‘Ah. Red Army technical experts.’ Mackie smiled ruefully. ‘All a bit delicate, isn’t it? Can’t shut Uncle Joe out of what we’re offering to share with the Americans. Anyway let them have the Colossus and so forth; that doesn’t really matter. In fact our pals here believe this is all part of a Nazi chemical weapons research programme. Sarin and Tabun. The verzweiflungswaffen.’
‘The weapons of despair,’ Ernst Trojan murmured.
‘A lot more plausible, don’t you think? Now, look, we don’t have to wait until the tower falls. What we plan to do is take this group in ahead of the main party and break into the Loom bunker itself. We’ve always had pretty good intelligence about this place, and we’re confident that right now in the bunker there’s only Standartenfuhrer Trojan and Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash. They’ve always kept the Loom technology to themselves - waiting to pass it on as a gift to Himmler.’ He glanced at Gary and Willis. ‘Two Nazis, that’s all, one of them a British woman. Think we can deal with them, boys?’
Willis grinned in that disturbing way of his, face blacked. ‘Show us the way in, sir.’
Gary checked his weapons, but he was more circumspect. ‘I think it would be a mistake to underestimate those two. Julia Fiveash in particular.’
‘I agree,’ Mary said warmly. ‘But I’d like to get this over before I lose my nerve altogether.’
Gary said, ‘I’ll keep you safe, Mom.’
‘I’ll stay out of the line of fire, don’t worry.’
Tom Mackie said, ‘Right, let’s get on with it. We can reach the bunker entrance by following this trench, and then hopping over that bit of wire over there. Corporal Wooler, if you bring up the prisoner - Farjeon, you lead the way, if you would.’
Willis grinned again. ‘Aye aye, Captain.’ He turned and scurried down the trench.
The rest followed, splashing through mud that stained their boots with blood and oil.
XVI
The door blew in. In his chair, handcuffed, George cowered.
‘Drop your weapons! Hands up, hande hoch! Drop your weapons!’
Running figures, silhouetted by daylight, came through the smoke and dust, fanning out quickly, rifles raised to shoulder height, shouting. Their faces were blackened. They were soldiers with guns, soldiers in British battledress, six, seven, eight of them, and other figures behind. Josef Trojan backed up to the Colossus machine uncertainly, his Luger in his hand.
Julia ran to George. She grabbed him under one armpit and hauled him to his feet, with a strength like a rugby player’s. She pressed the barrel of her silver pistol to his temple.
And with her free hand she turned a switch on the glass tank. Ben had been struggling to stay awake; he had been fighting his restraints, if feebly. Now he was sinking into a deeper sleep. George had seen this done before, the medication automatically fed to the boy. It would take him some minutes to succumb.
One of the soldiers, blond hair under his helmet, peered into the glass tank. ‘That’s him, Gary, that’s Ben Kamen! My God, he must be the unluckiest man alive.’ He actually laughed at Ben’s plight.
The other called, ‘Ben, I told you I’d come back for you.’ His accent was American. George recognised the voice; he couldn’t believe his ears. Gary?
‘Dunno if he can hear you,’ the blond one said. He came closer to the tank, rifle raised.
Julia snapped, ‘Another step and I’ll kill the policeman and the Jew. Is that clear?’
George, dizzy from lack of food and water and sleep, crusty in a uniform he hadn’t changed for two days, tried not to laugh. ‘So we’re reduced to this, Julia? What on earth did I ever see in you?’
His reward was an elbow in the kidney.
Another of the intruders stepped forward. He wore a peaked Navy officer’s cap. ‘All right, lads. Lower your weapons. Let’s get this mess sorted out without anybody else dying. I said, lower your weapons.’
The others looked at him uncertainly before they complied. Julia, though, kept the pistol muzzle at George’s temple.
The captain was distracted by the calculating machine. ‘Look at that bloody thing. Puts my bloody bits of Meccano in the shade, Mary!’
Mary?
George called to the American soldier, ‘Gary Wooler? It is you, isn’t it?’
The American grinned at George, his teeth white in the black on his face. ‘Should have known you’d be up to your neck in it, George.’
‘I haven’t heard from you since you got out of the stalag.’
