I realize we didn’t actually spend much time together even as I Embraced you and brought you into the Camarilla. You don’t know me beyond what I did to you and from these little notes I have left you. Maybe you think me a flippant monster toying with matters of life and death.

Well, when it comes to the Second Inquisition, I am not playing games. They are terrifying and you must take them seriously. Otherwise, you really will die.

I want you to appreciate these words. I have lost many dear friends to the Inquisition and almost died myself. Sometimes we forget the advantage the Masquerade gives us over the mortals. We forget how weak they are made by their ignorance. Once they learn the truth, they are not so weak.

I do not like to talk about this, but I made it out of London when the Second Inquisition started its assault. I was in the haven of a friend when the doors were bashed in. There was sunlight everywhere, my friend collapsing into dust as he tried to claw his way to safety. I was burned badly, and from my wounds they could easily tell what I was. Embarrassingly, I was saved only by my speed and knowledge of the London sewer network. I used to live there, at one point, and the sewers have a lot of history.

After sundown, I made my way to the airport with a view to borrowing Lady Anne's private jet, but they had seized that too. The same happened to me at countless other havens. All destroyed or full of terrifying kine. I soon realized it was even difficult to walk the streets, the damnable cameras the mortals put everywhere detecting me when I tried.

I had to fall back to my oldest tricks. I pretended to be an illegal Polish immigrant on the run from the authorities, and a sweet young man drove me out of the city in the trunk of his car. I was so overcome with gratitude, I gave him a ring I'd had in my possession for two centuries.

The Second Inquisition killed the high and mighty of London Kindred society. They made Victoria Ash run like a dog. If you have a burning desire to fight them, fight like a vampire. Unfairly, and from far away.

V,A

Our ancient traditions, of control and obedience and especially of Masquerade, are our greatest shield against the greatest danger facing us in centuries: a new war of human against Kindred, of sheepdogs against wolves. This Second Inquisition pits our old enemies in the Vatican, the secret police and shadow warriors of a dozen countries, and hunter cells in a dozen more, against not just the Camarilla but against all of our kind. They go to war against us in the guise of their War on Terror, concealing their actions from their own masters in the name of “preventing panic” and “operational security.” Already the Second Inquisition has cost us dearly, in Vienna and London and in nameless sunlit rooms guarded by faceless seneschals. Our resources drained, our movements hampered, we must understand our enemies, blunt their attacks, and then turn their panopticon gaze toward those foolish enough to stand outside the Ivory Tower.

The Second Inquisition is a term of art, doubtless coined by some gifted Artiste who wished to emphasize the danger we face, while perhaps reminding us that we have seen such things before. Certainly, to the Vatican this is simply a continuation of the Holy Inquisition established to burn us out of Christendom eight hundred years ago. The Vatican found it needful to change that body’s name to the Holy Office, and then to the still more anodyne Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but the inquisitors’ fire, banked though it may have been for a time, never went out.

Similarly, the secular inquisitors keep their true purpose masked behind bland committee-driven titles. Currently, the Second Inquisition operates under the rubric of the Intergovernmental Task Force on Extraordinary Counter-Terrorist Response (ITFECTR), but this name shifts with the political winds and bureaucratic tides. Thus, we refer to the SI, or the Second Inquisition, as such regardless of their official (or most likely, unacknowledged) status.

Such nomenclatural legerdemain also has the doubtless intentional effect of muddying the waters for our tools and other potential investigators. For instance, a Freedom of Information Act request for documents concerning the “Joint Working Group on Transnational Unusual Threat Assessment” never reveals that after the JWGTUTA “disbanded” in 2007 its core membership immediately re-formed as the Multilateral Liaison Committee for Counter-Terror Scenario Planning.

This bureaucratic shell game switches the Second Inquisition from patron to patron, its jurisdiction and budget sloshing between nations, from civilian to military to clandestine and back again. But the core remains the same throughout: five relentless foes hunting us through silicon and shadows, with an ever-growing pack of curs on their leashes.

