The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The incendiary charges that Jurgensen had triggered were unusual, the product of
a German military research laboratory during the Great War. During the final
stages of the War, just before the Armistice had taken effect, several men working
for Jurgensen and the Unity had stolen the work from the laboratory, destroying
the research center and killing the chemists and pyrotechnic experts to cover the
theft. Concealing the truth of all this had not been difficult in the chaotic last days
of the Great War. The theft had been valuable, because the incendiary chemicals
were extremely effective, producing enormous temperatures while remaining very
safe until the specific triggering conditions were met.

Now triggered, the charges turned the former safehouse into a blazing nightmare
of flame and heat, instantly reducing the entire building to a roaring inferno. Yet
there was little explosive effect beyond a small immediate blast wave, most of
the immediate destruction was confined to the house itself.

Of course, the heat quickly began to affect the surrounding area. An updraft rose
from the blazing pyre, drawing in a wind from all sides in the formerly still air.
Heat from the blaze ignited much of the brush and trees near the house, adding to
the confusion and the heat and the fear amid attacker and defender.

It was now that a miscalculation on the part of Jurgensen worked to the benefit of
the Seven Aces. He and his men from the house had expected the effects from the
powerful incendiary charges. They had warned the men at the boathouse, but they
had not conveyed the magnitude of the effect. Caught by surprise by the flash and
heat, they were distracted, and a few of the men actually panicked. Ready to deal
with combat, they had been startled enough by the flash, the heat, and then by the
sight of the fire spreading to the surroundings that they jumped into the water to
escape their panicky fear of the flames.

The Aces had been caught just as much or more by surprise, but they recovered
faster than many of the men Jurgensen was employing. McLaird had chosen his
personnel well, and Conners and Adams had trained them well. Seeing the men
jump from the runabout, Joneson recognized a opening and ordered an advance,
and in the confusion that followed, they managed to get aboard the runabout, and
took only two non-fatal casualties in doing so.

The opportunity was short, because the other side were by no means cowardly,
nor were the amateurs. Only a few men panicked, and briefly, in reaction to the
illusion that fire was breaking out all around them. This opportunity was just
enough for the Aces to break through the defenses around the boats, however.

Once aboard the runabout, the Aces who boarded the craft had the opportunity to
turn the flank against the men defending the boathouse and the cabin cruiser. The
men in the boathouse were forced to turn and defend from behind, opening up the
defenses and allowing more of the Aces to press forward. Jurgensen and his men
advanced as well, but were slowed by the men of Team Three coming in from their
own rear, and now by the men of Team One, escaping from the deathtrapped house.

In the minutes that followed, a swirl of chaotic fighting left both sides unsure of
their targets, unsure who was firing at them, and unable to easily coordinate their
actions. The spreading flames from the house added to the confusion, both sides
were acutely aware that to be pressed in the wrong direction could mean a choice
of being shot to death or being burned to death.

Trying to make their way toward the boats, Jurgensen and his inner circle were in
a quandary, because now they faced the risk of the boats being destroyed. This was
serious on several levels, but Jurgensen and his innermost circle did have another
option open to them, though it was an option they were very reluctant to use.

“Damn them,” Jurgensen muttered to himself in German, barely
above a whisper, “damn them all to Hell!”

The boats were only some few tens of meters away, but now
they could hear fighting coming from that direction, and see the
occasional muzzle flash. The enemy had somehow managed to
reach the boats, which was just sort of a complete disaster.

“Dekter,” Jurgensen asked his lieutenant, his voice held under
rigid control, “if it becomes necessary to use the Last Resort,
can we manage to sink the cabin cruiser in the process?”

“Normally,” Dekter whispered back, his accented German
showing very little sign of the stress he had to be feeling, “to do
that would be simple. Now, however, it can not be guaranteed.
There are incendiaries aboard, but we have no ready way to
activate them. None of our weapons have sufficient range or
power to reliably sink the cruiser, either.”

“If they find what we have aboard it,” Jurgensen said slowly,
thinking aloud, “the damage could be considerable. Yet if we
do not escape this situation, it hardly matters.”

Dekter, who was one of the very few human beings who
was in the inner circle of his confidences, replied, “Sir, I do not
believe we can reliably prevent them from find what we were
hiding. It is not a sure thing, but we can not rely on
stopping them. The situation has slipped beyond our control.”

Jurgensen closed his eyes, fighting down a further wave of raw,
consuming rage. With the practiced experience of many long
decades, he fought down the rage, contained it, bound it. The
rage would only cloud his thinking, interfere with sound and
reasoned judgement, and he knew it.

“We can not let the Unity know what we have actually been in
pursuit of,” Jurgensen said. “Nor can we permit our mysterious
foes to interrogate anyone we leave behind, do you not agree,
Dekter?”

“Quite so,” Dekter replied. If the man felt any doubts or any
qualms about what he and his employer were discussing, he
showed not the slightest trace of this. “We must also decide
on our course immediately, if we are to use the Last Resort,
we should move no closer to the boats. We are as close as we
are going to be to the ideal position to use that route.”

Jurgensen paused, and thought. He thought deeply, and hard,
and with no more consideration for sentiment or conscience
than a machine. Coldly rational considerations went through
his mind, as he revolved the probabilities and chances in his
experienced and well-trained brain. He considered various
options, considered what would be revealed to who by his
choices, considered what various actors were likely to do in
response to his possible decisions.

“Summon my mentalists,” he ordered Dekter. “We will use the
Last Resort to evade our enemies, and we will make use of the
finality protocol to keep our foes from learning anything useful
from those we must leave behind.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Moments later, several men gathered around Jurgensen. They
were of various nationalities, though there were more Germans
among them than any other sort. They all shared some things
in common with Jurgensen. All worked for the Unity in one
way or another, all were also involved in the more private plans
of Jurgensen, those plans he hoped to hide from the Unity. All
were gifted with what a later age would call ‘psionic’ ability of
one sort or another, of varying strengths and specialties.

