The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Three days after the attack on the Breymont Museum, Conners watched through
the window as the last of the foreign exhibits were moved onto the heavily
guarded trucks for removal. The fires set during the brief battle of a few days
before were out, the Museum was not even all that badly damaged, other than
some gaping holes in the floor. The old building had been very well-constructed,
and would certainly be repairable.

Other matters might not be so readily repaired.

“Yes, sir,” McLaird was saying into the machine, “I realize that-
you can inform General Stallings that his orders will be carried
out. I realize that this is a major situation-yes, sir.”

McLaird had been on the special telephone line for hours, as the
repercussions of the previous events spread up and down the
chains of command. Conners sympathized, McLaird was in the
midst of a nightmare of a hot situation.

The exhibition had been cancelled, the displays and the loaned
items were on their way back to their nations of origin, in
reaction to the previous outburst of ‘gang violence’. All of the
exhibits were intact, nothing was gone, which meant that the
embarrassment for the United States was relatively minor, but
only relatively minor. It was still a significant diplomatic
‘black eye’, and McLaird was in the middle of trying to deal
with the internal governmental fallout from that.

“Yes, sir,” McLaird said, his voice very tightly controlled. He
returned the handset to the phone, and for several moments he
did nothing but breathe.

Then he said, “Nate, remember when I said you won’t get my
job if I die?”

“Sure?”

“Would you be interested in a recommendation from me, as my
final official act before retiring, that you be returned to officially
active duty and given my rank and position?”

“Not a chance in Hell, sir!” Conners said with a mock-serious
salute. “I prefer my job. Easier on the blood pressure.”

McLaird sighed. “It’s not that bad, Nate. Most of the people
who really matter know what almost happened, and how
bad it would have been if it was known that we lost those gems
for a while. So this is manageable. Give me some time, and a
few favors called in, and I’ll have the bureaucratic waters calm
again. It’s really the least of our problems right now.”

“Regarding that,” Conners said, “what about my request?”

“To pursue this bastard? Pursue him where, Nate?! We
don’t even know who he is or what he wants, other than that he
apparently orchestrated the whole crown jewel theft as some
kind of cover or diversion to steal some moldy old stones off
of a treasure ship! We don’t even know why he went to so
much trouble, with his resources he ought to have been able
to steal those tablets easily at any time! According to what the
curator said, they’ve been in the Museum for decades!”

Conners shrugged. “Who knows, Bob? Maybe he only just
recently found out about them. Or maybe we still don’t even
know the right questions to ask, yet. Either way, the only
way we’re going to find out anything is to track down our
mystery man and ask him a few pointed questions.”

“You still haven’t answered my question, Nate. Where do you
propose to track him? He managed to get away clean, even if
we caught some of his men. For all the good that did us, they
keeled over dead moments after it was all over!”

“I know,” Conners said. He had poured himself a glass of very
old Glenlivet and took a slow sip. He enjoyed the warmth of
the drink, and then added, “Just like at the house up the coast.
We still don’t know how that works, but it’s damned effective
at keeping us from learning anything, which is what I’m sure
the purpose of it is.”

“How do you think he finds people willing to work for him?”

“You’re assuming they know about it,” Conners commented.
“I’m not so sure. But be that as it may, I think I know where
our mystery man is heading.”

“Do tell, Nate,” McLaird said, sitting down on the corner of
the small desk in the makeshift office.

“Brazil,” Conners replied.

“Brazil? And how exactly, out of all the world, do you reach
the conclusion that our mystery enemy is heading there?”

Conners sighed. “Informed guesswork. You saw that we were
able to make the enemy leave behind three of the slabs they
were apparently trying to make away with. My man Lake has
been going over them, with help from an associate, and he has
a theory that he can identify some of the markings. One of the
slabs had what looks suspiciously like a part of a map carved in
amid the writing, too. Those parts of it that we can make out
seem to look roughly like the coast of Brazil, and that lines up
with some of what Howard thinks the writing says.”

“Part of a map? Just part?”

After another sip of liquid confidence, Conners said, “We think
that the slabs are part of a larger whole, Bob. Probably with way
more than just five pieces originally. Kind of like a mosaic.”

“You have reason to think this other than a hunch?”

“Howard says that some of his associates, the people who study
the Atlantean leftovers and traces, have found such mosaics here
and there, with a few bits and pieces still in place. From what
I’m told, and I’m still catching up, one such was found in the
mountains of central Greece, another in Africa. Howard thinks
it’s highly likely that those slabs were pieces of another one. The
map, if that’s the right word, is just one part of a larger structure,
but it does seem to roughly match the coast of Brazil.”

McLaird let out a sigh. “This is a thin line of logic, Nate.”

“There’s more,” Conners promised him.

“I can’t wait to hear it,” McLaird said dryly. “Unfortunately, it
seems to me that if you’re right, time may be of the essence.
Whatever the enemy is trying to do, if it’s served by something
in Brazil, he’s already got three days on us.”

Indeed, even as Conners and McLaird were talking in Chicago, a ship was making
fast time, for the conditions, en route from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro.
The ship was skirting the edges of a tropical storm, but making adequate time even
for that, and in a modest cabin amid other medium-fare passengers was Jurgensen.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen was of course traveling under still another of his extensive aliases, he
maintained literally dozens of identities, at least insofar as he had convincing-
seeming papers and identifying materials to support his possession of the names
in question. Not all of these identities would have stood up to a close, deep
investigation, but they were usually sufficient to permit him to travel in secrecy.

Jurgensen preferred, when it was an option, to travel first-class or better, to make
such journeys in luxury. This was not, however, usually possible when he was
travelling incognito. More often than not, Jurgensen was required to make
use of false personae that would not be able to afford such accommodations, or
who might be able to afford them but would be expected to prefer cheaper ways.

