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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
248 Time Wars #3
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,
The Pimpernel Plot
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
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