Her eyes were pleading. But her gun was steady.
‘You had my wife and kids murdered, professor.’
‘Yes but now, Hugh, now they never actually existed … So it’s OK … isn’t it? To move on?’
‘It doesn’t look very OK, does it? With you pointing a gun at me.’
McCluskey thought for a moment.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know you can never forgive me and I don’t blame you, of course, but you have a job to do, Hugh. The most important job in history and that’s what you need to focus on now. So here’s what I suggest. Our first stop is Bucharest in about five or six hours, so we just sit here tight together till then and, when we arrive, you get out. I’d go myself but frankly it’s easier to cover you with this little six shot if it’s you that gets out of the carriage. Fortunately we have our own door, which is such a civilized design, don’t you think? You go off and fulfil your mission and I just disappear. You’ll never see me again, Hugh. And I won’t flap my wings too much, I promise. Bit of dinner and the theatre is all I ask and quite frankly I’ll be dead in half a decade anyway. You have the whole world before you. A world you will have saved. Don’t spoil all that for a bit of revenge.’
‘How do you mean, spoil it?’
‘Well, you see, if you won’t get out of the carriage, Hugh, I’ll have to kill you. You do see that, don’t you? So that you don’t kill me. That’s obvious.’
‘But what about the mission? The most important mission in history? If you kill me, the Great War will begin again in just ten weeks. Europe’s great calamity, professor. The thing we came to stop.’
There was a film of tears over McCluskey’s eyes now, although that may have been as a result of the smoke drifting up from the smouldering cigarette clamped between her teeth. She had both hands on her gun now, arms held out in classic firing position.
‘I know it’s wrong, Hugh. And I do care, I care so much. All those millions of young men. The Russian princesses murdered in that awful cellar with their poor jewels sewn in their knickers. The terrible dictators, the wars and the genocides and the starvation to come … but … I’m just a selfish old fool, you see, and I do so want to see the Diaghilev ballet.’
Stanton stared at her. He had always been proud of his ability to read people and yet it seemed he had never known this woman at all. So weak, so selfish. So … appalling a human being.
‘I loved my wife and kids,’ he said.
‘Oh I know, Hugh, I know.’
He stood up. Her knuckles whitened on the trigger.
‘Please don’t make me do it, Hugh! Because I will. I really will. Just get off the train at Bucharest. It’s easy, it’s all good. I’ll be gone, I promise.’
‘Goodbye, professor.’
He reached forward towards the gun. She pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked against the empty chamber. McCluskey stared at it for a moment in surprise.
She clicked again.
‘Bugger,’ she said.
‘You didn’t think I was going to leave a half-concussed lunatic like you with a loaded gun in her bag, did you?’
She was about to speak but Stanton reached forward and took hold of her by the neck. He pushed his thumb deep into her windpipe, preventing her from shouting out.
‘You were actually going to kill me,’ he said, ‘and screw the twentieth century. I really didn’t think you’d do that.’
McCluskey could only offer a choking grunt in reply.
He dragged her to her feet and swung her towards the outside door of the carriage. In the same movement, he reached through the open window with his free hand and, jamming his back against the frame, opened it from the outside. McCluskey’s eyes widened in terror as the door swung open.
‘You’re scared!’ Stanton shouted over the rattling of the train. ‘Big bullying old Professor McCluskey’s scared. Scared of dying. Christ, I really would have credited you with more balls. Shows what a blind idiot I am, eh?’
The train was travelling through rocky, low-lying foothills. Glancing out Stanton saw that there was a steep, sparsely vegetated scree slope below them. Nobody was going to survive hitting that at speed. McCluskey could see it too. He felt her windpipe convulsing as her body tried to retch with fear. He felt a sharp pain in his shins as she began kicking at them.
He dragged her face towards his own. Their eyes met for a moment.
There was so much he would have liked to say to her.
About how much he hated her. About how much he hoped there was a hell and that she would burn in it for eternity.
But what was the point? He just threw her out of the train.
He watched as her body span and bounced like a broken doll crashing a hundred metres down the slope.
Stanton stepped back inside, leaving the carriage door open.
He checked in McCluskey’s coat and bag for anything suspicious or anachronistic. He took her gun, which had fallen from her hand, her modern medicines and her underwear. There seemed to be nothing else which she had brought with her from the twenty-first century. Pretty much all that was left in her bag was booze and tobacco. The authorities could draw from that whatever conclusion they wished.
Checking the corridor for the third and final time Stanton slipped out of the compartment and returned to his own.
He was now entirely alone in a new universe.
18
THE NEWS THAT an English lady travelling alone had somehow managed to fall from the train spread through the carriages while Stanton was having lunch in the dining car. Some passengers to the rear had spotted what had looked like a falling woman and alerted the guard. A search of the train revealed a first-class passenger to be missing and the door of her private compartment to be open.
Stanton had just ordered the lobster and the dessert soufflé.
Fuck her. Let her rot in hell.
If he could have the moment of killing her again, the moment where her eyes had met his in mute appeal, he’d gouge them from her skull with his fingers before tossing her out of the train.
That murdering bitch. That evil bitch.
He’d been on his way home. To make it right with Cassie. They could have had nine more months together. Nine months of happiness and love, before being evaporated, oblivious, into time and space along with the rest of humanity. They would have been stars together. Him, Cassie, Tessa and Bill, twinkling in the same firmament. Instead, because of McCluskey, they had never even existed and he was exiled in a different universe.
Why couldn’t she have chosen someone else? The regiment was full of hard men. Resourceful men. More experienced assassins than him. MI6 was busting with bored wannabe heroes desperate to get into the field but stuck behind computers because they couldn’t speak any African or Asian languages. Why not choose one of them? But of course any other guy would have far more dependants and emotional loyalties than he did. His life was unique in its isolation. No parents, no siblings, no kids by previous partnerships. A loner by circumstance and later by choice. All he had had in the whole world was his own tiny little family. They were his world.
And so easy to kill. Two little kids, clinging to their mum. How simple is that? Knock the lot off at once.
Any other guy McCluskey and her murderous crew of skeletons might have set up would have put two and two together at once … Hang on, they’d have said to that lying witch, you needed a man without ties and now all my loved ones, devoted friends and extended family have been knocked off separately over the last six months. Something fishy here.