Stanton settled deeper into his firing position, the barrel of the gun resting on his folded jacket on the ledge.
The Kaiser took his position in front of the ribbon and nodded. It seemed he definitely did not intend to say anything as an officer approached him at once carrying a cushion on which was a pair of scissors. The Kaiser took up the scissors and reached forward to cut the ribbon.
Bang!
A shot was fired.
But it wasn’t Stanton who fired it. Stanton felt a massive pain in his back, as if somebody had taken a clump hammer and brought it down with all their might on a space just to the right of his spine, just behind his heart.
He’d been shot at and but for the polyethylene ballistic plates in his Gore-tex vest he would have been dead already.
Stanton let go of his rifle and rolled over. Already the Glock semi-automatic was in his hand. All in an instant he saw a grey-clad figure with a shaven head standing ten metres or so away with a rifle at his shoulder. The figure must have managed to cock the bolt with inordinate speed because there was another crack and Stanton felt another horrendous blow to his chest, a ferocious steel punch from a tiny ballistic fist which left him gasping for breath. However, the body armour saved his life a second time and despite the twin blows he’d taken on the back and front of his body, Stanton was able to bring his handgun up into the firing position and return fire. He loosed off three rounds in scarcely more than a second. The first missed, but the second two hit the man in the arm and upper chest, knocking him backwards against the chimney in front of which he was standing.
Stanton didn’t even watch his assailant fall fully to the ground. Even as the man slid down the chimney into a heap, Stanton had rolled back over on to his front. Gasping at the pain in his bruised chest, he took up his telescopic rifle once more. It had been incredible misfortune that some sort of guard had happened upon him at that time. The Kaiser’s people were clearly a massive step up from the Austrians, as indeed Stanton had feared they would be. They must have decided to sweep the roofs after all. Nonetheless as long as there weren’t any more of them he might still have time to get his man.
Glancing down into the Potsdamer Platz he realized that the whole incident with the guard had only taken a matter of seconds. The Kaiser was still cutting the ribbon. It seemed to be proving troublesome and two officials had stepped forward to pull the thing tight to make it easier to cut.
Stanton thanked the heavens for the German public’s appetite for military bands. Gun fights make a noise and while his own Glock was a relatively quiet piece the two rifle shots might easily have carried as far as the podium had a brass band not been playing. They had no doubt been heard in the roof garden but Stanton could only hope they had been ignored. There were plenty of motor cars in Berlin and cars from that time backfired a lot.
Putting all other thoughts from his mind, Stanton settled once more and, after a moment’s searching through the magnified lens, picked up his target in the cross hairs. The Emperor was standing quite alone, behind the little ribbon at the front of the stage. The dignitaries had all gathered at the edges of the podium, apart from the two holding the ribbon. Stanton was glad to see that the Kaiserin was not present. He had no wish to shoot a man in front of his wife.
Now, with the Kaiser in his sights, he could see the man’s face close up for the first time. It was shocking how familiar it was, even to a man born towards the end of the twentieth century. That moustache, so fierce and uncompromising, the waxed and carefully arranged glory of what had at that time been the most famous whiskers on the planet. The eyes, not unkind at all, but made deliberately fierce from years of assuming a look as stern as he could make it. Stanton knew that the Kaiser had been quite friendly and considerate as a schoolboy, but later as a guards officer and young ruler he had deliberately cultivated an abrupt and imperious manner. He’d thought it was expected of him.
Looking at the man, Stanton was also struck by his resemblance to the British royals, even the ones who had been born a hundred years after him. That was one strong gene pool. And powerful. Incredibly powerful. The British King, the German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar. All first cousins. How strange the world had once been.
Stanton raised the angle of his sighting by an infinitesimally small margin, bringing his cross hairs up to a point an inch above the space between the Emperor’s eyes. The man was speaking now, perhaps complaining about the bluntness of the scissors, but keeping himself stiff and rigid as he did so.
Formal, proper.
Dead.
Stanton watched his target’s head explode through the magnified lens. He had known he’d only get one shot and so had used ammunition that was designed to do the maximum damage.
And it had. As the man’s body seemed to half float, half stagger backwards there was almost nothing left above its shoulders at all.
Stanton had completed his mission.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was alive and the Kaiser was dead.
The Great War had been averted.
The world had been saved.
31
STANTON DISMANTLED HIS rifle and stowed it in his bag. He picked up the spent cartridge shell and stowed that also. Next he took a second empty rifle cartridge shell from his pocket. It was for a Mauser Gewehr 98, the German army rifle of the period. He put the empty shell on the ground where his firing position had been.
When the police discovered the shell they would presume they knew the make of the murder weapon. A German gun for a fictitious German killer. His own bullet would have disintegrated.
Now there was just one last element to the Chronos plan to be completed. An element Stanton found almost as distasteful as having been required to shoot an innocent man from a safe distance. This was to give the authorities someone to blame for the killing. Someone German so that the nation would look within itself for revenge and not abroad.
Stanton couldn’t fault the logic. By 1914 Germany had the most developed and the most sophisticated left wing in the world. The pace and sophistication of Germany’s economic revolution had led to a huge new class of educated men and women who were more than aware of their own exploitation. The Red Scare bogeyman was alive and well in pre-war Germany and hysterical reactionaries were ready to believe any slander against organized labour.
Stanton was about to give them a bigger stick to beat them with than they could have ever dreamt of. He didn’t like doing it. Blaming the Left for crimes they hadn’t committed was an age-old establishment sport. But it had to be done.
Better a Germany fighting itself than fighting the rest of the world.
Stanton took one of the leaflets from his bag and placed it under the Mauser shell case. The leaflet was bright blood red in colour. It featured a stern and noble-looking working man who was bringing his mighty fist down on the head of a vicious little devil with the face of the Kaiser. The wording on the leaflet was very simple – The Kaiser is dead! Workers rise up and take control!
That was all, no detail. Nothing more specific.
‘Let ’em sweat over it,’ McCluskey had said. ‘Let ’em obsess over it! Who killed Bill? The whole country will tie itself in knots.’
Having left his false evidence, Stanton put on his jacket ready to leave. He allowed himself one last glance down into Potsdamer Platz where, not surprisingly, absolute pandemonium had broken out. The crowd had surged forward and lines of soldiers, including the entire brass band, were struggling to keep them back while all the top-hatted gentlemen clustered together behind the podium where the ex-Emperor’s body no doubt had landed.