Hidden Agendas

palmed, or had arrived drunk, and had had to hack several times at a screaming victim's neck before managing to lop off the offending head. Such a thing was barbaric for civilized people like the French. The Scots, the English, mon Dieu! even the ignoble Poles possessed bladed mechanical devices they used for executions — although these were mostly for nobles, to be spared the embarrassment of an inept headsman. So the doctor helped pass a law requiring that legal execution be performed by a machine that would not miss, to be more humane to the condemned, rich and poor alike.

Le Docteur hardly wanted to be remembered by history as the man primarily responsible for the head-cleaving device at first called La Louisette. He certainly had not wanted to see the killing machine, which he had no hand in inventing, tagged la guillotine, the name that eventually stuck.

What a wonderful legacy for one's relatives. A family name with which to inspire gasps and revulsion, how lovely that must have been. And how ironic, given Le Docteur's good intentions.

But men like Quisling and Guillotin had been small of vision, and not gifted with Hughes's intelligence. In a few days, he would be going to Guinea-Bissau, to sit with the head of that small country's government, to strike a deal that would someday be viewed by history as one of the most daring and clever schemes of all time. If history was written by the victors, then surely he would write his own.

He did not for a moment doubt it.

Saturday, January 1st, 2011, 7 a.m. Washington, D.C.

In her kitchen, waiting for the coffee maker to finish brewing, Toni held the sheathed kris in both hands. Traditionally, silat players would not want a 'used' kris. If you didn't know who had owned it or what he had used it for, you might be inheriting some bad hantu; you might find yourself connected to dead people by an evil blade, soaked in blood and karma. But since this was Guru's family blade, it was certainly reputable.

Maybe it did have enough magic to help her with Alex. She had been sleeping with it in its wooden sheath on her night-stand, blade carefully pointed away from her head. She was willing to take any help she could get…

Even if she was peeved with him just now. It hadn't taken long for the story to get back to her about his little adventure in the desert during that raid on the terrorists. Naturally, he hadn't told her, but it hadn't taken long for him to figure out she knew either. He was supposed to be the Commander of Net Force, not a foot soldier! How dare he risk himself like that?

Toni grinned as the coffee maker chose that instant to gurgle and belch the last of the coffee into the pot, a kind of brewed raspberry noise, almost as if making fun of her.

She put the kris onto the counter, laying it softly on a clean dish towel, and grabbed her cup from the cabinet. Oh, well. Life was never boring.

Saturday, January 1st, 2011, 7 a.m. Oro, California

Joanna Winthrop stood in the warm spring sunshine, waiting for the train to arrive. She wore a long, yellow patterned dress, a bonnet, and held a small tube-shaped brown leather travel satchel. The year was 1916. She was at the Oro Station, in northern California, and the surrounding fir and alder had sprouted new greenery to herald Persephone's return from the Underworld.

Joanna had been impressed with that legend as a girl, how the Lord of the Underworld had kidnapped the beautiful Persephone, and how her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Corn, had been so wracked with grief that she turned her back on mankind, causing a cruel winter in which no crops could grow.

Joanna had always felt a certain sympathy with women who had gotten into dire straits because of their beauty.

According to the mythology, after a year of this cold misery, Zeus finally intervened, sending Hermes to ask the Lord of the Underworld to allow Persephone her freedom. The Lord of the Underworld was not happy about this request, for he did, in his own brutish way, love the woman he had kidnapped to be his wife. But one risked the wrath of Zeus with great care, if one dared risk it at all, so by Zeus's request, Persephone was released. Demeter was so overjoyed that the flowers blossomed and the grasses grew, and spring came. Alas, her daughter had eaten seeds of the pomegranate during her stay in the Underworld — there's always a catch in these things — so Persephone was required to return to the Underground for a portion of each year. And each time, Demeter's grief at losing her daughter caused winter to fall upon the Earth…

It was a wonderful and imaginative story to explain the seasons. Although you'd think Demeter would have wanted to cut the apron strings after a few thousand years. God-time must be different.

Too bad she didn't have Zeus to help her find the hacker who had used her computer station. She could use the help. The guy had left a trail, but it was faint, and rigged with booby traps all along the way. She was beginning to get really pissed off. When she found this guy and turned him over to the feebs, she was hoping to get at least one clean kick at his testicles before they hauled him away. Having your supposedly secure computer station used for sabotage was, at the very least, embarrassing.

It was one thing to be thought beautiful when it got in your way. It was another thing entirely to be thought inept at what you did for a living.

The incoming train's whistle blew twice, steam-powered hoots that echoed into the station. There were only a few passengers waiting in her scenario, none of them paying any attention to her. She liked this time; it allowed her to wear clothes that could utterly conceal her shape and most of her features. People had been polite to each other in 1916, and the pace of life, just before America entered the Great War for Civilization, had been more stately than brisk.

The locomotive arrived, pulling a passenger train of some sixteen cars, blasting clouds of steam, its great wheels squealing and squeaking to a halt at the platform.

Well. It didn't matter how many traps this bodoh left in his wake, she was going to track him down…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Monday, January 3rd, 8:02 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

Alex Michaels leaned back in his chair and wished he was somewhere else. Just about anyplace would do, instead of sitting here listening to one of Senator White's staffers drone on at him over the phone.

'You understand our problem, don't you, Commander?' Oh, yeah, he understood, all right. He made a sympathetic noise he didn't mean: 'Um.'

Congress was still out for the holidays, but the staff people got a lot of work done when the bosses weren't around. Probably more than when they were here, getting in the way. The truth of it was, Washington was run by staff. Without them, most congressmen and senators would not have a clue as to what was really going on. How some of the most influential people in the country ever got elected amazed Michaels. Some of these bozos probably had to be led to the bathroom and shown how to work a zipper.

'So I can pencil you in for the committee meeting?' Michaels thought about it for a second. What if he said no?

That would be fun. They'd have to subpoena him. Would Net Force security keep out a federal marshal looking to serve papers if he asked them to? Probably, but Michaels would have to leave the building sooner or later. And the good senator would make mounds of political hay out his refusal to take the hot seat voluntarily. Did the Commander of Net Force have something to hide? An honest man doesn't fear a few questions, does he?

'I'd be happy to talk to the senator's committee.'

'Thank you, sir. Eight a.m. on Monday the 10th. I'll e-mail you to confirm.'

'This isn't going to be another of those week-long deals, is it, Ron?'

'No, sir. The senator is going on a junket — uh, a fact-finding mission — to Ethiopia on the 12th, so we'll wrap by Tuesday.'

So, at worst, he'd be on the hot seat for a day or two, assuming nobody else was slotted. And it was unlikely that he'd be the only sacrificial lamb — White's committees always had plenty of victims they wanted to skewer. What an idiot.