Duel Identity

Chapter 14

Megan twisted desperately, trying to get free of the iron grip on her wrist holding her implacably in place for the final, fatal, slash.

P. J.'s big Army Colt boomed in the tight confines of the parlor car.

The dark-haired kidnapper was probably dead even before he hit the floor.

Even as he fell, however, the swordsman wasn't through. His blade whistled through the air as he twisted from the bullet's impact. The Wilkinson saber in his hand shattered one of the crystal lamps on the table. Oil spattered onto the carpet and the drapes. The furnishings in the wooden train car might be opulent, but they weren't fireproof. Flames immediately began licking along the rich fabrics.

"Over here!" Megan called desperately to P. J.

He made it to her side of the parlor car just before the spreading fire cut them off. The two remaining kidnappers, slowed by injury, remained screaming on the other side.

Megan and P. J. burst onto the forward platform to face a big bin full of coal-the tender. Over the chugging of the laboring locomotive, they could hear an ominous hiss. "That boiler's going to go!" P. J. panted.

Great, Megan thought. A choice between being blown up or roasted to death. The things I do for fun! She pointed between the two cars. "The coupling!" she shouted.

P. J. leaned down, trying to disconnect their car from the train. He even kicked desperately at the coupling. "Need a lever," he said.

Megan looked at the Wilkinson saber in her hand- thirty-four inches of the world's finest steel. Wordlessly, she handed the sword to P. J. He jammed it into the stuck coupling, heaving with all his strength.

It was an ignoble end for the sword, which broke. But so did the coupling. The locomotive shot forward. The parlor car rolled on a bit from sheer inertia. Then gravity started pulling it back along the rails.

"Gotta jump before it picks up too much speed the other way!" P. J. shouted. He made a cowboy's idea of a courtly gesture. "After you, ma'am!"

Gathering her long skirts together, Megan jumped. She hit the ground hard, rolling along the gravel-bedded railroad tracks.

Between my butt and my shoulders, Vm going to have some glorious bruises tomorrow, she thought. What next? Splinters from the wooden railroad ties?

From up ahead came an earth-shaking roar like the end of the world. The locomotive's boiler had blown up! Megan was suddenly glad she was already hugging the ground.

P. J.'s voice sounded slightly tinny in her ears as he slowly pushed himself up. "Come on, your Majesty, we've got a long walk back to town. Sergei was ridin' along after me, so he should be able to help…."

He looked back along the tracks, toward the still- moving parlor car. By now, even the roof was ablaze.

"Providin', of course, that the Rolling Inferno there doesn't run him over first."

P. J. extended his hand. Slowly, shakily, Megan got herself to her feet. They began hiking along the tracks, back in the direction of Herzen.

After only a few minutes, Megan was painfully aware that she wasn't wearing walking shoes. She glanced over at P. J., who was also limping slightly.

"Not as bad as high-stacked cowboy boots," he said, ruefully holding out a pair of finely made city shoes. "But not designed for a stroll like this, either."

At that moment, they heard approaching hoofbeats. P. J. looked up. "Good old Sergei."

The arrival of Sergei Chernevsky solved Megan's traveling problems. The gallant young Hussar insisted that she ride his horse. It wasn't the most comfortable seat, considering where some of Megan's bruises were located. Also, her voluminous skirts required that she ride side-saddle-women didn't sit astride horses in this era, after all, especially not princesses. At least the cavalry mount wasn't feeling frisky. It was too exhausted after a long, uphill chase.

The boys weren't moving too quickly either. By the time a cavalry contingent met them, drawn by the locomotive explosion, both P. J. and Sergei looked pretty footsore.

The lieutenant in charge of the search party immediately dispatched a messenger back to the Graf von Esbach. The prime minister arrived with a carriage almost as soon as they reached level ground again. Megan piled pillows around herself and leaned back, closing her eyes. She could smell smoke coming off her clothes, and was sure that she looked a sight.

A very long, very hot bath, she promised herself.

Then she remembered this was veeyar. All she really had to do was cut her connection.

Von Esbach's quiet voice cut into her thoughts. "Did Your Majesty recognize any of the men who abducted you?"

Megan opened her eyes. "No, but I could describe them."