The United States government never had an official “Project Twilight,” or even an unofficial unified program to hunt the supernatural. Occasionally DEA, CDC, FBI, NSA, or other federal agents stumbled onto our activities and survived to investigate further. Beginning in the 1980s, these investigations began to overlap, and an informal information-sharing network grew up. The agents in this network called their investigation Project Twilight, a reference not to oleaginous interspecies children’s romances but to the Twilight Zone of American television fame.

Our countermeasures had almost completely stifled or co-opted these “hunters of hunters” before the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington completely altered the game board. The National Security Agency, freed of its institutional fetters, aggressively acquired control over global electronic communications; the Swiss turned their once-secret records over to the U.S. Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence to sift for extremist financiers. Those two developments revealed anomalous patterns of activity in certain centuries-old accounts: our accounts.

Those who had long advised our kind to stay off the Internet, and to distrust human banks, were proven completely prescient by what followed. OTFI investigations and NSA traffic analysis pierced the Masquerade, and American death squads stormed our havens. The black ops at the spear tip may have initially thought they were assaulting al-Qaeda cells, but soon enough the survivors discovered our true nature. Suddenly the old Project Twilight veterans found themselves called in for urgent noontime briefings in sunny Washington courtyards. Their superiors forgave or wiped clean their irregular records, and promoted them to head up nameless units with quiet authority to task and unleash sudden dawn raids.

As noted, the specifics of the American effort in the Second Inquisition remain hard to pin down — some Princes may even have tried to sic the NSA or FBI on Anarchs and other troublemakers, and then rightfully covered their tracks. However, the general picture has clarified and solidified in the last fifteen years. The American military and black budgets provide these hunters with oceans of untraceable funding, stored in illicit accounts or in tedious-sounding line items. The new Project Twilight comprises three main elements: the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the Defense Department, a joint NSA/CIA Special Access Program code-named FIRSTLIGHT, and the retasked and rejuvenated Special Affairs Division (SAD) of the FBI.

In January 2002, the American veteran secret warrior Admiral John Poindexter established an office inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with the goal of establishing “Total Information Awareness” of all possible threats to the United States. Every half-baked and experimental program in the DARPA in-box got massive funding, directed to such tasks as analyzing every post or email on the global Internet, identifying specific suspects at long distance using millimeter-wave radar, and most famously briefly establishing a “futures market” in crisis analysis.

Most importantly to us, the Total Information Awareness sentries perceived far more than we had imagined mere machines and algorithms could: correlating random data removed far too much of the concealing fog and doubt around our activities. Poindexter’s team prodded at the anomalies in several global economic and political maneuvers until it discerned our outline. When it coupled those analyses with the new OTFI financial profiles, the IAO identified a number of Camarilla assets within the higher councils of American corporations and government. Our tools found themselves slowly cut out of the flow of real power and information — and occasionally, surgically removed from America entirely.

Poindexter had called on his old Reagan-era network of assets and conspirators, now influential administrators in the national security establishment. They freed up platoons of CIA paramilitaries, squads of NRO “security specialists,” and even a Navy SEAL team or two. Dominated thralls, ghoul addicts, and even a few foolishly “hands-on” Ventrue found themselves awakening in black sites in the sunny, sunny tropics, invited over holy waterboarding to share more details of the “vampire terrorist conspiracy” IAO had found. We managed to manipulate Congress into officially defunding the IAO over civil liberties concerns in October 2003 before it could wound us too severely. However, we soon discovered that we could not re-stage the Masquerade.

