The Ocean of Time

by David Wingrove

  A tear rolls down my cheek. The first I’ve cried. The first I’ve been allowed since I returned from there.

  I wipe it away, then stand, opening my eyes, looking about me determinedly.

  I will not let this defeat me. I will not. They’ve killed me, sure, but I don’t have to stay dead. I’m a time agent – a Reisende. If anyone can avoid death, I can.

  And then it strikes me. They brought her back. They brought her back through time. They had to, because there is no other explanation, unless her corpse was a fake. How do I know this? Because there were two of her – one dead and one alive – and they couldn’t manage that unless one of them was from another timeline.

  But what does that mean? Did they do to Katerina what they did to Seydlitz?

  Maybe. But who’s they? And how was the old man, Kolya, involved in all of this? Why have I never heard of him before?

  Yes, and why that intense hatred of his? What have I done to him that he should hate me so?

  I must get answers. Only how?

  And then I laugh, because the answer’s simple. Pretend he’s here, in Poltava. Get Hecht and the others to look for him for me.

  Oh, I don’t mean to neglect my task. I’ll do my best to unravel whatever’s happening here. I’ll find out who and why and how and change it back. Only I can’t leave Katerina to that fate. I can’t. And if a lie or two will help, I’ll lie like Loki himself.

  The thought disturbs me. Loki … Someone once quipped that Loki had to be a Russian. But he’s German through and through. Or, should I say, Teuton. His inventiveness. His quick and agile mind. His ability to seem what he is not. These aren’t Russian qualities. No. Russia is a landscape; Germany an idea. And Loki, I sometimes feel, embodies the idea. And yet …

  I pause. For some reason the image of Reichenau with his obscene double head comes to mind, and for no reason I shiver as if cold. But the day is warm. Even the slight breeze that moves the curtains cannot mask the fact.

  Kolya, then. I’ll find out who Kolya is and where he comes from and who he’s working for.

  And then?

  But that’s asking too much. One step at a time, Otto, that’s the way.

  218

  Hecht frowns, as if my news has only clouded things further, but Freisler for once is grinning.

  ‘It’s a major push,’ he says. ‘It has to be. Why else make so many changes?’

  ‘Yes, but why?’ I ask. ‘Why undermine your own side?’

  I look to Hecht, but he has that distracted look he always has when he’s thinking things through.

  I lower my voice, then speak to Freisler again. ‘Charles bought the Patkul story.’

  ‘About his brother?’

  I nod.

  ‘Good. Then that has to be your main priority. To flush out one of them. We’ll send in agents to check out the rest.’ Freisler sits back a little, then shakes his head in admiration at the Russians. ‘What audacity!’

  Audacity? Or stupidity? Because how can it benefit them? If Peter loses, Russia will be close to collapse, the road to Moscow open to a decisive strike from the combined Swedish and Turkish armies, and there’s nothing the Sultan would like better than to add the Russian steppes to his vast empire.

  And how can that help their cause?

  Hecht clearly feels the same. I can see it in his face. Only he says nothing, merely gestures for Freisler to go.

  But this is intriguing. Why would the Russians want to lose such a crucial battle? I go to speak, but Hecht lifts a hand. I can see he needs to think this through.

  Sensing that I’m dismissed, I stand and, following Freisler’s example, leave.

  Only I don’t go straight back to my own rooms. Instead I go and see an old friend.

  The room I step into is long and narrow, like a railway carriage, only shelves fill both walls, stacked to bursting with files and boxes and tapes, a disorderly mish-mash from across the ages.

  ‘Otto?’ old Schnorr says, looking up from his desk and peering over his massive spectacles at me, the lenses of which make his eyes seem as large as gobstoppers. ‘Now here’s a stranger. Must be … oh, a good three years since you last graced us with your company.’

  There are three others in the room with old Schnorr, each at their own desk, each staring across at me through a pair of identical overlarge glasses.

  ‘Any new faces?’ I ask, and wonder how many thousands of times he’s been asked that.

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Anyone interesting?’

  Old Schnorr smiles. ‘It depends on what you mean by that. Interesting operationally or interesting genetically?’

