BLACK LANTERN Assessment of CONRADIN - Sun, Jul 19, 2020

The session opened with a summary of the investigation conducted so far by the newly assembled Delta Green analysis team.

• The team consisted of:
  • DEA agent Andy Banks.
  • Neurologist Dr. Louis Ming.
  • Computer scientist Ernst Balkar.
  • Bureau of Prisons chaplain Jeremiah Arnaldson.
• The four agents had been brought together as strangers and placed in a secured WeWork office to examine the extensive Black Lantern document cache.
• Their assignment was to determine:
  • Whether the online figure known as Conradin was actually Conrad Hopko, one of the children rescued from Cornucopia House in 2001.
  • Whether Conradin represented an unnatural threat significant enough to warrant further Delta Green action.
• Their examination of the Black Lantern analysis had revealed that Parker Crown was probably not an isolated supernatural incident.
• Black Lantern analysts instead described Parker Crown as a recurring cycle involving:
  • Abused or imprisoned children.
  • Adult predators.
  • Damaged survivors of childhood abuse.
  • Animals exhibiting unusual or coordinated behavior.
  • Acts of punishment, revenge, predation, and consumption.
• The analysts believed that Working Group MASTICATE may have become part of the Parker Crown cycle merely by investigating and confronting it.
• The Black Lantern material further suggested that Delta Green was no longer observing Parker Crown from outside the phenomenon.
• The Program had already become entangled in the cycle, and whatever intelligence or force existed behind Parker Crown was probably aware that Delta Green was investigating it.
• The agents had also uncovered a connection involving Nika Chilikov, another survivor of Cornucopia House.
  • During Operation FIFE LIFT, Nika had employed an academic ghostwriter using the name ScribeLife420.
  • ScribeLife420 had been referred to Nika by Conradin.
  • This demonstrated that Conradin had been in at least limited contact with another Cornucopia House survivor.
• A roster of the children rescued from Cornucopia House showed that, by 2020, nearly every known survivor was dead.
• The sole survivor whose whereabouts remained completely unaccounted for was Conrad Hopko.
• The available information increasingly suggested that Conrad Hopko and Conradin were the same person.
• FBI interviews with Lee Jarnigan indicated that Conradin had operated under several identities, including Jacob Tillman and later Esau Tillman.
• Jarnigan had assisted Tillman in obtaining employment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
• Jarnigan eventually reported him to federal authorities after Tillman attempted to place two disturbing associates inside ICE.
• Jacob Tillman’s documented childhood contained major contradictions.
  • His father’s memoirs portrayed Jacob’s recovery from profound childhood language deprivation as miraculous.
  • Critics of those memoirs alleged that Jacob had spent years being moved among abusive institutions.
  • The available records did not resolve those contradictions, but they reinforced the sense that Jacob Tillman’s history had been repeatedly rewritten or obscured.

Jeremiah Arnaldson reviewed the biblical story of Jacob and Esau because of Tillman’s decision to change his first name.

• Jacob and Esau were brothers in the Book of Genesis.
• Jacob was the figure who later received the name Israel and became the patriarch associated with the tribes of Israel.
• Esau became associated with Edom and was remembered as an adversarial figure in the biblical history of Israel.
• The choice to abandon the name Jacob and adopt the name Esau therefore appeared potentially meaningful rather than arbitrary.
• The agents also recalled that Jacob Tillman’s father had written several memoirs centered on:
  • His own religious conversion.
  • His efforts to recover his missing son.
  • His portrayal of himself as an exemplary father.
• According to the memoir, Tillman’s father underwent a religious conversion in a truck-stop chapel shortly before seeing his son for the first time in seven years.
• The agents noted the possible religious symbolism surrounding Jacob’s name, his father’s conversion, and Jacob’s later adoption of the name Esau.

Andy Banks examined the Black Lantern material for instructions about what agents were expected to do when they identified a person affected by Parker Crown.