The various IAO programs simply submerged back into the Pentagon’s secret assets and continued under other names. Poindexter’s hand-picked successor, Admiral Roberto Farrier, continued and accelerated his work. Farrier personally supervises and unifies the threads of the IAO, keeping it an entirely black project run out of his office in Pearl Harbor without Congressional or Pentagon oversight. He turns promising DARPA projects toward anti-Kindred analysis, weaponizing their findings as they become available. He also coordinates American and other military attacks on us, bureaucratically disguising the operations as “training missions” or “counter-terrorist strikes.” Without a direct line to main command authority, the IAO has limits: a few Predator drone strikes or submarine-launched cruise missiles, a company of deniable paramilitaries, renditions to one or two carefully guarded black sites in the Indian Ocean or Micronesia. But the IAO does have a tap into the so-far limitless American clandestine operations and surveillance budget, and willingly spends its lucre on anyone and anything that might burn out one more of our havens.

The first wave of IAO strikes in 2002 brought the True Death to, among others, a sewer-dwelling would-be spymistress in Ciudad Juárez named Xóchitl. This may have been the highest-value target the IAO hit in the entire Second Inquisition, because Xóchitl had been slowly grooming her own Dominated tool within the National Security Agency, Associate Director Felicity Price. With her handler gone, Price managed to throw off her condition — the exact methodology she used remains unknown, but was likely something developed early on by DARPA. She “came in from the cold” with first-hand knowledge of not just the Nosferatu, but of the Camarilla’s clan structure, traditions, and an uncomfortably large piece of our entire North American network. She gladly underwent every test the IAO could throw at her, even volunteering to be examined by specialists from the Society of St. Leopold. With her bona fides established to the IAO’s satisfaction, they returned her to the NSA, her career intact and her access vastly increased.

Over the next year, Price worked with the Society’s CIA allies to establish a Special Access Program to sift all U.S. intelligence product for signs of Kindred action. The result was FIRSTLIGHT, an ECI (Exceptionally Controlled Information)-designated compartment within the NSA and CIA bureaucracy. Information flows into FIRSTLIGHT from all over the world, gathered by satellites, informants, and the endless seining of NSA intercepts. Price’s team only reads new analysts into FIRSTLIGHT under very specific conditions: full daylight, at the very least, under the supervision of a Leopoldite or other aware hunter. This staffing bottleneck is FIRSTLIGHT’s great weakness — there just aren’t enough proven hunters to go around.

Price attempts to make up for this shortfall with a punishing schedule of briefings and planning, often while airborne. She habitually and continually flies westward around the world, holding rapid-fire meetings at secret airfields and military bases, remaining in daylight as much as possible. Each meeting produces another FIRSTLIGHT tasking, another one of us targeted, turned over to the IAO, the FBI, or one of the Second Inquisition’s foreign arms to be hunted down.

During the first three years of IAO operations, its analysts incidentally solved scores of heretofore isolated murders and disappearances. By this time, the Project Twilight old boys’ network had caught wind of the new dispensation to hunt down weirdness, and someone put the IAO in touch with FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Marcus Questor, who supervised the Southern region for the almost moribund Special Affairs Division. The SAD had begun as an anti-Kindred death squad during the Bureau’s war against Capone, branched out to investigate UFOs and Bigfoot sightings in the 1950s and 1960s, and badly lost the thread during the Bureau’s post-9/11 restructuring, distracted by paranoid investigations of the so-called “demonically imbued.”

Questor used the tranche of IAO information to close a number of high-profile cases with plausible cover stories, burnish his bureaucratic credentials, and to covertly unify the old-school “ Van Helsings” in the SAD behind him. Within two years, he was promoted to Assistant Director, then to Associate Deputy Director and head of the Division. Questor’s pipeline to the IAO provides the Division with hundreds of (sadly legally inadmissible) leads, as well as access to compromised and confiscated Kindred bank accounts when official budgets tighten.

Formally based out of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, SAD maintains its archives, specialized training center, and armory in a Cold War-era facility dug into the Blue Ridge Mountains. SAD agents operate all over the country, usually under cover in regular FBI field offices. Questor has refocused the Division on anti-Kindred hunts, renditions, and investigations, leaving its former “occult crimes” specialization as a cover against internal Bureau scrutiny. Special Affairs also serves as the formal FBI liaison office to the Second Inquisition’s international partners.

