The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

We need to take our leave of Conners and Lake for a moment, in order to take note of some events that either are, or will eventually be, relevant to our tale.

Our first such diversion takes us well to the south and east of Harrystown. In fact, our attention must now turn to the home town and birth place of Nathan Conners, the small farming and market community of Grandfield, Illinois.

Our attention must go outside the community proper, to a small farmhouse and associated land on the outskirts of the city to the east. Here we find a farm, nestled in the shadow of the hill locally called Devers Bluff. On the south-facing side of the hill, sheltered form the cold north wind that at times howled through the region in winter, we find a modest two-story farmhouse.

This farmhouse is the property of the Cameron family, owned by a direct descendent of one of the men who actually founded the city of Grandfield.'

In the warm morning sunlight, there are a dozen men on the roof of the farmhouse, including the owner, the forty-five year old Ezekial Cameron. The reason for their presence is a necessary piece of repair work, one that had been delayed for several days by rain.

(The same weather front, by the by, that was just then dropping a light rain on Nathan Conners and his men in far-away Harrystown.)

The damage to be repaired was straightforward enough: the brick chimney that served the main fireplace and cooking stove in the farmhouse was broken, shattered bits of brick still to be seen on the ground around the farmhouse. At first glance, an observer might have reasonably thought that the damage was the result of a lightning strike. This sort of thing certainly did happen from time to time in that part of the continent.

The truth was odder. The night that the chimney had been broken had been calm and quiet, with clear skies and bright stars. In the late pre-dawn hours, a sudden crackling sound, that had indeed sounded rather like a nearby lightning strike, had suddenly shattered the peace and quiet, and shook the entire farmhouse at the same time. The sound had awakened all the inhabitants, as well as several neighbors as it echoed up and down the side of the hill. There had been no light, however.

That had been odd enough, but the morning light had revealed that even though there had been no storm and no visible sign of lightning, something powerful had shattered part of the old chimney structure, cracking bricks as easily as a lightning bolt might have done.

This had been a mystery, but whatever the cause, the chimney had to be repaired, a project that would be both expensive and time-consuming. It had to be delayed by several days, because even if there had been no rain or storms the night of the event, a wet line of rain and storms had moved into the Grandfield area later that same day, and the rain had prevented repairs for several days. Only now was it dry enough to get to work.

What does any of this have to do with our tale? That may not be revealed for some time yet, but one thing might be noted, even if nobody was in a position to make the connection: the 'event' that damaged the chimney had occurred within a split-second of the explosion in the warehouse in Harrystown.

Now we must turn our attention forward in time by a few days, and across the world to Sweden. Here we find a small boat drifting at sea, a few kilometers off the shore, just out of sight of land, in fact. Beside it is a slightly larger fast craft, a cabin cruiser type. If we look closely, we see that a young man is being taken, by force, from the smaller boat to the larger, dragged almost literally kicking and screaming by two large and strong grown men. The youth, who is no older than his early teens, is nearly hysterical, the men moving him calm, cool, and professionally indifferent to his cries or struggles.

The reason for his hysteria is little mystery, if look to the smaller boat and note that there are several dead bodies lying here and there aboard it, all shot through the head or torso, bullets penetrating vital organs with sufficient accuracy to show that they were fired by skilled professionals.

After the teenager is transferred, the men cross back to the smaller boat, and repeat the process with a younger girl, perhaps a year or two younger than the first. Where the boy was hysterical, the girl is silent, in shock and numb.

With the two survivors aboard the larger boat, it is the work of a few minutes to bring the smaller craft out into deeper water and scuttle it. The craft sinks, taking its dead crew and passengers with it into the briny deep, as the larger craft sails away with its two young prisoners.

For now, we can take our leave of this grim scene, though in due time we will learn more of the reason why it is important to our narrative. In the meantime, we now turn our attention across the world to the Eternal City of Rome. There, in that ancient metropolis, we find Karl Jurgensen.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Karl Jurgensen was in Rome in pursuit of both his own personal agendas, and those of his collective master, the Unity. In this case, they were almost precisely the same anyway, Jurgensen was in Rome seeking information.

Even by the later months of 1927, Jurgensen was still busily at work trying to recover the damage from the fiasco two years before. Jurgensen and the Unity had sought the location of the ancient Atlantean Refuge in South America for decades, and had finally tracked it down, only to encounter the Seven Aces and to suffer an immense setback. They had lost a large number of their best operatives and personnel, as well as substantial amounts of resources and money. Long-maintained networks of contacts and sources had been disrupted and were yet to be entirely restored.

To make it worse, Jurgensen had actually found the Refuge, and its fabled Library. He had actually touched the books and scrolls, he had held artifacts in his hands that were precious beyond belief. A vast storehouse of knowledge, a source of power almost too great to be imagined, it had literally been at his fingertips...and it was gone. Thanks to the American team that had interfered, the work of decades had been destroyed almost overnight.

Jurgensen had finally managed to get agents back to the site, only to find it now drowned under a new lake, and all trace of the Refuge gone. He was not sure how this had happened, he was fairly confident that it was not the work of the Americans, but he did not know who had the resources achieve it.

