Time and Time Again

20

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Stanton rose early and assembled his equipment.

He’d given this a great deal of thought over the previous weeks, considering exactly what he would require.

In theory he didn’t even need a gun. He needed nothing save his foreknowledge. He knew exactly what was going to happen throughout the day and he needed only to change one tiny thing about it to alter the course of an entire century.

All he had to do was to prevent Princip from getting a shot at the Archduke.

He knew where Princip would be standing and he knew what he’d be doing; he knew that Princip’s window of opportunity had been agonizingly brief. Stanton simply had to stand in front of Princip at the moment at which his path was about to cross with the Duke’s, and with any luck the killer would not even see his intended victim. He’d never even know he had missed his chance.

That was the theory, but things go wrong when theories are put into practice and Stanton needed to prepare for eventualities. His target was armed and, as history had shown, extremely happy to shoot. If anything went wrong, Stanton might have to shoot him. He therefore put his Glock pistol in the pocket of his Norfolk jacket, which was hanging over the dressing-table chair. He also reflected that the intervention, when it came, would occur within sight and earshot of a lot of heavily armed soldiers and policemen, all made nervous by the bomb attempt which Stanton knew would have occurred earlier in the day. It was possible that if Princip and he were involved in a firefight then others might join in. Stanton decided to take precautions against that also. He would wear body armour. It would be slightly restrictive but since Stanton was the only man alive with the specialist information to prevent global catastrophe he needed to make sure he stayed alive. It was for this reason that Chronos had supplied him with the armoured vest in the first place.

All of his equipment was, of course, the very best that twenty-first-century military technology could provide. Stanton knew the armour well; he’d worn similar kit many times. It consisted of a Gore-tex vest and groin flap fitted with polyethylene ballistic plates; these plates were capable of stopping the kind of armourpiercing ammunition which would not be developed for ninety years, and therefore offered 100 per cent protection from the small-arms technology of 1914.

Stanton was hopeful that he would need neither gun nor bullet-proof vest but it didn’t hurt to be sure. He could remember his first staff sergeant in the Regiment pointing out that ‘Better Safe Than Sorry’ would have been a much more sensible motto for the SAS than ‘Who Dares Wins’. Stanton smiled at the memory as he put on his protective vest. The staff sergeant had hated that motto.

‘Who dares without proper preparation and training does not fucking win,’ he used to say. ‘He gets shot dead, and what’s more the idiot probably takes good men with him.’

Stanton put on a shirt and tie over the vest and his Norfolk jacket over that.

Then, having prepared, he hoped, for any eventuality, he sat down to have one last study of the royal route, which he had up on his computer screen. On it he’d marked the places where all the assassins would be, the location of the first attempt and, of course, the last point, that infamous place where Princip was destined to murder the Archduke unless Stanton prevented him from doing so. Having satisfied himself that he could walk this route and find his marks without any map, he went downstairs and drank a cup of tea in the hotel dining room. Then when he judged the time right he set out to walk the short way to Sarajevo station. It was there that the royal party were scheduled to arrive and where this most important day of the century would really begin.

Guts versus the Black Hand.

‘This is it, Cassie,’ he found himself whispering under his breath as his fingers closed around the gun in his pocket. ‘I’m going in.’

The crowd at the station was being kept at a good distance from the arrivals barrier by lines of police and soldiers but Stanton was tall and it was still possible for him to get a view. There were flags and bunting but not what Stanton would have called a festive spirit. The twenty-eighth of June was a Serbian holiday, the anniversary of a famous historic victory over the Turks. The decision to stage a royal visit on this day by a man who to many represented an occupying power was significant and provocative. Stanton sensed a great deal of anger in the deeply divided crowd.

The royal train arrived exactly as Stanton had known it would. Exactly as it had arrived in the previous loop in space–time. He had the timings and people present from the records of the subsequent trials and he was relieved to note that every detail was as it once had been.

He saw the six-car motorcade draw up. Just as he had known it would.

The local governor was standing stiffly with his entourage, as Stanton had seen him in those grainy photographs from another universe. He saw the mayor of Sarajevo and the police chief speaking together, heads bowed towards each other. He saw the flash powder pop as a photographer took a photo of them, a photo that Stanton had seen pinned to the wall of the Incident Room in the History faculty in Cambridge at Easter in 2025. The same photo that was contained in digital form in his computer at the hotel.