In the United Kingdom, the Second Inquisition operates through the Newburgh Group, an informal but close-knit body of highly placed advisors to Her Majesty’s Government headed by Sir Simon Newburgh. The Group has no official remit, and barely any official existence — we suspect the hand of the prying Arcanum in its founding. Working through backstairs channels, Newburgh directs the Joint Threat Response Group within GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency and equivalent to the American NSA. The British security service, MI5, sanctions the JTRG to act on intelligence developed by the GCHQ, especially by the Joint Operations Cell created to track sex trafficking and illicit sales on the Dark Web — the overlap between our activities and such commerce is quite substantial, as you will recognize.

Or it was before the JTRG began its work. Newburgh or his Arcanum minders identified Captain Ishaq Khan of the Metropolitan Police as a true believer. Our own records are understandably sparse, but Khan’s son and daughter did disappear under circumstances that could imply Kindred involvement. (If they were Embraced, we have not yet found them.) With Newburgh backing, Khan rose to command of the London police Anti-Terrorism Unit, Specialist Operations Branch 13. On paper, SO13 merged with the former Special Branch, SO12, in October of 2006 to form the new Counter-Terrorism Command, SO15. But in actuality, Khan’s hard core of SO13 remained an independent unit devoted exclusively to hunting down and destroying the Kindred in Britain. Reinforced by SAS commandos and Royal Marines when necessary, and protected by GCHQ and the Official Secrets Act, SO13 “slayers” burned out virtually every haven in London. In November 2013, SO13 discovered the resting place of Lady Anne of London — you doubtless remember seeing the photograph of Captain Khan holding her severed head.

With London officially “cleaned,” SO13 turned its attention to other British cities and began seconding teams of investigators — and occasionally slayers — to Second Inquisition operations in other parts of Europe and elsewhere. The Newburgh assets within GCHQ had long since connected with their NSA counterparts. As two of the Five Eyes partner nations, the U.K. and U.S. routinely combine intelligence and information culled from the ECHELON program of global electronic surveillance. Felicity Price happily added JTRG to the FIRSTLIGHT distribution list, and Price and Newburgh soon identified like-minded partners in the other Five Eyes countries: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Their own hunter-slayer teams burgeon on the SO13 model, funded by the IAO or by seized Kindred treasuries.

While the Brujah more or less ran the old Soviet Union, their primary enforcement arm was the KGB. Its rival ministry, the Red Army military intelligence arm known as the GRU, remained under KGB control until the convulsions of 1990 and 1991. However, as the fall of the USSR demonstrated, Brujah and KGB control were far from absolute. Within the GRU, covert resistance to the Brujah regime accreted informally at first. At some point during the 1970s, General Ieronim Arkhipov, commander of the GRU Fifth Directorate responsible for operational military intelligence, set up a covert office to identify and isolate KGB influence within the Red Army. That office, the Eighth Direction (восьмое управление), eventually established the truth about the Anarch Soviet and — we theorize — took action.

To what degree, if at all, the Eighth Direction played a part in the fall of the Communist Party, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the Baba Yaga disinformation campaign remains unknown. Certainly the GRU has no incentive to reveal its possible role in dismantling its own government. And it has much yet to fear from its new masters. Brujah influence remains pervasive at the highest levels of the Kremlin, as former KGB colonels with archives full of secrets become oligarchs and Mafiya lords with billions to spend on bribes.

Certainly someone close to Putin engineered the abrupt 2009 resignation of GRU head Valentin Korabelnikov, who had been General Arkhipov’s protégé. Without Korabelnikov’s support and protection, the Eighth Direction — which had eagerly joined the Second Inquisition in 2004 — has been forced to scale back its efforts.

