BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Hulius entered Berlin in the back of an airport taxi, eyes closed and mouth ajar, drooling in the grip of jet lag. It was perhaps good for his peace of mind that he slept through the ride from Brandenburg, for his driver took an unholy joy in taking manual control. He pushed the needle insistently past two hundred kilometers per hour as he flung the Mercedes Kombi about the autobahn. He had to slow down soon enough, though, impeded by the growing congestion of the afternoon rush hour traffic.
By the time they arrived at the hotel, Hulius had been in transit for nearly twenty hours. He yawned as he peeled himself out of the taxi, paid the driver, and trudged inside. Five and a half hours of west to east time difference and two flights was enough to scramble anyone’s brain: relocating himself safely to the other Berlin, in the heavily policed time line that was his ultimate destination, could wait a little longer.
He napped for an hour and a half on the hotel bed, fully dressed, then woke to his phone’s alarm. Still groggy, he showered and changed into clean clothes. He was trying to get his tablet to talk to the hotel Internet when the phone on the desk rang. “Hello?” he asked.
The front desk spoke fluent English: “There is a Herr Reinhardt to see you in reception, Herr van Rijnt.”
“Good. Can you send him up here, please?”
“Of course, sir. Have a good day.”
A minute later there was a knock on the door. Hulius opened it. “Come in,” he said.
“Danke, ah, Herr van Rijnt.”
His visitor was skinny, with sallow skin and scarred cheeks that supported a pale brown beard that clung bashfully to the line of his jaw. “Mr. Muller, I presume?”
“No, I am Mr. Fox.” His English diction was clipped, suggesting that he was a native German speaker.
Hulius stepped backward into the room and gestured at the door. The man who called himself Fox closed it carefully then followed. “Why is Mr. Muller not available?” Hulius asked.
“Because he, he—” Fox momentarily looked irritated and snapped his fingers: “I know, he was, uh, discommoded. That’s the password, isn’t it?”
“Practicing in front of a mirror generally helps,” Hulius suggested. “Sit down. Would you care for a coffee?”
“No thanks.” Fox poured himself into the room’s single armchair, an expression of hangdog relief on his face. He’d probably been worried that Hulius would murder him if he didn’t come up with the correct response to the challenge phrase, unaware that Hulius recognized him from the briefing dossier. Fox wasn’t aware who he was working for. He had been led to believe that the DPR was a shady PacRim industrial espionage outfit, contracting for Indonesian and Malaysian multinationals as they played footsie with their Chinese and Thai opposite numbers for lucrative EU contracts. It was a good enough story to account for the sub-rosa posturing and skullduggery. The truth would have panicked him.
Hulius busied himself with the kettle and instant coffee that the hotel supplied. He felt thick-headed and dizzy, as if his head was packed with a fog bank. “What is the current state of arrangements?” he asked, taking the office chair for himself.
“Everything is on course.” Fox shrugged. “The SR22T has been paid for and title transferred to the service company I set up for you. A ferry pilot has been commissioned to fly it to Enschede Airport Twente where it will be serviced and provisioned to your specifications. The flight plans you requested have been prepared, but will not be filed until you request them. And the residence you asked for will be available from tomorrow, if all goes to plan.”
Hulius gave him a hard stare. “I was not notified of any delays,” he said. “What’s the holdup with the building?”
Fox shrugged again, nervously. “It took me a while to find premises in the right neighborhood that were for sale or lease, and then to confirm the site survey with your head office. Houses are not so common here in the inner city: most Berliners live in apartment blocks, and obviously there are relatively few ground-floor apartments with direct entry. I had to query HQ twice before we could agree on a suitable target. Then I had to make an offer, and undergo reference and credit checks. This all took time.”
“Ah.” Hulius relaxed slightly. “But it will be available tomorrow?”
