[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Even as McCord and Davis were boating up the river, and Conners and Lake were staking out the cemetery, Robert McLaird was sitting in his office in Washington, D.C. The early morning light poured through the east-facing windows, giving a discordantly cheerful aspect to the room.

The discordance was between the cheerful dawn light and the dark mood that haunted McLaird. He had returned to the capitol city after his visit to Miami to set the Seven Aces on the bizarre matter in upstate New York, and he had found yet more trouble brewing almost from the moment of his return. The sun was only just now rising above the eastern horizon, but McLaird had been in his office and busily at work for over four hours already.

Among the problems facing him were matters of politics, matters of money, and matters of tradecraft. All of these matters interconnected intricately in a Gordian knot of difficulty.

The budgetary problem was the smallest, but a painful nuisance. Many of the myriad off-the-record, under-the-table operations that McLaird supervised and directed required substantial amounts of money. In absolute terms, the sums were not so huge, perhaps. Certainly they would not have been particularly noticeable compared to many of the everyday expenditures of the Federal Government.

The problem was that the money had to be invisible. This was difficult because money tended to draw attention. One of the basic rules of off-the-record activity were that inexplicable flows of money could be damningly noticeable. The funding for his operations could not simply be entered into the Congressional budget bills openly, even if the actual sums might have looked small amid the other expenditures there.

Some of the operations could be made to self-fund. Much of the activity carried out by the Seven Aces, for example, was funded by an actual, functional shipping company that served as their first layer of protective coloration. These monies were blessedly independent of the regular budgeting process in his department.

Some of his other operations could be funded by ‘innocuous’ items planted in open budgets. Sometimes, a judicious cost overrun on a procurement tender could be used to supply funding to a concealed activity. Sometimes, less savory sources had to be cultivated.

McLaird was no naïf and understood the necessity of such things, but he disliked them nevertheless, for reasons both moral and pragmatic. Morally, such funding had a way of involving illicit and illegal activities of various sorts, and even with the best of intentions could end up twisting what it touched. Pragmatically, illegality was best avoided where possible, even in secret activities, any such connections were potential sources of trouble.

Right now, money was especially tight. Several operations had been necessary of late, all of them expensive, and all of them with bad side-effects. To many of them, unlike those involving the Seven Aces, had no independent sources of funding, meaning that his hidden budgets were strained to the breaking point.

He had to scour his various funding sources with an avaricious eye, seeking to squeeze every last dollar out of every last source, with as little moral or legal compromise or tactical risk as possible.

That alone would have been enough to put him into an unpleasant mood.

Along with the money issues, however, McLaird now had to deal with another and even more pressing problem. He was increasingly convinced that that his organization had been penetrated of late, yet again. This issue had been a running sore for years now, ever since that nasty business in Brazil two years before. He still did not know how those prisoners had disappeared from their cells so completely, and the dragging necessity of being on the watch for penetration was adding expense and difficulty to all of his operations.

He was fairly sure that they had managed to keep most of their operations quiet, but at the expense of a level of paranoia and precaution that was extreme, even for their shadowy world. It was draining, expensive, and could not be kept up indefinitely.

On top of that, there was the ongoing effort to deal with what seemed to be becoming the bogeyman of their entire organization, the matter of the mysterious man that the Seven Aces had encountered in Germany, Russian, Chicago, and the remote depths of the Brazilian jungle.

It was this last matter that had put McLaird in his office so many hours before dawn.

For two years, McLaird had worked his sources, spread around the world, for information about the mysterious man, and come up with a significant amount…all it at least two years old. The huge gift of information from their British counterparts in SG-7 had added an enormous amount of information to that total, albeit much of it difficult to credit.

Or at least, McLaird mused wearily, it would have been difficult to credit a few years before. Now, he believed it all too completely. Somewhere in the world, there was a ‘player’ who had been in the game for an impossibly long time, a man who had to be at least a century old and still active. A man who had caused an enormous amount of trouble in recent years, only to apparently vanish off the face of the Earth for the previous two years.

It was always possible, of course, that he was dead, but McLaird did not believe that for a moment. Somewhere, that man was hiding, keeping out of sight, but McLaird was sure that he was still active and busy.

Now, it appeared that they might have a hint about some of what he might have been busy doing.

MORE LATER.