Time and Time Again

48

KT503B678 NEVER GOT the chance to go to Cambridge and close the loop in time, but she died ensuring that Stanton might.

The Turkish police were waiting for them when they tried to leave the house. They’d lingered too long reading ancient histories in the cellar and been overheard by the night nurse on duty.

As they opened the front door of the building, car headlamps were turned on and a warning shouted. The street was full of police, crouching behind cars and wagons.

Katie made her decision without hesitation.

‘I will engage these people,’ she said. ‘You find another way out.’

‘But—’ Stanton began to protest but Katie stopped him.

‘You can survive much better in this civilized world than me,’ she said, ‘and besides, it’s time for me to die. I always swore that I’d never take my own life, that the Party would have to kill me, that I’d die fighting them. Well, this way I will. Because if my death helps you escape, then perhaps the Party will never even exist. Besides, it’s time. Time for me to join my babies.’ Her eyes were bright and far away. ‘Go. Do what you can for this last twentieth century. Then go to Cambridge. You have to go to Cambridge, Hugh. Make it so that finally history can move on.’

‘I will,’ Stanton replied.

Then he leant forward and kissed her on the cheek.

To his surprise she reached out and put her arms round him. Drawing him to her in an embrace. It was the first physical contact of any sort that they had had since she had leapt from her sick bed at the Kempinski hotel in an effort to kill him.

The hug lasted only a few seconds but it seemed to Stanton that in those seconds there was a world of sorrow. Her body quivered as she gripped him tight and laid her head on his shoulder.

When she stepped away, her eyes were glistening with tears.

She produced a gun from each of her pockets.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Goodbye.’

Stanton turned away and made his way back through the house. There were doctors, nurses and patients peeking out of doors but he ignored them and they didn’t try to stop him.

Once more he was heading for a rooftop escape and he realized that for the second time he was leaving behind him a woman about whom he had come to care deeply.

He made his way up the various flights of stairs. The sound of rapid fire behind told him that Katie had engaged the police. He knew that she would make sure he had enough grace to make his escape. It wouldn’t be their choice when to kill her but hers when to die.

He found a skylight in the attic of the building and made his way out into the night.

Alone once more.

He was never to return to the house of Chronos in Constantinople.

Instead he made his final trip to Berlin.

He knew where to find Rosa Luxemburg. The history of her time of struggle and the glorious revolution that followed had been holy writ to Katie and her fellow Communist pioneers. During their time together travelling across Europe she had been able to give Stanton the address of the safehouse in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht had gone underground during the months of persecution. That house had become a shrine in Katie’s century, a place of pilgrimage for high Party officials. Stanton intended to ensure that in this century it would be remembered only as the place where a briefly notorious Social Democrat had been shot by an unknown assassin.

And then … then?

Stanton knew what then. He had thought of nothing else during his final train journey from Istanbul.

He would find Bernadette Burdette. Whether she was in custody in Berlin or home in Ireland or somewhere else altogether, he’d find her. He would make her travel with him to Cambridge, at gunpoint if necessary. Then, he would take her to the Master’s Lodge at Trinity and somehow he would show her Newton’s box. Then once she had seen it and knew that he had not lied, he would destroy it, closing the loop in time for ever.

And then he and Bernadette could face the last ever twentieth century together. Her riding pillion on his 1914 Enfield.

That was Stanton’s plan. It was Guts Versus Newton.

End game.

And so from his hotel room at the Kempinski Stanton equipped himself for another assassination. He had no body armour this time, having left it in the apartment he had shared with Bernadette, but he had one of his Glock pistols, which he checked and loaded carefully, although he knew he would require only one bullet.

He made his way to the secret Socialist safehouse and lay in wait, hiding in the car he had hired for the job. Katie had told him that Rosa Luxemburg was known to emerge each day, heavily disguised, ready to go about her business of agitation and revolution.

As expected she emerged from the house. Liebknecht wasn’t with her but she was flanked by two bodyguards. Stanton hoped he would not have to kill them also. He doubted it would be necessary; he had a clean shot.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, he wound down the window and, resting his pistol on his arm, took aim. He didn’t need a rifle; the range was close enough and the Glock an accurate weapon.

Then he heard a noise behind him. Turning he saw that a man was leaning in through the passenger window, which was open thanks to the late summer warmth. The man was pointing a gun at Stanton. A gun Stanton recognized as a type not known in 1914, and which, like his own weapon, was made of polymer, a substance not yet invented.

And Stanton understood.

Another century had passed.

A century in which he’d killed Rosa Luxemburg but must then have died himself because he had not been able to destroy Newton’s box.

For here was another visitor from the future.

A man come to prevent the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg.

Stanton thought all this in the moment his eyes met his brother Chronation.

And he wanted to cry out: ‘Kill me if you must but for God’s sake go to Cambridge and destroy the box.’

But thought is quicker than speech.

He never said a word.

And at that moment in space and time, Hugh Stanton was taken out of the loop.