TW04 The Zenda Vendetta NEW (11 page)

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.

The transition was a complete disaster. Half of his unit was lost in the dead zone coming through.

Many came in too low and splattered before they could recover from the effects of the transition and activate their floater-paks. The survivors were widely scattered and, eventually, they managed to get back, but it was one hell of a mess. He came through alone.

He had never made transition before and there he was, on his first hitch, in free fall with a malfunctioning floater-pak. He came in way too low and way too fast. He barely had enough time to realize that he would splatter unless he gained some altitude in one heck of a hurry, so he kicked in his jets and that lousy, misbegotten piece of army ordnance shot him right at the ground instead of boosting him higher. It was all he could do to reduce his speed and try to alter his flightpath so that he didn’t corkscrew into the Russian countryside.

He was over a field, traveling at a high rate of speed with a floater-pak that was virtually out of control. He resigned himself to death. He saw the old wooden barn looming up before him and, helpless to alter his direction, he plowed right into it. The barn was old, abandoned. It had seen a great deal of weathering and neglect. Sections of its roof were missing. He went through an exposed latticework of beams and cross-members, managing somehow to turn as he hit so that the pak absorbed most of the impact. It was torn right off him, damaged beyond all hope of repair. He sustained several broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, a broken arm, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, numerous lacerations, and a concussion. Considering the circumstances, it was a miracle he wasn’t killed.

He came to in a hayloft. He could still recall the smell. The hay was old and decomposing. It had rained recently and, with the gaping holes in the roof, much of it was wet. A young woman was kneeling over him, a beautiful young woman with green eyes and long, wavy black hair. She was using a kerchief to wipe the blood away from his face. Her hair was brushing his cheeks.

She spoke to him in Russian. He may have mumbled something back, he did not recall. She remained with him, caring for him as best she could, trying to set his bones and ease his pain. Her name was Vanna Drakova and she was a nineteen-year-old gypsy, a runaway serf. They were both very young, both lost, both scared.

It took Search & Retrieve a long time to sort the whole mess out. When no one came after him, he concluded that his implant must have been damaged in the crash through the barn roof. He assumed that he was stranded, marooned in the 19th century.

As the days dragged into weeks and weeks turned into months, he recovered slowly. His bones began to knit, but without proper medical attention, they did not heal properly. Thanks to the drug treatments he had received in the 27th century, he healed with astonishing rapidity, but he would be a cripple—functional, but twisted out of shape. There would be no going back or, in his case, forward to the time from which he came. In his despair, he told Vanna everything.

At first, she did not believe him. Eventually, however, he was able to convince her and more was the pity. He should have kept his mouth shut, but he believed that he would never get back to his own time, much less have his deformity corrected. It seemed important to him that she should know the truth, because by then she was pregnant with their child.

It never should have happened. Strict precautions were observed to prevent just such an occurrence, but Forrester did not react well to the pills they issued in those days. Rather than take the trouble of getting a temporary sterilization, he simply hadn’t bothered taking them. It would have taken a mere couple of days of medical leave, but it would have caused him to miss out on his first mission, and he had been too eager to go out to wait until the next one. He had not counted on being intimate with anyone in Minus Time. The possibility had simply not occurred to him. He had not counted on being separated, thinking he was stranded, or falling in love. When S & R finally tracked him down, he didn’t tell them that Vanna was pregnant. They would have aborted the fetus. It would have been the best thing all around, but he could not bring himself to go along with it. Leaving her would be hard enough.

He tried to explain things to her before they took him back. They were kind enough to give him the time. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He could not take her with him and he had no idea what would become of her and of their child. But there was nothing to be done. There were a lot of tears, both hers and his. She gave him a lock of her hair in remembrance and like a fool, he told her that he would come back for her. He never saw her again.

As if what he had done had not been bad enough, there was yet a further complication, something that never even occurred to him at the time. His family had not been well off and it was always taken for granted that he would go into the service. As a result, they had spared themselves the expense of procuring antiaging treatments for him. As an inducement for recruiting, the Temporal Corps provided antiagathic drug treatments for those unable to afford them during indoctrination processing. The drugs were very volatile. It took a long time for them to stabilize. When Vanna became pregnant, they were still active in his system and were passed on to her in his sperm.

Forrester tipped the unauthorized bottle of Glenlivet back and took a long pull from it. He had a son.

Falcon took great pleasure in telling him about him in her letter. His name was Nikolai Drakov and, by now, he’d be 79 years old. She wrote that he appeared to be in his late twenties. She ran into him in London, purely by accident—he thought of Delaney and his fated coincidences. He had made a good life for himself. He was a very rich man, a playboy with a well-known reputation, especially for his astonishingly youthful appearance. She even joked about it. In the circles that he moved in, she wrote, he probably knew Oscar Wilde, which raised the intriguing possibility that he might have been the model for Dorian Grey. The fact that he looked so young had suggested another possibility to her. She thought at first that he was a member of the underground, a deserter from the Temporal Corps. In order to find out the truth, she had seduced him and found out a great deal more than she had bargained for.

He never knew his father, but he knew that his father’s name was Moses Forrester and he knew who and what Moses Forrester was. His mother had told him all about his father before she died. She had been raped and killed when Nikolai was just 15. Falcon took him to Plus Time with her. She obtained an implant for him, educated him up to the standards of the 27th century, and indoctrinated him into the Timekeepers. Now things had come full circle.

He was back in his own time again, with her. It was he who had murdered Rudolf Rassendyll, causing the disruption. Drakov was motivated by a hatred which Falcon had fed—a hatred for his father.

