Time and Time Again, page 13
It was her last phrase that stopped him.
That’s why I chose you.
McCluskey shrugged. ‘Oh well, your loss. I admire your self-discipline. That Cassie must have been one hell of a girl.’
‘She was,’ Stanton said quietly.
They lapsed into silence, McCluskey smoking happily, smiling to herself as she browsed greedily over the lunch menu.
That’s why I chose you.
Stanton found his mind returning to the previous morning on the Galata Bridge. To the cold damp stones he had picked himself up from. To the moment after he’d saved the mother and the girl and boy.
He’d saved that little family but he hadn’t saved his own.
Now, he suddenly wondered, had it actually been infinitely worse? Had he been the cause of their deaths?
‘Lobster!’ he heard McCluskey exclaim. ‘They are serving fresh lobster. On a train! God, I love this century.’
Stanton got up. Opening the inner door of the compartment, he glanced out into the corridor. McCluskey, salivating over the lunch menu, scarcely noticed.
‘O – M – effing – G,’ she said. ‘They do a sweet soufflé for dessert. You can’t cook a soufflé on a train, surely? Well, let me tell you, boy, I intend to find out.’
Stanton sat down once more and stared at McCluskey.
Could it be true?
Had he really been so used?
They had needed him. That shadowy collective known as Chronos had needed him. Or at any rate, a man just like him. Guts Stanton, celebrated survivalist. Adventurer. Man of proven resource and decisive action.
But they had needed him without ties.
That’s why I chose you.
Stanton’s mind ran back to Christmas Eve, when he’d first learned of Chronos. He thought about the weeks and months since. Running in his mind through conversations past and finding that seeds of doubt had been planted which had only now germinated and were showing on the surface of his conscience.
He should have guessed before. It was so obvious when you came to think about it.
Once more he got up and checked the corridor. This time McCluskey noticed.
‘Bit fidgety, Hugh? Something on your mind?’
‘A bit, yes.’
‘Care to share?’
‘Yes, I would, as a matter of fact. I was just wondering how you knew that there were four of them?’
‘Sorry? Not following. Four of who?’
‘The hit-and-run murderers. The ones in the car who wiped out my family. “All four got clean away.” That’s what you said. On Christmas Eve when we had that first breakfast. How did you know how many of them were in the stolen car?’
‘Well … I don’t know. Did I say that? I suppose I must have read about it somewhere. Why do you ask?’
‘You didn’t read it. It wasn’t reported. Violent death’s a bit too common where we come from to make the papers and there was nothing on the net. No details were ever published. But you knew how many were in the car. “All four got clean away” – that was what you said.’
‘I don’t know what I said, Hugh, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now are you going to have a look at this menu? Because I want to order lunch.’
‘Last spring.’
‘What?’
‘That was when Davies said you were choosing your agent. On that day when we were in his Incident Room. When he said that he approved of your choice. Your choice of me. He said that the committee had met “last spring”. And you suggested me. Last spring.’
‘Yes, last spring, last spring, what about last bloody spring?’
‘My wife and children were killed in the late summer, professor.’
‘What has your family got to do with it? I brought up your name because you’re Guts bloody Stanton. You’re an obvious choice.’
‘Yes, a choice who would most certainly refuse the job if it meant consigning the only people he loved on earth to an existential oblivion. A man who in fact would have tried to stop you with everything in his power.’
‘Hugh, please. Come on! What the hell are you insinuating?’ She had put down the lunch menu. And her hand was on her bag.
‘You needed a soldier. A special operative. A trained man. Someone who could adapt to and survive in any environment.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘And it would also help if that soldier had some understanding of the past and the people and events that created it. A history graduate would be good. Decent German was another prerequisite, you said so yourself. That’s already a pretty specific order. But when you add to that the requirement that this soldier has to be desperate and alone, without love, a man simply waiting for death, a man who would happily step away from the whole world and everyone in it because there was nothing and no one he cared about any more … What was it Newton said? Let them be without ties.’
McCluskey’s hand was inside her bag now.
‘You might wait a century for such a very specific type of man and still not find him. But Newton only gave you a year.’
‘This is crazy!’
She was smiling, trying to laugh. But for Stanton that big, red, happy face that had always seemed so gleeful now looked sinister. As if a mask had fallen away. He had spent a lifetime reading fear and lies in the eyes of his adversaries and he read them in McCluskey now.
‘You chose me, professor, and then you set about ensuring that I was without those inconvenient ties. I can’t believe I didn’t work it out before. It’s so bloody obvious when you think about it. You murdered my wife and children.’
McCluskey pulled the gun from her bag and pointed it at him.
‘I could try to bluster it out,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t believe me. Because you’re right. It is pretty obvious. I mean, what are the chances of finding a qualified man who didn’t care whether he lived or died?’
‘Pretty slim.’
‘We took a view, Hugh. We had to save the world.’
‘And if it had turned out that Newton was wrong? I’d just lose my family?’
‘Collateral damage, Hugh. You know how things go.’
‘Oh yes, professor. I know how things go.’
