Time and Time Again

22

STANTON HAD MADE his way down to the warren of streets by the Miljacka river and located Schiller’s Delicatessen. However, since it was too early to enter he had carried on past, walking down on to the Latin Bridge.

Thinking about McCluskey and her Easter toast.

Waiting to save the world.

A flower seller approached him. A young woman of perhaps seventeen or eighteen with a basket of primroses in her hands. He didn’t understand the words she was saying but their meaning was clear: she was hungry and she wanted him to buy a flower.

The girl was painfully thin. The evidence of want in her face and the hunger in her look gave her a slightly other-worldly quality, as if she were part spirit. Her cheekbones and her enormous eyes made her look like one of those Japanese cartoons of girl-women that had become so popular in the century from which he’d come.

For a moment Stanton was so struck by her that he merely stared. The girl turned away without a word, clearly having no time for men who wanted to stare at her but didn’t buy a flower.

‘Please. Wait …’ Stanton called after her. He spoke in English but again the meaning was clear. The girl turned back to him, a question on her strangely ghostly face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, then, ‘Es tut mir leid,’ in German.

The girl just smiled and held out her basket.

The smile was as enchanting as the face that framed it. Her teeth were not good but somehow that added to her ghostly beauty. Her skin was pale but when Stanton smiled at her she blushed a little and her cheeks turned pink.

Stanton felt drawn to the girl, perhaps because she was all alone, like him. An outsider struggling in a cold and indifferent world.

He took out his wallet. He had nothing smaller than a two-krone note, which he knew was far too much, enough to have bought a dozen of her flowers at least. The girl reached into the purse at her belt and produced a handful of coins and began counting them out to see if she had sufficient change. Stanton smiled and waved a hand to make it clear that he didn’t need any and that she could have the whole amount. Delighted, the girl took the money, gave him a flower and walked on.

Stanton watched her leave. He was glad he’d given her too much. The money had been supplied by the bastards who killed his family; why not make a hungry, delicate creature a little happier in a hard world?

He put the primrose in the buttonhole of his Norfolk jacket and turned once more to stare at the river. The Schiller Delicatessen was only around the corner and there were still a few minutes before the time would be right for him to enter it.

He looked over the railing of the Latin Bridge into the Miljacka river, thinking about the murky waters of the Bosphorus and that first morning, a month earlier. He no longer considered the possibility of jumping in. He believed absolutely in the importance of his mission. Besides which, he was learning to appreciate life again. Meeting the flower girl was a little part of that. Cassie was gone but there was still beauty in the world. Not for him perhaps, that part of his life was over. But it was beauty nonetheless and beauty was a wonderful thing.

Stanton checked his wristwatch. It was nearly time.

The watch had come with him from his old life. Quartz battery-powered and with more computing power than would exist anywhere else in the world for at least fifty years, and even when such technological power did come to pass again it would take a machine the size of a small house to create it rather than that of a milk bottle top. Staring at his watch, Stanton wondered if perhaps after what he was about to do it would take longer than fifty years for the first proper computers to develop. After all, the majority of the great technological leaps of the twentieth century had been the result of military research. Perhaps, if he was able to bequeath the century a more peaceful beginning, those computers might never be developed. It occurred to him that this was another good reason for preventing the Great War. A few decades’ delay in the development of smart phones and video games consoles would probably be a good thing.

Stanton watched from the bridge as a small, sad-eyed youth scarcely older than the flower girl and almost as hungry-looking approached, walking along the bank of the river and turning up the little street on which Schiller’s Delicatessen was located. With a slight chill and a quickening of his pulse Stanton recognized that this was Gavrilo Princip. A young man whom he had travelled across space and time to meet. A man who was no longer about to make history.

Stanton continued to wait, checking his watch again as the seconds of the twentieth century progressed.

And then came the time to move. The Archduke’s car was one minute away. Stanton could hear it approaching.

He walked off the bridge, up the tiny street and into Schiller’s. His plan was simply to distract Princip’s attention, place himself between the window of the shop and Princip, and play the bewildered foreigner, lost and waving a large and distracting map, speaking loudly in English and German, neither of which the young Serbian would understand. Hopefully this should be enough to prevent Princip even seeing the Archduke. After all, the sound of a car stalling in the street wasn’t that uncommon even in 1914, and the driver would quickly restart his engine. If the distraction failed and Princip tried to leave the shop, then Stanton planned simply to physically restrain him.