Still, this particular voyage was in less comfort than Jurgensen was used to, even
when traveling under a legend. The ship was primarily a cargo vessel, though it
did have some low-quality passenger accommodations. It was cheap, which was
a consideration when using the particular personae he was using, and moreover
it was convenient, making for Rio de Janeiro fairly directly, and on a schedule
that would bring it to Rio de Janeiro as quickly as any vessel available. Even so,
behind his professional mask of calm, Jurgensen was in a desperate hurry, he was
resentful and anxious about every passing day.

That said, he was able to reassure himself that at least he had a good head start on
pursuit, though in truth he was not sure if there was any pursuit to worry about.
He knew that the Avatars, and the Rhaemyi, would certainly be interested if they
knew where he was going and even more so if they knew why he was going there.
However, as far as he knew his enemies on that front had no idea about that goal.

On the other hand, he was very concerned about his mysterious new foes, in
a way more so than he was of his old enemies. In part this was for very rational
reasons. They were an unknown factor, he did not know anything of substance
about them. He did not know who they worked for, who funded them, or why, he
did not know why they had interfered in his activities. He had some very serious
suspicions along those lines, based not on any hard intelligence but simply on the
fact that he had known the leader of those men in his nightmares for over a century.

Jurgensen did not know his name, but he knew his face. It was a face that he
knew so well that he could even recognize some of the facial expressions, a face
that had been in his nightmares for decades. He knew some things about that face
from his nightmares and warning visions. He knew that somehow that man was,
or had been, an officer in the United States Army. He had foreseen that much for
decades before that man had even been born.

That suggested to Jurgensen that in some way his recent reverses might be linked
to the American military or at least to their government. That was hardly hard to
believe in itself, of course. The vast resources and abilities available to the
major governments made them potential major threats, if somehow they became
aware of his affairs and activities. For many long years, however, Jurgensen had
been very adept at keeping his activities below the notice of the governments, or
in deflecting or neutralizing the occasional instance of interest.

Now, though, something basic seemed to have changed. In the course of less than
a few days Jurgensen had seen an intricate and carefully prepared operation turned
inside out, wrecked, by the action of a new group of enemies that he suspected had
a connection to the conventional authorities of America. Not only had they done
this totally by surprise, they had done so with a frightening suddenness. They
had been able to come out of seeming nowhere, and done so much damage so
fast that they had forced him to kill many of his own most loyal and capable
personnel, and come close to shattering his plans completely.

If they were agents of the American government, everything had changed. The
vast resources that could be brought to bear against the Unity, and himself, if
Washington had learned of their existence, was a frightening prospect.

Along with the rational fear that came from uncertainty, there was of course a
deeper, more bone-chilling fear in play. The fear that had haunted him over a
lifetime, the fear that came from his innate sense of danger. The fear that came
from a deep, certain sense of potential disaster. The fear that came from his
psychic certainty that one particular man had the potential, the special personal
likelihood, of bringing about his own personal destruction.

Jurgensen had now seen the face of his personal demon, on three different and
widely separated occasions, in Germany, Russia, and in America. That face
had already been associated with such setbacks as to give full credence in his
mind to the danger warning his psionic senses had been flashing for decades, a
face that now haunted him in more than a simply psychic sense.

Those few associates traveling with him were careful to give their leader a very
wide space. In his current mood, they knew Jurgensen to be dangerous.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The conversation between Conners and McLaird had continued, and now Conners
was leading his chief through the corridors of a morgue. There was a particular
corpse that Conners wished his superior to see. They arrived in the room to find
Brady Joneson waiting, along with two new Aces, all armed and ready for trouble.

“So what is so important about this body that you needed us to put
pressure on the Illinois authorities to exhume it?” McLaird asked.

The three men were standing beside a table, on which lay a body
covered by a sterile sheet.

“I told you we’ve been putting together the pieces since the whole
thing went down,” Conners explained. “One of the loose ends we
kept scratching our heads over was how these people knew it all,
how they knew so much about the layout of the Museum. Some
of the knowledge they needed to pull this off so slick was really
obscure. The little nooks and crannies of the building, the tunnels
under the place, a lot of little things that they had to know but had
no plausible way to discover.

“Somebody had to tell them, but everybody who knew was clean.
Then we heard that a young woman who worked at the Breymont
died in a fire earlier this year. She would have known the things
the thieves needed to know, and that made us curious. That’s why
we asked you guys in Washington to arrange to have her grave
opened up. It looked like the only lead.”

“Did it pay off? We had to call it some favors and jump through
some hoops to make it happen without it being noticed where the
request was really coming from.”

“It paid off, sir,” Joneson said. “We...well, brace yourself, sir.
This won’t be pretty, but you should see it for yourself.”

“Let me see her,” McLaird ordered. “I’ve seen plenty of bodies.”

“Not like thi-well, see for yourself, sir,” Joneson said.

He pulled aside the sheet, and McLaird looked down at the remains
of what had been a healthy young woman just a few months earlier.
As he did, he felt his stomach twist and for a moment he thought he
was going to be nauseous.

“That’s why I warned you not to eat anything before you came,”
he heard Conners say sympathetically.

McLaird mastered himself by an effort of will. As he had said to
Joneson, he had indeed seen many corpses in his life. He was a
combat veteran of the Great War, he had seen bodies blasted, he
had seen men mutilated, burned, scarred. He had seen men with
eyes gone, noses gone, limbs gone. McLaird had thought he was
hardened to such matters, but this was different.

The body on the table had been heavily burned before it was laid
to rest. That McLaird could have accepted without any danger
of losing his self-possession. McLaird had seen burns all too
often, on the living and the dead.

This corpse had changed over the months since it had been
buried. Not by decay, not in any normal sense. The body was
not even as decayed as one would have expected, even with the
limited amount of ‘repair’ that had been possible after the fire.

