The Pimpernel Plot

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 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.

“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.

“In order for anyone to be able to clock back safely, they would have to be sent back to a point before the split occurred. Since we had no way of knowing when that was, we decided to make certain that whoever was sent back would arrive moments before the actual disruption occurred.”

“You mean that when I arrived in Minus Time, the original Blakeney was still alive?” said Finn.

Mongoose nodded. “It all required careful timing. First it was necessary for the disruption to be reported, as it should have been right from the beginning. Then it had to be arranged for the adjustment team to arrive upon the scene just before the actual disruption was to occur, not too terribly difficult because we had the connivance of a referee and we’d already been through it once. I underwent cosmetic surgery to become Major Fitzroy. The real Fitzroy, the one whom Cobra killed in the Chat Gris, was a genuine member of the Observer Corps, but he was also a TIA agent. The reason for there being two Fitzroys was that our man in the Referee Corps raised the unpleasant possibility of interference from the alternate timeline.

“It was possible that all the members of the first team and the agents we sent after them had died, but it was also possible that, having caused the split, they then tried to clock back to Plus Time. It would have explained their having disappeared. They clocked forward several centuries, but they arrived in the 27th century of the alternate timeline.

“We began playing with scenarios for what might have happened. If the 27th century they arrived in was significantly, which is to say, obviously different from the one that they had left, they might have realized what had occurred. They might have had the presence of mind to keep their mouths shut and try to find a place for themselves, if that was possible. On the other hand, suppose they did not immediately recognize that they were in a different timeline? What if there was an alternate Darrow heading an alternate TIA and so forth? We could not afford to dismiss that possibility, because the moment that they reported in, our counterparts in the alternate timeline would realize that they were the result of a timestream split. We had to ask ourselves how we would react if we were in their place.

“Once the shock wore off, we would realize that we’d have to take steps to protect our own existence. We’d have to send people back to make certain that events in that particular scenario occurred exactly according to our history. And we would have the advantage in that the people in the original timeline would have no way of knowing what our history was.”

He paused to take a drink and there was dead silence in the room.

“If it was me, living in the alternate timeline,” Mongoose said, “I would have put that TIA team through an exhaustive interrogation. I would have wrung them dry. I would have had to know everything they knew, because my existence would depend upon that information. As it turned out, that was exactly what Cobra must have done. He was good. He was really good. He knew who our top field operative was, yours truly, and he realized that the people in the original timeline would bring in their best people. What he didn’t learn from our agents, he inferred. What he didn’t infer, he got straight from the source. Meaning, he came to us.

“Finn, you arrived somewhat earlier than you thought you did. You presented a slight problem. Andre and Lucas were clocked back and immediately sent on to Richmond, which got them out of the way. You had to be stalled long enough for us to make certain of several things. The moment you materialized, I had to get to you fast, before the aftereffects wore off and you were fully cognizant of your surroundings. Fortunately, I was able to time it just right. Just as you materialized, I injected you with a tranquilizing drug similar to the one we used on Lady Blakeney. Then, while you were out, I clocked you about an hour into the past with a fugue program sequence.”

Finn nodded. “Clever. I was in limbo for an hour, which allowed the disruption to occur and gave you time to do what you had to do. You must have timed the dose real well, because I materialized just as I was coming out of it, thinking I had just arrived. Nice piece of work.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Andre, “is that if we were all clocked back to a point prior to the disruption, then that means that the team you had originally sent back would have been arriving after us. What happened to them?”

“Fitzroy and I killed them,” Mongoose said.

“Your own people?”

“We had no choice. During the hour that Finn was in fugue, Blakeney died, our first team arrived to make their substitution and as they arrived, we had to take them out so Finn could then step into the role of Blakeney. It was the only way. They had to die back in that time period.”

“But…but then if you killed them,” said Andre, “how could they possibly have gone on to cause the split in the first place? It just doesn’t make sense!”

Mongoose smiled. “It does, but it’s a bit of a brain-bender for a rookie. No offense meant.”