Also, and importantly, none of them were any more sentimental
or conscience-bound than was Jurgensen himself.

Their similarity of mind made the process of linking their wills
together, of forming a ‘gestalt’, as the Unity had taught them,
all the easier. It took only moments to form the fusion of wills,
moments more to prepare their action, and to actually do what
they had decided to do took no more than a split second.


The effects of this action were swiftly perceived by the Seven Aces. Indeed, it was
all but impossible to avoid such perception, so obvious was the effect. The Seven
Aces knew immediately what had happened, their opponents never knew at all. The
battle came to a sudden, unnerving halt, as all the combatants on one side fell dead.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The sudden cessation of violence was so abrupt, so total, that it left the Seven Aces
momentarily stunned. Literally over the course of less than one second, a pitched
battle came to a total stop. For a few moments the Aces continued to fire, then the
strange, eerie silence took the place of the sound of combat. Only the sound of the
roaring flames and the wind they generated could be heard.

“What the Hell?!” Conners gasped.

Just an instant before, he had been taking aim at an enemy fighter,
drawing a bead to open fire. Before he could pull the trigger,
however, that man suddenly, simply keeled over, lying on the
ground with that odd, hard-to-define stillness that hinted that he
was never going to move again.

All around him, a disturbing silence had fallen. For a moment
he was sure it must be some any trick, but it quickly became
apparent that this was quite real. All the men they had been in
the process of fighting were now dead. On the boats, in the
boathouse, all over the unburned part of the property, none of
their foes remained alive. Not one.

Conners knew they had very little time to investigate, the fires
were spreading and had to be dealt with, it would have been all
too easy to be trapped in the narrow valley by the flames. Now
that the boats were secure, it was simple to take them out of the
dock and out onto the safety of the Lake, and a radio message to
their fellows put the process of fighting the fire into effect.

The Aces on site raced to remove the bodies, and otherwise to
do what they could to make the site of the battle look more like
a ‘normal’ firefighting situation. They also sought to learn
what they could as fast as they could before the fires destroyed
the entire site. Over the course of a few hours, they managed to
learn some things, and to remove all the bodies they could find,
but then the firefighters had to be allowed to deal with the fire.

As he stood on the deck of the cabin cruiser, out on the water, a
sense of loss and futility filled Conners. He stood there watching
the firefighters at work, and wondered what story they could use
to hide the strange truth.

Conners was blissfully unaware that even as he watched the effort to contain the
fire, and pondered the events of the night, he was himself subject to observation.

Jurgensen was in pain. The drugs that reduced the pain were now
wearing off, and his still far-from-healed body had taken additional
damage during the escape from the safehouse. He was exhausted,
drained both physically and mentally from pain, stress, and the
use of his mental abilities. He was angry, almost shaking with
suppressed fury, and now he was watching his plans literally in
burning ruin.

Standing on the shore some distance from the burning ruins,
careful to remain under the cover of the foliage, Jurgensen directed
a pair of binoculars toward the boats floating on Lake Michigan.

Jurgensen and his inner circle had made their escape, after killing
the rest of his men to keep their secrets, through what Jurgensen
thought of as his ‘Last Resort’. Running from a hidden point on
the shore was a ‘tunnel’, or tube, of waterproof material. It was
a short distance under the surface, disguised to look like part of
the lake bottom, and no more than a meter wide. Using it, they
had crawled, or been dragged in the case of the still-wounded
Jurgensen, to an exit point some distance down the shore.

It had been sheer, unadulterated agony for the wounded
Jurgensen to be pulled along through the passage...but still, it had
worked. They had made their way out, at the cost of losing their
safehouse, its facilities, much valuable information and money,
the valuable contents of the cabin cruiser, the deaths of many of
his best soldiers and operatives, and the wreckage of complex
long-term plans, subtle and delicate plans that had been unfolding
within other plans for many years.

All was not lost, but the scale and cost of this setback was quite
shocking. Now Jurgensen could only make his further escape,
and try to salvage something from it all. Still, he was determined
to take a look at the people who had inflicted so much damage
so quickly and so unexpectedly.

He looked at his captured boats, and saw several unfamiliar men,
but when the binoculars fell on one particular man, standing on
the deck of his cabin cruiser, he felt his blood seem to turn to ice!

He recognized the man instantly. He had seen him before. He
had seen this man in Petrograd. He had seen him in passing in
Europe in 1918. Above all else, he had seen him, dimly, with
no clarity, in psychic visions and premonitions going back to his
early adulthood. It was the man who had haunted his nightmares
and preyed on his waking thoughts for many long decades, the
man whom he had long sensed, long perceived, represented the
possibility of his utter undoing.

The binoculars dropped to the ground from suddenly nerveless
fingers, as Jurgensen fought a choking rush of hate and fear.

The strangeness of the day was not yet over for the Seven Aces. They had won a
battle against a dangerous enemy about whom they knew little, but the manner of
their victory was almost more disturbing than reassuring.

When they searched the boats, they found that the runabout carried more in the
way of weapons and armor than was reasonable for a civilian vehicle. Under
the circumstances, this was hardly a surprise.

When they searched the cabin cruiser, however, they found something that left them
in disbelief. In a hidden compartment, they found the stolen crown jewels, complete
with the display case in which they had been taken!

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Events now moved very quickly. Within less than a day of the battle along the
coast of Lake Michigan, Conners was back in Chicago. Standing in a small, very
private, and very well-guarded chamber, Conners was busily engaged in a lively
discussion with his chief, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McLaird.

“Nate,” McLaird said, “if I die of my ulcers, you will not get my
job. You do know that, I assume? So if all this is part of
your plan to get my job by killing me with a heart attack or with
ulcers, it will not work!”

McLaird looked harried, and tired, Conners thought to himself.
Of course, that was little wonder, he had arrived on the train in the
early hours of the morning, having rushed to Chicago upon first
learning of the events of the previous day. Conners was rather
impressed that McLaird had managed to go from train to train
effectively enough to cover the distance so quickly, and without
drawing any undue attention.

