The Empire of Time Read online

  And if I die, who will look after Katerina?

  37

  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.

  38

  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 gen
erated 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?

  I grin then close the file. It’s time to get back. Time to find Gruber and close him down.

  39

  I return to Potsdam. It is still the evening of the twenty-seventh. A single hour has passed since I was last here, but the shadows are lengthening, and the streets are silent now. At the Black Eagle tavern, the innkeeper, Muller, tells me he saw Gruber earlier in the company of two men: a big, dark-haired man and a weasel of a fellow.

  Dankevich.

  They bought several flagons of wine, then left.

  ‘How long ago?’

  Muller shrugs. ‘Two hours, maybe three?’

  I thank him with a silver thaler, then hurry to Taysen’s stables to the west of the town. As I walk between those neat, Prussian houses, I start trying to think like them. Gruber and I were here for one reason only: to save Frederick’s life.

  In seventeen days’ time, Frederick will take on the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Kunersdorf, eighty kilometres east of Berlin. It will be a fateful battle, and Frederick’s forty-eight thousand men – almost half the strength of the enemy force – will be soundly beaten. That much we cannot change. But we can keep Frederick himself alive. Two horses will be shot out from under him on the battlefield, and two musket-balls will penetrate his cloak. The second will kill him. Unless the snuff-box that it hits on the way – a flimsy silver thing, barely capable of deflecting a shot – is replaced by something sturdier.

  Historically I knew I had already succeeded. Frederick had survived. But unless I actually made the swap, he would not. And then …

  It was simple, really. If Frederick died, so too would Prussia, partitioned off between its three great rivals: France, Austria and Russia. Not a square mile of it would survive, and without Prussia there could be no Germany.

  Because Frederick had lived, catastrophe was turned into ultimate victory, for though only eighteen thousand of Frederick’s men survived that bloody encounter, by the end of the month Old Fritz would gather together a brand-new force of thirty-three thousand men and, in an act of heroic defiance, steel himself to fight one final battle on the open field before Berlin.

  He never had to, of course. His defiance proved enough. Both the Russians and the Austrians withdrew. Prussia was saved, and so, a century further on, its greatest chancellor, Bismarck, would create the German Confederation.

  So history functioned. With a little help from us.

  As I came into the street where Taysen’s was, I looked up past the walls of the town towards the royal palace. Sanssouci rested on the hills above the town, a marvel of rococo architecture, its elegance understated, like its owner.

  He was a wonder, Old Fritz. For six years now he had taken on the rest of mainland Europe and held them off. And not merely held them off, but beaten them soundly on numerous occasions. He was an inspiration to us all. Prussia, a country of four and a half million souls, had faced a coalition whose joint population was over ninety million, and whose combined armies were at least six times the size of Prussia’s own. In the space of nine months, between November 1757 and August 1758, Frederick had crossed a thousand miles of Central Europe and defeated his three main rivals one after another – the French at Rossbach, the Austrians at Leuthen, and the Russians, finally, at Zorndorf. Each time the odds were heavily against him, and each time he emerged from the battlefield the undisputed master. To have won a single one of those battles was remarkable, but to have triumphed in all three …

  There was no king to match him in all of Germany’s long history, and I had met them all. But the long struggle had cost Prussia dear. To arm and feed his armies, Frederick had bled his country white. There was barely an animal to be had in the whole of Potsdam, or so Taysen told me as we sat in his office sharing a tankard of beer.

  Taysen is an old friend, but this once he says he cannot help.

  ‘I’ll pay well,’ I say. ‘Whatever you ask.’

  He gives the faintest smile. ‘If only it were that easy, Otto. You see, I’ve sold all my horses. Yes, and for a good price. Your friend Gruber—’

  ‘I need a horse,’ I say. ‘If you can get me one …’

  I place a heavy bag of silver thalers on the table before him.

  ‘Otto, I …’ He shrugs apologetically, but his eyes look longingly at the bag of silver.

  ‘There must be one horse left in Potsdam, surely?’