“They disrupted the adjustment of a disruption,” Lucas said to Andre. She looked at him blankly.

“Blakeney died,” said Lucas. “That was the disruption. The TIA team went back to adjust for it, taking advantage of temporal inertia to substitute another Blakeney for the real one. At some point thereafter, temporal inertia was overcome and the split occurred. In order to negate that, they had to go back and cause yet another disruption. However, in this case, the people who would have to adjust that second disruption would come from the alternate timeline, since it was now their history that was disrupted. We thought that we were adjusting a disruption, which we were, but while we were doing that, we were being a disruption ourselves. All things considered,” he said to Mongoose, “you were putting one hell of a strain on temporal inertia.”

“They had no choice, considering what was at stake,” said Forrester.

“The real game began when Finn stepped into the role of Percy Blakeney,” Mongoose said. “Since we had no way of knowing what event had caused the split, Fitzroy and I had to make certain that events proceeded according to our history. We couldn’t clock back to see what had caused the split because we didn’t know when that happened. We might have clocked back beyond the point at which it happened and disappeared just like the others. So we had to replay the whole scenario with a different cast of characters and make sure that we controlled the plot. The moment Cobra showed up, we knew he was the agent from the alternate timeline, sent back to make certain that the split occurred.”

“How did you know?” said Andre.

“We knew because Cobra, our Cobra, couldn’t possibly have clocked back to join us. I had been removed from active temporal field duty for a time while Cobra stayed on as a field agent. During that time, he was sent on a mission from which he never returned. He was killed by Indians in the American Revolutionary War and his death was witnessed. Unless he had somehow come back from the dead, this Cobra had to be from an alternate timeline in which events had proceeded almost exactly parallel to ours. Who knows, perhaps in the alternate timeline, I was the one who was killed instead of Cobra. He certainly knew ‘me’ well enough.”

“But if you knew he was from the other timeline, why couldn’t you move against him?” Andre said. “Why couldn’t you tell us?”

“Because we were meant to be the Judas goats,” said Finn, grimly.

“That’s part of it,” said Mongoose. “The other part is the fact that I couldn’t do anything against him because he was the only one I knew about. I had no idea how many other people from that timeline came back with him. At least I knew who Cobra was. At first, I was so paranoid that I began to think that there was a possibility that he could have pulled a substitution of his own and brought in an alternate Finn Delaney. However, Finn disproved that for me most emphatically.” He smiled and felt his left side, where Delaney’s sword had grazed him. “It was necessary for you to think that it was nothing more than an ordinary temporal adjustment mission. Knowing the truth about Cobra would certainly have affected your performance.”

“But he had plenty of opportunities to move against us,” said Andre. “Why didn’t he?”

Mongoose glanced at Finn.

“Because he couldn’t,” Finn said. “He didn’t dare to act until the actual split point. His timeline came about as a result of the first adjustment team’s interaction with an historical event. That’s why Mongoose had to snatch all the aristocrats away from us. He didn’t know when the actual split point was and he had to protect the historical events of our timeline.”

“Exactly,” Mongoose said. “Fortunately, the Cobra from the other timeline didn’t know that our Cobra had died prior to this mission. However, he figured that out quickly enough. It took a lot of nerve to play it the way he did. He had to improvise like crazy, but he really had you going. We might have been stalemated if I hadn’t doubled Fitzroy. That’s the one thing he didn’t anticipate. Just the same, it was pretty close right there at the end.”

“I had a feeling something strange was going on when I. walked through the door of the Chat Gris,” said Finn. “Talk about your Mexican standoffs. Everybody in that place with the exception of Chauvelin, Brogard, and Lady Blakeney was from another time. And from two different timelines.”

Mongoose grinned. “You should have seen your face when they all pulled out their weapons.”

Finn shook his head. “I imagine it was something like Brogard’s expression when he came up from the cellar to find his inn full of dead bodies. If he had come up several moments sooner, he would have seen twice as many corpses, half of which would have disappeared before his eyes. He was shocked enough as it was; I don’t think he could’ve handled that.”