  I smile, then hand him the slip of paper on which I’ve written Kolya’s name.

  ‘This all you have?’

  ‘I can describe him for you, if you like.’

  Which I do. Schnorr sighs, then looks round at his fellows. ‘Anyone?’

  Three heads shake a no, then settle. Schnorr looks back at me. ‘I’ll run it through the machine. See what comes up. But without an image …’ He hesitates, then. ‘Any reason why you want to know?’

  ‘He killed me.’

  ‘Ah …’ Schnorr nods and his chin lifts thoughtfully. ‘Then I can see why you’d want to trace him. Even so …’ One hand comes up and scratches at his cheek a moment, then he looks back at me. ‘You got an hour?’

  I smile. ‘Sure. All the time in the world.’

  219

  Old Schnorr is an interesting fellow. Moreover, his job, which he created himself, is one of the strangest in Four-Oh.

  Old Schnorr trawls Time for faces. Repeated faces. Faces so alike that they might be accidents of genetics, or – just as likely – the faces of agents operating in Time.

  The idea came to him when he was looking at a reproduction of an old painting one day – Raphael’s The School Of Athens, I believe – when he recognised one of the faces as being similar to that of a Russian agent. He told Hecht, who sent a man back, and sure enough, one of Raphael’s models, back there in sixteenth-century Florence, turned out to be one of theirs: a ‘sleeper’ by the name of Grechko. He escaped, but not before we blew their whole operation there.

  After that there was no looking back. Schnorr was allocated a budget and a team of keen young students to help him. Repeatedly going back in time, they began to build up a massive data base of names and faces, using the most up-to-date technology – that, incidentally, of the twenty-sixth century – to begin to create what we now know as ‘The Record’. Old paintings, photographs, films and holo-images all went into the mix indiscriminately to be sorted and collated by a programme devised specially by Schnorr for the task.

  Trawling Time. Looking for repeated features.

  It’s easily done. Agents go back into areas of time we know are ripe for change with discreet cameras. Posing as natives, they wander the streets, casually looking at this or at that, and all the while their cameras record everything they see. And when they return, the cameras are processed and the faces fed into the programme, and we see what we see.

  I say easy, but it wasn’t easy at first. Because some faces are just so similar, the genetics so close. that we can make mistakes. Faces repeat naturally – it is the way of nature – so we have to look for unnatural repetition. Faces that seem to have died out, along with that genetic line, and then suddenly are there again. Faces that leap five hundred years, that are found in tenth-century Byzantium and then, later, in Renaissance Italy.

  Like Grechko’s.

  Since he set up ‘The Record’, Schnorr has traced over sixty of their agents by this means. Some we knew about already, but several – and Vosnesensky is perhaps the most famous – would have eluded us altogether without Schnorr’s programme identifying him.

  But Kolya … will they be able to find Kolya?

  Schnorr sits me down in front of his machine, then leans over me and taps the screen. ‘You say he’s old?’

  ‘Old for the time. Late forties, maybe. Fifties, eve
n, but no older.’

  ‘And burning eyes. Like Rasputin’s?’

  I nod.

  ‘Okay. Then let’s form a subset of possibles. Let’s see if you can’t see a face that’s like his.’

  And so, for the next hour, I watch face after face appear before me and try to describe in what fashion each differs from Kolya’s. And as the process continues, and Schnorr fine-tunes his database, so the distinctions become finer, the faces more and more like Kolya’s, until—

  ‘That’s it! It isn’t him, but that’s almost him. If it wasn’t for the eyes …’

  Schnorr nods. ‘Good. The eyes aside, there might be a direct genetic line, and if we can trace it …’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Of course. We’ve another six matches to this one already. Scattered, admittedly, but they’re family, even if they don’t know it. What we’ll try to do now is fill the gaps and trace the line forwards and back. Somewhere, I’m sure, we’ll find your fellow.’

  ‘As easy as that?’

  Schnorr laughs. ‘Far from it. Genetic lines are real bramble trails: illegitimacy, emigration, blood feuds. There’s never a direct road. But it is possible. Given time and a great deal of detective work.’

