Johnny O'Brien - Day of the Assassins

Angus glanced at Jack. “Looks thin and pale — a bit like you.”

Jack ignored him.

“…Princip and his co-conspirators of the ‘Black Hand’ are planning to assassinate the man on the left, the Archduke, in Sarajevo, a town in Bosnia — part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… By shooting the Archduke, Princip will set in motion a chain of events that will lead to the outbreak of the First World War. Eight million people will die in this war.”

The boys both gripped their controllers tightly.

The narrator completed the introduction, “Your mission is to infiltrate the Bosnian Serb assassination cell, prevent the killing of the Archduke and thereby stop the countdown to war. In this way you will change the course of world history. Good luck.”

They spent the next hour working their way through the level, taking turns. It was compulsive gaming. They travelled across 1914 Austria in a train to Vienna. From there, they journeyed by horse, cart and even a pre-1914 motorbike to Belgrade. They dodged Austro-Hungarian imperial lifeguards, secret police and a range of other unsavoury characters. On more than one occasion their cover was blown and they were thrown back to the start of the level. Finally, they infiltrated the ‘Black Hand’ in a dusty cafe in Belgrade and learned of the plans for the assassination in Sarajevo, which would take place at the end of the level. If they could stop Princip before he pulled the trigger of his pistol, history would be changed forever. Much more importantly, they would move on to the next level.

The great thing about Point-of-Departure was that depending on how you played the early levels, the subsequent levels would change — sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. Sometimes the diplomatic intrigue would take a different course or the war, triggered by the assassination in Sarajevo, would be delayed or possibly even averted (although they hadn’t managed to work out how to do that yet).

In other scenarios, apparently, the war was successfully postponed only to turn into a much longer and even bloodier affair. It was all down to how you played the first levels and the choices you made.

Now it was Jack’s turn. He held the controller in two sweaty palms. In the game, he was standing on the Appel Quay in Sarajevo next to the Lateiner Bridge. He knew that Princip was near him in the crowd — but he couldn’t see exactly where. Suddenly, a car passed in front of the crowd, then a second. There were a few muted cheers as a third car passed. He caught a fleeting glance of hat feathers and finery over the heads in front of him… and then the Archduke Ferdinand and Sophie, his wife, and the pursuing motorcade were gone.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the unmistakable figure of Princip furtively crossing the Appel Quay in front of him and then disappearing into Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen. Beside him, in the cellar, Angus was on tenterhooks, staring intently at the images on the screen.

“There he is!” he shouted. He jumped up and down in excitement as Jack expertly fingered the controller to manoeuvre himself towards Princip.

“Yes, I can see him,” Jack said sarcastically.

“You’ve got to get him!”

“I know.”

The tension mounted. In a few minutes Jack knew that the motorcade would be returning from the Town Hall and Princip would have his final chance to shoot the Archduke — and strike a devastating blow for the Bosnian Serbs against their oppressors, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instinctively, he followed Princip and took up position next to the shop. History was about to happen before his eyes.

At that moment they saw the big headlamps and fender of the Graf und Stift lumbering round the bend. The car was slowing down. He could see all the occupants including, perched up high in the rear, the Archduke and, to his left, Sophie. A man was leaning over to the driver to tell him something. Suddenly only two and a half metres away, Princip appeared. He had emerged from the delicatessen and had a sandwich in one hand. He had a look of amazement on his face as the Archduke’s car ground to a halt, right in front of him. Princip dropped his sandwich and reached into his jacket pocket.

Angus was standing on the armchair. “There! Get him!”

But Jack kept his nerve. “Wait for it…”

He reached into his own coat and pulled out the pistol that he had been given earlier in the game. He held it in both hands and levelled it directly at Princip, who was by now pointing his own gun into the large car.

Angus was apoplectic. “Shoot him!”

Jack pressed the button on his controller once. The pistol jerked in his hands on the screen and Princip collapsed to the ground.

“You got him! You got him!”

They had completed the level. They had foiled the assassination and thereby stopped the countdown to the First World War. They had changed history, but they would not know exactly how they had changed it until the next level. In his excitement, Angus leaped onto the armchair. The big old springs inside the chair absorbed his weight, but then unexpectedly rebounded. Angus suddenly found himself flying over the back of the armchair and towards an old bookcase that stood against one wall of the cellar. Jack turned away from the game just in time to see Angus’s large frame crash headlong into the bookcase. There was an explosion of splintering wood and collapsing shelves as he made contact. Then, the entire structure started to move. With a huge crash, the bookcase, its contents and Angus landed in a heap of rubble, wood and dust.

As the air cleared, Jack peered into the gloom over his friend’s prostrate body. The bookcase had fallen backwards through a thin partition into… Jack was not quite sure what.

Angus groaned and pulled himself to his feet. “What happened?”

“I got him, like you said, but…”

Jack had put down his controller and had already stepped over Angus and the bookcase and into the opening next to the cellar.

Gingerly, Angus got to his feet wiping off the dust from his shirt and trousers. As the air cleared, a mysterious annex to the cellar took shape. It looked like a… library. The hole in the cellar wall had opened up onto a narrow balcony, which housed an upper section that swept completely around a small oval room. From this upper section you could reach the lower room by a spiral staircase. The lower floor was well below the level of the adjoining cellar where they had been battling with Point-of-Departure .

The upper level of the library was packed with books from floor to ceiling — although it looked like there were gaps where some books were missing. In the lower level of the library, there were papers and journals stacked haphazardly. The walls of the lower level were also plastered with large panels of brown paper to which an extraordinary array of photographs, diagrams and stapled notes were attached. In some places, large felt-tipped arrows were scrawled, connecting one section to another. There were scribbles and crossings out everywhere. In some cases, different-coloured string had been used to interconnect various items and above each main panel of paper there was a large label. These labels were the only things that seemed to exercise any kind of order on the messy workings pinned on the wallcharts beneath. From right to left along the wall, the labels for each wallchart could be read in sequence: ‘Timeline Simulation 0103’, ‘Timeline Simulation 0104’, ‘Timeline Simulation 0105’, and so on, all the way up to ‘Timeline Simulation 0109’.

“What is this place?”

“Looks like a kind of control room…” Jack replied.

“Or something out of Crime Scene Investigation .”