Ernest Koenig is a smooth-talking bootlegger and the proprietor of a New York speakeasy, a self-styled man of the people who keeps the law paid off and the liquor flowing. He is the contact the team must reach, known to them only by the codename Gemini, and his bar is the very place destined to one day shelter the organization they serve. Pragmatic and prickly, he agrees to supply a high-profile political gathering and draws both his young associate and the disguised agents into the work, never suspecting that his small-time enterprise sits at a hinge point of history.

Koenig is nobody's fool, and it does not take him long to see that the Mounties drinking in his bar are anything but. Once the truth comes out, that these strangers have come from a future he can scarcely picture, he trades his help for it gladly, leading them toward Freddy and remarking, with no small amusement, that he has badly underestimated Canadians. Brought aboard their impossible flying machine and folded into the team for a night, he takes to the role with relish, and when the shooting starts he seizes a gun and throws himself into the fray, delighting in the chance to fire on the coppers who have always been a thorn in his side.

His one misstep is sentiment. Going after Freddy to talk him down from whatever he has gotten himself into, he refuses to believe the young man capable of harm, and takes a bullet for his trouble. Wounded but undeterred, Koenig finds himself genuinely taken with the team, and with Enoch most of all, fascinated by the notion of a thinking machine and hungry to learn its secrets. In that fascination, and in the talk of the grandchildren who will follow him, the first thread is spun between the Koenig name and the organization he has only just met.