Instead, the body was mostly intact, but strangely shriveled,
as if the burned tissues had somehow contracted around the bone,
yet the tissues were strangely moist. The color of the body was
like nothing McLaird had seen on human remains. The remains
of the young woman were green, and blue, and red, and even a
dark mauve. The colors were unnatural, bright, somehow they
were just simply wrong.

The body was intact, but twisted, as if in some rictus of agony,
almost tense, for want of a better word. The face was not
quite unrecognizable, but one eye socket was empty. The other
eye was present, and the lid was open-no! There was no eyelid
over the other eye!

“What the Hell?!!”

“Good question,” Conners said grimly in answer to McLaird’s
whispered question, “and I think Hell might be just the place
where the answers are.”

McLaird swallowed hard and forced himself to look closer at
the bizarrely changed body on the table.

“There’s no way she would have been buried like that,”
McLaird said slowly. “A body looking like that would
have the authorities all over the area.”

“She didn’t look like that when they buried her,” Joneson said.
“She supposedly died in an apartment fire, we talked to
the mortuary people, the police and fire personnel who did the
investigation, we even managed to talk to some of her friends
and relatives, the body did not look that way when she was put
in the ground.

“One of the people who prepared the body has vanished since
then,” Joneson went on. “We think he was working for the
enemy. He probably helped prepare the body to look like she
had died in the fire, and the corpse changed after burial to
look like it does now.”

McLaird had noticed that the Aces had all begun to refer to the
thieves they had been dealing with as ‘the enemy’, in a tone of
voice more usually used for wartime foes or the like. Looking
at the corpse, he found that he could understand that reaction.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

"All right, Nate," McLaird said after a moment of looking at the
remains of what had been a young woman not so long before.
"Lay it out for me. What exactly do you think happened, how
does she tie in?"

Conners drew a breath, and said, "Keeping in mind that a lot of
this is speculation, Bob, I think our enemy leader was after those
mosaic tiles, and I think he was casing this place for months before
the exhibits were brought in. He needed information, and I think
he got it from this young woman.

“We talked to her roommates, and she had a new boyfriend for
a while just before the international exhibition started. He was
an older man, they said, and their descriptions sounded rather
like the man I saw in the Museum a few days ago. I got a very
good look at him, Bob, and the man they describe sounds like
the man I saw...allowing for some changes to his appearance.

"She was tortured," Joneson said. "We've examined the corpse
closely, and even with changes that happened after she was buried,
if you know what to look for it's clear. Broken bones, one eye
cut out of her face, the eyelid cut off from the other eye, that was
done before she was killed. Their confederate at the funeral home
covered that damage up before they buried her. It was pretty easy,
the body was badly burned and they did a closed-casket funeral.”

“The burn damage kept us from learning as much as we would
have,” Conners picked up from his officer. “But we know she
had broken bones, fractured ribs, sections of skin had been very
heavily...well, abraded. We can’t be sure, be we think she
had her tongue cut out before they killed her.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” McLaird said after a moment, setting
aside his revulsion at what he was hearing to focus on the key
point. “If they wanted information, why do that? They’d want
her to be able to talk!”

“I think I know,” Conners said. “But first let me add a couple
of things. All the Museum employees knew they weren’t supposed
to be talking to people about the sort of thing she knew, they had
signed an agreement about that late last year, when the plans
for the exhibition were being finalized. So we think the enemy
resorted to torture when she refused to tell him what she knew.
But I don’t think that was the only reason.

“Also,” Conners went on, “I am quite certain, now that I’ve had
time to think about, that we’ve encountered this man before. He
was our mystery man in Petrograd, the one I remembered seeing
in Germany. I didn’t make the connection immediately this time
because his appearance had changed since the last time I saw him.
It was subtle, but it was enough to throw me off in the heat of the
moment. I made the connection later, after I had time to think it
over and think back to the operation in Petrograd. It was three
years ago, after all, and a lot has happened since then.”

McLaird drew in breath, remembering the futile efforts they had
made at the time to determine the identity of their opponent in
the Petrograd operation.

“Go on,” McLaird said. “Fill me in on the rest.”

“There’s not that much left,” Conners said. “This is a picture
of the woman, before this happened.”

McLaird looked at the photographic image Conners had given
him. It showed a pretty girl, with dark hair and wear dark eyes,
wearing clothing that had been in style a few years earlier.

“That picture was made when she graduated from high school,”
Joneson said. “She was twenty-five this year.”

McLaird looked from the picture to the ruined, weirdly changed
corpse on the table. He swallowed hard. The girl in the picture
reminded him more than slightly of his own daughter, who was
currently still in school herself.

“She wasn’t quite as innocent as she looks in the picture.”

McLaird looked up at Conners. He suspected the Conners had
some idea of what had been in his mind, Conners had met his
family on a couple of occasions.

“It discovered, when we started looking, that she had used her
charms to make a little money, when she was younger. One of
her roommates knew about it, she had peddled her chassis when
she was 21 and 22, in college. On her own, mind you, just as
an occasional thing. She had no connection that we can find
to the local gangs or the flesh trade.”

“But here’s the thing, chief,” Conners went on. “We’re pretty
sure she had stopped. She was raised in a pretty religious
household, and from what we found out she was ashamed of
what she’d done, or at least afraid of it getting out.”

McLaird looked at the horribly maimed body, and said, “She’s
not the only girl ever to do that. How is it relevant to us?”

“Because her parents had no idea their daughter had done what
she’d done,” Conners said. “She kept it from them, for obvious
reasons. But, but, after her death, somebody sent her
parents some information that let them know all about it. They
know, because somebody made a point of letting them know.”

“I assume you believe that our mystery man did it,” McLaird
said. “Why? What would be the gain?”

