What if he is? I ask myself, thinking of Gress. What if he does work for Reichenau? But if so, why wouldn’t he keep me? Why let me go?
It’s a good question, only I have a possible answer. To find out what I was up to, and, at the same time, to keep an eye on me and make sure I was no threat.
I go inside and ride the lift to reception, twenty floors down, deep in the earth, where another of the do-hu serves me, giving me my electronic key and a sealed letter.
The letter intrigues me. Who, apart from Ernst and Svetov, knows I’m here? And why would they write me a letter?
Back in my room, I lock the door then slit the letter open with my thumbnail.
And laugh. It’s a note from Theoretician Fischer, saying how much he enjoyed my company and would I be his guest at dinner tomorrow evening?
It seems I’ve talked my way inside.
I stretch out on the massive bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep, but it’s less than five minutes before I have a visitor, Svetov appearing out of the air.
‘Otto …’
I sit up. ‘What is it now?’
Svetov looks about the room, taking in its opulence. ‘Are you all right, Otto? Your movements …’
‘I got picked up. By the local SS. A man by the name of Gress. Here’s his details …’
And I hand Svetov a handwritten copy, based on the plastic card Gress gave me.
‘He might be worth looking at. There was something about him that was odd. I even wondered whether he might be one of Reichenau’s men.’
Svetov looks up, interested. ‘Okay. I’ll check him out. But I came because we’ve had some news.’
‘News?’
‘From Hecht’s brother, Albrecht. He’s finally turned up.’
‘And?’
‘He’s got news of what happened to Hecht.’
359
Albrecht is sitting with Master Schnorr, in Schnorr’s private rooms, when I arrive. I embrace him briefly, then sit, facing him, listening as he briefly tells his tale.
Hecht did, it seems, return to the Haven for his final days, and it was there that he met his death.
‘Who killed him?’
Albrecht hesitates, then, softly, ‘You did.’
His words stun me. But Albrecht explains.
‘It was Reichenau. He managed to place a mind-brace on him.’
‘A mind-brace?’
‘It controls the cerebellum by means of pulsed signals. Hecht thought at first that it could be removed, but that wasn’t so. It’s semi-organic, you see, and as it slowly infiltrated his mind, so it slowly took him over. Eventually it would have controlled him totally. My brother would have been Reichenau’s tool, and Reichenau would have had full access to Four-Oh. Hecht could not allow that to happen.’
‘Okay. I see that. But why me?’
‘Because you were the only one he trusted. Even at the end, even after all you’d done, he knew he could count on you.’
‘And the ash-leaf pendant?’
‘Reichenau left that. Hecht said you would know what it meant.’
I look down. This, surely, is proof that Reichenau and Kolya have been working together, for how else would Reichenau have obtained it?
‘How did Reichenau locate the Haven?’
‘I don’t know. But my brother thought that Reichenau must somehow have “tagged” him with something like the patch he used to take Gehlen from his age. There is no other way.’
‘And the Haven?’
‘Is safe again. We’ve changed the jump coordinates. They always did involve two small jumps rather than a single one.’
‘And now?’
‘You must go there, Otto. You have to kill him.’
Which is what I knew he would say. Only how can I?
‘It is done,’ I say. ‘And yet it remains to be done.’
‘So it is,’ Old Schnorr says, tears welling in his eyes. ‘So it is.’
360
Albrecht and I stand there on the platform of Four-Oh, waiting to jump back to the Haven, back in the Deep Past, where all of our records are kept. Svetov, looking on, has been left with strict instructions to seal it off if, for some reason, we don’t come back within the hour.
‘Imagine,’ I say to Albrecht, in the moment before we depart, ‘Kolya in charge of all that valuable information.’
‘Or that two-headed bastard,’ Albrecht answers. ‘It’s unthinkable.’
I nod, and back we jump, Four-Oh throwing us in effect a micro-second to the right, and then a huge, long way – like a catapult shot – back into the distant past.