As she ran through detailed descriptions of the quartet of kidnappers, the prime minister shook his head. "None of them sound like members of Gray Piotr's inner circle. Of course, he could have hired some desperate men to do the job-"

"They were dressed like gentlemen," Megan said, "even if they acted like villains from an old melodrama. At least two of them knew how to handle a sword."

"The redheaded one-he sounds like the person who approached me in the other plot I mentioned," Sergei said.

The jealous AHSO members, Megan remembered. Just wonderful. I've got at least two sets of enemies, and half the people I can trust have pulled out on me.

The adrenalin high that had pushed through this whole little adventure was finally wearing off. Megan hid a sudden yawn. She also tried to stretch, groaning at the response from her stiffening muscles.

This princess business isn't all it's cracked up to be, she thought.

All of a sudden she was looking forward to reality and tomorrow's simple, prosaic fencing lesson.

In his family's Washington apartment, Leif Anderson sat on the living room couch, frowning at the images on the holographic display. With his computer's help, he'd edited the multimedia presentation on fencing, culling all the references to the various masters he now recognized into one file. It was pretty amazing.

At a sudden thought he checked the copyright date on the presentation. The thing had just come out. There was no way Alan Slaney could have cribbed his inner circle from this presentation. That meant he must have been mining fencing history, assembling the necessary research to create those fencing masters as characters, for-how long?

Leif went back over his confrontation with Louis Rondelle. The short, tough Frenchman had seemed like a real person, not a nonrole-playing character responding to a program. If Rondelle was a typical creation, Latvinia began to look less like a labor of love and more like the product of obsession.

Well, well, well, Leif thought. Mr. Alan "Aw, Shucks" Slaney has some hidden depths.

Leif headed into the kitchen. One good thing about this particular distraction. His stomach had quieted down, and he was ready to eat something. He constructed a sandwich and stood at the kitchen counter, frowning as he chewed.

When you come down to it, he suddenly thought, what do we really know about Alan Slaney?

Everybody (including Leif) had simply hung a "nice guy" label on Slaney and left it at that.

From what I've heard about Slaney, he comes off as trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, /cmd, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, c/eart, am/ reverent- a// f/ie oW /toy Scowf virtues. Well maybe that's not surprising. They came into being in the early 1900s, after the Boer War.

In fact, Alan embodied many of the qualities of the heroes from the novels Latvinia was set up to emulate. He was honorable, pleasant, hardworking, good at sport-and fencing, a gentleman's sport, at that.

On the other hand, no gentleman of Ruritanian romance would dream of making a living as a glorified janitor, Leif thought. I guess you could add "modest" to the developing character profile.

Add it all up, and a cynical voice at the back of Leif's head whispered, "Too good to be true."

Leif finished his sandwich, cleaned the dishes, and headed down the hallway to his room. What he intended to do now might require tools that he wasn't about to leave traces of on the family's home system.

He checked over the computer-link couch, sat back, closed his eyes, and linked in. This time he went to his virtual workspace, the Icelandic stave house of his dreams. Leif opened his eyes sitting on the living room couch and immediately headed for the floor-to-ceiling shelves set against one wall. Literally thousands of tiny 3-D icons, each representing a different program, stood ranked in front of him.

Pursing his lips, Leif began choosing his weapons: a glowing question mark; an icon like a fiery red shovel; and finally a bone-white skeleton holding a stylized key. Something told him that if he wanted the true story on Alan Slaney, he'd need something more than the usual search engines.

Holding up each icon separately in the palm of his hand, he imparted specific instructions. As he did, each of the little doodads flashed and disappeared.

Okay, they're off and searching the Net at the speed of light, Leif thought. But that doesn't mean they'll be back with anything very fast. What do I do in the meantime?

Of course, there were still all those virtmail folders to go through.

Leif did not do a great job of sorting, half-distracted as he was. Several items he'd probably end up wanting were instead carelessly trashed. But it helped pass the time while his specialized Net agents did a quick onceover of Alan Slaney's past and present life.

The question-mark program was the most general- purpose of the three, making all the usual general inquiries-date of birth, upbringing, schooling, etc. Its most off-beat quality was that it was more persistent and less selective than most search engines, harvesting a wide field of data.