“Nothing,” Conners replied, rather grimly. “It was a waste of
time, energy, purely pointless, very ‘unprofessional’. I think
our man was sure enough of his situation, at the time, that he
indulged himself, allowed himself a little ‘fun’. I think he was
getting his jollies just by making sure that the grieving parents
found out their baby girl was, or had been, selling herself.

"Think about it, they lost their daughter, supposedly she had
burned to death, and this guy thought it would be a laugh to let
them find out about that just then. Maybe even give her parents
a reason to fear for her soul, given their faith.”

“We already knew that he was ruthless,” Joneson commented.
“He killed his own men to keep us from being able to talk to
them, he’s killed people left and right since this started, we knew
that he tortured this woman for information. But all that at least
had some purpose to it, even if it was not a good purpose.
But this was different.”

“In the middle of planning and carrying out this whole crazy
complicated, incredible operation,” Conners said, “our man
still found a moment, went out of his way, even if it took
only a few minutes and little effort, to add to the pain of this girl’s
family. No benefit in it for his plan that we can discern, no
operational advantage in it, but he still took a moment and spent
that bit of effort anyway.

“Just for laughs,” Conners said. “That’s the sort of person we’re
dealing with here, if we’re right.”

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

McLaird looked the body on the table again. There was simply
something more than just hideous about, something more than
just normally repellent. Somehow, looking at the remains of the
young woman left McLaird almost nauseous, in a way that he
could not explain. The body looked wrong.

“What about her?” McLaird said. “Why is that body like that?
I’ve seen more than a few in my time, and I’ve never
seen a corpse change like that.”

“Howard Lake isn’t sure,” Joneson said. “He said that when
he tried to analyze a sample of her remains, the results were
just crazy, all the chemistry is wrong. He wants to bring in
some heavy-duty experts, but that’s something that can wait
for now.”

“I think there’s probably more than one reason she’s ended up
like that,” Conners said. “But the fastest way to get the truth
on that would be to ask the people who did it.”

“All right, he’s a complete bastard,” McLaird said. “Granting
that he’s a bastard. What was he doing in Chicago? What was
he trying to accomplish? Do we have any idea at all?”

“We can only speculate, beyond that he wanted those mosaic
tiles,” Conners said. “Which is why I want your permission to
pursue him to Brazil. This is the crux of it, Bob. That’s what
we think he wanted with the ‘tiles’. I told you there’s a map,
or what we think is part of a map, on the tiles we have. Lake
has extrapolated from it and from his notes. He had sketched
copies of the writing and markings on all the slabs, and from
that he has calculated where we think our man is going.

“We think he needed that information to find something, and we
think our best bet to catch up with him and find out what the
Hell this has all been about is to chase him down. If we can catch
him before he gets there, so much the better.”

“Brazil,” McLaird said softly. “It’s a big place. How closely
do you think you know his destination?”

Brady Joneson pulled out a roll of paper and spread it out on one
of the small work tables of the morgue. It was a map, and a set
of colored markings on it designated areas of uncertainty.

“If Howard has his figures right, and if all those markings on all
of the slabs mean what he thinks they mean, and if he copied the
markings on the slabs that the enemy now has accurately, then
we’ve got the enemy’s destination narrowed down to an region
just about four miles across, right here.”

Joneson put his finger on a circle of red.

“Four miles across,” McLaird said, looking at the map and the
region Joneson was indicating. “Four miles across, in the middle
of the Amazon jungle. That areas hasn’t even been completely
explored yet, at least not by anybody but the local Indians. Do
you have any idea how big an area four miles of dense jungle is?”

“If we can catch up to him before he gets there, we can let him
direct us to the right spot,” Conners said. “If we can catch up to
him enough, we can follow him to it if we can’t catch him. But
every hour we delay is an hour he gets further away from us and
that much closer to whatever is down there that he wants.”

“You’ll be operating without official sanction,” McLaird warned
them. “We don’t dare tell the Brazilians what we’re doing, even
if we were sure which faction down there we should be talking
to about it. If you get caught...well, you know what happens if
you get caught.”

“This sort of thing is what you recruited us to do, Bob,” Connors
said. “What was it you said to me, let’s see...’careful diplomacy
or knives in the dark’?”

“True enough,” McLaird admitted.

“On top of that,” Conners went on, “if this bastard went to all the
trouble of all this, he had to have some strong motive for trying
to find whatever it is those tiles point to, and I have a very strong
personal suspicion that whatever he’s looking for, it’s not in our
interest for him to get it.”

McLaird looked back at the corpse on the table, frozen in its odd,
undecaying, rictus of apparent agony.

“What do you have in mind doing when you catch up to them?”
McLaird asked. “Or do you know?”

“We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Conners said. “It’ll
depend on what we find when the time comes. Like you told
me back in April when you sent us to Chicago, the uncertain is
what the Aces handle. This is what you set us up to do, Bob.”

McLaird looked at the corpse again, and considered what had
happened in Chicago, and thought. Part of his mind was aware
that his ulcers were acting up, but most of his mind was on the
process of assessing risks, considering contingencies. He was
being asked to authorize illegal action, of course, but that was
the least of what he considering.

In the end, his decision came down to one thing. Like Conners,
McLaird could not avoid the conclusion that no matter what it
was that their mysterious enemy was seeking, it was a very safe
assumption that his finding it would be a negative. A negative
for the Aces, for the United States Government, probably for
anyone, anywhere, who fell into the category of ‘decent sane
human being’. He could not look at the remains of that young
woman and not sense the truth of that somewhere within himself.

“Go,” McLaird ordered. “Go...and do what you have to do.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Conners replied. “Let’s get started, Brady.”

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

While the Seven Aces make their preparations to pursue Jurgensen to Brazil, and as
their quarry makes a run for that southern land, this might be an opportune moment
to enlighten ourselves as to what exactly has been going on. It seems probable that
there are those of us who are just as confused as Conners and Jurgensen (and even
Zadatharion and Aradel and the others) as to occurred in Chicago in summer 1925.

