Careerist

Dear me. All these wonderful DG agents, ex-agents and friendlies. So selfless. So dedicated. Fighting the mythos with never a thought for their own lives, loved ones or wallets.

I would like to introduce you to a type of agent who is not like this. A type partly inspired by the Neal Stephenson/George Jewsbury (aka Stephen Bury) novel Cobweb (http://www.amazon.com/Cobweb-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553383442) in which intelligence agents make progress not because of their agencies, but in spite of them, by exploiting friends and informal connections across agencies to get around the culture of buck-passing, turf-guarding and arse-kissing that prevails between the CIA, FBI, and all the other alphabet soupmeisters (yes, I know the DHS was supposed to solve that problem. It looks to me like it just accelerated it. There is a wonderful bit of the old british series Yes, Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey explains that civil servants love department mergers in the name of “efficiency”; you keep all the old staff and then add a whole new layer on top who “coordinate” and “manage” the merger). Having succeeded because of this, they then get shafted for breaking the rules.

This leads me to the new type of agent: the Delta Green Careerist.

The DG careerist is someone who exploits his DG connections for non-Mythos-fighting ends. He recognises that in DG he has the perfect vehicle to cross agency and legal boundaries to get the evidence he needs to catch (or frame) perfectly “ordinary” serial killers, tax frauds, militia gun-nuts, drug smugglers, etc. After all, even if they don’t turn out to be mythos threats, who can say in advance that they weren’t? Especially if the careerist plants a few mysterious pages of latin gibberish (copied from the internet) or a few vials of Reverb (obtained from another cell for “research”) on the bodies. In the meantime, the Careerist’s arrest and conviction record is stellar. He’s on the fast track, he’s in line for promotion, because he cracks those cases no-one else can. And because he pulls in other cells (who report to him, or who he requests from A-cell, or who he’s become aware of) to do the dirty work, he never gets caught.

What’s more, A-cell loves him; they’ve been short of agents high-up in the bureaucracy ever since Adam got waxed and MJ-12 purged the top echelons (as outlined in Through a glass darkly). They take good care that the careerist doesn’t get sent to the frontlines of Mythos-fighting, because as the law enforcement community’s golden boy, he’s a more valuable asset pulling strings behind the scenes. In the meantime, he’s using DG resources, endangering cell members (and possibly blackmailing them too), and raising the risk of exposure of the entire conspiracy, to accomplish his own ends. Which, given that they involve solving complex, jurisdiction-crossing crimes, are probably good ends.

The Careerist didn’t necessarily start that way. He may have had a breakdown into office-sociopathy following one failed SAN roll too many. He may have a desperate need for money that he wasn’t going to get without rapid promotion, which playing the game DG’s way would never get him. He may have just been sent on one Opera too many without decent backup. You don’t know.

All you do know is, he somehow knows your real name, and if you don’t do the favour which he assures you is vital to cracking the cult of a god so vile it’s not even spellable, he’s going to have a word to your boss about all that “sick leave” you took and your next performance review will fuck you so hard you’ll never sit down in your office again.

Life’s a bitch. And then there’s Delta Green.

npc
The intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © the Delta Green Partnership. The contents of this document are © their respective authors, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.