Samples of Art

Samples of Art
by
Bobby Derie

Dear Sir;

Not having much experience at this, I've drawn up a preliminary list of art suggestions and notes on why I picked them. 1-4 are some classic illustrations, some of the earliest to feature nudity and tie in with some of Lovecraft's comments on sexual depiction and weird fiction. 5-6 are rare depictions of Sonia and her relationship with HPL - not always accurate, but interesting in how they show how others used or understood them. 7-12 might push the bounds of "tasteful," though they're all in the public domain. Essentially a pictorial depiction of the evolution of tentacle erotica from Japanese shunga to European japonisme to the covers of pulps. Could easily be expanded with more examples, or cut back. Most of these examples are taken from art books, particularly Secret Images: Picasso and the Japanese Erotic Print (2010). 13-20 are various more modern works.

Bare-breasted revelers ring a shadowed idol; in the background, a man hangs upside down.

1. Interior illustration for "The Call of Cthulhu," Weird Tales February 1928, Hugh Rankin, B/W

The nude blonde's hands are tied to an iron ring, set into the wall above her head. Before her, the lithesome, scantily-clad brunette draws back the cat-o'nine-tails for another stroke.

2. Cover for Weird Tales September 1933, Margaret Brundage, Color

A starscape, crowded and close near the bottom, where individual stars reveal at their cores gods of ancient Egypt, bird-faced monsters, faceless tentacles, a buxom siren...

3. Cover for The Outsider and Others, Arkham House 1939, Virgil Finlay, B/W

Squat, amphibious creatures, human no longer, posed before a stone wall. The pendulous bosom of the rear creature is clear in profile. Beneath, the legend reads "One night, in frightful dream, I met two Ancient Ones under the sea..."

4. Interior illustration for "The Shadow over Innsmouth," Weird Tales January 1942, Hannes Bok, B/W

Six panels. Headshot of a woman in a lavish hat. The couple stand together looking out across the water at New York City. The woman embraces the man, perhaps too vigorously. They embrace again, in the dark, in bed. "The hat shop failed. We need money, Howard." she says, lying back in bed, as lewd as a covered pose could be. She stands at the door, prepared to leave; Howard cannot.

5. Panels with Sonia from "H. P. Lovecraft 1890-1937", Arcade #3 1975, George Kuchar, B/W

Five panels. A convention of amateur journalists; she spies him from across the room. She goes to speak to him, but he makes his excuses and leaves.

6. Top half of page 48 from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories 2011, Jason Bradley Thompson, B/W

A nude woman, the waves crashing over her; the lumpy octopus has her in its arms, one strand of itself between her lips, another buried in her hairy fundament. Dancing on the waves, lines of alien characters.

7. Diver and Octopus, 1786, Katsukawa Shuncho, B/W

In a cloud of Japanese script, the pale woman leans back. A small octopus wrapped around her neck, its mouth finding hers in obscene kiss; below, a larger, googly-eyed octopus holds body and legs, bringing its mouthpiece directly to her vagina.

8. Diver and Octopus, 1814, Katsushika Hokusai, color

The nude model's hands are hidden by the sign; it says something ..."Justitia"...there is more, but that is all that can be made out. Below, ropy fronds grope about her groin, reaching towards her navel; from some perspectives they look like a giant hand. Buried among them is a monstrous face, like that of a corpse. A variant exists which is more implicit, showing her penetrated by the tentacle.

9. Istar, 1888, Fernand Khnopff, B/W

A woman on a bed, clothed only in her garters and shoes. Something attacks her; a head like the skull of a bird set at the center of a mass of spaghetti-noodles topped with bulbous heads; she has not enough hands to deal with them all. The beak draws blood, the tentacles nestle at her nipple, prod at the entrance to mouth and pussy.

10. The Octopus, c.1880, Felicien Rops, color

The woman recumbent; background and foreground are mere shapes suggested by the darkness, given only the barest definition by the light. Behind the victim, the bulbous shape of the Martian, one tentacle hovering in the air above her, the other wrapped around her. Where it grasps her, a bloody wound, black blood contrasting against pale flesh.

11. The Martian Claims A Victim, 1906, Henri Alvin-Correa, B/W

Orange, white, and black. A woman in the background, thick pseudopod wrapped around her; farther back, an orange-black blob with eyes. In the foreground, a man with slick-back hair brandishes shotgun and dagger. The tentacle on the "Ooze" very clearly has suckers.