The events that so confused Conners, McLaird, Jurgensen, Zadatharion, and all the
others were the result of nested plots, wheels within wheels, turned by many hands.

Jurgensen, as Conners had correctly surmised, was primarily interested in the stone
slabs in the old Breymont Museum display. That was his primary physical goal in
the operation. The slabs had rested in a small dusty display in the Breymont for
decades before Jurgensen learned of their existence. Nobody in the Museum or in
the visitors who saw them had any idea of their significance, they were just odd.

Jurgensen had a world-wide network of people who worked for him, some without
any idea of who they reported to, some knowing some of the truth. This network
was run by Jurgensen mostly through proxies, through various degrees of separation,
often acting through layers of ‘cut outs’. While this served to efficiently conceal
his interest and involvement, it also introduced inevitable delays and inefficiencies
in the passage of information.

By the time someone saw the slabs in the old display who recognized something in
them worth reporting, they had been on display for decades. The man who spotted
the display did not know anything of significance himself. He simply knew people
who would pay good money for information about certain sorts of interesting things,
and he had a knack for recognizing what they would find interesting. The slabs and
the square metal items with them fit into that category, and he mentioned them in
his next report to the man who paid him. That report, however, came on a regular
schedule and was well over two months in coming.

(This individual was on the very outer edges of the network, after all.)

The man he reported to was interested enough to go to the Breymont Museum and
take a look, but he was also not extremely ‘in the know’. He did recognize that it
was something worth telling his own employer about, but his visit to the Museum
came weeks after he heard the report, and it was another month or more before
he passed on the information. This process continued on up the line as the data
passed through various cut-outs, proxies, and employees. By the time the report
reached Jurgensen himself, it had been over three years since the first recognition.

Even after the information reached Jurgensen himself, it was some time before that
extremely busy man found time to examine it. When he read the report, he became
excited, because he had the necessary knowledge to recognize that it might be.

Jurgensen traveled to Chicago, incognito, and finally saw the displayed items.
The moment he laid eyes on them, he came close to fainting from shock, because
he knew exactly what he was seeing, and it was the sort of thing for which he
was always obsessively searching. The Unity had taught Jurgensen to read the old
script of ancient Atlantis long since, and through the glass case Jurgensen was able
to read some of the writing on the objects. Not all of it, by any means, the script
was too small, some of it in shadow, some covered in dust or hidden by the folds
of the cloth on which the items rested. He could read enough of it, however, to
know that he had to have those slabs.

This goal was both extremely simple, and also extraordinarily complicated at the
same time. It would have been the veriest trivia to purchase the display from the
Breymont Museum owners, or to steal it. He knew he could steal it right then
and there if he wished, he had the powers and the skills to make such a thing easy.

Yet he dared not do either. Indeed, he dared not even linger in the Breymont
Museum, after only a few minutes of apparently casual interest, he forced himself
to move on to other exhibits, and then to eventually leave the Museum, behaving
like any other casual visitor. With the practice and professionalism of decades of
experience, Jurgensen easily carried off this deception, even as his excitement
almost threatened to overcome him. He was putting together his plans even as he
walked out the door of the Museum, plans to deceive both enemies and allies.

Lake had told Conners that he thought the ‘slabs’ in question were parts of a sort
of mosaic, and Lake had been correct. One of the common forms of expression
in the Antediluvian had been this sort of mosaic work. Huge walls were at times
totally covered in intricately carved, polished slabs of thin stone, usually granite
or basalt, but it was no unknown for other, softer types of stone was used. This
had been both an art form and a practical technique of communication. Some of
the mosaics were purely decorative, examples of artistry the equal of anything
in any other culture, combining delicate stonework and visual techniques more
commonly seen in painting or drawing in other cultures.

Other mosaics were information, and were used for a variety of purposes. They
were a common sight in the Atlantean-derived cities of the Antediluvian Age.

Of course, by 1925 the Antediluvian Age was lost in the distant mists of ancient
prehistory. Only a tiny handful of people, a small percentage of the human race,
was aware that Atlantis was more than a myth, or that the legends of older, lost
world-wide civilizations were more than just myth in 1925. Only a tiny, sparse
handful of artifacts and ruins remained from that long-lost Age in 1925, as well.

Where once vast cities had stood on every coast, and in places deep inland, now
little was left. Where once the intricate mosaics had existed in the millions, now
only a handful endured. Of the few that remained in 1925, fewer still had been
discovered by either Jurgensen and his allies, or most of the other members of the
tiny handful of people who even knew what such things had ever been. Of the
few that were known, none were complete and none were undamaged.

Jurgensen had instantly recognized the slabs as components of an Atlantean (or at
least Atlantean-derived) wall-mosaic. Further, he had been able to read just enough
of what they said to realize that they referred to the hidden Refuge that he had long
sought, and that he knew had once existed somewhere in the vast jungles of the
Amazon Basin. It was the most significant clue that he had come across in decades.

The realization that this incredible lead had lain in plain, public view for so long, all
unsuspected by anyone, left Jurgensen amazed and shaking his head in metaphorical
wonder. More important now, though, was how to get access to it without somehow
upsetting his delicately balanced schemes and plans. He had to gain access, he had
to learn what the slabs could tell him, but he had to do so in a way that left both his
enemies, of all their various sorts, and his multiplex master, the Unity, partly in the
dark with regard to his motivations.

Jurgensen knew that the Unity would want the slabs as well, it too had been seeking
that long-lost Refuge since well before the Great War. They shared most of their
reasons for wanting to find that hidden Refuge and its once-legendary Library, but
Jurgensen had additional reasons of his own to seek it.

The Unity, Jurgensen suspected, would not have found these latter reasons pleasing.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The reason was simple.

