He settled down to wait, hoping that the celebrated German efficiency would deliver the Emperor on time. In fact, he arrived a few minutes early, perhaps anxious to get such a boringly non-military function over with as soon as possible so that he could get back to his beloved parade grounds. There was a stirring in the crowd, and the rhythm of the distant music changed to what Stanton thought he recognized as ‘God Save The King’. He was momentarily taken aback before recalling having read that the German Imperial anthem Heil Dir Im Siegerkranz used the same tune. The anthem signalled the arrival of the royal motorcade.

  There was much cheering and waving of hats as the middle car drew up in front of the red carpet. The small crowd, which had been swollen by the host of golden daffodils on their lunch break from the department store, were clearly enjoying the occasion. A gaggle of dignitaries scurried forward to greet the monarch. Stanton couldn’t see this part of the proceedings because the royal car was in the way. He could only imagine the great man trying to look interested while the details of the new tram-line pattern were explained to him.

  A few moments passed and the party emerged from under the cover of the roof of the car and the Kaiser strode up the red carpet towards the podium. Stanton viewed the scene through his gun sight but there was no chance to get a clean shot. The monarch was leading the group and all Stanton could see through the crowd of top hats that followed him were the ostrich plumes of his ridiculous helmet. Wilhelm was, of course, in uniform. Only he would have felt it appropriate to dress up as an admiral of the fleet or a commander of the heavy cavalry in order to open a new tram junction.

  The Kaiser mounted the platform. Stanton, who was already stretched out on his stomach behind the telescopic lens of his rifle, placed his finger against the trigger and took a view through the cross hairs. It was a fairly long range so the target bobbed about considerably in the circle of his lens but hopefully when it arrived at centre stage it would be still. But Stanton doubted that the Kaiser would remain still for long. The whole event was scheduled for only fifteen minutes and the Kaiser appeared to have brought no notes with him. Perhaps he would not speak at all and simply deliver the snip.

  Stanton settled deeper into his firing position, the barrel of the gun resting on his folded jacket on the ledge.

  The Kaiser took his position in front of the ribbon and nodded. It seemed he definitely did not intend to say anything as an officer approached him at once carrying a cushion on which was a pair of scissors. The Kaiser took up the scissors and reached forward to cut the ribbon.

  Bang!

  A shot was fired.

  But it wasn’t Stanton who fired it. Stanton felt a massive pain in his back, as if somebody had taken a clump hammer and brought it down with all their might on a space just to the right of his spine, just behind his heart.

  He’d been shot at and but for the polyethylene ballistic plates in his Gore-tex vest he would have been dead already.

  Stanton let go of his rifle and rolled over. Already the Glock semi-automatic was in his hand. All in an instant he saw a grey-clad figure with a shaven head standing ten metres or so away with a rifle at his shoulder. The figure must have managed to cock the bolt with inordinate speed because there was another crack and Stanton felt another horrendous blow to his chest, a ferocious steel punch from a tiny ballistic fist which left him gasping for breath. However, the body armour saved his life a second time and despite the twin blows he’d taken on the back and front of his body, Stanton was able to bring his handgun up into the firing position and return fire. He loosed off three rounds in scarcely more than a second. The first missed, but the second two hit the man in the arm and upper chest, knocking him backwards against the chimney in front of which he was standing.

  Stanton didn’t even watch his assailant fall fully to the ground. Even as the man slid down the chimney into a heap, Stanton had rolled back over on to his front. Gasping at the pain in his bruised chest, he took up his telescopic rifle once more. It had been incredible misfortune that some sort of guard had happened upon him at that time. The Kaiser’s people were clearly a massive step up from the Austrians, as indeed Stanton had feared they would be. They must have decided to sweep the roofs after all. Nonetheless as long as there weren’t any more of them he might still have time to get his man.

  Glancing down into the Potsdamer Platz he realized that the whole incident with the guard had only taken a matter of seconds. The Kaiser was still cutting the ribbon. It seemed to be proving troublesome and two officials had stepped forward to pull the thing tight to make it easier to cut.

  Stanton thanked the heavens for the German public’s appetite for military bands. Gun fights make a noise and while his own Glock was a relatively quiet piece the two rifle shots might easily have carried as far as the podium had a brass band not been playing. They had no doubt been heard in the roof garden but Stanton could only hope they had been ignored. There were plenty of motor cars in Berlin and cars from that time backfired a lot.

  Putting all other thoughts from his mind, Stanton settled once more and, after a moment’s searching through the magnified lens, picked up his target in the cross hairs. The Emperor was standing quite alone, behind the little ribbon at the front of the stage. The dignitaries had all gathered at the edges of the podium, apart from the two holding the ribbon. Stanton was glad to see that the Kaiserin was not present. He had no wish to shoot a man in front of his wife.

  Now, with the Kaiser in his sights, he could see the man’s face close up for the first time. It was shocking how familiar it was, even to a man born towards the end of the twentieth century. That moustache, so fierce and uncompromising, the waxed and carefully arranged glory of what had at that time been the most famous whiskers on the planet. The eyes, not unkind at all, but made deliberately fierce from years of assuming a look as stern as he could make it. Stanton knew that the Kaiser had been quite friendly and considerate as a schoolboy, but later as a guards officer and young ruler he had deliberately cultivated an abrupt and imperious manner. He’d thought it was expected of him.