“What happened to Chauvelin’s soldiers?” Forrester said. “You decoyed them away?”

Mongoose nodded. “That’s where old Lafitte came in. He met them as they were approaching and told them he was one of Chauvelin’s agents and that Blakeney had ridden out of town, trying to escape, with Chauvelin hot on his heels. The soldiers took off down the road to Amiens at full gallop. Chauvelin was to lose his head in Paris. He just died a little sooner.”

“Whatever became of old Lafitte?” said Lucas.

“I never saw him again,” said Mongoose. “I told him that he would have one final service to perform for me and then he would be on his own. He died soon afterward. He was an old man.”

“That still left you with some cleaning up to do,” said Forrester.

“Not much, really. We had to bring Pierre Lafitte back from England. Simple enough. Then we had to take care of Jean and Lady Blakeney. Pierre and his uncle never knew anything that would be a threat to temporal continuity, but Brogard, Jean, and Marguerite had seen things they should not have seen. They had to be conditioned to forget that they had seen them. A man from Relocation was sent back to take Finn’s place as Percy Blakeney and I imagine that they lived happily ever after. The relocation assignment was about as easy and pleasant as they come. Life in the upper crust of London society as an extremely wealthy man with a beautiful and adoring wife. We should all be so lucky.”

Andre glanced at Finn and their eyes met for a second; then he dropped his gaze, staring down into his glass. He did not look up again for a long time.

“As for Jean,” Mongoose smiled, “I was almost sorry that he had to undergo conditioning. I really developed quite a liking for that kid.”

“How extensive was the conditioning?” said Forrester.

“In Jean’s case, fairly minor. He would remember Monsieur l’Avenir and his peripheral involvement with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but he would forget all about the… untimely things that he had seen. After that, well, it seems he had always hated Paris. He and his brother used to dream of going to sea and becoming sailors. After their uncle died, they signed onto a merchant ship as cabin boys. They had a fascinating future ahead of them.”

“What actually happened to create the split?” said Andre.

Mongoose shook his head. “I can only guess. Perhaps Blakeney, our Blakeney, was killed by Chauvelin in the Chat Gris and the fact that it was a substitute Blakeney, which already worked against temporal inertia, was enough to cause the split. But then, Armand St. Just and the Comte de Tournay were due to arrive shortly. They would have been arrested, in spite of Chauvelin’s promise to Marguerite, no doubt. Possibly Ffoulkes and several other members of the league would have been caught as well. Whatever it was, that one moment in the inn was obviously the catalyst, because when it occurred or rather, when it did not occur, the alternate timeline ceased to exist.”

“Having never existed in the first place,” Forrester said.

“But of course it existed,” Andre said, frowning. “Why else was all this-”

“It never existed in the first place,” Forrester said, emphatically. “It was a shadow, a dream. What happened to the bodies of those agents from the alternate timeline? They disappeared, because they were never really there.”

Andre stared at him, perplexed.

“What he means,” said Mongoose, gently, “is that we changed reality. For a time, our reality was that which we knew, prior to the split. Then, we were dealing with another reality altogether. We changed that. We restored reality to the way it should have been, the way it was, the way it is. At this moment, as we sit here now, the incident that created the alternate timeline never occurred. That timeline, along with everyone in it, never existed. It was like a dream.”

“A nightmare,” said Forrester, drinking deeply.

Andre shook her head. “No, you can’t play tricks with logic to change what was. For a time, however brief a time from where we sit now, that timeline existed. Those people were real. There was another world, another universe!”

“If we accept that,” Forrester said, “then we must also accept that you helped kill them all.” He held her gaze. “You understand?”

She remained silent. She glanced at Finn and Lucas, but they wouldn’t meet her gaze. Both men stared down at the floor.

“I need another drink,” said Finn.

“So do I,” said Lucas.

Forrester refilled their glasses.