Recall that Jurgensen had for many years been quietly, very quietly, working
on a plan of his own amid his various machinations on behalf of the Unity. This
'plan within the plans' required extreme secrecy and was extraordinarily high-risk.
Jurgensen, however, was highly motivated.

Jurgensen had multiple reasons for his machinations, but the most important of the
reasons was survival. Jurgensen, let us recall, was born in the year 1788, and had
been extending his natural lifespan by the use of psychic power. [1]

His native psychic strength was sufficient, in conjunction with a very high level of
personal skill, to extend his life moderately. To survive until 1925, Jurgensen had
drawn upon the immense psychic potential of the Unity. This was, indeed, one of
the primary incentives the Unity had offered to obtain his loyalty. The Unity had
been as good as its collective/individual word, the power it had provided had been
fully sufficient to enable Jurgensen to survive well into his second century in good
physical and mental condition. In most respects, Jurgensen might as well have
been in his middle fifties. Only a very careful examination might have found
a few oddities that showed hints of his actual age.

That said, however, Jurgensen was unsatisfied. One reason was that he was deeply
dependent upon the continued support of the Unity to maintain his longevity. If
the Unity were to cease supplying its supporting energies, Jurgensen would resume
a normal or near-normal rate of aging. Though it would still take many decades to
reach the end of his life, since the effect would be a resumption of aging, no
more, this was still a terrible prospect from the point of view of Jurgensen. [2]

Jurgensen wanted a backup plan, a fallback position. If something were to induce
the Unity to remove its support, Jurgensen wanted a way to keep on ‘keeping on’.
Naturally, Jurgensen had no desire for the Unity to know that he was seeking
this backup option. Jurgensen was reasonably sure the Unity would not like the
idea, if only because such an option would leave Jurgensen less easily controllable.

Though that would have been sufficient motive, Jurgensen had another, even more
fundamental reason to seek another ‘longevity option’. As Jurgensen grew older,
as the years accumulated, he found that the ‘cost’ of the extension rose. More and
more psychic power was required to produce a diminishing return. The trend was
slow, the efficacy of the process was declining only slowly, but if the decline was
slow, it was also steady. Jurgensen could foresee a time when it would be a greater
cost to the Unity to keep him alive than he was worth to the collective. Jurgensen
also knew that the Unity was utterly, absolutely pragmatic about such things, only
as long as he was useful would Jurgensen receive the support the Unity could give.

Beyond that, even if the Unity was willing to keep supporting him without limit, a
time would come when not even the vast power of the Unity could continue to
stave off the inevitable. Having already lived well over a century, Jurgensen was
by no means prepared to calmly accept such possibilities.

Jurgensen had explored various possibilities, but few of them seemed to hold much
promise...with a single exception.

Jurgensen had learned of the existence, in the Antediluvian Age, of a type of mental
power separate from, albeit related to, the psychic abilities with which he was so
very familiar. The Unity had never spoken to him about such a thing, but over the
course of decades Jurgensen had discovered hints about it, and he even suspected
to the point of personal certainty that the Unity had servants able to use that very
power, in a separate ‘hierarchy’ of which he was intended to remain quite unaware.

Jurgensen still knew very little about that power, but the hints and indications that
he had assembled over the decades, from a variety of sources, led him to the strong
suspicion that it had been usable, by the Atlanteans, as a source of power able to
extend lifespans. This was sufficient to motivate Jurgensen as little else could.

MORE LATER.


[1] Specifically the psionic Power of Biopsionics and the skill of Life
Extension.

[2] The end of the life-extension process would not result in Jurgensen
suddenly aging to his ‘true’ biological age. It would merely be the resumption
of a process that had largely been suspended.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Further, and still very important to Jurgensen even if it was far less critical than the
issue of his own longevity, there was the matter of the personal power he suspected
might be obtained through knowledge of the mysterious secrets of the Antediluvians.
Jurgensen, as we noted above, was always aware that his continued well-being
depended almost entirely on the good will of the Unity. Furthermore, Jurgensen
had no illusions that this good will was in turn absolutely dependent on the desires
and interests of the Unity, there was nothing of sentiment, kindness, affection or
loyalty in the psychology of the Unity. Indeed, those gentler motivations played
only the smallest of roles in the mind of Karl Jurgensen, after so many decades of
the life he had led and service to the master he obeyed.

In light of that, Jurgensen was always seeking methods to improve his own personal
position, without revealing to the Unity that he was doing so, or how he was about it.
Indeed, it was the latter that was his primary consideration, because he knew that the
Unity would expect, indeed that it would take for granted, that Jurgensen was in
all ways motivated by self-interest. The Unity preferred its servants to be
so motivated, because these were motivations that it found easily comprehensible.

The Unity would expect Jurgensen to seek ‘security’, backup plans, etc. Jurgensen,
for his part, knew that success lay in deceiving the Unity about the true nature
of his various plans. For that reason, he maintained ‘cover’ schemes, intrigues that
were meant to be perceived by the Unity, in the hope that the Unity would thus think
that it perceived everything and miss the hidden plot behind the pretended plots.

For decades, Jurgensen and the Unity had sought clues to the supposed ancient city
or facility that they had tracked down to the vast Amazon Basin. Jurgensen, for his
own part, wanted to find the place just as much as the Unity, but has also hoped to
find it before the Unity knew that he had actually found it, so that he would be
able to study its secrets and control exactly what was passed on to his mater, without
the Unity being aware of the deception. This would necessarily require delicate and
dangerous maneuvers, and force him to work far less directly than he would prefer.

Thus when he discovered the existence of the artifacts at the Breymont Museum, it
was necessary for him to set multiple plans into motion. By this point, such deeply
convolution, ‘nested’ plots and schemes were practically second nature, even as he
first left that Museum after seeing that the artifacts existed, he was laying out his
various plans, considering what he would tell the Unity, what he would tell his own
confederates, how he would finance it all, and other details as well. Along with his
nested plots against his master, he had to consider the Rhaemyi, the Avatars, and no
few other people and groups as well.

