Agents Herschler, MacMillian, McGee, and Watts were called in for a routine mission assignment. Although they were still on disciplinary probation for engaging in an unauthorized mission against Bishop's cronies, Tad Eccles was forced to grudgingly pull them in due to a shortage of active Agents elsewhere. He assigned Agent Markham to the team as a "watchdog," to report any unorthodox procedures.
The Agents met with Coleen Shriver, the recent widow of Frank Shriver, a wealthy restauranteur with a number of eating establishments in the City and two more in neighboring cities down the coast. Frank was a car enthusiast, and was fond of driving to visit his other restaurants and spending the night in roadside motels along the way. Three days ago, Frank had been found dead at the wheel of his Lexus SC, several yards off the highway, about fifteen miiles south of the City. There was no sign of an accident: the car was undamaged and in park. There was no sign of a struggle: Frank had no injuries and no obvious cause of death suggested itself. The medical examiner had ruled heart failure.
Coleen was convinced that Frank had been cheating on her. She believed this was the reason for his constant car trips and motel stayovers. More tellingly, she stood to lose Frank's entire fortune, which according to the stipulations of Frank's will and Coleen's prenuptial agreement would go to Frank's daughter unless Coleen could prove that he had been unfaithful to her.
The night before his body was found, Frank's credit card records showed that he had spent the night at a place called the King Motel, just a few miles down the road. Coleen wanted the Agents to investigate the hotel, to use their "ghost powers" to find out what Frank had been up to, and unearth something she could use to prove Frank's infidelity and keep his money.
Perhaps justifiedly, the Agents felt that this was, in Herschler's words, a "bullshit mission," not least because Coleen Shriver did not seem to have a very clear understanding of exactly what the Agents were and were not capable of accomplishing with their abilities. However, they agreed amongst themselves to play it straight and by the book, if only to spite Eccles.
They immediately began investigating the background of the case. They examined the police report and spoke to the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. They searched Frank's house, and Coleen Shriver allowed them to take a digital camera with which she had taken several pictures of the interiors of Frank's cars. They talked to Frank's daughter, who attended the University of Chicago, by telephone, and learned that Frank was a quiet man who had been somewhat estranged from his daughter even before his first wife's death. Agent Herschler inhabited Frank's car and hacked the GPS computer, and confirmed that the car had left the King Motel, driven a few miles, and then simply stopped. They interviewed one of the many private investigators Coleen had hired to find evidence of Frank's infidelity. The investigator was convinced that Coleen was crazy — there was simply no infidelity to be discovered — but had been pleased to take her money regardless. In all of this, they discovered no clues as to what had killed Frank or what he might have been doing at the King Motel.
Finally, the Agents drove out to the motel itself. (Herschler and MacMillian, being sleepers, elected to project at Headquarters and accompanied the team in incorporeal form.) It was a "luxury" motel from the late 50s, with a main building that included a gift shop, restaurant, and even a small convention hall that was no longer used. The desk clerk, who also doubled as the motel's night manager, remembered Frank but had not seen anyone with him when he checked in. He said that Frank had left without paying or returning his room key, and the room key was not found on his body. It still had not turned up.
The Agents rented two rooms — 39, the room Frank had stayed in, and its neighbor, and prepared to spend the night.
After that, reports differ.
Agent MacMillian found herself sitting alone in the motel room. Her late husband stepped out of the bathroom, toweling his hair. He said they should get some sleep, because they had a long journey ahead of them. The kids are already tuckered, he said, pointing to the far bed. It was very dark at that end of the room. Through the shadows, MacMillian could just make out the outlines of two children lying motionless, side by side. MacMillian started to go to them, but her husband put his hand on her arm. Best not to disturb them. MacMillian brushed him aside and went into the darkness.
Agent Watts found himself in the motel room with two government agents, who were asking him questions about the circumstances leading up to the shuttle accident that had burned him. Can you describe what happened in the moments before you realized the reentry craft was on fire? From the bathroom, Watts could hear someone sobbing and retching. The government agents told him that it was his brother, that his brother was sick but would be fine momentarily. When Watts attempted to enter the bathroom, one of the agents stopped him. Watts pushed him away and entered the bathroom.
Agent Markham found himself in the motel room with Max Howard, the fictional protagonist of Markham's right-wing action thriller novels. Max Howard was going through a suitcase of Markham's old clothes, tossing away the articles that were too small for him and setting aside the rest. He told Markham that it was necessary for the disguise to be perfect if he, Max Howard, was to "take Markham's place." Once the clothes were sorted, all that was left was to take Markham's face. Sorry it has to be this way Emile, but you've been compromised. Consorting with the enemy. Max Howard took out his trademark Desert Eagle and chambered a round.
