Time and Time Again

27

WHEN HE WOKE up, perhaps an hour later, Bernadette wasn’t in bed any more.

She had put her slip back on and was at the table in the sitting-room part of the room.

Where the porter had put Stanton’s bags.

For a moment, as his consciousness surfaced, Stanton thought it was Cassie. He’d seen her sitting just that way so often, in the darkness, in her nightie. When she’d had some pressing work or study to do and had crept out of bed in the night to do it, and he’d awoken and seen her at the table across the room, her face a kind of monochrome grey silver, illuminated by the light from her computer.

But it wasn’t Cassie.

It was Bernadette’s face that was turned grey silver.

Illuminated by the light from a computer.

He was out of bed in a second but she was equally quick and he found that he was staring down the barrel of his own Glock semi-automatic.

It had been in his bag. Alongside the computer, which was concealed within a false book. The bag from which he’d got the multi-tool with the corkscrew to open the bottle of hock.

‘For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she replied, seeming genuinely surprised at what to her must have been an unfamiliar profanity.

‘I said what are you doing? Put that down! Why did you look in my bag? Christ, Bernie, put that gun down!’

She didn’t put it down but continued instead to point it with steady hand at his head.

‘I got up in the night,’ she said. ‘And I wanted something to read, and your bag was open and I spotted a book in it. And I wondered what a strange man like you reads to amuse himself. I know it’s wrong to pry but I’m a girl and I couldn’t help it, and when I opened the book I found an even stranger thing.’

He hadn’t locked his bag. The wine and the moonlight had got the better of him. He’d meant to relock it but then she’d started undressing and now a woman born in the 1880s had come into contact with a state-of-the-art twenty-first-century computer that would have looked like something out of science fiction in the nineteen eighties.

‘Look, Bernie,’ he began, ‘that … that’s a sort of light box … it’s to do with photography … it’s a kind of portable developing room … it’s a secret invention … but nothing very mysterious, just small and compact, that’s all.’

He took a step towards her.

‘Don’t move, Hugh!’ she barked, levelling the gun in front of her eyes and taking aim between his.

‘Bernie? What is this? You kind of guessed I was a spy. And you were right. I’m a sort of agent. I have equipment. Secret equipment—’

‘I touched your “photographic light box”,’ she interrupted, ‘and I don’t understand it and I think it’s very strange and quite frankly rather scary but not half as scary as the image that appeared on it.’

Stanton went cold. He remembered what had been on the screen the last time he had used his computer, in Sarajevo on the previous morning. Another imbecilic lapse of judgement. Why hadn’t he quit out of the program? Why hadn’t he shut down? ‘Now look, Bernie,’ he began.

‘It was a map, Hugh. A map of Sarajevo. The Latin Bridge area of Sarajevo on the north bank of the Miljacka. And the route of the Archduke’s motorcade was marked on it—’

‘Bernie …’

‘As were the positions of the would-be assassins. And of the two assassination attempts.’

‘I know but …’

‘How did they describe the missing man, Hugh? Six feet tall and a moustache. It could have been anyone. You said it on the train, didn’t you? It could have been you. Except that the man was Serbian. But was he? Perhaps he was an Englishman who could speak Serbian? Or even a Serbian who can speak wonderful, intriguing English. What did it say in the papers about the gun, Hugh? That the bullet that killed Princip came from an unknown type?’

She waved the gun in front of his face.

‘I’m a country girl. I’ve been around guns and pistols all my life and I have never seen one like this before. And I’ve never heard of Glock either. Quite frankly, I can’t think what this thing is even made of. More secret equipment? Perhaps secret Serbian equipment? You may be a spy, Hugh, but you’re also an assassin and the only thing that stopped you doing something that could have destroyed Europe is that you killed the wrong man. Your own man.’

There were tears in her eyes but despite that her hand was steady and her expression resolved.

‘Give me my gun back, Bernie,’ Stanton said.

‘Not likely. I’m arresting you, Hugh. I know it sounds ridiculous considering how we’ve spent the last few hours but I’m going to turn you in. I’m sorry but I have to do it because you are a terribly dangerous man and if you resist I shall shoot. I may not recognize the gun but I know a trigger when I see one.’

‘You can’t shoot a naked man, Bernie. It’s not … it’s not cricket.’

‘I damn well can and I will.’

‘Not with the safety catch on, you can’t.’

Her eyes flicked down and in that instant he strode forward and grabbed the gun from her with one hand while putting the other over her mouth just before it could let out a scream.

That same mouth which had so charmed him with its smile when they’d met on the train. The mouth which he had been kissing so ferociously just an hour before. And which had been kissing him. The pace of life in his new world was certainly picking up.