Jurgensen knew it was futile and suicidally dangerous to try to hide the existence of
the Atlantean artifacts from the Unity. Instead, he presented a plan to his collective
master to obtain the artifacts while at the same time improving the geopolitical state
of the world (as seen by the Unity) and inflicting a blow against Zadatharion and the
Rhaeymi in the process. Amid all these plots (which were real enough), Jurgensen
also intended to achieve his own goals ‘on the quiet’.

Geopolitically, the Unity as usual working to improve its own position, and in 1925
it had become concerned that the United States was becoming too powerful, or at
least that it was potentially becoming so. In actual practice, after the Great
War, the United States had disarmed and demobilized rather quickly, and the ‘mood’
of the country, both governmentally and at street level, was increasingly isolationist.
The Great War, and the messy and chaotic aftermath of the peace settlement, had
been more than sufficient to sour American popular opinion on global affairs in
general. The death of Woodrow Wilson had left the remaining internationalists
with no coherent voice. There appeared to be little or no impetus in America to
join in the post-war geopolitical maneuvers of the Great Powers.

The Unity, however, looked deeper than this. It knew, indeed it had observed at
first hand, that when sufficiently motivated the Americans could field immense and
effective armed forces. The Unity knew that the potential existed, if they had any
reason to want to use it, for America to rearm and remobilize quickly. If they did
so they would be a military power to match or even surpass the traditional Great
Powers of Europe. The Unity also knew that a national mood could sometimes be
an ephemeral thing, able to ‘turn on a dime’, as the Americans sometimes put it.

At the same time, the two mightiest of the old traditional Great Powers, Britain and
France, were attempting to stabilize Europe and their global empires against their
internal and external dissenters and enemies. This was no small task, not least
because the Great War had come close to destabilizing the entire global system in
a few short years. A network of balances of power and ‘understandings’ that had
been in place since the1870s had been utterly destroyed by the Great War, and in
its place had come chaos and confusion, held at bay in much by the threat of force.

The Unity had no ‘personal’ interest in the wishes or interests of any of the nations
that dominated the world in 1925, but it did have its own vested interests. Of all
the major nations, it had the strongest ‘hold’ on Germany, and it was rooted there,
it had been basing itself there for centuries. It needed Germany to be strong and
effective because this made its own work easier and more effective.

In 1925, however, Germany was anything but a strong and effective Great Power.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Germany had been reduced to a status close to
helplessness. This was in part the natural result of being on the losing side of the
greatest war in millennia, and was also in part the result of a conscious intention
on the part of the other Great Powers. This was especially true in the case of the
United Kingdom and France. Both of these Great Powers had consciously set
out, in their approach to the war settlement, to assure that a unified Germany was
no longer a threat to their own shaky empires and even their own existence.

Germany had been forced to acknowledge ‘responsibility for the Great War’ (this
was a tremendous oversimplification of what had actually happened), and had
been assessed tremendous ‘reparations’ and ‘war debts’ that amounted to very
nearly unpayable obligations. These debts were so immense that even the full
resources of a major nation-state like Germany would be strained to cover them
in any reasonable time scale, without simultaneously impoverishing itself. This
was made the harder by the fact that many of the most valuable and industrially
critical resources of Germany had been confiscated or otherwise put beyond the
use of the Germans in paying their war obligations.

Furthermore, Germany had been quite literally split apart territorially by the
creation of the ‘Polish Corridor’, a strip of land transferred to Polish sovereignty,
terminating in the city of Danzig. The stated intent of this action was to give the
Poles access to a sea port, the unstated (at least officially unstated) additional
purpose had been to weaken Germany as a whole, and also to separate Prussia
from the rest of Germany. For complex historical reasons, there was a widespread
perception in Britain and France that Prussia was ‘the real problem’ they were
facing in dealing with Germany, and that it had been since German reunification
in the 1870s. Thus the Polish Corridor served multiple unstated purposes along
with its official (and not entirely pretended) purposes of ocean access.

The Unity was displeased by this, because it tended to interfere with its own ability
to operate through the activities of the German state. Though the Unity was in no
sense ‘German’ and had no loyalty toward or affection for Germany, it was rooted
in Germany territorially, the heart of its invisible web was in Germany, and thus
it found the restrictions placed on Germany to be restrictions on itself as well.

The Unity had found the Great War to be both a boon and a curse, in some ways it
had gained by the years of horror, and in some ways it had lost. It was, on balance,
pleased that the French and British colonial empires had been weakened and made
less stable. Though this weakening had both positive and negative aspects for the
Unity, on the whole it considered the weakening a good thing for itself. If it could
somehow arrange to weaken the position of the Americans as well, that would have
added to the positive side of the ledger.

Jurgensen now presented a way to do that. From his point of view, the arrangement
to have the international exhibition at the Breymont Museum was a wonderful piece
of luck, it provided a glorious opportunity to potentially killed several birds with one
well-aimed and well-thrown stone. He presented some of those opportunities to the
Unity as part of his supposed main plan.

Jurgensen proposed to the Unity that they cover their theft of the Atlantean-derived
artifacts by stealing one of the loaned exhibits from the Museum. This theft would
produce a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States, which was desirable in
itself. As Jurgensen presented his plan, however, there were additional benefits to
be harvested. The gemstones he purposed to steal could of course be ‘recovered’
at a propitious time, and returned to the government that owned them. This would
be a useful piece of leverage at a due time. In the meantime, possession of the gems
offered the possibility of using them as a trade good for other items the Unity still
sought, items known to be held under tight security by various collectors of the
esoteric and exotic. Trading the stolen gems for those items was eminently viable,
and they could always steal them back later, or arrange for the new possessors to
be caught, when and if the time came for the stolen gems to be ‘recovered’.

