“Now, Maeve…” Robert touched her shoulder.
“Be quiet, Robert.” The tone of her voice made it quite plain that she was in no mood for compromise.
LeGrand squinted and pursed his lips, deciding. “Very well,” he said. “I forget who I’m dealing with: Maeve Lindford, head of Outcomes & Consequences, and the bane of research for…” he caught himself briefly, “an eternity,” he concluded.
“And what outcome will we have here, Doctor?” Maeve waited, chin up, eyes unyielding.
“Yes,” LeGrand said slowly. “We knew you were coming. We’ve had time enough to determine that much. The clues in that purse you dropped made the research easy. And I must warn you, Madam—warn you both.” He looked at Nordhausen as well. “They know you are here as well—the other side. You know who they are. Your friend, Mr. Dorland, made their acquaintance in Castle Massiaf. What a stroke of luck that was—a perfect example of his Pushpoint theory. Oh, Research predicted that you would try and retrieve your Ammonite fossil, Professor. Still, that little affair in Wadi Rumm was quite interesting. It’s amazing that you stumbled on the well like that.”
“You mean to say you knew about the well all along?”
“Quite the opposite,” said LeGrand. “We knew nothing at all. They set the Oklo reaction up with great secrecy, and used it sparingly so as not to reveal its location to our sensors. You see, Time war is a rather delicate business. You don’t fight any battles. There are no sweeping maneuvers and heavy blows against the enemy. It’s all subtlety, subterfuge, misdirection. It’s the little things that count, after all, the Pushpoints. So you can imagine our concern when we got a variation alert just as you were trying to slip out of Jordan for your surreptitious rendezvous with the Arabesque.”
“You knew about that?” Nordhausen seemed a bit flustered. “But I took the greatest care to conceal my plans. Why, not even Paul knew what I was up to until I had him in the helo over Wadi Rumm! How did you learn about the ship?”
“That’s irrelevant,” LeGrand waved him off. “The point is, we were caught off guard by a hidden Pushpoint at the edge of that well. When Mr. Dorland stumbled in the dark, and took his fall, it set off quite a stir back in operations. We had a mission into the very same milieu where he manifested—a rather delicate mission—and he upset the proverbial apple cart with his arrival at Castle Massiaf.”
Maeve smiled. “Let me guess,” she said with a slight edge of sarcasm. “The Horns of Hattin…”
LeGrand gave her a penetrating look. “Indeed, Madam. Do you think we would allow something like that to stand if we could prevent it? The entire Christian army was slaughtered. A hundred Templars were lined up and beheaded, one by one, with that Moslem flair for the dramatic.”
“The hostage executions were all over the Internet during the second war in Iraq,” said Maeve.
“Then you can understand our motives easily enough. The battle of Hattin set back Christian plans in the Middle East for generations. It undid ninety years of painful consolidation in the kingdom of Outrémere, and caused a great deal of misery and suffering for decades thereafter.”
“Yes,” said Maeve. “The third Crusade was the answer, but Richard The Lion Heart failed to deliver Jerusalem and met an unseemly end in a German prison. The Fourth Crusade gets diverted to Constantinople by greedy Venetian Merchants. Lots of pain and suffering there, I suppose.”
“We had our reasons,” said LeGrand, then caught himself, realizing that he had said a bit too much. “But in the matter of Mr. Dorland’s visit to Massiaf, we could not quite figure out if you were running a deliberate mission or if it was mere happenstance.”
“Yes,” said Maeve, “there are always reasons…” she let the phrase dangle, looking LeGrand square in the eye. “Tell me, Doctor. Were you trying to kill Reginald?”
LeGrand jumped at the accusation, then narrowed his gaze, somewhat determined. “That would be quite unseemly,” he said. “Did we want him dead? Certainly. Did we think we could be so bold as to… assassinate him? Absolutely not. There are rules in the game, my dear. Violations are severe. Reginald was a Prime, as you well know. Without his headstrong influence, poor Guy never takes the crown from Baldwin’s daughter. Without his lust for vengeance and his greed, Saladin is never provoked to muster the Moslem armies. Without his brazen insults and bullying ways, the Christian army never sorties out to confront Saladin at Hattin, and things turn out… quite differently.”
“I can imagine,” said Maeve. “So what were you up to, Doctor? And how did we upset your little scheme?”
“We let it be someone else’s little scheme,” said LeGrand. “We were trying to arrange it so they killed Reginald. After all—the word assassin dates from that very milieu. There were experts in the mountains of Syria who could do the job well enough. All we had to do was make certain Reginald gave them sufficient reason. Our adversaries were not sleeping, however. They must have been on to us—or so we thought. It took us some time before we realized they were running couriers into Massiaf to their agent in place at that location.”
“Sinan,” said Maeve, matter of factly.”
“Quite so,” said LeGrand. “You really are very good, Madame. Reading about you is one thing, but seeing you work this out with that steely resolve of yours is quite another. Touché!”
“Spare me the flattery,” Maeve put in.
Nordhausen was following along as best he could, but he had a puzzled expression on his face. “See here,” he began: “Then this Sinan, the one the Crusaders feared as the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’, was indeed an agent from the future?”
“Of course,” said LeGrand. “He was a perfect little Osama Bin Ladin for that milieu. He found a disaffected cult—just another of the many branches on the tree of Islam, and he managed to nurture and prune it until he had his crop of Assassins. They became a perfect instrument for the radicals for the next 200 years—until we put the Mongols on to them. In the meantime, Sinan poses quite a challenge for us.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Nordhausen. “If he was as skilled an adversary as you indicate, then why would he allow himself to be duped into taking the life of a Prime Mover?”
“Every barrel of fruit has a few bad apples,” said LeGrand. “Men are petty, they have pride, desire, odd motives that can be played upon by one who knows the span of their entire life. Sinan was not our target. We knew there were others in the Ismaili cult who could not abide a man like Reginald. We tried to get rid of Reginald ourselves, but to no avail. We urged him to conduct his little known raid by sea along the coast of Arabia, hoping to leave him hopelessly stranded there, but then, by some miracle, he escaped. We made sure he was restored to Castle Kerak on the southern border near the great Islamic trade route into Egypt, and then we whispered of the Sultan’s caravans, fat with gold, and spice and silk.”
“And it almost worked,” said Maeve.
“Almost.” LeGrand looked at her suspiciously. “Mr. Dorland’s fall into the Well of Souls undid our plan at the last moment. The man we were hoping to influence within the Ismaili cult failed to act. We aren’t exactly sure what Mr. Dorland did, or how he did it, but the assassination plot against Reginald was foiled. In fact, he managed to get the Assassins in Massiaf at each other’s throats! Quite effective for an agent saboteur! Well, we should have expected nothing less. After all, we relied on you people for the Palma reversal, so it should be no surprise to us that you find ways of… accomplishing things with great success. After all,” he smiled wanly, “you are the Founders.”