“Sorry I couldn’t pass on any warning,” Conners said. “None of
our secure communications methods were available at that time,
and my judgement was that we had no time to waste.”

“Nate, do you have any idea how many Federal laws this
escapade broke?! To say nothing of Illinois law, the Articles,
and basic tradecraft?!!”

Conners made a half-sour, half-amused smile, as he picked up
his glass and sipped at the whiskey within.

“The Articles don’t apply,” Conners replied, “since we’re not
technically military personnel. As for the civilian law, it
was paralyzed. These people were dancing past it and we both
know that wasn’t going to change.

“So of course you decided to join in,” McLaird said tiredly.
“No, no, I know,” he added with an exhausted gesture. “You’re
right, of course, the circumstances were such that you did
what you had to do. Heaven help us both if this ever gets out
to the public in the next few years, but I know why you did it.”

Conners sipped his whiskey again, hoping it would settle his
own twisting stomach. He was not nearly as calm as he had
been pretending about the entire business.

“Of course,” Conners said, “the fact that we did get the
jewels back helps, doesn’t it.”

McLaird sighed and said, “It helps more than you can possibly
imagine, Nate. Having those stones back in our possession is
going to avert a very serious international incident, a very bad
and very expensive embarrassment for the United States. I
wish we didn’t have to conceal what you guys accomplished
here, Nate. I honestly do.”

Conners shrugged, and refilled his whiskey.

“It balances out,” he said lightly. “Nobody knows we saved the
government’s bacon on this, but at least we don’t go to jail.
Comes with the territory.”

After a sip of whiskey, Conners asked, “What about the gems?”

“Well, the owners suspect that something was up with
them,” McLaird said after a moment. “But they don’t know
that they were stolen and out of our possession for several days,
and with a little luck they never will. They’re are a few men in
the State Department who would probably be willing to let you
sleep with their virgin daughters if they knew what you’d saved
them from, but they’re in the dark too, they just know somebody
retrieved the gems and that’s all they’re going to be told.”

McLaird fell silent for a moment, and then he said, “Given that
all we knew was that something was brewing, and nothing
else...you guys have done a fantastic job.”

Conners was quiet for a moment, taking another sip of the amber
liquid as he tried to focus his thoughts. He had been able to get
very little sleep in the previous thirty-six hours, and he was still
exhausted and simultaneously wide awake from adrenaline and
nervous fear. Still, he could not simply let it go at that.

“It doesn’t add up, Bob,” Conners said.

“What part of it do you mean?” McLaird asked dryly. “I still
don’t understand the ‘why’ of any of this!”

“Me either,” Conners said. “We obviously interrupted it all in
the middle of something, whatever it was. But I don’t think we
even know that basics of it. The gems...it just doesn’t add up,
Bob. They went to too much trouble, put too much effort and
care into the operation. Fake gems, a fake display case, perfect
timing, ‘witching’ the sounds, murder, arson, illegal weaponry,
they had a plan with dozens of moving parts and made it come
off without the slightest hitch, or nearly so. They took some big
risks doing it, a lot of work...way more than it could ever be
worth by anything they could reasonably do with those jewels.”

McLaird was silent for a moment. Something in his face told
Conners that his chief had been having similar thoughts.

“They could have sold the gems for a fair sum, in some places,”
McLaird nodded. “But I agree, anybody with the skill and the
resources to pull off all this could make that money and
more far more easily in other ways. So it probably was never
about the money, as such.

“But they could really, seriously have embarrassed the United
States Government with this, if they wanted to do so. So it
could have been politically motivated.”

“Maybe,” Conners said doubtfully. “But...same problem, all
the same problems, really. The same efforts, resources, and
risk could have been applied elsewhere for a lot bigger payoff.
Hell, I personally can think of half a dozen ways, using the
abilities these people displayed, to embarrass or damage the
reputation or interests of the United States in far greater ways
than this would have done.”

“At least we have the gems back,” McLaird said. “Even if we
don’t know why they were taken, or by who. That’s got to be
worth something.”

“I lost-we lost eleven men in this operation, Bob. It damned
well better have been worth something!”

Even as the conversation between Conners and McLaird was occurring, the other
ripples were spreading out from the events of the previous day.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

At approximately the same time that Conners and McLaird were engaged in their
discussion, Jurgensen and a few of his inner circle who had made their escape from
the house up the coast were preparing for their next move. It was a move rather
uncharacteristic of Jurgensen, in that it was hastily planned, improvised as much
as anything else. Still, the situation was very unusual, and Jurgensen, for his part,
was caught between a number of conflicting and inescapable imperatives.

Jurgensen was not so far from Conners and McLaird, in fact. Less than one mile,
as it happened. He had no idea where or who Conners and McLaird were, not
just then, however. The former man was very much in his mind, however. From
the moment he had laid eyes on Conners, through the binoculars, and recognized
the face of the man who had literally haunted his dreams for over a century, he
had been unable to keep his mind on anything else for very long.

Now, in the basement of a warehouse that Jurgensen owned, under yet another of
his many false legends, Jurgensen was supervising the assembly of a team of
men, arming them and supplying them for what he devoutly hoped would be a
fast, efficient strike. Jurgensen hoped for this, but his confidence was not
what it might have been. The men in his team were not the best in his service.

Too many of best men had died the day before, killed by his mysterious attackers,
or by Jurgensen himself to prevent the leakage of information. These men
were competent, but not as experienced or able as those he had lost. Further,
not all of them were as personally loyal to Jurgensen as the men he had
lost, many of them were minions of the Unity more than of Jurgensen. Thus, he
had to keep them more in the dark about his intentions and the real reasons for
what they were doing and why, making their chances of success that much lower.

What must be, must be, Jurgensen thought to himself, as he and Dekter laid
their plans and poured over what they knew of their target site.