12. Cover for Weird Tales March 1923, R. R. Epperly, color

"I am not dead" the spiky speech bubble proclaims "I sleep and yet I do not sleep, for I have died...and yet I am not dead, I shall rise again for that which is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die..." Human, in outline, with the googly-eyed head of an octopus or squid, the wings of a bat or dragon, fingers extending to long tentacles; strange eyes substitute for nipples, and at its crotch, a demure collection of tentacles. Below and to either side, two frog-men; the background is all clouds, a monolithic pillar, and a starry nightscape.

13. Interior front cover, Skull Comics #4 1972, Simon Deitch, B/W

A park, near a park bench. The trenchcoat pulls back to reveal the learing collection of eyes on stalks, tentacles, mouths, all in rows; the human head leers as the old woman gasps. The pants-legs are tied on with rope - what a detail! If the coat were closed, who would guess he was naked beneath?

14. "Flasher," Playboy Magazine March 1973, Gahan Wilson, color

The woman in profile, demure as a classical nude. In her raised right hand a pomegranate, hands and mouth stained red with its juices. The whole head above the nose and lower cheeks is decapitated, eyes lost as it dissolves into a thick mass of suckered arms, even the ear only a suggestion.

15. Cover for Cthulhurotica 2010, Oliver Wetter, color
Note: This is actually the original image sans title used for the cover, taken from Wetter’s deviant art account.

Medusas as in jellyfish, the great hooded caps like transparent, luminescent fungi; their bodies are those of nubile women. Behind them, bulbous eyes and arms like an octopus watch the beauties.

16. "Medusas of Cthulhu", Black Velvet Cthulhu 2010, Mike Dubisch, color

Pale grey form of Sandra Dee, supine and floating in the textureless void; above her, the monstrous face, eyes like a snake, wild hair from which emerge...necks? Tentacles? Something of that sort, scaly and segmented like an earthworm, tipped with claws and all manner of monstrous heads.

17. The Dunwich Horror (1971) movie poster, Reynold Brown, American International Pictures, b/w

- I got this one from The Dunwich Horror Press Book; it’s a rare variant that keeps Sandra Dee’s legs.

A human fetus in an amniotic sac; the womb attached to a collection of squid-like arms and tentacles. Below, the title burns like dry ice. A Stuart Gordon movie.

18. Dagon (2001) movie poster, Fantastic Factory, color

- From The Lurker in the Lobby (2nd ed.), hence the size; I haven’t been able to find another instance of this, so I don’t know if it actually went into production.

Green lighting gives a morbid cast to the still form of Joanna Angel, her cleavage stained with blood as she lies upon the table. Standing above her, one hand raised with the needle holding the potent reagent, Tommy Pistol as Dr. Hubert Breast smirks. To his right, a glimpse of some props: a hand in a jar, bits of bloody offal, somewhere in the distance the hazy glow of a lamp.

19. Front cover of Re-Penetrator dvd box, 2005, Burning Angel Entertainment, color

I could almost fill a book with comic images, if we could ever get the permissions, but if I had to pick one it would be this half-page panel from Alan Moore's Neonomicon. It's just a terrific, busy image that shows more imagination dedicated to sex and the Mythos than any half-dozen other artworks I could mention, without being grossly offensive in content.

Through the beaded curtain, to the forbidden underworld of Adults Only. A plastic blow-up doll hands on the wall, it's mouth orifice a star-like thing from a deep-sea anemone, the tits and slit of a vagina still very much human; boxed versions line the floor below. Leather masks with dangling face-tentacles hang to the left of the door, strict Etsy-fair; to the right, a shelf of boxed and unboxed alien dildos, some shaped like tentacles. One shelf holds what appears to be a three-pronged strap-on, a strange Sybian with a cock shaped like an Elder Thing on the floor; another box clearly states it holds Azathoth's Pipe. In the center of the room, a rack of pornography - DVDs, boxed sets, with titles like "C'Th'Orgy" and "The Dunwich Whore-r." They wander through smiling; the proprietor's smile is wider, like he knows something they don't.

20. Panel of the back room, Neonomicon #2 2010, Jacen Burrows, color

So those are my thoughts. I'm not married to any of them, but it's a start. 