Where it once sent stake-wielding Spetsnaz troopers into havens all over the former Soviet Union, the Eighth Direction now saves up its few “training missions” for the highest-value or most urgent targets. The main exceptions are in the Ukraine and Syria, where the Eighth Direction can operate within the fog of covert Russian military operations, although those theaters carry their own risks. To mitigate them, the Eighth Direction subsidizes and directs several chapters of the Orthodox hunters known as the Akritai. Working through cut-outs is, after all, one of the traits Russian intelligence has shared with us long before the rebels co-opted them.

Lasombra and Toreador have warred over Brazil for centuries, with the exception of the “Carnival City” Rio de Janeiro, which is open to all clans. Whether Kindred strife or Kindred satiety finally drove the kine to respond, when they did it was with fire and sword. Brazilian national police officers whose faith or hatred outweighed our substantial bribes assembled thick dossiers of the disappeared, the victimized, the kidnapped, the devoured. Possibly tipped off by the Society of St. Leopold, while Brazil’s states and cities created elite squads of special police in the 1980s, they formed their own Batalhão de Operações Especiais Secretas (BOES), the Special Secret Operations Battalion.

Funded by seized criminal assets at first, and then by seized Kindred assets, the BOES inserted five- or sixman comandarias within the military police or special operations police in São Paulo (ROTA), Belo Horizonte (BOPE), Rio de Janeiro (BOPE), Vítoria (BME), and other cities and states. Those comandarias scout a city and map out the Kindred turf and activity in it for months or even years. Once this is accomplished, the BOES “flying reserve” squads move in, strike as many targets at once as they can, and then begin clearing the city block by block if need be.

Because BOES for its first decades concentrated on non-Camarilla cities, we paid little attention to their raids. Indeed, it would likely not surprise you to learn that several local Toreador princes put the BOES on the scent of their rivals. But once the Society of St. Leopold brought BOES fully into the Second Inquisition, it became a significant threat to our activities as well. In some cases, BOES platoons have decades of hunting experience, more than any other human fighting force on the planet. The most veteran among them train and radicalize the new recruits to the “Sagradas,” (the Sacred, as they call the unit) blunting our kind’s weapons of shock and doubt. With U.S. military backing and funding via IAO, it is only a matter of time before they expand their operations outside Brazil: indeed, BOES comandarias may be operating in Bogotá, Caracas, and Luanda already.

The true core of the Catholic Inquisition, the Society of Leopold — or St. Leopold — has hunted us continually since its foundation in 1231 by Leopold of Murnau and Pope Gregory IX. Its fortunes waxed and waned with our own carelessness: the increasing effectiveness of the Masquerade eventually convinced even the Church that the Leopoldite crusaders were superstitious mad men. By the twentieth century, the Vatican had severed its formal ties of patronage and support, moving its clandestine energies entirely into its centuries-old intelligence organ, the Holy Alliance (known as the Entity since 1930). Denied the cloak of faith and patronage, the society was well on its way to disintegration through backbiting and factionalization. With the escalating reckless piercings of the Masquerade, however, it returned in force.

An Austrian fanatic named Ingrid Bauer, the so-called “Iron Maiden,” ascended as Grand Inquisitor in 1998 and began a full-fledged crusade against our kind. Even before the American military got into the inquisition business, Bauer’s Gladius Dei shock troopers burned out haven after haven with napalm, autos-da-fé rituals meant as much to build society morale as to weaken us. She reactivated old Cold War contacts between the Entity and the CIA, and with the U.S. military through Italian and Polish NATO liaison teams. When the NSA and IA O uncovered our traces, Bauer’s assets were already in place to shepherd their analysts toward understanding them.

The Americans repaid Bauer’s efforts tenfold, providing the Society of Leopold with military grade materiel (thermobaric rocket-propelled grenades and mass detection optics especially) and a few deniable billions for the collection plate. Bauer could now sideline or buy off opposing factions in the Society and devote it entirely to carrying out and coordinating the Second Inquisition.