Stanton saw the Archduke’s security detail standing slightly apart. Looking at the little team he felt a genuine sense of professional sympathy because he knew that those three serious-looking men in bowler hats were about to face the protection officer’s worst nightmare: losing contact with their charge. And right at the start of the day too. Stanton knew that through a ridiculous mix-up those officers would not ride with the royal couple to their first engagement, which was a military inspection at the local barracks, because three local officers had already placed themselves in the seats reserved for them in the front car. The protection squad would realize too late that there was no room left for them, and the Archduke and his wife would be driven off without their specialist team.

It would be the first little farce of a ridiculously farcical day.

The royal train arrived and Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess Sophie descended from it on to the red carpet laid out on the platform. They were a rather ordinary-looking couple who but for the splendour of their dress would have turned no heads. Stanton knew from surprisingly good photographs that Sophie had been a beauty in her day but her looks were rather faded now by childbearing, care and worry. This was a very special day for her and one she’d been looking forward to. It was one of the few public occasions in her life when it was possible for her to be at her husband’s side and get the respect she craved and which her husband considered her due. The problem was that Sophie was a Czech, a noble one for sure but still a Czech, and so not considered a good enough match for the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Ferdinand had married for love. His uncle, the Emperor, had been furious and had made it clear that Sophie would remain a commoner and would never be allowed an official rank at the Austrian court. What was even more wounding was that the bitter old man had made his nephew swear an oath that any children he had with Sophie could never inherit the throne.

Stanton studied the woman’s face, the face of a woman who lived at the heart of one of richest and most powerful families in Europe, but who every day experienced nothing but snobbery and insult. The wife of the Crown Prince, the chosen consort of the heir to a vast and ancient empire, who had less official status than the very lowliest Austrian lady at court. She was only with him on this day because he was visiting Sarajevo in a military capacity to inspect Imperial troops. Sophie, therefore, accompanied him not as a princess but as wife of the commander-in-chief and could therefore enjoy the rare treat of riding side-by-side with him through a crowd: a treat which in the previous loop of time had been her death warrant. Had the Black Hand chosen to strike at the Archduke on the majority of his public outings, Sophie would not have been present at all. At best she would have attended at a distance, kept in the background, sitting with a single maid in an antechamber and only allowed to see her husband when the grandeur and the pomp were over.

Stanton knew that both she and the Archduke had been aware that Sarajevo was a dangerous town for an Austrian royal to parade, but they preferred to accept that danger in order to get the chance to be publicly and proudly together.

They were prepared to risk their lives for love.

Watching her smiling shyly as she accepted the bows of the assembled officials, Stanton felt he understood the Duchess Sophie. She was on the outside. A loner. The victim of a bunch of upper-class snobs who had no better reason for their arrogance and pride than an accident of their over-privileged birth. Stanton knew a bit about that, and he was glad that because of him the much belittled Duchess would not die in agony in a few hours’ time with a bullet in her stomach.

In fact, world wars aside, he was glad that he would save them both. They were in love; it was obvious even on this official occasion. Still in love despite enduring a life that consisted only of stifling formality and painful slights. He knew from history that their happiness and their sanctuary was contained entirely in their private love and the love of their children. After they had been shot on that same 28 June in another universe, both of them had continued to sit upright in their car, a single bullet lodged in each, dying together as they had lived. The Archduke had been heard begging his wife to live. ‘Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die!’ he was recorded as saying. ‘Live for our children.’

Stanton felt a strange surge of emotion. The man in the huge plumed helmet with the absurd braid on his shoulder was just like him. A lonely man who loved his wife and his children. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had set his face against his father and his inheritance for love, and he had died for love while thinking of his children.

And to cap it all he had even been a friend of the Serbs, the very people on whose supposed behalf he was about to be shot. Franz Ferdinand knew they had grievances and needed greater autonomy. Had he lived and become Emperor, the whole sorry history of the Balkans in the twentieth century would have been different. That, of course, was the very reason a xenophobic psychopath like Apis had wanted him killed, because he was taking the sting out of Serbian nationalism by being sympathetic to it.

