Johnny O'Brien - Day of the Assassins

They could feel the paving beneath them rumble as the four hooves pounded forward. The horseman skilfully manoeuvred the lance so that it pointed at a slight angle down to where Dani and Anna stood, between Jack and Angus. In seconds he would be upon them. Jack and Angus dived for cover. But Dani was too slow. Jack twisted round and, as Dani fell, he saw the lance pierce his chest. Anna screamed in horror as her brother slumped to the ground. The horseman withdrew the lance from Dani’s body. He steered the horse back and it snorted as the lancer turned round for a second attack. Anna climbed, catlike, onto one of the long banquet tables. From her elevated position, she leaped out at the horseman landing plumb on his horse’s rump. The horse reared up in surprise, its front hooves kicking out wildly. First Anna, then the lancer tumbled backwards onto the stone floor. The lancer landed awkwardly on his head. He didn’t move. His lance spun from his hand and its metal tip shattered free from the wooden pole as it hit the stone floor. Jack and Angus rushed over to Anna who groaned, opened her eyes and shakily pulled herself up into a crawling position. She crept over to where Dani lay, and cradled her brother’s head in her hands. But it lolled uselessly and his eyes stared out into the darkness.

First the professor and now Dani. Dead.

In the dim moonlight, something caught Jack’s eye. He peered down and the metal lance head glinted up at him. It lay in a pool of Dani’s blood. It was exactly the same size and shape as the lance head he had discovered in his father’s workshop at Cairnfield. The Schonbrunn raid was not a historical myth. Jack knew now — because he had been part of it. In fact, his trip back to 1914 had caused it.

Anna turned from her brother and stared up at Jack and Angus. She had a strange, questioning look on her face. Then the shock of her brother’s brutal death hit her and she started to rock violently back and forth cradling his head, sobbing uncontrollably. Anna was in a place beyond comfort, and for a moment Jack and Angus just stared down, not knowing what to do.

Suddenly they heard voices from outside. More guards.

Angus looked at Jack, desperation on his face. “What do we do now?”

Jack fumbled in his pocket, “Time phone! Maybe we still have a signal… maybe we can get out of this mess, once and for all.”

He held the device in his hand and flipped it open, but the yellow bar had turned grey. The signal had vanished.

“No good,” Jack groaned.

At the far end of the orangery, the guards were starting to scramble through the shattered window. Soon they would be upon them.

“What’s this?” Jack had noticed something else in the time phone’s read-out. “Another message! Must have been sent just before the signal was lost.”

Sure enough the read-out was blinking.

Message 2…

Jack tapped a button.

Have lost contact with P-shape. Rescue may

have failed. Can only help when we have a

signal. If P-shape alive — he will help you.

In frustration, Jack snapped the time phone shut.

Next to them, Anna kissed Dani lightly on one cheek and rested his head on the stone floor. She looked back down the orangery where they could now see the shadows of the guards approaching. Then she got to her feet. She had stopped sobbing. She was suddenly cold and emotionless. There was steel in her voice. “Now I want one thing… only one thing: justice.”

It took them two hours to creep from the grounds of Schonbrunn and make their way cross-country to the pre-arranged meeting place. They worked their way through thick woodland, where shards of moonlight ghosted through the canopy above. Eventually, they arrived at some farmland, where a rustic timber barn nestled between the edge of the wood and the fields beyond. The crude structure was raised from the ground on four wooden stilts and in the grey light Jack saw that a large stone rested on each stilt, supporting the barn — the smooth surface of the stones deterred rats and mice from the barn’s contents. Gingerly, Anna approached the wooden ladder that led to the elevated doorway. She climbed up and levered open the door. Soon all three of them were safely inside. It was clear that this was to have been the rendezvous point with Vaso and Goran. But worryingly there was no sign of them. They had no idea what had happened to Pendelshape either, following his escape from the burning Tiger. They were alone and they would not be able to stay long.

Through cracks in the crude wooden walls, the moonlight washed eerily into the barn. Anna curled up in a corner and for a while remained motionless — brooding. Finally, seeking comfort from distraction, she pulled some bread and cheese from her bag and shared it out. They sat and tried to eat, but Jack’s mouth was dry and the bread and cheese rolled up in his mouth in a papery ball. When Anna finally spoke to them, her voice was strangely calm, “So — you will help us — as we planned, yes?”

It was clear what she meant. They had not staged the rescue from Schonbrunn for fun. Dani’s death was not to be in vain. They were still expected to travel to Sarajevo to help in the assassination attempt and help Anna find justice.

“Doboj, eh? I tell you what, they’ve got some daft names around here…”

Jack could not summon the energy to respond to Angus. The night in the third-class railway carriage had exhausted him.

Anna scanned the thronging crowds from the steps of Doboj’s main railway station. “There!” she whispered.

Further up the street stood a pony and hay cart. A dark-skinned boy — he couldn’t have been more than ten years old — was perched high on a wooden seat at the front of the cart.

“Our transport…”

“It just gets better and better,” Angus groaned.

Soon they were slumped on the hay in the back of the cart and the contraption rumbled off.

Jack reflected on their escape from Schonbrunn the day before and their six hundred and fifty kilometre journey from Vienna to Doboj — one hundred and sixty kilometres north of Sarajevo. It had been long and exhausting. On Thursday afternoon Anna had managed to get them aboard a train from Vienna to Belgrade and then on to Doboj. The Bosnian Serb underground network was proving to be remarkably pervasive and efficient. Jack had lost count of the times Anna had started a sentence with the words, “I have a friend who…”, or “I know someone who…”. The valuable train tickets had been procured from just such a source — a young train porter who was part of the network, and also, as Jack was starting to notice, one of Anna’s many male admirers.

Since Schonbrunn, and the final message from Jack’s dad, the time phone had gone back into hibernation and the telltale yellow bar had remained stubbornly unlit — making any pursuit by VIGIL very difficult. It also meant that there had been no communication with Pendelshape. There was still the risk, however, of being picked up by the regular Austro-Hungarian authorities — but so far they had avoided this fate.

Jack had begun to understand more about Anna as they rumbled south. Her desolation over the loss of her brother became buried under a brooding and renewed hatred of her Austro-Hungarian masters. Jack had persuaded her to tell them how she had orchestrated the daring rescue from Schonbrunn.

She had explained, “We are planning raid in Vienna for long time. It is heart of Austrian Empire. We have plans already. After I meet you, and realise you are sent by the English teacher, Dr Pendelshape, I know we must protect you… get you to Zadok to help us in Sarajevo. After capture at Vienna Station, we activate the Vienna cell. We know where they take you — so we organise raid.”