Soon after his elevation in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI brought the Society of Leopold back under Vatican control, re-canonized and carefully re-integrated with the Entity and the Church. It now formally exists as a personal prelature, becoming the Society of St. Leopold, the patron saint of Austria. (The retroactive assignment must have given Bauer a certain satisfaction.) Its Bishop has directed the entire Entity since 2007. Operationally, the Society’s black ops Gladius Dei act as the Entity Special Operations Group (ESOG). Previously, the Entity primarily engaged in conventional intelligence gathering and used the CIA and other deniable agents for direct action; the addition of the Gladius Dei to its ranks gave the Vatican a true covert operations capacity. Unlike the rest of the Entity, but like the Opus Dei (through and with which the Leopoldites and the Entity often work) the Society of St. Leopold can initiate lay and female members, although its higher Provincials are now all Catholic clergy.

Pope Benedict may have resigned in 2013 to protect the Society from its enemies in the Curia and elsewhere, or he may have resigned to serve full time as its true Bishop, with Bauer left in operational command. Since 2005, ESOG has recruited not only the cream of the Swiss Guard, but Catholics from other elite special forces units all over the world, and deployed them to the front lines of the SI’s crusades. The even more radical theurgists, unorthodox operators, and other “ loose canon” types from the old Society of Leopold became the core of ESOG Team X (or “ Team 10” to more secular audiences), a quick reaction force operating out of the Vatican. Armed with hyper-modern ordinance, burning faith, and the records of a 800-year-long hunt, the Society-controlled Entity is the backbone of the Second Inquisition. It must be broken for the Kindred to survive.

In the last decade, the Second Inquisition has expanded beyond its initial five core members. In addition to the three other ECHELON countries partnered with FIRSTLIGHT and the Newburgh Group, five more nations have provided enough intelligence or muscle to count as “second-party partners” and get seats at the table during operational planning sessions.

France’s DGSE intelligence agency had already created a threat-identification system called Emeraude when they joined. Lt. Col. François Senghor had noticed that the anomalous findings from Emeraude eerily fit, of all things, a profile of “most secret threats” assembled by Cardinal Richelieu’s Cabinet Noir. FIRSTLIGHT support has allowed Senghor to create the Calcédoine program within DGSE, which has driven François Villon into hiding and begun to clear Marseille of our kind. Calcédoine expanded into Africa in 2011, accompanying French troops deployed to Mali, Niger, Gabon, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Both Israel and Sweden came on board thanks to FIRSTLIGHT contacts with their own national SIGINT groups. Israel’s Unit 8211 tracks elders-en route to the Gehenna War, and passes along backtraces to FIRSTLIGHT so the SI can hit their now-leaderless cities. (Thus the importance of establishing solid Camarilla succession in a city before heeding the Beckoning.) Sweden’s G-Kontoret (“the G-Office”) works within that country’s shadowy IB military-clandestine apparatus, having reopened the old files of the T-Kontoret founded in 1946 by the occult scholar (and possible Arcanum member) Thede Palm. It increasingly takes on greater responsibility in the SI’s research work, alongside the Newburgh Group and the Society of St. Leopold.

We have almost no information about the SI units inside Japan’s Defense Intelligence Headquarters and Poland’s domestic intelligence agency ABW, but we can assume that the IAO and Leopold, respectively, act as their “senior partners” when planning actions in East Asia or Eastern Europe. Given the increased frequency and intensity of Inquisition hunts in Japan and Poland, however, it’s clear that those two agencies have growing shadow offices suckling on the teats of SI information and finance.

The Second Inquisition has inserted assets and cells on the individual or squad level within all major Western nations and American military allies, but has not yet spawned fully dedicated hunter commands. That said, it is only a matter of time before such commands emerge on the ground there as well. We specifically expect them in Germany (where the Berlin rising may have already triggered just such a thing), South Korea, Czechia (ESOG Team 4 has deployed into Prague for a “cleansing operation”), Colombia, Jordan, Italy, Uganda, Spain (which has excellent SIGINT capacity for its size), and the Philippines (where President Duterte’s death squads already include random hunter teams). Local political pressures or turmoil keep the SI from full cooperation for now in Turkey, Thailand, India, Nigeria, and Mexico, although all of them doubtless appear on FIRSTLIGHT and IAO briefing books for the next decade.