‘Sorry about that. Blame the Reich post. Hey, Mom. Guess who’s here?’
And George was stunned when Mary Wooler stepped forward. She was wearing a blue coverall, the kind the WVS girls wore, and she had a pack on her back. Her greying hair was tied back, and her face was blacked.
‘Mary? My God!’
‘I suppose I should have expected you, George. You’re still in thrall to Miss Fiveash here, are you?’
‘Unterscharfuhrer to you,’ Julia snapped.
Seeing Mary and Gary together brought memories flooding back to George, memories of Hilda he thought he had buried for good. ‘I’ve been lost, Mary,’ he said, hearing the gruffness in his own voice. ‘I guess a lot of us have, this side of the Winston Line.’
‘You always did your job, Sergeant,’ murmured the Navy man. ‘So our intelligence informs us. I’m Mackie, by the way. Captain, RN. Mary, I suggest we get on with what we came here for. We may not have time to interrogate these two. But the documentation here - look, there are heaps of it - that may be enough to tell us how far they’ve got.’
Mary walked to a set of shelves, where documents were piled in neat stacks. She began dragging papers down and spreading them out on a desk, and she dug out reading glasses from her blue overalls. She was a frumpy middle-aged woman preparing to study, George thought, while armed soldiers stood around with weapons raised.
Julia was getting more agitated. ‘Do not touch our work - do something, Josef, you coward!’
But Trojan was distracted too. ‘Ernst?’ He sounded bewildered, and spoke in German. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
Another figure stepped forward from the rubble of the doorway. He wore a Wehrmacht uniform, and had his hands tied behind his back. ‘Josef. I think I imagined we would never meet again ...’
‘Do stick to English, you fellows,’ Mackie said laconically.
‘Well, well,’Julia said sourly. ‘It’s a day of reunions.’
Trojan seemed outraged. ‘What is the meaning of this? Why have you brought my brother here? If he is a prisoner of war he should be treated as such.’
‘Like Ben Kamen?’ George spat, and got another jolt from Julia.
‘Isn’t it obvious, Josef?’ Julia said. ‘He’s here to make you dance to their tune.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ Mackie murmured.
‘Liar,’ Julia said calmly. ‘Ernst is a hostage, just like Sergeant Tanner here. You are a hypocrite, Captain. It’s the one thing I’ve always despised most about the English. The sheer bloody hypocrisy, when we are the worst butchers of all.’
Mackie studied her. ‘Do you really loathe yourself so much, madam? Is that what this is all about?’
Ernst said to his brother, ‘Josef, even on this day of all days, you skulk in the ground with women and absurd machines. What would Father have said?’
Trojan looked hurt. ‘I am trying to win the war. And cement the Reich’s power so that it will truly last a thousand years - ten thousand! If you understood, you would see.’
But to George, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself, not any more.
‘My God, Tom,’ Mary said now. ‘They know all about us.’ She held up sheaves of paper. ‘Even the simulations we did. Here is your 1938-war counter-history. And - oh my Lord - my Dunkirk study.’
Josef said, ‘We are the SS. Do you imagine your work was immune to our intelligence? I must say that MI-14 in particular was very prone to leaks.’
‘Actually,’
Julia said, ‘we found your studies useful. You kindly worked out the corresponding Gödel trajectories for us. We used these ideas as rehearsals.’
‘Rehearsals?’
‘You do understand how the Loom works?’
‘I believe we have a good idea,’ Mackie said.
‘Ben Kamen is our messenger, our sleeping child. We have used your solutions as exercises, using hypnotic, mnemonic and other techniques to force the information into his addled head, the Gödel trajectories and the counter-historical mandates.’
Mary looked at Julia over her reading glasses. ‘My God. You actually, um, loaded in my Dunkirk scenario?’
‘And the 1938 study. Of course we never let him sleep until these were out of his short-term memory.’
Mary leafed through the papers on the desk beside her. ‘And this is what you have sent back. Yes?’ She produced a set of papers covered with diagrams, like engineering sketches. George squinted to see. Aircraft with wings like birds’, submarines like metal fish. ‘Weapons designs, sent into the past. And gunpowder. You’re sent back a recipe for gunpowder.’
