Kim Possible and associated characters are © Disney, and used here without permission, for non-profit purposes.

HIDDEN AGENDA

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, 121 – 180 A.D.

Chapter eleven, which brings some unexpected help and escape.

Kim Possible felt alive. Truly alive.

She was free to act and could take the initiative. The choices were simple. Fight or hide? Left of right? Hit or kick?

She had just had a nasty chock. Someone she had worked with, even trusted, had turned out to be responsible for the attempts on their lives. The organisation she had worked for many times, and had considered joining, had turned out to be corrupt beyond her worst fears.

Added to that, she had just narrowly escaped death. The only way to avoid it would had seemed to be to compromise all her inner guidelines, all her gut feelings of right and wrong.

And whatever she would have had decided, she would in all probability have had to watch Shego die.

She wasn't used to seeing people pass that final frontier. She never killed people herself, and the villains she fought actually didn't either. Oh, they threatened a lot, and she had been in any number of death traps, but nothing had ever been carried out to the bitter end.

Now, she had instead had to see Will Du meet his maker. That was different, though. From their brief conversation, she had become quite convinced that he was, in fact, slightly mad. Mad and dangerous. And he had wanted to use her or kill her.

And he had planned to kill Shego, for no particular reason that she could understand.

This bothered her more than anything.

She had in some way gotten used to Shego. Most of the time, the pale woman was fun to be with. She was sarcastic and teasing, but she had a good sense of humour. Things were never boring around her.

She had also started to discover another Shego. A serious, lonely and maybe unhappy Shego. A Shego that made strange decisions, like helping Kim even if she thought the plan doomed to failure.

Maybe it was just guilt. Kim was after all to a great extent responsible for the current situation, and would have been partly to blame if Shego had died.

Or perhaps she had started caring for the abrasive green-tinted woman.

Anyway, at the moment, it was all action. Tough choices and introspection would have to wait. They had to fight their way out of some sort of secret base and escape.

A considerable challenge, to be sure. But this was the sort of thing that she actually enjoyed.

Yes, Kim Possible felt truly alive.

==##0##==

Shego had easily blasted her own constraints away. She couldn't hurt herself with her own plasma, so she did not have to hesitate using brute force.

Getting Kim free had been a bit more delicate. She had briefly looked for the controls for releasing the locks of the metal bands, but had given up. There were just too many switches and knobs on the instruments in the adjoining room. Instead, she had performed some precision plasma cutting, making sure that she didn't burn Kim too much in the process.

They had, however, found a security card in the breast pocket of Will Du's uniform.

"Excellent," Shego had said. "We can begin trying to sneak out, and hope to avoid outright fighting for a while!"

==##0##==

Luckily, the key card didn't need a code to work, at least not for getting out of the room they were in.

They were now moving along an empty corridor lined with closed doors.

There were no windows to be seen, and the walls and roof were not entirely straight. There were some irregularities and slight bends here and there. In combination with the slight but all pervading scent of damp, it led them to believe they were underground.

The walls were a dull gunmetal grey, the floors a little darker. The ceiling was invisible above all the cables, pipes and ventilation ducts.

"Even uglier than the typical Drakken lair!" Kim commented.

They were still dressed as they had been as captives. Neither of them had felt like stripping Will Du of his uniform, and put in on for disguise of protection. This meant that they both ran along the silent corridors in plain white t-shirts and blue boxer shorts.

Shego looked odd, going into action without her usual green and black cat-suit, or anything else in her favourite colour combination. Furthermore, her hair was still short after the cut Kim had given her at the Motel. Longer now, but still far from her usual flowing tresses.

Her skin had, however, returned to its usual light pistachio ice-cream colour since she had stopped applying the fake tan and body make-up. And she moved like she always did; fast, fluid, graceful.

Kim was happy to have her running alongside. It was the only familiar aspect in this whole sitch.

==##0##==

"Hush, Princess! Someone is coming!"

They communicated well without words: Shego quickly slipped into a doorway that was a little deeper than most, hiding from anyone approaching. Kim backed up a little, and prepared to distract whoever was coming. Shego held up one finger, and Kim nodded. Just one person.

A tall, middle-aged man in grey coveralls turned a corner ahead of them. He was carrying a clipboard in one hand and a coffee-mug in the other.