• Andy wanted to know whether the Program had an explicit policy requiring the elimination of anyone believed to be a Parker Crown vector.
• He made a HUMINT check while reading between the lines of the reports.
• The material contained no clear order to arrest, kill, or otherwise neutralize a Parker Crown subject.
• The practical guidance amounted to a warning to exercise extreme caution.
• The absence of direct instructions implied that the Program did not understand Parker Crown well enough to know how it should be contained.
• Andy asked whether the documents contained any warning about encountering an interdimensional duplicate of a known person.
• The reports contained no speculation about alternate dimensions or duplicate individuals.
• The only relevant anomaly was the fact that Matthew McCarter had appeared on security footage after his confirmed death.
• Delta Green possessed a body identified as McCarter through DNA, but the Black Lantern files did not explain how he could subsequently appear on video.
• Any additional Delta Green analysis of that footage appeared to have been redacted or withheld above the agents’ clearance level.

Ernst Balkar began closely examining tax and employment records associated with Jacob and Esau Tillman.

• A 2016 federal tax return placed Tillman’s residence in El Paso, Texas.
• A 2016 Form 1099-MISC listed freelance income from an organization called the Lafferty Youth Facilitation Force.
• In 2018, a Form W-9 requesting Tillman’s Social Security number had been sent from the offices of the Franklin Harvey Water Reclamation Plant, north of El Paso.
• The records suggested that ICE was routing Tillman’s pay through the El Paso Service Processing Center for work performed at an unlisted detention facility operating from the water reclamation plant.
• The agents concluded that the facility might be an undisclosed ICE detention site or black site concealed within or adjacent to the water-treatment complex.

Ernst successfully used Bureaucracy to identify the organization listed in Tillman’s employment records.

• Ernst rolled 29 against a Bureaucracy skill of 50.
• The Lafferty Youth Facilitation Force was a registered private business.
• The company abbreviated its name as LYF, allowing it to use the name Life Force.
• Life Force was owned by Kyle Lafferty.
• The company was administered by Kyle’s son, Jason Lafferty.
• Although the agents did not possess the underlying contract details, the records indicated that Life Force subcontracted with ICE.
• Tillman’s work history therefore connected him to:
  • A private youth-security contractor.
  • ICE.
  • A concealed detention operation at the Franklin Harvey Water Reclamation Plant.
• The combination of youth facilities, immigration detention, and Tillman’s Cornucopia House background immediately appeared significant.

The agents confirmed that Jacob Tillman had legally changed his first name to Esau.

• The name change occurred in 2011.
• Tillman was approximately seventeen years old at the time.
• The change was not mentioned in his father’s published accounts of his life.
• Jeremiah emphasized the biblical relationship between Jacob and Esau.
• Jacob was associated with Israel, while Esau was associated with Edom and opposition to Israel.
• The agents considered the possibility that Tillman had deliberately rejected the identity his father had imposed on him and selected the name of Jacob’s rival brother.

The team discussed the evidence connecting Conradin, Conrad Hopko, Jacob Tillman, and Esau Tillman.

• Conrad Hopko was the only Cornucopia House survivor whose current fate remained unknown.
• Lee Jarnigan had known Conradin as Jacob or Esau Tillman.
• Jarnigan had helped Tillman gain employment with ICE.
• The available FBI interrogation material made it clear that Jarnigan identified Conradin and Tillman as the same person.
• The agents’ working hypothesis became:
  • Conrad Hopko survived Cornucopia House.
  • Hopko was subsequently identified or presented as Jacob Tillman.
  • Jacob later changed his name to Esau Tillman.
  • Esau operated online as Conradin.
• The remaining problem was assembling the records into a sufficiently rigorous chain of evidence for their report.

Andy Banks located a document concerning missing children and ICE activity in El Paso.

