Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  The grand public spaces of the hotel seemed mostly to be peopled by attendees at the peace conference and they were mostly dressed in the heavy, uncomfortable fashions of the local era. Harry was grateful once again for his tailors back on Savile Row who had proven themselves adept at re-creating a much lighter and more comfortable set of uptime clothes for him. The lightweight sports coat that he wore let through the chill of the air-conditioning as soon as it hit him.

  Scattered about the large open space, he spied men who could only be operatives of the local security service. Two were leaned up against the concierge station on the eastern side of the foyer, drinking tea, their ill-fitting, off-the-rack suits doing nothing to conceal the weapons they carried. Another chap, an overweight Egyptian sporting a three-day growth and a fez, watched Harry from the depths of a white leather armchair from which he would probably take two or three minutes to struggle out of in any sort of emergency. Harry saw the coiled wire of his comm system before the man had lifted a hand to his ear and pressed a button to murmur a few words to his colleagues. Somewhere in here, Harry knew, Viv had an overwatch team, but unlike King Farouk’s men, he could not pick them out.

  All of these details he logged in the few seconds it took him to saunter past the two secret policemen leaned up against the front desk and through into the bar overlooking the bright, opalescent green golf links outside. Again, the fit-out echoed the far future so loudly he could almost feel it rumbling underfoot where the polished concrete floor threw off a light sheen under the illumination of carefully placed LEDs. The furniture in the bar was slightly less massive and imposing than the formal arrangements in the lobby, but that restraint merely drew attention to the Arctic cool of all the Eames and Herman Miller knockoffs.

  Actually no, thought Harry as he inspected one of the Nordic lounge chairs more closely. These weren’t knockoffs. These were contemporary pieces by Raymond Eames himself.

  “Staying classy, Conrad, good for you,” Harry murmured to himself as he inspected the room. And like a curious traveler who might have wandered in at that moment, he could see, sitting at the end of the bar, a vaguely familiar face. Although Ernst Bremmer had aged a decade or more, and he looked somehow thinner yet more fleshy, the face of the man Harry had helped escape both the NKVD and the SS unlocked a dark chest of memory and wonder. The prince rolled his left shoulder without thinking about it, working out a phantom cramp as his body recalled the pain of Otto Skorzeny’s broken bayonet being plunged into his chest.

  Bremmer was alone, unless you counted the beer stein and bowl of nuts keeping him company. He had not looked up, but he did so now, catching the look on the face of the big, redheaded Englishman that said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” The same expression came over the German, causing him to frown and tilt his head slightly as he groped for his own memories. They weren’t long in coming. His eyebrows climbed towards his gray, receding hairline as recognition flashed in his eyes. He had been reaching for a peanut but his hand now fell heavily and upended the bowl, just as though he were a puppet and his string had been cut. Harry arranged his own features in a half-smile that he hoped would imply he had recognized Bremmer, but couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that chance had thrown them together.

  Ernst Bremmer took a long pull on his beer, but absentmindedly, almost as though he was breathing rather than drinking. He shook his head as Harry walked towards him, but more in disbelief than denial.

  “Professor?” Harry said. “Professor Bremmer? How are you? It’s Harry, Harry Wales.”

  Bremmer had stopped shaking his head but now his whole body was trembling. He seemed to have to force himself to stand up as he put one unsteady hand out to take Harry’s.

  “Prince Harry, of course,” he said uncertainly. “I…” Bremmer trailed off.

  “I’m not really a prince anymore,” said Harry. “I mean, people still call me that, but Harry is fine. You’re in town for the peace conference? I think I heard mention of you on the radio this morning, but, I’m sorry, I wasn’t really paying attention. It’s good to see you again.”

  Bremmer seemed at a complete loss for words. He slumped back onto his bar stool and took another draft of the beer as though he were indeed breathing it in, as though his life depended on it. “And you, and you,” he said almost as an afterthought. “I don’t suppose you are here for the peace conference?”

