Black Helicopters

Black Helicopters is a novella by Caitlin R. Kiernan, part of her Tinfoil Dossier trilogy. It was first published as a Subterranean Press chapbook in 2013, then released in a considerably expanded form by Tor.com in 2018--so it may be considered either the first or the second book in the series, preceding or following Agents of Dreamland. 
The story involves the conflicts among secret agencies in the occult world over an outbreak of eldritch horror in Deer Isle, Maine, and over a weird science experiment involving twins. 
==Organizations==
*Y: A secret agency fighting occult threats. Also known as Barbican Estates, named for a residential development in Central London. Its leader is the Commissioner; Ptolema is an agent for them.
*X: A shadowy organization known for the "miasma, the muddling aura that surrounds every last agent of the X." Seemingly more interested in creating occult threats than in fighting them. They are described as quasi-Buddhist, mongrel Hindu, cyber-Shinto, Gnostic Thelemite worshippers at the shrines of Castaneda, Crowley, Camus, Blavatsky, Robert Anton Wilson, Velikovsky, Berlitz, Charles Fort, ad infinitum, a congregation based, possibly, in Saigon, or Calcutta, or Buenos Aires, or, more likely, nowhere at all.Led by a woman called Julia Set. They are responsible for Twisby's twinning experiments, and also apparently for turning Sixty-Six into an assassin.
*Albany: An agency that "has no official or unofficial title," though it's once referred to as the Other American Group. Called "Albany" because its headquarters are in the subbasement of the Erastus Corning TowerWikipedia, "Erastus Corning Tower". in Albany, New York: a "labyrinth of fluorescent lights and numbered doors" sometimes referred to as "the Ant Farm". They are "the men in black suits and tinfoil hats who answer to no one," "faceless, hollow men who crouch in the shadows beneath an Albany skyscraper and are ever on standby when this sort of s*** goes down". The Signalman is a high-ranking agent there.
==Characters==
*Lizbeth and Elle Margeride: A set of twins (and also lovers), albinos with pale skin, "cornsilk hair", and "startling blue eyes". They are prodigies in paleontology as well as chess; in chess, Elle always plays white. They are also known as Ivoire and Bête, though which is which is unclear; obedience comes easily to Ivoire, unlike turbulent, seditious Bête". It's Ivoire who is sent to Deer Isle to combat the shoggoth invasion, and who develops a heroin addiction to cope with chronic pain. Both twins have psychic abilities; Bête manifests hers through origami. Later there is only one twin, who goes by a multitude of names, but she is sometimes known as the White Woman. She suggests she may be the "Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Or, it may be I’m the Anti-Christ. Shiva. Maitreya."
*Twisby: Also known as Thisby, her real name is Dr. Lane Dunham, PhD, MD; her degrees are in neurology and biopsychiatry, from Oxford and Yale. She had a high profile in the American Psychiatric Association. She worked for the National Security Agency, and for Lizbeth and Elle are the products of an experiment she's conducting, under the aegis of X. Twisby believes that waste is the only sin. She has "frizzy ginger hair tied back from her face."
*Ptolema: An assassin working for Y. Called The Egyptian, though she may be Persian or Ethiopian. Also called Ancient of Days, el Judío Errante, Kundry. Apparently immortal, she lives at least well over two centuries, and may be thousands of years old. It's suggested at one point, possibly in seriousness, that she may be the Queen of Sheba. Ptolema is a chess master, but she says that "meting out death is one of the few things at which I excel." She has a "bald head smooth enough it glistens in the sun...brown skin, [an] ugly scar over her left ear.... [S]he probably appears no older than thirty, thirty-five."
*Barrymore: Ptolema's handler for Y.
*The Commissioner: The leader of Y. He "looks like John Tenniel’s interpretation of the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass."
*Julia Set: The leader of X.
*Nora Swann: An assassin for Albany, first contacted by them in August 1992. Born and raised in Iowa. She previously worked for the CIA, mostly in West Berlin. Hired by Albany because of her low susceptibility to psychic attacks.
*Hugh Papadopoulos: Swann's handler for Albany for the past three hits.
*The Signalman: A high-ranking agent of Albany. He is one of the main characters of Agents of Dreamland.
*Mary Vance: An agent of Albany, recruited from the FBI's Seattle office around 2010. She also appears in Agents of Dreamland.
*Sixty-Six: Born Olivia Estrid Noble, she is known as Sixty-Six, after the number of her room in a mental hospital in Ithaca, New York. Apparently turned into an assassin by X. "She’s not unpretty, despite the darkness like bruises that surrounds her oddly golden eyes. Her ebony hair hangs in unkempt dreadlocks."
