Time and Time Again, page 9
‘You want me to prevent the assassination by killing him?’ Stanton asked. ‘I mean, in our little game of what if, he’s your target?’
‘Well, he certainly held all the cards. And he certainly deserved a bullet. Terrible terrrrible man. Murderrrrous man.’ Davies seemed to chew each word, rolling his r’s with morbid pleasure. ‘Y’d no want to meet him in a dark alley. But then y’d no want to meet any member of the Serrrrbian military in a dark alleyway. Not then and not now. Crazed fanatical bastards to a man. Friend Dimitrijević was a man of truly savage brutality. D’y ken how he earned his position as Serbia’s Chief of Espionage?’
‘Not really,’ Stanton replied.
‘By organizing and perrrsonally leading the brutal murder of his own king! How’s that for audacity? You couldna’ make it up. Friend Apis thought the monarch he served was too conciliatory to the Austrians so he decided to kill him and install a king that better suited his taste. I say kill, butcher would be a better word. Because in 1903, him and a gang of cronies, all crown officers, mind, who’d sworn an oath of loyalty, stormed the royal palace. They shot their way through the building, forced the king’s guards to reveal where the royal couple were hiding, then shot King Alexander thirty times and Queen Draga eighteen. They then stripped the bullet-riddled corpses naked, slashed them up with their sabres and threw them out of the palace window.’
‘They did things rough in those days,’ McCluskey observed.
‘Aye, they did, professor. They most certainly did. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more violent spy. Or, and here’s the point, Captain Stanton, a cooler one. Because the very next day he installs a different king and makes himself Chief of Intelligence. He then proceeds to dominate espionage in Central Europe for the following decade, culminating in the Sarajevo assassination. I would say it’s no exaggeration to say that in June 1914 this man was the most dangerous man in the world. The question is: should we kill him?’
‘Well, obviously,’ McCluskey said, digging in her handbag for a sandwich.
‘Ah’m askin’ your man here, professor. Not you.’
Stanton stared at the photograph of Apis for a full minute before replying.
‘It seems to me,’ he said finally, ‘that if we try to kill this man, one of two things will happen. Either we bungle it or we succeed.’
McCluskey snorted loudly as if she’d expected better of Stanton but Davies nodded.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘If we bungle it, which I think is the more likely outcome, we’ll have seriously spooked him.’
‘Why would we bungle it?’ McCluskey protested through a mouthful of tuna mayonnaise. ‘I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. You’re Guts Stanton, remember!’
‘Prof, this guy stormed a palace in 1903 and personally killed his own King and Queen. Yet he’s still alive and pulling the strings in the same palace more than a decade later. Just how good a survivor do you think he’d have to be to manage that? Colonel Apis must have been the most tempting espionage target on the whole continent. Every other spy in the game would have dreamt of taking him out. But not one of them did. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević was second-guessing assassins before breakfast. So let’s not make the mistake of thinking that just because we’re coming at him from the future armed with a slightly better gun, Apis is suddenly going to present a soft target.’
‘But that’s the point, Hugh! We have hindsight,’ McCluskey countered. ‘We know many of his movements from historical documents; that gives us a massive advantage.’
‘Exactly. So I get close enough to take a shot but for any number of reasons don’t finish him off? What’s he going to conclude? That a time-travelling assassin has used history books to trace him? No. He’s going to presume his network has been infiltrated and therefore all of his plans are compromised. He will put the Black Hand in lock-down and clean it out root and branch. He’ll cancel the Sarajevo plot without any doubt, put Princip and the whole team to sleep and bide his time before beginning entirely afresh.’
Davies grunted approvingly.
‘Stanton is absolutely right,’ he said. ‘A failed attempt would be a disaster.’
‘Well, nothing’s foolproof, of course,’ McCluskey grumbled. ‘But if we succeed!’
