The Empire of Time (15 page)

‘In the field. Each one of them was contacted the very first time they jumped back.’

‘But that isn’t possible. How could they know where to be or when?’

‘Krauss told them.’

I stare at him, incredulous. ‘
Theodor
Krauss?’

Hecht shakes his head. ‘No, thank Urd. Phillipe.’

‘Ah …’ I have a vague image of a man; tall, blond-haired and broad-shouldered. A lot like Seydlitz, now that I come to think of it.

‘And the damage?’

But Hecht only sighs, and I realise that he doesn’t know. The damage is being done right now, and he needs us to rectify it before the game is lost and the branches of the Tree blink out one by one.

Time. There is never enough time.

The platform is ready, its massive concave circle vibrating faintly as if alive. As I step into the room the women look up from the surrounding desks, their eyes anxious. They know that I may not return this time.

So it is sometimes. But this is much more serious than usual. I am the third operative to depart. Two more will leave after I’m gone. Yet will any of us return? Not if we’re too late. Not if we can’t undo the damage that is even now being done.

I have been busy between times. Hecht gave me Ritter’s report to read and a copy of the Russians’ file. Where he got the last, I don’t know, but they are both sobering documents. Freisler was right, after all. Seydlitz
did
get careless. Hecht blames himself. He thinks that the very directness of Seydlitz’s project may have alerted the Russians, but Freisler and I know otherwise.

Meanwhile Time has healed itself. History is as it was. The river flows on. All except for that huge gap in Space-Time in the middle of 1952. That is still there, for some reason, though the main current of Time appears to flow about it, like a river about a rock. And we’re not sure why. Some changes take on a permanency, others don’t. Some alter the river’s course, others merely dam it for a while.

And sometimes – and these are perhaps the worst instances – it changes and our perceptions and memories change with it, so that there seems no change at all. That is, until a traveller returns from the past and finds us so.

Those are the times I fear. To lose something – or someone – and not to know.

I have come straight here from a conference – Hecht and the five of us. He wanted to see if we could discern any pattern to events. Aside from the obvious, that is. Of the five who are out there, not a single one is in charge of a major project. They’re all cadet operatives, learning their trade in the field before taking on new projects of their own. It’s how we all start, helping others to carry out their schemes while learning all we can about those Ages in which we travel.

Beyond this, what? Gruber is patient and careful – meticulously so. Of the other four, there is the same divergence of character one might expect from any group of young men.

The eldest is twenty-eight, the youngest twenty-three. None of them has any longer than four years’ experience in the field. Anticipating things, Hecht had the genetic charts of all the dead operatives over the past four years checked out. Of those, another fifteen carried variants of Seydlitz’s distinctive genetic pattern.

Murdered, he thinks. Killed because they would not switch sides and betray the Fatherland.

But the big question is, how will the Russians
use
them? What scheme have they hatched to get at us through these ‘sleepers’ in our midst? Or is the damage already done?

Hecht thinks not. It is a characteristic of Time that while one can travel back a long way, one cannot travel forward a single nanosecond beyond the Now. In that sense, Time has a ceiling. It is as if we are in a lift that is moving slowly upward, but down the shaft of which we might plunge at any moment. A hole so deep one might fall for ever.

In Hecht’s opinion, the Russians’ plan will have been triggered the very moment Seydlitz went missing. Until then, they would not have risked removing the foci from their chests, for as soon as they did, those agents would vanish from our tracking screens, alerting us. But unless they remove them and substitute their own – a lengthy process that can take anywhere between twelve and sixteen hours – what possible use can they be?

No. Things are happening now – right now – but in the Past.

Our job then is to locate our missing operatives and bring them back. Or, failing that, to kill them. It isn’t a pleasant thought. I like Gruber. Yet as I stand there on the platform, waiting to jump, I find a matching coldness in myself. If he succeeds, then I die, and all my friends with me.

And if I die, who will look after Katerina?