‘Now listen to me very carefully because you’ve made a big mistake,’ he said calmly. ‘No, don’t struggle! I very much don’t want to hurt you because although I’ve only known you for a day I am already very fond of you so, please, stop wriggling about and listen to me. I didn’t kill the wrong man, Bernie. I killed the right man. Remember what you said to me on the train? That you didn’t think I was the sort of person who’d miss? Well, you’re right. I’m not. I was in Sarajevo to stop an assassination, not commit one, and that’s exactly what I did. I killed Gavrilo Princip before he could kill Franz Ferdinand. And, yes, I am a British soldier as I’ve told you but I’ve been seconded from the army for a very special mission. A highly unofficial mission. You see, some very influential people in Britain knew about the Serbian plans to attack the Austrian royal family but of course they couldn’t send an agent to stop them. Not officially. Officially Britain has no spies and does not involve itself in espionage. A British citizen operating on behalf of his government in Bosnia would have been a serious breach of Austrian sovereignty, which could in fact have resulted in a crisis all of its own. So I was given leave from the army and sent in as a civilian to stop these people from carrying out their plan.’ As he spoke, Stanton couldn’t help reflect on the fact that every single word he was saying was entirely true, the only lie was one of omission in that he neglected to add that he’d been sent across a hundred and eleven years of time to do it. ‘You see, my controllers in Britain could see exactly what you could see, what any sensible person could see. That if the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was killed by Serbs there’d be a real possibility of European war. Global war, in fact. But it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen because I shot Princip.’

She’d stopped wriggling and had been listening intently, her eyes growing wider with every word he said. Stanton tentatively removed his hand from her mouth. She didn’t scream.

Then Stanton remembered that he was naked and felt rather stupid.

‘If I just put my trousers on, can I trust you not to scream?’ he said.

Bernadette nodded. But she clearly still had doubts.

‘The British Government wouldn’t have needed to send their own spy,’ she said. ‘If they knew about the plot, why didn’t they just warn the Austrians and let them protect the Duke?’

Stanton could think of two very good reasons for that.

‘Well, first of all it might easily not have worked. Britain is linked with Russia in the Triple Entente, remember, and Russia backs the Serbs. The Austrian military is paranoid about Russia and with good reason because only last year it turned out their own spy chief was a Russian mole.’

‘Mole?’

‘It means double agent. Did you ever read about the Alfred Redl scandal?’

Stanton had come across this catastrophe for Austrian intelligence during his preparatory research. The previous year, Redl, Austria’s Chief of Military Intelligence, had been discovered selling his own country’s entire battle plan to the Russians because he needed money to support his lover, who was a fellow officer.

‘Yes. I read about it,’ Bernadette admitted, ‘pretty fruity stuff.’

‘Well, because of Redl the Austrians have been fed misinformation by the Russians on a continuous basis since 1903, so they would very likely view information supplied by a Russian ally as deliberate misinformation.’

‘It’s a dark game, isn’t it?’ Bernadette admitted.

‘You haven’t heard the half of it. Consider this for dark. It’s perfectly possible that even if the Austrians had believed a British warning about the Sarajevo plot, they might have let it go ahead anyway.’

‘Go ahead? Let anarchists murder their own Crown Prince?’

‘Think about it. This is a crown prince who married for love. Against the Emperor’s violent objections. So violent, in fact, that he instructed the Austrian court to ostracize the woman and officially disinherited any children she had with Franz Ferdinand. Add to that the fact that most of the Austrian elite have been itching for an excuse to put Serbia in its place. In fact, Franz Ferdinand was one of the few doves; the Emperor was a hawk.’

Bernadette leant forward and squeezed his hand.

‘Doves and hawks? God, I love the way you talk, Hugh.’

‘So you believe me then?’

‘Yes, yes, I blooming well do! But do you really think the old Emperor might actually have wanted his nephew dead? Because his wife wasn’t posh enough?’

‘Power is a dirty game, Bernie. A very dirty game.’

Stanton would have liked to show her how true this was. To tell her that in the previous history of the world, on hearing of his nephew’s death the Emperor had actually expressed relief about it. That he was recorded as having said, ‘A higher power has re-established the order which alas I could not preserve.’ That would have given her something to get wide-eyed about. The old man had thought God himself shot Franz Ferdinand to preserve the integrity of the Habsburg dynasty.

‘So you see,’ he went on, ‘the only way to be absolutely sure the plot would fail was to prevent it ourselves. I was recruited to do the job by a group centred around Trinity College Cambridge, dedicated to preserving international peace. They call themselves the Companions of Chronos.’

‘The God of Time?’

‘Yes … because time was … running out to stop Europe from destroying itself.’

Bernadette was silent for a moment.

‘Well, it certainly makes more sense than you being a Pan-Serbian nationalist,’ she said. ‘Well done, by the way. I mean, on pulling it off.’

‘I’d hoped to do it without having to kill Princip and particularly that poor girl he was with but he was in the act of pulling his gun when I arrived.’

‘You had no choice.’

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

‘Amazing that you were there at all. The papers said it was a mix-up and the car took the wrong turn. It’s almost as if you knew.’

‘One develops a nose for these things in my game.’

‘A sort of sixth sense?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Well, you did really really well.’

‘Thanks.’

There was another pause during which Stanton took the opportunity to shut and stow his photographic ‘light box’.

‘Enough to make a girl swoon,’ Bernadette went on.

‘I find I often have that effect.’

‘Are all spies as devilishly attractive as you?’

‘Good God no. I’m far and away the sexiest.’

‘Sexiest? Another rather splendid word. Where do you get them from?’

‘It’s a gift.’

Bernadette got up from the table and began once more to remove her slip.