‘We call it the Codex,’ Julia said. ‘Rather proud of our research, actually. Not easy coming up with weapons that would make sense to a grubby-arsed monk of the Dark Ages.’
Ernst was staring at his brother. ‘What is this madness, Josef? Into whose hands did you hope to place these weapons?’
‘Ah,’ Mary said, and she produced another paper from the pile. ‘That depends on the second of these missives, doesn’t it, Standartenfuhrer? The Testament - which I now see,’ she said, reading, ‘was to go back into the head of a woman of the eleventh century. A wife of one of William the Conqueror’s warriors, called Orm Egilsson. So that’s who Eadgyth is. Wasn’t Egilsson involved with an English priest called Sihtric, one of Harold’s inner circle? So that’s the way in.’
Julia frowned. ‘You know a great deal about our work. Who were your spies?’
Mary shook her head. ‘I didn’t get this information from spies. I’m a historian, not a detective; I got all this from historical research. Whatever you have done has left traces in the past.’
‘And are we too late, Mary?’ Mackie asked grimly. He glanced around. ‘Is history changing around us, because of these criminals?’
Julia went straight on the attack. ‘Criminals? You patronising slug, Mackie, Captain, Royal Navy. Men like you have always disgusted me. You abuse the Party. You bleat about our treatment of the Jews. But who devised the blood libel? The English. Who expelled Jews in the thirteenth century? The English. Who set up concentration camps in Africa? The English. And you Americans are no better, Wooler. You bleat about our racial laws, but there are marital segregation laws in your southern states which the Party used as a model for its Aryan-Jewish laws. Everything Hitler has done is in the context of history - your history.’
Mackie listened to this, stone-faced. ‘I really do think we should get you to a bump-feeler, my dear.’
‘Do not speak to me!’ she yelled, a hysterical edge to her voice.
Gary glared at Julia. ‘Why is this Nazi woman keeping us talking? There’s something wrong here—’
And suddenly George saw Gary was right. This was all a performance, he knew Julia well enough to see that. He glanced around. Ben, in the tank, was still stirring, his eyelids lifting like heavy curtains. He was fighting the drugs.
George said quickly, ‘Listen. Gary’s right. She’s stalling. She sent the first lot back, the Codex. I heard her. But the second lot, this Testament, she loaded it into him but—’
The butt of Julia’s pistol slammed down on the back of his skull. It felt as if his head exploded. He was on his knees, on the floor, but he was conscious. ‘Ben - in the tank - keep him awake—’
It all kicked off.
XVII
Josef Trojan made a rush at the tank. But his brother blocked him, arms behind his back, getting in his way bodily. Then the British soldier, Willis, the blond one, jumped on them both.
Julia screamed her frustration, swinging her silver pistol wildly.
Gary charged her. She aimed her pistol. She fired.
George saw it clearly. Gary lumbered on, his legs still working as if by reflex, his limbs uncoordinated, his head lolling. But his forehead was a shattered mass of blood and bone. He tumbled into Julia, knocking her down. George was pushed sideways; on his back, stunned, handcuffed, he could barely move.
Mary fell on the body of her son, and the woman who had killed him. Her face was contorted, a mask of grief and rage. She clawed at Julia’s throat, her hair coming loose from its tie, a cloud of grey around her twisted face.
Mackie dragged her away. He grabbed Julia’s hand and crushed it, making her scream, until he had forced the silver pistol out of her fingers. He looked across at George. ‘Sergeant. Help me. Hold this woman.’
. George willed himself up onto his elbows. His head rang, and his vision was blurring. But he rolled over and lay on top of Julia. Mackie dug keys out of Julia’s pocket and released George from his cuffs. His hands free, George got her by her wrists, his heavy arse pinning her legs. She stared up at him, stunned, the bloody marks of Mary’s hands on her throat.
Mackie pulled Mary to her feet. ‘Mary. Mary! Listen to me. Listen. I know it’s hard, my God. But you have to help me. The job’s not done yet. The mission.’
Slowly she replied, ‘The mission.’
‘The Loom. You heard what George said. God, how can I have been so stupid? She was stalling - why didn’t I see it? They didn’t finish the job. Fiveash sent back the Codex. But she’s still in the middle of sending back Eadgyth’s Testament. We still have a chance.’