• The document was an article published by Jacobin and written by journalist Montgomery Baxter.
• Baxter had been working at or investigating activity around the Providence Children’s Hospital in El Paso.
• Baxter reported that ICE personnel were removing infants from the hospital nursery during the night.
• He reported the activity to local police, but no meaningful action was taken.
• Baxter later confronted a young ICE agent identified as Agent Tillman.
• Tillman was preparing a suite intended for unaccompanied minors.
• When Baxter asked how Tillman knew the children were unaccompanied, Tillman explained that he had just arrested their mothers for illegal entry.
• Tillman stated that the mothers were guilty of a crime and that it was therefore his duty to take custody of the minors for their protection.
• Among Haitian and Salvadoran communities, Tillman had acquired the nickname:
  • “The Babysitter.”
  • “El Niñero.”
• The article placed Tillman directly within the Trump administration’s family-separation system.
• The records cited an estimated total of approximately seven hundred separated children.
• The agents did not know how many of those children had been personally seized by Tillman.
• They also had no information about where the children taken through Tillman’s operation ultimately went.
• The evidence nevertheless showed that Tillman had deliberately entered a government system that gave him access to vulnerable and forcibly separated children.

Andy connected Tillman’s actions to statements Lee Jarnigan had attributed to him.

• Jarnigan recalled that Tillman wanted to work inside ICE for reasons that did not originate within the agency itself.
• Tillman had spoken of wanting to:
  • Get inside the organization.
  • Serve something outside it.
  • Change the institution from within.
• The agents considered this consistent with the Black Lantern description of Parker Crown.
• Tillman had placed himself inside an institution with access to children in captivity, deprived of their parents and legal protection.
• The agents increasingly suspected that the family-separation system was being used to recreate some aspect of Cornucopia House on a much larger scale.

Immediately after the agents discussed Tillman’s abduction of children, they heard movement inside the office ventilation system.

• The noise consisted of scratching and scrabbling in the ducts.
• Andy drew his weapon.
• He had taken seriously the Black Lantern warnings concerning anomalous animals and did not want to be surprised by an attack.
• The sound seemed to come from something relatively small rather than a person moving through the ductwork.
• Andy remained on the far side of the room, keeping distance between himself and the vent.

The agents then heard impacts against the exterior window of the meeting room.

• The first impact was a single heavy strike.
• It was followed by several more.
• The impacts quickly became a rapid succession of blows against the glass.
• Because the meeting-room windows were covered with an opaque film, the agents could not see what was striking them from inside the room.
• The office was six or seven stories above ground, eliminating most ordinary explanations involving animals reaching the outside of the window.

Ernst left the meeting room to investigate from a nearby uncovered window.

• It was dark outside.
• Ernst initially had difficulty seeing the source of the impacts.
• He eventually identified the objects as pigeons.
• The birds were approaching in ones and twos and flying directly into the meeting-room window.
• Most struck the glass and disappeared from Ernst’s view, presumably falling immediately.
• Some deflected from the window, allowing Ernst to watch them plummet toward the ground.
• Approximately fifteen to twenty pigeons struck the building during the incident.
• Their behavior did not appear accidental or limited to a single confused bird.
• Ernst remained at the window and observed the repeated impacts until they stopped.

While Ernst examined the pigeons, Jeremiah investigated the ventilation duct.

• Jeremiah shone a flashlight through the slats of the vent.
• He made a successful Sanity roll and lost no SAN.
• He obtained a clear view of a large rat immediately behind the vent.
• As he adjusted the angle of the flashlight, the beam reflected from numerous additional pairs of eyes deeper inside the duct.
• The eyes appeared small and beady, leading Jeremiah to assume that they also belonged to rats.
• The rats did not immediately flee from the light.
• They remained still long enough for Jeremiah to examine them and for them to appear to examine him in return.
• After a prolonged moment, the rats all turned at the same time and scurried deeper into the ventilation system.
• The movement left Jeremiah looking at a mass of retreating rats.
• At approximately the same time the rats withdrew, the pigeons stopped striking the window.

Andy reviewed the Black Lantern list of recurring Parker Crown indicators in response to the animal activity.

