THE MEN WHO KEPT TIME
An espionage thriller about forbidden watches, dangerous gentlemen and the terrible business of saving civilisation.
Albion, 2052
I. A Necessary Theft
James Heaton stole his first watch on a Tuesday.
It was an Omega Seamaster belonging to an elderly schoolteacher whose husband had worn it for forty-three years. The woman had wept as she surrendered it.
James entered DESTROYED BY FURNACE into the official register.
Then he put the watch in his briefcase.
Seventeen years later, his collection numbered 3,416.
James was Senior Inventory Officer at the Ministry of Temporal Affairs, where he had served with distinction for eighteen years. His superiors considered him conscientious, dependable and exceptionally dull.
He encouraged this impression.
In 2029, following the Temporal Crisis, Albion had prohibited private timekeeping. The government declared that independently maintained clocks threatened national stability. Possession of an unauthorised watch became punishable by death.
James found the legislation objectionable.
For centuries, mankind had struggled to measure time. Astronomers studied the heavens; craftsmen perfected escapements and balance springs; navigators carried chronometers across oceans.
And now men who could barely operate a kettle were melting these achievements into scrap.
James stole what he could.
He considered himself a custodian, holding the watches for generations who might one day appreciate them.
His collection occupied a climate-controlled chamber beneath his garden shed. No Ministry inspection had ever discovered it.
His wife Margaret believed he enjoyed woodworking.
After twenty-two years of happy marriage, she occasionally wondered why he never produced anything wooden.
That Thursday, James encountered a yellow-gold Patek Philippe reference 1518.
Its owner, Dr Edward Vale, had recently been arrested for treason. Vale had been a senior engineer within the Ministry’s National Synchronisation Directorate.
The destruction order was unusually emphatic.
IMMEDIATE DISPOSAL. PRIORITY SEVEN.
James substituted a weighted brass imitation, certified the destruction and slipped the Patek into a concealed compartment of his leather briefcase.
It became his 3,417th theft.
An hour later, a recovery order arrived from Temporal Security.
VALE PROPERTY. RETRIEVE INTACT.
By then, James was already on his way home.
II. The Man with the Navitimer
Jason Stacy had once owned twenty-three watches.
He surrendered twenty-two when the prohibition began, including his beloved black Tudor Pelagos FXD.
Only one remained.
His father’s 1950s Breitling Navitimer, given to Jason shortly before the older man disappeared during the Temporal Crisis.
Jason wore it secretly, frequently strapped around his ankle inside a Blundstone boot.
This made checking the time inconvenient, particularly in public. Execution, however, was considerably worse.
At forty-six, he was broad-shouldered, weather-beaten and dressed like a man expecting to repair a tractor at short notice.
He favoured Fjällräven trousers, vintage chore jackets and sturdy leather boots.
He also led the Second Hand, a clandestine organisation that had begun as a watch collectors’ club and developed into an armed resistance movement.
Its headquarters was an underground speakeasy beneath an abandoned railway station.
Entry required a peculiar exchange.
“Have you the time?”
“Depends whose time you’re keeping.”
A two-finger handshake followed.
Jason despised the handshake.
He suspected its inventor had been a Freemason with an excessively theatrical personality.
For months, the Second Hand had investigated mysterious discrepancies in the Ministry’s destruction inventories. Thousands of confiscated watches had vanished.
That afternoon, an informant finally identified the responsible official.
James Heaton.
The informant added one worrying detail: Temporal Security had suddenly requested Heaton’s personnel file.
Jason decided to reach him first.
A man capable of stealing thousands of watches without being discovered might prove extraordinarily useful.
III. The Unexpected Visitor
James opened his front door at seven.
A large gentleman stood outside wearing muddy boots and an indigo chore jacket.
“James Heaton?”
“Yes?”
“Jason Stacy.”
James examined the boots.
“Have you been gardening?”
“Running for my life.”
“How unfortunate. Please wipe your feet.”
Jason entered.
“I understand you’ve been stealing watches.”
James stiffened.
“I beg your pardon?”
“From the Ministry.”
“Extraordinary accusation.”
“Extraordinary inventory discrepancies.”
From the kitchen came Margaret’s voice.
“James, darling? Who is it?”
“Just a colleague, dear!”
Outside, two black Ministry vehicles stopped.
Jason glanced through the curtains.
“Expecting visitors?”
James went pale.
“No.”
“Then we’d better leave.”
“Margaret has made roast chicken.”
The first shot shattered the hallway mirror.
James stared at the fragments.
“That belonged to my grandmother.”
“Get your wife.”