Kim smiled brightly when he saw her, and looked at him with large innocent eyes. "Oh, hi!" she said breathlessly. "I'm sure glad to see you!"

She used a sickly cute voice, suggesting the totally brainless pretty girl. "I seem to have lost my clothes somewhere. I wonder, could you tell me the way to the nearest Club Banana?"

The man's eyes widened in surprise as he continued walking towards this totally unexpected presence. It was nothing, however, to the way they bugged when he walked past the doorway where Shego was hiding, and received a sharp stab with the side of the hand to the back if his neck.

He crumpled bonelessly to the floor without a sound.

"Kind of your size, Shego! Care to make a fashion statement? I hear dirty grey is the new black!"

"Ha ha, Pumpkin. But just so you know, the next one is yours, even if he's wearing pink with purple polka dots!"

Once Shego had slipped the coveralls on, they quickly continued. Shego took out every security camera they came upon with well directed plasma bolts.

"This can't last much longer! The control room just must have seen us by now!"

"Yeah, perhaps we should find somewhere to hide soon.

Just then they came upon a larger hall from which several corridors branched out. On one wall, there were the doors of two lifts.

The indicator boards by the lifts showed that there were at least 15 levels in the complex. One lift was near the top, and descending. The other lift was actually at their floor.

"Mr. Grey, there, must have come down in that one," Shego guessed. "Come on!"

They entered the elevator, and Kim quickly opened the service hatch in the roof. Shego gave her a boost up, and once on the roof of the cabin, Kim reached down to pull Shego up after her.

"So far, so good, Princess! At least they won't spot us immediately!"

Kim was glad, but not really surprised, that they seemed to think so alike, and act so in unison. They made an efficient team, even if their experience together came mostly from fighting each other.

"Let's rest a few seconds. Then we can start climbing!"

There was a gap between the two elevator shafts. On the back wall of the gap, a ladder extended up for as far as they could see.

"Oh, goody! Well, at least we may be out of reach from the security CCTV. And the cameras in the hall by the lifts wouldn't have had time to show anything of our movements before I fried them!"

"It won't help for long." Kim observed. "As soon as someone starts using his brain, they will guess where we went."

"So, get a move on, Princess! You first!"

"Aw, why me?" Kim whined, just to be difficult.

"So I can ogle your butt as you climb, of course. Now, git!"

Shego gave the rear end she claimed she wanted to watch an open-handed slap, like you would do to get a horse moving.

Kim gave a pathetic little 'eep', but did start climbing. She didn't really know how to take Shego's comment, but she figured the creepiness of having her behind watched would be compensated by the fact that this way, if she fell, she would fall on Shego, which might save her from a rather long drop.

After a while, the other lift passed them on its way down. They could hear people talking, and stood stock still on the ladder. If someone where to hear their footsteps on the metal rungs, they'd be spotted instantly.

They had not climbed more than about half the way to the top when the other lift came back up again. It stopped one or two floors down from the very top, before descending once more.

"Probably getting reinforcements. Let's not get out at that particular floor; might be the crew quarters…"

"Yeah," Shego said, "let's go on to the very top, to the machinery on top of the lift shafts. If we're lucky, that might just be a service level, for ventilation and stuff."

"OK! Top floor might also be close to the control room, or something. We should take down as many systems as we can before we try to get away."

==##0##==

They climbed as quickly as they could, and soon came to the top. The ladder led up to a system of catwalks around the two large cable wheels for the lifts, and two sizable electric motors. The walls were covered with fuse boxes, switches and the like. At one end, there was a metal door, looking a bit like something you would find in the lower decks of a battleship. There was no lock, just a big metal lever that engaged a metal flange when shut.

They squatted down on the catwalk by the door, listening for any sounds that might indicate if someone was on the other side.

In the end, they just had to take their chances. Shego looked at Kim and made a few hand signals, showing what she wanted her to do. Kim nodded to show that she was ready, and Shego opened the door.

They slipped quietly outside, into a small hall at the top of a staircase. Across from them, a steel and glass door led in to a large control room, just like Kim had expected.

