Bewildered, Finn stared from him to Chauvelin. The Frenchman stared in horror as Cobra lurched to his feet
“Shoot him! Shoot him or you’re a dead man, Chauvelin! Shoot! Shoot!”
Even as it dawned on Finn that Cobra was shouting at the Frenchman, Chauvelin moved as if in a trance. His eyes were unfocused as he reached for the pistol he had dropped upon the table. As he picked it up, a thin shaft of light lanced out across the room and neatly sliced his head off. Chauvelin’s headless corpse remained standing for an instant, then it toppled to the floor, upsetting the table.
“NO!”
Cobra lunged forward, bending down to pick up a fallen laser. As his fingers closed around it, a knife struck him in the chest. At the same instant, Cobra screamed and vanished. The knife which had been sticking in his chest clattered to the floor. There wasn’t even any blood on it.
Finn heard a soft gasp and turned to see Jean Lafitte, staring slackjawed at the spot where Cobra had been an instant ago. His own eyes bulged when he saw Mongoose standing on the stairs, holding a laser in his hand as he casually leaned on the railing. Finn quickly looked to his left, seeing Fitzroy’s body sprawled over a table. Then he looked back in disbelief at Fitzroy’s double, who was standing on the stairs. The double grinned.
“Hello, Finn,” he said. “Long time, no see. By the way, we’re even.”
Epilogue
The five of them sat in the living room of Forrester’s suite in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters section of the TAC-HQ building. Forrester had broken out several bottles of a fine Napoleon brandy and Mongoose was swirling his around absently in his snifter as he spoke.
“Darrow wanted to prove to the Referee Corps that the agency should remain independent of the Observers,” he was saying. “We had accumulated so much power over the years that neither the Observers nor the Referee Corps suspected just how far out of line we were. A good number of us, myself included and Darrow in particular, were using agency resources to enrich ourselves. It’s not all that uncommon a practice, really. The temptation to clock back a short way and take advantage of market trends, for example, is particularly hard to resist. Right, Forrester?”
Forrester gave him a surly look.
“It’s all highly illegal, of course, but it’s one of those things that don’t present much of a threat of instability so long as you’re very careful and act conservatively. It also helps not to get caught. Obviously, the temptation is especially hard to resist for highly placed officials and Darrow was no exception. I knew Darrow very well and I knew that he was incredibly wealthy, but I had no idea just how heavily involved he was in temporal speculation until it all came out into the open during the past few days. Art treasures stolen by the Nazis that were thought to have been destroyed, gold liberated from pirates who had liberated it from the Spaniards, 20th-century stock portfolios-”
“They really found the Maltese Falcon in his library?” Lucas said.
Mongoose nodded. “Not only that,” he said. “What wasn’t released as part of the official inquiry was the fact that he had three adolescent girls in his house whom he had purchased in various time periods on the white slave market.” He shook his head. “And I always thought they were his daughters.”
“Nice people you work for,” Finn said.
“Look, whatever you might think,” said Mongoose, “if I had suspected any of this, I would have turned him in myself. A little short-range temporal speculation is one thing, but he went way too far. Beyond the point of no return. He had to prote
ct himself and his interests, which was part of the reason why he wanted to take control of temporal adjustments away from the First Division. What seemed like an ideal opportunity presented itself when an unstable Temporal Corps recruit named Alex Corderro caused a disruption that resulted in the death of Sir Percy Blakeney.
“You’ll never see it in any official report because no one has the guts to admit to what really happened. Your mission was an adjustment of an adjustment. The first attempt, with a different cast of characters, came about as a result of what you would call TIA interference,” he said, looking at Forrester and smiling mirthlessly. “Purely by accident, there were a couple of agents on the scene when Blakeney was killed. Being good company men, they quickly took control of the situation, but instead of reporting a disruption to the Observer Corps, they reported it to Darrow. Darrow had a brainstorm. Why not let the agency handle the adjustment? Leave the Observer Corps, the Referee Corps and the First Division out of it entirely. Let the TIA take care of it and when it was done, he could come up with some sort of an excuse as to why the agency had to move in quickly, without being able to contact the proper authorities. Then, with the adjustment completed, he could present the case to the Referee Corps as proof that we were more than qualified to handle such tasks. The whole thing would have been facilitated by the fact that we
…shall we say, had some not inconsiderable influence with several members of the Referee Corps. The plan was made possible by the fact that our people were on the scene first and by the fact that Corderro had been shot a number of times. One of the musket balls took out his implant and there was no termination signal. It would be interesting to speculate what would have happened if no one had been on the scene when Blakeney was killed. With no termination signal to alert the Observers, would Corderro’s death ever have been discovered? Would Blakeney’s death have been discovered in time to effect an adjustment? Would Marguerite Blakeney have died of her wound?”