“So I am told. It is an apartment, it is on the ground floor and has its own private street door—also a back door opening onto the common yard. I took it for a one-year lease, with furnishings. Your name is not on the paperwork. If you require it I can have my lawyer prepare a sublease agreement, but then I would have to notify the police of a change of resident and incur all sorts of complications.”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” The kettle came to the boil: Hulius poured his coffee then unplugged it from the wall. “In any event I do not expect to be using it for more than two or three weeks.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Fox asked.
“Write your cell number on this pad.” Hulius pointed at the desk. “I’ll call you to arrange a face-to-face meeting if I need anything else. But nothing of any substance may be spoken of by phone or Internet. I repeat, phone and Internet are to be used only for arranging in-person meetings. Tomorrow, when you receive the keys, you will inspect the house. Then come here and collect me. There is no need to call ahead, I will be expecting you from noon. That is all.” Hulius yawned. Five hours, he told himself. Just stay awake for five more hours and you can go to sleep on local time. “You can go now.”
“You won’t need any assistance after, afterwards?”
“No,” Hulius said tersely. Fox rose, looking uncertain. “I just flew in,” he added, “if there’s anything more I will tell you tomorrow.”
“Guten tag,” said Fox. He slithered toward the doorway, gave Hulius a dubious glance, and was gone.
Why do we always end up hiring stringers who act like cheap drug dealers? he asked himself, then yawned again. Stay awake, fool. He drank the coffee, his eyeballs fixed to the TV, his mind a million miles away. Better go for a walk, otherwise I’ll be no use to anyone.
He stood up groggily, and pulled his jacket on, then headed out to hit the streets of this strangely futuristic Berlin.
PANKOW, BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Forty-eight hours after he arrived in Berlin, Hulius was ready to visit the Berlin of his adoptive time line: a Berlin of smoke-streaked tenements and sprawling palaces, a Berlin where Friedrichstraße had never been bisected by a wall, or pounded by western heavy bombers and Soviet artillery.
Fox had visited again the morning after his arrival, bearing keys and papers for a neubau apartment in Pankow. “Nobody here lives in American-style single-family houses—at least, not unless they’re millionaires,” Fox explained. “This is a large ground-floor apartment in a modern block. You’re lucky I could get one at all, mostly the ground-floor units are occupied by shops or businesses.” He presented Hulius with another bunch of keys.
Hulius nodded. Fox was not the DPR’s sole asset, and according to his overnight update the lamplighters—advance agents sent in to prepare a safe house for occupation—had already done their business and withdrawn. In time line three, the apartment block was doppelgängered with a furrier’s warehouse. The DPR’s Berlin Resident had bought the business from its owner for a hefty payout: the employees would be fired on the morrow.
Hulius looked at the keys in his hand, feeling faintly guilty. They’d just stolen the income of several workers, mere weeks ahead of winter. Even though vastly more was at stake than a few starving families, he found it unpleasant to consider. Time line two’s Germany had a fine welfare system, but the quiltwork of small states that paid tribute to the Bourbon throne had, at best, forced labor for the indigent. “I understand,” he said quietly, unsure whether he addressed Fox or his own conscience.
The neubau apartment was modern, airy, and largely lit by artificial lights. Its windows were small and protected by motorized shutters. Fox had rented it on a s
hort-term basis, ready furnished. It featured lots of austere white surfaces, with sensors that activated the indirect lighting and controlled the heating as he moved from room to room. The kitchen, all brushed-steel surfaces and gleaming appliances, was like something from a Commonwealth movie, a futuristic operating theater for daringly experimental culinary surgeons. Hulius hardened his heart against the sense of inadequacy that stole over him whenever he contemplated the technology gap between the Commonwealth and this world. He’d grown up in a stone-and-timber mansion with dirt floors in the servants’ quarters, lacking indoor plumbing, never mind glass in most of the windows. Seventeen years in the New American Commonwealth had accustomed him to rapid change: We’ll catch up with these people eventually, he reminded himself. Probably before I retire.