  It was a statement not a question. Harry laughed it off. “Oh hell no. Quite the opposite. I’m afraid I’m here hosting cocktail parties for the merchants of death. Well, our merchants of death anyway. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a drink if you’re up for it. It’s been years, hasn’t it?”

  The professor’s head jerked up and down but it looked more like a nervous tic than any kind of answer. “A long time indeed. Yes.”

  A barman appeared, a small Egyptian man in a white waistcoat who fussed around them cleaning up the mess Bremmer had made when he spilled his bowl of nuts. Harry took the opportunity to order himself a glass of champagne‌—‌“and open a fresh bottle if you have to”‌—‌and a second beer for Bremmer. A few more people had drifted into the bar looking to make an early start on the cocktail hour. The waiter produced a fresh bowl of nuts, the two drinks, and turned up the music, some pleasantly anonymous jazz track that Harry could not place. Could have been uptime, could have been contemporary, could have been some fusion of the two.

  “It’s good to see you again, Professor,” said Harry when the barman left them to get on with it. “I’d say you’re looking good, but frankly you look like a bag of shit. Jet lag?”

  The older man seemed distracted.

  “Jet lag? I flew here on an older plane, propeller-driven, but… maybe. I have not been so well of late, Your Highness.”

  “God, enough with the Teutonic obsession for correct forms of address. Call me Harry, or call me Colonel if you must, but apart from a decent pension and a nice apartment to live in, they took all my royal superhero powers away a while ago.”

  Bremmer looked at him as though he was speaking a foreign language, which in a way he was. Harry made an effort to think in the more structured, rigid ways of the old time temp. He was used to switching tracks in this way, conversing casually with uptime friends, while doing something akin to reading dialogue from a stage play with the temps, or at least with temps of a certain age or social station.

  “It’s okay,” Harry said. He almost went on to say “I’m cool with it”, but caught himself at the last moment. “I’m much happier now. It was easy in the war when I had a job to do,” he said, bringing the conversation around to touch on their common ground, “but after the fighting nobody really knew what to do with me. So it’s not like I’m a private citizen, but I’m not Your Highness, either. What about you? You on the conference circuit now?”

  He waved a hand around to take in the bar, the hotel beyond it, and the peace conference. Bremmer grabbed a handful of nuts and pushed them into his mouth. He could have been stalling for time, trying to think of an answer, but to Harry it looked like the anxious habit of a comfort eater. He let the German finish chewing and swallowing. Bremmer took another long drink before he spoke. No, thought Harry, this is not the same man I got out of Magdeburg. As tough as those times had been, Bremmer had held it together. Here he looked like a man who was about to come apart at the seams.

  “I do some teaching now,” he said. “I still have tenure and I am writing, but not in my old field. I took up the study of history some time ago. I find it…” He trailed off and shrugged.

  The background hum of conversation was loud enough that Harry had to lean in to hear the German, who was speaking very softly. At least half the lounge chairs in the bar were now occupied, mostly by men in business suits, but with a scattering of women too. They were all Westerners, but they didn’t look like conference attendees, or even academics like Bremmer. Some enjoyed the lavish tailoring and soft edges of business people. Here and there,
a couple displayed the harder lines of men and, yes, women with active military or security backgrounds. Harry took a quick sight picture of everyone in the room, noting that one of the king’s security men had taken up a chair in the far corner.

  Bremmer’s silence seemed more a result of being mired in his thoughts than a reluctance to talk. Harry wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. He supposed that Section 6 had training programs for this sort of thing. Or maybe they simply made a habit of hiring charming psychopaths who could talk people into anything. But he was a soldier and what he knew about dealing with difficult situations usually involved unloading large amounts of ordnance on them.

  “Are you staying long in the city?” Harry asked. “I have my partner with me‌—” he shook his head at his unwary use of such an uptime term. “My girlfriend, I mean. She spent quite a bit of time on the Continent and in Germany during the war. I bet she’d love to meet you, practice some of her restaurant German. Wo sind meine Schnitzel? Perhaps you’d like to get away from the hotel, come out to dinner with us?”

