‘Aye, they did, professor. They most certainly did. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more violent spy. Or, and here’s the point, Captain Stanton, a cooler one. Because the very next day he installs a different king and makes himself Chief of Intelligence. He then proceeds to dominate espionage in Central Europe for the following decade, culminating in the Sarajevo assassination. I would say it’s no exaggeration to say that in June 1914 this man was the most dangerous man in the world. The question is: should we kill him?’
‘Well, obviously,’ McCluskey said, digging in her handbag for a sandwich.
‘Ah’m askin’ your man here, professor. Not you.’
Stanton stared at the photograph of Apis for a full minute before replying.
‘It seems to me,’ he said finally, ‘that if we try to kill this man, one of two things will happen. Either we bungle it or we succeed.’
McCluskey snorted loudly as if she’d expected better of Stanton but Davies nodded.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘If we bungle it, which I think is the more likely outcome, we’ll have seriously spooked him.’
‘Why would we bungle it?’ McCluskey protested through a mouthful of tuna mayonnaise. ‘I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. You’re Guts Stanton, remember!’
‘Prof, this guy stormed a palace in 1903 and personally killed his own King and Queen. Yet he’s still alive and pulling the strings in the same palace more than a decade later. Just how good a survivor do you think he’d have to be to manage that? Colonel Apis must have been the most tempting espionage target on the whole continent. Every other spy in the game would have dreamt of taking him out. But not one of them did. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević was second-guessing assassins before breakfast. So let’s not make the mistake of thinking that just because we’re coming at him from the future armed with a slightly better gun, Apis is suddenly going to present a soft target.’
‘But that’s the point, Hugh! We have hindsight,’ McCluskey countered. ‘We know many of his movements from historical documents; that gives us a massive advantage.’
‘Exactly. So I get close enough to take a shot but for any number of reasons don’t finish him off? What’s he going to conclude? That a time-travelling assassin has used history books to trace him? No. He’s going to presume his network has been infiltrated and therefore all of his plans are compromised. He will put the Black Hand in lock-down and clean it out root and branch. He’ll cancel the Sarajevo plot without any doubt, put Princip and the whole team to sleep and bide his time before beginning entirely afresh.’
Davies grunted approvingly.
‘Stanton is absolutely right,’ he said. ‘A failed attempt would be a disaster.’
‘Well, nothing’s foolproof, of course,’ McCluskey grumbled. ‘But if we succeed!’
‘Yes. let’s presume for a moment our killer succeeds,’ Stanton went on. ‘He goes back in time and manages to put a bullet into the heart of the most experienced and accomplished spy in Europe. What will the repercussions be? It certainly won’t mean the end of the Black Hand organization, that’s for sure. Martyred leaders cast long shadows. Apis had comrades, blood brothers, men as tough and as fanatically devoted to the Serbian cause as he was. Look at them, Antić … Dulić … Marinković and Popović.’
Stanton turned to the grainy photographs that surrounded Apis on the wall, all connected by strips of green fabric tape. Hard-eyed men with frozen stares. Each one of them could easily have been a murderer or a cop, and of course each one of them was both.
‘What will these men do with their leader slain? One thing’s for sure: they won’t give up. In fact, they’ll be yearning for revenge. So who will they blame? Again, not a hitman from the future. They will blame their mortal enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Secret Service, and they will react by attacking the Austro-Hungarians where it hurts most. By killing one of their royals. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example. So by taking out Apis we don’t remove the threat to the Archduke at all. We merely place the planning of it in the hands of different people. People whose plans we wouldn’t know. Killing Apis is, in fact, as bad as failing to kill him because it removes our single ace. We know what Apis did. We know he had the Archduke killed on the twenty-eighth of June 1914 and we know how he did it. If that day changes we’ll be as much in the dark as the Austrians were at the time. The only certain way to prevent the murder of Franz Ferdinand is to stop the man who actually killed him from pulling the trigger and to do so at the last possible moment.’
For the first time Davies’s hard, craggy face seemed almost to smile, his thin lips grimacing like a knife cut in a mouldy lemon.
‘You chose y’ man well, professor,’ he said.
‘Yes, well, I told you he was good,’ McCluskey said, slightly huffily. ‘You didn’t believe me at the time.’
The brief shadow of a smile disappeared as Davies turned his hawkish countenance back to Stanton.
‘Verrrry true. If I were honest with you, Captain Stanton—’
‘Ex-captain,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The Regiment chucked me out.’
‘Exactly. And when the Chronos Intelligence Committee assembled last spring I didn’t relish the idea of entrusting the future of European civilization to a man who’d sacrificed a promising army career in favour of media celebrity.’
‘Well, that’s not quite how—’
‘But it’s a fool who won’t admit when he’s wrong. And I like your style, son, I really do. McCluskey was right, you’re the man for the job. The first part of which is to get to Sarajevo two months from now and neutralize the man who killed the Archduke.’
‘Gavrilo Princip,’ Stanton said.
‘Aye. Princip. The man who fired the first shot of the Great War.’
‘Stupid, stupid bastard,’ McCluskey muttered bitterly.
All three of them turned towards the photo on the wall. An absurdly youthful-looking lad of nineteen, his sad, slightly bewildered expression and deep-set, almost romantic eyes stared back at them from an image that had been reproduced millions of times in the last century.
Could it really be possible that Stanton would be looking into those actual eyes in eight weeks’ time? He was almost beginning to believe that it could.
12
IN THE EARLY hours of the morning of 31 May 2025, Hugh Stanton left Trinity College Cambridge in a small motorcade which he was surprised to see was travelling with a police escort. The Companions of Chronos might have been past their prime but they clearly still counted some pretty influential people among their members.
‘Best to be safe,’ McCluskey said. ‘Imagine, Isaac Newton arranges a time-precise rendezvous with history across a distance of three hundred years and we miss it because we’re stuck in traffic. We’ve got cops in Turkey too. God knows how it’s been arranged but I do know that some of our people are still pretty well connected with the Foreign Office.’
As the little column of cars and motorbikes drove out of the college gates, Stanton glanced out of the window and saw the motorcycle he had parked near the porter’s lodge. He’d scarcely ridden it since arriving at Cambridge five months earlier. The alarm signal had probably bled the battery dry by now.
He didn’t think it was even still insured. The reminders were no doubt among the rest of the many months of post that would be piled up on the inside of the front door of the house that he had never returned to.
He wondered now if he ever would.
They left Cambridge behind and headed for the motorway. McCluskey was the only Companion of Chronos who was travelling with him. The others had said their goodbyes at a farewell dinner on the previous evening during which many emotional and increasingly drunken speeches had been made in Stanton’s honour. He himself had drunk moderately but declined to reply. It was all too weird. They treated him as some sort of messiah figure, a hero ready to cleanse and redeem the earth from wayward humanity. Stanton didn’t feel that way at all, not least because he simply could not believe in what they all thought was going to happen in Istanbul that night.