The Defector

by Adam Gauntlett

Premise: a man shot dead as he drops his children off at school turns out to be a high-profile former Russian military man, who defected fifteen years prior and has been living peacefully in Madrid ever since. Was he killed by Russia’s current government, as the papers claim, or was he assassinated by servants of the Conspiracy?

The dead man: Gennady Prodayvoda was at one time a senior figure within Russian Aerospace Defence Forces, now (after reorganizations) Russian Aerospace Forces. He was part of Russia’s space warfare initiative. After a scandal involving a Russian billionaire’s (Mikhail Mordashov) questionable investments, Prodayvoda decamped for the West where he lived anonymously under the name Gino Palacios, in Spain. It’s not clear how Prodayvoda managed that. Was he backed by one of Mordashov’s many enemies? Or Mordashov himself? Was he financed by Western intelligence?

Early in the morning of April 7th, Palacios/Prodayvoda was shot dead while dropping his children off at the American School of Madrid. The shooter has not been publicly identified by local police. Initial reports suggested that the motive for the shooting was personal, but that theory was exploded when journalists made the Prodayvoda connection. Now spies and international assassins are all anyone wants to talk about.

The agents are brought in by their agency or a vampire-adjacent third party, who want answers to two questions:

• What was Prodayvoda doing in Spain?

• Was the killing Conspiracy-related?

Palacios/Prodayvoda’s home in Madrid is a penthouse in a stately 19th-century palace in Madrid’s Almagro neighbourhood. The area screams wealth beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and also privacy. Having the police stomp all over it conducting their investigation is giving the neighbours kittens. Getting in will want a Difficulty 6 check; failure increases Heat by 2.

Two things can be discovered there without a point spend:

• There’s no sign of a mother, beyond a few photographs in fancy frames. No personal belongings, no mention of her in Palacios’ socials or private correspondence, no banking information. There’s no reason to think she exists.

• The children must be the best-behaved in all of Madrid. They barely have personalities or interests; no art, no books except those required for school, no music, hardly any socials. What do they do when they come home? Stare at the wall?

Point spend required:

• Palacio was getting a lot of mail from a private investigator, Mateo Garcia of Detectives Madrid 8. Garcia was helping Palacios with death threats Palacios was getting.

• Palacios has a hidden laptop where he was keeping the results of monitoring experiments on his children. This was taking place regularly, with reports going out to an unknown contact. See further Casablanca.

• Palacios has a hidden cell phone which has one number pre-programmed. If used, unless the caller immediately uses an activation phrase [which the agents have no way of knowing] the call terminates. Tradecraft: this tactic is sometimes used by deep-cover agents for emergency contacts. Who would Palacios be contacting? Surely they know he’s dead?

Palacios/Prodayvoda’s work: On paper, Palacios works for a boutique mechanical engineering firm which assists big construction builds. It has a website and everything. However, following up this angle soon shows that the business, TechnoEng, does not exist and never did. The office block it’s allegedly based in is scheduled for demolition.

1 point spend on Palacios’s financials shows his paychecks were coming, ultimately, from a law firm in Switzerland, Grether Huwyler and Partner, with a less than stellar reputation. Money laundering, tax evasion, sanctions busting – Grether Huwyler is on the fringes of it all. Tradecraft also knows that Grether Huwyler is protected from on high by, of all things, the American Government, allegedly because Grether Huwyler does the CIA favours from time to time.

The American School of Madrid & Witnesses: The School is more worried about the children, the Palacios twins, than it is about the shooting. Nobody’s heard anything from the family since the incident. Where did the children go? Witnesses on-site claim a man of medium build, with dark (red? Blond?) hair, sunglasses and a hat pulled down over their face marched up to Palacios and shot him three times at close range.

1-point spend gets usable security camera footage which shows the killing from start to finish. With that, the agents can tell that the shooter’s an amateur; no professional would act the way they did. The agents can also tell that the shooter was very similar in build to Palacios himself.

One witness, teacher Daisy Bergstrom, who saw the shooter after his sunglasses fell off as he was running away says that the shooter looked so much like Palacios he might have been his twin. If the agents find this witness, then Bergstrom vanishes soon after telling the agents this. Nobody will see her for several weeks, after which they stumble into a hospital emergency room doped to the eyeballs with no memory of the past three months.

Detectives Madrid 8, Mateo Garcia: If the agents follow up this avenue, they discover a very puzzled private investigator. Garcia, a former cop, wasn’t sure what to make of the case. Sure, there were death threats, but they seemed so amateur, so out-of-a-comic-book, that Garcia was convinced they were fake. He thought something else was going on. He thought Palacios was connected to Military Intelligence. No hard proof, just something Garcia picked up on after seeing Palacios in close conversation with some Government officials Garcia happened to recognize.

1-point spend: Detectives Madrid 8 is being watched by a surveillance team. If the agents realize this then they have a chance to prevent the kidnapping of Mateo Garcia (3 Special Forces types, fast sports car). If Garcia is kidnapped then he will vanish for three weeks, after which Garcia stumbles into a hospital emergency room with no memory of the past three months.

Police & Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI): The agents, if they have sufficient Network contacts or similar means of entry, try to find out more about the official investigation into Palacios’s death.