‘Yes. let’s presume for a moment our killer succeeds,’ Stanton went on. ‘He goes back in time and manages to put a bullet into the heart of the most experienced and accomplished spy in Europe. What will the repercussions be? It certainly won’t mean the end of the Black Hand organization, that’s for sure. Martyred leaders cast long shadows. Apis had comrades, blood brothers, men as tough and as fanatically devoted to the Serbian cause as he was. Look at them, Antić … Dulić … Marinković and Popović.’
Stanton turned to the grainy photographs that surrounded Apis on the wall, all connected by strips of green fabric tape. Hard-eyed men with frozen stares. Each one of them could easily have been a murderer or a cop, and of course each one of them was both.
‘What will these men do with their leader slain? One thing’s for sure: they won’t give up. In fact, they’ll be yearning for revenge. So who will they blame? Again, not a hitman from the future. They will blame their mortal enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Secret Service, and they will react by attacking the Austro-Hungarians where it hurts most. By killing one of their royals. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example. So by taking out Apis we don’t remove the threat to the Archduke at all. We merely place the planning of it in the hands of different people. People whose plans we wouldn’t know. Killing Apis is, in fact, as bad as failing to kill him because it removes our single ace. We know what Apis did. We know he had the Archduke killed on the twenty-eighth of June 1914 and we know how he did it. If that day changes we’ll be as much in the dark as the Austrians were at the time. The only certain way to prevent the murder of Franz Ferdinand is to stop the man who actually killed him from pulling the trigger and to do so at the last possible moment.’
For the first time Davies’s hard, craggy face seemed almost to smile, his thin lips grimacing like a knife cut in a mouldy lemon.
‘You chose y’ man well, professor,’ he said.
‘Yes, well, I told you he was good,’ McCluskey said, slightly huffily. ‘You didn’t believe me at the time.’
The brief shadow of a smile disappeared as Davies turned his hawkish countenance back to Stanton.
‘Verrrry true. If I were honest with you, Captain Stanton—’
‘Ex-captain,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The Regiment chucked me out.’
‘Exactly. And when the Chronos Intelligence Committee assembled last spring I didn’t relish the idea of entrusting the future of European civilization to a man who’d sacrificed a promising army career in favour of media celebrity.’
‘Well, that’s not quite how—’
‘But it’s a fool who won’t admit when he’s wrong. And I like your style, son, I really do. McCluskey was right, you’re the man for the job. The first part of which is to get to Sarajevo two months from now and neutralize the man who killed the Archduke.’
‘Gavrilo Princip,’ Stanton said.
‘Aye. Princip. The man who fired the first shot of the Great War.’
‘Stupid, stupid bastard,’ McCluskey muttered bitterly.
All three of them turned towards the photo on the wall. An absurdly youthful-looking lad of nineteen, his sad, slightly bewildered expression and deep-set, almost romantic eyes stared back at them from an image that had been reproduced millions of times in the last century.
Could it really be possible that Stanton would be looking into those actual eyes in eight weeks’ time? He was almost beginning to believe that it could.
12
IN THE EARLY hours of the morning of 31 May 2025, Hugh Stanton left Trinity College Cambridge in a small motorcade which he was surprised to see was travelling with a police escort. The Companions of Chronos might have been past their prime but they clearly still counted some pretty influential people among their members.
‘Best to be safe,’ McCluskey said. ‘Imagine, Isaac Newton arranges a time-precise rendezvous with history across a distance of three hundred years and we miss it because we’re stuck in traffic. We’ve got cops in Turkey too. God knows how it’s been arranged but I do know that some of our people are still pretty well connected with the Foreign Office.’
As the little column of cars and motorbikes drove out of the college gates, Stanton glanced out of the window and saw the motorcycle he had parked near the porter’s lodge. He’d scarcely ridden it since arriving at Cambridge five months earlier. The alarm signal had probably bled the battery dry by now.
He didn’t think it was even still insured. The reminders were no doubt among the rest of the many months of post that would be piled up on the inside of the front door of the house that he had never returned to.
