[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Let us join those members of the Aces assigned to the Chicago operation, several
hours after the sudden epiphany struck their commanding officer.

The sun had risen, not that anyone could tell through the storm clouds.
The first thick drops of rain had begun to fall just as the first rays of
dawn would have touched the tops of the highest towers of the city,
though the clouds hid any sight of that light from the ground. By the
time the Aces had gathered and events had been put into motion, loud
blasts of thunder were shaking the building, and a howling wind was
blowing through the canyons and streets of the Windy City. Up and
down the lake front, high waves were crashing against the shore.

The storm howling outside matched the mood in the basement of the
Breymont Museum, where several men stood looking in a mixture of
anger and disbelief at the hole in the ceiling of the basement, and thus
in the floor of the Main Hall itself.

“I still don’t believe this,” the curator said, shaking his head. “I have
been the curator here for over seven years, and I never knew this room
existed. Of course, I rarely had occasion to come down here, but-”

“But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” the chief of the Chicago
police detail said. “It doesn’t look as if anybody’s been in here for
years, and that door was bricked up!”

“But there were other doors,” Conners said, ‘in character’. “This is
an old coal storage room, from before the Museum was a Museum.
They were prepared for this before the exhibition even opened, they
cut a trap door into the floor of the Main Hall, and they had this old
coal room available below. So when the lights went out, which we
can now be certain was arranged somehow, they opened their door
and lowered the exhibit they wanted, and put their fake one up in
its place. Shut the trap door, and when the lights come on, it looks
like the exhibit is still in place.”

“I still can’t believe how damned perfect that fake display is,”
one of the Bureau men said. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever
seen!

“What I want to know is how they could do this and none of us
hear anything?!” one of the police officers said.

This question was bandied back and forth among the personnel of the
security detail and the Museum personnel, with no obvious answer.
About an hour later, the Aces were gathered without the others, in a
room they had carefully searched and secured for privacy, and there
Conners explained how he had realized what had happened.

“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Conners said. “They
faked up the jewels, but they also made a fake display case, a fake
pedestal, the satin material the gemstones rested on had wrinkles in
the exact same places, they made sure there were matching damned
scuff marks on the case! They must have observed the target
every day to make sure they could produce a visually perfect fake.

“They even put a layer of damned dust on top of the fake display
case, to match the others. But that’s what gave it away. When I saw it
in that extra-bright light, the dust on top of the fake display looked...
well, it looked different. It’s a different material, not real dust but some
kind of powder they used. In ordinary light it looks just like dust, but
in that bright light it was too...I don’t know, too light colored or too
uniform or something. I can’t say just what it was but it looked unlike
the dust on the other cases in that bright light.

“That caught my attention,” Conners went on, “and when I was looking
down at that trying to figure out why it looked that way, I saw that the
case was sitting out of position, just barely. I could see that it was not
lined up with the other cases on either side, but I knew that that
case had been perfectly lined up before, I inspected everything in that
Hall several times. Supposedly nobody had been allowed to touch the
cases at any time for any reason, but I could see that it had been moved.

“That was when it suddenly hit me, it all seemed to come together in a
flash. Howard, you can take comfort in the knowledge that your device
worked perfectly, it picked up the use of psychic powers. I remembered
back when they were first training us, in our introductory sessions when
they were explaining about some of the weird stuff we’d be needing to
know, the stuff the Brits in SG-7 deal with, they mentioned that you
could use those mental powers to muffle sounds.

“It hit me that if somebody had those powers, he could use them to cut
off the sound while they were making the switch. I can’t be sure,
but I’d be willing to bet my boat that that is what your machine picked
up, Howie.”

“Which explains why the machines picked up vibrations,” Brody said
slowly, as he caught up his chief’s chain of thought. “They blocked the
sound...but Howie’s vibration detector picked it up through the floor of
the building!”

“That’s how I read it,” Conners said with a nod.

“It’s still amazing,” McNee said. “They had to have their timing down
to perfect, and that fake case is a sheer work of art. This was carefully
planned and they carried the plan off smooth as silk.”

“Just how big a deal were those gems, Chief?” Lake asked.

Conners grimaced. “Well, I’ve been on the phone with Bob McLaird,
and I think he just about had a stroke when he heard what happened.
I’m told the State Department is already hip deep in trying to calm the
waters, but the details are above my pay grade.”

“Those gemstones were the royal crown jewels of a formerly sovereign
principality,” Brody said. “It’s a province in a bigger country now, but
their government still considers those gems to be a national treasure,
and having them stolen while on loan to the good old USA is going to
be a major embarrassment. They’re priceless and irreplaceable.”

“They’re not going to need to be replaced,” Conners said firmly, “since
we’re going to get them back. I don’t know how yet, but we will."


Even as Conners was rallying his personnnel to begin his countermove, and at the
same time trying to figure out what that countermove would be, another man was
contemplating the very jewels that had been removed from the Museum.

MORE LATER.