Yet another advantage of the theft was that the gems were valuable, and it would
not seem at all odd that someone should wish to steal them. Thus Zadatharion,
the Rhaeymi, and the other enemies of the Unity (of which there were many, not
all of whom we have yet met) would have no reason to pay the entire affair any
particular attention. This was desirable, because the theft of the gems would also
provide a distraction and cover for what Jurgensen and the Unity really had
in mind stealing, i.e. the Atlantean ‘tile stones’ from the older permanent exhibits.

The Unity liked all this, and gave approval, and Jurgensen began planning for his
rather baroque nested thefts. The first step was detailed study of the Museum and
its environs. In the idiom of a later time, Jurgensen set out to ‘case the joint’.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen knew, of course, that his personal involvement would inevitably draw in
attention from their enemies, sooner or later. His plan was that the theft of the
gemstones and royal paraphernalia would appear to be his main concern, he intended
that their enemies recognize that he was involved but assume his apparent maneuver
was the primary action. In the meantime, he gathered data on the entire Museum,
its history, its construction, the area around the place, everything he could find.
Some of it was public information, easily and safely obtainable, some of it needed
a certain amount of effort. The fine details he needed could be obtained in various
ways, but the easiest method was also one of the most pleasant, for Karl Jurgensen.

There were various employees working for the Breymont, all of the busy and active
as the preparations for the upcoming exhibition continued. One such was a pretty
young woman of twenty-five years. She appealed to Jurgensen from the moment he
laid eyes upon her, in several different ways. She was certainly attractive, tall and
slender with dark hair, confident and outgoing. Clad in the up-to-minute fashions of
the typical American ‘flapper’, she nevertheless reminded Jurgensen instantly of his
long-ago wife, Jeannette. Her confidence, appearance, attitude, intelligence, they all
brought Jeannette to mind. This was an added pleasantness for him, because she was
also exactly the information source he needed to complete his various plans.

It was almost trivially easy for Jurgensen to introduce himself into her life, through
an ‘accidental’ meeting in a speakeasy, a telepathically-assisted seduction, within a
few weeks she was completely smitten with her new older-man boyfriend. This was
a game Jurgensen had played endlessly over the years, he was very good at it.

Jurgensen found her to be an enjoyable diversion, sexually and otherwise, even as he
subtly pumped her for information, aided by telepathy. He also learned that she had
some personal secrets that she preferred to be kept quiet. He met her parents at one
point, and conceived an instant personal dislike for them both, which he concealed
with a skill at dissembling mastered over the course of many, many decades.

Along with his other goals, Jurgensen now decided that this was as good a time as any
to put yet another of his many projects into action, or rather, into testing. One of his
many ongoing activities was scientific research into the principles and possibilities of
the mental power he and others wielded. One line of research involved the use and the
effects of various drugs and chemical substances on such abilities.

One ability that was quite rare among psychics was the ability to absorb, or drain,
for want of a better word, various mental, emotional, and ‘other’ things from one
person to another, by means of psychic abilities. [1]

Jurgensen had some experience with these techniques. He knew of ways to tap into
the strength of others, willing or not, to strengthen his own abilities. As a general
rule, this was more trouble than it worth, but sometimes it could be useful or even a
necessity to achieve certain ends. Many decades before, he had used one form of the
technique to steal power from a young women, drawing on her latent psychic energy
to extend the lifespan of his wife Jeannette (and killing the subject in the process,
although this had not been intentional).

At that time, the death of the subject had been devastating to a younger Jurgensen, a
man still possessed of a healthy conscience and a real sense of duty (as a doctor). He
had since changed his views, he no longer felt the slightest twinge of doubt or regret
at the effects of his experiments upon their subjects, other than in a pragmatic sense.

Jurgensen had discovered that certain drugs (or rather groups of drugs) could make
it easier, or more difficult, to engage in such ‘draining’ processes. Some drugs had
the effect of making the subject less resistant, more ‘drainable’, others tended to act
to insulate the subject against such processes, making them more resistant. Many
of the drug complexes, in either case, had very interesting and often unpleasant side
effects. Jurgensen had uses for both effects, and was constantly striving to refine
the drugs, producing versions that had few unwanted effects.

Other drugs also existed which could make a person either more resistant to having
his or her mind read, or less so. These drugs were more reliable, better understood
by Jurgensen and his fellows, after long experimentation. Jurgensen now decided to
make use of a combination of these drugs in an experiment upon his ‘girlfriend’.

When he was ready, Jurgensen finished his interrogation of the woman, using (and
thoroughly enjoying) torture as a tool to do so. He injected drugs which made her
mind more amenable to being probed telepathically, and using his telepathic power
he both obtained more useful information from her, and enjoyed her suffering both
from the outside and from the ‘inside’. We need not dwell upon the horror of those
last few hours for his subject, suffice it to say that it was quite horrific, both in terms
of pain and physical suffering, and mental suffering from the presence of a mind
invading her own, enjoying the pain and suffering she was enduring.

When he felt he had all the information he could usefully obtain, he ‘played’. Most
of the time, Jurgensen kept his sadism firmly leashed, when a chance came to let
it out, he made the most of it, enjoying himself thoroughly. The fact that this woman
reminded him of his long-lost wife added to his pleasure...and her pain as a result.

At last, Jurgensen moved on to his experiment. He injected his victim with a complex
of drugs, and made an attempt to ‘drain’ her living energy. The process did not work
as intended, though it made her death even more agonizing than her life had been in
her last few hours. Jurgensen drew considerable pleasure from that suffering on her
part, though he was disappointed in the failure of his experiment.

Still, even a failure was a source of useful data.

MORE LATER.


[1] In GURPS terms, this would be the ability of ‘psychic vampirism’, which
in my modified system is not normally a separate Power, but which does exist in
some forms.