That was the plan.

But when Stanton entered Schiller’s Delicatessen to put his plan into practice, the plan changed.

Because history had changed. Gavrilo Princip wasn’t there.

Stanton looked at his watch. There could be no mistake. Quartz timing didn’t lie. Besides which, he could hear the Archduke’s car turning into the street where it would stall outside the shop. It was just fifteen seconds away. At this point, if history were repeating itself, Princip would be leaving the shop, heading for his fateful encounter. But history wasn’t repeating itself because Princip wasn’t there. Something had changed history.

And the only person on the planet who could have done that was Stanton.

He heard the sound of the car stalling outside and rushed out of the shop. In the car just a metre and a half away from him sat the Archduke and his wife. Stanton was standing exactly where Princip should have been standing. Where Princip had stood the last time the universe passed this way.

So where was Princip?

Then Stanton saw him. And in that moment understood his own stupidity. Princip was across the street from him. On the other side of the car.

And he was with the flower girl.

Stanton had changed history. The indulgent tip he had given had altered the course of the girl’s day. She had given up her work and gone instead to treat herself with her unexpected windfall. A windfall she had not received in the previous twentieth century.

Of course! What else would a hungry street girl given a little extra money for which she would not be liable to account do but make her way straight to the nearest food? The nearest food was Schiller’s, and there she’d met Princip, whom she was not supposed to meet. And Princip was a teenage boy and she was a teenage girl. They had left the shop together, or perhaps he had followed her and approached her after she had made her purchases. Stanton could see that she had a paper bag in her hand.

All of this Stanton took in and understood in an instant. Just as he took in and understood that Princip wasn’t looking at the girl any more. He was looking at the Archduke and realizing that, after all, his chance had come. Just as he had done in the previous near identical moment in time, except now he was on the other side of the car.

Because Stanton had put him there.

The girl was in front of Princip, between him and the Archduke, between him and Stanton. She was turning to look where Princip was looking, at the car and its illustrious occupants. And as she did so Stanton could see that behind her Princip’s hand was moving towards his pocket. Stanton knew exactly what he had in that pocket.

Stanton’s hand was also moving, down towards his own pocket where he had his Glock.

Princip’s hand was emerging from his pocket now, holding something hard and grey which Stanton recognized from the many photos he’d seen of it. The gun that fired the first shot of the Great War and which, because of his carelessness, might be about to do so again.

Scarcely a second had passed but Stanton’s own gun was in his hand now and he was assuming the firing position, levelling his weapon, straight-armed in front of his eye. But the girl was still between Princip and him. Only Princip’s firing arm and part of his head were visible behind her. And that arm was also coming up to fire. The last time Princip had fired at the Archduke and his wife, he’d killed them both with just two shots. When studying the assassination, Stanton had been struck by how remarkable that was. Killing a person with a single shot is by no means a certainty even at point blank range. Certainly not with a 1910 Browning. Managing it twice in quick succession is even more unlikely. In their discussions on the murder both Stanton and Davies had wondered whether Princip had just been lucky or whether he had happened to be a natural shot. If it was the latter, then what he’d done in the previous dimension he could do again. Stanton couldn’t take the risk that he could. He had to make absolutely sure of the Archduke’s safety and he had to do it within the next half second before Princip had his own chance to fire. Stanton was a crack shot himself but Princip just wasn’t presenting enough of a target from behind the girl for Stanton to be sure of taking him out singly.

There was only one way to be sure of hitting him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, looking into the girl’s big shocked eyes.

The Glock fired a bullet that could pierce armour plate. Passing through two bodies would scarcely even reduce its velocity. Princip was a small man, not much taller than the flower girl. His heart was directly behind hers.

One bullet passed through two hearts.

The girl died instantly. A micro second later Princip died instantly.

The Archduke and his beloved duchess scarcely knew what had happened.

There were policemen and soldiers running towards them. The same policemen and soldiers whom Stanton had studied in the famous photograph of Princip being arrested.

But this time Princip wasn’t being arrested. He was dead and the Archduke was alive. Stanton had performed the first part of the mission tasked to him by the Companions of Chronos. He had saved Franz Ferdinand.

And he’d killed an innocent young girl.