James seized his briefcase and hurried into the kitchen.
“Margaret, darling, we must go.”
“James, what on earth—”
“An administrative misunderstanding.”
Another shot struck the staircase.
“Rather a serious one.”
They hurried into the garden shed.
James unlocked a trapdoor beneath his workbench. A narrow staircase descended into what appeared to be a concrete pump room.
He operated a concealed catch.
Part of the wall swung inward.
Beyond it lay an extraordinary chamber.
Cabinets stretched into the darkness. Thousands of watches rested on velvet cushions beneath carefully positioned lamps.
Margaret stared.
“James?”
“There’s something I ought to explain.”
“You told me you were making furniture!”
“Yes, well—”
A crash sounded from the shed above.
Jason noticed something inside a nearby cabinet.
A black Tudor Pelagos FXD.
He stopped.
Impossible.
He lifted the watch from its cushion.
There, beside the lower lug, was a familiar nick in the titanium case.
For an instant, he was twenty-one again, diving a wreck off the Maltese coast.
A sudden surge had thrown him against a corroded steel ladder. His Tudor struck a rung, and its NATO strap caught on a projecting bracket.
He remembered the unpleasant jerk against his wrist and the brief conviction that the watch would remain forever at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
But the fixed strap bars held firm. The tough woven strap survived the strain as he twisted himself free.
He had surfaced with a bruised wrist, a torn wetsuit and a Tudor that hadn’t missed a beat.
The nick had remained.
Now, twenty-five years later, there it was.
He turned the watch over.
Two scratched initials.
J.S.
“This was mine.”
James glanced back.
“It seems to have seen its fair share of adventures. I found it in a Ministry storage backlog in 2035.”
“They confiscated it in 2029.”
“Well, I’ve kept it running ever since.”
From the shed came a muffled shout.
“Find Vale’s watch! The Director wants it intact!”
Jason glanced at James’s briefcase.
James frowned.
“Vale?”
Another heavy blow shook the staircase door.
Jason slipped the Tudor into his chore jacket pocket.
James guided Margaret towards a narrow escape passage.
He closed the vault’s concealed door behind them, then activated a second mechanism from inside the passage.
Heavy counterweights drew the false wall into position, concealing both the vault and the escape route behind the pump room’s foundations.
When the Ministry officers finally broke into the basement, they would find concrete walls, old plumbing and nothing remotely resembling a watch collection.
Twenty minutes later, the fugitives emerged beside an overgrown railway cutting.
Margaret walked in silence.
Finally, she turned towards her husband.
“James, have you ever actually made anything out of wood?”
He considered this.
“A shelf.”
“You bought that shelf.”
“Yes. Well.”
IV. The Escapement
Jason arranged for Margaret to be taken to a safe house, then brought James beneath the abandoned railway station.
The Escapement resembled a gentlemen’s club overrun by clockmakers.
Clocks ticked along every wall. Collectors examined movements beneath green-shaded lamps. A retired colonel sat polishing a Casio G-Shock.
James was impressed.
Then he noticed the explosives.
“You keep those beside antique chronometers?”
“Space is limited,” Jason replied.
“Barbarians.”
Jason ordered tea.
“Those officers weren’t after your collection,” he said. “They wanted Vale’s watch.”
James frowned.
“The Ministry ordered it destroyed this afternoon.”
“And now they’re sending armed men to recover it.”
“Extraordinary.”
“Anything unusual about it?”
James opened his briefcase and removed the Patek.
“A magnificent reference 1518. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Jason nodded towards the workshop.
“There’s someone I’d like to examine it.”
James looked suspicious.
“Who?”
V. The Samurai and the Swiss
Kenji Takamura was Japanese, descended from samurai and a master of Zaratsu polishing.
Beside him worked Hans Keller, a Swiss watchmaker from the Vallée de Joux.
Their professional disagreement had lasted eleven years.
“Japanese watches,” Hans was saying, “are excellent appliances.”
Kenji smiled.
“And Swiss watches are excellent investments. Particularly for Swiss banks.”
After Jason explained the Ministry’s interest in Vale’s Patek, Kenji asked James’s permission to inspect it.
James reluctantly agreed.
Kenji rotated the watch beneath a lamp.
After a moment, he stopped.
“The caseback has been altered.”
Hans leaned forward.
“Nonsense.”
“Look at the reflection.”
Hans examined it.
His eyebrows rose.
Someone had concealed a fine seam beneath newly polished gold.
Kenji looked at James.
“May I open it?”
James hesitated, then nodded.
With extraordinary care, Kenji released a concealed inner plate.
