Russell Andrews - Hades

In 2001, H. R. Harmon left his cozy corner office and became the U.S. ambassador to China. In 2003, while he was in Beijing, his wife, Patricia-Evan's mother-died. She succumbed to a several-year battle with cancer at a Boston hospital. H. R. had not seen her in four months. He returned to Boston for the funeral, stayed three days, went back to China.

Herbert Harmon stayed in his ambassadorial position until mid-2005, when he suffered a minor heart attack. And thus ended his political career and globe-trotting ways. Since the attack, he'd been based in New York City and been a consultant for his son's hedge fund company, Ascension. His name stopped appearing in the papers on a regular basis. His face stopped showing up on television interviews. The only thing he seemed to do consistently was play golf. Every afternoon, weather permitting, at his Westchester country club, he teed off at 4 p.m. The time rarely varied because he was both punctual and a creature of habit and because the course was empty then. Sometimes he would take a business associate, sometimes a friend. But mostly he went by himself. H. R. Harmon didn't like to play with friends. He liked to play alone, with just a caddy. It's easier to cheat, Justin thought, if the only person watching you is someone you're paying to walk along beside you.

And that, Justin decided, was all he was going to learn that morning. He didn't know exactly where he was headed, but he had some names and places with which to start. And he had a few patterns. They were vague and tenuous at best, but they were there. Now he just had to figure out what they meant.

At 6:30 a.m., Justin Westwood left his computer and stretched out on the living room couch. At 6:35 he was sound asleep. He stayed asleep for all of twenty-five minutes. As tired as he was, he couldn't ignore the urgent ringing of his telephone. And at 7 a.m., when he stumbled back toward the small table that served as his desk and spoke to the person on the other end of the line, he wasn't tired anymore. He was, in fact, as wide awake as he could be.

Li Ling waited in the shadows without moving.

It was not difficult for her to wait. She had long ago been trained to view time as something that could be mastered. That was unimportant. Time was something that, for her, did not really exist except as a way to put chains around anyone weak enough to bend to its will.

It was also easy for her to stay completely still. The position was called Silent Oak. They had taught it to her when she was three years old. It had been torture to remain so unbending at such a young age. Her tiny body had wanted to wiggle and squirm and run free. But with every little spasm, every minute tic, came punishment. By the age of five, she could remain perfectly rigid for four hours at a time. At seven, she knew she could stand without moving all day and night if need be. When she reached the age of ten there was no longer even a thought of movement or of freedom. Restriction was freedom by then. Freedom from her body. For with her training came the knowledge that the body was merely a tool of the brain. It was there to do what it was told. By itself it could feel nothing: no pleasure, no discomfort, no pain. It felt only what she decided it would feel.

She had worked with her master before she could even walk. He taught her many variations of the martial arts, always making sure she understood that it was indeed art she was learning to create. The art of movement. The art of power. The art of violence. The ultimate art of both life and death.

The discipline she gravitated toward was shin yi, for she loved its short, precise moves. There was no waste of motion or energy and no room for error. Much of its art was in knowing when not to move. It reinforced what she had, nearly from the beginning of her life, instinctively understood: in stillness there was also beauty. And it was beauty, above all, that she learned to crave. Beauty in any form. Beauty that could match her own.

She had known that her appearance was not ordinary from the time she was able to stand so silent and unmoving. She saw the looks in men's eyes when they stared at her. In women's eyes, too. The eyes of others revealed all: desire, envy, submission, rage. She saw all that when people looked at her. She saw it and she began to crave it the way she did beauty. She wanted all of it.

As she grew older, her form became even more exquisite. Her body lengthened and became lithe and hard. Her fingers could flutter like graceful butterflies, her hair was thick and dark and seemed alive in its own movements. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. Her eyes-light brown-were captivating, capable of overwhelming and luring others into her lair as irresistibly as any siren, capable, too, of cruelly dismissing anyone who dared to venture, unwanted, into that same lair. As she went through her teens, her expertise in shin yi became even greater. She exalted in the most difficult moves: The Pouncing Lion, The Twisting Grasshopper, The Stinging Wasp. She mastered it all. Everything she touched, everything she tried, she mastered. And when her own master decided that she had become arrogant, that she was not in proper control of her pride and her emotions, she mastered him, too. She remembered the movement she used to break his spine: it was her own creation, her first work of original art, and she named it Shattering Glass. She could still see the look of surprise on his face. And she could still conjure up the enormous feeling of pleasure it gave her when he pleaded silently for her to end his pain by ending his life. She obeyed him one final time. A quick jab: The Kiss of the Scorpion.

No, Silent Oak was not difficult at all. Not for her.

She was Li Ling.

She could do anything.

Several hours before dawn was due to break, she felt the breeze rustle past her. She smiled-and only her lips moved; even her forehead did not crease-because she knew it was not the breeze. It was another perfect and beautiful form of nature. It was Togo.

Ling had not seen him, but she had felt his presence. He would not be seen unless he wanted to be seen. Togo lived in the shadows. He moved as if carried by air. So she waited, knowingly, confidently, to see how he would reveal himself. And then the shadows moved and he appeared before her, as if created from a sliver of smoke.

She looked into his eyes. There was no need for words. They did not communicate with words. They communicated with their souls. Sometimes with their bodies. Always with love. But rarely with words.

They had been trained together. Neither ever knew their parents or where they had come from or why they had been picked for such an honor. They were taught that the past did not matter. Nor did the future. All that mattered was the present and their training and their obedience. When she was a child, she thought of Togo as her brother, but when she turned fourteen, she looked at him as if seeing him for the first time and realized he was as beautiful as she was and as well trained. Their minds had been as one for many years, and then one day she no longer thought of him as a brother and their bodies joined together as well. She loved Togo fully and completely; he was the only person in the world to whom she was truly attached. Sometimes the mere thought of him caused an onrush of desire that could make her dizzy. At night they would lie together naked, entwined, and he would whisper how great their power was, how magnificent their strength was now that it was combined. He would tell her that the two of them made one whole being. That they were equal halves forming something perfect.

She knew that what he said was, in part, true.

But she knew one other thing, too: They were not equals. She had no equal.

She knew well that she would never love anyone the way she loved Togo.