Yet other ripples were spreading as well. To the north of Chicago, near the site
of what had formerly been the safehouse, two figures stood on a ridge line, and
watched as firefighters, State and local police, Federal agents of various sorts,
and sundry others went over the smoldering remains of the recent battle.

The two figures should not have been able to do this. They were standing inside
a secured area, normally two intruders in such an area would have been arrested,
especially standing in what should have been plain sight atop the ridge line. They
ought reasonably have been spotted by the professional law enforcement and
security men pouring over the area. So one would have expected, anyway.

Such an expectation would have been naive, because these two figures were most
unlike the vast majority of people. Both were taller than average, one was male
and one was female, the male had thick silver hair, the woman bobbed hair that was
superficially honey-brown at that point in time. Both were in fact many tens of
thousands of years older than their superficial appearance would have indicated.

The true name of the man was Zadatharion, the name of the woman was Aradel.

Though they stood in plain sight atop the ridge, they could not be seen by any of
the men below. By a masterful application of a process that would one day be
known as ‘photokinesis’, they rendered themselves invisible from that direction.
By applying their telepathic abilities, they steered anyone near at hand subtly away,
few people possessed the necessary skill, or the necessary will in its place, to be
able to resist or evade this subtle compulsion. A few of the patrolling personnel
had search dogs with them, the senses of the dogs were harder to deceive, but the
instinctive fear the two could project toward them was more than sufficient to
make up for this lack. It was not impossible that these two might have been seen
or detected, but the odds were very definitely against this outcome.

If we might be able to stand nearby and listen, we would have had difficulty in
following their conversation. Some of it was in audible words, but they spoke in
a language long forgotten over most of the Earth. Further, parts of the discussion
were made by use of telepathy, a trait for which this language was well suited.

The language was that of long-lost Atlantis.

As we have done before, we might pretend that their discussion was purely done
in verbal words, for the sake of understand that which was said. Indulging this,
let us join Zadatharion and Aradel on a warm morning in 1925.

“It was definitely not the Rhaemyi,” Aradel said. “I have
contacted all of my sources amid their leadership and I have also
communicated with their local field chiefs. They did not do this.
They did not even know this place mattered, until the battle broke
out here yesterday.”

“Nor was it any other enemy of the Unity of which I am aware,”
Zadatharion said. “Most of them appear not to even know anything
has happened here as yet, those who do show every sign of being
as puzzled as we are ourselves.”

“We ourselves only learned of this place when we felt the telepathic
impulse, the one Jurgensen uses in extreme situations. So it’s
hardly surprising that none of the others knew anything of it.” [1]

“Obviously, someone knew something,” Zadatharion noted
dryly, as he gestured down at the smoking wreckage below.
“Someone armed and able to carry out a fairly effective attack.”

“I may have a hint on who,” Aradel said. “Some of my sources
in Washington say that just after the time this all happened, there
was a flurry of activity in the Americans’ War Department.
Apparently some officers of their army’s intelligence department
were rousted out of bed in the early hours, but with no explanation
circulating even in the rumor mill.”

“Odd. Their military would not be the first group that I would
have expected to be brought in, this would have appeared at first
to be a law enforcement matter. If I am not mistaken, do not the
Americans have a law dividing such matters from their armed
forces?”

“Yes,” Aradel said with a nod. “But if my sources are accurate,
these men were awakened before the law enforcement
agencies were informed.”

“That is...very interesting, indeed,” Zadatharion said, looking
back and forth from his associate to the men below. “It would
imply that the American government did this. Which would be
almost without precedent.”

MORE LATER.


[1] This was the telepathic technique Jurgensen used to kill his own
men at the end of the battle. All of Jurgensen’s men, unknown to themselves,
had been conditioned by a combination of drugs, telepathy, and other means
to be especially vulnerable to a certain type of mental blow. It would kill at
greater distance and with far greater certainty than with a typical subject. He
had used a gestalt to project his blow at the end of the battle at the safehouse.

Aradel and Zadatharion did know about this technique, and had sensed it in
use at the edge of the sensory range the day before.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

"How much do your sources know about any of those involved?"
Zadatharion asked his associate. "My contacts in Washington
are limited right now, I have been focused on Europe since the
Great War."

"Less than I would like," Aradel replied. "But they are seeking
more information now. Most of my sources are connected
either to the Americans' State Department, or else to parts of their
military other than those where this may have been rooted. We
still do not strictly know that whatever roused those men
yesterday was connected to this."

"It would be a peculiar coincidence if not," Zadatharion said.

"I should know more before the day is over," Aradel commented,
as they watched a piece of heavy equipment being used to pull
some of the rubble aside. Even as they watched, fresh flames
broke out when new air rushed in to the hot rubble that had been
beneath the removed piece. Firefighters rushed in to suppress this
latest outbreak, the latest of many such.

Not very long after the time that Zadatharion and Aradel were watching the steady
firefighting and recovery operation at the safehouse, Conners and McLaird were
standing in the Main Hall of the Breymont Museum, looking at the restored jewels
in their display case. The public was still milling through the room, though there
were now more unobtrusive armed guards among them, and various members of
the Seven Aces were quietly spread through the Museum as well, in response to a
set of orders Conners had issued a few hours previous.

“So what, exactly, are you afraid of, Nate?”

“I wish I knew,” Conners replied to his chief. “It’s instinct as
much as anything. I can’t shake the feeling...well, we both
think that this whole thing doesn’t make sense as a robbery,
so I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a distraction for
something else.

“If so,” Conners went on very quietly, as both men climbed up
the stair to the overhead observation balcony, “I started to ask
myself what it could possibly be distracting us from. It seemed
to me that it almost had to be something to do with the Museum,
otherwise why bother with the whole thing in the first place?”

“But you don’t have any idea of what the distraction might have
been about?”

“Not a clue,” Conners admitted. “Obviously we can’t wait for
it forever, but it seemed to me like it might be a good idea if
we waited around for a day or three, just in case of...well, just
in case of whatever might happen.”