Beneath it lay a microscopic data capsule.
James stared.
“Good heavens. Someone has been using a Patek Philippe as a filing cabinet.”
The capsule contained a recording by Dr Edward Vale.
Before his arrest, Vale had uncovered Project Meridian, a programme for manipulating official time records. He had hidden the evidence inside his watch, intending to pass it to a trusted colleague.
The original Temporal Crisis had been deliberately engineered.
For twenty-three years, working hours had vanished from records, financial transactions had been rewritten and political prisoners had disappeared during intervals that officially never existed.
At midnight the following evening, the Ministry intended to activate a system placing every public record in Albion under permanent central control.
The archive included plans of the Central Observatory.
Jason studied them.
“Take out the regulator and the whole network collapses.”
James examined the drawings.
“There’s a library above it.”
“Yes.”
“And laboratories.”
“Yes.”
“How large is your explosive charge?”
Jason didn’t answer.
James traced the neighbouring streets.
“These are residential districts.”
“We aren’t targeting the residential districts.”
“No. But the Army will be.”
Jason looked up.
“If the regulator goes, the provinces will rise.”
“And if the Army doesn’t surrender?”
“Then we’ll deal with the Army.”
James folded the plans.
“I see.”
VI. The Black Tudor
Later, the two men sat in the Escapement’s private dining room.
James had proposed copying Vale’s evidence and distributing it through independent publishers and foreign institutions.
Jason favoured destroying the regulator before Meridian could activate.
“The Ministry won’t surrender because someone publishes an interesting document,” Jason said.
“And demolishing the Observatory will make it more agreeable?”
“People are being executed, James.”
“I’m aware.”
Jason shook his head.
“Easy to say from behind a Ministry desk.”
James put down his teacup.
“I’ve been stealing from that Ministry for seventeen years, Mr Stacy. Do not mistake the absence of gunfire for the absence of danger.”
Jason reached into his jacket and placed the black Tudor on the table.
“Twenty-three years,” he said. “I thought this was gone.”
James inspected it.
“You kept it safe,” Jason said.
“That was the intention.”
“If they’d found your vault tonight?”
“They didn’t.”
“If they had?”
James said nothing.
Jason continued.
“How long do you imagine you can keep doing this?”
“Long enough, I hope.”
“And if they never fall?”
James looked towards the Tudor.
“Then I suppose you had better succeed.”
He rose to leave, but paused beside the door.
“Do you know how many watchmakers are still working in Albion?”
“Not precisely.”
“Neither do I. That’s rather the point.”
James glanced towards the workshop, where Kenji was adjusting a balance assembly beneath his loupe.
“They work in cellars now. Behind bakeries, beneath garages, in rooms without windows. The Ministry hasn’t found them.”
“That’s why we’re fighting.”
“And when the Army divides? When every cellar is searched for weapons, every workshop suspected of supplying the enemy?”
Jason regarded him.
“You expect them to remain underground forever?”
“I expect them to remain alive.”
“Another twenty years?”
“If necessary.”
“And another twenty after that?”
James set down his empty cup.
“You seem terribly certain your war will last less.”
From the adjoining workshop came Hans’s indignant voice.
“A Swiss movement would never behave like that!”
Kenji replied, “No. It would have stopped working twenty minutes ago.”
James allowed himself a small smile.
“Remarkable men,” he said. “It would be a pity to lose them.”
The following morning, the Second Hand voted eleven to seven in favour of attacking the Observatory.
James was not a member and had no vote.
Before leaving, he asked to examine the operation’s timetable.
“If you’re determined to go,” he told Jason, “someone ought to preserve the archives.”
VII. Four Minutes
At eleven the following evening, Jason’s team entered the Central Observatory through a maintenance entrance identified by James.
James accompanied them, carrying a forged contractor’s pass supplied by the Second Hand’s Ministry informant.
His own credentials had been revoked following the raid on his home.
The team separated inside.
Jason’s men headed towards the regulator.
James went to the records chamber.
Jason found him there shortly before midnight.
“How long?”
“Seven minutes.”
“We have ten.”
A distant explosion shook the building.
Jason looked towards the corridor.
“That wasn’t scheduled.”
Gunfire followed.
Temporal Security had discovered the operation.
The building was sealed.
Jason’s radio crackled.
Thomas, his seventeen-year-old courier, had been shot.
Two others were missing.
The explosives had already been positioned beneath the regulator.
Jason could detonate them.
The network would collapse.
But hundreds of night-shift workers remained inside the complex.
Worse, the Second Hand’s provincial cells were awaiting confirmation of the Observatory’s destruction.
