Time and Time Again (27 page)

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
Bernadette and Stanton parted company and he continued his journey to Berlin, Imperial capital of the Second Reich and the place where he knew he must kill the Emperor.

Berlin was two cities.

That was the conclusion Stanton came to as he ate a dish of ice cream on the terrace of the Kranzler patisserie on Unter Den Linden.

One was nineteenth century and the other twentieth century.

The nineteenth-century one was about as nineteenth century a city as you could find, steeped in the Imperialist mind-set of the time. A fiercely militaristic town, capital of the garrison state of Prussia. No people since the Spartans had so gloried in martial ardour. No nation of the modern world, with the possible exception of the Zulus, ever idolized its army so completely. The army was far and away the most important and the most visible institution in the city after the monarchy, with which it was inextricably linked. The military were everywhere. Marching bands in every park. Grand parades on every Sunday (and any other day on the tiniest excuse). Officers strutting in the boulevards and lounging in the cafes in ornate dress uniforms which would have been entirely impractical for any other activity than raising a glass or bowing to a lady. Columns of troops marched about wherever there was space to march about. And there were sentries
everywhere
. Stanton had had no idea of the number of soldiers on the streets of pre-war Imperial Berlin. It was frankly a bit weird. No other city felt the need to place uniformed sentries outside every public building. Museums were guarded, national monuments, railway stations, public toilets. Anywhere that crown or municipal authority was extended there was a spike-headed soldier with rifle at his shoulder marching about, usually with the ubiquitous black-and-white sentry box behind him. To a military man like Stanton it was all quite fun; he enjoyed the sight of their impeccable turnout, their faultless drill and the shine on every boot. The Germans did military ceremony almost as well as the British and they did a lot more of it. The sort of show the Horse Guards put on outside Buckingham Palace once a day, the Reichsheer would mount at a sewage pumping station on the hour.

And where there could be no soldiers, then there were people trying to look like soldiers. Half the population of Berlin was in uniform, three-quarters if you counted waiters and hotel doormen. Every institution in the city seemed to have been moulded in the image of the military. Everyone from policemen to postmen to students to hotel concierges dressed like soldiers. Teachers wore uniforms.

And yet strangely Stanton found the overall effect was neither warlike nor threatening. Rather, it gave a slightly comical impression of benign and self-satisfied
permanence
. The postmen that looked like captains and the water board officials that looked like generals and the telegram delivery boys that looked like field marshals were just part of a happy pantomime. As if the whole city was the set of some Ruritanian comic opera and the people its chorus and principals.

Germany hadn’t fought a real war since Bismarck had unified the country forty years before, and for all the martial music and stamping about, Stanton sensed no desire among the people of its capital city to fight one now.

A cake trolley passed by Stanton’s table. They really liked their cakes, the Germans. Or, perhaps more to the point, they liked their cream. For as far as Stanton could see, cakes were really no more than whipped cream delivery systems, thin layers of sponge set between inch-thick layers of dairy fat.
Kaffee und Kuchen
, that was what they liked in Berlin. Stanton liked it too.

The whole place just felt so
contented
.

And of course that was because of the other Berlin. The twentieth-century Berlin.

The Berlin whose time had come.

Because, military pantomime aside, the place was
modern
. Even to a visitor from the twenty-first century it felt that way. It seemed to Stanton that there was scarcely a single building that was over fifty years old and many more appeared only to have been built the previous week. This was a city expanding more quickly and more dynamically than any other town in the world. There was a huge amount of motor traffic, far more so than Stanton had noticed in London, and everywhere there was evidence of power-house industry and cutting-edge technology. On the same streets where squads of soldiers marched there were banks of public telephones, automatic ticketing machines and the most efficient and well-organized trams in Europe. There were elevated railway lines and underground railways with stations on almost every corner. There was electricity everywhere; the whole town was wired, and more reliably than anywhere on the planet. When Stanton plugged in his personal computer using a customized transformer he’d found as steady a current as ever he’d had in the twenty-first century.

Berlin made
everything
. Most of the world’s chemicals. The bulk of the world’s electrical engineering. A large chunk of the world’s steel.
All
the world’s advanced cameras, telescopes and precision instruments. And above all it made incredible amounts of money. Even the great cities of the industrial USA looked enviously at Berlin.

Nutters aside, the last thing anybody in this city wanted was a war.

War would cost it everything. It
had
cost it everything.

The last time.

Stanton had
seen
the pictures. Pictures of this magnificent city in ruins. Hatred and slaughter stalking the town. He knew the history; every school kid from his time did, it was all they studied. How Germany had led the twentieth century to nightmarish ruin and in so doing had destroyed itself. How these plump, busy, prosperous people would in just a few years’ time be shattered ghosts, disease-ridden and on the very brink of starvation, their world-beating economy destroyed and facing decades of nightmare, revolution, deprivation and oppression.

But it wasn’t going to happen this time.

Because Stanton was going to stop it. He would save Berlin and he would save Germany. He would save its foolish, stamping toy soldiers and he would save its brilliant people, whom Stanton admired so much for their industry and their inventiveness, their crazy originality, their commerce, their science and their arts. He would save them from the terrible fate that awaited them.

He would save them from their kaiser.

Because outrage in Sarajevo or not, sooner or later Emperor Wilhelm, with his militaristic obsessions, his vanity and his raw wounded ego, would drag this young, dynamic nation into suicidal war.

A large picture of the Emperor hung on the wall opposite and to Stanton’s mind that picture said it all. It was cartoonish in its vainglorious swagger, the great man viewed slightly from below as if surveying the whole world and intent on being its master. Dressed in a white uniform with steel breastplate like some angel of war, a colonnaded Roman background made his Imperial pretensions all the more clear.

