Time and Time Again

19

FOR ALL HIS fearsome reputation as Europe’s most brutal and dangerous spy chief, the man known as Apis had organized, or rather failed to organize, the most cack-handed cock-up of an assassination in history.

This was the conclusion that Stanton was reminded of again and again as he pondered the details of the event during the lonely hikes he took from his solitary camp in the Western Highlands through the hot, midge-infested June days of the fateful summer of 1914.

He considered it again while journeying across Europe on his way to Sarajevo and it still took his breath away. He lay in bed in his cosy sleeping compartment, staring into the glow of the only working computer on earth. It was simply stunning what an utter farce the single most influential assassination in history had really been. It had, in fact, only succeeded at all due to almost uncannily spectacular bad luck.

Pretty much everything had gone wrong. The assassins themselves were a pathetic bunch, ill armed and terminally indecisive. But for a wrong turn, a stalled motor engine and the luckiest two shots of the entire century, the spark that ignited the Great War would have never occurred at all.

Stanton knew that it was never wise to underestimate a mission, but as he stretched out under the thick cotton sheets (of a quality he had never experienced in the twenty-first century), he couldn’t help concluding that for Guts Stanton, ex-Special Air Service Regiment, foiling this bunch of muppets was going to be a piece of cake with a cherry on top.

For the first time since midnight on June the first, he began to relax.

The journey across Europe was delightful, bathed from start to finish in the bright glow of summer sunshine. The summer of 1914 was a glorious one, a fact that every history book Stanton had ever read on the period had made much of, equating the wonderful weather with a golden Imperial period for Europe that was about to come to a sudden and terrible end. Living through it as he now was, Stanton could certainly see the point. The whole continent seemed almost to sigh with a deep and comfortable contentment. No doubt it was different in the slums and factory sweatshops, but journeying through the countryside, past endless ripe fields, picture-postcard villages and little towns, Europe really did seem to be the sun-drenched idyll that romantically minded historians had always claimed it was. Pastoral, timeless and achingly beautiful.

Lying in the darkness of his sleeper car, soothed by the regular rattling rhythm of the train, Stanton felt an overwhelming surge of emotion that it had fallen to him to save this paradise from destruction.

He thought of the email printout in his wallet. The letter Cassie had written.

I was proud of you when you risked your life on peacekeeping missions, saving children who were just like your own.

He was back on course, fulfilling the promise he’d wanted to make to her, to be himself again. Even if she had died before she’d had the chance to hear it.

‘This is for you and the kids, Cass,’ he whispered as he drifted off to sleep.

In order to get to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Stanton had to cross the entirety of the two great Germanic central powers, Germany and Austria, with which (if history was allowed to take its course) Britain would shortly be at war. In only a matter of weeks the press on both sides of the conflict would be screaming hatred at each other but that June a British tourist could not have been a more welcome guest, and Stanton’s papers were stamped and his person saluted at every border.

‘Welcome, sir! Germany is honoured by your visit!’

What did they know? Nothing. Only Stanton knew. Only Stanton and a few psychopathic Serb nationalists knew that as the boats and trains of Europe steamed about, delivering happy tourists and welcome guests to their destinations, already hiding out in and around Sarajevo was a terrorist cell. Six Pan-Serbian nationalist assassins recruited by the Black Hand. These men, armed and let loose by the shadowy Apis, would shortly commit an act that would turn all this peace and comfortable good fellowship to bloody carnage within eight weeks.

Except this time they wouldn’t. Stanton was thundering between Frankfurt and Munich on his journey across Europe to stop them.

He arrived in Sarajevo in the late afternoon on 27 June and checked at once into the central hotel that Thomas Cook’s travel office had secured for him by telegram from London. He went for a walk about the town and dined in a small restaurant down by the river. It was a strange feeling, knowing that elsewhere in the city the two groups of would-be assassins had also arrived and were meeting up for the first time. Three had been recruited locally in Bosnia Herzegovina, and the other three, including the killer, Princip, had come from Belgrade. Stanton knew that, unlike his, their journey had been a pretty tortuous one lasting almost a month and involving numerous safehouses and codes, a multitude of agents and even a secret tunnel. Once again, as he chewed on his schnitzel and drank his beer, Stanton wondered how it could have been that Apis planned so much of the plot so carefully and yet had left its execution up to a bunch of pusillanimous incompetents. Arrogance, Stanton reckoned. He thought he could do anything and he got careless. It was usually arrogance that undermined men like Apis in the end.

Looking at his watch he guessed that the meeting was in progress and that the conspirators would shortly send a postcard to the Black Hand chief in Bosnia Herzegovina to tell him that all was proceeding well. Another astonishingly stupid move in Stanton’s view. The chief in question was currently hiding out in France and so could play absolutely no part in the planned hit on the following morning, so why the group compromised their security by bothering to keep him in the loop would remain for ever a mystery.

Stanton didn’t know where the six plotters would be staying that night so he made no effort to track them. He knew they were in town, that was all. He would only be able to pick up their trail in the morning. Which was good. The later he intervened in events the less likely he was to prematurely adjust them.

As he went to bed that night, Stanton tried to feel some emotion about the immensity of what was about to happen. Brought here by the genius of a dead physicist, he was about to change the course of history. Prevent perhaps the single most renowned event of the twentieth century and so prevent its most disastrous war. He tried, but he couldn’t. The brief surge of emotion he’d had about his mission on the train had left him. Maybe if Cassie had been there to talk to about it, or even the traitor McCluskey. Anyone. But there was no one. He was alone. He was always alone. He could never be truly intimate with anyone again because were he to share with them the central fact of his existence, the fact that he had arrived from the future, they would undoubtedly think him mad.