==##0##==

The room was a very modern type of control centre. The main equipment seemed to be two large desktop computers, with enormous flat screen monitors. More screens were mounted on the wall. Between the computers, there was what looked like a big telephone switchboard, together with some sort of short wave radio equipment. To the right of the computer desk, farthest from the door, there was a standard rack for computer components, full of servers, hard disk drives and the like.

The wall facing the computer desk was taken up with shelves, containing what looked like telephone books but which were probably manuals or schematics for the various installations of the base. There was also a small kitchenette. At the end of the room there was a table and some chairs.

There were three persons in the room. Two men sat in office chairs by the computers, and the third, a woman of about 30, stood behind them, leaning against the counter of the kitchenette.

Shego pointed to Kim and then right, towards the standing woman. Then she held up three fingers, folding them down one at a time.

When all fingers had been folded down into a fist, Shego blew the door in with a massive blast of green plasma. Kim instantly jumped through, going diagonally from the left of Shego and towards the woman by the kitchenette.

Shego took the other diagonal a fraction of a second later, slamming into the man at the closest computer and taking the other one out with a flash of green fire.

It probably didn't take even two seconds. The men were out cold, and Kim held the woman in a stranglehold from behind. Shego quickly took out the CCTV cameras in the control room and then turned her attention towards Kim and her prisoner.

The woman in Kim's grip, however, started making frantic gestures towards something at the bottom of the rack of computer equipment. Shego followed her pointing fingers and saw something that looked more like a piece of stereo equipment at the bottom of the stack. She reduced it to a smoking ruin and turned back to their hostage.

"Good," the woman said. "Voice recorder. Sort of like the black box in an airplane."

"And that would be important because ...?" Kim asked.

"Because I do not want anyone else to hear what I will tell you now!"

Shego led the woman to one of the chairs by the table and sat her down. "But we can hear it, right?"

"Right." The woman collected her thoughts for a while before continuing. "Look, my name is not important. I have been with the GJ for six years now, and I can't get out. I'm sort of important to them, as a computer expert and in ... other capacities. They have ... ways ... of keeping you. Still, I do not like it here anymore, and I wouldn't be at all sorry if someone were to bring some trouble down on the whole sorry mess. Not me, though. But someone else."

"Yeah, we get it", Shego said. "You're secretly cheering for the other team, but you don't want to rock the boat."

"Well, that's one way up putting it. Anyway, we probably don't have much time. Listen to what I can tell you, knock me out, and then get out of here!"

Kim and Shego nodded.

"OK, so this is one of the middle sized bases of the covert operations of the GJ. We didn't build it, it's a remnant from some cold war super-secret thing. It's huge, but most of the levels are actually not used anymore. There's usually a crew of about sixty, but twenty of us are away at the moment. They took the two big choppers and went to help with some operation or other. You took down Chopper 3, as well as Reconnaissance 1."

The woman stood up and started removing her uniform while she talked. "You'll be wanting this, I guess," she said before continuing her account.

"We have four jet fighters stationed here. Together with the helicopters that gives us a small strike force capability for the north-western US and Canada. The rest of what we do here is mainly intelligence work, the monitoring of radio traffic and such." - -

- - "The fighters are Hawker Siddeley Harrier VTOLs. They are in the hangar on the third level down. There is no need of a runway for them, of course, and not for the choppers either, but there is a small dirt airstrip down in the valley for the reconnaissance planes, R1 and R2. R2 is still down there, more or less ready to take off." - -

- - "Now, the main entrance is also down by the hangar. There is, however, an emergency exit from here; through that door behind us. It opens on a short tunnel that emerges in a hidden lock-out post on the hillside. If I were you, I'd use that. You might want to do something with the control system first, though. Might I suggest the Emergency Lockdown protocol? And please make it look like I put up some resistance before you leave!"

Shego turned to the nearest computer and looked at the screen. She soon found what she was looking for, and a sharp beeping sound burst forth from speakers in the roof as she made a few clicks with the mouse. The radio equipment squawked into life. "Hey, control, this is Team 1. What's up? Why are you locking the doors?"

Shego grabbed a microphone. "Control to Team 1! Sorry, new strategy. We need to contain them. Back-up well be moving through the levels one by one, with override key cards!"

Shego then shut the communication down. "That won't really fool them, you know," their informant said, shivering a bit in her underwear. "You'd better hurry! And ... good luck!"

