The Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running, and then pressured by EUROPOL to act as a courier to provide gear and funds to informants and similar shady characters
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back. Mostly a desk jockey who acts as the ‘guy in the chair’.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker. Likes squirrelling away guns, dislikes loose ends.
• Al, playing Petros - ‘Ambiguously Balkan’, openly works for the dog/horse racing rings that the various Balkan mafias are involved with, really undercover Romanian security.

Recap

13 - 17 April 2011

The agents had a few days before Lennart was due to leave. Aristides had told them that he had had a person on the base (smugglers try and keep track of naval movements) check his office, and Lennart was breaking security procedures and taking his laptop home. The agents decided to check out what his routine was and what sort of security was in place at his house. They found a spot outside the base and followed him home. His routine seemed pretty set over the two days that they watched and trailed him for.

They took the opportunity to get into the house, bypassing the reasonable, but by no-means top-flight security. They then scouted the place, not finding anything obvious of use, but they did take advantage of a few items stored in Petros’ medical bag to ensure a solid night’s sleep for the Lt-Gen and left. They then waited until it was dark enough to get back in unseen and Yannis cloned Lennart’s PC. So this all went super smoothly.

Concurrent to this, they had been reaching out to the Source in London, who was only checking mail once a day, slowing things down dramatically. A discussion about what to do next followed. This gave them the option of spending a few days seeing the sites in Napoli, or getting in touch with Aristides’ man in the area and see how that would work. They chose the latter, being workaholics, it seems. It would also take a day or two to get anything useful out of Lennart’s laptop anyway.

The meeting was set a few hours east, at an old quarry outside the town of Monopoli, between Bari and Brindisi. They arrived a little early to scout the area. Coop, taking his sniper rifle, made a loop around the top of the quarry edge, finding that someone else had come along in the last hour or two, breaking off the little path he was following. On taking up a position to watch the quarry without being too obvious, Coop was able to spot a sniper in a decent overwatch position. Once he was in position, the others arrived in their rented/stolen vehicle.

Shortly afterwards an SUV rolled up, and two men got out, another one staying at the wheel. One of the men looked, in Petros’ professional estimation, like he was definitely ill. They had a brief discussion in which the ill man identified himself as Costas, followed by swapping a copy of the drive for a briefcase of cash. Padraig, handling the meeting as a ‘journalist’, was taking a quick look at the money as Costas and his heavy moved towards the SUV. In a move that surprised no one, the bills were fake. Padraig and Petros immediately raised a fuss, leading to the heavy threatening them with a gun.

That was the signal for Coop to take a shot at the driver, which hit. A short sharp exchange of bullets followed, the result of which was the opposition sniper and the driver being dead, Costas and the other heavy being slightly injured but surrendering, and Petros taking a minor scratch to the arm. Yannis, not on site, was monitoring the police bands and heard a response being organised, given the relative proximity of the quarry to a regional road the automatic fire was definitely heard and being called in. The agents on the scene did a quick search of the SUV, finding some wild roses in the boot. They also restrained Costas and Andros, the heavy, before bugging out ahead of the police response back towards Napoli with their captives.

GM Thoughts and Notes

Pretty smooth session, over all. Combat worked really well in the quarry, nice and snappy. I think that it only took two or three rounds to resolve everything, and moved quickly. As always, I emphasised that players could use the environment as they wanted, which for this fight was mostly limited to taking cover. Coop’s player got ridiculously lucky, with two 12s in a row, so two of the opposition got dropped in short order, leading the others surrenduring. For now, nothing really to address here.

Yannis being a hackery type is maybe staying a little out of the excitement, but that will only be possible for situations like this, where the agents have a choice about how and when to engage. Also, this was the player’s choice, so not an issue so far. Still, worth bearing in mind.

The plan for stealing Lennart’s data went off super smoothly, thanks to some good planning and a couple of good ideas (such as drugging the toothpaste). Very few rolls here, aside from one that determined that the front-door lock was too good to get in, which made it a little tricky to disable the alarm. My philosophy on this was that the failed roll was not going to make the house impossible to access, but that the nice easy access to the alarm console at the front door was not going to happen. This gave them a harder task there, but they managed to watch the housekeeper when she left and got the alarm code that way instead.

NPCs of Note

• Lt-Gen Malcolm Lennart - Canadian Air Force officer stationed at Joint Force Command Naples
• Costas - Greek mafioso, works for Aristides Daudolos
• Andras - Greek mafioso, works under Costas for Aristides Daudolos