Yours,

- Bobby

The Wickedest Woman

The Wickedest Woman
by
Bobby Derie

Arriving at the Delphinium, he took the old black marble back stairs to the second floor, as was the rule. A toddler by the standard of the other London clubs, the Delphinium claimed to be the first to have admitted men and women both as members, but it had started life as a ladies' club, and certain inversions of the old chauvinistic ways still held there. So it was that he arrived on the second story from the back way, while the ladies of the club used the grander front stair.

At the bar, some ladies rested their feet on the brass and bent the elbow, taking their drink and enjoying themselves in silence and in laughter. Others, men and women both, occupied the generous high-backed loungers and small tables, reading, talking, drinking, smoking, eating; a couple of women members in back monopolized the old felt, and the crack of billiards broke through the low din with a steady regularity.

A waiter came and took his order - men and women both dressed in shirt, vest, and slacks - and he took it to a quiet corner of the library, where tall windows gave good light to read by in the early mornings, and at length selected a small brown-leather volume without a title, but only a curious star-leaf worked out on it in gold. He leaned back to read it, sometimes gazing idly out the window at the smart-dressed people walking by on the street below. Opening it at random he took it for a book of poetry, but the stanzas did not match any familiar meter, and soon he determined it was a more esoteric work, though with a mythology he'd not yet run across, and long phrases in Greek he had to spell out a letter at a time.

"Morven Deen," Anne said, giving him a start. He hadn't heard her come up behind him. Anne had been a friend of his wife, who had also been a club member, and had sponsored him for membership. She was tall for her height, as they say, with a mien and poised that seemed to carry her several inches higher than her five and ten. Anne preferred trousers to skirts, and had proven to him on more than one occasion that she never went without a knife somewhere upon her person. Today it appeared to be a large American Bowie knife in a sheath at her belt on the left hand side, and her left hand rested on it as the right plucked the book from his unresisting fingers.

"They called her the Wickedest Woman in the World." she said, taking the seat opposite him. A waiter came over and took her order, and he smiled to have a partner for some conversation.

"A female Crowley?" he said, and then quickly realized his error at her frown. She silenced his apology with a curt shake of the head, which sent the bangs framing her face to sashay.

"An incorrect comparison, though you're not the first to make it. The journalists loved her, in a small way, but her enormities were too much for the press. Like Crowley, but hers were real, and they didn't care. She was only a woman, after all. The 'Great Bitch' to the 'Great Beast.' They did have some similarities, after all."

Anne leaned back in her chair, and her gaze stretched out beyond the walls of the Delphinium.

"You have no idea what it was like for a woman, back then. A girl, really. Her family's wealth bought her an education, but to her father and mothers she was only fit for breeding; she was well rid of them when her father brought home the French pox from some Italian whore. Imagine that then, if you would, the rarity of it - a young woman, educated, monied, unmastered. Edward wasn't even on the throne yet, a few of the outer relatives wanted to take control, but she fought them off, them and every smooth-talking bachelor and eager cleric that tried to collar her into marriage."

"She found solace, or perhaps at least society, in para-masonic organization. Her father had been a Master Mason before the disease ate away at his mind, and his wife in one of the auxiliaries. A wee Scots lass, maybe she wanted to see what mysteries lay beyond the kirk and didn't care for table-rapping and faerie photography...though I think that all came later. Anyway, she went through the initiations, talked her way into libraries and homes to read the old charters; preached the equality of all people, men and women...she made her way to France in the 1890s, where the whole co-masonic movement was going on. She rose up the degrees...but never got recognition from the Grand Lodges. None of them would admit a woman."

"So she fell in with the more occult elements...learned theosophy at Blatavasky's knee and some say in her bed; stood the rituals of the Golden Dawn and stayed silent during its divisions and internal struggles. Some say she was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis before Crowley published his damned book...and left, because he came in and changed all the degrees." Anne sipped her drink. "She loved women and used men, as they say; and one of them got her in trouble - a rite of Attis which went awry when the initiate changed their mind at the worst possible moment. So she began her travels...Greece, where the first mystery schools were, and especially Thessaly. Anatolia and Armenia, Romania and Russia...some say she was a spy, though they never say for whom. The first World War began and ended; in the '20s she was in America, selling dream-books through Sears & Robuck catalogues. The Great Depression saw her in Mongolia, where she met the Panchen Lama; there's even an account where she met David-Néel's tulpa."

