You are Dig Freedman, a trained field agent for the ILF. You're pretty experienced by now, both as an agent and as a Vortex Mechanic; you've run several missions with fair success. Your qualifications eventually brought you to the notice of the highest ranks of the Foundation, who assigned you a new job that they had created just for you: Chaos Wrangler.
It's not a high-profile position, but it's an important one. It's like this: Vortices of Chaos are a special, rare subclass of the basic Vortex. They attach themselves to physical objects -- people, places, things -- more or less permanently, and are constantly drawing micro-Vortices to themselves. They tend to have all sorts of wierd effects, such as enhanced synchronicity and strange luck patterns. Normally, they are a nuisance; when they attach themselves to people, they tend to be a real problem.
The ILF has, in recent years, become aware of two people infested with Chaos Vortices: Jeff Diewald and Gail Peck. They were your assignment: not to do anything terribly complex, just keep an eye on them, understand the effects of the Vortices as best you can, and try to help them when their Vortices cause trouble. You surprised yourself by getting relatively close to both of them, becoming friends with Diewald and falling in love with Gail. That may be what has caused the current problem: you may have gotten yourself in just a little over your head, caring about the people you're supposed to be observing.
It all started a year or two ago, when you happened to read the report from a mission that had involved some mystical research. The curious thing about it was the description of a process of mind-transference; two agents had swapped bodies for a while, before getting switched back again. And you had a sudden realization: the Chaos Vortex is attached to physical objects, right? So if the mind of the person stuck with the Vortex were swapped into someone's else's body, they wouldn't be stuck with the Vortex any more. Hmm...
You spent a few months researching it, and came to some conclusions. The process was possible, although a bit tricky. It requires the presence of a fairly strong Vortex -- despite the technological trappings that accompanied the reported incident, it looks like the effect actually occurred due to the belief of those around it that it would happen, combined with the force of the Vortex. It also requires that the mind and body be dissociated somehow. This wasn't going to be easy -- but it could be done.
You broached the topic to Jeff, and he was highly enthusiastic; he'd be willing to handle a body-swap, if it would make his life a little saner and more manageable. Then there was the more difficult question: who would he swap with? This isn't exactly a win-win situation. Jeff allowed as to how he knew exactly the right person; he didn't say more at the time, only that you should worry about the process, and he'd make sure a thoroughly deserving target was available.
So you dug into it in more detail. You prefer not to think about all of the strange sorts you had to deal with, but you eventually managed to procure the drug that appeared right for the process. It is used in various religious ceremonies of certain Andean Indian tribes, and frees the mind more or less completely from the body. It shuts the body down for the duration, keeping it in a sort of stasis, neither dead nor entirely alive. The tribesmen couldn't say exactly how quickly the body had to be returned, but indicated that stronger-willed shamen had occasionally spent several days separate from their bodies before returning to them. It seemed like the right thing to use.
When you came back to Jeff with that, he had lined up the person he wanted to switch with. You were a little perturbed by the fact that it wasn't a willing subject, but couldn't argue that it was well-deserved -- the person in question was Roger "Bob" Enfield.
Enfield has been involved with the ILF for several years now; no one really likes him all that much, but he has been a good enough field agent that no one could really call him on it. Jeff (who is himself an ILF field agent) had been keeping Enfield under observation for some time, though, having had bad incidents with both Enfield's family and their cognates in other worlds a number of times. And he had found the smoking gun: Enfield was involved with the Followers of Set.
The world is filled with strange groups and conspiracies, but the Followers are one of the few that can be considered genuinely evil. They have existed for at least a thousand years, according to the ILF's research department, and have been trying to conquer the world that entire time. From the Roman Empire to World War II, you can find traces of their handiwork everywhere. They are sort of the ILF's opposite number: they try to open Vortices, and manipulate them for power. Bad news, in every respect.
You double-checked Jeff's facts, and they proved true: all the indications were that Bob Enfield was not only a member of the Followers, he was probably one of their leaders. You wanted to go straight to Gordon Olmstead-Dean (then the President of the ILF) with the news, but Jeff proposed a subtler course, killing two birds with one stone. You would use Enfield as the other half of the switch during an open Vortex, then arrange for him (in Jeff's body) to be on the other side of the Vortex when it closed. Jeff would be free of his curse; Enfield would be out of the way, without actually killing or arresting him; and whatever the Followers were currently up to would probably be spoilt. Complicated, but you couldn't argue that it made sense. And if you pulled it off, you'd both come out smelling of roses, next time bonuses were being discussed.
You arranged to make it happen during I13. All the projections from ILF Central are that a massive Vortex should be building up, peaking at around 1:30am late Saturday night; Jeff arranged that he would hold a party at the time and place of the peak. Jeff also, as the head of the I13 mission, arranged for Enfield to serve as his deputy, so that he could keep an eye on him and have some control over his movements. They theory was that, during the party, he would propose a toast of port with Enfield with you present (and with the drug mixed into the port). They would both dissociate from their bodies, and you could then use the power of the Vortex to "believe them" into each others' bodies and wake them. They'd wake up; the two of you would throw Enfield through the Vortex, and everything would be nice and happy. So much for theory.
You've spent much of the past month brewing up the drug, and mixing it into a bottle of Tawny port. It was a delicate process: the drug is sensitive, and the proportions have to be just right. You then sent it on ahead of you by Fedex to Jeff, not wanting to trust the bottle to the tender ministrations of the airline luggage handlers.
From there on, the details get a little hazy. Jeff mentioned that the bottle didn't get there Thursday as planned, but he was expecting it to arrive Friday afternoon, in plenty of time for the party. And you didn't think anything more of it, until you heard everyone crying about Jeff being dead.
It's pretty clear from the reports that somehow he foolishly drank from the bottle too early: all of the reports are that he drank a toast of port, and then keeled over. How, precisely, he managed to accidentally drink from that bottle is unclear, but you should have expected something like this where a Chaos Vortex is concerned.
So the question is: what to do next? It seems like you are in for a penny, so you might as well go in for a pound and try to rescue the plan. Jeff should be strong enough to manage outside his body for the 24 hours or so you need before the Vortex hits peak; besides, it isn't clear that you can wake him without the force of the Vortex behind you, anyway. You just need to make sure that no one decides to do an autopsy or something like that in the meantime.
This can still work, if you manage it right. You need to make sure Enfield is near the Vortex when it peaks tomorrow night, and that Jeff's body is somewhere nearby. You need to get Enfield to drink a toast from the port bottle, and then the plan continues along the original lines. The tricky part is going to be working your way into Enfield's good graces, so that he trusts you enough to have a drink with you...
You haven't told any of your superiors at the ILF about the plan (Jeff urged you not to, since they would almost certainly veto the idea); you're hoping that John Corrado doesn't decide that Jeff's "death" is somehow your fault. You can still pull a promotion out of this if you pull it off; if you tell them about it now, it's probably back to Cute Fuzzy Animal duties for the next ten years.
You haven't told Gail about it, either. The fact is, she's one of the main reasons you decided to go along with this deranged little experiment of Jeff's in the first place. If you pull it off, and it succeeds, you might be able to somehow refine the process to help Gail as well. But the last thing she needs is to know that Jeff's "death" is partly for her sake...