He wondered now if he ever would.
They left Cambridge behind and headed for the motorway. McCluskey was the only Companion of Chronos who was travelling with him. The others had said their goodbyes at a farewell dinner on the previous evening during which many emotional and increasingly drunken speeches had been made in Stanton’s honour. He himself had drunk moderately but declined to reply. It was all too weird. They treated him as some sort of messiah figure, a hero ready to cleanse and redeem the earth from wayward humanity. Stanton didn’t feel that way at all, not least because he simply could not believe in what they all thought was going to happen in Istanbul that night.
‘I know deep down you don’t actually believe any of this, Hugh,’ McCluskey remarked.
‘Look, I’m prepared to accept that something might happen,’ Stanton conceded. ‘Newton obviously believed it and he was pretty much the cleverest man who ever lived. Perhaps I’ll be vaporized by a thunderbolt. Or else gravitational pull will tear me in half or suck me up into a black hole.’
‘But you don’t believe you’re about to embark on a journey to the past?’
‘Well, come on, do you? The Great War started a hundred and eleven years ago this August. Do you really think we can stop it now?’
‘All I know is that I pray we can.’
They both lapsed into silence but Stanton could see that evangelical zeal still shone in McCluskey’s eyes. She really believed. They all believed, those crazy old men and women who called themselves Chronos; imagined that they were all going to be genetically reassembled, young and lusty once more in the sun-lit uplands of a Britain reborn.
‘Time will tell, eh?’ McCluskey said, almost under her breath.
‘Yes,’ Stanton agreed, ‘so you keep telling me. Time will tell.’
They flew from Farnborough by private plane. Most of the equipment Stanton had been supplied with travelled with them. But the weaponry was already waiting in Turkey.
‘Even we Chronations can’t get a telescopic-sighted rifle through airport security,’ McCluskey explained.
The flight took almost four hours, during which McCluskey ate everything that was offered and as ever drank considerably. Then she managed to get herself stuck in the tiny loo.
‘You know, they had one of the most famous seasons ever at Drury Lane in 1914,’ she said once the stewardess had freed her and she’d waddled somewhat shakily back to her seat. ‘The Diaghilev Company came from Russia and just blew London away. They did ten operas and fourteen ballets through the spring and summer and nobody had ever seen anything like it. Or, in fact, ever would again. Sets and crowd scenes on a truly epic scale, impossible to do today, nobody could afford it. You really ought to try and see a couple, maybe even slip one in before you go to Sarajevo. You’ll have a month to kill, after all. But I’d send a telegram ahead from Istanbul if I were you because it was a very hot ticket. You’ll probably need to go on the list for returns.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Stanton said.
‘And Pygmalion’s just opened at His Majesty’s. Imagine it! You can go to the very first ever production of Pygmalion. With Mrs Campbell as Eliza and Shaw himself directing! Isn’t that almost too wonderful to imagine?’ McCluskey had a faraway look in her eye. ‘The London Theatre in 1914,’ she whispered almost to herself, ‘now that is a dream.’
Then she fell asleep and didn’t wake up till they’d arrived in Istanbul.
They were driven to the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera where rooms were waiting for them. As the porters helped McCluskey out of the car she paused for a moment and looked up at the imposing building.
‘They restored it a few years ago,’ she said. ‘Got it right back to its original glory. So in fact this is just how it’ll look tomorrow whatever happens. Whether you’re in 1914 or boring old 2025.’
‘I’m sorry to say I really do think it’ll be 2025,’ Stanton said, ‘because there’s no such thing as time travel, as we’ll be forced to accept at midnight. When you and I are feeling pretty stupid standing alone in a cellar in the old dockland quarter of Istanbul.’
‘Well, if that’s the case we’ll just have to find a late bar to toast Sir Isaac Newton and the fact that even geniuses can get it wrong.’
