“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. There was a large porcelain bathtub, a chamberpot, a sofa with faded and torn upholstery, a throw rug before the sofa, a battered reading chair and an old lamp. A wooden chest of drawers with discolored brass handles and a large traveling chest completed the furnishings. With the exception of the damaged tracking system on its tripod, there was nothing to distinguish the shabby room from any other shabby room in the low-rent district of Strelsau’s old quarter, except for the ring of border circuits on the floor where he had clocked in. The room was on the top floor of an old four-story building. The window had heavy wooden shutters and the door had a decent bolt. Forrester stood still by the door and listened for a moment, then he unbolted it and opened it a crack. He heard footsteps on the stairs close by and a moment later, two people walked past him down the hall, a man and a young woman. The man was stumbling slightly and mumbling to the woman, leaning on her heavily. She laughed in a sultry way and rubbed his crotch with her right hand. Meanwhile, her left hand reached into his pocket and removed his wallet. Derringer had done well in his selection of a safehouse. No one would notice the coming and goings here.
He closed the door and bolted it again, then turned to face the squalid little room. He spied a bottle on the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full, a bottle of Glenlivet unblended Scotch, very nonregulation. Damn kid, he thought, and suddenly tears came to his eyes.
Forrester didn’t know why he was crying. He didn’t know if it was from anger or sorrow or frustration. His emotions, which he had steadfastly held in check for more years than he could count and which had been under an extremely great strain ever since he had received that letter, suddenly let go, like a cable snapping, and he lost all control of them. They came over him in waves-unutterable grief at the death he might have, should have prevented; frustration at his inability to change what he had done; fury directed at himself and at the woman he once loved. Like some manic depressive run amok, his mood shifted with lightning speed; one moment he wanted to collapse onto the bed and sob his heart out, the next he felt charged up with a trembling fury that made him want to batter down the heavy plaster walls with his bare fists. He had Drakov in his sights and he had hesitated. And Derringer had died. Even when he fired, he could not be sure if it was Drakov’s swift reaction or some unconscious impulse that had made him miss the killing shot. He seemed to remember crying out. Had he done that on purpose? In either case, the responsibility was his. He had not been able to kill his own son.
He should have told them. He should have told them at the briefing. He wanted to, but he had not been able to bring himself to do it. He had rationalized. They were the three finest soldiers under his command. They had never failed before. They would not fail now, he told himself. They will neutralize the threat, effect the adjustment, and correct the mistake I made many years ago. Why burden them with the knowledge of who it was I’m sending them to kill? But when they had left, the sour taste of guilt had filled him with immense self-loathing. He had given Drakov life. It was on him to take it away. Elaine-or Falcon-knew that, which was why she had written him that letter. She had known that he would come. It was all there, all the details, she knew it all, even more than he did. And to prove it, she had recounted the whole story for him.
It happened many years ago. The year was 1812 and the place was Russia just prior to the French invasion. He was a young man on his first mission to Minus Time, a newly indoctrinated recruit assigned to the Airborne Pathfinders, as green as a granny apple. The refs had selected that scenario for a campaign, and his unit was floater-clocked into the period for the purpose of scouting out the territory in order to facilitate the temporal conflict. They were to make maps and compile logistics reports. It was supposed to have been a routine mission.