We appear from the air, our senses alarmed, an immediate sense of wrongness making us turn and look and see …
… the Neanderthal village, burning. No sign of any of the creatures.
Albrecht looks thoroughly confused. Unlike us, he is not used to change. ‘This didn’t happen before …’
No. Nor is there any sign of Master Hecht himself. We go to the door in the mountain face and find it untouched.
‘Thank Urd,’ Albrecht murmurs, then taps in the code to give us access. But inside there’s still no sign of Hecht.
‘Has Reichenau out-guessed us?’ I ask. ‘Is he here still, somewhere in the Haven, waiting to kill us?’
It is a possibility, after all.
I go outside, gun at the ready, my skin crawling now, expecting Reichenau to come at any moment. Only when someone does come, it’s Hecht. It’s he, it seems, who set fire to the Neanderthal village, he who chased the tribe away, firing gunshots into the air to frighten them.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘So that he couldn’t hurt them.’
‘He?’
‘Reichenau.’
And now Albrecht emerges and, seeing his brother, hugs him to him, tears coursing down his face.
‘This is it,’ Hecht says, breaking from his embrace and turning to me. ‘You know what you must do, Otto.’
I shake my head, denying him.
‘How can I?’ I ask, torn apart by what he’s asking of me. ‘How?’
Only his eyes are filled with the certainty of someone who has come to terms with what faces him. Even in his final moments he is still the Master.
‘Because you must,’ he says. ‘For all of us.’
I shake my head once more. I cannot, will not, do this. Only Hecht has strength enough for us both.
‘It’s okay, Otto. I do not fear death. Only life as a slave.’
Hecht takes a step toward me, smiling at me, his Eizelkind, all disagreements behind us. Then, his voice filling the air, he repeats the words that I know are engraved on the base of the Tree of Worlds that’s in his rooms.
‘Tok, Ick, jraule nicht vor Dir! … Death, fear thee not!’
And I nod and raise the gun.
361
Back at Four-Oh, I sit on the edge of my bed, staring at my hands and at the ash-leaf pendant I hold between my fingers.
It is done, the worst of it behind me, and yet I cannot push on. It is as if I’ve been turned to stone. Trapped, like Ernst was once trapped, every living breath a torment.
And it is Ernst they send to me. Ernst who crouches by me, kneeling to face me, a limitless sympathy in his eyes.
‘I know how you feel, dear friend,’ he says quietly, gently holding my hands in his own. ‘I know the agony of it. But it’s done now. You must move on.’
‘Move on?’ My voice is filled with anger and frustration and hurt. ‘How can I move on? He has her. Reichenau. He and Kolya. And they’re toying with me. Making me their puppet, making me kill one of the few men I’ve ever loved. I don’t know how I can live with that, Ernst. I …’ I swallow, then. ‘I keep seeing it. His face …’
Ernst is quiet, then. ‘Are you ready now?’
‘Ready?’
‘To go back in. To see the job through.’ He pauses, then: ‘The simple truth is, we need you, Otto. You’re the Master now.’
‘To the death,’ I say, and Ernst almost s
miles. Only he doesn’t, because he does know how this feels. He alone of them.
362
And so, feeling angry and hurt, I return to 2343 and to the Gast Gebaud where I am staying for the conference.
I have been back there only minutes when one of the do-hu knocks on the door and announces that dinner is about to be served in the main dining hall.
I go down to the big banqueting hall on the eighteenth floor and join my fellow geneticists, and there, at my table, is the second of my ‘targets’, one of the King’s own private surgeons and, in actuality, one of the King’s creators, Hans Klug.
Klug is a very jovial, effusive man in his mid-fifties, a very different kind of man to Theoretician Fischer. But Klug is also highly political, and no fool, and on being introduced to the man, I find his eyes trying to penetrate my own – to work out what kind of man I am. Whether I’m a threat or a potential ally.