Forrester could hardly blame him.

Time had bent back in upon itself like some sort of double helix. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, with the Fate Factor tying the whole thing together. Forrester was sure that Finn Delaney would appreciate this little problem in zen physics. He imagined that Finn would be just thrilled to find out who got him into all of this, as would Andre and Lucas be. What could he tell them, that he was sorry?

Nikolai shouldn’t be alive, he thought. He’s a paradox. At the time he was conceived, I wouldn’t have been born for another six hundred years. He should not exist, but he does. And I have to kill him.

Or maybe he’ll kill me. One way or another, it all ends here.

He tipped the bottle back again, wishing that Derringer had brought more than just the one.

The large grandfather clock in the sitting room outside the royal bedchamber chimed twice. It was a soft sound, coming through the closed doors, one that would not have impinged upon the monarch’s sleep, but Finn heard it clearly. He seemed to hear even the slightest sound in his wing of the palace and in the streets outside. He lay on his back, chainsmoking Rudolf’s Turkish cigarettes and wondering when he would finally start feeling the effects of the previous day’s exertions.

He had been up since five o’clock in the morning, rudely awakened with a hangover to be plunged headlong into his impersonation of Rudolf Rassendyll impersonating Rudolf Elphberg. He was hustled at full gallop to the Hofban station, put aboard a train and drilled mercilessly in the requirements of the part he had to play. He was displayed to all of Strelsau in a grand parade, crowned king in an opulent and lengthy ceremony, driven through the city in a coach while improvising his way through his first meeting with Flavia, toasted in a seemingly interminable banquet, hustled once again on horseback at breakneck speed from Strelsau to Zenda and back again and yet
still
the adrenalin rush would not subside. It felt like being in battle.

He realized that the time had to come when it would hit him all at once, fearing that it would come at the worst possible moment, knowing that when it did come, he would have no choice but to resort to that small but no less potent dose of nitro that he carried. He loathed that horrifying stuff. It made him burn like some apocalyptic roman candle. When it wore off, he had the shakes for hours. The sleep that came thereafter was always filled with hideous nightmares that left him wondering at the sanity of a mind that could manufacture such twisted, tortured visions. He blew a long stream of smoke towards the large canopy above his bed and, for lack of anything better to do on this sleepless night, ran over the events of the last few hours in his mind, trying to get some sort of handle on the role he was assigned, a role in a demented play with only the barest outline of a script.

Poor Fritz von Tarlenheim, his nerves strained to the breaking point by his long vigil, almost had a stroke when he realized that it was not the king who had returned with Colonel Sapt. Finn wondered how he would have taken it if he had known that the man whom he first took to be the king returned from Zenda, but who was actually Rudolf Rassendyll was, in fact, not Rudolf Rassendyll at all, but a soldier from the 27th century named Finn Delaney, who just happened to resemble Rudolf Rassendyll, who just happened to resemble the king. Von Tarlenheim had been badly shaken when Sapt explained to him what had occurred. Finn could only imagine the effect on him if he were to have heard the
real
story.

You see, Fritz, it all has to do with something called the Fate Factor, which controls the flow of time.

Most people believe that time is absolute, but in point of fact, it’s not. Time is absolute only in a manner of speaking. It depends on where you are in time and what you’re doing in time at the time. It’s all a question of relativity—temporal relativity, to be exact. It’s a bit difficult to comprehend, but don’t concern yourself, old sport. The only man who ever came close to really comprehending it wound up committing suicide, so I wouldn’t work too hard at trying to understand it all if I were you. Basically, what it comes down to is that my friends and I have come here from the future in order to prevent a group of criminals from the 27th century who call themselves the Timekeepers from altering the historical sequence of events in this tiny fragment of what we refer to as Minus Time. Unfortunately, what’s making our job a bit difficult is the fact that not only are we supposed to make certain that events at this particular point in time proceed according to history when we aren’t exactly sure of the historical details, but—and this is where it gets a little sticky—these Timekeepers are apparently intent on killing us while we’re about it.

I realize it all sounds totally insane, Fritz, but the truth of the matter is that what we have here is a situation in which nothing seems to be happening the way it’s supposed to happen and no one is who or what they seem to be. I’m not really Rassendyll. There’s a woman here in Strelsau who calls herself the Countess Sophia and it appears that she’s involved with Rupert Hentzau and Black Michael, only she’s actually involved with the Timekeepers and her name is not Countess Sophia, but Sophia Falco, alias Elaine Cantrell, alias Falcon, a woman whose
true
identity no one seems to know. And while we know that Countess Sophia isn’t really Countess Sophia, at this point we have no way of knowing if Rupert Hentzau is really Rupert Hentzau or if Black Michael is really Black Michael. For that matter, Princess Flavia, for all I know, could be a B-girl from San Diego, Sapt could be a hired assassin from Detroit and, come to think of it, Fritz, I’m not too sure about you, either.

Finn crushed his cigarette out with a vengeance, lighting up another one immediately. Best to stop thinking that way, he told himself. That kind of paranoia will make you really crazy. He wondered where in hell Lucas and Andre were. Why hadn’t there been any contact? Not that there had been much chance for it, the way he’d been running around. His mind involuntarily returned to the image of Falcon standing on the balcony of the Grand Hotel, watching him with a mocking gaze, smiling. Had she wanted to, she could have taken him out right there and then. Rudolf the Fifth assassinated on the day of his coronation before thousands of witnesses. After that, Michael could have killed the king and there would have been a truly fine mess. So why hadn’t she done it?