• The listed indicators included:
  • Children being held in conditions of abuse, deprivation, captivity, or ritualized fear.
  • Animal attacks or animal behavior that appeared purposeful, symbolic, or coordinated.
  • Adult predators being hunted or destroyed by animal, child, or agent proxies.
  • Survivors of childhood abuse later becoming vectors, cultists, predators, or operational attractors.
  • Agents experiencing heightened synchronicity, animal fixation, predatory impulses, or sensory abnormalities.
  • Messages being delivered through coincidence or apparent technological malfunction.
  • Repeated imagery involving mouths, teeth, hunger, meat, blood, and consumption.
• The current investigation already contained several of these markers.
• Tillman was connected to children being held in captivity.
• The pigeons and rats appeared to be behaving in a coordinated fashion.
• The timing of their activity corresponded directly to the team’s discussion of Tillman and the missing children.
• Andy made a Sanity roll and succeeded, suffering no SAN loss.
• Despite remaining composed, he continued to treat the animal activity as a possible manifestation of Parker Crown rather than an ordinary infestation.

When Ernst returned to the meeting room, he reported what he had observed.

• Multiple pigeons had deliberately flown into the same exterior window.
• The birds had approached individually or in pairs.
• They had continued striking the glass until the rats withdrew from the vent.
• Jeremiah reported that numerous rats had been watching the team from inside the ventilation system.
• The agents noted that the pigeons and rats had ceased their unusual behavior at nearly the same time.
• Although several agents attempted to dismiss the incidents as ordinary urban wildlife, the coordination and timing made that explanation increasingly difficult to sustain.

The team returned to identifying the two men whom Tillman had attempted to place inside ICE.

• The names were:
  • Terry Smedley.
  • Alan Rapp.
• The relevant material was recovered from Lee Jarnigan’s confiscated computer drives.
• Tillman had sent Jarnigan blank ICE application forms and instructed him to complete them in a way that would allow Smedley and Rapp to be hired.
• Jarnigan extracted metadata from the PDF files.
• That metadata preserved earlier versions of the applicants’ answers.
• The agents therefore possessed what Jarnigan believed to be the applicants’ original, unedited responses.

The agents read Alan Rapp’s original ICE application answers.

• When asked why he believed he was a good fit for ICE, Rapp wrote that:
  • He had seen what the organization was.
  • He knew what its members did “behind their eyes” and “behind those walls.”
  • He believed they were already doing what he wanted to do.
  • He wanted to be let inside.
• When asked where he saw himself in five years, Rapp wrote about:
  • Being inside “young skin.”
  • Becoming “resplendent” like the people already inside the organization.
  • The world changing.
  • Joining with them to forge “a heaven behind bars.”
• When asked whether a current or former ICE employee had referred him, Rapp wrote that:
  • He had lost his nerve concerning a planned school shooting.
  • He had then seen Tillman and ICE.
  • Their work inspired him to imagine something more enduring and long-term.
• Rapp’s answers implied:
  • A desire to occupy or wear another person’s young body.
  • An expectation that ICE concealed a secret purpose behind its official operations.
  • An interest in prolonged institutional violence against captive children.
  • A previous intention to commit a school shooting.

The agents also read Terry Smedley’s original application answers.

• Smedley claimed that he had left his previous employer because he had been targeted by:
  • An extremist left-wing misinformation campaign.
  • The liberal media.
• In his additional comments, he thanked what he called the “real American patriots” running the country.
• He denounced “cancel culture.”
• He wrote that a white and racially pure American people had to be preserved for generations.
• Unlike Rapp’s strange and possibly unnatural language, Smedley’s application consisted primarily of explicit white-nationalist ideology.
• The agents nevertheless considered him dangerous and wanted to determine what had frightened Jarnigan during his background check.

Several agents attempted to identify Terry Smedley through open-source research.

