Lightning (46 page)

He put on Kokoschka’s gate-homing belt, which Laura had taken from her safe the night that Stefan had arrived wounded on her doorstep. His fear remained apparent, but the moment that he put on the belt, his anxiety was overlaid with a steely determination.

In the kitchen at ten o’clock, each of them, including Chris, took two of the capsules that would render them impervious to the effects of the nerve gas, Vexxon. They washed down the preventive with glasses of Hi-C orange drink.

The three Uzis, one of the .38 revolvers, the silencer-equipped Colt Commander Mark IV, and a small nylon backpack full of books had been loaded into the car.

The two pressurized, stainless-steel bottles of Vexxon were still in the Buick’s trunk. After studying the informational pamphlets in the blue plastic bags attached to the containers, Stefan had decided he would need only one cylinder for the job. Vexxon was a designer gas tailored primarily for use indoors—to kill the enemy in barracks, shelters, and bunkers deep underground—rather than against troops in the field. In the open air the stuff dispersed too fast—and broke down too quickly in sunlight—to be effective beyond a radius of two hundred yards from point of release. However, when opened full-cock, a single cylinder could contaminate a fifty-thousand-square-foot structure in a few minutes, which was good enough for his purposes.

At 10:35 they got in the car and left the Gaines’s house, heading for the desert off route III, north of Palm Springs. Laura made sure Chris’s safety harness was buckled, and the boy said, “See, if you had a car that was a time machine, we’d drive back to 1944 in comfort.”

Days ago they had taken a night drive to the open desert to find a spot suitable for Stefan’s departure. They needed to know the exact geographical location in advance in order to do the calculations that would make it possible for him to return conveniently to them after his work in 1944 was done.

Stefan intended to open the valve on the Vexxon cylinder
before
he pushed the button on the gate-homing belt, so the nerve gas would be dispersing even as he returned through the gate to the institute, killing everyone who was in the lab at the 1944 end of the Lightning Road. Therefore he would be releasing a quantity of the toxin at his point of departure, too, and it seemed prudent to do so only in an isolated place. The street in front of the Gaines’s house was less than two hundred yards away, within Vexxon’s effective range, and they did not want to kill innocent bystanders.

Besides, though the gas was supposed to remain poisonous only for forty to sixty minutes, Laura was concerned that the deactivated residue, although not lethal, might have unknown, long-range toxic effects. She did not intend to leave any such substance in Thelma and Jason’s house.

The day was clear, blue, serene.

When they had driven only a couple of blocks and were descending into a hollow where the road was flanked by huge date palms, Laura thought she saw a strange pulse of light in the fragment of sky that was captured by her rearview mirror. What would lightning be like in a bright, cloudless sky? Not as dramatic as on a storm-clouded day, for it would be competing with the brightness of the sun. What it might look like in fact was the very thing she thought she had seen—a strange, brief pulse of brightness.

Though she braked, the Buick was into the bottom of the hollow, and she could no longer see the sky in the rearview mirror, just the hill behind them. She thought she heard a rumble, too, like distant thunder, but she could not be sure because of the roar of the car’s air conditioner. She pulled quickly to the side of the road, fumbling with the ventilation controls.

“What’s wrong?” Chris asked as she put the car in park, threw open her door, and got out.

Stefan opened the rear door and got out too. “Laura?”

She was looking at the limited expanse of sky that she could see from the bottom of the hollow, using her flattened hand as a visor over her eyes. “You hear that, Stefan?”

In the warm, desert-dry day, a faraway rumble slowly died.

He said, “Could be jet noise.”

“No. The last time I thought it might be a jet, it was them.”

The sky pulsed again, one last time. She did not actually see the lightning itself, not the jagged bolt scored on the heavens, but just the reflection of it in the upper atmosphere, a faint wave of light flushing across the blue vault above.

“They’re here,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

“Somewhere on our way out to route 111, someone’s going to stop us, maybe a traffic cop, or maybe we’ll be in an accident, so there’ll be a public record, and then they’ll show up. Stefan, we’ve got to turn around, go back to the house.”

“It’s no use,” he said.