Emile put his hand on the hot light bulb in the room's single lamp, and squeezed. The bulb shattered and the light went out.
Agent Herschler found himself playing poker in the motel room with three of his Air Force buddies. They told him that a stripper would be arriving soon, and joked that Herschler should "do that stunt again with the pasties." Several times they urged him to go to the window and see if the stripper had arrived yet. Instead, Herschler went to the door, but could not bring himself to open it. Instead, he picked up a chair and threw it at the window, shattering the glass and tearing down the curtains.
He saw an endless, blasted landscape of gray ash and wind. In the far distance, great, blurry, lumbering things moved on the horizon. Herschler felt a sense of terrible exposure, as though he had just attracted the attention of some huge but terribly fast predator. He dove to the floor and shut his eyes tight.
Agent McGee found himself in the motel room with Frank Shriver. Frank offered him a drink, then began telling him the story of a young Viet Cong woman that he killed while he was in the Vietnam War. The woman had surprised him as he was securing a captured village; she'd had no weapons, but Frank had reacted instinctively and bayoneted her in the stomach. It a guilt he had never forgotten.
When he had finished the story, he offered to take McGee to see his friends. McGee agreed, and they walked together into the darkness in the back of the room.
Agent Herschler opened his eyes to find himself in a large, dark room full of people chatting and drinking cocktails. He searched the area for a phone, and found a waiter in a white dinner jacket holding a telephone up on a silver hors-d'oevres platter. Herschler picked it up and found it was already ringing.
Meanwhile, Agents MacMillian, Watts, and Markham each found themselves wamdering alone through a series of identical corridors lined with red curtains. At various times they were able to hear each other's voices or footsteps from an adjoining corridor, or even see signs of each other's passage, but at no point were they able to locate each other. Eventually Agent MacMillian found a corridor in which a telephone was ringing; on picking it up, she was connected with Herschler. After a frantic discussion of their current situation, MacMillian discovered the cocktail room just past the next corridor. The other Agents heppened upon the cocktail room at about the same time.
Agent McGee, in the meantime, had been led directly through the red corridors to the cocktail room by Frank Shriver. In this way the Agent team were able to regroup.
At that moment, the other people began to gravitate towards one end of the cocktail room, where a raised stage stood against the red curtains. A spotlight turned on, illuminating an old-fashioned microphone stand. Behind the microphone stood the mysterious albino, whom Agent Watts had seen outside his shuttle just before the re-entry malfunction, and who had been haunting him ever since. On the albino's left stood the night manager of the King Motel; on his right stood Frank Shriver and a Vietnamese woman the Agents had never seen before.
The albino spoke to the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here tonight. And a special thanks this evening to the House. We're all in the House tonight, folks. Big round of applause! Thank you, thank you. And now the moment you've all been waiting for. Let's have a warm, warm welcome for our very special guest: the void beneath the skin of the world!"
The audience began to applaud. The curtains behind the albino began to depart.
The Agents all closed their eyes.
Agents Herschler and MacMillian immediately came to in their projection creches back at Orpheus Headquarters, in considerable physical distress. Both Agents were suffering the equivalent of mild cardiac arrest as a result of spontaneous corporeal reintegration. Fortunately, Dr. Neel Shivani was able to get both Agents into a stable condition.
Agents Watts, Markham, and McGee fared little better: they regained consciousness in their room at the King Motel, which was now a decayed ruin. There was no sign that anyone had been at the motel for decades.
Even more disturbing was the fact that Frank Shriver and everything about him seemed to have been retroactively erased from everyone's memory. Tad Eccles claimed to have never sent the Agents on any such mission. The police had no record of any such person, deceased or otherwise. The woman who had been Coleen Shriver was now living as a single mother of two children, with a different last name. She had no memory of ever contacting Orpheus Group about anything.
The Agents had only two pieces of evidence to show that Frank Shriver or the King Motel had ever existed. The first was Agent Markham's hand, which was still scarred from the lacerations he suffered when he broke the light bulb in his motel room. The second was the digital camera that Agent Watts had borrowed from Coleen Shriver, and then enshrouded to keep safe. It still contained the images that had been on it before: pictures of the interiors of cars that no longer existed anywhere but in the Agents' memories.
No official record of this mission exists. The true nature of the incident remains a mystery.