• Initial Search rolls failed to locate a convincing match.
• Ernst asked to use Computer Science instead of an ordinary search.
• He proposed writing a script that could perform a broader automated search and classify the results.
• Ernst rolled 37 against a Computer Science skill of 80 and succeeded.
• By this point, the agents had been working well past midnight and were increasingly tired.
• Ernst completed the script and allowed it to run through available records.
• The script eventually located newspaper articles from a Midwestern community.
• The articles identified Terry Smedley as a member of a local militia and neo-Nazi organization.
• A journalist had infiltrated the group and publicly exposed its members.
• The incident occurred in the early 2000s, when the group still attempted to conceal its membership.
• The organization belonged to the tradition of violent far-right militias that admired or emulated Timothy McVeigh.
• The discovery explained Smedley’s claim that he had been attacked by the left-wing media.
• The “attack” had been the public exposure of his participation in a neo-Nazi militia.

The agents attempted to identify Alan Rapp but obtained no definite result.

• Alan Rapp was common enough as a name to produce numerous unrelated matches.
• The team lacked sufficient identifying information to determine which result, if any, belonged to Tillman’s associate.
• Delta Green may have possessed access to ICE employment data, but that access had not been granted to this team.
• The agents therefore could not confirm whether Rapp or Smedley had actually been hired by ICE.

The team reviewed the different names involving Cole, Clove, and Clovis.

• Clovis had been associated with Jacob Tillman as a caretaker.
• Agent Cole was identified in the available material as the Delta Green agent who originally placed Working Group MASTICATE onto the Cornucopia House investigation.
• A woman operating under the alias Crystal Killian had also been connected to the case.
• The timeline did not rule out a connection between these identities, but the agents lacked enough information about Crystal Killian’s background to establish one.
• The files did not provide a definitive explanation for the repeated use of similar names.

A search for connections to the name Clovis produced information about Cornucopia House survivors in Miami.

• A group of children whose behavior matched that of the Cornucopia House survivors had ended up in Miami, Florida.
• Working Group MASTICATE encountered those children there.
• The children appeared to have organized themselves into a street cult.
• The name Shredni Vashtar had been used in connection with the group.
• Shredni Vashtar was a name taken from The Chronicles of Clovis.
• The agents could not determine whether this was a direct clue, a deliberately selected literary reference, or another repeated coincidence within the Parker Crown pattern.

The agents revisited the connection between Nika Chilikov and Conradin.

• Nika Chilikov had also been a resident of Cornucopia House.
• She had later been encountered by Working Group MASTICATE during an incident involving a bear attack.
• Conradin had contacted Nika because of her academic thesis work.
• Their known communication appeared limited.
• Conradin referred Nika to ScribeLife420, who had previously helped him with his own academic work.
• The agents possessed no direct records of the conversations between Nika and Conradin.
• Their knowledge came primarily from:
  • MASTICATE’s debriefing notes.
  • Nika’s statements during an earlier interview.
  • Copies of her thesis materials.
• No additional documents in the Black Lantern cache showed a sustained relationship between them.

Ernst searched current public records for Nika Chilikov.

• Her name was uncommon enough that she was relatively easy to locate.
• She was still listed as an employee of the King Torino Children’s Refuge in Charlotte, North Carolina.
• Ernst found no obituary or news report indicating that she had died.
• She therefore appeared to be one of the few Cornucopia House survivors still alive in 2020.

The agents investigated Jason Lafferty and Life Force through professional and public records.

• Jason Lafferty was listed as the chief executive of Life Force.
• He appeared unusually young for his position.
• Other records indicated that Jason and Tillman had previously been roommates.
• Jason’s public professional profile did not mention that personal connection.
• Life Force advertised several security services.
• One of those services was called School Shield.
• School Shield provided security personnel to elementary and middle schools.
• The agents located a two-year-old video that had resurfaced and attracted renewed attention in March 2020.
• The video showed a School Shield resource officer:
  • Using a Taser on an elementary-school student.
  • Handcuffing the child.
• The child appeared to be approximately eight or nine years old.
• Life Force had reportedly lost contracts after the video became public.
• Other complaints alleged that Life Force personnel regularly used more force than necessary.
• Jason Lafferty’s professional profile consisted largely of conventional self-promotional corporate language and did not acknowledge these incidents.