  The professor picked at the peanut bowl and shook his head. “I would very much like to get away from the hotel, but I am afraid that will not be possible… Harry.”

  That felt like progress.

  “Oh come on. Why not? I’ve been to a few of these conferences. Well, not peace conferences obviously. But if they’re anything like war conferences the whole thing is a bit of a tax dodge and you should have plenty of time for skiving off with an old mate. Did you bring your wife? I’m sure she would‌—”

  Bremmer tensed, noticeably, at the mention of his wife, and shook his head.

  “No, no, I’m afraid it won’t be possible. I have to stay here.”

  Harry took a sip from his champagne, but it was a very small sip, mostly for show. He had no intention of finishing the drink or even making much of a dent in it. He leaned in a little towards Ernst Bremmer, just like an old friend imparting some choice piece of gossip.

  “Are you okay, Professor?”

  The other man stared into his drink. His eyes were already bloodshot and watery, but Harry could have sworn he teared up a little at the question. Harry leaned further towards him to give him a friendly shoulder bump. Time to press his luck.

  “Come on, Ernst. I didn’t drag you out of that cellar in Magdeburg so you could spend your life moping over spilled peanuts. You were a rock for your family at the end of the war. What’s up? Are you having some sort of trouble? Something I could help with?”

  Harry was peripherally aware of something being wrong. Of something going wrong. He thought he heard a car backfire in the distance. But then it fired again and he was sure he could hear the muted sound of gunshots. A movement at the edge of his visual field. A jolt of tension that seemed to shoot through the postures of everybody in the room. Or maybe he simply imposed that perception on his memory later, when his recall was scrambled. Bremmer seemed about to give something up when his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped open. Harry was certain he heard a dull thump, but again, thinking about it later, that could have been a trick of his memory, a detail he filled in after the flash bang went off.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Duffy didn’t make it to the tent. Nor did she hear the men come up behind her until it was too late. Perhaps her attention was focused on the task ahead. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been wasting her time bitching to herself about the temps and her disappointments. Perhaps she had simply lost her edge. It had been a long time since Julia Duffy had been a combat embed.

  “Do not make any trouble, Miss Duffy,” said a soft voice in an accent she thought of as Eastern European, rather than anything specific like Russian or Bulgarian.

  “Just get into the car,” said another voice, deeper, harsher, but in the same accent which she now tagged as “Slavic”. They had bracketed her, coming up close before speaking. Close enough to dig the point of a knife into her back just above her kidneys. The thin silk tank top, which had seemed such a good idea earlier, now seemed a ridiculous choice. Fingers dug into her right arm, just above the elbow. Hard, strong fingers that pinched painfully into a nerve bundle, directing her off the path she had been walking, away from the air-conditioned tent with all of the delightfully naïve young peaceniks.

  She said nothing. She moved in the direction the men wanted her to move, matching her pace to theirs. She didn’t bother trying to turn around to get a look at them, instead concentrating on fixing their relative positions by listening to their footsteps, watching their long shadows as they bracketed her own, and listening to their breathing. The one on the right, the one who had the blade at her back and the grip on her upper arm was the closest. The other man‌—‌he smelled of stale food, boiled cabbage maybe‌—‌was a few strides away and behind her on her left. Outside of striking or kicking distance. Riding shotgun.

  Julia’s head swam with the adrenaline rush, with the accelerated tom-tom beat of her heart as her fight or flight reaction took hold. Once upon a time she would have reacted instinctively, but although she had maintained her fitness over the years, and had even kept up some of her fight training, it had been a long time since she had done the advanced combat course as part of her embed requirements for the Marines, and it had been nearly ten years since she had seen any actual combat. Her instincts, such as they were, told her to run. The rational mind, and all of her experience, however, told her that the man holding her arm tightly enough to leave a bruise would put the tip of his blade deep into her vital organs as soon as he felt her body tense up ready to flee.

  She would have to wait.

