The Empire of Time (5 page)

‘Otto?’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you speak to Hecht for me?’

I hesitate, then nod. It will do no good, of course, but how can I refuse? Ernst is my best friend. To say no to him is almost unthinkable. Yet if I were in Hecht’s place, I would make the same decision, for to even think of sending him back would be disastrous – for
all
concerned.

Ernst stares at me a moment, then looks away.

‘What?’

He looks back at me, then shrugs. ‘I was just thinking. About the Past. About us.’

‘We were a good team.’

‘We were. Only …’

He doesn’t have to say it. He only has to look at me and I can see the damage, there behind his eyes, there in every line of his face. And I sense – as maybe he senses – that it will never change; that he will
never
get better. And I don’t know how
I
would deal with that. Because I know that the Past is like a drug for me: I have a craving to go there, to see it and be a part of it. Without that …

I cannot imagine it. I just can’t.

‘I’ll speak to Hecht,’ I say. ‘I’ll try to convince him.’

But when he’s gone, I slump down on my bed, my mood dark, because I know I can’t help him. And if you can’t help those closest to you, then what kind of man does that make you?

I sigh. Maybe it’s the business at Christburg, but suddenly I wonder what the point is to it all, and whether I’m not simply lying to myself thinking I can make a single shred of difference to what’s happening. But what’s the alternative? To give up? To let the Russians win?

No. Because this is to the death. And whatever doubts I have, I need to keep them to myself.

As if on cue, I hear Hecht’s voice from the speaker overhead. ‘Otto, I need you. At the platform. Now.’

And I go. Because this is what I do, who I am. And to do otherwise is …

Unthinkable
.

Kramer is the first to come through. Looking across at us, he grins. He’s wearing a simple brown garment of the roughest kind of cloth and his reddish hair is cut pudding-bowl fashion. He’d look the part, the archetypal medieval peasant, were it not for the way he bears himself now that he’s back in Four-Oh, his ‘disguise’ thrown off.

As he steps down, the air behind him shimmers once more and Seydlitz forms like a ghost from the vacuum, his tall, well-proportioned figure taking on colour and substance in an instant. He’s dressed in full armour, the mantle of a Livonian Sword Brother about his shoulders, and his ash-blond hair is cut short, crusader-style. He looks exactly what he is, an aristocrat, his princely bearing only emphasised by his aquiline, almost Roman nose.

I look to Hecht for explanations, but Hecht ignores me. Stepping across, he greets the two.

‘Hans, Max …’

They bow their heads respectfully, then look to each other, excitement written all over their faces.

‘Well? What did you find out?’

‘Russians,’ Kramer says, his eyes gleaming.

‘Two of them,’ Seydlitz adds. ‘We killed them.’

Or think you did
.

Hecht smiles. ‘Do we know who they were?’

Kramer looks to Seydlitz. ‘We’re not sure.’

‘Not sure?’ Hecht’s eyes narrow. ‘Then how do you know?’

‘We overheard them,’ Kramer says.

‘We’d tracked them down, to an inn.’

‘They were discussing what to do next.’

‘So we pre-empted things.’

Hecht doesn’t even blink. ‘In what way?’

‘With a grenade.’ And Seydlitz grins as he says it.

‘Ah …’ But before Hecht can ask, Kramer intercedes.

‘We buried what remained of them. Made sure the site was hidden.’

Hecht smiles. ‘Good. Then maybe this once they’ll stay dead and buried.’

Unlikely
, I think, knowing how carefully the Russians track their agents, how they’ll venture back and extract their agents moments before we’ve acted against them.

But both Kramer and Seydlitz are novices at this; they’ve barely half a dozen trips between them and it’s clear they’ve let their enthusiasm cloud their judgement. But Hecht says nothing. He smiles at them, as if they’ve done well.

‘Is that all?’

Kramer shakes his head and looks to Seydlitz, who produces a slip of paper.

‘What’s this?’ Hecht asks, handing the paper to me. I look at it and frown. On it is drawn a figure of eight lying on its side. It is like the symbol for infinity, except that drawn inside each loop is an arrow, the two arrows facing each other.

‘It was a pendant,’ Seydlitz explains. ‘A big silver thing. The fat one had it round his neck.’

‘And the other? Did he wear one?’

Kramer shrugs. ‘He may have done. There wasn’t that much of him left.’