Stanton’s eyes had narrowed to two slits, burning into McCluskey, who was squirming with anguish.
‘Oh bugger! Bugger, bugger, bugger,’ she said. ‘This is just awful. There we were beginning to have fun and … now I suppose it’s all spoiled. It is spoiled, isn’t it … I suppose.’
Her eyes were pleading. But her gun was steady.
‘You had my wife and kids murdered, professor.’
‘Yes but now, Hugh, now they never actually existed … So it’s OK … isn’t it? To move on?’
‘It doesn’t look very OK, does it? With you pointing a gun at me.’
McCluskey thought for a moment.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know you can never forgive me and I don’t blame you, of course, but you have a job to do, Hugh. The most important job in history and that’s what you need to focus on now. So here’s what I suggest. Our first stop is Bucharest in about five or six hours, so we just sit here tight together till then and, when we arrive, you get out. I’d go myself but frankly it’s easier to cover you with this little six shot if it’s you that gets out of the carriage. Fortunately we have our own door, which is such a civilized design, don’t you think? You go off and fulfil your mission and I just disappear. You’ll never see me again, Hugh. And I won’t flap my wings too much, I promise. Bit of dinner and the theatre is all I ask and quite frankly I’ll be dead in half a decade anyway. You have the whole world before you. A world you will have saved. Don’t spoil all that for a bit of revenge.’
‘How do you mean, spoil it?’
‘Well, you see, if you won’t get out of the carriage, Hugh, I’ll have to kill you. You do see that, don’t you? So that you don’t kill me. That’s obvious.’
‘But what about the mission? The most important mission in history? If you kill me, the Great War will begin again in just ten weeks. Europe’s great calamity, professor. The thing we came to stop.’
There was a film of tears over McCluskey’s eyes now, although that may have been as a result of the smoke drifting up from the smouldering cigarette clamped between her teeth. She had both hands on her gun now, arms held out in classic firing position.
‘I know it’s wrong, Hugh. And I do care, I care so much. All those millions of young men. The Russian princesses murdered in that awful cellar with their poor jewels sewn in their knickers. The terrible dictators, the wars and the genocides and the starvation to come … but … I’m just a selfish old fool, you see, and I do so want to see the Diaghilev ballet.’
Stanton stared at her. He had always been proud of his ability to read people and yet it seemed he had never known this woman at all. So weak, so selfish. So … appalling a human being.
‘I loved my wife and kids,’ he said.
‘Oh I know, Hugh, I know.’
He stood up. Her knuckles whitened on the trigger.
‘Please don’t make me do it, Hugh! Because I will. I really will. Just get off the train at Bucharest. It’s easy, it’s all good. I’ll be gone, I promise.’
‘Goodbye, professor.’
He reached forward towards the gun. She pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked against the empty chamber. McCluskey stared at it for a moment in surprise.
She clicked again.
‘Bugger,’ she said.
‘You didn’t think I was going to leave a half-concussed lunatic like you with a loaded gun in her bag, did you?’
She was about to speak but Stanton reached forward and took hold of her by the neck. He pushed his thumb deep into her windpipe, preventing her from shouting out.
‘You were actually going to kill me,’ he said, ‘and screw the twentieth century. I really didn’t think you’d do that.’
McCluskey could only offer a choking grunt in reply.
He dragged her to her feet and swung her towards the outside door of the carriage. In the same movement, he reached through the open window with his free hand and, jamming his back against the frame, opened it from the outside. McCluskey’s eyes widened in terror as the door swung open.
‘You’re scared!’ Stanton shouted over the rattling of the train. ‘Big bullying old Professor McCluskey’s scared. Scared of dying. Christ, I really would have credited you with more balls. Shows what a blind idiot I am, eh?’
The train was travelling through rocky, low-lying foothills. Glancing out Stanton saw that there was a steep, sparsely vegetated scree slope below them. Nobody was going to survive hitting that at speed. McCluskey could see it too. He felt her windpipe convulsing as her body tried to retch with fear. He felt a sharp pain in his shins as she began kicking at them.
He dragged her face towards his own. Their eyes met for a moment.
There was so much he would have liked to say to her.
About how much he hated her. About how much he hoped there was a hell and that she would burn in it for eternity.
But what was the point? He just threw her out of the train.
He watched as her body span and bounced like a broken doll crashing a hundred metres down the slope.
Stanton stepped back inside, leaving the carriage door open.
He checked in McCluskey’s coat and bag for anything suspicious or anachronistic. He took her gun, which had fallen from her hand, her modern medicines and her underwear. There seemed to be nothing else which she had brought with her from the twenty-first century. Pretty much all that was left in her bag was booze and tobacco. The authorities could draw from that whatever conclusion they wished.
Checking the corridor for the third and final time Stanton slipped out of the compartment and returned to his own.
He was now entirely alone in a new universe.
18
THE NEWS THAT an English lady travelling alone had somehow managed to fall from the train spread through the carriages while Stanton was having lunch in the dining car. Some passengers to the rear had spotted what had looked like a falling woman and alerted the guard. A search of the train revealed a first-class passenger to be missing and the door of her private compartment to be open.