"An adventuer," he said.

"A seeker," said Anne, "She had children, but never raised them. She wanted something else. The money ran out and she returned to Britain, to find the movements she left in perpetual decay. Even Crowley had left for his Abbey at that point, and she was never a builder. Ended up as a sort of headmistress for her own public school, the kind the Decadents would have pissed blood to hang about; a closet with a peephole would have filled a hundred of their shabby pornographies. I think...she wanted a child, with another woman. Not to be a man, but woman to woman, together. She kept trying, you see. But the ceremonies...there was talk of a prison sentence, once or twice. Prudish old laws. No one knows how she died, exactly."

She finished her drink, and signaled the waiter; she ordered for them both, and he let the waiter take his half-finished drink away. In a few minutes, the waiter returned. He felt he should do something, and raised his glass in toast.

"To the Wickedest Woman in the World." he said, and they clinked glasses.

###

The Green Sith

The Green Sith
by
Bobby Derie

"So, what are you in for?" Task asked.

It had been four weeks by Eiven Task's reckoning since he'd been dumped on the prison-isle. Alone with a group of criminal Jedi, the Sith stupid or weak enough to get captured instead of killed, Sithspawn, dabbling force-adepts too dangerous for a regular prison. The mighty orders reduced to separate gangs based on philosophy and affinity more than race or inclination; the bulk of the fifty-odd prisoners rose at dawn and split up into separate groups for exercise and meditation, only breaking up for breakfast, individual training, and whatever passed for entertainment.

Task preferred to sleep in, when he could. Though most mornings the one-armed near-human would lay awake of mornings, feeling the pull of the Force, almost polarized between them. A recent arrival, and one-armed at that, Task had started his stay by getting his ass kicked, and had only secured a little space by shivving someone else to prove he wasn't everyone's bitch. With his good hand, Eiven scratched at the golden-brown beard growing in; in a few more weeks he'd be able to claim wookie heritage.

The closest thing Task had found to a friend was Greenie. Squat, brown, and wrinkled, with a barrel chest, a huge head perched atop a longish neck and stubby legs that left him with a distinct waddle, and wide staring eyes, Greenie looked about as inoffensive an individual as Eiven had ever run across...except, of course, for the scrawl of pale grey Sith tattoos up the little alien's arms, culminating in the glyphs for "Reaper" spelled out across his knuckles. Like Task, Greenie preferred to exercise on his own schedule.

In answer to his question, Greenie burped and stared out across the water, then up at the sky. It was a little rocky outcropping near the eastern edge of the island; they sat on the mossy rock as the stars came out, with a pot of Greenie's home-brewed silva between them, a thin green soupy mixture that tasted like liquid chlorophyll to Task, but it got him drunk eventually, and he wasn't one to complain. Slowly, Greenie raised on spindly brown arm and pointed out a blue star.

"Green Planet. Home." he said in his halting Basic. "Strong...pulse, in Green Planet, in Children of the Green Planet. My people. Strong in the Force. Living Force. Healers, caretakers. Growers of plants."

Greenie lowered his arm and pointed at the moss of the rock; Task felt a pull in his mind as Greenie's chest and finger tip began to glow, and the moss began to send forth new, springy green shoots that waved and curled upwards towards the finger. Then the pull stopped, the glow dimmed, and the mossy sprigs felt back.

"Gardeners, is always about garden. Plants born, plants die, with the seasons. Is always cycle, death lead to life, life spreads to non-life, dies, new life comes. Always spreading, growing, changing. Gardner...shapes. Directs. Impose order on nature. These plants, weeds. Grow unwanted, unchecked. Cancer in the garden. Tear them out."

Greenie sighed, and drank another cup of silva.

"Green Planet not all...garden. Much wild. Argument. What is weed? Is right to shape nature? Big argument, very old. No love in Force."

"What makes you say that?" Task asked.

Greenie made a gesture with both hands and bobbed his head, but whatever that meant it was lost on Eiven.

