Simon Hawke - The Pimpernel Plot

Finn complied. Where the hell are you, Cobra? he thought, furiously. If Chauvelin had only allowed him to get a little closer…

“Drop your pistol, Chauvelin!”

The Frenchman’s eyes grew wide as he saw the man two tables away stand up and level a pistol at his head. Finn stared with amazement at Fitzroy. Looking suddenly frightened, Chauvelin dropped his pistol down onto the table. Before Finn had a chance to say anything to his rescuer, another voice said “Now you drop yours, Mongoose.”

Cobra was standing in the doorway, holding a laser.

“You haven’t got a chance, Cobra,” said Fitzroy. “Take a good look around you. I’ve got men all around…” His voice trailed off. Every single customer in the inn held a laser and they were all suddenly pointing them at each other.

Cobra fired, his shot catching Fitzroy squarely in the chest. As Fitzroy fell, Finn dropped to the floor and rolled as the inn became a violent crisscross of laser fire. He retrieved his totally inadequate pistol and hid under a table, trying to become part of the floor. It lasted perhaps a second or two; then Finn heard somebody moan. Finn looked up to see that Chauvelin, miraculously, stood unscathed, his jaw hanging open. Finn started to get up, cautiously. There were dead bodies all around the room.

“Shoot him, damn you!”

Cobra was on his knees. One arm was gone from the shoulder down and there was a hole in the side of his face.

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.”

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 protect 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.