By late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the agents had assembled a coherent operational theory.

• Esau Tillman was likely still working for ICE in or around El Paso.
• The Franklin Harvey Water Reclamation Plant was a real and publicly visible facility.
• Satellite imagery showed the plant at the edge of the city.
• The records indicated that an unlisted ICE detention facility operated there.
• Tillman’s 2018 tax records provided a residential address in El Paso.
• Louis Ming proposed that a future team could:
  • Locate Tillman’s residence.
  • Conduct surveillance on the water reclamation plant.
  • Identify personnel entering and leaving the facility.
  • Determine whether Tillman, Rapp, or Smedley were still employed there.
• The team had not, however, been given field-operation cover identities or authorization to conduct surveillance.
• Their formal assignment was limited to analyzing the documents and deciding whether Conradin was Conrad Hopko and whether he represented an unnatural threat.
• The agents agreed that their conclusions were effectively:
  • Yes, Conradin was almost certainly Conrad Hopko.
  • Yes, he represented a threat that Delta Green needed to investigate.

The agents decided to sleep before preparing their formal report.

• Their Program contact was expected to return at 8:00 a.m. Monday to receive their findings.
• It was approximately 1:00 a.m. Sunday.
• The agents reasoned that Tillman’s activities had continued for years and that waiting until morning would not materially change the situation.
• They set up cots and sleeping bags in offices near the meeting room.
• The office was extremely hot because the air-conditioning was not operating effectively.
• Ernst selected an interior room without an exterior window.
• He checked the vent and confirmed that the slats were too narrow for a rat to pass through.
• He used the vent lever to restrict the airflow.
• Ernst slept with the light on.
• The team obtained only intermittent and uncomfortable sleep.

At approximately 4:00 a.m., the agents were awakened by noises from the meeting room.

• They heard:
  • Rustling.
  • Scrabbling.
  • Clattering.
  • The movement of many small bodies.
• The meeting-room door was closed.
• The quantity of noise made it clear that numerous creatures were moving inside.
• The agents gathered in the hallway outside their temporary sleeping rooms.
• Ernst approached the meeting room and opened the door.

Opening the meeting-room door revealed that the room was filled with rats.

• Everyone with a view of the room was required to make a Sanity roll.
• A successful roll caused no SAN loss.
• A failed roll would have caused the loss of one SAN.
• Dozens of rats were running frantically throughout the room.
• As soon as Ernst opened the door, the rats surged into the hallway.
• They swarmed around the agents’ feet.
• They climbed up the agents’ legs.
• The agents felt the rats scratching and biting them.
• The agents attempted to knock the animals away and retreat from the doorway.
• Once the agents moved away from the meeting room, the rats did not pursue them as a unified swarm.
• Instead, they dispersed throughout the office.
• They:
  • Ran down hallways.
  • Followed the edges of the walls.
  • Scrambled beneath doors.
  • Vanished into the larger office space.
• Several rats were killed or injured when the agents kicked or struck them during the attack.
• The injured animals remained in the hallway after the rest had scattered.

The agents discovered that the rats had deliberately disturbed the investigative material.

• The papers and books arranged across the meeting-room table had been scattered.
• Some pages had been pushed onto the floor.
• Many documents had been chewed.
• Shreds and tatters of paper were distributed around the room.
• Rat feces covered portions of the table, floor, and documents.
• Small smears of blood appeared on several exposed pages.
• The material did not initially appear to have been completely destroyed.
• The damage was extensive enough that the team would have to reorganize and carefully inspect the evidence.

The agents examined themselves after the attack.

• All four had suffered numerous small wounds.
• The scratches and bites were concentrated on:
  • Their lower legs.
  • Their thighs.
  • Their hands, depending on how they had attempted to knock the rats away.
• The injuries proved that the earlier animal behavior had escalated from observation and intimidation to a direct physical attack.

Ernst noticed a pattern in the bloody marks left on the documents.