"Light Side is all calm. Surrender. Body is vessel for Force; emotions get in way. Jedi seek oneness through...denial. Separation. Focus. To be the wind in the grass; hurricane drive leaf through rock, but never to guide the wind. Dark Side, is...is stirring. Is roots. Reach down and out, push earth out of path, take in air and water. Sith strive, always, stir up Force, drive it; sometimes quiet, sometimes seem still, but always, always. Roots crack mountains, in time. So is with Sith. But no love in Force. Jedi deny self; Sith embrace self, neither connect. Is hard find balance, if love."

"And you loved." Task said. Greenie bobbed his big head.

"Little flower. Very rare. Fragile. Only certain soils. Came another flower. Invasive species. Much argument, to save, not to save. Some want nature take its course, others want preserve. Compromise reached. Samples taken, seeds. Flower becomes captive, kept only in glass houses. New flower spreads, wipes out native species. Council is happy, says this is right."

Greenie dipped his cup again, scraping the sides of the pot.

"Upset. Out of balance. Seed planted, but still. Waiting for right conditions. Then, found...something. Force saber. You know?"

Task cocked his head. "You mean a lightsaber?"

Greenie shook his head.

"No. Force saber. Old, old thing. Found in trunk of tree, artifact of the old race. Forbidden to Jedi, when they have memory of them. Strong in the Dark Side. Is...not like lightsaber blade, but burns from within, you know? Like using Force. Using Force all the time. Exhausting."

Greenie settled back against the rock, lying flat on his back and staring up at the night sky, his chest glowing a little.

"Force saber...seed within finds right soil. Begins to blossom. Kept it secret. Play with it, study it, feel tired but...good. Good kind of tired, like long day of weeding. Thoughts turn to healing. Children of Green Planet, good healers. Heal ourselves, others. Work long time; tired and sore, heal, feel better, work some more. Some things, Children cannot heal. Cancer, gangrene, grow wrong. Have to cut them out, then try to heal..."

Their came a sound like an electrical discharge, and flashing lights from the direction of the prison building. Neither Task or Greenie moved or spoke for a few minutes, feeling the back and forth of the fight taking place behind them, the spike of emotions - rage, pain, excitement from the crowd, then the thrill of victory. When it was over, Greenie continued.

"Decided to weed. With force saber. All the little flowers burned at its touch. Others came. Bad. Like said, Green Children can work long time; fights last long time, pain heals, just makes angry...many died. Many many. Flames spread, forest burned. Didn't become Sith, proper Sith, until later. But already had new name, worst name: Reaper. The Green Sith."

Task clinked his cup against the inside of the pot, and found it empty save for a trickle of green sludge. He tipped the last sip into his cup, downed it, then laid back.

"Task." Greenie said. "Jedi, Sith. Define each other. Neither like...loners. Want you to choose a side. You wait too long. They come for you. Tomorrow. Reaper...cannot help."

"I know," Eiven said.

"Do not know. When big Jedi, Sith come...too much power, skews balance. All the knives come out, the hidden weapons. Come all at once, overwhelm, both sides. Maybe some die, probably some die, but no little emperors, no grandmasters. Not here. They see you, first day, you take kicking. One-armed Jedi with Sith tattoos. Hard to read, make some nervous - no power, or too much power? Enough to hide power? Nobody knows. Then you kill the Besalisk. Unexpected. Still not choose side. Plant seeds of fear. Now you harvest what you sow."

"Tomorrow?" Eiven asked.

"Tomorrow." The Green Sith said.

###

Unexploded Ordnance

Unexploded Ordnance
by
Bobby Derie

Metadata
Numbers crunched, advanced search engines engaged, scripts scrolling through terabytes of metadata, emails, tweets, and text messages. More data than any human could go through on their own in a lifetime, but easy enough for a group of servers to process over night; during the day hapless bipedal drones would scroll through the outputs, human intuition a complimentary nonlinear processing technique. Until mortal eyes gazed on it, the output of the mighty computers was impotent, sterile, mere letters and numbers.

Gwen's mortal eyes widened. "Oh fuck."

The United States intelligence community did have nice, new, airy buildings with great big windows and corporate cafeterias that would rival anything at Google. Gwen didn't live in one of those; her rat's-nest of old coffee cups, dying plants, and pictures of her cats was in one of the older buildings, a maze of cubicles squeezed into an immortal office building that had been re-structured so many times the interior might have been anything from a meatpacking plant to a museum when it first started life. Far easier to replan an office space than to get a building reclassified, and presumably Gwen's boss's bosses had their reasons.