The Unity, however, had its theories, of which it had so far shared only hints with Jurgensen. Still, it was fairly clear that that immeasurably precious prize had been taken away and was now beyond recovery. Every time Jurgensen pondered that, every time he let himself dwell on what had been within his grasp and taken away, new fury permeated his being. Sometimes, the anger and hate was so great that it left him almost literally trembling in fury.

For just that reason, Jurgensen rarely allowed himself to dwell for long on the matter. He had over a century of practice at discipline and self-control to draw upon, the training of the Unity, and a native strength of will that was not inconsiderable as well. All this let Jurgensen put the thoughts of what had been taken from him out of his mind...mostly. Still, the anger and hate did not leave, they were merely suppressed, waiting to be released at the appropriate time. Jurgensen was rather looking forward to that time.

In the meantime, he was busy, busy as he had not been since the height of the Great War. The vast networks of power and influence that he maintained for the Unity had to be restored. New resources had to be developed, new personnel recruited. Always there was the quest for more information about the men who had so disrupted their plans two years before, as well.

On that front, Jurgensen had made some progress, but not nearly enough to satisfy him, or to be able to take any meaningful measures...yet. The Americans had done a remarkable job of burying all leads and connections that might lead to the men he sought. To make matters worse, others were both seeking that same information, and working to black Jurgensen and his own organization from such knowledge.

Now matters had grown more complicated yet. Jurgensen had become aware that he was being shadowed, or rather, sought, by a new set of operatives in late 1927. Ever since arriving in Italy, both his professional sense and his espersense had been warning him of trouble. There was mysterious people in Italy, and especially Rome, seeking information too close to his affairs for comfort, and his own counter-investigations indicated that they were either Americans, or people in some way connected to the Americans.

He was still managing to elude their grasp, but he was all too aware of their presence, and it was making his own work in Rome that much harder, forcing him to take extra precautions, to move more slowly and less directly.

What Jurgensen sought in Rome was information, as so often the case, that concerned more remnants and relics of the Antediluvian Age. Such remnants were very few and very far between. Of those, most were of only aesthetic or scientific interest. Jurgensen did not discount either motive, he was a scholar himself, in his own way.

His more pressing interest, however, was in those remnants that could open up access to the vast power that had been lost in the Great Cataclysm. The Unity sought this power, still striving to regain its ancient strength and power,
and Jurgensen sought out the clues to such both on behalf of the Unity and his own needs and interests as well.

This last motive was becoming more pressing for Jurgensen. Earlier that same year, as they had done so many times, the Unity had shared its vast psionic power with Jurgensen, giving him the necessary strength to slow down his own aging processes. It had worked yet again. Jurgensen was well over a century old, he had the physicality and in some ways the mentality of a man in his early fifties, a very healthy and fit man in his early fifties.

Still, it was getting harder each time. Each such effort required a greater investment of psychic energy from the Unity to achieve the same level of result, and Jurgensen knew that this trend was only going to continue. The matter was not yet critical, but Jurgensen could foresee that day coming, though it might yet be decades away.

Though he might be over a century old, Jurgensen was by no means tired of living. He continued to seek that source of power that would let him bypass the limitations of his current state. The knowledge lost with the Refuge Library had been an important part of his plan in that regard, but he had by no means given up on the goal, and now he sought a new path forward.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen had a 'lead' on an ancient Atlantean text, which he rather suspected, but did not know for sure, would take the form of a collection of metal plates with writing on them. In the shadow-world in which Jurgensen moved, it was rumored that this codex had been in the possession of a Scottish collector up until 1834, then passed into the hands of a French millionaire after the Scot had been forced to liquidate his properties to pay gambling debts. As best Jurgensen had been able to determine, from there it had passed through various hands in France, England, and finally had crossed the Atlantic to America. From there the trail went cold.

Jurgensen was prepared to try and follow that trial, but he wanted to know if there was any reason to bother. In the aftermath of the disaster of two years before, resources were stretched. He had no desire to spend time and energy seeking out an item that might not exist and might be worthless if it did.

But supposedly, in the Vatican libraries was a copy of several pages from the codex. Jurgensen reasoned that if he could gain access to that, it might enable him to evaluate whether it was worth trying to seek out the codex.

The problem was twofold: the Vatican libraries were mostly open to reputable scholars, especially if they could show some connection to the Church. This Jurgensen might have been able to manufacture, but not all of the libraries in the Vatican were so open. Some were much more restricted, and some were not even publically admitted to exist. These were far, far harder to access, and the attempt to do so by above-board means would have drawn a great deal more attention to Jurgensen than he cared to incur.

On the other hand, gaining illicit access to such documents required getting past various protective measures, and the security procedures at the Vatican were far more careful and effective than most civilians ever suspected.

It was this that had brought Jurgensen to Rome, and under those conditions it was the worst of times for new American attention to his movements.

Now let us turn our attention back to Harrystown. We find Nathan Conners sitting in his hotel room, or rather the hotel room he was renting under his 'cover' identity, in the late evening, pondering the situation and going over what they had learned about the frustratingly complex situation.