The room is locked. As I look about me, I remember how things were and note that nothing seems to have been disturbed. My books lay open on the desk to the right of the bed as I left them, the old brass candlestick I bought in Konigsberg spattered with melted wax. My black leather boots rest on the floor to the left, dry mud still clinging to them, while my green velvet smoking robe hangs from the back of the tiny walnut wardrobe.

In the corner, tucked away, rests my leather travelling case, a white cloth belt acting as a strap.

It is the evening of 27 July 1759, and the sun is shining in through the leaded window of my Potsdam apartment. But what I am most aware of is the smell.

Someone has been in my room. I can smell the faint odour of their cologne, like a dark ink stain in a bowl of crystal clear water.

Smell. It always hits you powerfully when you jump back. Its richness can be overpowering at times. This time, however, the smell means something.

Gruber. Gruber has been here.

It takes a moment to assimilate. As my pulse slows and my lungs become accustomed to the richer air, so my thoughts clear.

Getting in here was no mystery. Gruber had a copy of the key. Until today there was no reason not to trust him, but now I know what he is.

There could be a bomb here somewhere, or a device to trap me.

I decide not to touch a thing – not even to look – and, turning about, I open the door and slip out, locking the door and then walking down the stairs, careful to make no sound, pausing on the turn to listen before hurrying to the door and out on to the street.

My clothes are of the Age: a long brocade jacket and a three-cornered hat, knee-length boots and britches. And, as this is Potsdam, capital of Prussia, and the style is distinctly military, so the cut and colour of my clothes is simple too: blues and greens, with a plain black hat. I blend in. And little wonder. I have spent years here in this place.

Church bells are ringing for the evening service. Even here, in free-thinking Prussia, religion is still important, and people stroll in their best attire, enjoying this most beautiful of evenings.

I see it all, but am distracted. Where is Gruber? That’s what I want to know. That’s why I hurry now, as if late for the evening service.

Gruber’s rooms are on the other side of town, near St Nikolai. He’ll not be there. He’d not be that stupid. But I have to check.

His landlady squints out at me from the darkness of her hallway, then grudgingly lets me pass. She knows me as Gruber’s friend, nor is there any reason for her to suspect otherwise, unless he’s told some tale. But it seems not. I am allowed to go up. The door is locked, but again I have the key. I hesitate. What if there’s a bomb? I fling it open, trusting to fate. Of Gruber there’s no sign, but it’s clear he was in a hurry. Clothes are strewn all over the place, and the contents of a bag have been emptied out over the floor. And there on the bed …

I walk across, then crouch, sniffing at the stain on the cover. It’s blood. Gruber’s blood, no doubt, where they cut the focus from his chest. Indeed, after a moment’s search, I find the tiny, delicate circle lying there among the debris. It looks like the very finest of filters, its ridged edge like the milling of an ancient metal coin.

They would have had to have done the crudest of operations on him – the most basic of repair jobs – but they will need to buy themselves time if they’re to replace it with their own. It takes twelve hours minimum to fix a new focus, sixteen max – it needs to grow into the nerves, to integrate with the whole of the body’s nervous system, especially the brain. Get it wrong and you might arrive at your destination missing a hand, a leg, or even your head.

I straighten up and look about me. There is a second smaller room just off to the left behind a pair of doors. I go through. Inside is a card table and four chairs. Two empty wine bottles and three glasses clutter the table. And cards. I can almost see them there, playing endless hands of cards, seeing out the night, awaiting the moment when they’d have to act. No doubt a messenger was sent, the very instant that the focus was taken from Seydlitz’s chest.

I smile and reach into my pocket, drawing out the skin-tight gloves. Pulling them on, I pick up the cards and slip them into the transparent bag.

As ever, I have come prepared. I knew I would find this, or something like this. To take Gruber they would have to have come here in person, and that meant that they would leave traces. From those traces we can put faces to them, reconstruct their appearance from their genetic code. Saliva, sweat, skin particles – anything will do. And the results are good. Ninety-eight per cent accurate, or thereabouts.