For so it is, in this state at this time.
Drinks in hand, we talk, and it’s clear Klug warms to me, for, less than ten minutes after we have first met, he offers me a job.
‘Why?’ I ask him, surprised by the offer. ‘Forgive me, Meister, but you don’t even know my work!’
Klug smiles. ‘No. But I know it must be good for you to be here. Besides, it’s the man I always go for. Good brains are ten-a-pfennig these days, but a good man …’
And he reaches out and holds my bicep for the briefest moment, squeezing it, as if testing a horse’s withers.
‘You’re good Aryan stock, Meister Kroos, and I like that!’
I agree to meet with him later, to formalise our new arrangement, but I suspect his interest in me is as much sexual as it is political, and in the mood I’m in I’m quite ready to hit the man should he over-step the line.
The dinner is long and tedious, but eventually I get back to my room. Ernst is already there. He tells me that there’s been a change of plan. One of the rebels they’ve captured was based in the Mechanist Age. What’s more, he has vital information.
And so we jump. This time back to Moscow Central.
363
Zarah meets me at the platform and, before I go on to interrogate our captive, asks me if I’ll spare the time to let her update me as regards the ‘Great Men’ project.
‘We’ve only two more to bring through,’ she says, handing me a slender folder, in which is a printout of her thoughts on the usefulness or otherwise of each of the ‘extracted’. I glance at one, then look to her.
‘You’re not convinced, are you?’
‘I’m not a convert, no. But they’ve not really started yet. We’re letting them get accustomed to things. It’s a tough assimilation process, but most of them are up to it. The women, however …’
‘Yes?’
She hesitates, then. ‘It’s just that they’re finding it particularly hard. The men … they can’t help it, I guess, but they were raised in another ethos, for the main part. They consider the two women a waste of time. There to get the food ready. Marie Curie is having none of it, of course – she’s a match for most of them – but the other, Rosalind Franklin, is finding it particularly hard.’
‘So what do you propose?’
‘That you have a word with them, Otto. Make it clear that it’s an equal partnership.’
‘But what if it isn’t?’
Zarah looks at me, disappointed. ‘Is that really what you think?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just …’
I don’t say it, but just look at the list. Galileo, Newton, Einstein, da Vinci, and Aristotle, for a start! Those five alone ought to come up with a few ideas. Then again, I’ve read about Rosalind Franklin’s work – how she went up to Cambridge to meet Crick and Watson, the winners of the Nobel Prize for their work on the double helix structure of DNA, and took their ‘model’ of the double helix and there and then reconstructed it. Only a truly great scientist could have done that. And, of course, when it came to giving out prizes, she was overlooked, time and again. So maybe Zarah has a point.
‘I’ll talk to them,’ I say. ‘Knock a few heads together. But right now …’
Right now I have a rebel to question.
364
He’s standing with his back to me as I step into the room. Even so, there’s something really familiar about him, something that makes the hairs on my neck bristle. And when he turns …
Dankevich! Fedor Ivanovich Dankevich!
I almost laugh, only I’m not in a good humour, and, drawing my knife, I cross the room swiftly and grab him, slamming him again the wall and putting the blade to his throat.
‘Talk, you bastard! Everything you fucking know!’
But Dankevich just smiles and, slimy as ever, tells me he wants a pardon before he says another word.
Svetov and Ernst have come into the room, but neither interferes. They know well enough what I think of Dankevich, and now that he’s been proved to be a traitor, they’re as dismissive of the man as I.
To think he was a member of the veche.
I tighten my grip on the man and prick him with the knife’s sharp tip.
‘Listen, you weasel. I have absolutely nothing to lose. Whether you live or die is nothing to me. I would just as soon slit your throat as learn a single fucking thing from you. So the only way you can possibly persuade me not to gut you like a pig is for you to tell me everything.’
