Lightning

with it would be better able to drive back the subhuman hordes who would depose der Fuhrer.

He looked at the clock on the gate's programming board and saw that seven minutes had passed since the research team had left for California on February 15, 1989. They were there to search public records — mostly back issues of newspapers — to discover if Krieger, the woman, and the boy had been found by police and detained for questioning in the month following the shoot-outs at Big Bear and San Bernardino. Then they would return to '44 and tell Klietmann the day, time, and place where Krieger and the woman could be found. Because every time traveler returned from a jaunt exactly eleven minutes after departing, regardless of how long he spent in the future, Klietmann and his squad had only four more minutes to wait.

2

Thursday, January 12, 1989, was Laura's thirty-fourth birthday, and they spent it in the same room at The Bluebird of Happiness Motel. Stefan needed another day of rest to regain his strength and let the penicillin do its work. He also needed the time to think; he had to devise a plan for destroying the institute, and that problem was sufficiently knotty to require hours of intense concentration.

The rain had stopped, but the sky still looked bruised, swollen. The forecast was for another storm to follow the first by midnight.

They watched the local five o'clock television news and saw a story about her and Chris and the wounded mystery man they had taken to Dr. Brenkshaw. Police were still looking for her, and the best guess anyone could make about the situation was that the drug dealers who had killed her husband were after her and her son, either because they were afraid she would eventually identify them in a police lineup or because she was somehow involved in drug traffic herself.

'My mom a drug dealer?' Chris said, offended by that insinuation. 'What a bunch of bozos!'

Although no bodies had been found at Big Bear or San Bernardino, there had been a sensational development that guaranteed the media's continued interest. Reporters had learned that considerable blood had been found at both scenes — and that a man's severed head had been discovered in the alleyway behind the Brenkshaw house, between two garbage cans.

Laura remembered stepping through the redwood gate behind Carter Brenkshaw's property, seeing the second surprised gunman, and opening fire on him with the Uzi. The burst had taken him in the throat and head, and at the time she had thought that the concentrated automatic fire might well have decapitated him.

'The surviving SS men pushed the call-home button on the dead man's belt,' Stefan said, 'and sent his body back.'

'But why not his head?' Laura said, sickened by the subject but too curious not to ask the question.

'It must've rolled away from the body, between the garbage cans,' Stefan said, 'and they couldn't find it in the few seconds they had to look. If they'd located it, they could have laid it on the corpse and folded his arms around it. Anything a time traveler wears or carries is taken with him on a jaunt. But with the sirens approaching and the darkness in the alley… they didn't have time to find the head.'

Chris, who might have been expected to revel in these bizarre complications, slumped in his chair, legs curled up under him, and was silent. Perhaps the hideous image of a severed head had made Death's presence more real for him than had all the gunfire directed at him.

Laura made a special point of hugging him and subtly reassuring him that they were going to come out of this together and unscathed. The hugs, however, were as much for her as for him, and the pep talks she gave him must have seemed at least somewhat false, for she had not yet convinced herself that in fact they would triumph.

For lunch and dinner she got take-out from the Chinese restaurant just across the street. The previous night none of the restaurant's employees recognized her as either the famous author or the fugitive, so she felt reasonably safe there. It seemed foolish to go elsewhere and risk being spotted.

At the end of dinner, while Laura was cleaning up the cardboard containers, Chris produced two chocolate cupcakes with a yellow candle on each. He had bought the packet of Hostess pastries and a box of birthday candles at the Ralph's supermarket yesterday morning and had hidden them until now. With great ceremony he carried the cupcakes from the bathroom, where he had secretly inserted and lit the candles, and golden reflections of the two flames shimmered brightly in his eyes. He grinned when he saw that he had surprised and delighted her. In fact she had to strive to hold back tears. She was moved that even in the thrall of fear, in the midst of danger, he'd still had the presence of mind to think of her birthday, and the desire to please her; it seemed, to her, to be the essence of what mothers and children were all about.

The three of them ate wedges of the cupcakes. In addition five fortune cookies had come with the take-out food.

From his pillowed perch upon the bed, Stefan opened his cookie. 'If only this were true: 'You'll live in times of peace and plenty.' '

'It might turn out to be true,' Laura said. She cracked her cookie and withdrew the slip of paper. 'Oh, well, I think I've had enough of this, thank you: 'Adventure will be your companion.' '

When Chris opened his cookie, there was no slip of paper inside, no fortune.

A flicker of fear passed through Laura, as if the empty cookie actually meant that he had no future. Superstitious nonsense. But she could not suppress her sudden anxiety.

'Here,' she said, quickly handing him both of the remaining cookies. 'Getting none in that one just means you get two fortunes.'

Chris opened the first, read it to himself, laughed, then read it to them: ' 'You will achieve fame and fortune.' '

'When you're stinking rich, will you support me in my old age?' Laura asked.

'Sure, Mom. Well… as long as you'll still cook for me, and especially your vegetable soup.'

'Going to make your old mom earn her way, huh?'

Smiling at the interplay between Laura and Chris, Stefan Krieger said, 'He's a tough customer, isn't he?'

'He'll probably have me scrubbing his floors when I'm eighty,' Laura said.

Chris opened the second cookie. ' 'You'll have a good life of little pleasures — books, music, art.' '

Neither Chris nor Stefan seemed to notice that the two fortunes made opposed predictions, effectively canceling each other, which in a way confirmed the ominous meaning of the empty cookie.

Hey, you're losing your mind, Shane, you really are, she thought. They're just fortune cookies. They don't really predict anything.

Hours later, after the lights were out and Chris was asleep, Stefan spoke to Laura from the darkness. 'I've devised a plan.'

'A way to destroy the institute?'

'Yes. But it's very complicated, and there are many things we'll need. I don't know for sure… but I suspect some of these items can't be purchased by private citizens.'

'I can get anything you need,' she said confidently. 'I have the contacts. Anything.'

'We'll have to have quite a lot of money.'

'That's thorny. I've only got forty bucks left, and I can't go to the bank and withdraw funds because that would leave a record—'

'Yes. That would draw them straight to us. Is there someone you can trust and who trusts you, someone who would give you a lot of their own money and tell no one they'd seen you?'

'You know all about me,' Laura said, 'so you know about Thelma Ackerson. But, God, I don't want to drag her into this. If anything happened to Thelma—'

'It can be arranged without risk to her,' he insisted.

Outside, the promised rain arrived in a sudden downpour.

Laura said, 'No.'

'But she's our only hope.'