Chris had gotten out of the other side of the car. “He’s right, Mom. It doesn’t matter what we do. Those time travelers came here ’cause they’ve already peeked into the future and know where they’re gonna find us maybe half an hour from now, maybe ten minutes from now. It doesn’t matter if we go back to the house or go on ahead; they’ve already seen us someplace—maybe even back at the house. See, no matter how much we change our plans, we’ll cross their path.”

Destiny.

“Shit!” she said and kicked the side of the car, which didn’t do any good, didn’t even make her feel better. “I hate this. How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It’s like playing blackjack when the dealer is God.”

No more lightning flared.

She said, “Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn’t it? So this is no worse. Get in the car, Chris. Let’s get on with it.”

As she drove through the western neighborhoods of the resort city, Laura’s nerves were as taut as garroting wire. She was alert for trouble on all sides, though she knew it would come when and where she least expected it.

Without incident they connected with the northern end of Palm Canyon Drive, then state route 111. Ahead lay twelve miles of mostly barren desert before III intersected Interstate 10.

Hoping to avoid catastrophe, Lieutenant Kliehnann lowered the driver’s window and smiled up at the Palm Springs policeman who had rapped on the glass to get his attention and who was now bending down, squinting in at him. “What is it, officer?”

“Didn’t you see the red curb when you parked here?”

“Red curb?” Klietmann said, smiling, wondering what the hell the cop was talking about.

“Now, sir,” the officer said in a curiously playful tone, “are you telling me you didn’t see the red curb?”

“Yes, sir, of course I saw it.”

“I didn’t think you’d fib,” the cop said as if he knew Klietmann and trusted his reputation for honesty, which baffled the lieutenant. “So if you saw the red curb, sir, why’d you park here?”

“Oh, I see,” Klietmann said, “parking is restricted to curbs that aren’t red. Yes, of course.”

The patrolman blinked at the lieutenant. He shifted his attention to von Manstein in the passenger’s seat, then to Bracher and Hubatsch in the rear, smiled and nodded at them.

Klietmann did not have to look at his men to know they were on edge. The air in the car was heavy with tension.

When he shifted his gaze to Klietmann, the police officer smiled tentatively and said, “Am I right—you fellas are four preachers?”

“Preachers?” Klietmann said, disconcerted by the question.

“I’ve got a bit of a deductive mind,” the cop said, his tentative smile still holding. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes. But the bumper stickers on your car say ‘I Love Jesus’ and ‘Christ Has Riser’ And there’s a Baptist convention in town, and you’re all dressed in dark suits.”

That was why he had thought he could trust Klietmann not to fib: He believed they were Baptist ministers.

“That’s right,” Klietmann said at once. “We’re with the Baptist convention, officer. Sorry about the illegal parking. We don’t have red curbs where I come from. Now if—”

“Where do you hail from?” the cop asked, not with suspicion but in an attempt to be friendly.

Klietmann knew a lot about the United States but not enough to carry on a conversation of this sort when he did not control its direction to any degree whatsoever. He believed that Baptists were from the southern part of the country; he wasn’t sure if there were any of them in the north or west or east, so he tried to think of a southern state. He said, “I’m from Georgia,” before he realized how unlikely that claim seemed when spoken in his German accent.

The smile on the cop’s face faltered. Looking past Klietmann to von Manstein, he said, “And where you from, sir?”

Following his lieutenant’s lead, but speaking with an even stronger accent, von Manstein said, “Georgia.”

From the back seat, before they could be asked, Hubatsch and Bracher said, “Georgia, we’re from Georgia,” as if that word was magic and would cast a spell over the patrolman.

The cop’s smile had vanished altogether. He frowned at Erich Klietmann and said, “Sir, would you mind stepping out of the car for a moment?”

“Certainly, officer,” Klietmann said, as he opened his door, noticing how the cop backed up a couple of steps and rested his right hand on the butt of his holstered revolver. “But we’re late for a prayer meeting—”

In the back seat Hubatsch snapped open his attaché case and snatched the Uzi from it as quickly as a presidential bodyguard might have done. He did not roll down the window but put the muzzle against the glass and opened fire on the cop, giving him no time to draw his revolver. The car window blew out as bullets pounded through it. Struck by at least twenty rounds at close range, the cop pitched backward into traffic. Brakes squealed as a car made a hard stop to avoid the body, and across the street display windows shattered as bullets hit a men’s clothing shop.

