Free TW12 The Six-Gun Solution NEW by Simon Hawke Page A

Division Lounge to discuss their strategy and come up with a mission plan.
    It was late, but the First Division Lounge was one place that never closed.
    It was about the size of a briefing room, with a long bar and round tables with comfortable chairs placed around the room. The entire far wall was one huge floor to ceiling window, looking out over the base from sixty stories up. The lounge did not have the ambience of a bar. There were no hanging ferns or potted plants, no pretentious décor, little in the way of decor at all, in fact. One wall was hung with a large plaque of the division insignia, a number one bisected by the symbol for infinity, which resembled a slightly stretched out, horizontal figure eight.
    Next to it was another large plaque, solid gold mounted on mahogany, a small replica of the Wall of honor downstairs in the lobby of the building. It listed the names of all those members of the First Division who had died in action.
    Another plaque had recently been added. It was the insignia of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, the symbol on it represented an infinitely repeating number and, as such, it had been an appropriate selection.
    The resources of the T.I.A. indeed seemed infinite, as did the number of its personnel. Its budget had been staggering from the days of its inception and the highly classified nature of the work the agency performed was such that section chiefs had never needed to justify their budgetary requisitions or fully document their subsidiary personnel. Section chiefs often recruited from among the locals in their time sectors, none of whom, of course, knew whom they really worked for.
    And just as journalists zealously protected their sources and police officers carefully guarded their informers, so did the section chiefs of Temporal Intelligence protect their field agents and collaborators.
    Until recently, there had been no way to obtain a complete and accurate listing of all the personnel the agency employed. It was impossible. The section chiefs would not cooperate. Even now, there was no way of knowing if they submitted complete lists or only partial ones, or even if the lists that they submitted were genuine or fabricated. Abuses had been flagrant and frequent. Upon assuming the directorship of the agency, Forrester had discovered that it was like an octopus that had lost count of its tentacles and had no real ability to control them.
    Past directors had simply allowed the agency to operate in its own way, to run on its own inertia. And they had not overly concerned themselves with regulations. Though he was hardly a stickler for going by the book himself, Forrester did not work that way. He took firm charge of the agency and the section chiefs who ran their sectors like feudal kingdoms. He was determined to streamline the agency and mold it into a tight, well-disciplined, efficient unit, just as he had done when he had organized the First Division. To weed out the corruption, he had organized the agency's own internal police force, the Internal Security Division, which had been headed by senior field agent Colonel Creed Steiger.
    Forrester had known there were abuses. He had been aware of the corruption. But he had not been prepared for the incredible conspiracy he had uncovered when he found out about the Network. It was a secret agency within a secret agency. The Network made its own rules and was accountable to no one. Its only imperative was profit. The Network went beyond organized crime. It was like a multinational corporation whose influence transcended time. Forrester had been astonished to discover the extent of the Network's operations. They were involved with organized crime in a large number of temporal sectors and they had extended their influence into politics, as well. The I.S.D. had uncovered Network involvement in large multinational conglomerates of the 20th century, in the 18th-century Moroccan slave trade, in piracy on the Spanish Main during the 1600s, and in