Gulliver gingerly took the pistol and followed his example.
“Good. It will kick a bit, but don’t let that throw you.” Hunter watched the brief instruction session with curiosity.
“Are you sure he knows what he’s doing? Just what time period is he from, anyway?”
“Well, that’s—”
“Yeah, I know. A long story. Never mind. Forget I asked.”
“Sorry, Hunter, but you’re on a need-to-know basis. You are from the other side, after all.”
“Yeah, sure. It’s just that I’d feel better about this if we had a little more help. “
“We do,” said Delaney. He picked up a leather valise that was sitting on the floor on the spot where he’d clocked in.
“What’s that?” Hunter said.
“A little more help,” Delaney said. “Very little.”
The limousine turned left on the Avenue of the Americas, known to native New Yorkers simply as Sixth Avenue, then headed north towards the fashionable neighborhood of Soho, short for “South of Houston.”
“Where are you taking me?” said Andre.
“Patience, Miss Cross,” said Drakov. “All will become self-evident before too long. “
“Why, Drakov?” she asked. “Why work for the Network? What are you after?”
“I should think that would be obvious, Miss Cross,” said Drakov. “The Network pays me very well and I find their logistics support extremely helpful. They are very well organized, you know. Quite impressive. Not even the Timekeepers operated on such a scale. There is, in addition, a certain delightful irony to being subsidized by what is essentially a branch of my father’s own organization. And in that, regard, we have certain mutual goals in mind, don’t we, Mr. Savino’?”
She glanced at Savino with contempt. “Steiger said you were a section chief in the 20th Century, but I never made the connection. From the way be talked about you, I never would have believed you were a traitor.”
“A traitor?” said Savino, in that same, curiously unemotional tone. “That’s interesting. To what or to whom am I a traitor? To the country? How? I haven’t sold the country out. To the agency?” He shook his head. “I haven’t sold the agency out, either. In fact, I’ve been instrumental in bringing a considerable amount of revenue into the agency. True, I’m not exactly playing by the rules, but the idea of a clandestine intelligence organization playing by any set of rules is patently absurd. “
“Oh, I see,” said Andre. “I guess I just didn’t understand. And taking part in a plot to assassinate the director of the T.I.A., that’s nothing more than interdepartmental politics, right?”
“Forrester brought it on himself,” Savino said. “I’m sure he never paused to consider the complexities that gave rise to an entity such as the Network or the conditions that make its existence necessary. I doubt he ever gave any thought to the consequences involved in dismantling the Network.”
Andre snorted derisively. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Network is a necessary organization?”
“Absolutely,” said Savino. “That’s something your friend and mine, Creed Steiger, will probably never understand. You probably can’t understand it, either. You both seem to share the same delusion. You believe in absolutes. You think there’s such a thing as right and wrong. “
“How foolish of us,” Andre said, sarcastically.
Savino shook his head with resignation. “You people in the First Division always had it easy compared to what we had to do. By the time you got involved, your objectives were clearly delineated. You weren’t sent in unless there was a specific situation to be dealt with and you always knew what the parameters of your missions were, thanks to us and the Observers. We did the scout work. We pinpointed the temporal anomalies. We gathered the intelligence that made it possible for you to do your job. “
“And you feel you didn’t get enough credit or compensation, is that it?” Andre said.
Savino shook his head. “No, not me. Maybe some people in the Network feel that way, I can’t speak for everybody, but I’ve never felt like that. In the old days, when Steiger and I were starting out as field agents, we weren’t after glory or compensation. Doing our duty was enough. Besides, we were young. We got off on the adventure. But as time went on, the thrill wore off. And I began to realize something. That what we were doing was like trying to stop a horde of locusts with a fly swatter.
“It was impossible to do the job that we were being asked
to do and still play by the rules,” Savino continued. “The thing was, nobody really cared when it came right down to it. The legislators gave a lot of lip service to ‘working for the cause of peace’ and ‘bringing the Time Wars to a halt,’ but when it came time for appropriations for funding temporal defense plants in their districts, guess which way they voted? When it came time to make spending cuts so they could say they were trying to balance but the budget, did they cut appropriations that funded jobs in their own districts? Did they maybe refuse to vote themselves their annual salary increase? No, they cut services everywhere they could, instead. And they kept chipping away at our budget every year. But they still wanted us to keep doing the same job, a job that kept on getting more and more impossible to do. And they wanted us to do it by the book. Even that was so much lip service. Most of them didn’t care one way or another, so long as the job got done and nobody got caught.”
“Steiger cares,” she said.
“Yeah, well, he would,” Savino said. “He wound up working with a man named Carnehan after a few years. Name mean anything to you?”
“Col. Jack Carnehan,” she said. “Codename: agent Mongoose. “