“What did happen?” Forrester said.
“Darrow put a team together and clocked them out,” said Mongoose. “One of them, like Finn, was given the full treatment so that he could become Sir Percy Blakeney. The substitution was made, as we now know, and the adjustment proceeded. However, none of those people ever made it back. They simply vanished. When they did not clock back in on schedule, Darrow started getting nervous and he dispatched several agents back to see what went wrong. They didn’t come back, either. At that point, Darrow panicked. It was possible that the first team completed their adjustment and got lost in transit while clocking back to Plus time. Possible, but highly unlikely. They were using the personal chronoplates, which meant that they would be in transit one at a time. One or two of them lost in the dead zone, maybe. But the entire team? For the whole team to disappear, as well as those sent after them, the unthinkable had to have happened.
“To cover himself, Darrow made a big show of resigning the directorship, ostensibly in protest over the agency’s being placed under the jurisdiction of the Observer Corps. By that time, I had returned to active duty and was working in the evaluations section as a result of screwing up on the Timekeeper case.”
“Never thought I’d hear you admit it,” said Delaney.
“Be quiet, Finn,” said Forrester. “Go on.”
“Darrow’s last act before resigning was to reinstate me, clandestinely, as a field operative once again. He needed his most experienced agent, otherwise I’d still be sitting at a console. Darrow was afraid to try sending anyone else back. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown because, quite clearly, the team he had sent back messed up somehow and a timestream split had occurred. We put our heads together with a member of the Referee Corps who shall remain anonymous. This ref had long been sympathetic to the agency and could be trusted not to reveal what had happened to his colleagues, mainly because Darrow had something on him. If Darrow went down, he went down. So, together we reasoned that the original disruption had set up what Mensinger referred to as a ‘ripple’ and that, at some point, the TIA adjustment team had failed in their task and caused an event or a series of events to occur that overcame temporal inertia. Instead of the ripple being smoothed out, it branched off into another timeline. The main problem was that we had no way of knowing exactly when that had occurred or what specific incident or incidents had triggered it.
“Obviously, having caused the split, whichever members of the team survived the incident wound up in the alternate timeline, which they had created. When Darrow sent people back after them, they may have wound up in the second timeline, as well. We’re not sure why, exactly. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Maybe they were lost in transit or caught in some kind of zone of instability and ceased to exist. That’s one for the refs to work on. Frankly, I doubt anyone will ever know the answer.
“Anyway, if we were to assume that Blakeney was the focal point of the scenario, then the point at which the original disruption occurred was not the split point because we had been able to get our man in and there was still, at that point, a Blakeney in existence, even if it was a bogus one. Naturally, this was all guesswork on our part. We know what happened now, but at the time, if we hadn’t acted on that assumption, we might as well have not done anything at all. We figured that the split point had to have occurred within the boundaries of the ripple. Either the death of our man and our inability to compensate for it or something he and the team had done or failed to do had been the direct cause. Only what was that, specifically?”
He shrugged. “There was no way on earth that we could tell unless we had been there. Yet, we had to do something. Darrow was practically hysterical with fear that the timelines would rejoin before we could do something to remedy the situation.”
“The only way that you could remedy the situation once it had occurred,” said Forrester, “would be to wipe out that alternate timeline.”
“Precisely,” Mongoose said. “Now you see why it had to be, why it has to be kept secret. Frankly, we didn’t know what would be worse, failing or succeeding. There was, however, no alternative.