This has been taken over by the CNI, Inspector Abarca, a former policeman, heading the unit. It doesn’t take much to realize that Abarca is soft-pedalling it, but it does take 1 point spend to realize that Abarca’s going slow on orders from his superiors who are being pressured by the CIA. Several high-ups within the CNI were recently accused of being bribed by the CIA; the Americans are using the threat of further bribe scandals to slow the CNI’s investigation down.

Abarca’s upset about this. Upset enough to reveal to sympathetic listeners that the investigation uncovered an African link: Palacios made regular trips to Morocco, including one a week before he was killed. It’s not clear what Palacios was doing there. Abarca thinks Palacios was an American intelligence asset, else why would the CIA be so keen to keep the investigation blind?

Abarca also knows that Palacios’s children were flown out of Madrid by the CIA shortly after the attack. Abarca doesn’t know for sure, but strongly suspects the kids ended up in Morocco.

Palacios’ Past: If the agents dig into Palacios/Prodayvoda’s backstory, they discover that one of the last operations Palacios/Prodayvoda worked on while he was still in Russia involved an alleged meteor strike. This meteor strike hit near the closed city of Tsiolkovsky, at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, while the Cosmodrome was still under construction. The strike was the official cause of an explosion at the Cosmodrome, and Prodayvoda was lead investigator. Immediately afterward, Prodayvoda defected and went off the radar. Nobody knew where he went. For a time, in intelligence circles, he was the most sought-after spy, but he was forgotten when more colourful spy stories took over the narrative.

Mikhail Mordashov: Allegedly Palacios/Prodayvoda left Russia because of a scandal involving this secretive tech billionaire. Mordashov, who claims to have 100 children in an attempt to repopulate the world, was caught up in a bribery scandal involving Vostochny Cosmodrome equipment supplies. Prodayvoda uncovered the scam and angered the billionaire. That’s why he fled. Agents who follow up this angle uncover, on a 1-point spend, Accounting, Tradecraft and Data Recovery links that show Prodayvoda was actually on Mordashov’s payroll. The billionaire made sure Prodayvoda got out of Russia. The scam story was just a cover.

The question remains: is Prodayvoda still on the payroll? That would explain his high-flier lifestyle and his paychecks from Swiss firm Grether Huwyler, which is known to work with Mordashov. Agents who follow up this angle also discover that Mordashov’s got some expensive assets in Morocco, including a data centre in Casablanca. Except, why would a Russian have a data centre in Casablanca?

The Hit Team (Core Scene): After the agents have been poking around for a while, they sufficiently alarm the OPFOR that someone decides it’s time to strike back. A team of 3 Adzeh Brain Bugs (main book p.147) working with Terrorist hosts make their move by planting a bomb at the agents’ base of operations or in their car. If this doesn’t work the brain bugs, working with Thug assistance, try a more direct chase/shootout. Once the dust settles the agents can go through the hit team’s possessions. Among them is sufficient pocket trash, identity documents and plane tickets to indicate their origin: Casablanca Prefecture, Morocco.

Casablanca (Capstone): This is the largest city in Morocco and the country’s economic and business centre. Made famous by the Bogart film, Casablanca is a city of more than 3 million and has significant industrial, harbourfront and financial economic drivers.

It’s also home to Mordashov’s ‘data centre’ Cyber Oasis.

This is the central hub for what Mordashov is calling Operation Eternity. Mordashov fancies himself a Bond villain and may or may not be working with the Conspiracy or one of the significantly more important players in your game world – e.g. Dracula Dossier’s Alraune.

Mordashov’s big idea is cloning. He’s been using Prodayvoda as a test subject, with some success. His adult Prodayvodas last five years, on average, before succumbing to internal defects. Cyber Oasis is meant to be working on extending this lifespan but is having no luck so far.

The Prodayvoda shot in Madrid was the original. All others are copies. At least, so says Mordashov, who ought to know, but organization has never been his strong suit. He lets other people handle the day-to-day; Mordashov is a big-picture man.

Prodayvoda died because he was getting too independent. Prodayvoda had been installed in Madrid to see what would happen if two of the younger clones were raised in the outside world, not the lab. There was a perceived risk Prodayvoda might take his story to the media, using the children as proof.

Mordashov used the assassination as a test case, to see what would happen if the Prodayvoda adult clones were tasked with something a little demanding, a little complicated. That’s why the killing and death threats were so amateur; the clones were in charge. After the shooting, Mordashov brought the children back to Cyber Oasis for further study.

That was a mistake. The children have been telling all the other clones about life outside the facility. Resentment and revolt are fermenting. Mordashov knows this. His Brain Bug assistants have been keeping him updated. So Mordashov’s going to come to Casablanca to have a heart-to-heart with the clones.

After all, if this goes on it might jeopardize Eternity’s end goal: cloning hundreds of Mordashovs. That is something the tech billionaire will not tolerate.

But perhaps Eternity will just vanish like tears in rain – unless the agents intervene.

---

Night’s Black Agents by Kenneth Hite puts you in the role of a skilled intelligence operative fighting a shadow war against vampires in post-Cold War Europe. Play a dangerous human weapon, a sly charmer, an unstoppable transporter, a precise demolitions expert, or whatever fictional spy you’ve always dreamed of being — and start putting those bloodsuckers in the ground where they belong. Purchase Night’s Black Agents in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.