Hecht nods then looks to me. ‘What do you make of it, Otto?’

‘I don’t know. Some kind of religious sect?’

‘Maybe.’ But I know that if Hecht doesn’t know, then it’s unlikely anyone else does. The question is: is it significant or just some piece of decorative jewellery?

Hecht watches them a moment longer, then nods to himself. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘I want to hear it all.’

They shower, then join us in the smallest of the lecture rooms. There, with the doors locked and the cameras running, we go through it step by step.

I stand at the back, looking on, as Hecht faces the two across the table. Neither looks nervous, but why should they? I am the one who made the mistake. Or so I’m about to find out.

The story’s pretty straightforward. While Kramer infiltrated the Curonians, Seydlitz went directly to the Brotherhood’s headquarters at Marienburg where, posing as an emissary of the Sword Brothers, the Brothers of the Knighthood of Christ in Livonia, he’d spent the best part of a month sniffing around, under the pretext of soliciting aid for his own Knight Brothers who, at the battle of Saule earlier in the year, had suffered an almost terminal mauling at the hands of the Lithuanians.

‘So,’ Hecht says, looking to Seydlitz first. ‘What did you find out?’

Seydlitz sits up straighter. Even dressed simply, as he is, he looks every inch the knight. ‘I didn’t recognise them at first.’

‘Was it these two?’

Two faces appear on a large screen to the side, larger than life. Seydlitz is surprised, but I just grin. Hecht sent in another agent and didn’t tell them.

‘Yes,’ Kramer answers. His voice is a whisper.

‘Ah. Go on.’

Seydlitz tears his gaze from the image on the screen and looks back at Hecht. ‘They were posing as envoys from Rome, sent by Pope Gregory the Ninth. And they were good. Very convincing.’

Hecht nodded. ‘They speak excellent Italian, so I’m told.’

‘
Did
,’ Kramer says.

Seydlitz glances at him, then continues. ‘Anyway, I didn’t suspect them at first. Not for a moment. Then, one night, I went down to the harbour. I had this notion that maybe the Russians were posing as traders, and there they were, the two of them, talking to a rather wild-looking fellow – a boatman – in fluent Curonian.’

‘They saw you?’

Seydlitz smiles. ‘No. It was very dark. The thinnest sliver of moon and heavy cloud. But I could see them by the light of one of the braziers that were burning along the harbour front. I hid behind a herring boat and listened. That’s when I found out. After that I began to watch them. Noted who they spoke to, who they went to visit.’

‘And then?’

Seydlitz pauses. ‘It was about six days later. I turned up at the palace and they were gone. I asked about and no one had seen them since the previous evening. I thought I’d lost them, and then I remembered the fellow they’d met up with – the Curonian – and I went down to the harbour again.’

‘He was there, then?’

‘Yes, but another hour and I’d have missed him. He was waiting on the tide.’ Seydlitz smiles. ‘I put my knife to his throat and questioned him. It seems they’d paid him a visit the night before. Told him they were heading up the coast to rendezvous with his fellow Curonians. He’d offered to take them, but they’d not been interested. Said they had their own transport.’

Hecht nods thoughtfully. ‘They jumped, then?’

Kramer answers him. ‘Must have done. One moment they were in Marienburg, the next a hundred miles up the coast.’

‘You saw them?’

‘Yes. It was late. We were eating supper when they strode into the camp. The Chief of the Curonians, Axel he called himself, was surprised to see them. It was clear he wasn’t expecting them back so soon. But it was also clear – and pretty quickly – that the news they’d brought was just what he’d wanted to hear. They had a bit of a party that night. Those Russians sure can drink!’

‘
Could
,’ Seydlitz says pointedly.

Hecht looks to him. ‘So what was happening back at Marienburg?’

‘I found that out later, when I tried to see the
Hochmeister
. I was told he had already left, with a small company of knights.’

‘You didn’t see him go, then?’

‘No. He just slipped away. Pretty secretively, if you ask me. But then I asked around, and one of my contacts – one of the higher-placed clerics – told me he’d heard a rumour about Mindaugas wanting to meet up with the
Hochmeister
.’

‘Mindaugas, the Grand Prince of Lithuania?’

