They sat together on the floor and by the light of their torches began to read.
The stories of a dozen centuries. A dozen twentieth centuries.
The same hundred and eleven years repeated over and over again beginning each time in 1914. Sometimes the authors came back to save or to kill the Archduke. Others to save or kill the Kaiser. Others came with their sights set on some different figure altogether, monsters in the making, too young as yet to have committed the crimes they were destined to commit if left to live. But each time the result had been the same. A nightmare catalogue of human brutality and human misery. War and genocide. Bigotry and fear.
Some versions, like Stanton’s own century, had resulted in some kind of human progress, although never it seemed enough to persuade the Chronations of those times to leave well alone. Others, like Katie’s, were simply unmitigated nightmares descending ever further into a hellish darkness, the type of which only humanity is capable of inventing.
Sitting together in the beams of their torchlight, Stanton and Katie read of dictators and secret policemen. Of terrible science and murderous disease. They read of Communism corrupted over and over again. And also of something called Fascism, of which neither of them had heard but which had sometimes gained the upper hand, although the result was just the same.
The name Hitler came up in four separate histories.
Stanton didn’t know him at all; the Austrian fanatic had played no part in his century, but Katie knew him as one of Strasser’s henchmen.
In other centuries, however, it seemed this terrible man had been able to make himself the boss, a monster the equal of Stalin and Strasser. Harnessing Germany’s might to conquer half the world and murder half the people in it. Two previous Chronations had come back specifically to kill him while he was still a penniless dosser, painting his watercolours in Vienna.
Hours passed. Time was moving on. Soon the hospital above them would be up and bustling. Stanton laid the papers back on the table all together.
‘I think perhaps we’re the first Chronations to meet,’ he said. ‘Those who came before us simply rebooted the previous one’s creation and the loop went round again. You were supposed to kill me but instead we met.’
Katie nodded, still staring moist-eyed at the papers she’d been reading.
‘So many other women forced to kill their babies,’ she whispered.
‘This can’t go on,’ Stanton said firmly. ‘The twentieth century can’t spin in time for ever, a howl of pain ringing across the universe into eternity. Same century following same century, a planet and a race lost in loop, destined to suffer alternative versions of the same nightmare for ever.’
‘No,’ Katie said quietly, tears glistening on her cheeks now. ‘It can’t go on.’
‘So, after we’ve killed Rosa Luxemburg,’ Stanton went on, ‘and done what best we can to give this new century a chance, we have to go to Cambridge.’
‘Yes,’ Katie said, ‘and destroy Newton’s box. There can be no more Chronations. I must be the last.’
48
KT503B678 NEVER GOT the chance to go to Cambridge and close the loop in time, but she died ensuring that Stanton might.
The Turkish police were waiting for them when they tried to leave the house. They’d lingered too long reading ancient histories in the cellar and been overheard by the night nurse on duty.
As they opened the front door of the building, car headlamps were turned on and a warning shouted. The street was full of police, crouching behind cars and wagons.
Katie made her decision without hesitation.
‘I will engage these people,’ she said. ‘You find another way out.’
‘But—’ Stanton began to protest but Katie stopped him.
‘You can survive much better in this civilized world than me,’ she said, ‘and besides, it’s time for me to die. I always swore that I’d never take my own life, that the Party would have to kill me, that I’d die fighting them. Well, this way I will. Because if my death helps you escape, then perhaps the Party will never even exist. Besides, it’s time. Time for me to join my babies.’ Her eyes were bright and far away. ‘Go. Do what you can for this last twentieth century. Then go to Cambridge. You have to go to Cambridge, Hugh. Make it so that finally history can move on.’
‘I will,’ Stanton replied.
Then he leant forward and kissed her on the cheek.
To his surprise she reached out and put her arms round him. Drawing him to her in an embrace. It was the first physical contact of any sort that they had had since she had leapt from her sick bed at the Kempinski hotel in an effort to kill him.
The hug lasted only a few seconds but it seemed to Stanton that in those seconds there was a world of sorrow. Her body quivered as she gripped him tight and laid her head on his shoulder.
When she stepped away, her eyes were glistening with tears.
She produced a gun from each of her pockets.
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Goodbye.’
Stanton turned away and made his way back through the house. There were doctors, nurses and patients peeking out of doors but he ignored them and they didn’t try to stop him.
Once more he was heading for a rooftop escape and he realized that for the second time he was leaving behind him a woman about whom he had come to care deeply.
He made his way up the various flights of stairs. The sound of rapid fire behind told him that Katie had engaged the police. He knew that she would make sure he had enough grace to make his escape. It wouldn’t be their choice when to kill her but hers when to die.
He found a skylight in the attic of the building and made his way out into the night.
Alone once more.
He was never to return to the house of Chronos in Constantinople.
Instead he made his final trip to Berlin.
He knew where to find Rosa Luxemburg. The history of her time of struggle and the glorious revolution that followed had been holy writ to Katie and her fellow Communist pioneers. During their time together travelling across Europe she had been able to give Stanton the address of the safehouse in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht had gone underground during the months of persecution. That house had become a shrine in Katie’s century, a place of pilgrimage for high Party officials. Stanton intended to ensure that in this century it would be remembered only as the place where a briefly notorious Social Democrat had been shot by an unknown assassin.
And then … then?
Stanton knew what then. He had thought of nothing else during his final train journey from Istanbul.
He would find Bernadette Burdette. Whether she was in custody in Berlin or home in Ireland or somewhere else altogether, he’d find her. He would make her travel with him to Cambridge, at gunpoint if necessary. Then, he would take her to the Master’s Lodge at Trinity and somehow he would show her Newton’s box. Then once she had seen it and knew that he had not lied, he would destroy it, closing the loop in time for ever.
And then he and Bernadette could face the last ever twentieth century together. Her riding pillion on his 1914 Enfield.
That was Stanton’s plan. It was Guts Versus Newton.
End game.
And so from his hotel room at the Kempinski Stanton equipped himself for another assassination. He had no body armour this time, having left it in the apartment he had shared with Bernadette, but he had one of his Glock pistols, which he checked and loaded carefully, although he knew he would require only one bullet.
He made his way to the secret Socialist safehouse and lay in wait, hiding in the car he had hired for the job. Katie had told him that Rosa Luxemburg was known to emerge each day, heavily disguised, ready to go about her business of agitation and revolution.
As expected she emerged from the house. Liebknecht wasn’t with her but she was flanked by two bodyguards. Stanton hoped he would not have to kill them also. He doubted it would be necessary; he had a clean shot.