Hulius moved his suitcase into one of the two bedrooms. There was another case waiting for him there, a leather-and-wood steamer trunk with cheap brass buckles. He opened it and inspected the contents. It was like a step backward and sideways in time, a reverse knight’s move between worlds. It held two suits, worn but well-mended and not too shabby, such as a working professional man might wear. There was a thick wool coat, a choice of hats, underwear, shirts, boots, and shoes—all in his size, procured locally in the time line he was about to travel to.
A carpetbag at one end of the trunk proved to contain a small attaché case with travel documents, identity papers, and one highly incriminating letter. It would condemn him to the headsman’s block if he was taken in possession of it: he treated it with the wary respect due a loaded gun.
Finally, there was one last piece of luggage.
A flat black nylon strongbox nestled in the bottom of the trunk. It was full of anachronisms sourced from this time line. “James Bond shit” as his wife Elena disapprovingly called it. (Not that James Bond was a thing in the Commonwealth, but one of the perks of being a world-walker with connections to the former Clan was easy access to extratemporal media.) There was a set of cardboard cartridges preloaded with imperial coinage, including enough écus d’or to buy a house or bribe an official above his own pay grade. There was a handgun with a suppressor and laser sight built into the receiver; a compact set of night vision goggles; and a couple of preloaded self-injecting syringes. He took a deep breath, wishing he could call Elena and the girls, then dismissed the thought. The sooner this was over, the sooner he could see them again.
There was one other device, a peculiar hybrid. Hulius turned it over in his hands, marveling. One face of the milled black-enameled aluminum slab was half-covered in buttons and an e-ink display; the other face (including the power button and antenna jack) was covered by an adhesive label bearing blood-curdling warnings that it was not to be turned on in this time line. It had been assembled and programmed in the DPR’s electronics laboratories using smuggled integrated circuits and test equipment. Although laughably crude by the standards of the United States of 2020, it was a generation ahead of any encrypted spread-spectrum radio the scientists of the French Imperium had ever imagined: late 1990s or even early 2000s equivalent tech. “In another decade we’ll be building these ourselves,” Brill had told him. “But for now we’re dependent on components imported from time line two, which is why we’re not spreading it around—it’s the tech equivalent of heroin. We don’t want to get our embryonic semiconductor industry hooked on this stuff when we should be gearing up to build our own.”
The French were still trying to make transistors reliable enough to use in simple amplifier circuits. Current Commonwealth intelligence assessments suggested they were still relying on HF/DF to intercept spy transmissions. If Hulius needed to phone home, he could record a voice message on this machine’s flash memory—or laboriously key in a telegram—and it would send it out within ninety minutes, as one of the Commonwealth’s new military relay satellites flashed overhead. He chuckled grimly. After the evasion protocols he was used to needing on contact missions in the United States, avoiding the Imperial Intelligence Service’s signals intelligence people was on a level with taking candy from a baby.
Enough vacillation. Hulius selected an outfit then undressed, showered, applied the temporary tattoo he found in the supplied toilet bag to the inside of his left wrist, and dressed again from the skin out: this time in the costume of a Prussian legal clerk. He double-checked his identity papers, procured by bribery from an issuing official. The photograph staring out at him named him as Herr Julius Gormer, an import/export factor from the Low Countries. “Gormer,” he muttered. “Gormer.” He could feel Herr Gormer settling across his shoulders like an ill-fitting coat. He picked up the shipping trunk—only three-quarters full, now he was wearing some of the contents—and trudged through into the living room with it. Then, on impulse, he checked the second bedroom.
There was a suitcase here, too, waiting beside the made-up bed. Flipping the latches, he opened it. It was full of women’s clothing, still in the original store packaging: a trouser suit, a winter coat, a couple of tops and skirts. No underwear or shoes, he noted, but a prepacked toilet bag. He closed the suitcase again, then paused while his own personal flashback passed. At least I knew what to expect, he thought. Even the backwoods peers of the Clan had owned portable generators and videocassette players for after-dinner entertainment. They imported soap operas and movies and dramas from America in their personal allowances when they performed the corvée for the Clan postal service. He’d grown up in a rusticated quasi-medieval backwater, but at least he’d known there was another world out there. Better minimize her exposure, he resolved. If she sees too much of this Germany she might have second thoughts about the Commonwealth. Even if she didn’t flip out completely, the culture shock was going to be huge.