  The notion gets him thinking. He reaches for his beer and downs it, then stands. ‘Wait here,’ he says. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Thus it is that, twenty minutes later, I am riding north-west towards Berlin on a horse that previously belonged to a captain in the Bayreuth Dragoons. The man, Taysen tells me, was drunk, else he’d never have contemplated the deal, but my only concern is not to be taken as a thief.

  Besides, I have other things on my mind. Like where Gruber is. I go to Nauener-Tor and ask the gateman if he’s seen a party heading out on to the Berlin road – merchants, not soldiers, with pack horses, maybe – and he says yes, they passed not an hour back. Four men in a hurry. And he thought it odd, because they had three spare horses with them, and horses being at such a premium, and there being no wares on their saddles …

  I thank the old man and ride on, hastening my pace as darkness falls. If I were them I’d find lodgings in Berlin – in one of the poorer quarters, maybe – and do the operation there. But they’ll know I’m after them.

  Or someone like me.

  40

  There are a dozen inns on the road and I am forced to stop and check each one, but my instinct is that they’ve headed straight for Berlin. If I were them, I’d try to lose myself in some backstreet lodging house and do the operation there, but I know from experience that it’s a mistake to try to outguess the Russians. They rarely do the expected. The only thing I’m certain of is that Gruber cannot jump – not yet – and they won’t leave him here, so until they’re settled somewhere they’ll move fast and try to lose me.

  Of course, it’s possible that they left the Berlin road and doubled back in the dark, but it’s unlikely. This is Angerdorfer country – farming villages. There’s not a major town for more than fifty miles, unless they make for Brandenburg, and why go there? Besides, Berlin is on the way to Kunersdorf, and, if my hunch is right, they’ll not waste the chance to make a double strike: at us, through Gruber, and at Frederick himself.

  It’s after dawn when I reach the Schloss Bridge to the west of the medieval town. The royal residence dominates the skyline on the other bank, but it’s of no interest right now. Frederick has not been to Berlin these past six years. He’s south of here. Until three days ago he could be found on a lon
ely farm in Duringsvorkwerk, catching up on his correspondence, but having heard of Marshal Saltykov’s victory at Paltzig, he’ll have broken camp immediately and will be marching north, towards Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. In four days’ time he will reach Sommerfeld, and four days after that he will arrive in Frankfurt itself. It’s there I plan to meet him. But not until I’ve dealt with Gruber.

  The gate is open and has been for an hour, and when I ask the gatekeeper, he tells me that four men entered the town at daybreak. It would appear that they have let the spare horses go, for the man makes no reference to them when I question him. I leave him with a thaler in his hand and gallop on, down the Schlossfreiheit with its tall and massive buildings, then out into the open space before the Schloss itself.

  Berlin, even in this age, is large, and I barely know where to begin my search, but I’m certain they’ll head for one of the poorer, less reputable parts of town. I stop and look about me. There are stalls out already. I dismount and walk across to one that’s selling Bouletten, and purchase several of the spicy meatballs that are Berlin’s culinary specialty. I’m hungry, but that’s not the reason why I choose this particular stall. It’s well placed, on the corner of the two main thoroughfares, with a good view of the entire square. The vendor is a big man in his forties, with an untrimmed hedge of a moustache, and as I chew on one of his delicacies, I ask him if he saw four travellers pass earlier.

  He’s been here since first light, hoping to catch the early trade, and he remembers the men well. He even describes the fourth of them: a tall man, quite young and yet completely bald, with the look of a priest about him. He says they went south, down the Bruderstrasse.

  I thank the man with a coin, then walk my mount across the cobbled square.

  I should be hurrying, only I’ve a good idea now where they’ve gone. Berlin is, and always has been, a twin city, and here, to the south of the Schloss, begins its other, smaller half. This is Colln. Where I’m walking now is the nicer, more respectable part of Colln, but to the south, where the town nestles in a curve of the River Spree, is a huddle of streets that spill out on to the river front.