As we must, above all else, keep to the Masquerade, so must our foes. The Second Inquisition cannot simply declare open war, burn us out in urban combat, and corral us into camps for two main reasons: First, the Camarilla still holds very powerful cards within the SI governments (and the Brujah likewise in Russia). We command corporations, senators, newspapers, television stations, whole nations — thus, operational security requires the SI to keep their actions secret even from their own putative masters. The ease with which we officially dismantled the IAO provides a constant reminder of this. Second, the Second Inquisition has fewer advantages than the First: it does not command the spirit of those it supposedly protects, so it cannot assuage their fears of us. Announcing an “anti-vampire crusade” in the modern night would cause global panic, and possibly the fall of one or more of the governments whose treasure and soldiers the SI redirects. Worse, from the hunters’ viewpoint, they could not prevent foolish or self-interested interference on behalf of “undead civil rights,” “negotiating with a new species,” “the opportunities for knowledge.” Or any other excuse the kine would make to remain in their comfortable slaughter pen. Even the Pope could not inform his own cardinals of the true threat — how much weaker must be the hand of a faceless bureaucrat in some lower floor of the Pentagon?

Thus, the SI carry out their hunts disguised as operations in the War on Terror or training exercises, or use deniable allies like the Society of St. Leopold and the Akritai. The SAD may have reached an understanding with the remaining “imbued,” using them to hunt us in exchange for legal anonymity. The SI may even, in cities where Princely justice is weak or wanting, use self-hating or so-called “independent” Kindred against us. Ever since the disastrous Detroit Hunt of 2012, however, the SI have deprecated that tactic, preferring to vivisect those Kindred foolish enough to try to come in from the cold. Now, when the SI uses our own kind against us, it is through cut-outs or simply by providing haven locations to both sides of a vendetta.

This points up a great advantage on the side of the SI: its complete and total mastery of the global computer network, and its willingness to exploit that mastery to our detriment. The laughable SchreckNet fell to NSA exploits almost immediately, mayfly humans steeped in silicon culture easily outwitting ancient sewer rats who fancied themselves “hackers.” That trove of data, thanks to the pestilential habit of storing up other clans’ secrets with their own, provided FIRSTLIGHT and JTRG analysts with the basis of their network analysis maps. For every city in the world, the SI has at least a general idea of our activities by night in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Every connection one of us has made with another potentially appears on these maps as a link; with enough links, a counterintelligence analyst can trace the pattern even though they have no comprehension of its true significance. That is how the Second Inquisition determined that the Tremere chantry in Vienna was a crucial hub of our activities, even if they believed it to be “the vampire conspiracy global headquarters” rather than the center of one clan’s activities. Regardless of their misperceptions, however, the IAO, BOES, and ESOG Team X did in fact destroy the Prime Chantry in 2008 with an as-yet-unknown combination of holy relics and ground-penetrating ordnance. The site of the “terrorist atrocity” has remained cordoned off since then, and the SI keeps a permanent bureaucratic presence in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in the city.

The SI develops more details for its network analysis by pulling emails, telephone calls, indeed every form of electronic communication, into its ambit. FIRSTLIGHT does most of the initial analysis, with backup from JTRG and Unit 8211. The GRU’s SIGINT capability rivals that of the NSA, and the Eighth Direction performs its own taskings and analyses, which provides a useful (though doubtless seldom appreciated) cross-check on FIRSTLIGHT findings.