After a few dry days, Harrystown was once again beset by rain. The earlier mild days had given way to chilly weather, and the slow but steady rain that was now soaking the city was cold enough to the skin. There was no thunder or lightning, little in the way of wind, just a slow, steady autumnal rain driving people off the streets and into the shelter of warm houses and cheerful restaurants and taverns and movie theatres on a Saturday night.

Nathan Conners was lying on his back on his made bed, still fully dressed, his mind going back and forth over the strange situation in Harrystown. The rain could be heard beating against the window panes, enough through the drawn curtains. One part of Conners was glad to be indoors in his warm hotel room, another part was frustrated at being trapped there, with no way to get to grips with his problems.

It was not that he had no leads. Indeed, if anything the problem was just the opposite, he had a surfeit of clues and leads. The problem was that none of them seemed to connect together in any coherent way, and circumstances worked to keep him from taking the steps necessary to unsnarl the tangle.

They had never regained their trace on LeMoine. He had vanished into that hole in the hillside west of the city, and never re-emerged. No sign or trace of the man had appeared in the two weeks since. Even the car he had used to go up to the old cemetery in the hills had proven to be a rental vehicle, rented under a pseudonym.

They had learned that the caves in the bluffs and hills west of the city were every bit as complicated and dangerous as Conners had feared. There were known to be caves and tunnels up and down the bluffs, some of which connected to each other in odd places. There were many ways in and out, and apparently nobody knew all of them.

Indeed, there were local city and county ordinances in place against entering most of them, having been put in place some twenty years before when some local boys had gotten trapped and killed while in the caves. The city police and county sheriff enforced the ordinances fairly strongly, which meant that there were not too many people who knew much about the interior of the caves anymore. Some of the older people might have been better informed, but their knowledge would have been decades old and there was no good way to ask very much about it without being too obvious.


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Discreet inquiries about the caves had revealed a few things, but most of them were in the way of local legends and folklore. The older people they had managed to talk to had been more helpful there, as might be expected. The problem was that the local stories were not all that revealing.

There were the usual stories about criminals using the caves as hideouts, of course, and the occasional rumors to the effect that one might find hidden loot or long-concealed bodies in the right places in the caves. Conners tended to discount those stories, they were almost universal.

One local legend did speak of an underground river flowing through the tunnels and caves under the bluffs, eventually to join the above-ground river well upstream of the city. The accounts of just which caves might give access to this supposed underground river were always vague, though, and never consistent. Still, Howard Lake had noted that it was not an impossible idea, such an underground channel might just exist in the lower levels of the caves, though the fact that it could did not mean that it necessarily did.

Inquiries, discreetly made, about the obelisk-object atop the largest bluff to the west of the city had been equally confusing, if slightly more disturbing. As Conners had expected, the locals were indeed aware of the strange object outside their city, but again, it proved to be mostly the older people who had anything to say about it.

Once again, it was mostly a matter of old stories and legends. One thing everybody agreed upon was that the obelisk, and the former house beside it, had been old, most of them put the origin of both around 1800. The stories they had heard and read (in some books of local folklore they had managed to find in some local libraries) mostly told various versions of a story about a Revolutionary War soldier who had come home to marry a local girl and build the house atop the ridge, and later erected the monolith beside it. Except, of course, for those versions of the story that had it that the obelisk long predated the house, crediting it to the local Iroquois or Algonquians, or to some even older source predating them, or perhaps even to the ‘little people’ of the New York hills.

The location of the house, well away from any good farmland, was explained in the stories by either some mysterious treasure trove brought back from the war, an inheritance through either the soldier or his wife, or simply ascribed to a mysterious unknown source of money, depending on the version. By some accounts the soldier made his money by piracy on the river or waylaying travelers or other unsavory activities.

All versions agreed that there was something odd and wrong about the soldier or his wife or both.

Here again the details varied. One version had it that the former soldier went mad and murdered his wife in her sleep. Another version had it that he caught her with a lover and killed both. Still another version had it that the wife committed suicide after the soldier committed adultery, or she mistakenly thought he had done in still another story, while yet another had it that a lover of husband or wife killed both out of jealousy or greed. Various elaborate tales spoke of bloodshed and curses and ghosts subsequent to the event as well.

The one that disturbed Conners the most, though, was one that he gave slightly more credibility, because of the source. The source was an old diary, which one of his men had discovered in the basement of a library in a nearby town, while supposedly looking through old books and records for information on other subjects. (The senior Seven Aces had long since become past masters at coming up with creative supposed reasons to do odd things.)

Conners credited the diary slightly more than the other sources, living and print, because it was old enough that the writer was only a generation removed from the events. The diary had been written by a local farmer, city council member, and amateur historian over the course of the years from his graduation from college in 1840 to his death in 1911. Most of it, of course, had little to do with anything of interest to Conners and his men, though doubtless it would have been a fascinating read for a local historian or folklorist.