The red shovel was more specialized; in fact, it was very selective. It looked specifically for dirt on a given subject-brushes with the law, arrests, police records, criminal and civil court cases, stuff like that. Unless a judicial seal had been placed on the records, that program could usually worm information out of any public databases.

The skeleton key program went even farther, checking for dirt in private files that normally weren't available to the general public-or most entry-grade hackers.

When he got the signal that the low-order profile had been compiled, Leif cheerfully stopped messing around with his folders and began reading.

Nothing really seemed to leap out at Leif. Alan Slaney was indeed as old as he said he was. He grew up in New York City, the only son of a nice middle-class family. His grades weren't just good, they were spectacular. Young Alan was quite the whiz kid. His parents began moving around the country, finding schools that would promote their son to classes matching his ability. Alan finally wound up graduating from college at a time most kids were trying to decide which high school they would attend.

But college represented the first big check for young Alan-he tried out for the fencing team there, but was repeatedly beaten by larger, older, and more experienced opponents. Could that be why he turned to the more scholarly approach of historical fencing? Leif wondered.

Not satisfied with a bachelor's degree in political science, Alan went on to win a doctorate in record time.

Then… a blank. No jobs, no schooling-

Leif blinked. Wait a minute. That wasn't exactly a surprise. Alan would have been only about seventeen. He wouldn't be going to school anymore, and what sort of job would a seventeen-year-old expect to win? Most kids would be slinging hamburgers or ice cream at that age.

The next hit came from legal records-a will from Alan's parents being probated. Leif dug back. That looked okay-a car accident. Alan wound up with a house and a little money. A couple of years later there he was selling the house, moving to Washington, and setting himself up.

Not exactly a surprise for a job-seeking poli sci wonk to come to the nation's capital. If you want to play politics, this was the biggest arena available.

But it didn't explain how an apparent genius with a background in political science wound up as little more than a maintenance man.

Alan hadn't killed anybody, at least according to police records. In fact, he hadn't even been caught spitting on the sidewalk. So why wasn't he working in his field? Politicians always needed aides-the brighter, the better. Somebody had to write speeches, do the research on bills and issues, not to mention all the grunt-work involved in getting someone elected, installed, and working in high office.

Through his father, Leif knew of several likable pols who were probably more cunning than smart-kept afloat by the staff people they'd assembled around them.

Why would a supposedly nice guy like Alan Slaney not fit in? Leif called up his searchbots and gave orders for them to search harder. Ah. Here were mentions of a couple of internships-which quickly went nowhere.

Was Alan the lone-genius type, not able to fit in with a team? The guys he'd briefly worked for were pretty much on opposing ends of the political spectrum.

What were Alan's own political views?

Maybe the easiest way to find out was to take a look at his thesis. A quick order to the search program, and a copy of the archived thesis was immediately downloaded. Leif looked at the title: The Fin de Siecle-A Final Opportunity Lost.

So, Leif thought, Alan's fascination with that time period started pretty young. He began scanning through densely written pages of scholarly mumbo-jumbo.

The more he read, the wider his eyes got. Alan Slaney certainly had an… interesting point of view.

As seen by him, the Fin de Siecle was truly a golden age for the great Western powers. Human relations were enhanced by the traditions of social restraint.

Funny, Leif thought. Most people considered that era to be an age of prudery, hypocrisy, even oppression. If those traditions were so great, why were women out fighting so hard to get the vote?

Back to Alan… in international politics, self-control was also the watchword. These were the great days of the Concert of Europe, when nations could sit down and iron out differences around a conference table instead of a battlefield.

Except for Russia and Japan having that nasty little war, and America and Spain, not to mention most of the Western powers intervening in China for the Boxer Rebellion. And those were only the high points Leif remembered from history classes. A quick look at a history timeline and he tallied two more wars in the Balkans between 1912 and 1913, involving six different countries in various sides and combinations, which eventually led to World War I, as well as a number of smaller disturbances all over the globe.

But the most worrisome part of Alan's version of the turn of the century fairyland was what he called "a clearly defined social compact." Leif translated that as certain people knowing their place and staying in it.

He shook his head, suddenly reminded of how unwelcome David had been made to feel in Latvinia.

I expected to find that Slaney had a skeleton in his closet, he thought. Instead, there seems to be a burning cross!