• The Handler called for an Intelligence check.
• Ernst rolled 65 against an Intelligence score of 80 and succeeded.
• At first, the blood looked like random smears made by rat paws or bodies.
• As Ernst examined multiple pages, he realized that the marks repeatedly crossed individual printed words.
• The marked words were not random.
• Every word marked in blood was one of the same three words.
• The words could be arranged into the message:
  • “Go to him.”
• Not every printed occurrence of “go,” “to,” or “him” had been marked.
• However, every word that had been marked belonged to that three-word message.
• The pattern appeared across multiple separate documents rather than a single page.
• Ernst carefully reviewed everything that had been left exposed on the table.
• The same pattern held throughout the damaged material.
• The rat attack had therefore delivered a direct instruction to the agents through the documents they were studying.

Despite the attack and the message, the agents continued preparing their report.

• They still lacked field authorization to travel to El Paso or arrest Tillman.
• They intended to recommend that another team locate and investigate him.
• They considered whether to disclose:
  • The coordinated pigeon strikes.
  • The rats watching them from the ventilation system.
  • The overnight swarm.
  • The bites and scratches.
  • The bloody message instructing them to go to Tillman.
• Their eventual level of candor would be decided when they presented their findings to their Program contact.

Andy continued assembling the definitive chain linking Conrad Hopko to Esau Tillman.

• The records established that, in 2001, Conrad Hopko was removed from Cornucopia House.
• Hopko and several other children were sent to the King Torino Children’s Refuge.
• At the same time, the FBI was conducting a kidnapping investigation concerning a missing child named Jacob Tillman.
• The investigation located Jacob at King Torino.
• Jacob was subsequently reunited with his father.
• This placed:
  • Conrad Hopko at King Torino.
  • Jacob Tillman at King Torino.
  • Both children there at the same time and under circumstances indicating that they were the same person.
• The connection also explained how Jacob would have known Nika Chilikov, who had likewise been placed at King Torino after Cornucopia House.
• FBI records therefore connected Conrad Hopko directly to the identity Jacob Tillman.

The later records traced Hopko and Tillman through adolescence and adulthood.

• Jacob’s father published memoirs about recovering and rehabilitating his son.
• The father also operated an evangelical homeschooling business.
• Those materials documented Jacob’s apparent development after years of severe language deprivation.
• Jacob eventually developed enough spoken and written language to attend college.
• He legally changed his first name from Jacob to Esau.
• He employed ScribeLife420 to help complete his academic work.
• With that assistance, he graduated.
• Through personal and professional connections, he became involved with Jason Lafferty and Life Force.
• Life Force’s ICE contracts gave Esau access to the immigration detention system.
• Esau was subsequently placed at the Franklin Harvey Water Reclamation Plant, where ICE appeared to operate an unlisted detention facility.
• He participated in the family-separation program and personally took custody of children after arresting their mothers.
• The agents had no reliable record of what happened to those children after Tillman took them.

The team identified numerous ways in which circumstances had repeatedly favored Tillman.

• His identity had changed several times.
• Records from his childhood were incomplete and contradictory.
• The transition from Conrad Hopko to Jacob Tillman had been poorly documented.
• His father’s memoirs provided a simplified and self-serving narrative that obscured much of Jacob’s earlier life.
• The later name change from Jacob to Esau further complicated efforts to trace him.
• Despite this fractured history, Tillman encountered almost no resistance during his ICE background investigation.
• ICE either failed to locate his contradictory history or chose not to investigate it closely.
• He obtained access to a system containing large numbers of captive and vulnerable children.
• The agents considered this accumulation of improbable advantages to be another likely indication of Parker Crown.

The agents’ principal conclusion was that Conradin, Conrad Hopko, Jacob Tillman, and Esau Tillman were the same person.

• The FBI records linking Hopko and Jacob at King Torino provided the strongest identity connection.
• Jarnigan’s testimony connected Jacob and Esau Tillman to Conradin.
• ScribeLife420’s records linked Conradin to Nika Chilikov and Tillman’s academic history.
• Tax, employment, and journalistic records placed Esau Tillman inside ICE’s El Paso operations.
• The agents concluded that the identification was supported to a high degree of confidence, even though no single surviving document explicitly listed every alias together.