McLaird looked at Conners for a moment, and said, “You do
think something is going to happen, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Conners admitted after a moment of hesitation. “I do.
Like I said, it’s mostly instinct, but I expect something to happen.
I don’t know what...but something.”

“How long do your purpose to wait?” McLaird asked him.

“How long do we have?” Conners replied, trying for a light tone.

McLaird sighed and said, “Under the circumstances, I’m going to
give you as much as I can. Use your own discretion for the next
couple of weeks, anyway. Whoever did this went to this much
trouble, I have no trouble believing they may try something else.
I just wish I knew what they wanted.”

At just about the same time that Conners and McLaird were standing on the high
balcony, looking down at the restored jewels and considering what was likely
to happen next, that ‘next’ was in the process of unfolding just some few hundred
meters away, in an underground tunnel adjacent to the Breymont Museum.

The tunnel was relatively new, delved off of a pre-extent coal supply tunnel across
a street from the Museum. The older tunnel had not been used in many years, and
Jurgensen had delved a narrow, short tunnel off of it to reach the basement of the
Breymont Museum some weeks earlier, in preparation for his now-ruined initial
plan. That plan was now shattered beyond repair, but the tunnel offered another
possibility for the improvised backup plan Jurgensen had put together.

At that moment, Jurgensen was supervising the careful placement of several small
explosive devices in that tunnel, observing to make sure they were correctly wired
and placed. He was worried about this because the men doing the installing were
not his best, and not the ones he would normally have chosen for demolitions work.

Unfortunately, under the circumstances he had to make do with who, and what, he
could manage to lay hands on in a short time.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The day was passing, slowly or quickly, for the various players in the strange matter.
For Conners, the day was crawling, as and his men waited for the advent of whatever
was going to happen, if anything at all. For Jurgensen, time seemed to be racing,
as he struggled desperately to get all the moving parts of his improvised plan into
place in time to be useful. Yet the number of hours in the day was the same for both,
and the difference was mostly a matter of perception.

Shortly after the noon hour, while Conners was taking his lunch, and Jurgensen
was on the shore of Lake Michigan, unloading a hastily arranged shipment of very
illegal alcoholic beverages, Zadatharion and Aradel were arriving in the city by
car, still discussing the events of the day before and the entire strange situation.

“My sources have not learned much yet,” Aradel commented
from the passenger seat of the 1923 Duesenberg.

It was a lovely day, so they had the top down and the wind was
blowing even her short brown-dyed hair as she spoke. Almost
any observer would have seen simply a couple out for a drive,
with little reason to suspect anything of import about them other
than what met the eye.

“Only a handful of people were involved,” she continued, “and it
appears that most of them are not well-known or of particularly
high rank. One name in particular did turn up, however.”

Zadatharion guided the car into the thickening traffic as they came
closer to Chicago. Aradel mused to herself that she was going to
have to learn to drive these things soon, they were becoming too
common and necessary in some places to put it off any longer.

“There’s a man in Army Intelligence,” Aradel went on, turning
to the matter at hand. “My people have noted that he seems to
be a little unusual, but not enough so that they did more than make
a note of it. He’s just a Lieutenant Colonel, by rank...but he seems
to sometimes be seen with higher ups, more often than one might
expect for someone in his supposed position in his organization.

“Yesterday, when they rousted out those Army Intelligence men,
he seems to have been one of them. Furthermore, he was seen
since then on trains heading toward Chicago, but he was wearing
civilian clothes and apparently going out of his way to avoid any
attention to himself as a military man.”

“Worth investigating, anyway?” Zadatharion noted, as they came
to a stop at a train crossing, waiting along with many other cars
for a swift-moving passenger train to pass through. “For the
moment, though, we need to focus on trying to figure out what
the enemy was up to in the house in the first place. Nothing in
this makes any sense!”

As the train cleared the crossing, Zadatharion put the car back
into motion, heading into metropolitan Chicago.

The passenger train which had briefly delayed the two Avatars carried aboard it a
man by the name of Howard Lake. As was his wont while travelling by train,
he was deep in study, pouring over a set of papers covered in finely scrawled
equations and notations. He was just returning from a brief trip to the campus
of the University of Illinois at Urbana, Illinois.

Unlike the other members of the original members of the Seven Aces organization,
Howard Lake was not a military man. Legally speaking, Lake had been a civilian
throughout his life. That did not mean he had never seen combat, of course. Lake
had been in combat as a technical consultant in the Great War. He had been shot
at, come close to being gassed, and he had killed other men during those years. It
was, nevertheless, true that Lake had always been technically a civilian.

In terms of his training background, Lake had degrees in chemistry and electrical
engineering, with some additional mathematical education beyond that which was
required for those two major degrees. His employment since then had added an
array of additional certifications and recognitions. These ‘formal’ accolades, as
impressive as they might be in certain ways, also missed a basic part of his nature.

Howard Lake was what an earlier age would have called a ‘polymath’. Possessed
of (or possessed by, as some might see it) a powerful, driving intellect and broad
intellectual curiosity, he had over the course of his adult life studied and mastered
a number of skills beyond those of his formal training. In a previous age, all this
might have made Lake a legend, a ‘master of many things’. In the modern world
of the 1920s, with far more knowledge to master and far broader subjects to study,
it had led him to become a ‘jack of all trades’ (and a master of none, some of his
more malicious enemies might have added, with half truth and half falsehood).

In his role in the Seven Aces, Lake had found a niche that fit his personality and
unusual combination of skills almost perfectly. It brought him no fame, in fact
by its very nature it meant that his work remained utterly secret. He was not a
wealthy man, and not likely to become such in his work with Army Intelligence,
but it paid the bills well enough, and there were unique compensations as well.

One of those compensations was the people he was enabled to meet.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

One such individual was a professor at the University of Illinois campus in the city of
Urbana, Illinois. Formally a professor of history and linguistics, with a special
interest in Egypt, this particular academic had a reputation in certain circles for an
interest in some rather ‘esoteric’ aspects of history. Lake had learned of this specific
interest from some his counterparts in the British organization SG-7.