The SI also attempts to channelize our movements. They seldom interfere with elder travel to the Gehenna War front, preferring to prevent lateral journeys from city to city. The early “chaoscope” technology introduced (from unknown sources) in 2004 has now become the somewhat less reliable but vastly easier to mass-produce “Xscope” system embedded in millimeter-wave body scanners in airports worldwide. An SI controller team at the airport keeps an eye out for “blankbody” signatures and alerts either tasked SI hunters in the area or, if need be, the local gendarmerie. Man-portable Xscopes exist, but for now remain almost exclusively in SI hands for field work. The exception is London, where the CCTV systems now incorporate Xscope technology on dedicated feeds to JTRG command posts.

Our activities and relationships mapped, penned up in our cities and leaderless, the SI moves to “cleansing” operations. In London, Brazil, and now Prague, the inquisitors hit as many havens as they can simultaneously, though not all those they have identified. (The goal is, again, to herd us toward places they already have mapped.) Then, if politically or tactically possible, the SI turns to block-by-block clearing with helicopter- and truck-mounted Xscope scanning and follow up raids.

To keep us off balance, and to placate specific interests, the SI launches pinprick raids wherever one of us (usually an Anarch coterie) has been too clumsy or thirsty for comfort. For these actions, they field a hunter team, or if need be embed one or two SI officers into a team of special operations soldiers or special police. Raids launch at dawn or noon, depending on local tactical concerns; even the ridiculously confident ESOG and BOES do not relish night combat with our kind. Any survivors — ghouls, hangers-on, or Kindred caught in coffins or otherwise — rapidly find themselves in sunlit rooms for interrogation and then a final combustion before a smirking priest.

The threat is real, and it is deadly. But it is not existential, not if we fall back on the truths that enabled us to survive the first Inquisition five centuries ago. We must clamp down on the Masquerade wherever possible. Disguise our actions as conventional crime, our feedings as simple disappearances or human trafficking. Resist the temptation to peacock outside Elysium. Shift our funds out of electronically harnessed banks and into gold and narcotics and cash. Get off the Internet and off the confounded cell phones, return to hand-delivered messages or the voices of the night.

We must continue to co-opt the intelligence community, especially those already threatened by the War on Terror agencies’ claim to turf and footprint. We must own the legislators (or their over-powerful staffers) who theoretically oversee the inquisitors’ home agencies. We cannot weaken the intelligence community outright; we depend on it ourselves for information and control of the kine. But we must break it to our bridle again. Here, we have the promise of power and knowledge, along with secular wealth and gratification of desire, to offer.

In the short term, we can turn the attention of the SI to the Anarchs and the Sabbat. Let them be our hounds for once. Ideally, by pursuing the Sabbat, the SI will find itself drawn into the Gehenna War — surely the American military habit of walking into quagmires overseas can be turned to our advantage. Speaking of the Americans, we can play the other factions of the SI against their overweening paymaster and armorer. Bauer believes her society should hold pride of place, and the Newburgh Group must resent being lectured to by a former thrall. Historically suspicious of (and rightly distrusted by) both the Americans and the Vatican, the Eighth Direction ironically acts as the deciding vote when the two diverge within the Second Inquisition. It should not be impossible to lay false trails in targeted havens to encourage such dissension.

Finally, we must throw the SI onto the wrong foot. Strike where they feel secure, send scouts and even full coteries behind their lines: to London, for example. The inquisitors are awash in money and treasure confiscated from our own coffers; leave behind co-operative “accountants” to encourage malfeasance, embezzlement, and eventual betrayals. Convince them one of their own has turned to us; if we could distract the witch hunters with a witch hunt in their own ranks, that would be both effective and artistic.

For all these tasks, I urge you to consider thin-bloods as possible tools. They can often withstand daylight, and perhaps confuse an Xscope reading. They are eager for advancement in our councils, and will thus perform dangerous tasks without cavil. They seek new territories to hunt in; what better ground to gift them than ground they must retake. Finally, of course, we can lose any number of the thin-bloods if it means weakening our foes. They remain entirely expendable.