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.