The agents also concluded that Tillman represented a serious unnatural and operational threat.

• He was a survivor of Cornucopia House.
• He displayed several Parker Crown indicators.
• He had deliberately embedded himself in an institution that imprisoned and separated children.
• He had unexplained influence over hiring and background investigations.
• He attempted to recruit Alan Rapp and Terry Smedley, both of whom were overtly dangerous.
• His activities corresponded with coordinated animal behavior directed at the investigators.
• The rat swarm delivered a direct message telling the agents to go to him.
• The team’s likely recommendation was that Delta Green:
  • Locate Tillman.
  • Investigate the Franklin Harvey facility.
  • Determine the fate of the separated children.
  • Identify and locate Alan Rapp and Terry Smedley.
  • Examine Life Force and the Lafferty family’s involvement.
  • Prepare for the possibility that the El Paso operation was a deliberate recreation of Cornucopia House.

The Handler provided one final connection from the Black Lantern analysis concerning the historical origins of the Parker Crown pattern.

• Black Lantern analysts had compared Parker Crown to a largely discredited account of ancient Egyptian religious practices associated with Bast.
• The relevant tradition was called the Black Rites of Bast.
• According to the historical account, priests of Bast:
  • Took children.
  • Raised them under conditions of torture, deprivation, and terror.
  • Used some children as bait for monsters.
  • Used other children to attract or identify people capable of fighting those monsters.
• The system created a repeating chain:
  • Abused children attracted monsters or predators.
  • The monsters drew in hunters, protectors, or avengers.
  • Those people became entangled in the same cycle.
  • At the end of their service, the priests found more children and began the process again.
• The Black Lantern analysts believed this pattern strongly resembled what had occurred around:
  • Cornucopia House.
  • The quiet children.
  • Working Group MASTICATE.
  • The later lives of Cornucopia House survivors.
  • Conradin’s apparent use of separated immigrant children.
• The agents inferred that Tillman might be rebuilding or continuing the same system at the El Paso detention site.
• Rather than merely abusing children, the operation might be creating the next generation of bait, predators, monsters, and agents who would perpetuate Parker Crown.

The team searched MASTICATE’s previous experiences for other Egyptian connections.

• Most of the Skoptsi and Magna Mater material remained redacted or compartmentalized.
• The clearest Egyptian connection came from a prior incident involving Steele Monroe.
• During the encounter associated with the unnatural biker or “Rider in Yellow,” Monroe experienced a vision or hallucination.
• Afterward, he phonetically recited words resembling Middle Egyptian.
• Middle Egyptian was not a living spoken language that Monroe should ordinarily have known.
• The recitation had been recorded.
• Scholars later attempted to interpret the sounds and tentatively identified them as Egyptian.
• The recording was believed to have eventually reached Assistant U.S. Attorney Antonia Pitzerelli.
• This incident suggested that the Egyptian material in the Black Lantern report was not based solely on abstract historical comparison.
• At least one earlier MASTICATE operation had produced an apparently genuine and unexplained link to ancient Egyptian language.

The session ended with the agents preparing to decide what they would advocate when presenting their findings.

• Each agent needed to determine:
  • How strongly to recommend immediate intervention.
  • Whether to request authorization for an El Paso operation.
  • Whether Tillman should be surveilled, detained, or treated as an unnatural threat.
  • How much of the animal activity and bloody message to include.
  • Whether the message “Go to him” should be treated as guidance, manipulation, or a trap.
• The team had completed the analytical portion of its assignment.
• Their findings showed that Conrad Hopko had survived under the identities Jacob and Esau Tillman.
• He had embedded himself in ICE and gained access to hundreds of separated children.
• The investigation itself had triggered increasingly direct Parker Crown manifestations.
• The next step would be presenting those findings and deciding whether Delta Green would send agents to the Franklin Harvey Water Reclamation Plant in El Paso.