In some of the entries in the earlier portions, however, the diarist made mention of events related to him by his parents and others of the generation immediately previous, regarding the obelisk and the house, which still stood at the time of which the diarist wrote. His account was straightforward, concise, and strange.

According to him, the account he had heard was that the house had indeed been built by a returning Revolutionary soldier, and he had lived there with his wife, a local girl he had married upon his return after the War ended. His account, however, had it that the obelisk had been erected about ten years later, and that up until that time the soldier and his wife had been respected and accepted local residents. The diarist had it that the source of the money for the couple had simply been that the soldier owned a number of farms and other properties around Harrystown, inherited from his parents, and rented them out for income, and that this money had enabled him to build his house on the bluff, and in time to fund the masons to carve the strange obelisk. The reason for his choice of the remote site was that his family already owned it, and he had come back from the war slightly disturbed. He often felt a strong need to get away from everyone, and loud noises and crowds were difficult for him to tolerate.

Conners had nodded in understanding and recognition as he had read that. He knew exactly what the diarist was talking about, he had seen too many of his fellow veterans from the Great War show the same tendencies. It also added to his tendency to credit the reliability of the long-dead diarist.

Supposedly, everything had suddenly changed at about the time the obelisk went up. The diarist made no mention of Indians or other exotic sources, apparently it had been well-known at that time that the soldier erected the stone.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The diarist explained that from the accounts he had heard from his own parents, grandparents, and other elders, at the time the obelisk was put in place the behavior of the soldier and his wife suddenly changed. Who made the obelisk had been no mystery at the time the diarist wrote, he had even given the specific names of the stonemasons who had cut it and the company that had transported it up to the hilltop and put in place.

Conners and his men had double-checked that information and found it quite accurate, to the degree such checks were possible after the passage of over a century. They found the names of the stonemasons in the records of local churches and city halls, the company the diarist had mentioned was in fact still in business in New York City, it had grown into a significant construction company and was well known to road and bridge builders in New York State.

Conners had almost hoped he would find evidence that the diarist had been untrustworthy, because the account he gave of what followed the erection of the obelisk was rather disturbing and unpleasant.

According the sources the diarist quoted, once the obelisk had been put in place, both husband and wife had become reclusive, only occasionally appearing in town and when they did behaving oddly. They became remote, curt, they cut most of their ties with former friends and acquaintances and relatives. Both had apparently had a number of kin in the area, but by the accounts the diarist had heard they ceased to interact with them. Their appearances in town became fewer and fewer, and when they did appear, they tended to dress oddly, in black or gray, and to cover their eyes from the sunlight even on cloudy days. They also forbade any trespassing on their extensive hilltop property for any reason.

The stories also agreed that all of a sudden, the wife was seen to be pregnant on the few visits to town that they did make. This had apparently caused some gossip, because the couple had been married by that point for well over a decade and there had been no child. There had been some assumption that the wife might have been barren, apparently some tendency in that direction had run in her family.

The pregnancy had apparently occasioned a spate of rumors that perhaps it had been the husband who had been sterile, and his wife was now carrying the child of another man. Conners saw then the source of some of the local legends that still survived a century later.

The diarist, though, had written only a generation later and from accounts of those who knew the couple first-hand. The diarist noted that the rumors had been spread, but also that nobody had any evidence to back them up, and further added that he suspected the rumors were simply scurrilous gossip.

The reality, the diarist went on, had apparently been odd and tragic enough on its own, no additions were needed.

The diarist went on to relate that according to his elders, the baby had been born, or rather the babies plural, she had given birth to fraternal twins, a healthy boy and girl. The couple remained reclusive, and then, about two years after the children were born, finally stopped appearing in town entirely.

At first this drew little comment, they had been so reclusive already that it was not unusual for a gap of a month to go between their infrequent trips into Harrystown for supplies. When they did show up they would fill two large wagons with supplies. It was known that the former soldier sometimes hunted wild game in the area of his home as well, so long absences raised no questions until they had not appeared for nearly three months.

Winter was by now coming on, and relatives of both husband and wife were concerned, especially for the well-being of the small children. At last two men, one relative from each of the families, had determined to invade the privacy of the couple and assure themselves of their well-being, and that of the children. They left on a bright autumn morning in 1813, and though it was easily possible to get out to the house and back to town in one day, they did not return that evening, or the following day.

Their absence stirred more attention, and the following day the local sheriff and several deputies and relatives of the men involved had headed out to the remote house to ascertain what was happening.

The sheriff and the men had returned late that evening, reporting only that the couple, their children, and both the men who had gone to check on them were dead. Apparently they had refused to reveal anything more, other than to say it was of a fire. Apparently, according to the men who had returned, somehow the couple, their children, and the relatives had all been caught and burned to death in a fire that consumed the house.

This was widely disbelieved, according to the diarist, but the sheriff and his men and their accompanying group had stuck to the story. It seemed to make little sense, of course, but no more was forthcoming.

Except, however, that the diarist recorded that the sheriff had revealed some of the actual truth to his grandfather, who had been an old friend. The diarist recorded that his grandfather, and he himself as well had been present, when the old man who had been the sheriff when he was younger told them what he and his party had actually found when they arrived at the house.