When the strange activities in Chicago had arisen, Lake had noticed something,
what appeared to be a minor side-matter. When the battle the morning before had
ended and word had come of its end, Conners had authorized Lake to make a side-
excursion, in part as a reward for his role in tracking down the enemy at the lake
side safehouse, and his work with the psychic detector machine.

The side-issue was a set of stone tablets that Lake had seen in an old display in the
Breymont Museum. Lake had noticed it early on, and it had piqued his curiosity,
but in the confusion since there had been no time to spare a thought for it, until the
day before and the break for a side-trip. A phone call from one of their mutual
acquaintances had enabled the meeting, and Lake had spent an interesting few hours
in Urbana before he had to head back to Chicago.

The subject had been a display in the Museum of items taken off of a sunken
Spanish treasure ship in the Caribbean Sea, items that had ended up in the Breymont
Museum by an obscure chain of events in the Nineteenth Century. Most of the
items had been of the sort one would expect from such as source, but there had
been a few that were...very peculiar.

Among those odder items were a set of thin stone slabs, or plaques, each of them
about a meter long, half that wide, and no more than a centimeter thick. There
were five such, each made of granite and each polished on front and back to a glass-
like smoothness on front and back and all sides.

To Lake, something about that smoothness reminded him uncomfortably of the
newer sort of tombstone.

The slabs were each extensively carved on one side, carved with what were clearly
words of some kind, in a gracefully flowing script that defied all efforts at translation,
or even recognition. Superficially the script resembled both Arabic and Hebrew,
but it also bore a certain vague resemblance by appearance to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
These were superficial, however, the script on a closer examination had proven to
be unlike any known writing.

Further, the slabs were odd in their precision. The script was cut into the
smoothly polished flat surfaces of the slabs, cut to a uniform depth of about two
millimeters. A very uniform depth, suggestive of great skill and considerable
care and patience on the part of the stone carvers.

Which led to another oddity about the slabs: there were no detectable marks
on the slabs. No marks of tools, no indications of the use of chisels, or hammers, or
even files. The carved symbols were so flawlessly smooth and even that they seemed
almost to have been a natural part of the stone.

Nothing else quite like the slabs had been found in the New World, at least as far as
Lake knew. The rock itself was a common enough form of granite, found in many
places in both North and South America, and in the Isthmus of Panama as well. The
rock was ordinary enough, but the markings and preparations of the rock were very
odd. Even the smoothness of the polish on the faces of the slabs was unlike other
artifacts of the known pre-Columbian New World civilizations. While those
cultures had shown great skill at stone work, and produced many remarkable and
even stunning artifacts and constructions of stone, nothing of which Lake had ever
heard had ever showed anything like the utter precision of those strange slabs, and
the language with which they were carved looked nothing at all like any work by
the Toltecs, or the Maya, or the Aztecs, or any of the other pre-Columbian cultures.

The slabs were one oddity from that long-lost treasure ship. Another oddity, a very
odd oddity indeed, were the coins that had been retrieved from the same container
as the slabs. Coins unlike anything used in the pre-Columbian societies, indeed
unlike anything used in either the Old World or the New World.

Apparently the ship had carried enormous quantities of the sort of thing the Spanish
treasure ships had usually carried, gold and silver in immense amounts, sundry gems,
the normal contents of such a vessel. The slabs, and the odd coins (if that was what
they were!) had been in a container on their own, as if the Spaniards had recognized
them as being unusual, different from anything else they had found.

The items with the slabs had been assumed to be coins, because they seemed more
like coins than anything else. Small squares of an alloy of gold and silver, with a
square hole in the center of each, marked with tiny examples of what looked to be
the same sort of script as was to be found on the slabs. Like the slabs, the square
items were carved with the script with an amazing precision, a precision impossible
to explain given the technology available in the pre-Columbian New World.

Each was about a centimeter on a side, close enough, with smoothly rounded corners
and each was an almost perfect square. This was strange in itself, of course.

Creating the sort of smooth, perfect coins so familiar to modern Westerners was not a
trivial matter, it required considerable knowledge of metallurgy and not small amount
of engineering knowledge. The coinage of the ancient cultures was rarely anything
close to that sort of precise work, and when it was it was not reliably so.

These coins, however, if that was what they were, appeared to be as precise and as
perfectly shaped and formed as any modern United States dime or quarter.

There had not been very many of them, perhaps twenty, but among them were a
variety of different ‘grades’, the mix of gold and silver was different. Some of
them were almost pure silver, a few were especially heavy in gold. This had been
taken as yet more evidence that they were some sort of coinage.

All this was the sort of thing guaranteed to capture the interest of Howard Lake.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The professor with whom Lake had spent a fascinating few hours was known in
academic circles as being both extremely competent in his specialties, insightful,
imaginative, and careful, and also as something of a crank. His fascination with
subjects most of his academic fellows considered to be fringe, or worse, had not
helped his reputation with those men.

Howard Lake, however, knew that certain elements of those fringe interests not
only might be valid, but were in fact quite certain. As a member of the nascent
Seven Aces organization, he had been exposed to some matters that were held
in uttermost secrecy by the governments of the United States and Great Britain,
and one of those secrets, known to only a handful of men in either, was that the
ancient myths about ‘Atlantis’ were in fact based on hard facts. Though neither
government knew a great deal about the matter, they did know that the legendary
island in the Atlantic had quite literally existed, some millennia earlier, and that
the stories associated with it had roots, albeit distorted and confused, in reality.

Lake had been shown certain artifacts, held by the United States Government in
extreme secrecy, that actually dated from those times, and some artifacts which
were believed to be of the same era held by the British. There had been all too
few examples of writing or other information, but there had been a few items, a
few things, which displayed what appeared to be a flowing, unknown script that
was almost surely a form of writing.

