Time and Time Again (18 page)

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.

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.