And the left arm on his sword hilt, where it usually was, disguising the birth defect which many believed had shaped the psyche of the man. It was withered and fully six inches shorter than his right arm. Wilhelm had always bravely ignored the disability, taking part in every sport and military practice, but nonetheless he had remained secretly prey to deep self-doubt and also a self-disgust.

Stanton asked for his bill and laid some Reichmarks on the saucer. And there was the Emperor again, on the notes and coins, Kaiser Bill. The man with the pointy-up moustache. The man for whom there was still only one Germany. The military one. Because it meant nothing to Wilhelm the Second that German industry was conquering the world. For him it had to be German arms that did the conquering, with him at the front in a helmet with a huge eagle on top.

Stanton looked at his watch. In less than twenty-four hours the Emperor would be dead.

He felt a pang of pity. Wilhelm was by no means all bad. But he was vain and cantankerous and pompous and unreasonable and emotionally unstable with a well-established small empire complex. Those were very dangerous characteristics in a person who was the undisputed war lord of the finest army on the planet.

He simply had to die.

STANTON LEFT THE
cafe and walked out on to Unter Den Linden intent on one last reconnoitre of his chosen vantage point. It was a delightful morning and the sun was shining through the linden trees and the chestnuts, making a dappled pattern on the road. Cars, carriages and pedestrians hurried up and down and policemen waved their arms about.

When Stanton had arrived in Berlin, instead of checking into a hotel, he’d taken a short-let furnished apartment. He had no idea when a suitable opportunity to carry out his mission would arise and reckoned that he might be resident in the city for months waiting for the perfect hit to present itself. He certainly didn’t intend to rush it. After all, he would very likely get only one chance. If he failed, there was a fair possibility he would be captured. Even if he got away, the Kaiser’s security people would be so spooked that it might prove impossible ever to get another opportunity. He was painfully aware that unlike with the Sarajevo mission he had no benefit of hindsight this time, and that apart from having superior equipment, his chances were no better than any other assassin’s would have been.

As it turned out he hadn’t needed to wait very long at all because on only the third morning after he had arrived from Vienna a royal ceremony was announced to take place in Potsdamer Platz. A glance at the published arrangements was enough to convince Stanton that his chance had arrived.

He strolled along Unter den Linden and turned south into Friedrichstrasse then on to Leipziger Strasse and into Leipziger Platz, from where he intended to take up his firing position.

Leipziger Platz was adjacent to Potsdamer Platz, the heart of Imperial Berlin. This was the great transport hub of the city, across which were laid numerous tram lines. The arrival of automobiles in large numbers had placed extra pressure on the
Platz
and extensive reorganization had been required. A new layout for the maze of tram tracks had been put in place and the Kaiser himself had been persuaded to journey in from his Potsdam Palace to declare it open.

This was considered a great coup for the municipal authorities who, unlike the army, found it very difficult to persuade the Emperor to interest himself in their activities. They had therefore made a great fuss over the arrangements for the ceremony, all of which were fully described in the papers.

Stanton had spent the days since the announcement had been made laying his plans. It was clear that he needed elevation to get a clear shot. The target would no doubt be on a podium but he was likely to be surrounded by staff and he certainly couldn’t rely on the German security team being as unfathomably incompetent as the Austrian one had been in Sarajevo. Stanton only had to look at the difference in the state of the two nation’s armies and economies to be clear that dealing with the Germans was going to be a very different thing from dealing with the Austro-Hungarians. Royal protection techniques and theory might have been less advanced than they were in Stanton’s personal experience but it would nonetheless be a big mistake to underestimate the German police and Secret Service.

Fortunately for Stanton there existed an obvious platform from which to fire. Leipziger Platz was famous for its shops and restaurants, and most famous among these was the Wertheim department store. This was a truly massive structure at the end of Leipziger Strasse, facing on to Leipziger Platz: ninety metres of shop front towering over the plaza and offering an uninterrupted view of Potsdamer Platz beyond.

And the Wertheim had a roof garden.

A roof garden from which it was possible to gain access to the rest of the roof, and to which the only impediment to trespass was a sign on a small door informing the public that access was
Verboten
; a door through which Stanton had simply stepped on the three previous days and through which he stepped now.

These truly were more innocent times.

The roof area outside the fenced area of the cafe garden was much like the roofs of most large buildings, a maze of chimneys, pipes and ventilation shafts. Plenty of cover, making it possible to be completely concealed within a very few steps of leaving the cafe.

Having made his way to the position he had selected on the edge of the roof of the Wertheim store, Stanton looked out over Potsdamer Platz far below him. The great junction was crisscrossed with trams and cars and scuttling pedestrians. Tomorrow it would be filled with cheering crowds, marching bands and lines of policemen. And in the middle of it, his target. The vantage point simply could not have been more perfect. No sniper had ever been better served.

He crept back across the roof and made his way home.

That night, in his little apartment, Stanton got out his computer and attempted to write down his thoughts. The following day would be the last one when events in Europe would bear any resemblance to how they had unfolded in the previous twentieth century.

Preventing the Sarajevo assassination had merely put the catastrophe on hold. Europe remained a primed bomb with the Kaiser itching to light the fuse. It was still perfectly possible for the twentieth century to unfold in exactly the same disastrous manner that it had the last time. Tomorrow all that would change. He would eliminate the root cause of conflict and there would begin an entirely new history. One single bullet from another world would send the whole course of human events plunging into uncharted waters.

And with that his own mission, his purpose in this time and place, would be over. He would have done his duty.

And what then?

For the five weeks that he had been living in the past he had been able to avoid that question. The business of Chronos was too pressing, his work too important. But in just a few hours that would all be over. He wouldn’t be a special agent from the future any more. Just a lonely man prone to strange and fantastical dreams about peoples and events that had never occurred nor would ever occur.