  ‘If you haven’t time …’

  But old Schnorr looks down at me and beams. ‘On the contrary, Otto. I’ll put young Horst on the job. After all, if we can find this Kolya, then maybe we can stop you being killed.’

  220

  ‘Otto’s right,’ Freisler says, as he enters the room. ‘They’ve made at least five, possibly six major changes to the pre-battle scenario.’

  Hecht looks up, past me. ‘On just the Swedish side or both?’

  ‘We haven’t checked yet to see what changes have been made to the Russian side of things. I thought Otto might find that out.’

  Hecht shakes his head. ‘Too risky right now. They’ll have Peter surrounded with their agents.’

  ‘But he knows Peter. He has access.’

  ‘Maybe. But Otto stays with Charles for now. Focus on what’s happening around him. If changes have been made on the Russian side, then they’re almost certain to have been made to further weaken their position. That is, if that’s their strategy. Speaking of which …’ Hecht looks to me. ‘There’s something you should know, Otto. About the situation back there. Our agents …’

  ‘Five dead,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but only two of them were from that time zone. As usual, they were being tracked, on the screens back at the platform. When they blinked out – one almost immediately after the other – we sent an agent back, to a point one minute before they vanished. He too blinked out, almost instantly.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘We sent one back an hour before, another a week. Both were intercepted by the Russians almost immediately they jumped through.’

  ‘Do we know how?’

  Freisler answers for him. ‘They’ve saturated the area, Otto. There must be three, maybe four dozen of their agents back there.’

  ‘But none about Charles,’ Hecht throws in. ‘That’s why we sent you straight back there, into his tent. It was the safest place.’

  Yes, I think, but if the Russians are looking out for our agents jumping through, then surely they could have hit me once I came out of there – in the village, perhaps.

  ‘So we know nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing except what I brought back.’

  ‘Not so,’ Freisler says. ‘I went back myself. We got a map and worked out where the first two vanished, then dropped me in the day before, half a mile away, in a wooded copse, looking down across a valley at the place.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘They were duelling,’ Hecht says, a slight anger in his voice. ‘Agents of mine and they were duelling among themselves! Over some gambling debt, no doubt, or a woman.’

  Freisler is silent a moment, watching Hecht, then looks to me again. ‘It’s true. They were standing on a hilltop, out in the open, twenty paces apart. It was quite distant but you could see the two puffs of smoke. One of them fell immediately, the other …’

  The look on Freisler’s face surprises me. ‘What?’

  Hecht answers for him. ‘A Russian sniper, that’s our guess. Blew the top of his skull off. Knocked him forward, so it had to be from behind.’

  ‘There was a thicket,’ Freisler says, back in control of himself, ‘just to the right of where they had set up. The assassin must have been in there, waiting to pick him off.’

  ‘And the one who jumped in?

  ‘The same,’ Hecht says. ‘He didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘But we can get them back, right? We can make changes and—’

  ‘They keep anticipating us,’ Hecht says. ‘Out-guessing us. But it’s also weight of numbers. That’s why I called you back. That’s why we need to capture one of their agents and find out what’s going on. What Yastryeb’s thinking is. Because I can’t afford to send in agent after agent. We haven’t got the men.’

  ‘But Freisler showed it could be done. We just need to be careful.’

  ‘We tried that.’

  Freisler nods. ‘It’s like, well, like they wanted us to see. I felt, well, it’s something I’ve never felt before, but I felt I was being watched. Like Yastryeb himself was somewhere in that landscape, looking across at me through high-powered lenses, a sardonic smile on his features.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘But what?’ Hecht asks. ‘Cut our losses? Let the Russians get on with it, whatever it is?’ He sighs heavily. ‘If it were a single agent, and if it wasn’t Poltava, and if I had a single clue as to why the Russians were doing this, then yes, I’d cut our losses. Only …’

  I count to ten, then ask, ‘What happens up the line? How does it affect things historically?’

  ‘For the Russians? The consequences are appalling. They pretty well cease to exist. And that makes no sense at all, unless—’

  ‘Unless they want to draw us in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you want me to find out what Yastryeb’s thinking is?’

