Simon Hawke - The Timekeeper Conspiracy

At that moment, D'Artagnan came out of the chamber. Seeing Lucas and Andre running off with Patrick, he called out, "Where are you going?"

"An urgent matter! An agent of the cardinal!" Lucas shouted over his shoulder, improvising. "Go on, D'Artagnan, ride! We'll see you in Paris!"

They ran for "Patrick's" chambers, leaving behind them a perplexed D'Artagnan and a repentant Buckingham, kneeling before the portrait of the queen.

The timing was all wrong, but now there was no choice. Taylor hadn't planned to make his final move for several days yet. There would have been plenty of time to arrange things before D'Artagnan returned with the diamond studs, trailing all of Mongoose's agents behind him.

They would have become increasingly anxious as the journey of the musketeers progressed. They would have had to watch closely every attempt made by Richelieu's men to stop the musketeers to see if it could be a cover for a terrorist ploy. Their anxiety could easily have already triggered needless interference with the cardinal's men. That would have worked for Taylor. He knew that Mensinger's "Fate Factor" tended to compensate for the deaths of people who were historically insignificant, but in this case, such minor disruptions would only place added strain upon temporal continuity. There had simply been too many small disruptions with too inadequate compensations in too short a span of time. With the final act, the scenario would have been irreversibly disrupted and a temporal split would have been inevitable.

Milady rode in her carriage toward the palace. If the agents were sharp, and if they were right on top of D'Artagnan all the way, then they would have noticed the historical discrepancy of all twelve diamond studs still being in Buckingham's possession. Perhaps Buckingham might even have told them that Milady had "visited" with him. In such a case, the agents would have undoubtedly devised some ploy to detain D'Artagnan while they frantically examined all twelve diamond studs in order to make certain that they were nothing but twelve diamond studs.

Otherwise, they would follow D'Artagnan straight back to the palace, watching while he delivered the studs to the queen and all the while wondering when Taylor would make his move. An enemy on edge, nervous and ridden with anxiety, was an enemy off guard.

The ball would take place as scheduled. The agents would have undoubtedly infiltrated en masse, since with the ride of the musketeers safely and successfully completed, they would have deduced that the planned disruption would occur during the ball. They would all have been there, waiting, watching, when Richelieu gave the king the two studs that Milady had supposedly stolen from Buckingham. Richelieu would tell Louis that he doubted that the queen still possessed the diamond studs, but if she wore them, then in that case the king should count them. If the king found only ten, he was to ask her who could have stolen from her the two studs Richelieu had given him.

Taylor was to have been at Richelieu's side then. While he was with the cardinal and under his protection, the agents would have been powerless to move against him. They would have only been able to watch and wait. They would have been helpless to do anything when the queen arrived, wearing her diamond studs, and the king and Richelieu, with Milady by his side, went over to her to count the studs and to confront her with the two "missing" studs in case she had only ten of them. In that moment, when they were all together, Taylor would have pressed a tiny button.

Taylor had known for quite some time, or at least some rational part of him had known, that he was going insane. He had known that his personality was fragmenting. Before the mission had begun, he was already aware of at least two other personalities within him. Personalities that, at times, he could not control. The condition was not beyond a cure, but there was no way that he could risk obtaining therapy. He had been living underground for years and seeking help would have resulted in his almost certain apprehension. So Taylor had decided to "retire" at his peak. Quite literally, he had intended to go out with a bang. Two factors had prevented him from seeing his plan through as he had intended. There had been no way of knowing that the agents would somehow find the terrorists. He must have judged Mongoose incorrectly. Also, he had not counted on Milady. Since he had assumed her character, she had developed within him quickly. She had entirely taken over or eradicated his other personalities and she had grown very strong, indeed. Moreover, she did not want to die.

"You were a suicidal fool, Adrian," she said, as he listened somewhere, helplessly. "You never knew what you really wanted. You were clever, Adrian, but you were weak. Weak where it really mattered. Anger is not strength. Egotism is not strength. Strength lies in knowing who you are. I know who I am, Adrian. I am what you were always meant to be."

She chuckled. "You wanted to die. That doesn't surprise me. You were always self-destructive. Well, you're going to get your wish, though not quite in the manner you intended. I'm afraid that I do not share your sense of theater. You see, I intend to survive this little episode. You, on the other hand, will die. You will have made your grand and final gesture, so in a way, it will all end more or less as you had planned."

Taylor battled his way back to the surface. Almost at once, his face became flushed with perspiration, his breath came in irregular gasps.

"Control, control," he said through gritted teeth. "Don't lose it now, not yet, stay in control-"

He was interrupted by a throaty, rippling, feminine laugh that burst forth from his lips even as the upper half of his face remained twisted in a concentrated frown, eyes staring wildly, beginning to glaze.

"No! No!"

"We've reached the palace, Milady," said the coachman, opening the door.

"Thank you, Maurice," she said, sweetly. "Will you assist me?"

As D'Artagnan started on his journey back to Paris, a trip he would make at breakneck speed in just over twelve hours, word was passed quickly among the TIA agents, with mixed efficiency. The operation which, up until that point, had gone off like clockwork began to fall apart.

The suddenly disorganized agents had to move quickly, since Taylor's hand had been forced and there was now no way of telling where he would strike or at whom. There was no time for detailed planning and coordination. There was little opportunity to check new, unsurveyed destination settings programmed hastily into the chronoplates. As a result, there was a great deal of confusion and there were several casualties.

One agent, clocked out to cover Aramis, had the misfortune to arrive in the middle of the English Channel. He also had the misfortune of not being a strong swimmer.

Another agent, assigned to Porthos, clocked in much closer to his destination than he had intended, appearing inside the musketeer's room at a tavern in Beauvais. The wounded musketeer, who had been recovering at the innkeeper's expense by consuming massive quantities of food and drink and refusing to pay for same, turned over in his bed and saw what appeared to be an armed man about to attack him in his room. Thinking that the innkeeper had hired someone to exact payment in a pound or two of flesh, Porthos grabbed his pistols off the table by his bed and shot the man to death.

Two of the men departing to look after Athos never arrived. A too hastily programmed chronoplate consigned them to the limbo that soldiers of the Temporal Corps had named "the dead zone." Trapped somewhere in nonspecific time, they would, theoretically, continue to exist, but no one could say exactly where or in what form.

Several of the agents, clocking out from different points, tried to arrive in the safehouse in the Rue Servadoni in the same place, at the same time. The agent that Cobra had stationed there watched in horror as the shapeless mass of flesh that materialized before him briefly became a writhing grotesquerie of thrashing arms and legs that flopped spastically on the floor, making a sound that no human ear should ever be subjected to. It died in seconds and was quickly clocked out to a prehistoric time, where its bones would be picked clean by reptilian scavengers.