Shaking his head, he went back into the living room. The small trunk was a problem: he hefted it, then put it down again and instead moved most of the contents to the carpetbag. Picking up both now-balanced bags, he took a step forward into a section of floor the lamplighter had marked out in red tape. Hulius squinted at the back of his left wrist, and the knotwork design of the tattoo seemed to shimmer and distort before his eyes.
Five minutes later, the apartment’s environmental controller dimmed the lights and set back the temperature on the thermostatically controlled radiators. Ten minutes after that, the burglar alarm—having confirmed that the occupant had left the premises—armed itself. And then there was silence, for a considerable length of time.
BERLIN, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
Her Royal Highness, Elizabeth, Princess of New England (in exile) and heir to the Throne of New Brunswick, flew in to Köpenick Aerodrome aboard her father’s royal air yacht, a three-engined airliner of sturdy construction but not terribly recent vintage. For a Crown Princess she traveled with a remarkably small retinue—just two ladies-in-waiting, two bodyguards, and three servants—and so little luggage that the party required only two automobiles and a small truck to take them from the VIP pavilion at the side of the field. This was not an accident.
Her recent fiancé, Prince Louis, had offered her the use of his royal train, a much more sumptuous conveyance. He’d also pressed her with a vastly larger and more overbearing retinue, and an entire battalion of dragoons for security. But neither Elizabeth nor her father wanted to be beholden to the French prince: both had their own reasons. “It will attract the wrong type of attention,” she insisted. “And besides, I wish to be able to travel at will and see my future domains without dragging a three-ring circus behind me!” Which was true, but not the entire truth.
For the time being her plans would have to wait. She had been sent to Berlin by her father to attend Mme. Corinne Houelebecq’s finishing school for ladies of noble birth. Her father’s motivation was to protect her from her fiancé’s premature attentions (not to mention the miasma of scandalous whispers that followed him around like a plague of bad airs). She fervently approved of this aspect of her father’s scheme. Perhaps her father also thought it best to distract her from her usual
pastimes of hunting, skiing, and shooting in the northern forests. And perhaps he genuinely thought it necessary for her to polish the social graces of a royal consort. But her own motives were somewhat different. Although she was only eighteen, Elizabeth had her own agenda and plans—plans she did not expect her father or her fiancé to approve of—and the smaller her entourage, the easier her plans would be to execute.
She had set the wheels in motion months ago, back in the palace in St. Petersburg. Regardless of the ultimate outcome it would be a glorious adventure, with minimal—she believed—risk to her person. More to the point, this would be her only opportunity to experience anything approaching a normal life. A solid gold cage studded with diamonds and surmounted by an imperial crown was still a cage. Once she was tied by wedlock to the French imperial crown, she’d be manacled by one wrist to the royal nursery and by the other to the claustrophobic squabbles and intrigue of court life.
As the convoy pulled away from the VIP pavilion, Elizabeth sank back into the leather-padded womb of her car and reached up to tug the privacy curtain forward across the window. “What is it, my lady?” Susannah asked anxiously.
“Face-stealers,” she said acidly, turning her head away from the magnesium-flash of the camera lights. “You’d think they’d never seen me before, wouldn’t you?”
Susannah leaned sideways and tugged the curtain across the opposite side window. She was just in time, for a moment later there were more flashes. “These ones haven’t,” she said softly. “You have never set foot in the Holy Roman Empire before.”
“Daddy would say I should stop the car, wave and smile for them: but I don’t care.” Elizabeth crossed her arms stubbornly. “I’m tired, I need a bath, and I know what the headlines will say. And what the cartoons will look like.”
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