Because it will help to know who I’m looking for. Gruber they’ll hide away. But they can’t all hide. Not all of the time. And if I know what they look like it will give me an advantage. That is, if Gruber hasn’t already given them
my
likeness.

Gruber and his new friends will be armed, but that doesn’t worry me. If I find them I’ll give them no chance to use a weapon.

But before then I need to trip back.

They are waiting for me at the platform. Inge takes the samples and hurries off, and while I wait, Urte comes across and asks me how I am.

I have not seen Urte in almost a month. She’s almost half my height, but she always seems somehow bigger than her physical size. Her grey eyes smile up at me.

‘Will I see you later?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Have you forgotten?’

For a moment I wonder what she means, and then it hits me. We have an appointment for that evening. This thing with Seydlitz and Gruber had driven it from my mind.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I shall be there.’

Either that, or I’ll be dead. But I do not say that. I stand there, awkward now. And, sensing that, she smiles and nods and walks away, leaving me wondering how she manages to do that to me. After all, she is only half my age.

I walk over to where Zarah is sitting, hunched over her monitor, and ask her how things are. She looks up at me, distracted momentarily, then gestures towards the screen.

‘He’s still there. For the moment.’

She is speaking of Klaus, Klaus Heusinger. He has gone back, too, to take out Schwarz, another of the turncoats. They are out there right now, somewhere in the late twenty-fourth century, in the Time of the Mechanists. At any moment he might return. Or things might change.

In an
Augenblich, I think.
In the blink of an eye
.

If a single one of us fails, we all fail. If a single one of them is successfully operated upon by the Russians, then we have lost, because then they can infiltrate us before we know what’s happened and can thus penetrate our defences. Right now, however, all five are suspended in their timestreams, subject to the normal flow of Time. Until the Russians can place foci in their chests they are vulnerable. And so we must hit them now. There will be no second chance.

If you’re clever, you might have spotted a paradox of sorts in there. If they could operate, then they would have done, and we would have lost already, so this wouldn’t actually be happening. Only it doesn’t quite work like that. Timestreams have this peculiar property of running twice: first time without interference, and only then, second time round, with their changed characteristics. For instance, the day
before
Gehlen invented his first crude time machine, no one had ever travelled back in Time. Time was pure. No one had tinkered with it. There were other dimensions and secondary universes, certainly, but there were no links between them. Only when Gehlen started things rolling – made his first trip back, eighty-five years into the Past – was the timestream sullied.

Inge returns and offers me a pair of files. ‘There are three separate DNA strands, Gruber excluded. Those are the first two. The other’s new, so it’ll take a while to process.’

I open the first of the files and study it.

His name is Nemtsov – Alexandr Davydovich Nemtsov – and the generated image shows him to be a large-built, heavily muscled man. They’ve made him thirty in the picture, but he could be anywhere between twenty and fifty. Dark eyes, dark hair and a large, long nose. Not a handsome man.

I push the picture aside and look at the report. Nemtsov has crossed our paths on two previous occasions, once in the twenty-third century, and once late in the twenty-fourth, during the last days of the Mechanist Kings. According to this he killed one of our agents, but on neither occasion did we get a good look at him, so the image
could
be wrong. Unlikely, but …

He’s clever, this one. Good at his job. But this seems to be the earliest he’s ventured back, and I note the fact, hoping it might help. If he’s not familiar with Frederick’s period then he might just fuck up. It’s possible.

The other one is Dankevich.

I look up at Inge and laugh. ‘You’re kidding!’

She smiles back at me. ‘No. It’s your old friend. Guess they needed someone who knows the Age.’

True. But Dankevich! I had shot the bastard twice, the second time fatally – but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t the same man. When you travel in Time, things don’t always happen sequentially. What was
my
past was probably
his
future. But at least I knew one thing: I wouldn’t die this time round, not if Dankevich was there, because if
I
died, then who would shoot
him
?