  Looking at the man, Stanton was also struck by his resemblance to the British royals, even the ones who had been born a hundred years after him. That was one strong gene pool. And powerful. Incredibly powerful. The British King, the German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar. All first cousins. How strange the world had once been.

  Stanton raised the angle of his sighting by an infinitesimally small margin, bringing his cross hairs up to a point an inch above the space between the Emperor’s eyes. The man was speaking now, perhaps complaining about the bluntness of the scissors, but keeping himself stiff and rigid as he did so.

  Formal, proper.

  Dead.

  Stanton watched his target’s head explode through the magnified lens. He had known he’d only get one shot and so had used ammunition that was designed to do the maximum damage.

  And it had. As the man’s body seemed to half float, half stagger backwards there was almost nothing left above its shoulders at all.

  Stanton had completed his mission.

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand was alive and the Kaiser was dead.

  The Great War had been averted.

  The world had been saved.

  31

  STANTON DISMANTLED HIS rifle and stowed it in his bag. He picked up the spent cartridge shell and stowed that also. Next he took a second empty rifle cartridge shell from his pocket. It was for a Mauser Gewehr 98, the German army rifle of the period. He put the empty shell on the ground where his firing position had been.

  When the police discovered the shell they would presume they knew the make of the murder weapon. A German gun for a fictitious German killer. His own bullet would have disintegrated.

  Now there was just one last element to the Chronos plan to be completed. An element Stanton found almost as distasteful as having been required to shoot an innocent man from a safe distance. This was to give the authorities someone to blame for the killing. Someone German so that the nation would look within itself for revenge and not abroad.

  Stanton couldn’t fault the logic. By 1914 Germany had the most developed and the most sophisticated left wing in the world. The pace and sophistication of Germany’s economic revolution had led to a huge new class of educated men and women who were more than aware of their own exploitation. The Red Scare bogeyman was alive and well in pre-war Germany and hysterical reactionaries were ready to believe any slander against organized labour.

  Stanton was about to give them a bigger stick to beat them with than they could have ever dreamt of. He didn’t like doing it. Blaming the Left for crimes they hadn’t committed was an age-old establishment sport. But it had to be done.

  Better a Germany fighting itself than fighting the rest of the world.

  Stanton took one of the leaflets from his bag and placed it under the Mauser shell case. The leaflet was bright blood red in colour. It featured a stern and noble-looking working man who was bringing his mighty fist down on the head of a vicious little devil with the face of the Kaiser. The wording on the leaflet was very simple – The Kaiser is dead! Workers rise up and take control!

  That was all, no detail. Nothing more specific.

  ‘Let ’em sweat over it,’ McCluskey had said. ‘Let ’em obsess over it! Who killed Bill? The whole country will tie itself in knots.’

  Having left his false evidence, Stanton put on his jacket ready to leave. He allowed himself one last glance down into Potsdamer Platz where, not surprisingly, absolute pandemonium had broken out. The crowd had surged forward and lines of soldiers, including the entire brass band, were struggling to keep them back while all the top-hatted gentlemen clustered together behind the podium where the ex-Emperor’s body no doubt had landed.

  Stanton knew that he was watching the epicentre of a storm. That moment when the pebble hits the pond. Already he could see many figures scurrying not towards the tragedy but away from it. Most of them would be police fanning out in an effort to find the perpetrator, but there would also be reporters, anxious to be the first to file the most astonishing and momentous story of the century. The undisputed ruler of the German Empire, virtual dictator of the most vibrant economy and fearsome military in Europe, had been murdered! Arguably the single most powerful man on earth was dead. Stories simply did not get any bigger.

  So far the shock waves had scarcely reached the edge of Potsdamer Platz since they were still being propelled on foot. But let the first man reach a telephone or a telegraph office and the world would tremble at the astonishing news.

  Stanton turned away. He had killed the Emperor less than ninety seconds before. The scene in the roof garden cafe would remain undisturbed for perhaps another two or three minutes. He wanted to be there when the news hit, not still out on the roof. He thought for a brief moment about checking on the guard he had shot. Possibly he was still alive and, if he was, there was an outside chance that the man could identify him later. Stanton decided to let it go. One cold-blooded murder was quite enough for one day. Besides, he needed to clear the scene of the crime quickly and distribute his leaflets.

  Having sprinted back across the roof, Stanton paused for a moment outside the Verboten door to collect himself, then strode through, as ever looking confident, relaxed and in command. He doubted that anybody noticed him but if they did he was pretty sure the moment would not register. Why would it? The world was still the same as it had been for decades. A charmed, Edwardian world, ever steady and reassuringly unchanging.

  That world would last about another minute.