Stanton had just ordered the lobster and the dessert soufflé.
Fuck her. Let her rot in hell.
If he could have the moment of killing her again, the moment where her eyes had met his in mute appeal, he’d gouge them from her skull with his fingers before tossing her out of the train.
That murdering bitch. That evil bitch.
He’d been on his way home. To make it right with Cassie. They could have had nine more months together. Nine months of happiness and love, before being evaporated, oblivious, into time and space along with the rest of humanity. They would have been stars together. Him, Cassie, Tessa and Bill, twinkling in the same firmament. Instead, because of McCluskey, they had never even existed and he was exiled in a different universe.
Why couldn’t she have chosen someone else? The regiment was full of hard men. Resourceful men. More experienced assassins than him. MI6 was busting with bored wannabe heroes desperate to get into the field but stuck behind computers because they couldn’t speak any African or Asian languages. Why not choose one of them? But of course any other guy would have far more dependants and emotional loyalties than he did. His life was unique in its isolation. No parents, no siblings, no kids by previous partnerships. A loner by circumstance and later by choice. All he had had in the whole world was his own tiny little family. They were his world.
And so easy to kill. Two little kids, clinging to their mum. How simple is that? Knock the lot off at once.
Any other guy McCluskey and her murderous crew of skeletons might have set up would have put two and two together at once … Hang on, they’d have said to that lying witch, you needed a man without ties and now all my loved ones, devoted friends and extended family have been knocked off separately over the last six months. Something fishy here.
They’d have shot the disgusting old Gorgon where she stood. In her study, in front of her fire, cognac in hand.
But his whole life could be dispensed with in one simple car crash. God, McCluskey must have punched the air in joy when she settled on him. He was absolutely perfect.
‘I’m sorry, Cassie,’ he whispered to himself, as he pushed the soufflé away untasted. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa and Bill. It was me those bastards wanted. But you paid the price.’
Stanton kept pretty much to his compartment for the rest of the journey to Paris, ignoring the bar carriage and the occasional efforts of other passengers to make conversation with the tall, handsome loner when he took his meals in the dining car. There was, of course, some consternation over McCluskey’s death. The express made an unscheduled stop at Lüleburgaz where police joined the train. Everyone in first class was interviewed, including Stanton, but since he and McCluskey had been careful to book and board the train separately and he had not been seen entering her private compartment there was nothing to connect him. The lady had been elderly and travelling alone. An opened bottle of brandy had been found in her bag and it was concluded that she had suffered a terrible accident while trying to open the window under the influence of alcohol.
Nonetheless it had been a close-run thing. Another potentially disastrous action which could so easily have ruined everything. Stanton imagined how he would have felt if he’d had to watch the oncoming disaster of the Great War while awaiting trial for murder in a Turkish prison cell.
More than ever he needed urgently to hide out. He needed to find a place where he would do no harm and where no harm could be done to him for the twenty-seven days that must elapse before he could begin his mission. On the spur of the moment he decided he would return to the shore of Loch Maree in the most remote part of north Scotland, the place where he’d first received McCluskey’s email and his mission had begun. He decided he’d travel there directly, Orient Express to Paris, boat train to London, sleeper to Inverness and pony and trap to Maree.
There was a comfort in the plan too. In the excitement of the last thirty-six hours, Stanton had been finally starting to readjust to his bereavement. He’d even been on the verge of taking up smoking again. But the revelation of McCluskey’s brutal treachery had torn savagely at a wound that had begun to heal. He knew he missed Cassie and the kids as much as he had in the first moment of his loss, and to this deep sadness was added the furious guilt that in a way he had been the cause of their deaths.
Of all the places in the UK he could visit, he imagined that distant Loch Maree would be the most similar to its twenty-first-century state. He’d been there only a few months before, trying to come to terms with his bereavement; he would return there now and spend another week or two saying goodbye to what he’d lost.
He made only one small exception to his plan.
On arriving in London he made a detour between Victoria Station and Euston Station, when instead of going direct he took the underground to Camden Town.
He hadn’t intended to do it but on arriving at Victoria off the boat train he’d been seized with a sudden and fervent desire to do what he had been planning to do when he had jumped ship in the Aegean, on the morning he had put Cassie’s emails in his wallet, given up smoking, resigned his job and headed for an airport.
To go home.
It was the underground map that made him do it. A very different map to the one he was familiar with but nonetheless featuring stations he knew, including his own, Camden Town.
He could still do what he had done so many times before when arriving at some London station. Just hop on the tube and go home.
To the same street. To the same house.
It was still there, he knew that. Or more accurately, already there.
In St Marks Crescent, in Primrose Hill. A nineteenth-century street. The very bricks and mortar he had bought with Cassie during their brief period of wealth after the webcasts took off. The home they’d shared. It actually existed in this new world he was living in. There was no real connection, of course; he knew that. The house was over a century younger than the one he’d known and nothing that he had ever touched or loved existed in it. But it was there. His house, just the same, or at least the exterior would be the same because it had been protected under its Grade 2 listing.
