Stanton stared back, meeting the challenge of her eyes. He hadn’t asked for any of this. And he’d lost his children too.
‘Maybe you’re right, Katie,’ he said quietly. ‘Although I think you’ll find I’m not so easy to kill. What I and the people of my time set in motion was disastrous, that’s pretty clear. But I stayed with the mission when I saw how it had gone wrong. I could have walked away but I didn’t. I found you and I saved you. And because of that we have a chance to pool our knowledge and try again. There’s a phrase from my century, third time lucky. Do you know it?’
‘There was no luck in my time, Hugh Stanton. The word and the very idea were banned. The Great Navigator directed all things for the peace and harmony of all. Luck is a bourgeois notion.’
‘Well, we’re directing things now. And we’re going to get it right this time. And for that reason, before we begin our plan we have to go back to Constantinople one more time. To the cellar from which we were both born.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re going to make a better century and, when we’ve done it, we want it to be left that way. So we must place your warning next to mine.’
47
TRAVELLING WITH KATIE was complex. The Chronations of her time had not had the resources or the technological sophistication to supply her with papers or currencies. In fact, there had been very few early-twentieth-century documents left for them to forge. All evidence of the petit bourgeois past had been destroyed in successive ‘cultural’ revolutions and purges. Great buildings, museums, pictures and books. Virtually nothing remained of the time before the Dynasty of Great Navigators had taken the helm.
It had been as much as the Chronations of Katie’s world had been able to do to smuggle her to the ghost town once known as Istanbul and place her in the cellar in the dockland area at the appointed time. Katie had arrived in 1914 with not much more than a couple of guns and a few bits of gold which had been supplied by a senior Party dentist. The only aids the Master of the State Research and Education Facility had been able to give her were a compass, a map of Europe, a piece of paper with the location and time of the assassination of the Kaiser and a suit of rough male clothing and boots. She had lived by her wits as she made her way across Turkey and the Balkans, stealing and killing to get whatever she needed.
‘I’ve been on the run for most of my adult life,’ she explained. ‘That’s why they chose me. But if you want my opinion anybody could survive in this world. The fields and woods are full of food, the peasants are trusting and the border guards shout out a warning before they shoot, which is very foolish of them since it allows me to shoot them first.’
Stanton and Katie travelled by train across Europe. Katie maintained her guise as a man wearing a suit of clothes that Stanton bought her. She refused point blank to wear the women’s clothing of the time, maintaining not unreasonably that it was ridiculous and would severely restrict her fighting ability.
Due to her lack of papers they were not able to cross borders by train but instead got out at the last stop before each one and hiked out into the country to find a suitable point to cross. By such a manner the two Chronations crossed Europe north to south and returned once more to the city where both their adventures had begun.
Once more Stanton took rooms at the Pera Palace Hotel and that evening in the dark of night, for the final time, he made his way to the house that Isaac Newton had bought when first the business of Chronos began.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said to Katie as they reconnoitred the street, ‘was it really necessary to kill the doctor and the nurse when you came out of the cellar?’
‘The woman in the room in the corridor heard my footsteps,’ Katie answered. ‘My boots were too heavy, and steel shod.’
‘Didn’t you think to come in rubber soles?’
Katie stopped in the darkened street and turned to Stanton.
‘Those boots were donated by a soldier who probably paid with his life for losing them. Without them I would have come to this time either barefoot or at best in canvas moccasins. You have no comprehension of the utter poverty of the world you created, Hugh Stanton.’
Stanton kept silent after that. Together they broke into the hospital building using Stanton’s skeleton keys and crept down into the cellar.
It was just as Stanton had left it, with the two sets of footprints and the chair and the table on which lay the letter to the future that Stanton had left.
‘Your history,’ Katie said. ‘The one I found.’
‘No,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The one you found was left at the beginning of the century in which you were born, the century I created which disappeared the moment you entered the past and rebooted history all over again. This letter was left in the new version of the twentieth century, the one that you are creating. The one in which you’ll die. That letter is the same letter as the one you found down to its last molecule but it exists in a different version of time.’
‘Well, let us hope there’s only ever one version of mine,’ she said.
Katie approached the table and put a second envelope beside Stanton’s. The history of her own twentieth century. A catalogue of utter misery, written out during the long hours they had spent travelling on the train.
Two different versions of the future lying side by side. Both terrible but one vastly more terrible than the other.
‘So, it’s done,’ she said. ‘Now if another traveller passes this way at least there’s a chance they’ll know all that we know.’
‘But if we succeed in our mission,’ Stanton replied, ‘if we’re able to prevent the German revolution, perhaps there won’t be another traveller.’
‘Perhaps,’ Katie said.
Stanton turned his torch beam from the table where Katie was standing to the shadowy arches where the ancient dusty bottles were laid down.
There were the footprints he had left, halfway between Katie’s and the arches. Stanton played his torchlight into the darkness of the vault.
A thought occurred to him.
One which made his soul shiver with dread.
He stepped towards the darkness.
‘Where are you going?’ Katie asked.
‘Towards the past,’ he said. ‘Your footsteps are ahead of mine. I came here to change history and I did. A century passed and then you came for the same reason, but time had slipped a little and the sentry box had moved. Just like Sengupta said, As each loop of space and time progresses, space and time are gained.’
‘Sentry box?’ Katie asked. ‘Sengupta? What are you talking about?’
Stanton didn’t reply. He was under the first arch now.
He turned his torch to the floor. Were there marks? He thought perhaps there were but the dust was so thick he couldn’t be sure. He shone his light once more on the bottles, sooty black upon their shelves.
‘Perhaps I wasn’t the first,’ he said. ‘After all, why should I have been?’
And then he saw it.
Wedged in among the rows of bottles.
An envelope.
He reached out and took it from its place.
Then he walked a little further into the catacomb. McCluskey had said it stretched back away under the street and the next house along.
After a few more steps Stanton found another envelope.
Then another.
And another.
Five, six.
Nine, ten.
‘What are you doing?’ He heard Katie’s voice behind him. ‘If we’ve done what we came to do we need to clear out.’
Stanton returned to where she was standing. He was carrying the brittle, yellowing papers in his hands. He had twelve, perhaps there were more; the cellar went further back and deeper than he had gone.
‘It’s what I feared,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t the first. There have been many.’
He put the bundle of papers down on the table beside his and Katie’s own.