In the wee small hours

Most decent folk were asleep an hour after midnight when the explosion rocked the area.....the lights went out, the telephone lines went dead.....sirens began to sound, and bells rang.....hidden in our basement office, we lit kerosine lamps and fell back on emergency drill, dispatching runners to predetermined offices of various police and security functions of the government.  Darkness was giving way to dawn when the lines started ringing again.....a while later current was restored....callers were asking us if we knew what was going on, but we had no answers yet. One of our officers returned from his trip to a close police station, to report that the fire was out now and detectives were starting to study the scene.....it looked like a bomb had been planted, it was not thought to be some kind of industrial accident in the power station.

Superior offices gave us the word to not release to callers of lower clearance the true nature of the incident.....they did not want the newspapers to be putting out extra editions stirring up fears in the public of anarchist mad bombers on the loose in the city.  But all resources were being mobilized to find exactly that....the mad bombers.....the detectives did find some evidence of their identity....in many small pieces at the scene.....it was beginning to look like their device had gone off prematurely, catching the madmen in their own blast of high explosives.....a wallet was found that had not burned....a name was associated through our files with another name.....and eventually the nature of the anarchist cell was deduced.....these findings are classified to this day, and the public will probably never know what really disturbed their rest that dark night.

Theory

A call came in one afternoon from an Admiral's office at the War College.....someone had gone missing, a theorist with access to the most secret aspects of current strategic thinking.  He had been on a short vacation, to deal with personal matters he had said....so some days had passed before anyone at his office even realized that he was out of contact.  He was unmarried....his known friends and relations did not know where he might be.....did the Agency have any file on him?

Our only entry under his name was a confirmation that his security clearance was of the highest level.....all we could do was speculate.....  Speculation sometimes leads to some good result.  Talking with his close associates at his office, one of our Field Officers ascertained that the gentleman in question had been morose of late.....distracted and glum, out of sorts .....personal matters?  In his rooms we found a book....The State of Man: Metaphysics of the Modern Age....a work of a fairly radical foreign philosopher, who freely disparaged the traditional ideals of established human society.

Of course the leadership of the War College were concerned that perhaps the theorist had been abducted by some clandestine intelligence organization, or had gone over to another government with his insights into our military thinking seeking profit, or for some other reason....perhaps he had other loyalties.....But some of us involved in the matter began to speculate that this lonely and seemingly depressed individual might have decided that the modern condition of humanity was something inherently unbearable.  He had last been seen on a tram that went to a resort area by the sea.....eventually his remains were found.....he had walked into the water with heavy rocks in the pockets of his overcoat.....a victim of metaphysical theory?

There's a woman screaming in my back garden

The caller said that there was a woman screaming in his back garden.....he gave me his address, and I quickly made a connection with an on going problem in that neighborhood.....checking with a Field Officer, I confirmed that the back garden in question connected with the back garden of an address where narcotics activity was suspected.  And not just any ordinary narcotic activity, but a new class of mind altering drug activity.....a rouge chemist once associated with Royal College was known to be somewhere in the city at the time.  He was thought to be tricking persons into ingesting a substance that caused visions that could be beautiful, or could be horrific.....

Officers were dispatched, who did not look like policemen of course.....they looked  like typical Club members who would belong in the neighborhood.....they approached the distraught woman and administered a sedative, so that they could remove her quietly from the premises.  A second team awaited word as to whether or not the suspected narcotics house should be raided .....the family resident there had political connections at a national level, discretion in order ......Eventually we were informed that the father of the young woman had been contacted by a higher official in the government and been given the current circumstances.....the father was in another city at the time and had no idea what was going on at his house here.  He authorized our team to proceed as they thought best .....

A son of the family and a number of guests from his social circle were interviewed after our people entered the premises.....the son directed our attention to a guest house in their garden, where the criminal chemist was found in a non responsive state, having indulged himself too much in his own concoctions.  Medical procedures restored the daughter to a better mental state.....the erstwhile professor was transported out of the Republic, that is all I know about his fate.....

A dark highway

An Undersecretary calls from a roadside inn....he and some friends had been motoring back from the seashore casinos when they came upon an altercation occuring on a lonely stretch of road in the orchards.....they heard what they took to be a gunshot, and two men sped away into the orchards on foot, leaving a man slumped over in an expensive model vehicle.  They investigated and found the man to be wounded and bleeding profusely.....they did their best to staunch the wound, and took both cars and the victim to the first light they found along the highway.....where the Undersecretary decided to call Agency, since he recognized the injured man as a member of a highly placed family, and so thought discretion would be in order.

I called our contact at the Sheriff's Office, and Deputies were dispatched to render aid.  A private clinic treated the gunshot damage, and the family made sure no mention of the incident was made in the press.  But something had to be done about these fellows who were watching at casinos for winners, and then waylaying them on the highway somehow.....here is where our Field Officers enter the picture.....we made a plan to catch the thiefs.  The management of the casinos and the rich folk that frequented them did not want publicity focused on the problem, so we operated undercover.

Our Officer played the part of a lucky winner....he bought a round at the bar, and then left the casino obviously flush with winnings.....heading back towards the city through the orchards, he found two men by the side of the highway.....one fellow appeared to be injured or in some kind of distress, while the other was calling and waving for help.  When our man stopped, the two ruffians presented revolvers and demanded cash.....our trained and skilled officer made as to reach for his wallet, but in fact pulled out his automatic pistol and shot the two men dead.  Officially, this never happened.....there was no Court publicity to trouble the gambling industry, and the unsavory elements heeded this warning that hijackers would be dealt with harshly.....I wrote all this up in a report, which is not open to press or public.....