Now she overturned mounds of old hardcopy, shifting through the piles of accumulated crap on her desk, discarding half-dry pens and ancient, dust-covered sweets until she seized her prize triumphantly: a slim deck of cards, the cover in 2002-era desert camo pattern and stenciled black letters proclaiming "Occult Identification Tarot." One chipped nail pulled open the tab and emptied the cards in her hands, setting aside the Major Arcana and began shuffling through the rest.

Five minutes later, Gwen knocked politely outside her boss's door. Mrs. Buell wasn't much higher up the government pay scale than Gwen, but as an administrator her cubicle rated at least that much, even if she rarely closed it.

"Boss," Gwen said, holding up the card. "I think we've found the Eight of Cups."

Intellipedia
"Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti," Doctor Husayn began. The room was lit only by the projector, all eyes on the bright square of a power point slide on the far wall, a dead dictator in better days. Husayn was a subject-matter expert, with the scars to prove it; now he lectured on dead men at the head of the table, one hand on the keyboard.

"None of the member nations of the Allied Coalition ever found any definitive proof that Hussein was involved with the occult, but given the region everyone acknowledged the possibility. We know that after the failed assassination of General Qasim, Saddam escaped to Syria, and after that to Egypt where he lived for several years; we have very little intelligence of what he did there, but we have reports of an initiatory sect inside the Ba'athists, so either of those locations might have furnished material. Whatever the case, Saddam's Iraqi government was predominantly secular, but there is some evidence he had...something."

Click. The portrait replaced by a grainy photo of a mass grave. Something crouches over the bodies, staring at the camera, eyes glowing like a dog.

"We think the Israelis caught wind of it because of the Iran-Iraq War; they shared some concerns about proscribed techniques being used by elements of the mukhabarat as early as the late '60s, but apparently some journalist stumbled onto a group of ghūls exchanging something with a man in Iraqi uniform. The Israelis traced the package to Osirak, and that was part of the justification given before the Security Council for Operation Opera in '81."

Click. Flowing Arab script, photographed through glass.

"In 1997, Saddam commissioned the 'Blood Qur'an' - a copy of the sacred text scribed by hand, inked partially with blood he donated himself. Public announcements suggest he donated as many as 27 liters; the calligrapher who penned the book said the actual amount was closer to three pints. As you might imagine, this set off warning signs throughout the occult intelligence community; the Israelis think it was a direct challenge to the Iranians, especially after we shared with them Dr. Price's report on the horror in the genizah. Later evidence after the 2003 invasion of Iraq supported our conclusion that the Blood Qur'an project was the public cover for a parallel effort, and we informed Military Intelligence, who designated the hypothetical artifact the Eight of Cups."

"Doctor," Buell said. "What is our worst-case scenario?"

Husayn coughed and consulted his notes. "In a worst-case scenario, Saddam managed to synthesize a complete copy of the Kitab al-Azif of Abd al-Hazred; the copy may be partially or completely activated, but with Saddam's execution unbound and, as it has not surfaced, probably has not been sealed for over a decade. We're looking at the occult equivalent of an unexploded atomic bomb."

The nameless suit at the back of the room spoke.

"Weaponizable?"

The doctor scratched his beard. "If the seal's decayed sufficiently, even a child could call something with it. The chances of accidental exposure are most immediate but...yes, if you had someone that knew what they were doing."

"Thank you Doctor." Buell said. "Gwen?"

Gwen stood up slowly, smoothed her pants.

"The NSA has continued to monitor the known deep web networks and darknets looking for child porn, drugs, and terrorists; after they finish they pass the rest to us for our more specialized searches - spells over the internet, old Nazi gear, human remains, that kind of thing. This morning we got a hit on multiple search parameters, an anonymous dealer in illegal antiquities offering up an authentic copy of the Blood Qur'an, and someone trying to buy it with bullion coins - American Gold Dinars. We've put a request in to the NSA through channels for more information on the parties involved."

Buell silenced Gwen with a nod.

"Given the circumstances," Buell said to the man in the back of the room. "I'd like to request an immediate upgrade to operational status under ordnance disposal protocols."

The suit nodded. "I'll approve it. Do we have any idea where the Eight of Cups is?"

Gwen swallowed, voice wavering.

"The buyer gave a Virginia address." she said. "Not far from Langley."

###