By that version, the sheriff and his men had arrived in late morning, to find the house quiet and little sign of activity. They had found the boot prints of the previous visitors, leading to the house, but none leading away. They had knocked, received no answer, other than a scent of what might be rotting meat. They had found the front door unlocked, entered, and discovered a scene out of a nightmare.

According to the sheriff, there had been six bodies hanging on nooses from rafters in the main room of the hold house: the soldier, his wife, their children, and the two men who had gone to check on their status. All six bodies had been nude, mangled and damaged as if animals had torn at the corpses, and some had been hanging there long enough that the bodies were decaying.

The diarist recorded that the old man had refused to say what else his group had encountered at the old house, other than that it was worse than what he had revealed. He also admitted that they had torched the house themselves before they left, because of what they had found, and that they had made up the story about the deaths in the fire because it was better that everyone believe that than that the truth be known.

According to the diarist, the old former sheriff would say no more than he that night, under the influence of a certain amount of whiskey, and perhaps a sense of time passing. The diarist also recorded that the old man had passed away less than a week later, and that all the other men in the party that had gone out there were already dead by that time.

By the time the sheriff told his partial story, the diarist noted, it was 1859, and forty-six years had passed since the events. There was little else to be told, all the witnesses were dead. The diarist did mention that even by that time, wild stories had grown up that contradicted each other, and he also noted two other oddities.

He mentioned that he had himself been out to the site out of curiosity, describing it very much as Conners and Lake had seen it, and he noted that the trees did not grow there. For some reason, the clearing around the site already remained grassy and open, and nobody knew why. The markings on the obelisk had fascinated the diarist, who had been something of an amateur historian, and he had visited the site several times to study them.

The other oddity the diarist noted was that people who hunted or otherwise passed through that area at night, or less often during the day, sometimes reported hearing something, a strange high distant cry that did not sound like either a human or an animal. The diarist also noted that he himself had heard this sound on three different occasions over the years, including on one of his visits to the site of the obelisk. He noted that the cry had been unnerving enough that he had ceased his visits, and indeed made a point of avoiding that area entirely afterward, though he admitted that he had no idea what made the sound and had seen nothing unusual.

That was the last entry in the diary that touched upon the matter of the house or the obelisk, and it was dated to 1859. There was a great deal more of the diary, over half of it was written after 1859, but nothing in it touched on the subject at hand. Naturally, much of it immediately after that last entry was primarily concerned with the Civil War that broke out a year later, then after that matters of his personal life, or public life in Harrystown in the late Nineteenth Century. Apparently he had lost interest in the site in later life, or else was reluctant to return out of nervousness about the strange sounds. Either way, the diary was silent on the matter of the obelisk after 1859.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Conners lay on the bed, pondering what he had read in that diary. He had reread the account three times, and he wanted rather badly to disbelieve it, if only because of the horrific nature of the story. The mental image of the two-year-old children hanging from nooses had haunted his nightmares since he read the diary. The problem was that everything in the account 'felt' real, his instinct was that the diarist had been telling the truth as far as he knew it. Those aspects of the story that they had been able to check out, checked out.

Of course the diarist had been reporting a story from another person, it was thus a report at third hand by the time it reached Conners. Even if the diarist had been completely on the level and accurate, it was possible that the old sheriff had been lying, or misremembering after many years.

It was possible...but Conners strongly doubted it.

Assuming the account was true, Conners mused, where did that leave him, and the Seven Aces? It was apparent that there was some kind of connection between that obelisk on the hill top and the current strange events in Harrystown, but what was the connection?

The horrible events the diarist described had apparently occurred in 1813. The obelisk, apparently, had been erected a few years before that. How was it that events at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century were somehow entangled with international espionage operatives over a century later? What did the additional modern carvings, dating back apparently to 1903, mean?

Conners remembered watching LeMoine study the obelisk. The strange markings on the obelisk had clearly meant something to the Frenchman.

Conners thought again about the caves in that bluff, that Phillipe LeMoine had entered. They were still watching the entrance he had gone into, but no sign of him had been seen. He had clearly not been dressed for caving. It was possible that he had died in there, though Conners tended to doubt it.

The more he pondered the matter, the more Conners came to the reluctant conclusion that they had go cave exploring. That promised to be difficult, dangerous, and time consuming, but he could see no other way to regain a lead on LeMoine. If he was dead, they needed to ascertain that. If he was alive, he was their only line on the meaning of the obelisk.

At the same time, they had to keep up the work on the other goings on in Harrystown. Already Conners could see that he was going to have to call in more men, straining the already thinly-spread resources of the Seven Aces further. It was going to take time and effort to create viable 'covers', and it was going to cost money to expand the operation.

McLaird was not going to like it, but there was no way around it, Conners mused. He was increasingly sure that this whole business was more important than it initially appeared. Part of this was simple logic, partly also it was a sense, a creepy feeling on the back of his neck, he could almost feel that there was something much bigger in this than it seemed.