Lake had recognized the marks on the slabs and metal squares in the Breymont
display as being very similar to the markings from the artifacts he had seen in
his initial training and orientation. Though it had been years since he had seen
those items, he had an excellent memory, and he knew that what he had seen in
the Museum matched very closely with what he had seen in his training.

The professor in question had been one of the few men outside governmental
circles that the British personnel in SG-7 knew was aware of some of what the
intelligence services knew. This had led Lake to copy some of the script from
the slabs, and show it to the professor without telling him where it came from.

The professor had immediately become excited, and shown Lake some samples
of the same sort of script that he and his associates and colleagues had gathered
over the course of years, from widely separated sites all over the world. None
were very complete, but all were recognizably of the same sort, though some of
them showed differences in detail. They had come from the Americas, and also
from Europe, and Asia, and Africa. The latter were fewer, having been found as
Europeans explored the most remote parts of the Asia and Africa, the ones from
Europe were more extensive...relatively speaking.

The two had discussed the matter for the brief few hours Lake had available, the
discussion had been fascinating and Lake could happily have spent days in the
exchange. However, he had only a few hours, and further, he was confused and
worried by another matter. The more he thought about that aspect of the mater,
the more worried Lake became, the anxiety growing steadily as the train carried
him back toward Chicago. He could not shake the conclusion, it seemed to much.
No matter how he looked at the matter, the coincidence was simply too extreme.

The fields of grain and corn were giving way to the buildings and
structure that marked the outskirts of Chicago. Lake was looking
out the window at the changing scenes, but he was not really seeing
them. Most of his mind was turning over the complexity of the
matter of the artifacts, and the improbability of their presence.

It’s just too much, Lake thought to himself, as he watched
a last broad field of ripening corn give way to rows of newly
built houses. Atlantean artifacts...they’re beyond rare. They
are so rare that those who do have them often don’t even know
they are valuable, they think they’re fakes, or just old junk. The
people who know them for that they are...we’re just as rare. Not
one person in tens of millions would have that knowledge.

So it’s not hard to believe those slab and coins could sit there in
that Museum all these decades. Out of all the people who ever
saw them, odds are nobody had the necessary knowledge to even
recognize them for what they were. Add in that they were in a
back corner of the Museum, so a lot of people would walk right
past them anyway, and it’s even easier to believe. They’d just
read the plaque that said they were of unknown origin, and go
on. No big mystery about it.

But...

Lake looked away from the window, glancing around the car at
the dozens of travelers, all of them blissfully unaware of some
of the strange things going on in the world around them.

But...all this craziness suddenly breaks out in Chicago, centered
on jewels stolen from a Museum where what are almost certain
Atlantean artifacts are also sitting, out of the way, unnoticed...
craziness involving people who know about psychic talents, and
how they can be used...artifacts that are so rare as that...the odds
against it are so long...coincidence only goes so far. Yeah, weird,
unlikely things do happen...but that weird and unlikely...no.

The train was approaching the station, and Lake was increasingly
anxious. The more he thought about the matter, the more certain
he was that whatever was going on somehow involved the slabs
of stone in the Museum.

But what? How did they tie together? Lake had no idea of that,
but he was now certain that he needed to warn Conners of what
he suspected. Lake emerged from the train almost at a run, he
ran so fast that he lost his hat as he pressed through the crowds.

As Lake struggled to make his way to a telephone, Jurgensen was leading his own
improvised force through the tunnels into prearranged positions. His plan was not
overly complex, but he was in haste. His plan was to attack the Museum, and set
up the situation to look as if someone had been using the tunnels underneath the
Breymont Museum as a link in a smuggling chain for illegal whiskey.

If his plan worked out, the authorities would assume that the trouble about to break
out was the result of criminal-on-criminal violence that had risen out of hand. It
might not be perfect, but Jurgensen was prepared to settle for ‘good enough.’

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Howard Lake, to his frustration, had not been able to reach a telephone in time to
get his message through to Conners. Giving up on that, he had made his way to
the streets and frantically waved down a taxi. He had experienced some luck on
this, the taxi driver had proven to be efficient at getting through the traffic. Still,
it took what felt to Howard Lake like an eternity to reach the Breymont Museum.

Lake made his way into the Museum, past the guards, both the open ones and the
hidden ones who recognized him and let him pass, into the part of the Breymont
that the Aces had been using as their field headquarters, and finally he arrived at
the little room that Nathan Conners had been using as a makeshift office.

Conners was going over a map of the streets, looking for anything
that might give his intuition of trouble a harder basis. Conners
saw nothing of any particular use, and was about to go to the
blueprint of the Museum for what was at least the sixtieth time,
when a sudden sound of running steps heralded the arrival of
Howard Lake, who was sweating, breathing hard, and appeared
extremely upset.

“Chief,” he gasped, “I think I might know something, what they
might be after, or-”

Lake fell silent for a moment as he gasped for air. Conners was
just about able to get his technical officer into a chair before
Lake began gasping out what he had deduced about the artifacts
in the display in the side wing of the Museum.

Conners remembered seeing those stone slabs, without actually
paying much attention to them, during his many previous walks
through the building. As Lake explained what he believed them
to be, Conners immediately saw the chain of logic, and found
the coincidence no more plausible than Lake had done.

It was the matter of a few minutes for Conners to move some of
his men into position to cover the wing of the Museum more
tightly, and to carry out a few other instructions. He and Lake
were on their way to look at the items in question when the entire
building was suddenly rocked as if by an immense impact, and
a roar of sound filled the entire area.

A section of the floor caved in, forcing Conners and Lake to make
a jump for safety. They had just managed to get back up on their
feet when the sound of gunfire filled the air!


The roar had been the sound of explosive charges detonating, triggered by a wired
remote in the hands of Karl Jurgensen. The explosives had done their work, but
not as well as Jurgensen had hoped, his worries about the quality of the work proved
to be well-founded. Some of the charges failed to detonate, others went on in such
a way that most of their force was wasted. Still, large holes had been blown in the
floor and walls, the entire Museum was in chaos, and as his men entered and began
to open fire, at first everything went their way.