And again I prick him. Harder this time. Drawing a trickle of blood. Not sporting, I know. But then the bastard deserves it.
Dankevich swallows, then nods.
I look to the others, then, easing the blade from his throat, sheathe my knife and push Dankevich away.
We sit, he on the far side of the desk, Ernst and I with our backs to the door. A door ‘guarded’ by Svetov, who knows Dankevich all too well.
‘So?’ I ask. And Dankevich launches into his tale.
‘It began six years ago, subjective. I was there, in Neu Berlin, in the Mechanist Age. We’d heard something … about some new experiments that had taken place. Something that was affecting the timeline. I was put in charge of a team of five to investigate …’
‘Go on …’
‘Your Master, Hecht … he must have had the same idea, because he sent in a team of your agents to take a look around. Krauss was in charge. Phillipe Krauss. We crossed paths a few times, had a few small skirmishes, before we realised what was going on.’
‘And?’
‘Something changed. One moment there was no trace of it, the next—’
‘You mean Reichenau, yes?’
‘No. Not at first. Reichenau came later. No. I mean the experiments … into making a functional doppelgehirn. The academicians had this idea, you understand. They wanted to force an evolutionary leap. As it turned out, the experiments proved something of a failure. Less than ten per cent proved functional. The rest, well, the rest simply went mad.’
‘But Reichenau …?’
‘As I said, he came later. No. What happened next was that I got captured. By Krauss. I thought I was dead, but he surprised me. Told me about how he’d built this little sect among the German agents. How they were operating as a rogue unit. I didn’t see how they could, because they, like we, were being tracked every moment we were in the field. That’s when he showed me the pendant. I didn’t believe him at first. But we arranged to meet up again, and this time he handed some of the pendants over. He never said how he got them, or from whom, but it wasn’t Reichenau. Not at first, anyway.’
He looks down a moment, as if recollecting events.
‘That’s when it began for me. Like Krauss I started recruiting. Fellow agents who weren’t entirely happy with how things were being run. Malcontents, you might call us. Only we saw ourselves as revolutionaries. Undrehungar. And what we did, far from being traitorous, was visionary.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, suddenly, he was there. I jumped back one day and there he was, bang in the centre of the Akademie, walking about like he owned
the place, that big head of his turning this way and that, as if to take in his domain. Only I’d never seen him before that moment. In effect, he had never existed. Only suddenly he did. Suddenly he was laced in tightly to it all. As real as you and I. But where he’d come from … that I never found out.’
‘So he was to blame?’
‘To blame?’ Dankevich shrugs. ‘If you want to call it that. He certainly took over. Planning it all. Sending us in here, there and everywhere. Rattling the cage, as he liked to call it.’
‘Meddling.’
‘Oh, he certainly did that. He went back years to change things. Each tiny event prolonging the War. Keeping it going, long after its natural term. Making change after change until we couldn’t remember how it had been to begin with.’
‘And you wanted that?’
For the first time there’s the slightest shadow of doubt in his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I guess it becomes automatic after a while. You must remember that. How we did what we were told? And then you met her.’
Her? But I say nothing. Only note the tone of contempt in his voice when saying the word.
‘He hated that. Hated the way they protected you. Hated you being happy, I guess. He’s like that, though. He thinks he’s Loki …’ Dankevich smiles at that, like at a fond memory. ‘That’s where you got it wrong, Otto. Thinking he had some kind of plan, when all he wanted to do was to cause mischief between you.’
‘So where does Kolya fit in?’
‘Kolya?’ Dankevich looks genuinely puzzled. ‘Who the fuck is Kolya?’
I stare at him a moment longer, then draw my gun and, before either Ernst or Svetov can stop me, blow a hole in the fucker’s head, watching him slump lifeless to the floor.
For her.
365
Svetov isn’t happy.
‘Dankevich may have been a traitor, but—’
The Master of Time: Roads to Moscow: Book Three Page 12