Simon Hawke - The Zenda Vendetta

Forrester tipped the unauthorized bottle of Glenlivet back and took a long pull from it. He had a son. Falcon took great pleasure in telling him about him in her letter. His name was Nikolai Drakov and, by now, he’d be 79 years old. She wrote that he appeared to be in his late twenties. She ran into him in London, purely by accident-he thought of Delaney and his fated coincidences. He had made a good life for himself. He was a very rich man, a playboy with a well-known reputation, especially for his astonishingly youthful appearance. She even joked about it. In the circles that he moved in, she wrote, he probably knew Oscar Wilde, which raised the intriguing possibility that he might have been the model for Dorian Grey. The fact that he looked so young had suggested another possibility to her. She thought at first that he was a member of the underground, a deserter from the Temporal Corps. In order to find out the truth, she had seduced him and found out a great deal more than she had bargained for.

He never knew his father, but he knew that his father’s name was Moses Forrester and he knew who and what Moses Forrester was. His mother had told him all about his father before she died. She had been raped and killed when Nikolai was just 15. Falcon took him to Plus Time with her. She obtained an implant for him, educated him up to the standards of the 27th century, and indoctrinated him into the Timekeepers. Now things had come full circle.

He was back in his own time again, with her. It was he who had murdered Rudolf Rassendyll, causing the disruption. Drakov was motivated by a hatred which Falcon had fed-a hatred for his father. Forrester could hardly blame him.

Time had bent back in upon itself like some sort of double helix. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, with the Fate Factor tying the whole thing together. Forrester was sure that Finn Delaney would appreciate this little problem in zen physics. He imagined that Finn would be just thrilled to find out who got him into all of this, as would Andre and Lucas be. What could he tell them, that he was sorry?

Nikolai shouldn’t be alive, he thought. He’s a paradox. At the time he was conceived, I wouldn’t have been born for another six hundred years. He should not exist, but he does. And I have to kill him. Or maybe he’ll kill me. One way or another, it all ends here.

He tipped the bottle back again, wishing that Derringer had brought more than just the one.

The large grandfather clock in the sitting room outside the royal bedchamber chimed twice. It was a soft sound, coming through the closed doors, one that would not have impinged upon the monarch’s sleep, but Finn heard it clearly. He seemed to hear even the slightest sound in his wing of the palace and in the streets outside. He lay on his back, chainsmoking Rudolf’s Turkish cigarettes and wondering when he would finally start feeling the effects of the previous day’s exertions.

He had been up since five o’clock in the morning, rudely awakened with a hangover to be plunged headlong into his impersonation of Rudolf Rassendyll impersonating Rudolf Elphberg. He was hustled at full gallop to the Hofban station, put aboard a train and drilled mercilessly in the requirements of the part he had to play. He was displayed to all of Strelsau in a grand parade, crowned king in an opulent and lengthy ceremony, driven through the city in a coach while improvising his way through his first meeting with Flavia, toasted in a seemingly interminable banquet, hustled once again on horseback at breakneck speed from Strelsau to Zenda and back again and yet still the adrenalin rush would not subside. It felt like being in battle.

He realized that the time had to come when it would hit him all at once, fearing that it would come at the worst possible moment, knowing that when it did come, he would have no choice but to resort to that small but no less potent dose of nitro that he carried. He loathed that horrifying stuff. It made him burn like some apocalyptic roman candle. When it wore off, he had the shakes for hours. The sleep that came thereafter was always filled with hideous nightmares that left him wondering at the sanity of a mind that could manufacture such twisted, tortured visions. He blew a long stream of smoke towards the large canopy above his bed and, for lack of anything better to do on this sleepless night, ran over the events of the last few hours in his mind, trying to get some sort of handle on the role he was assigned, a role in a demented play with only the barest outline of a script.

Poor Fritz von Tarlenheim, his nerves strained to the breaking point by his long vigil, almost had a stroke when he realized that it was not the king who had returned with Colonel Sapt. Finn wondered how he would have taken it if he had known that the man whom he first took to be the king returned from Zenda, but who was actually Rudolf Rassendyll was, in fact, not Rudolf Rassendyll at all, but a soldier from the 27th century named Finn Delaney, who just happened to resemble Rudolf Rassendyll, who just happened to resemble the king. Von Tarlenheim had been badly shaken when Sapt explained to him what had occurred. Finn could only imagine the effect on him if he were to have heard the real story.

You see, Fritz, it all has to do with something called the Fate Factor, which controls the flow of time. Most people believe that time is absolute, but in point of fact, it’s not. Time is absolute only in a manner of speaking. It depends on where you are in time and what you’re doing in time at the time. It’s all a question of relativity-temporal relativity, to be exact. It’s a bit difficult to comprehend, but don’t concern yourself, old sport. The only man who ever came close to really comprehending it wound up committing suicide, so I wouldn’t work too hard at trying to understand it all if I were you. Basically, what it comes down to is that my friends and I have come here from the future in order to prevent a group of criminals from the 27th century who call themselves the Timekeepers from altering the historical sequence of events in this tiny fragment of what we refer to as Minus Time. Unfortunately, what’s making our job a bit difficult is the fact that not only are we supposed to make certain that events at this particular point in time proceed according to history when we aren’t exactly sure of the historical details, but-and this is where it gets a little sticky-these Timekeepers are apparently intent on killing us while we’re about it.

I realize it all sounds totally insane, Fritz, but the truth of the matter is that what we have here is a situation in which nothing seems to be happening the way it’s supposed to happen and no one is who or what they seem to be. I’m not really Rassendyll. There’s a woman here in Strelsau who calls herself the Countess Sophia and it appears that she’s involved with Rupert Hentzau and Black Michael, only she’s actually involved with the Timekeepers and her name is not Countess Sophia, but Sophia Falco, alias Elaine Cantrell, alias Falcon, a woman whose true identity no one seems to know. And while we know that Countess Sophia isn’t really Countess Sophia, at this point we have no way of knowing if Rupert Hentzau is really Rupert Hentzau or if Black Michael is really Black Michael. For that matter, Princess Flavia, for all I know, could be a B-girl from San Diego, Sapt could be a hired assassin from Detroit and, come to think of it, Fritz, I’m not too sure about you, either.

Finn crushed his cigarette out with a vengeance, lighting up another one immediately. Best to stop thinking that way, he told himself. That kind of paranoia will make you really crazy. He wondered where in hell Lucas and Andre were. Why hadn’t there been any contact? Not that there had been much chance for it, the way he’d been running around. His mind involuntarily returned to the image of Falcon standing on the balcony of the Grand Hotel, watching him with a mocking gaze, smiling. Had she wanted to, she could have taken him out right there and then. Rudolf the Fifth assassinated on the day of his coronation before thousands of witnesses. After that, Michael could have killed the king and there would have been a truly fine mess. So why hadn’t she done it?