“To find you,” Stefan said, “they made two trips. First, they went farther into the future, a couple of days farther, to this coming weekend perhaps, to see if you had shown up anywhere by then. If you hadn’t—and apparently you had not—then they started checking the public record. Back issues of newspapers, for one thing. They looked for the stories about the shooting at your house last night, and in those stories they read that you’d taken a wounded man to Brenkshaw’s place in San Bernardino. So they simply returned to ’44 and made a second trip—this time to Dr. Brenkshaw’s in the early hours of this morning, January 11.”
“They can hopscotch around us,” Chris told Laura. “They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It’s sorta like … if we were cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.”
“Who was Kokoschka?” Chris wanted to know. “Who was the man who killed my dad?”
“Head of institute security,” Stefan said. “.He claimed to be a distant relation of Oskar Kokoschka, the noted Austrian expressionist painter, but I doubt if it was true because in our Kokoschka there was no hint of an artist’s sensitivity. Standartenfuhrer—which means Colonel—Heinrich Kokoschka was an efficient killer for the Gestapo.”
“Gestapo,” Chris said, awestruck. “Secret police?”
“State police,” Stefan said. “Widely known to exist but allowed to operate in secrecy. When he showed up on that mountain road in 1988, I was as surprised as you. There’d been no lightning. He must have arrived far away from us, fifteen or twenty miles, in some other valley of the San Bernardinos, and the lightning had been beyond our notice.” The lightning associated with time travel was in fact a very localized phenomenon, Stefan explained. “After Kokoschka showed up there, on my trail, I thought I would return to the institute and find all of my colleagues outraged at my treason, but when I got there, no one took special notice of me. I was confused. Then after I killed Penlovski and the others, when I was in the main lab preparing for my final jaunt into the future. Heinrich Kokoschka burst in and shot me. He wasn’t dead! Not dead on that highway in 1988. Then I realized that Kokoschka had obviously only just learned of my treason when he’d found the men I’d shot. He would travel to 1988 and try to kill me—and all of you—at a later time. Which meant that the gate would have to remain open to allow him to do so, and that I was destined to fail to destroy it. At least at that time.”
“God, this headache,” Laura said.
Chris seemed to have no trouble whatsoever following the tangled threads of time travel. He said, “So after you traveled to our house last night, Kokoschka traveled to 1988 and killed my dad. Jeez! In a way, Mr. Krieger, you killed Kokoschka forty-three years after he shot you in that lab … yet you had shot him before he shot you. This is wild stuff, Mom, isn’t this wild? Isn’t this great?”
“It’s something,” she agreed. “And how did Kokoschka know to find you on that mountain road?”
“After he discovered I’d shot Penlovski, and after I escaped through the gate, Kokoschka must have found the explosives in the attic and basement. Then he must have dug into the automatic records the machinery keeps of all the times the gate is used. That was a bit of data tracking that was my responsibility, so no one previously had noticed all my jaunts into your life, Laura. Anyway, Kokoschka must have done some time traveling of his own, must have taken a lot of trips to see where I’d been going, secretly watching me watch you, watching me alter your destiny for the better. He must have been watching the day I came to the cemetery when your father was buried, and he must have been watching when I beat Sheener, but I never saw him. So from all the trips I made into your life, from all the times I just observed you and the times I acted to save you, he picked a place at which to kill us. He wanted to kill me because I was a traitor, and he wanted to kill you and your family because . . . well because he realized you were so important to me.”