Even as Conners was lying awake in his warm hotel room on that chilly autumn evening, a small boat was unloading a few passengers in the rainy darkness a few kilometers to the west of Harrystown.

The boat had transported Henry McCord, his 'associate' who went by the name of 'James Davis" and a dozen picked men to a spot on the south side of the river, where they had pulled ashore and were searching through the weedy and rain-soaked undergrowth and riverside scrub for something. The area was thick with overgrowth, and the level ground was a narrow strip of land between the edge of the river and the face of a steep bluff, a strip of land no more than thirty meters wide at that location.

They found that something in short order, after all, Davis and a few of the other men aboard knew precisely where to look. That something was a cave entrance, where once a small stream had flowed out to feed the river. Now the only trace of the stream was a shallow eroded depression in the ground, thickly overgrown and all but impossible to find in the rainy darkness.

When they did find the cave entrance, they were about to go inside, when suddenly a sharp, unmistakable sound rang out, the sound of a gunshot!

The men from the boat dropped for cover immediately, all had been in combat situations before. Firearms appeared among the party, but there was no indication of further fire. Then another shot rang out, followed by a third, and the men from the boat realized that someone near at hand was exchanging fire with someone else near at hand, but they were not under attack themselves, at least not at that moment.

Still, proceeding under the circumstances was out of the question, they retreated to the boat and made a quick exit, even as the occasional shot was still between exchanged between the mysterious combatants on the hillside above the cave entrance.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The following day, the confusion in Harrystown grew considerably, when the news broke that three dead bodies had been found in the wooded hills to the west of the city, and their deaths had been anything but natural causes.

Unless, of course, one considered death by gunshot to be an instance of 'natural causes'.

The first of the corpses had been found by a local small farmer who made a habit of letting his pigs enter the woods in the hills to the west of town to feed on the abundant acorns from the oak trees. They had run across the first body, which lay face-down in the leaf-bed of the autumn woods, two bullets lodged in his chest, one in his heart.

That had of course brought out the police, who had discovered two more dead bodies in the same area, all dead of gunshots. The circumstances and position of the bodies suggested that they had been shot in the course of a fire fight, rather than a simple murder. None of the bodies were locals, or recognized by any of the police involved, and though investigation was ongoing, nothing had as yet been uncovered about the identities of the men.

Or at least, not by the local or New York State authorities. The Seven Aces were another matter entirely.

The information that went to the police also went, by circuitous channels, to Army Intelligence, and from thence to McLaird and his organization and down to the Seven Aces. Some of it also came direct, from contacts that had been made between Conners and his men and some locals. Once they had photographs of the victims, they were able to put names to the faces of two of the three. The names might not have been their real names, but at least the Aces recognized the two men as operatives in the employ of the Weimar government in Germany.

The other man was a mystery, but it was clear from the accounts of where the bodies were found that all three had apparently been together when they were killed. The bullets were standard .45 caliber shells. Other shells and spent cartridges were found in the area by searchers, mostly of standard size and typical of any number of common American weapons.

As the search had expanded, something else had been found: blood stains on the ground and on a tree, some modest distance from the site of the bodies, and footprints in the rain-soft ground. The prints were of booted feet, and from the look of one of the sets of tracks, the police thought that one of them might have been a woman, though that was far from certain just from that evidence. Adding to the 'female' theory, though, was a torn piece of blood-soaked clothing that might have come from an outfit worn by a woman, and appeared to be made out of silk.

Though the police tried hard to keep as much under wraps as they could, rumors flew, on top of the strange events that had already been happening in Harrystown. Conners was impressed at how well they had managed to keep the most grisly and salacious details of the entire business off the national papers, but this was made the easier by the recent devastating tornado incident in Saint Louis, among other things.

The incident did make it easier for Conners to convince McLaird to put more resources in the Harrystown operation, however, including committing more men to the matter. They were also expediting the manufacture of cover identities and other details for the men, as much as that could be hurried.

While Conners and his men were involved in learning the details of the latest twists in the matter, two the people involved in that twist were engaged in a conference in a hotel room across the city. One was a redheaded man, the other a woman with blonde hair, and they were not married, though they were sharing a single hotel room under the false identity of a married couple.

If we were to peer into the hotel room, we would see that the redheaded man was checking the dressing on his 'wife', a bandage over a grazing bullet wound on her torso. If we listened in on their conversation, it would sound very little like the casual exchange of a typical married couple.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Let us now take a closer look at the pair in the hotel room, and listen in on their conversation to see if it sheds any light on our own interests.

The redheaded man finished checking the dressing that covered the grazing bullet
wound on his female partner. The bullet had barely touched her, but if either woman
or bullet had been only a fraction out of place, it would have penetrated her lung.
The blonde had good reason to be grateful to be alive, on balance.

She sounded less grateful than frustrated, however, as she put her blouse back on.

“Did you find out anything?” the blonde asked.

“Just a moment,” the redheaded man said. He got up from the bed where both
had been sitting, walked over to a radio sitting near the closed window curtains,
and turned it one, adjusting the dials until he found a suitable music broadcast.
The sound of the music would help cover their conversation.

