David Wingrove - The Empire of Time

As if on cue, I hear Hecht’s voice from the speaker overhead. ‘Otto, I need you. At the platform. Now.’

And I go. Because this is what I do, who I am. And to do otherwise is …

Unthinkable .

Kramer is the first to come through. Looking across at us, he grins. He’s wearing a simple brown garment of the roughest kind of cloth and his reddish hair is cut pudding-bowl fashion. He’d look the part, the archetypal medieval peasant, were it not for the way he bears himself now that he’s back in Four-Oh, his ‘disguise’ thrown off.

As he steps down, the air behind him shimmers once more and Seydlitz forms like a ghost from the vacuum, his tall, well-proportioned figure taking on colour and substance in an instant. He’s dressed in full armour, the mantle of a Livonian Sword Brother about his shoulders, and his ash-blond hair is cut short, crusader-style. He looks exactly what he is, an aristocrat, his princely bearing only emphasised by his aquiline, almost Roman nose.

I look to Hecht for explanations, but Hecht ignores me. Stepping across, he greets the two.

‘Hans, Max …’

They bow their heads respectfully, then look to each other, excitement written all over their faces.

‘Well? What did you find out?’

‘Russians,’ Kramer says, his eyes gleaming.

‘Two of them,’ Seydlitz adds. ‘We killed them.’

Or think you did .

Hecht smiles. ‘Do we know who they were?’

Kramer looks to Seydlitz. ‘We’re not sure.’

‘Not sure?’ Hecht’s eyes narrow. ‘Then how do you know?’

‘We overheard them,’ Kramer says.

‘We’d tracked them down, to an inn.’

‘They were discussing what to do next.’

‘So we pre-empted things.’

Hecht doesn’t even blink. ‘In what way?’

‘With a grenade.’ And Seydlitz grins as he says it.

‘Ah …’ But before Hecht can ask, Kramer intercedes.

‘We buried what remained of them. Made sure the site was hidden.’

Hecht smiles. ‘Good. Then maybe this once they’ll stay dead and buried.’

Unlikely , I think, knowing how carefully the Russians track their agents, how they’ll venture back and extract their agents moments before we’ve acted against them.

But both Kramer and Seydlitz are novices at this; they’ve barely half a dozen trips between them and it’s clear they’ve let their enthusiasm cloud their judgement. But Hecht says nothing. He smiles at them, as if they’ve done well.

‘Is that all?’

Kramer shakes his head and looks to Seydlitz, who produces a slip of paper.

‘What’s this?’ Hecht asks, handing the paper to me. I look at it and frown. On it is drawn a figure of eight lying on its side. It is like the symbol for infinity, except that drawn inside each loop is an arrow, the two arrows facing each other.

‘It was a pendant,’ Seydlitz explains. ‘A big silver thing. The fat one had it round his neck.’

‘And the other? Did he wear one?’

Kramer shrugs. ‘He may have done. There wasn’t that much of him left.’

Hecht nods then looks to me. ‘What do you make of it, Otto?’

‘I don’t know. Some kind of religious sect?’

‘Maybe.’ But I know that if Hecht doesn’t know, then it’s unlikely anyone else does. The question is: is it significant or just some piece of decorative jewellery?

Hecht watches them a moment longer, then nods to himself. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘I want to hear it all.’

They shower, then join us in the smallest of the lecture rooms. There, with the doors locked and the cameras running, we go through it step by step.

I stand at the back, looking on, as Hecht faces the two across the table. Neither looks nervous, but why should they? I am the one who made the mistake. Or so I’m about to find out.

The story’s pretty straightforward. While Kramer infiltrated the Curonians, Seydlitz went directly to the Brotherhood’s headquarters at Marienburg where, posing as an emissary of the Sword Brothers, the Brothers of the Knighthood of Christ in Livonia, he’d spent the best part of a month sniffing around, under the pretext of soliciting aid for his own Knight Brothers who, at the battle of Saule earlier in the year, had suffered an almost terminal mauling at the hands of the Lithuanians.

‘So,’ Hecht says, looking to Seydlitz first. ‘What did you find out?’

Seydlitz sits up straighter. Even dressed simply, as he is, he looks every inch the knight. ‘I didn’t recognise them at first.’

‘Was it these two?’

Two faces appear on a large screen to the side, larger than life. Seydlitz is surprised, but I just grin. Hecht sent in another agent and didn’t tell them.

‘Yes,’ Kramer answers. His voice is a whisper.

‘Ah. Go on.’

Seydlitz tears his gaze from the image on the screen and looks back at Hecht. ‘They were posing as envoys from Rome, sent by Pope Gregory the Ninth. And they were good. Very convincing.’

Hecht nodded. ‘They speak excellent Italian, so I’m told.’

‘ Did ,’ Kramer says.

Seydlitz glances at him, then continues. ‘Anyway, I didn’t suspect them at first. Not for a moment. Then, one night, I went down to the harbour. I had this notion that maybe the Russians were posing as traders, and there they were, the two of them, talking to a rather wild-looking fellow — a boatman — in fluent Curonian.’

‘They saw you?’

Seydlitz smiles. ‘No. It was very dark. The thinnest sliver of moon and heavy cloud. But I could see them by the light of one of the braziers that were burning along the harbour front. I hid behind a herring boat and listened. That’s when I found out. After that I began to watch them. Noted who they spoke to, who they went to visit.’

‘And then?’

Seydlitz pauses. ‘It was about six days later. I turned up at the palace and they were gone. I asked about and no one had seen them since the previous evening. I thought I’d lost them, and then I remembered the fellow they’d met up with — the Curonian — and I went down to the harbour again.’

‘He was there, then?’

‘Yes, but another hour and I’d have missed him. He was waiting on the tide.’ Seydlitz smiles. ‘I put my knife to his throat and questioned him. It seems they’d paid him a visit the night before. Told him they were heading up the coast to rendezvous with his fellow Curonians. He’d offered to take them, but they’d not been interested. Said they had their own transport.’

Hecht nods thoughtfully. ‘They jumped, then?’

Kramer answers him. ‘Must have done. One moment they were in Marienburg, the next a hundred miles up the coast.’

‘You saw them?’

‘Yes. It was late. We were eating supper when they strode into the camp. The Chief of the Curonians, Axel he called himself, was surprised to see them. It was clear he wasn’t expecting them back so soon. But it was also clear — and pretty quickly — that the news they’d brought was just what he’d wanted to hear. They had a bit of a party that night. Those Russians sure can drink!’

‘ Could ,’ Seydlitz says pointedly.

Hecht looks to him. ‘So what was happening back at Marienburg?’

‘I found that out later, when I tried to see the Hochmeister . I was told he had already left, with a small company of knights.’

‘You didn’t see him go, then?’

‘No. He just slipped away. Pretty secretively, if you ask me. But then I asked around, and one of my contacts — one of the higher-placed clerics — told me he’d heard a rumour about Mindaugas wanting to meet up with the Hochmeister .’

‘Mindaugas, the Grand Prince of Lithuania?’