*Madeline Noble: A student at Bowling Green State University who is unwittingly dosed with BX, a powerful experimental hallucinogen.
*Patricia Elenore Noble: The daughter of Madeline Noble, born under the influence of BX, and the mother of Olivia Estrid Noble, known as Sixty-Six.
*Dr. Allan Logan: A psychiatrist from McGill University who is helping to administer the BX tests for the CIA.
*Dr. Dreiser: Working with Logan.
*Carlisle: A virtual reality journalist in 2035. He is haunted by an encounter he had with the Woman in White.
*Ahmed Andrushchenko: A smuggler in 2112. He is "not a man who is well in the head."
*Bartleby Johnson: Andrushchenko's cabinmate. 
*Babbit: A "splice" assigned to seeing to the Woman in White's every need on Mars in 2152. Described as a "tall, thin, towheaded man" who is "only mostly human".
==Timeline==
1861: The first specimen of Archaeopteryx discovered in Langenaltheim, Germany,
1892: Ptolema plays chess with Wilhelm Steinitz
1963: Ptolema buys a watch from a Munich pawn shop.
1964: Madeline Noble enrolls at Bowling Green State University.
November 15, 1966: Madeline Noble interviewed by Dr. Dreiser and Dr. Allan Logan
c. 1970: Madeline Noble gives birth to Patricia Elenore Noble.
c. 1990: Sixty-Six born (according to Ivoire). Lizbeth Elle Margeride is born about the same time.
August 1992: Nora Swann first contacted by Albany.
c. 1997: Ptolema quits smoking.
January 1, 2001: Lizbeth Margeride sits in a white room across from her sister Elle. Twisby tells them that waste is the only sin.
2005: "Nora Swann" adopts that alias.
2006: The polar hexagon on Saturn is discovered; it was described in great detail by Madeline Noble in 1966.
c. 2010: Mary Vance hired away from the Seattle FBI office by Albany.
August 12, 2012: The date that turned Deer Isle "into a Stephen King novel", according to the Signalman.
August 20, 2012: "A chartreuse light fell screaming from the sky" at Deer Isle, according to Ivoire. Seventy-eight percent of Deer Isle's population is killed in the subsequent plague.
August 27, 2012: the visibility zero-zero begins rolling in from the east,
September 28, 2012: Ivoire and Sixty-Six battle shoggoths in Stonington, Maine.
October 12, 2012: Ptolema meets with agents of X at Bewley’s Oriental in Dublin to ask them about Twisby and the twins.
October 13, 2012: Ptolema meets again with the redheaded agent at Aston Quay in Dublin.
October 15, 2012: Nora Swann is ordered to assassinate Bête and Twisby, and shoots herself instead.
October 16, 2012: Bête and Twisby drive to a ferry in Dublin, headed for Cherbourg and Paris.
October 18, 2012: Nora Swann is interrogated by Albany in Borrisokane, County Tipperary, about her failure to assassinate Bête and Twisby.
November 4, 2012:  In Stonington, Maine, Ivoire gives Sixty-Six an ammonite, and tells Bête about a paleontology article she read in a journal that hasn't been published yet.
November 7, 2012: Bête spotted in Paris.
December 12, 2012: Ptolema meets with the Commissioner at Barbizon Estates.
December 19, 2012: PLoS publishes an article about a freshwater mosasaur.
December 20, 2012: The Signalman contemplates dropping a nuclear weapon on Deer Isle.
December 21, 2012: A Great Old One rises from the slime around Deer Isle. The Deer Isle-Sedgwick suspension bridge is blown.
Sixty-Six shoots Ivoire with a shotgun in an attic on Deer Isle, and Lizbeth Elle, with Twisby in aabandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Knivsta, Sweden, has a vial of liquid from Penobscot Bay.
January 5, 2013: Ptolema meets Elle on the G train in New York City.
February 18, 2013: The sample  of the Deer Isle infection is dated.
2026: As a chess expert, the Twin is in her middle game, and she’s already got king safety down to an art.
August 9, 2035: Carlisle has a conversation with Sara White Queen while virtual-reality-casting a live suicide in an Atlanta hotel room.
May 7, 2112: As the Argyle Shoestring sails past the ruins of Old Boston, Ahmed Andrushchenk and Bartleby Johnson argue over Ahmed's tapping into datastreams for information about the Twin's chess strategy.
May 13, 2114: The Argyle Shoestring is intercepted by the Far Shore Navy, and Ahmed  Andrushchenk arrested.
December 3, 2152: The White Woman talks to Babbit in the Nautilus-IV on Mars while awaiting the arrival of Ptolema and arranging the detonation of the Deer Isle sample over Sharonov. 
==References==
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works