The Denver bureau office was the only real bureau office in the four corners region, and it wasn't much to write home about. They had half of the third floor of the district court building, which made it the closest thing to home base for the whole Rocky mountain region. Josh's meeting was scheduled at ten, and at ten on the dot a tired, well fed looking middle aged woman, the front desk secretery, escorted Josh to an interview room. Sitting in there was a Man From Washington, clearly identifiable as such by his soft, pale skin, J. Edgar Hoover approved black suit and necktie, and overly pommaded hair. He was jowly and red-eyed, with thinning hair inartfully arranged to cover a hairline making a tactical retreat. He did not stand up when Josh entered, and instead gesured with his hand to the small wooden chair on the other side of the table from him.

"Good morning, Agent Reid, I'm Deputy Director Davies." He had in front of him on the scarred wooden table a neat stack of olive green folders, maybe half a dozen of them all told.

Taking his stetson off and holding it over his chest in a respectful manner, Agent Reid said, "I'm pleased to finally get to meet you, sir. Aside from memo and such, out in Phoenix we don't get much contact with the higher ups in the Bureau."

Mentally Josh added to himself, "... and we like it that way."

Offering his hand to the deputy director for shaking, Reid asked, "So, how can I be of service the Bureau, sir?"

"Good news and bad news, Agent," the deputy director seemed more businesslike than fatuous. It would be easy for a man in his position to be a pompous windbag, but that wasn't the deputy director's style. "The good news is you're getting your own team, and a special assignment. The bad news is you're on your own, as far as the agency is concerned. Officially, you're being reassigned to temporary duty of an unspecified nature."

The deputy director slid the stack of folders over to the space on the table in fron of Josh, and tapped them with his index finger for emphasis, like a man playing blackjack and hoping for the right card. "These are them, your team. You'll find they are all civilians, more or less, and you have to recruit a few of them. It might be like herding cats, but you like you've done some herding in your time. Have a look, and I'll be back in a minute to tell you what all this is about. I'm going to go scare hell out of the district chief for a minute so they think I'm not just here for little ol' you." Davies affected a western drawl for that last bit, both good natured humor falling flat and a genial Eastern contempt for the nation's hinterlands. He shut the door behind him when he left, and Ried was alone with the folders.

Putting his stetson back on, Agent Reid picked up the top folder from the desk and scanned its contents. Not knowing how long Davies would be gone, he quickly moved on to the next folder. By the the time he had looked at the third folder down, Josh reached into his jacket and pulled at a flask of whiskey. Just before he took a swig, he remembered where he was and hastily shoved the flask back into his jacket. He was just finishing up looking at the last folder when the deputy director barged back into his office.

Eventually, Davies returned, gratified for the opportunity to bring a little heat now and then. "You want to hear what this is all about, I expect."

"In all due respect, sir, do you think it is a good idea putting this group of birds in the same room together? Let alone try to make a team out of them?" Agent Josh Reid inquired, still holding the last folder.

"It's an unusual circumstance, Agent," Davies replied. "You're job is to investigate and respond to some unique events which are cropping up more and more often down in the four corners. If the problem is unusual, so is the solution." He sighed and fiddled with his ball point pen for a second, clicking it back and forth and looking at it curiously, like the novelty of it would never wear out.

"There's strange things going on out there, Ried," he continued, leaning forward and speaking quietly even though he was fairly certain the room wasn't bugged. "I need you to find out what they are, fix 'em if you can, and report back to me what they are, or were. And I need you to keep a lid on them. America isn't ready for another crisis, and we're not going to make one."

"I'm having you issued an encrypted radio telegraphy machine," he continued. "Keep it in your apartment, the Sheriff's office doesn't need to know about it. You'll send and receive reports through it, and you likely won't see me personally again for some time." He looked at Josh with one pepper colored, furry eyebrow raised.

Unconsciously, Josh adopted the same tone of extreme agreeableness that he used on Carl Jones whenever the old prospector ran through town naked yelling that the huns were coming."Yes, that looks like a real fine machine there , chief. I'll make sure that I keep it well hidden so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands."

"So exactly what sort of strange things have been going on out there, chief?", the G-man inquired trying to sound casual.

"This is military intel, so take it for what it's worth," Davies said, producing a long envelope from his coat pocket, ignoring Reid's skepticism if he noticed it at all. That it was military intelligence only meant that the agency producing the information had been around for more than a century longer than the bureau. Davies could not besmirch the quality of the intel, however much he wanted to: competition between the agencies was covert but fierce, and they were unofficially working together, the sort of harmonic dissonance that could only exist within the intelligence community. He passed the envelope to Reid, adding "What you're looking at doesn't exist, officially."

There was a piece of typing paper with a list eight items long, listing dates and locations. For each item there was a numbered photograph.

1. 6/13/34, Cooney, New Mexico. The picture showed the after effects of a dust storm, with drifts standing among the ruins of an old mining town. Scattered among the ruins were at least half a dozen visible skeletons, bearing arms and lying on the ground where they had fallen years earlier. Reid knew about Cooney, and he knew the place was abandoned but not that abandoned.

