"You took Bill Hagsteen to see the President?"
Agent Wharton nodded.
"How did it go?" Paula Zarte watched the young man turn the question round in his head, examining it from every angle.
When he was certain it was safe, Agent Wharton said, "It went well."
"Good." Paula Zarte smiled. "What did they talk about?"
This elicited a much longer silence. "Warren Zevon mostly," Michael Wharton said finally. "About the round-up of musicians playing on his last album. A bit about John Hyatt..."
Paula Zarte's office looked out onto a lawn set with sprinklers and a high-tech security system that relied on everything from pressure pads across paths to infrared sensors and directional mikes. A very beautiful and meticulously tended lawn, it had to be mown twice a week with a hand mower because anything more sophisticated might upset the security system.
Standing up from her desk, Paula Zarte went across to the window and looked down at two men walking across the grass. They were both nu-school CIA, thin and fit, probably teetotal and dressed like fashion plates in something understated but expensive.
They made her feel antique.
Her life had improved in the last few weeks. Mike had stopped coming home at midnight and was muttering about maybe taking the kids to Orlando for Christmas. He'd hate the place and so, she imagined, would the kids, being precisely the wrong age. She was pleased all the same.
They weren't back to sex yet, although Paula could see that happening. Maybe they should be the ones to go to Orlando and leave the kids with her mother. The kids would probably prefer that anyway.
Paula's Puerto Rican bodyguard was gone, fast-tracked to the next level and reassigned to San Francisco. Doubt and the faintest trace of bitterness had filled Felicia's eyes when Paula described this as a well-deserved promotion, but the new job was a good one and what else could Paula do?
Felicia had traced Mike to a hotel in Baltimore and found out far more than Paula now wanted her to know. Of course, Paula had been the one who'd asked Felicia to do it. And it had been the President's offer of an ambassadorship in Central America that brought Mike to heel. He wasn't stupid, he knew exactly what that meant.
"They talked about Warren Zevon?" Paula said over her shoulder, watching the two young agents close an outside door behind them. She was due to address their section head shortly. As yet she had no idea what to tell him.
"Mostly... The President also wanted to know about something called the Stiff Tour."
"The Stiff what?"
"‘If it ain't stiff it ain't worth a fuck’..." Agent Wharton spread his hands apologetically. "It was a seventies thing in England apparently. Bill Hagsteen played drums briefly in a support act. That was when he first toured with Jake Razor."
"He's absolutely sure it's the man he knew?"
"Prisoner Zero? Yes, absolutely. Bill Hagsteen told the President he was kicking himself for not recognizing Jake from the start. You know, in Paris, when he and his... When they went looking for Jake."
"He and his what?" Paula Zarte asked.
"Partner," Agent Wharton mumbled and Paula sighed. He was even younger than she'd imagined.
"Jim James, the photographer, right?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And where's Bill Hagsteen now?"
"Downstairs, ma'am. In one of the holding rooms."
"Let him wait." Paula turned back to her desk and reached for a file, then changed her mind. Agent Wharton wasn't the person to talk to about its contents. In fact, Paula Zarte was beginning to resign herself to the fact there might not be a right person to talk to, and that included Mike.
The big question and the one Paula didn't really feel competent to answer was should that also include the President? If she could read Gene's mind, which would he want -- for Prisoner Zero to be Jake Razor or for the man to be some North African kid grown old and bitter?
She was coming close to making real enemies of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General and the Pentagon. And it was a tough call, even for someone whose job it was to make such calls.
Prisoner Zero was still on death row, put there by a military commission and with an execution date set at least one week before the start of Ramadan, because the last thing America needed was to execute an Arab on the eve of a major Islamic fast.
Only now everyone thought Prisoner Zero was American, which presumably meant that America could do what they wanted with him. Except if Gene pardoned him half the world would decide it was because he wasn't Arab after all.
"Cancel the briefing," she said. Paula was talking to a squawk box on her desk and not Agent Wharton, who looked up guiltily and then relaxed once he realized he wasn't the one being addressed.
"Send my apologies," Paula added. "Oh, and organize a secure video link to all the section chiefs for six p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Okay, Steve? I want hearts and minds for all areas on local responses...
"No," Paula said heavily. "Not the execution. The equations." Steve Duffy was pretty, enthusiastic and ticked off the boxes for a handful of the government's affirmative action requirements, being trailer poor, dyslexic and gay. Unfortunately he was also none too bright.
"And get me Professor Mayer on the secure line, then Vice Questore Pier Angelo... the Italian," she said, "and the President's private secretary. In that order."
CHAPTER 46
Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
"I'm winning," Zaq said. "So you might as well go away." Every looking glass the Emperor passed showed him the same thing...
A man with a scroll under his right arm and long scholarly robes tumbling down that side, his long fingers stroking a poet's chin. The Librarian had the obligatory beard of a Taoist thinker and thin moustaches that draped into wisps of white hair.
And every time the Chuang Tzu caught a mirror's eye, the Librarian would open his mouth to say something and then close it as the Emperor strode by.
In his other hand the Librarian carried a long halberd, its blade facing towards the floor. The left side of his body was armoured with plate mail over padded leather and a steel helmet switched to a scholar's cap along a line bisecting the middle of his forehead.
The split between warrior and scholar represented the classic virtues required of the Emperor's tutor and, by extension, of the Emperor himself. Zaq was only too aware that his own chao pao militated against mockery of the old man's costume.
An embroidered dragon coiled across the front of Zaq's formal court robes, which were for a duke, first class. Zaq changed his clothes every day now, switching ranks at random and varying the path of his early morning walks through the outer pavilions.
He did this for amusement and because he knew that it worried the Library. Sometime soon, Zaq would have to face the glass and listen as the Librarian explained what Zaq already knew. That a young assassin, crazed with cold and loneliness, was working her way across the bridge between plateaux. A dark-haired, thin child who held conversations with the air and carried a large knife with which to rip out the heart of the Chuang Tzu.
Everyone Zaq met in the palace thought he was hiding from the danger facing him. Zaq could see it in their faces and hear it in the way conversations stilled as he swept through the corridors.
They were wrong.
Zaq knew all about the cold assassin and he assumed the Library knew about the prisoner trapped on a sun-baked island who carried the emperor's dreams. War could be a very complex business and weapons were not always what they seemed.