  But not for long. As they approached the great sweeping ring road that delivered taxis and limousines and the occasional tour bus to the front of the Hilton, Julia saw a long, black low-slung sedan approaching from the direction of the hotel. She could just make out the silhouette of a shaven-headed, thickset man behind the wheel. The reflection of the lowering sun slid up the tinted windshield as the vehicle approached, making it impossible to see anything else. She didn’t recognize the make of car, a contemporary model, but a new one. It reminded her of the cars you saw in old gangster movies.

  The sedan glided to a stop, gravel crunching under its wheels as the second assailant, or kidnapper, or whatever these guys were, moved around her to open the rear door. She could see him now, a short, muscular Slavic type in a cheap, ill-fitting suit. He looked like a wrestler forced into his Sunday best. One last glance up towards the conference tent confirmed that nobody was paying any attention to her abduction. She was just a few steps from the dark interior of the car now and the pressure on her upper arm increased painfully.

  “Keep moving,” hissed the man behind her.

  She took one more step before bracing her legs and pushing back against him, the natural reaction of someone trying to avoid being forced into a vehicle. He did exactly as he had been trained, strengthening his grip and prodding the tip of his knife into her back where she felt it prick the skin, a cold stinging sensation followed by the warm trickle of blood down the small of her back.

  Her legs were still braced, as she apparently fought to stay out of the car. Julia felt him move even closer behind her when the door swung wide open. Without giving any warning of what she was about to do, she screamed a war shout and reached across her body with her free hand. She took hold of the wrist restraining her upper arm as she accelerated forward, using the man’s own momentum against him. She dropped her hips and pulled him down, smashing his head into the sharp corner of the passenger door.

  Julia kept moving forward, away from the knife. The grip on her arm relaxed as the man cried out in shock and pain. She pivoted away from him, from the open door, from the knife, sweeping both hands around in a low blocking movement to protect herself from the blade.

  It didn’t work.

  The cutting edge opened up a shallow gash across the small of her back, a small line of fire that caused her to gasp. There was no stopping now, however. She had
maybe half a second before his companion reacted. Maybe another second after that before the driver got out, probably pointing a gun at her. She whipped around in a tight circle, fending the knife off, locking one arm against the man’s elbow, taking hold of his wrist and slamming her hips into him as she levered against his limb. He was already sagging to the ground, either unconscious from the blow to the head, or collapsing with the shock of the pain, when she broke his arm. The vulnerable elbow joint came apart with a wet crack.

  The wrestler was snarling, closing in on her, but she had control of the knife now, even though it meant cutting her fingers when she stripped it from the slackening grip of the first attacker. Julia’s own grip on the weapon was not strong, but it was strong enough to lash out with a short, jabbing strike that drove the point of the stiletto deep into the man’s eye. He shrieked, an unsettling animal sound as he threw his hands up involuntarily.

  She had put her full weight behind the blow and buried the knife to the hilt. In some quiet, detached part of her mind she imagined it tickling his brainstem at the back of his skull. His screams added to the mad cries of his comrade. Blood gouted from the terrible wound, spraying her face and painting her silk top as she wrenched out the blade and stabbed it back in to finish the job. Julia gagged as the rich coppery smell of blood was buried beneath the sudden stink of somebody’s bowels evacuating. Probably old Squinty here. His body was already dropping to the ground with the familiar heaviness of the dead.

  His friend, however, was getting up again. One of his eyes was also ruined, put out when she had slammed his face into the sharp corner of the car door. Three cheers for unsafe contemporary design standards, she thought. This one was only hurt, unfortunately, and coming at her now like an enraged grizzly. He kept one hand over his blinded eye. The other reached out for her with thick, grasping fingers. Again, Julia had to tell herself to react, rather than relying on muscle memory and instinct. It had been a long time since she’d had to do this sort of thing. She stepped towards her attacker, surprising him, batting away his arm and driving the knife up under his chin. His one good eye went round with shock as the stiletto speared up through his mouth, into the back of his throat and buried itself deep inside his head. Julia tumbled to the ground, knocked over by the weight of his crashing bulk as he fell dead.