Michael has done without revealing our deception?”
“But the king may be murdered even as we sit here!” Finn said, trusting to the old soldier’s quick thinking to leap to the logical conclusion. Sapt did not disappoint him.
“No, by God!” he said, rising to his feet with a wild gleam in his eyes. “No, they can’t. They will not dare!”
Finn looked at him with feigned uncomprehension.
“We’ve shaken up Black Michael, by the Saints,” he said, “and we’ll shake him some more! Aye, we’ll go back to Strelsau, lad. The king shall be in his capitol again tomorrow!”
“The king?” said Finn, still playing dumb.
“The crowned king!” Sapt said.
“You’re mad!” said Finn. “We’d never get away with it.”
“If we go back now and tell them what we’ve done,” said Sapt, “what would you give for our lives?”
“Just what they’re worth,” said Finn.
“And for the king’s throne? Do you think for one moment that the nobles and the army and the people will sit still for being fooled the way we’ve fooled them? Will they love a king who was too drunk to be crowned and sent a servant to impersonate him?”
“He was drugged,” said Finn, “and I’m not his servant.”
“Mine will be Black Michael’s version,” Sapt said. “Can you disprove it?”
Finn chewed on his lower lip. “No,” he said. “You’re right, Sapt, that would be playing right into Michael’s hands.”
“So we do the one thing left for us to do! You must return with me and continue playing the king. Michael will know the truth, as will those who are in on his plot with him, but don’t you see, Rassendyll? They cannot speak! Just as we cannot speak for fear of revealing what we have done, so they are in the same predicament! Do they denounce you as a fraud, thereby revealing that they have kidnapped the king and killed his servant? No, they cannot. Michael has the king in his power now, true, and in that his plot has succeeded better than he had hoped. Your playing Rudolf enables him to keep the king a prisoner, but he cannot murder him, for that could make your impersonation a lifelong one. Nor can he produce the king to unmask you without unmasking himself, as well. It is a stalemate. A stalemate works in our favor. We need time to plan and you can buy us that time!”
“But suppose you’re wrong, Sapt,” Finn said. “Suppose they kill the king?”
“If you do not carry on with the charade, my friend, I can assure you that the king is as good as dead. We have slipped away from the palace like thieves in the night, leaving poor Fritz to guard the royal bedchamber with orders to admit no one. Suppose Michael, having realized our plan, returns posthaste to Strelsau with Hentzau and some of the others in tow? Suppose he confronts Fritz and demands entrance to the royal bedchamber?”
“Von Tarlenheim will stand firm,” said Finn.
“Aye, that he will and against Michael alone he could hold the doors, but against Michael and Hentzau together? Hentzau by himself would not be deterred by Fritz. The man is the very devil of a swordsman and an expert marksman. So they kill Fritz, storm the royal bedchamber and the king is nowhere in evidence. The secret passageway will be discovered and it will be clear to all what has occurred. Having attended his coronation and quaffed wine at the banquet, the king slipped out the secret passage for some clandestine assignation. That is how Michael would construe it! And he would have the devil’s own confederates to back him up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have lived as long as I have because as a soldier, I always asked myself, what strategy would I employ if I were in my enemy’s position? With no king in the palace, a frenzied search is made for him and as the search progresses, Michael moves to assure himself the throne. He has the king. He murders him. And then the king is ‘found’ in the bedchamber of some woman, killed by a jealous lover who recognized the man that he had slain and fled. If I were Michael, I would no doubt enlist the aid of the Countess Sophia, that woman you were staring at so fixedly when we passed the Grand Hotel. She has scarcely been in Strelsau for a month and already her reputation as a libertine is notorious. In any case, with the king in his power, Michael can murder him at will and dispose of the body in some such fashion and who will be able to gainsay him?”
“But so long as I’m alive and playing the king…” said Finn.
“Exactly.”
“Which means that Michael would have to dispose of me, first,” Finn said.
Sapt looked grim. “I will not try to deceive you, Rassendyll. There will be great risk, even greater than before. But without your help-”
“We’d best get going, then,” said Finn.”l saw fresh horses in the paddock. If we ride hard, we can still get to Strelsau well ahead of them. I just hope that Michael’s thought the whole thing out as well as you have and keeps from murdering the king.”
Sapt looked at him with the wild exuberance of a man embarking on a desperate venture. “If he does,” he said, “then, by Heaven, you’re as good an Elphberg as Black Michael and you shall reign in Ruritania!”
5
Forrester knew he had to move fast. Lucas and Andre would have seen the beam flashes, and with no reason to expect anyone except the Timekeepers, they would fire on sight. It would be embarrassing, to say the least, to be burned by his own people. He turned the Observer’s body over and quickly started searching it.
Christ, he thought, they’re sending children now. He recognized the boy. Bobby Derringer. Mensinger’s grandson. He remembered him from RCS, when he had lectured there on temporal adjustments, part of his regular duties in Plus Time. That had only been last year. What the hell was he doing on Observer duty in the field already? He recalled that the kid had an amazing mind. He must have breezed through RCS in record time. Now he was dead. When were those people going to learn that it took more than classroom instruction to prepare people for active duty in Minus Time? As he stared down at the dead boy’s face, his feelings were a volatile mixture of sorrow, anger, outrage and self-recrimination. If he had fired just one moment sooner-
His searching hands found what they were looking for. Derringer’s chronoplate remote. For a brief moment, he hesitated. The most important thing now was to safeguard the Observer’s chronoplate. He had to get to it at once, but he had no idea what would happen if he activated the remote. The remote would instantly transport him to the location of the chronoplate, but there was no way of knowing what he would be clocking into. On the other hand, if he stayed where he was, he would be in danger from his own people. He knew only too well how they would react. He had trained them himself. That decided him. He hit the button on the small remote, launching himself into a diving forward roll even as he did so.
He disappeared in midair and an instant later, completed the forward roll upon a wooden floor, coming up with his laser held ready in his hand. Before he could even realize where it was he found himself, before he could recover from the dizzying effects of the transition, his ears picked up a soft, chuffing sound and a faint mechanical whirring noise. Instinctively, he fired in the direction of the sound.
The tracking system he had incapacitated had just been zeroing in on him, reacting to his body temperature. It was a small, portable unit that had been set up on a tripod. The chuffing noise had been the sound of its twin turrets firing. In the opposite wall, at the level where his chest would have been had he clocked in standing up, two small needle darts were imbedded in the plaster. He went over to the wall and pulled one out. An M-90 Stinger. Clever. If anyone broke into the safe-house who had no business being there or if someone managed to get hold of his remote and clock in without knowing how to deactivate the tracking system, the M-90s would knock him out for a period of at least 48 hours. You can teach them to be clever, he thought, but you can’t teach them the instincts they need in order to survive. They have to pick those up themselves and no one had given Derringer that chance.
He took stock of his surroundings. It was a small room with a well-worn bare wooden floor and white plaster walls grown dingy with age and neglect. The beamed ceiling was low and there was only one tiny window that looked out on a narrow alley with nothing opposite it except the wall of the adjoining building. A ramshackle bed covered with a heavy woolen blanket stood in one corner of the room. A crude table made of old, scarred oak, heavy and blocky, was stood up against the bare wall to his right. Two wooden chairs were pushed in to the table.