Some intended to seize police stations and military depots.
Jason had approved those plans himself.
Another burst of gunfire echoed through the corridor.
He looked down at the detonator.
He had spent six years waiting for an opportunity like this.
James continued working at the terminal.
He did not look up.
Jason’s thumb rested on the switch.
Then, slowly, he put it away.
“Can you transmit Vale’s records?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Seven minutes.”
“We have three.”
“Then you’d better find me four.”
Jason drew his pistol and went to hold the corridor.
VIII. The Forty-Seventh Minute
The final transmission required a sequence of precisely timed intervals recorded by Vale as part of the Ministry’s emergency broadcast authentication system.
Hans’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Use a chronograph!”
Jason removed his Blundstone boot.
James stared.
“A nineteen-fifties Navitimer? Inside your boot?”
“James.”
“Do you know what perspiration can do to a vintage movement?”
“James!”
Kenji interrupted.
“Gentlemen. The country is about to lose forty-seven minutes.”
Jason operated the Breitling’s chronograph while Hans read the intervals.
Kenji checked the sequence.
“Your third interval is wrong.”
“Impossible,” Hans replied.
“Two-tenths of a second.”
“Swiss precision!”
“Swiss approximation.”
James entered the final code.
ACCESS GRANTED.
At midnight, Albion’s official clocks advanced forty-seven minutes.
Thousands of forbidden mechanical watches did not.
Across the country, members of the Second Hand raised their timepieces in public squares.
Vale’s documents appeared on public screens.
The deception was exposed.
Crowds gathered.
Soldiers deployed.
Some demonstrators were arrested.
Others were killed.
In the northern provinces, police stations were attacked despite Jason’s orders to stand down.
Several towns declared themselves free of the Ministry.
Others remained loyal.
By dawn, barricades had appeared across the capital.
The government did not fall.
Jason escaped carrying the wounded Thomas.
Three members of the Second Hand never returned.
James escaped separately with the original capsule.
Neither considered the night a victory.
IX. The Hours That Remained
Six months later, Albion remained divided.
The Ministry controlled the capital, while several provincial assemblies had rejected the National Synchronisation Act.
In the northern provinces, the fighting had reached the old industrial quarters.
A clandestine watchmaking workshop had been discovered beneath a disused printing house.
Nobody knew which side had burned it.
Its master watchmaker, who had spent forty years specialising in complicated movements, was missing. His two apprentices had fled across the border.
James received the news in a letter without a return address.
He read it twice, folded it carefully and placed it in his desk drawer.
He said nothing to Jason.
Elsewhere, a northern garrison had surrendered without a shot being fired. Three hundred prisoners were released, including several craftsmen imprisoned for possessing illegal timepieces.
The Second Hand had fractured. Some demanded renewed armed rebellion. Others favoured less destructive methods.
Jason continued his work.
James, now a fugitive, maintained quiet contact with former colleagues and the few underground craftsmen he trusted. His collection remained undisturbed beneath the garden shed, its concealed chamber and environmental systems operating as he had designed them.
Margaret had taken rather longer to forgive him than he had anticipated.
She still complained about the woodworking.
One Sunday, Jason visited the Heatons at their safe house.
He wore his familiar Fjällräven trousers and indigo chore jacket.
The black Tudor Pelagos FXD was concealed beneath his cuff.
James poured the tea.
“Still at it?” Jason asked.
“Whenever I can.”
“They’ll catch you eventually.”
“They’ve been saying that for seventeen years.”
Jason looked towards the distant government towers.
“Three of my people died that night.”
James nodded.
“I know.”
“Thomas will never walk properly again.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jason looked at him.
“And the Ministry is still there.”
“Yes.”
For a while, neither spoke.
James did not mention the burned workshop.
Jason did not mention the three hundred prisoners.
Margaret brought in another pot of tea.
Beyond the garden wall, a public clock struck three.
Jason glanced at his Tudor.
It was actually two thirteen.
“Forty-seven minutes,” James observed.
“Still.”
James reached into his waistcoat and took out an eighteenth-century pocket chronometer.
“Made in 1783,” he said. “Its maker spent seven years perfecting it.”
Jason examined the instrument.
“Still works?”
James wound it gently.
“Perfectly.”
“How long would it take the Ministry to destroy?”
“Seconds.”
Jason returned it.
From somewhere beyond the garden came the sound of children playing.
“You can’t keep doing this forever,” Jason said.
James listened to the little movement ticking in his hand.
“No,” he said. “But it should.”
And somewhere beneath an ordinary garden shed, 3,415 stolen watches waited for a different future.
THE END