wouldn't actually work except as a hand grenade, triggered by pressing the power button three times in rapid succession. She knew a couple agents who had lost fingers that way, and she didn't intend to join their ranks.

"I'm gonna start with your mom's old personnel file," Merlo explained, fingers flying through her secure login prompt. "It'll be an unreadable mess of codeword classifications, but we might be able to infer something even from the codewords I don't have clearance for."

She waited the few agonizing seconds for SCiPnet to respond to her query. "Here, see..." She turned the phone to show it to Thorne. "Grand Slam is gonna be the SATF Program, and Triton Point is for Site-246. No idea what Wise Guys is, but it looks like a sub-clearance of Grand Slam -- maybe for the original Delta-3? Same with Love Doctor, that one only shows up in connection with Grand Slam or Wise Guys. Lightfoot Ballad is a complete mystery, but it only shows up twice in the 90s."

Thorne nodded. "That's when she left the Foundation, it's probably related to that."

"Makes sense."

"Are there any file sections from 2008? What are those classified under?"

Merlo tapped at the keyboard to scroll through the rest of the file. "Looks like... Blind Pythagoras, that's for the UIU, and Angry Bovine is MOOT. Here's one I haven't heard of... Lightfoot Elegy. It's the last clearance assigned to the file."

"Would that be related to Lightfoot Ballad?" Thorne asked.

"Probably."

"That's gotta be it then. Can you see what other files have that codeword on them?"

"Yeah, we've got..." Merlo paused, heart sinking as the results loaded in. "Ah, fuck."

"What?"

She didn't say anything, just handed the phone to Thorne.

"A file on the Oregon State Penitentiary and something redacted?"

"It's a person of interest file," Merlo explained. "Completely expunged, so there's just the RAISA metadata left. I've never seen that before."

"Sounds like someone trying to cover something up," Thorne said softly.

"Yeah, it sure does."

Thorne handed the phone back to Merlo. "Can you get anything out of them?"

Merlo shook her head. "No. It's above my clearance level. I'd need to get authorization from Holman--"

"No."

"Thorne, be reasonable. We've both worked with him for years, you can't seriously believe that he would--"

"That he would what? That he would authorize [[[austringers|an illegal operation in Three Portlands]]]?"

"That's different, and you know it."

"All I know is that my mom didn't trust him. Until we have proof that he wasn't involved, I'm going to follow her lead on this."

"Fine. But without Director-level clearance, you aren't getting those files."

Thorne rubbed their thumb against the sunstone necklace, their expression betraying the fact that they were clearly contemplating something distasteful.

"…Who's the current Director of Site-246?" They asked.

"The Draintrap? Cody Westbrook. Why?"

Thorne shook their head. "You're better off not knowing. Will anyone know you've been looking for these files?"

"Maybe. The RAISA request will be logged, and it might trip a flag if anyone is worried about someone digging. But I can pull some more of our files on the Unit to cover my tracks. If anyone asks, I'll just say that I was doing research for an assessment on whether we should try to recruit you and Spencer."

"Not happening."

"Well, yeah, that's obvious now, but it wasn't the last time Holman asked me about it." Merlo turned off the phone and reversed the battery again. "Don't worry too much about me, I know how to answer questions from internal affairs. Seems like that's half my job these days."

Thorne nodded. "Thank you, Sasha. For everything. For believing me."

"You'll forgive me if I'm not as pleased about it as you are." Merlo blew out a long breath. "I really didn't want you to be right."

"I know. I wish I wasn't."

"What's next?" Merlo watched dispassionately as a young yuppie couple approached, walking one of those trendy labradoodle hybrids with a rididuculous name -- probably a snickerdoodle or something equally stupid.

Thorne stared pensively off into the distance. "Now I get to see if my badge has the right memetics to convince the TSA that I'm an Air Marshal. Otherwise, I'm walking to Minnesota."

[[=]]
//can you trust the words of a bird?//
**<< [[[memory-of-a-murder| Memory of a Murder]]] || [[[crowne-thorne-hub| HUB]]] || [[[where-it-all-ended| Where It All Ended]]] >>**
[[/=]]

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[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box |author=GreenWolf]]
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Calling on the Blackbird

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