[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Four days after the abduction in Scotland, minutes before dawn, Nathan Conners and Howard Lake were making their way through a wooded area west of the city of Harrystown. It was a chilly morning, winter was approaching quickly and there was a hint of rain in the early morning wind. Conners, who had spent much of his life in New York State, albeit in New York City, had a suspicion that there was snow waiting in the near future.

Conners and his men had hardly had time to learn much about what was going on in Harrystown, but was already clear that it was complicated and much stranger than it had seemed at first glance. Quiet checks by Army Intelligence had revealed that the warehouse in which the explosion had occurred belonged to a man who did not actually exist. They had traced the line of ownership through several such blinds, and the probe was still ongoing, the need for secrecy slowing the process down considerably.

They still had not managed to gain direct access to the site, because they had to work in deep secret, which meant that they could not bring Federal pressure directly to bear on the local authorities or the owners of record. They had learned, though, from talking to people in Harrystown, that a few people had thought there was something odd about that warehouse even before the explosion had happened.

Nathan was not sure just how much to credit these stories, the more so because they were hearing them after the event, when it was easy to retroactively have noticed something. Still, the whole business was odd enough that Nathan did not dare disregard the stories, either.

One story had it that people living in the cheap working-class houses near the warehouse district had, at odd times in the late hours, seen strange lights moving in the streets, lights clearly not headlights, flashlights, or lanterns. Some claimed to have heard odd sounds as well, sounds that were not quite like those of any familiar creature, but which had still seemed more like the cry of some animal than anything else.

There was a story that the ground occasionally seemed the vibrate in that area, as if some huge machinery was at work in one of the warehouses across the street. Again, this was usually reported to happen in the late night hours, especially on stormy nights.

One tale reported that a man coming home late had seen a faint light, like St. Elmo’s Fire, flickering around the particular warehouse in question, but that the light seemed to cast no shadows.

More prosaically, and in some ways more interestingly, to Nathan, was a report about gunshots being heard in the hours just before dawn near that warehouse, about a year before the explosion. This particular story, anyway, was confirmed, the Aces had seen the police report associated with the incident. Apparently the shots had been heard by quite a few people, though the police were never able to find any sign of who fired them or why.

The local sheriff had made an announcement three days before, to the effect that contemptible vandals had been digging in the local cemeteries and disturbing the contents. He had vowed to deal harshly with whoever was responsible, and he played down how extensive the damage had been. Nathan had learned, over the previous four days, that more than a dozen graves had been violated, ranging from an elaborate mausoleum to the corner area of the town cemetery where the county buried indigents and paupers.

This aspect of the entire matter was particularly disturbing to Nathan, not merely because of the obvious but also because it was so very out of the usual ways of secret work. All aspects of espionage tended to involve illegal activities, but that did not mean that there were no rules at all. Quite a few unwritten but generally observed rules tended to apply, rules about how one went about the work and rules about how one interacted with other players.

If it had been just one grave, Nathan might have assumed that someone had concealed something in it, perhaps inadvertently. Hiding things in graves was not a normal practice, both because it was pragmatically difficult and dangerous, and because people were people. Most agents were no more eager to engage in such things than anyone else, a grave would rarely be a first choice for a drop or a hiding place.

Had it been two, or three graves, Nathan might have still thought that, perhaps someone was looking for something specific but did not know which precise grave it had been hidden within.

But twelve? Twelve graves at least had been violated, and not only opened, but corpses removed, coffins torn apart, Nathan knew that the public statements from the sheriff had only touched on how strange the crimes had been.

In some cases, the corpses had been found dismembered near the opened graves. In other cases, the bodies were simply gone, taken away for purposes unknown. In one particularly disturbing instance, the body was gone except for the head, which had been found impaled on a metal rod near the opened grave.

The sheriff had definitely left that detail out of his public statements. Nathan had learned of it because the Aces had managed to get a back channel through the State Police.

Nothing about that added up. It was not just out of normal procedures, it was insane from a professional point of view. The last thing any agent, of any sort, wanted to do was draw untoward attention. Tearing up the cemeteries, desecrating the corpses, was certain to increase official attention on the whole area, once the full truth leaked there would be newspapermen swarming all over the area as well. The damaged cemeteries would make a far more sensational and popular story than the explosion in the warehouse, which was superficially a mundane sort of event.

Nor could it be kept quiet indefinitely, Nathan was already impressed at how well the police had managed to keep things contained so far, but soon such a sensational story would have to break. Too many people already knew.

Nathan had considered, and considered again, the possibility that whatever was going on with the cemeteries was not connected to the explosion in the warehouse, or the presence of so many foreign agents. But Occam’s Razor sliced that idea apart. It was far too large a coincidence, the explosion, the agents, and sudden strange ‘flu’ outbreak, and the cemetery desecrations, all happening at once. It defied all probability that it could be coincidental.

MORE LATER.