“Not a lot,” the redhead, who was going by the name of ‘Shaw’, and whose true
name was Michael Ashton Kelly, said quietly as he returned to the bed to sit
beside his associate. “The town is in an uproar, as you would expect after everything
that’s happened, but nobody seems to actually know much. The local police are
keeping things very close to the vest still.”

“I can’t blame them for that,” the blonde woman said. She was going by the name
of ‘Mrs. Shaw’, though her real name was Helen Samms. “But it makes hell with
our business.”

She fell silent for a moment, and Kelly saw her suppress a wince as she made too
fast a motion, paining her wound. She visibly forced herself to sit as still as she
could, and asked, “Do you think the men who shot at us were with McCord?”

Kelly had given that very question considerable thought, over the previous forty-
eight hours, and he answered with reasonable confidence.

“No,” Kelly said. “We were staked out waiting for McCord to show up, and the
shots came at us from above us on the hill, and to our left. McCord was down
on the river’s edge, and he and his men took off as soon as the shooting started, I
think we was just as surprised as we were.”

“What about the shot that got me? It came from the right!”

“I know,” Kelly replied. “Here’s what I think happened, Helen. I think
somebody else was out there waiting for McCord, just like we were. Don’t ask me
who or why, but they were on the hill for the same reason we were, is my guess.
That would be the group to our right.

“But somebody else was there as well. They were the ones who opened fire, the
ones above us and to our left. And as I think about it, I don’t think they were shooting
at us, I think they were shooting at the other group.”

“Why do you say that?” Samms asked.

“I can’t be sure, but the first shots sounded to me like they were fired from a rifle,
and the sound seemed to be coming from behind us. If whoever it was had been
firing at us with a rifle, I think they’d have gotten us, I don’t believe the first
shooter was very far from where we were hidden.

“So I think they were shooting at whoever it was to our right, and that they fired
back, and we were caught in the cross-fire. My guess, and that’s all it is, is that
probably neither group even knew you and I were there. We started to clear the
area, but in doing so we passed through the fire zone in the confusion, and you
got clipped.”

“No kidding,” Samms replied. “Grazed me and ruined my silk blouse, too. I had
to leave a piece of it behind, I hope that doesn’t cause a problem.”

“I wish you could have been sensibly dressed,” Kelly said. “Too bad we had to
go straight from a formal affair to a stake out.”

“We’re going to have to call Mr. Bingham,” Kelly added after a moment. “This is
too far out of hand now, we’re going to have to find out how he wants to proceed.”

“So much for our performance pay,” Samms said sourly.

“Needs must,” Kelly replied. “He may want to pull us off entirely and let this case
go, I don’t know how much the B-G is being paid for it. He and Mr. Jones might
decide this just isn’t worth it.”

“I’d still like to know who nicked me,” Samms said. “Rumor has it they’ve found
three bodies out there in the hills, but that’s all I’ve been able to get listening to the
girls around town. I managed to talk to the wife of one of the local deputies, but
she knew better than to talk about anything.”

“Good for her,” Kelly said, with the approval of a former police officer in his voice.
“Bad for us right now, but definitely what she should do.”

“So when do we call Mr. Jones?”

“This afternoon,” Kelly said. “I’ll make the call and see what they want us to do.
Until then, there’s not much for us to do, really.”

“Do you think McCord has left town?”

“No,” Kelly said after a moment. “I don’t read him as a man who scares easily.”

“Me either,” Samms said after a moment. “He’ll up the ante. I wonder what his
next move will, be, and when he’ll make it?”


With that, we must leave Kelly and Samms for a moment, but we will return to them and their business in due time.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

A few days passed, and Conners gathered more men in from other Seven Aces operations, straining the resources of the Aces and Army Intelligence to produce semi-plausible 'covers' for them to use upon arrival in Harrystown. In the meantime, Conners and his inner circle made plans to explore the caves in the bluffs and hills to the west of Harrystown.

The exploration had to be done quietly, which was made the harder because the police were still trying to find the perpetrators of the killings in those very hills a few days before, on top of all the other strangeness that had been happening. This requirement in fact required that the exploration be done at night, which naturally made the already tricky prospect even more risky and difficult. Still, their plans went forward.

The tunnels proved to be easily as complicated and difficult as Conners had feared. Some of the tunnels were too narrow for a grown man to pass through, others were clogged with mud or debris washed in from the surface. The tunnels interconnected intricately, but gradually they began to put together a crude map of the tunnels.

They had found the trail of LeMoine in the tunnels, he had not been properly dressed for spelunking, and his shoes had left distinct prints in the wet mud of the passages. The trail came and went, because the mud was not always present and LeMoine had left little trial when the cave floor was hard rock. Still, they found the trail again, and also found other signs of his passage, such as a dropped hand-sized magnetic compass that he had apparently been trying to use to find his way through the passages.

What they did not find was LeMoine himself. He had apparently managed to find a different way out of the tunnels than the one through which he entered, or else he was still somewhere in the passages, and the Aces knew that if the latter was the case, he was likely to be dead.