  Stanton exited from the roof garden by the same door he had entered it, walking down the flight of stairs to the fifth-floor furniture department. Then he strolled casually across the floor until he came to the top of the grand staircase which descended in gilded magnificence down five floors. Looking down, Stanton could see the top of the head of the female statue. It was also possible from where he was standing to imagine that one was squinting down inside her plaster blouse, a circumstance that had given a generation of schoolboys enormous comical pleasure. As Stanton passed the top banister he took from his jacket another sheaf of a hundred or so of the forged Socialist leaflets. Scarcely breaking his stride he balanced them on the top balustrade as he passed and then began to walk down the stairs.

  He knew that they would not balance for long and, sure enough, before he had taken another five steps the pages came fluttering down the great stairwell of the atrium like large pieces of red confetti. Looking down as they fluttered past him Stanton could see that at the bottom of the fifth flight, down on the ground floor, clusters of people were gathering together and gesticulating; one woman had even swooned. Time seemed to slow down for a moment as Stanton watched the intense conversations begin to spread up the stairs as the leaflets descended to meet them.

  People were grabbing at the red confetti now and as they did there were cries of anger and horror all around. Stanton kept walking down on to the ground floor where the shop was all of a sudden in complete uproar as everyone began to digest and protest the terrible news.

  Stanton pushed his way through the excited throng, through the doors of the shop and out on to Leipziger Strasse.

  Although it was a warm day there was a stiff breeze blowing east across the twin Plätze of Leipzig and Potsdam. Stanton turned west and as he did so he plunged his hand into his bag where the rest of his leaflets were hidden. In one confident movement he drew them out and dropped them to the pavement. Then he just kept walking, not looking back even once. He didn’t need to. He knew that behind him the red leaflets would be gusting across the tram lines towards where the Kaiser’s corpse no doubt still lay.

  Stanton’s mission was complete.

  As the adrenalin rush of the previous hour began to subside, he had leisure to realize that he was finding breathing a little painful. Putting his hand to his chest he felt the rough quality of singed cloth and remembered for the first time since leaving the roof that he had been shot at twice. Glancing down he saw a black burn mark on his tweed jacket right in front of his heart. He knew there would be identical damage on the back of his jacket, again right in front of his heart. That guard had been a bloody good shot. It seemed German police training was as efficient as their army and their industry.

  Stanton took off the jacket and folded it over his arm. Better to be out in shirt sleeves than displaying what might be recognized as bullet holes in your clothing.

  Stanton probed gently at his chest and back as he walked, wincing when his fingers applied any pressure. He was badly bruised, there was no doubt about that, and would certainly be an ugly colour in the morning, but nothing was broken. So far his luck had held. If it changed now it didn’t matter. He’d already saved the world.

  32

  STANTON TOOK A walk down Unter Den Linden and went for lunch in the Tiergarten. Bratwurst, mustard and a stein of beer. A typically German meal to celebrate the private knowledge that by what he had just done he had preserved a better Germany for the century to come. That Germany of contented, progressive people who were more fond of beer and sausage than conquest and murder. The Germany the previous twentieth century had corrupted.

  The Tiergarten had been quiet and rather sedate when he had walked through it previously but now it was full and what would in another age be called ‘buzzing’. The news of the Kaiser’s death was crashing through the city like cannon fire, and as Stanton sat at his lunch it occurred to him that he was watching a city becoming collectively traumatized. All around him hundreds of identical conversations were occurring as the news was shared. Nannies with their charges, wide-eyed with shock, portly gentlemen waving their arms in horror, earnest students tight-lipped and grim. Each had been going about his or her business, strolling through the park, chatting to friends, pondering some private thought, only to overhear a comment or join a conversation and be suddenly transformed. Their faces turning in an instant to blank bewilderment and utter horror.

  If it were possible for an entire city to go into shock, that was what was happening to Berlin.

  Nobody in that city was ever going to forget what they were doing when they heard the news that the Kaiser had been assassinated.

  Stanton felt a little uncomfortable, almost like a voyeur spying on someone else’s sorrows. That sensation brought to mind his own personal isolation and loneliness. He was still on the outside, still emotionally unconnected with the world in which he was living, in which he would always live now. Nonetheless that loneliness was tinged with elation. It came upon him in little waves. The world-historical task with which he had been entrusted was over and he had done his duty.

  And he had done what a million British soldiers had dreamt of doing. He’d killed the Kaiser.

  On that thought he decided to order another beer but discovered that he’d been lucky to get the first. On hearing the momentous news the owners had quickly concluded that serving beer and sausage wasn’t an appropriate thing to do on such an afternoon. The waiters were at that moment closing the little entrance gate to their tea garden and telling the customers that they were shutting up indefinitely out of respect for the fallen Emperor.

  Stanton decided to return to his apartment.

  This wasn’t his grief, his trauma. He might have caused it but he was not of it. His had been a clinical action, theirs was a guttural reaction. By dying the Kaiser had brought the whole city together far more completely than he had ever done in life. But Stanton wasn’t part of it.

  He had a bottle of raspberry-flavoured schnapps waiting in his room and some Liebfraumilch wine, keeping cool wrapped in a wet undershirt. He had laid these in in anticipation of not quite knowing what to do with himself after the event. So he decided to go home, get a little drunk and once more consider his future. A future that was finally his to consider.