Seydlitz nods. ‘He wouldn’t say why, but it was pretty obvious. After his victory at Saule, Mindaugas was in the ascendant, and the Knight Brothers knew it.
Hochmeister
Balk knew he needed to buy time. A temporary peace with the Lithuanians would give him that.’

‘So you think that’s the reason he went to Christburg? To meet with Mindaugas and arrange a peace?’

Seydlitz looks past Hecht at me. ‘I can’t be certain, but it seems likely, don’t you think? More likely than that he’d make that perilous journey just to enrol a single knight – however worthy – into the Order.’

I feel some of the tension leave me at Seydlitz’s words, and thank him inwardly for saying them. Maybe it wasn’t my fault, after all. Maybe this was – as Seydlitz and Kramer are suggesting – a well-worked Russian plan to get to Meister Balk and kill him and so destabilise the situation. Yet it is some coincidence, if so. And why not just take him, there in Marienburg? It’s unlike the Russians not to be direct.

Hecht looks to Kramer. ‘What happened next?’

Kramer looks to Seydlitz. ‘We met up. At the pre-arranged jump location. Traded information. Then decided to jump back to the Curonian encampment and follow the Russians. See where they went, what they did.’

‘You didn’t think they’d just jump home?’

The two of them look surprised at that. It’s clearly not occurred to them before now.

Hecht pursues the point. ‘You don’t think they might have waited for you? Deliberately travelled by horseback down the coast so that you’d find them and make an attempt against their lives?’

‘
Waited?’
Seydlitz looks aghast. ‘But why should they do that? They didn’t even know we were there!’

‘Didn’t they?’ Hecht pauses, then says, ‘As you might have guessed, I sent in another agent. Just to be safe. To
protect
you. And what he discovered was interesting.’

He turns in his seat, indicating the screen. ‘Our friend on the left there is named Kabanov, and his fellow – the largish man – is named Postovsky. They’re both new to this era, which is probably why you – and Otto, there – didn’t recognise them. That said, they’ve clearly done their homework well. Well enough to fool you, Max, and many a better agent, too. But even so, they made mistakes. Once alerted to them, our man jumped back to when they first arrived in Marienburg and kept a close eye.’

Seydlitz looks up. ‘Who was it?’

Hecht smiles. ‘Our agent? You want to know?’

Freisler
, I say to myself, a moment before Hecht confirms it.

Both men look thoughtful now. Neither meets Hecht’s eyes.

‘So what did he find out?’ I ask, walking over to the table.

Hecht looks up at me. ‘I believe they knew who you were, Otto. And that we were sending other agents in.’

‘Not possible,’ I say. ‘I took such care.’

And it was true. I had spent time in Thuringia, establishing my credentials as a knight, then rode all the way to Marienburg, along with other knight-supplicants, so that when the time came they could speak for me and guarantee my authenticity. It simply wasn’t possible that they had penetrated my disguise.

‘Freisler thinks they got lucky. That one of their agents spotted you before you spotted him. If so, it would be easy to jump him out of there and replace him.’

‘And is there any evidence that they did that?’

‘Freisler thinks so. He traced them back, and discovered that there was just such a change of agent shortly after you arrived in Marienburg.’

‘And who was there before?’

‘Dankevich.’

‘
Dankevich
? Is he certain?’

Hecht nods.

‘Shit …’

There’s a moment’s silence, and then Kramer asks. ‘So are they dead?’

‘The Russians?’ Hecht smiles. ‘What do
you
think?’

Both men look down, deflated now, but Hecht seems unaffected.

‘It was rash, perhaps, to ambush the Russians, only you already had all the information you needed. You knew who they’d spoken to, and who the traitors were. That could be helpful in some future campaign. All in all, you did well. But for now, we do nothing.’

‘
Nothing
?’ Kramer looks horrified. But I understand. For any of our schemes to succeed we rely upon an element of surprise – we need to be able to spring the trap before they can get any of their agents into that time-line to combat us.

Hecht spells it out. ‘I’m not going to waste good resources getting drawn into a tit-for-tat over a very minor time-line. As you know, the Russians have more agents than us – a hell of a lot more – and there’s nothing they like better than to involve us in a fire-fight over nothing.’

Kramer makes to object again, but Hecht raises a hand, brooking no argument.

‘We leave it. Understand me, Hans? We let it go.’

‘Why Seydlitz?’ I ask, when he and I are alone again.

‘Because the Elders have agreed.’