[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

When the news arrived in Washington of the failed (relatively speaking) sabotage
attempt aboard the Molly Gordon, Robert McLaird grasped the implications
immediately. He also immediately recognized one salient fact about the entire
business, and that was a limited range of potential suspects. There simply were
not that many people physically in a position to have attempted the sabotage, and
the amateurish nature of the attempt argued against the effort being performed by
a genuinely professional operative. McLaird suspected that if they moved very
quickly, they had a reasonably good chance of identifying the person responsible.

The effort began immediately, and the lists of names were rapidly winnowed down
by concerted effort. Within a week of the bomb exploding, McLaird had narrowed
down the possibilities to no more than six men, and of those six only three appeared
to be reasonably realistic possibilities for being the guilty party.

As it happened, the saboteur, aware of the narrowing search, panicked and made the
task both easier and harder for McLaird and his team. The guilty party tried to flee
the facility where he worked, in a driving rainstorm, and ended up smashing his car
to pieces and removing himself from this world in the process when his car went
over the edge of the road into a rain-swollen river.

This made the investigation easier for McLaird by focusing attention on him, and
it was not long before the post-mortem investigation revealed reasonably solid proof
that the now-dead man had been the saboteur. It made things harder for McLaird
by removing the saboteur from any possibility of interrogation.

In fact, the man would not have been all that useful as a source of intelligence even
if he had been alive, he simply did not know that much. He had been an employee
of a master he did not know, his motive had been the classic one: money. He did
have knowledge of his immediate contacts, but given time, McLaird and his fellows
were able to identify some of them anyway, by analyzing the movements and past
associations of their now-dead saboteur.

In the meantime, the Seven Aces proper continued their voyage toward Brazil, and
Jurgensen continued to make his way toward his own goal. The Aces received an
unknowing lucky break when Jurgensen reached Rio de Janeiro, he organization
was in chaos and he took more time than he had planned, or hoped, to organize his
movement into the interior. Jurgensen would normally have been in the city and out
again within no more than two days on such an errand, in this case he ended by
requiring three days to organize his expedition and it was at dawn on the fourth day
after he arrived in Rio de Janeiro when Jurgensen and his expedition finally set out.

This was totally unknown to the Seven Aces or their superiors, but it was even so a
tremendous gift to them, because it enabled the Aces to sharply narrow the lead their
quarry held over them. The Seven Aces arrived in Rio de Janeiro the day after the
expedition led by Jurgensen left the city, they were no more than thirty-six hours or
so behind him at this point, though they did not know that, and they inevitably lost
some time in organizing their own movements. Still, McLaird had been busy, and
though his resources in Brazil (or rather, the resources of the Army Intelligence) at
that time were very limited, what there were had been put to good use.

Since travel by river was the only realistic way to operate, a riverboat had been made
ready, along with supplies and some equipment, and the Seven Aces brought in more
from their supplies aboard the Molly Gordon. Since secrecy was absolutely of
the essence, false identities had been prepared, along with ‘nested’ cover stories as to
what Conners and his men were seeking under those false identities. McLaird was
very, very good at that sort of thing, even on relatively short notice.

Matters were complicated by the fact that Brazil in late 1925 was far from an open,
egalitarian place. Most political and social power was held in the hands of a very
small landed elite, and the government was a republic in name and a dictatorship in
fact, with executive power passed back and forth between factions of an oligarchy.

MORE LATER.