2. 12/23/38, southwestern Arizona. A low elevation aerial photograph showed a snowy mesa. In the middle of it a dark circle that was apparently thick, lush, blooming vegetation, much of it identifiably not native.

3. 5/17/36, Colorado. A picture taken from a train track of the open end of a boxcar. The car itself was shown in cross section and the remainder of it was either missing or not in the picture. The sectioning of the train was clean enough that the iron frame gleamed in the sun where the fresh cuts were, the wooden walls, floor and roof were cleanly cut, almost polished. A barrel of grain that was part of the cargo had an ovoid section of it missing, and grain was spilled out of it. Crates of dry good stacked up along the wall of the car were sliced just as neatly, just as cleanly as a carrot on a cutting board.

4. 2/16/34, Colorado. An alpine view in the background. In the foreground, a stack of equipment that Reid could not identify, with an antenna protruding from the top. A typewritten label developed on the photograph identified it as a soviet radio retrans site.

5. 8/26/31, Arizona. Another picture of somewhere in the high desert. A squadron of Fokker E3's lay crashed and half buried in the sand, either obscured or revealed by the dust bowl.

6. 11/1/34, Las Cruces, New Mexico. A picture of a closed stone jail cell. A crumpled heap of black clothing including an obvious top coat and top hat lay on the floor atop a pair of well polished shoes. The cell was closed and there was no one in it.

7. 8/6/38, Utah. A bunk house in the picture appeared to be somewhat blurry and darkly colored. The ground around it was likewise dark in patches, and the hitching post in the foreground revealed the dark areas were most likely tarantulas. Hundreds, possibly thousands would be required for the incident depicted in the photograph. Under the dark carpeting there were a few mounds which were not identifiable.

8. 5/29/39, Bryce Canyon, Utah. A model T Ford sat in the foreground, doors open. The ground in front of the open driver's door was wet, and a large fish of some sort could be seen there still arched in its struggle for life. The Ford contained the slumped bodies of a driver and passenger, both soaked. Vegetation of some sort adorned the hood of the car. A guess would be that it was seaweed of some sort. A crab was clearly visible emerging from the driver's side foot well of the auto.

Agent Reid shuffled through the photographs, examining each one carefully. He placed the picture of the water logged Model T down on the desk, and the pictures of the tarantulas and the mesa down on top of it without comment.

The pictures of the crashed Fokker E3s, the rail car and the the soviet radio antenna he placed in triangle. "I don't suppose that our army friends were willing to say what the airplanes were doing at the time that they crashed, by any chance?"

"They wouldn't say," Davies replied. "I suspect they didn't know, since the gerries haven't used those since before the great war ended."

You don't think gerries were flying them do you?" agent Reid asked. "How would they get them to all the way to Arizona? Those things don't have a enough range to hope the pond much less make it all the way here. No, they must have been carried over on a boat, and more likely than not, that boat said 'Property of the U.S. Army' on it."

"They know what those planes were doing," the g-man asserted. "They just aren't telling."

Setting down the picture of the clothes in the jail cell by itself, Reid asked, "Did they get Harry Houdini's name when they arrested him?"

"I made a few phone calls on that one, I couldn't resist," Davies replied. "Suspect identified himself as Oper" Davies said the name like "open" or "Opie", "and declined to give any other name. Picked him up on a disorderly charge at a bar. They say they lost his booking photo."

The cowboy turned federal agent held onto the picture of Cooney, New Mexico and didn't set it down. "I've been to Cooney since this picture was taken. It would have taken some serious effort to cover something like this up, and somehow I don't think the soviets could have managed it."

"I'd say you're right on that one, Agent" Davies agreed. He looked at his watch, and frowned. "Those cases are colder than the honeymooners in the Ford, though. These are just a few examples of the stuff giong on out here that I need someone to work on. This is why I'm just using one agent, and a bunch of civilians. The civies can each be relied on for their discretion, for a variety of reasons, and if one of the chickens does wander too far from the coop, who's going to believe them? Too many agents creeping around makes folks out here suspicious, I hear, especially when something suspicious is already going on. Does the same back east."

He took a breath and let it out as though he had a cigarette, a habit built by usually having one. "I'm short on time as usual," Davies rolled his eyes in frustration that being Deputy Director of the FBI did not end scurrying about. "Moriarty and Chow can be found at Moore Detective Agency in Phoenix. Read the files, and believe me when I tell you she's out of both our leagues in more ways than one. Mendez is waiting for you in the Maricopa County lock up. It's the best way to keep a carny in one place. There's paperwork in her file to get her released to your custody. We've got budget enough to hire them all, and they've got little enough that working full time should seem like a blessing."

Still very dubious of the enterprise, but seeing no use in arguing it with Deputy Director Davies, Agent Reid collected the files and radio, shook Davies' hand and showed himself out. The long train ride back to Phoenix would give him plenty of time to read over the folders. However, he didn't need to look any more at them to know that he would recruit the detective lady first. Her photograph alone made that decision for him.

fin