"Thanks!" Shego said, and punched her viciously in the jaw. The woman went over backwards, smashing the table. Shego hit her a few more times for good measure, and ended the treatment with burning the woman's right hand with her plasma. Kim felt bad about the injuries so easily handed out, but knew that worse could happen if the GJ suspected that they had been given some help escaping.

"That ought to do it! Now, come on!"

Kim had finished putting the uniform on, and soon they were moving quickly through a tunnel roughly hewn out of the living rock. The passage was not full height, and they had to crouch down while running.

The look-out post was just a small round chamber, with a narrow slit running round half the circumference. It looked like a WWII gun emplacement, but there were no weapons in sight, and the dust on the floor made it obvious that the room hadn't been used for some time.

==##0##==

There was a round hatch in the roof, and metal rungs were mounted of the wall under it. Kim and Shego lost no time getting outside, and soon found themselves on the side of a hill. Some twenty meters below them, the floor of a valley stretched away from them. There was a fairly long flat stretch of gravel, looking a bit like a dried up river bed, and the sides of the valley were not very high. It was not immediately recognizable as an airstrip, but would serve that purpose nicely for the Harriers and for a biplane such as the red R1 they had taken down earlier.

Scrambling down the hillside, Kim and Shego soon discovered a large opening in the cliffs below and to the right of them. In the shadow of what looked like a huge natural cave, the broad metal doors of a hangar could be seen. The sound of an alarm emerged from the still open doors. Evidently the Emergency Lockdown didn't shut all the doors. Perhaps the hangar doors were not affected since there might be need to get the aircrafts out also in the case of an attack on the base.

This suited Kim and Shego well. They ran quickly down to the hangar and peeked in.

As promised, four Harrier jets stood in the large open space of the hangar, in various stages of maintenance. Three mechanics stood about, talking, by a small hut inside the hangar. They gesticulated animatedly, pointing to the loudspeakers emitting the alarm, and to the obviously locked doors that led inside to the rest of the base.

Closest to the open doors of the hangar, however, there was a biplane just like the red one they had seen earlier, but bright yellow.

"I do hope that one is ready to go!" Kim whispered.

"Only one way to find out! Go grab the propeller and get ready to start when I say 'contact'!", Shego answered. She then strolled up to the group of mechanics.

"Hey, guys! What's going on?" Dressed in the grey coveralls she had taken from the first guy they had met, she hoped they wouldn't instantly recognize her as an intruder.

"Not a clue," one of the men said. "The alarm went off, and now we can't get back in. And Control isn't answering. "

"Aw, don't worry! That's the least of your problems."

All three men did slap-stick type of double takes at Shego's comment. They did not have time to do much else, though. Shego had walked right up to them and had no trouble knocking them out before they could even think of resisting.

Kim stood by the biplane, waiting nervously while Shego then ran past all the four jets, collapsing the landing wheels on each with a blast of plasma. The jets tipped over, smashing their wings on the ground. Nobody in their right mind would try to take off with that kind of potential damage to the airframe.

"OK, Princess, CONTACT!" Shego shouted, vaulting into the cockpit and flicking switches.

Kim gave the prop a sharp twist and the engine roared into life. "Boyaah!" she whispered, feeling that a small, careful measure of triumph was called for.

There was no time for pre-flight checks, and the plane was moving out of the hangar before Kim had finished settling in the aft cockpit.

The plane shot down the gravel runway, and rose steeply over the hills and trees at the end of the valley.

==##0##==

They had done it! They were out of the secret base, and they had discovered more than they had expected about the identity of their adversaries. Despite the almost disastrous encounter with Will Du, they had got what they came for!

Kim Possible felt truly alive and high on an adrenaline rush as she sat in the airplane, watching the landscape rush past just below her as Shego flew as close to the ground as she dared.

With some help from Shego, I really can do anything! She thought.

==##0##==

A/N. And from near disaster to successful escape! Less talk and more action in this chapter, too. But where will they go now? And how will they continue to evade the GJ turned bad?

There might be a small delay before I can put the next chapters up, due to a business trip. Or not, maybe transatlantic flights are just what's needed for writing. As long as the laptop batteries don't die too quickly!

Until then, please read and review!