‘But Gary, look at him, he’s not even got his face covered—’
‘Mary, we have to make his loss worthwhile.’
She pulled away from him. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that, you manipulative prick.’
He held up his hands. ‘All right. I deserved that. But, Mary, for now - please.’ He began to tinker with the bank of controls beside the tank. ‘What if we stop the supply of opiates? Fiveash, which is the switch?’
‘Too late for that,’Julia said, pinned on her back, her mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘Too late! The Jew will be under in a minute, and everything will change.’
Mackie looked around. ‘Trojan? Is she right?’
‘I am afraid so,’ said Josef Trojan.
‘Plan B,’ Mary whispered. ‘Turn Columbus west. Not east.’
‘Yes.’ Mackie said. ‘That’s it. Good. Good, Mary. Come on, work with me now. We prepared for this eventuality, didn’t we? If you can feed him your alternate version of the Testament, maybe that will be enough. Trojan, is this a microphone? Can Ben hear us? You can do it, Mary. Come on. Speak into his ear as he falls asleep. Do you remember what you worked out? The Aztec feathered serpent, the Chinese dragon—’
‘They could just kill him. Kill the little fucker. But that hasn’t occurred to them, has it?’ Julia whispered this to George, as once she had whispered erotic promises.
He pinned her down harder. ‘Shut up. For the last time, shut up.’ He held his face over hers, close, as if he might kiss her. But a drop of blood from the wound she had inflicted rolled over his scalp and splashed on her cheek.
Mary lowered her head to the microphone. The body of her son was sprawled at her feet, and George could see how she was drawn to him, as if by elastic cables. But she spoke into the mike, improvising. ‘Egilsson. Orm Egilsson. Can you hear me? Are you there? Are you there, Orm Egilsson? Orm Egilsson! Listen to what I have to tell you. Listen, and remember, and let your sons and their sons remember too ...’
Mackie whispered, ‘Mary. Old English. Speak to Egilsson. Make him hear you through Eadgyth.’
‘Yes ... Egilsson. Orm Egilsson. Hierst pu me? Bist pu ðær? Bist pu ðœr, Orm Egilsson? Orm Egilsson! Hlyston ond mune, for pon ic pu recce. Hlyston ond mune, ond giefst to pin sunum ond to hira sunum...’
EPILOGUE
‘My son didn’t deserve this, George.’
‘I know, Mary, I know.’
‘To be killed by practically the last shot of the conflict.’
‘Oh, the war’s not over yet, Mary. And, look - well - he’s with my Hilda now. His Hilda. That’s something, isn’t it?’
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I was brought up to believe it. And, you know, I think if I try really hard I can believe it again.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to teach me.’
‘Mary - George - please.’
‘Tom? What now?’
‘I know you don’t want me around. But I have to show you this...’
If he could hear their voices, Ben knew he must be waking. If he was waking, he had been asleep.
And if he had been asleep, he must have implemented another of Julia’s grisly historical changes. He had died and had been reborn. Again. That deep fear stabbed at him. It was a fear at the transience of life, at the impermanence of it, the fragility. A fear like being suspended over a thousand-foot cliff.
He put it aside, and kept his eyes closed. Sleep hovered about him, a loose blanket. Perhaps if he willed it he could bring it back, fall away from the world again.
But if he slept again, could he control his dreams?
‘Mary. Look. These are your own notes - look, your transcription of Eadgyth’s testament, taken from Geoffrey’s memoir, written out in your own hand. Can you see?’
‘It’s changed. It no longer reads as it did. Send the Dove west! O, send him west!“ West, not east.’
‘History has shivered around us, Mary. The past has changed.’
‘And yet we remember.’
‘And yet, yes. It may take a century of tinkering with this Loom of Trojan’s, and even more theorising, before we understand any of this ...’
Ben had a good memory. He always had. It had only been enhanced by Julia’s hypnotism and the mnemonic tapes. He thought he could remember every word of the time-manipulating chunks of doggerel she had beaten into his head, every one of the attempts she had made to change history. Even the ‘dry runs’, as she had called them.
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