In the meantime, Conners was surprised to hear from his superior that McLaird was coming to Harrystown personally. Conners, knowing how inhumanly busy McLaird usually was, was surprised that his chief would come into the field with no warning, and even more surprised to learn that he would be accompanied by a civilian to the meeting.

This was very unusual, because of the deep secrecy that the Seven Aces habitually worked within. There was no official connection between them and the United States Government, indeed, the Seven Aces did not officially even exist, and the large majority of even the high-ranking officials of the Federal Government had no idea that that the organization existed. It was known to a few highly-placed and carefully cleared officers of Army Intelligence, and Conners suspected that the President knew of their existence, though he could not be certain about even that.

Thus, for McLaird to bring a civilian outsider to meet the head of a group that did not officially exist was unusual, to say the least.

The meeting actually occurred in a train car, disguised to look from the outside like an ordinary private passenger car, but which was actually a sort of 'mobile headquarters' that McLaird used when it was necessary for him to go into the field, it could be attached to almost any train and look utterly normal to the untrained observer.

Even an experienced eye would have to look closely to see the small signs and traces that revealed the presence of such things as armor plate and concealed gun ports, heavy locks on the doorways and hidden observation points. The car had its own telephone system and switchboard that could be connected to the phone lines with a minimum of effort by the assigned staff, as well as a powerful two-way radio set with a concealed retractable antenna. There was also a small but well-equipped arsenal of small arms and rifles hidden within.

The 'special' car came to Harrystown attached to an otherwise-ordinary passenger train, and it was no great problem for Conners to slip in to the car shortly before dawn on a cool morning in late October to meet his chief. With McLaird in the office of the special car was a non-descript man of medium height and medium build, clad in an expensive but otherwise ordinary suit, wearing slightly old-fashioned spectacles.

Most people would have looked no further than that. Conners also noted the alert stance, the very slight bulge where a small concealed holster rested under his suit jacket, the callouses on his hands, and the 'look' in his eyes that was difficult to define but hard for an experienced operative to miss.

To his surprise, McLaird introduced him to the stranger by his real name, and then introduced the stranger to Conners as one Terrance Evelyn Bingham.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Conners was surprised by this level of openness, because the operations and even the existence of the Seven Aces organization was very, very clandestine. McLaird, however, explained over the course of the next few minutes that this secrecy was a moot point in the case of Terrance Bingham.

Terrance Evelyn Bingham had been, a decade before, Colonel Bingham, assigned to Army Intelligence, and he had been one of the small inner circle who had conceived of the idea of the Seven Aces in the first place, and recruited Robert McLaird to organize it and supervise it. He had himself been the officer to whom McLaird answered up until 1922, when he left the Army.
There was no reason to conceal the identities of the senior members of the Aces from Bingham, he already knew them from the beginning.

Bingham, McLaird explained, had gone on to found a private investigative and security organization, one partaking somewhat of 'private eyes' and somewhat of the legendary Pinkertons. Though it was not spelled out, Conners suspected that this organization, the Bingham-Jones Group, was probably a 'civilian' outfit in somewhat the same sense that the Seven Aces were technically all civilians. That is, somewhere within the layers of the onion, so to speak, were entirely unofficial associations with Army Intelligence and other organizations, 'associations' entirely undocumented and deniable.

Conners was sure that the outer layer of respectable business was entirely legitimate, and even next layer in would seem innocuous if someone penetrated the outermost layer. The Seven Aces were structured similarly.

Let us look in on the conversation that followed, after McLaird had made the introductions and explained, to a minimum degree, the connections between the three men.

"My organization," Mr. Bingham explained, after a sip of the Irish whiskey
that McLaird had poured for all three men, "is self-supporting financially.
We really do take paid work, and we do it well, if I do say so myself. Less
openly, we take on matters of a more...esoteric...sort.

"Early in 1926," Mr. Bingham continued, "we were engaged by a client to
track down an...item. Apparently he is something of a collector, and he
and another collector had been bidding over this item, and the other man
managed to pull a fast one after putting in the smaller bid, and made off
with it. We were hired to track it down for him, at least, and get it back,
if possible."

Conners nodded noncommittally, sipping his own whiskey.

"This turned out to be rather harder than we expected. The 'auction', if
you want to call it that, was held in San Francisco, but our man moved
the item across the country fairly quickly, by circuitous routes, and we
only managed to get a lead on it again by indirect means.

"We had managed to identify the man who had absconded with the item,
and some of his men, or at least their usual public identities, so we tracked
them and worked out way back to our quarry that way. I won't go into
involved details, but we tracked him and the stolen item back to Harrystown.
We knew he had concealed it somewhere in this town, along with some
other collected items, but we still did not know just where."

Bingham fell silent for a moment, then continued after another sip of his
whiskey. "We had just tracked it here, and I had sent in two of my people,
when everything went insane here. The warehouse explosion, the sickness,
the grave robberies, the foreign personnel that have infested the town since
the initial upheaval, all happened just as we were moving in to get set up."

MORE LATER.