Stanton liked the funny, stiff, shaven-headed old Archduke.

And he hated Apis for the cruel fanatic that he was.

The motorcade pulled away and the band stopped playing. Stanton could not help but smile at the looks on the faces of the three royal protection officers as they realized they’d lost the Duke and had better start looking for a cab. As a fellow soldier he felt their pain. They had seriously screwed up.

He turned away from the station and along with the rest of the crowd began to make his way towards the centre of the town. The royal route had been advertised in advance and everybody knew exactly where the motorcade would go after it had left the military inspection.

Stanton was liking the Archduke and his Czech duchess more and more. They knew they were in what was at least partially enemy territory and that the town was full of Serbian nationalists and yet they had elected to ride in an open car on a previously announced route. That was impressive behaviour. Stupid certainly. But brave and kind of noble. Like him, they had guts.

The virtual reconstruction of the fateful day that Stanton had in his computer told him that there would be three assassins waiting for the couple between the barracks and a reception that was to take place at the town hall. They would all fail in their appointed task, the first two with almost comical ineptitude.

Stanton spotted the first assassin, as he knew he would, in the centre of town in the garden of a cafe called the Mostar. This was Muhamed Mehmedbašić. He was one of the local guys, a carpenter from Herzegovina. Stanton stared long and hard, wondering whether he might have spotted the man in a crowd had he not previously studied his photograph on a wall in Cambridge and known him to be a terrorist.

For a moment he imagined himself in Afghanistan once more, surveying a group of workers as they assembled at the camp gate. Remembering the heat and the sand and studying the faces, looking for one who might have a bomb beneath his shirt, and missing the guy who shortly thereafter killed himself and three of Stanton’s comrades. You really could never tell. People could look nervous and sweaty for any number of reasons. It didn’t mean they had a bomb tied round their waist, and of course it didn’t mean they didn’t.

Stanton wondered where Muhamed Mehmedbašić was hiding his bomb. In his little shoulder bag, probably, although even there it couldn’t be a very big one. Big enough no doubt if thrown accurately but Mehmedbašić wasn’t going to throw it accurately. In fact, he wasn’t going to throw it at all because he was going to totally lose his nerve.

Mehmedbašić had form. He was a serial failure. In Stanton’s experience, the young men recruited by terrorist organizations usually were. Mehmedbašić was even the son of a failure; it was in his genes. His dad had been an impoverished noble. A fatal combination: failure and delusions of grandeur. Stanton could see it all over the young man as he shifted from foot to foot in the hot sun. The classic private bitterness of the public zealot. A man who wanted to take out his own inadequacy on other people.

And yet Apis had recruited him? How could he have been such an arsehole?

Didn’t he profile his choices at all?

It wasn’t as if Apis hadn’t been warned. Mehmedbašić had failed as a terrorist before. At his last attempt at killing for the Black Hand he’d been tasked with hitting the Bosnian Governor, but sitting on the train on his way to the hit, Mehmedbašić had panicked when a cop happened to get on looking for a thief. He’d thrown his weapons out of the window.

A knife and a bottle of poison.

Once again Stanton wondered how these ridiculous comedy villains had ever managed to change the course of history. They were just so amateur.

The motorcade approached heading down the near empty street at a slow enough speed for a man with a steady nerve to throw a bomb. But Mehmedbašić did nothing. Stanton saw him twitch but that was all.

There was another Black Hand assassin close by. Vaso Čubrilović, a Serbian youth, this time armed with a bomb and a gun. He used neither, just stood there, frozen. The open-topped Gräf & Stift double phaeton in which the royal couple were riding passed by without incident.

Two stupid, useless boys, both carrying bombs, looked foolishly and sheepishly on. That was the foot-soldier of a terrorist organization for you.

The Archduke and his party were now heading down to the Miljacka river. Having studied the route they would take, Stanton knew that by cutting through some back streets he could arrive there before them, although it wouldn’t really matter if he missed it. He was just an observer; his own part in the drama was yet to come.

