Time and Time Again (20 page)

Stanton could only agree with her. The more he studied the time-line of the Sarajevo killing, the more incredible the coincidences and the incompetence became.

‘You’re right, prof. It wasn’t really Princip that killed the royal couple at all. It was General Oskar Potiorek.’

‘
General
Oskar Potiorek,’ McCluskey echoed with contempt. ‘A general. He wasn’t qualified to sweep the barrack-room floor. What a truly world-historical arsehole.’

Stanton reached into his file of briefing material and took out a photograph.

‘The man who really started the Great War.’

They both stared at the old picture. If Hollywood had been casting an arrogant, blinkered, pig-headed, supercilious Austrian general of the old school, they could not have done better than used the real thing. Bullet head, shaven on the sides to three inches above the ears, forensically clipped moustache, chest full of medals, head tilted very slightly back, he fixed the camera with a stare of cold contempt, the faintest sneer playing on his lips.

‘What’s he got to sneer about?’ McCluskey shouted, throwing her fag end into the fire and reaching unsteadily for more cheese and booze. ‘I mean, seriously, what has this truly Olympic-class idiot got to sneer about? The man who decided to change the route of the motorcade for security reasons but
forgot to tell the royal driver
. He makes sure all the other drivers know but not the one driving the Duke! That’s it! In a sentence. The reason the Black Hand got a
seventh
chance, which
amazingly
they didn’t screw up, and the Great War started. I mean
blimey
!’ McCluskey was actually pulling at her own hair in frustration. ‘Princip’s blown it. He
knows
he’s blown it. In fact, he’s given up assassinating for the day and wandered off for a sandwich. A
sandwich
! What
is
this? Laurel and Hardy? He mooches down to, where was it …?’

‘Schiller’s Delicatessen.’

‘That’s it.
Schiller’s Delicatessen
, sounds like Joe’s Caff. Basically he’s gone for the early-twentieth-century equivalent of a Big Mac and fries, no doubt wondering what he’s going to say to Apis, who we know is the sort of bloke who shoots kings thirty times, dices up the corpses with a sabre then throws them out of the window—’

‘Princip would never have met Apis, nor would he ever meet him,’ Stanton interrupted. ‘The Black Hand operated on a cellular model.’

‘Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter. The silly young bastard’s blown his chance of being a hero of the Serbian people and he’s gone off to take comfort in a cheese and pickle sarnie. Meanwhile, the Archduke’s driver realizes he’s lost the motorcade, because they know where they’re going and he doesn’t, and, in an effort to get back on track, chooses to turn into a street which, of all the flipping streets in Sarajevo,
happens
to be the one with Schiller’s Deli in it! I mean, can you credit it? Can you
sodding
credit it? This is the start of the
Great War
we’re talking about, and it comes down to a wrong turn and a cheese sandwich!’

For a moment McCluskey’s outrage exhausted her. She reached into the pocket of her greatcoat and pulled out a golf-ball-sized wodge of tobacco. She then spent a moment trying to wrestle it into a cigarette paper before realizing that she was too drunk to manage it. She opted instead for the easier option of grabbing her pipe, which she kept stuck in the visor of a medieval helmet, and stuffing the tobacco into that.

‘Don’t forget the dodgy gear change,’ Stanton reminded her.

He was enjoying her frustration; it reminded him of long past student afternoons. McCluskey had always been good value when properly outraged. They used to try to provoke her. On this occasion she needed no assistance.

‘Oh, don’t talk to me about the dodgy gear change. The bloody driver not
only
doesn’t know where he’s going, which I accept is not the silly arse’s fault, but he can’t handle a simple double declutch. History is holding its breath while yet another incompetent to add to the already crowded cast tries to put the royal car into reverse and
stalls
it. Stalls it! He is a
professional
chauffeur and he cannot reverse his car!’ Her face was bright red now and the veins were standing out on her neck and forehead. ‘At which point Princip walks out of the deli, lunch in hand, and finds himself
one and a half metres
from the very bloke he’s supposed to kill. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. The very man he and his hapless colleagues have spent all day trying to kill is sitting in front of him in a stalled motor in a confined street. What are the chances of that? It is just insane.’

Having been almost dancing with frustration on the carpet, McCluskey sank down into an armchair, exhausted. She took a swig of wine and a couple of big sucks on her pipe to restore herself but unfortunately managed to put the pipe back into her mouth upside down, thus depositing a great plug of burning tobacco into her lap. When she’d brushed that on to the rug and stamped on it she finally seemed calm.

‘Haven’t I always
said
history turns on individual folly and ineptitude!’ she said. ‘Come on, be honest, haven’t I always said it?’

‘Yes, you have, professor,’ Stanton said, reaching for a bit of chocolate. ‘History is made by people.’

‘And the majority of people are arseholes.’

‘Which is I suppose why the majority of history has been so disastrous.’

‘But not this time!’ McCluskey said, draining her glass and punching the air. ‘Not this time! This time there’s going to be another guy in town. And he won’t be an incompetent idiot. He’ll be a highly competent and highly trained British officer and he will save the world. Think of it, Hugh. You’re going to save the world!’ She reached for the decanter and took a chug direct from the flask. ‘Happy Easter!’

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.