  Hecht nods.

  Only … would Yastryeb let his agents know what his thinking is?

  Maybe not, but I understand Hecht’s dilemma. If this is an attempt by the Russians to suck us into a massive firefight, then Hecht ought to cut his losses and keep out of it. Better to lose five agents – bad as that is – than fifty. But it’s not that that’s nagging at me. What intrigues me is why the Russians should want to destroy their own history – to, in effect, burn their own house down – to achieve that?

  And I laugh, because the answer is right there in front of me. ‘Scorched earth.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Hecht says, not following my reasoning.

  But I’m gone from there. Gone to see Ernst. Because Ernst, if anyone, will know.

  221

  Ernst is halfway through a lesson, but he’s delighted to see me, as are the boys – Alpers and Haller, Muller, Tomas and young Matteus.

  I embrace him, then stand back a little. ‘Scorched earth. What are the historical parallels?’

  Ernst laughs. ‘Well, it’s a particularly Russian form of warfare. Almost no other nation does it, unless one counts the Portuguese in 1811, or certain Chinese warlords, who—’

  ‘Russia, Ernst. Stick to Russia.’

  ‘Okay.’ He thinks a moment, then, as if delivering a lecture, begins. ‘As far as Russia is concerned, three particular instances come to mind. The first is Poltava, 1709. Where the crisis is right now, am I right?’

  I nod, and Ernst continues, the boys watching him, enthralled.

  ‘To be more specific we’re talking initially about the summer of 1707. That’s when Charles XII of Sweden decided to march his army across Poland to capture Moscow. Ahead of this advance, the young Russian tsar, Peter, had vast swathes of Poland put to the torch, whole towns destroyed, so that Charles and his men were unable to replenish their supplies. And it worked. Without forage the Swedish
horses suffered. They were too weak to continue. Charles’s campaign faltered and finally came to a standstill at Grodno, halfway between Warsaw and Vilnius, on the Russian border. Charles dug in for the winter and awaited the fresh grass of the spring. At the same time he had Count Lewenhaupt scour Livonia for supplies – food, powder and ammunition – together with the horses and wagons to carry it all. By late spring the next year he was ready to resume his campaign. Only Peter was up to the challenge. The young tsar called a council of war and ordered the creation of a zone of total devastation one hundred and twenty miles deep, stretching north and east from the Swedish camp. Within that zone, every last scrap of food or fodder was to be burned, denying the Swedes any sustenance. And again it worked. Faced with what was in effect a region of utter desolation, Charles turned his army south, towards his Turkish and Cossack allies and away from the heart of Russia. Moscow was saved.’

  ‘And the second instance?’

  Ernst smiles. ‘Napoleon. June to November 1812. His “Grand Army” of almost half a million men ran into difficulties almost immediately when they discovered that their very first “prize”, the town of Vilnius, had been left in ashes by the retreating Russian forces. The bridge – their only river crossing – had been destroyed, along with the Russians’ supply magazines and stores, which Napoleon had counted on for his campaign. A change in the weather, which turned the roads into quagmires, and the use by the Russian peasantry of vicious guerilla tactics, ended with a mere forty thousand ragged and almost skeletal troops staggering back into Vilnius six months later.’

  A hand goes up.

  ‘Yes, Tomas?’

  ‘But the French took Moscow, Meister.’

  ‘Yes, but they couldn’t hold it. Besides, you recall what happened …’

  There are one or two frowns, but three of the boys have their hands up, eager to answer.

  ‘Matteus?’

  ‘They burned it, Meister.’

  Ernst beams. ‘They did indeed. The Governor, Rostopchin, ordered the prison doors opened. Among those freed were over four hundred arsonists. Within hours the city was on fire, the conflagration so intense, so widespread, that three-quarters of Moscow burned to the ground. Napoleon marched into a city that had been virtually destroyed. Not only that, but the land surrounding Moscow was systematically ravaged by local peasant bands and Cossacks, making the task of gathering enough food to feed the city an almost impossible one.’