Unfortunately for Jurgensen, Conners had expected some variety of trouble,
even if he did not know exactly what form it would take. There were Aces all
over the building, in various disguises, well armed and watchful. The scale of the
attack was bigger than anything Conners had feared, but the Aces were ready for
enough trouble that they were not immediately overwhelmed.

Unfortunately for Conners and his men, the situation now worked against them in
several ways. The Museum, fortunately, had not been heavily occupied at the time
of the attack. There were relatively few people visiting the Breymont on a weekday
afternoon. Still, there were enough civilians around, many now fleeing in panic,
to make the situation like something out of a nightmare.

The one saving grace of the situation was that Jurgensen and his personnel were
not there for slaughter, just a ‘smash and grab’ raid. As the civilians now fled,
Jurgensen did not pursue them, or attempt to maximize the body count, he simply
made his way toward where he expected to find the artifacts he sought.

Jurgensen had learned much about the layout of the Museum from the women he
had ‘interviewed’ weeks before. He had every reason to think that his target was
still where she had said it would. He would have been right even a few hours
earlier, but Lake had arrived in time to warn Conners of his hunch. Conners had
taken the idea seriously enough to have his men move the slabs to a different part
of the building, so that when Jurgensen arrived at his target, he found nothing else
but an empty space, with marks on the floor showing where something had been
recently moved. Jurgensen let out a curse as he and his men followed the tracks.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Conners and his men had not had time to move the artifacts very far. That had
not even been sure if the artifacts were important, but even if they had known for
sure, such heavy items could not have been moved far in the few minutes since
Lake had arrived. Conners and his men had moved the display into one of the
storage rooms, and in the process left marks enough on the floor that to make it
easy for Jurgensen to follow. Had there been more time Conners and his men
would have removed the marks, but only minutes had passed since the arrival of
Lake. Jurgensen had arrived before they had time to take full steps.

There were four Aces in the storeroom with the artifacts when Jurgensen and six
of his own fighters broke into the room, a short, sharp firefight ensued, in an
enclosed space with no cover and at point-blank range. Jurgensen was a survivor,
along with two of his men who had been lucky. They were in the process of taking
the slabs when another group of Aces, led by Conners, arrived. Outnumbers and
outgunned, Jurgensen was forced to play one of his emergency trump cards simply
to get out. This emergency maneuver required a moment of time to execute.

In the instant of Conners entering the room, Jurgensen found himself closer to his
long-sensed nemesis than he had ever been. Conners and Jurgensen were looking
at each other, face-to-face, no more than two meters apart. In no more than half
a second, each took in the face of the other, though only Jurgensen was aware of
the eerie strangeness of the instant.

Conners saw a man of what appeared to be late middle age, with thick silver-gray
hair, blue eyes, a face lined without appearing either unusually handsome nor in
any particular way unattractive. The man could have passed anywhere, blended
easily into any crowd of the right ethnic makeup. The man was wounded, it was
clear that he was recovering from serious damage suffered in the recent past, he
walked with a cane and there were other signs of damage to his body.

It was a face Conners had seen before, in Petrograd, and in Germany.

Jurgensen saw a man he had been seeing in his nightmares, quite literally, for many
long decades. Ever since the 1840s, Jurgensen had periodically sensed that this
man would probably someday exist, that he represented some deep, existential threat
to him. Jurgensen had been haunted by the face before him since long before that
face had been born, since before the parents of that face had been born. It was a
face that Jurgensen had first seen in physical reality during the Great War, and again
in Russia in the years after the War.

The moment lasted no more than the blink of an eye. Then Jurgensen felt the raw
power of his emergency escape plan. A telepathic signal from Jurgensen to his
inner circle of psions had gone out, and they had responded. Prepared beforehand,
linked together into a potent gestalt, their abilities amplified by hours of careful
meditation and concentration, by the use of various drugs, these men struck out
with their power, guided by the mind of Jurgensen himself on the scene.

The Aces experienced this attack as a wave of agonizing pain, as if every nerve in
their bodies had suddenly been dipped in fire. Though all the Aces had some very
limited training in resisting such things, this was far too fast, to powerful, and too
subtle for their crude training to overcome, most of them went down instantly, some
blessedly unconscious, others paralyzed by the agony.

A few of the Aces, stronger-willed than most, managed to stay up on their feet, but
all of them were shaky and staggering. Conners was one of the latter group, but
even if he was awake and half-functional, aiming his weapon was more than he
could manage under the circumstances. He was aware, through a haze of pain, that
the man with the silver hair was aiming his own pistol at him, but Conners could
not focus enough, or move fast enough, to do anything about this. The only thing
he could focus enough to do was the last thing Jurgensen expected, he lunged,
moving toward his foe in a clumsy move that threw off Jurgensen. The bullet
went wild, and Jurgensen dropped his pistol in surprise as Conners fell forward.

Jurgensen had fired his last bullet, and though he had more ammunition on him it
would take moments to get it, load it, and use it. Jurgensen longed to do so, this
was the best chance he had ever had to destroy the man he had so long feared, but
already more men were arriving and the effect of the telepathic attack would last
no more than a few seconds.

Jurgensen thus found himself in a quandary, because already the local authorities
were converging on the Breymont, along with the various private security officers
and Federal personnel who were still detailed to watch over the exhibition, more
and more forces were pouring into the building. Jurgensen knew painfully that if
he paused to kill his old nightmare, he would probably not get out himself, even
if he fled right then it would be difficult.

With a snarled, hate-filled curse, Jurgensen fled, with his survivors, and with a few
of his men carrying the stone slabs from the display. The slabs were heavy, and
they slowed his escape, but he dared not, he refused, to leave them, they were too
vital to his own long-term plans. They killed several men in the process of their
own escape, and in the end a team of Aces, placed by Conners beforehand where
they could act to cover the exits, forced him to abandon two of the five slabs.

MORE LATER.