Stanton arrived as expected in good time. There was a larger crowd gathered on this part of the route. Being down by the river, the area was more conducive to a day out and the crowd was in festive mood. Not everyone in Sarajevo was a radical Serb by any means and there were many who were loyal to the Austrian Crown. One onlooker, however, was intent on murder and he would prove to be the only member of the gang who would act decisively according to the original plan.

This man was Nedeljko Čabrinović. He was the firebrand of the group. He’d had many a falling-out with the others over his lax security and Stanton spotted him easily, standing straight, almost to attention, as if attempting to physically embody the nobility of his cause.

It was this moment that Stanton had agonized over. He knew that Čabrinović would throw his bomb and that it would bounce off the folded soft top of the royal car and explode underneath the following vehicle. Stanton also knew that this would cause severe injury to some twenty people in the immediate vicinity. Stanton had seen what bombs did to crowds and every instinct he possessed made him want to stop this bomb being thrown. He wanted to position himself behind Čabrinović and grasp his arms tight until the cars had passed.

But he didn’t do it.

He couldn’t. Because he knew that this failed attempt on the Archduke’s life would be the cause of the royal party changing its plans after lunch. They would abandon their published itinerary in favour of visiting the hospital to comfort the wounded. It would be that decision that would lead them via a wrong turn and a stalled engine into the path of their killer. Stanton knew when that incident would take place and where. However, if he prevented Čabrinović from throwing his bomb, the entire history of the day would change completely and Stanton would be as helpless as the official security guys. Princip might get his chance in some other manner and Stanton would not be there to stop him.

And so he merely watched, sick to his stomach, as Čabrinović made his move. Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess were smiling broadly as the cars approached the river. They were clearly flattered and relieved at receiving such a positive reception. The crowds truly were cheering and Imperial flags fluttered in the hands of little children. Children whom Stanton must now see blown into the air and dashed upon the ground.

Čabrinović threw his bomb. It bounced off the royal car as Stanton had known it would and exploded as he expected. There was some satisfaction in that at least: the textbook-perfect occurrence of the bombing was proof that nothing of significance had so far changed in history. Stanton turned away from the mayhem; he’d seen too many bodies maimed to want to watch any more, but the fate of Čabrinović was of interest, if only because what happened next was so absurd that Stanton had strongly suspected historians of embellishing the truth.

As the angry crowd moved in on Čabrinović, he pulled something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Stanton knew that this was a cyanide pill, which had been supplied to the conspirators on the orders of Apis. However, as with so much of what the Black Hand attempted, it failed. It was too weak. Clutching his stomach, beginning to vomit and being pursued by the crowd, Čabrinović ran puking to the river and jumped in, hoping to drown himself instead. However, it was late June in what was famously one of the most gloriously hot and dry summers in years. The river was only thirteen centimetres deep.

Stanton watched as the police waded in up to their ankles and dragged the vomiting would-be national hero from the shallows. The cops then allowed the angry crowd to savagely beat him up before finally taking him into custody, still vomiting and with his shoes full of water.

The history books hadn’t lied. It really was that stupid. Stanton thought about how thrilled McCluskey would have been to see it. He could imagine her crowing over it. ‘Let’s see the dialectical materialists claim that was a historical inevitability! You couldn’t make it up.’

Stanton drove the memory of McCluskey from his mind. The associations were too painful. He should have torn the bitch’s face off before he chucked her off that train.

Stanton walked away from the angry crowd. He knew that for the time being Čabrinović’s failed attempt would put paid to any further planned efforts by the Black Hand to kill their quarry. The Archduke’s motorcade, its occupants now thoroughly alarmed, increased speed and hurtled past the remaining three conspirators, including Princip, whom the Black Hand had placed along the route. The royal car was now moving too fast for them to do anything, even if they’d had the nerve.

And there but for fate would have ended one of the most spectacularly inept attempts to assassinate a senior royal ever staged. Six agents, all armed with bombs or pistols, or both, and only one of them had even made an attempt at the hit. And he had missed.

But Stanton knew what would happen next. Or what had happened next on the last occasion space and time had passed this way together. Perhaps the most ill-starred encounter in all of history. An entirely accidental, completely coincidental and supremely improbable meeting that had changed the world.