With the cool detachment and quick thinking that made Klietmann proud to be in the
Schutzstaffel,
Martin Bracher got out of the Toyota on his side and loosed a wide arc of fire from the Uzi to add to the chaos and give them a better chance of escaping. Windows imploded in the exclusive shops not only on the side street at the end of which they were parked but all the way across the intersection on the east flank of Palm Canyon Drive as well. People screamed, dropped to the pavement, scuttled for the cover of doorways. Klietmann saw passing cars hit by bullets out on Palm Canyon, and maybe a few drivers were hit or maybe they only panicked, but the vehicles swung wildly from lane to lane; a tan Mercedes sideswiped a delivery truck, and a sleek, red sportscar jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, grazed the bole of a palm tree, and plowed into the front of a gift shop.

Klietmann got behind the wheel again and released the emergency brake. He heard Bracher and Hubatsch leap into the car, so he threw the white Toyota in gear and shot forward onto Palm Canyon, hanging a hard left, heading north. He discovered at once that he was on a one-way street, going in the wrong direction. Cursing, he dodged oncoming cars. The Toyota rocked wildly on bad springs, and the glove compartment popped open, emptying its contents in von Manstein’s lap. Klietmann turned right at the next intersection. A block later he ran a red light, narrowly avoiding pedestrians in the crosswalk, and turned left onto another avenue that allowed northbound traffic.

“We only have twenty-one minutes,” von Manstein said, pointing at the dashboard clock.

“Tell me where to go,” Klietmann said. “I’m lost.”

“No, you’re not,” von Manstein said, brushing the contents of the glove compartment—spare keys, paper napkins, a pair of white gloves, individual packets of catsup and mustard, documents of various kinds—off the map that he was still holding open in his lap. “You’re not lost. This will connect with Palm Canyon where it becomes a two-way street. From there we head straight north onto route 111.”

Approximately six miles north of Palm Springs, where the barren land looked particularly empty, Laura pulled to the shoulder of the highway. She slowly proceeded a few hundred yards until she found the place where the embankment declined almost to the level of the surrounding desert and sloped sufficiently to allow her to drive out onto the flat plain. Aside from a little bunchgrass that bristled in dry clumps and a few gnarly mesquite bushes, the only vegetation was tumbleweed—some green and rooted, some dry and rolling free. The fixed weeds scraped softly against the Buick, and the loose ones flew away on the wind that the car created.

The hard ground had a shale base over which an alkaline sand was drifted and whorled in places. As she had done when they found the place a few nights ago, Laura stayed away from the sand, kept to the bare gray-pink shale. She did not stop until she was three hundred yards from the highway, putting that well-traveled road beyond the radius of Vexxon’s open-air effectiveness. She parked not far from an arroyo, a twenty-foot-wide and thirty-foot-deep natural drainage channel formed by flash floods during hundreds of the desert’s brief rainy seasons; previously, at night, proceeding with caution but guided only by headlights, they’d been fortunate not to drive into that enormous ditch.

Though the lightning had not been followed by any sign of armed men, urgency informed the moment; Laura, Chris, and Stefan moved as if they could hear a clock ticking toward an impending detonation. While Laura removed one of the thirty-pound Vexxon cylinders from the trunk of the Buick, Stefan put his arms through the straps on the small, green nylon backpack that was full of books, pulled the chest strap in place, and pressed the Velcro fasteners together. Chris carried one of the Uzis twenty feet from the car to the center of a circle of utterly barren shale where not even a tuft of bunchgrass grew, which looked like a good staging area for Stefan’s debarkation from 1989. Laura joined the boy there, and Stefan followed, holding the silencer-fitted Colt Commander in his right hand.

North of Palm Springs on state route 111, Klietmann was pushing the Toyota as hard as it would go, which was not hard enough. The car had forty thousand miles on the odometer, and no doubt the old woman who owned it never drove faster than fifty, so it wasn’t responding well to the demands Klietmann made on it. When he tried to go faster than sixty, the Toyota began to shimmy and sputter, forcing him to ease up.