It was mid-afternoon and having checked in and deposited their bags in their rooms, Stanton and McCluskey returned to the lobby where they met up with members of a local security company who had been engaged to take them to the property the Companions of Chronos had recently purchased.
‘I thought we should have a bit of a reconnoitre while there’s still some light,’ McCluskey said. ‘Don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark tonight with no idea where we’re going.’
They were driven over the Galata Bridge and down into the old dock area of Stamboul. There they found a street filled with houses that had once been wealthy but were no longer so. They pulled up outside a derelict building that in its heyday must have been an impressive city mansion.
A security man stood at the front door ready to let them in.
‘Just one guard,’ McCluskey explained. ‘Don’t want to be ostentatious. There’s nothing here worth stealing and it wouldn’t do to draw attention to ourselves.’
They picked their way in the gathering gloom through the ruin, stepping over shattered glass and bits of broken furniture. Quite recently the place had been squatted and there was much graffiti on the walls. Since then only tramps and vandals had ventured in and now the place reeked of piss. Not a single window remained whole in its frame.
Guiding themselves by torchlight they found their way via a precipitous stairwell down to the cellar, a much larger space than they had expected, with arched vaults disappearing into the darkness.
‘It extends beneath the next house,’ McCluskey explained. ‘It was a wine cellar when Newton’s agents bought the place and they just locked and barred the door. The wine was still there when the hospital closed after the war. It will still be there when you arrive tonight. Revolting, of course, after two hundred years but you should try one for fun. I know I would. Not many people get the chance to taste wine laid down in the early eighteenth century. Imagine that. Wine laid down more than a generation before Marie Antoinette was born.’
Stanton didn’t reply but instead took out a satellite navigation device and, following it, found his way to a place about seven metres from the door they’d entered by, halfway between it and the deeper darkness of the wine vaults. Then, using the coordinates Sengupta had supplied, he took a piece of chalk and marked out the relevant surface area.
‘Newton’s sentry box,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ McCluskey said. ‘Bit bloody tight, better mark the centre.’
There was a broken chair nearby and in the torchlight Stanton took it and placed it carefully in position.
‘So this is where you’ll be standing at midnight,’ McCluskey said. ‘Just think how pleased old Isaac would be to know that his message got through and that somebody acted on it.’
Standing in the silent cellar in the light of just two torch beams it suddenly all seemed very real to Stanton. As if this place really could be the gateway to another universe.
McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts.
‘It has to be true,’ she said firmly. ‘Mankind deserves a second chance. A better twentieth century than the one we were born into.’
‘Well,’ Stanton said, ‘I don’t agree we deserve it. But right now I truly do hope that we get it.’
13
HAVING COMPLETED THEIR reconnoitre, Stanton and McCluskey retraced their steps through the now darkened building and returned to the hotel. That evening they met at the Orient Bar then went through to supper in the restaurant. Once again McCluskey made the most of the food and wine, determined to enjoy what she referred to as her ‘last supper’. Stanton, on the other hand, ate lightly and drank only water.
‘I suppose on the off chance that Newton’s right I should have my wits about me,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t want to time-travel under the influence.’
After they’d eaten, Stanton left the professor to her coffee and cognac and went to his room to change. Looking at himself in the mirror he reflected that he would cut a fairly unusual figure in Istanbul that night, wearing the socks, knee britches and thornproof tweed of an early-twentieth-century man of action. But then Istanbul was a renowned party town so he doubted anyone would notice much. Next he checked his kit, which he was carrying in one large holdall bag, plus a smaller one with an emergency version of the same. He had guns and explosives, medical supplies, his computers, IDs, and a great deal of money in various currencies and government bonds. These last had all been expertly forged from originals taken from museums and bank archives.
At 10 p.m. he met McCluskey in the lobby and once more they took a limousine across the Galata Bridge. The streets by this time were full of evening revellers so their progress was slower, which was why they had allowed themselves plenty of time.
