While Laura and Stefan spent long hours at the computer Monday and Tuesday, Chris watched television, looked through the bookshelves for something to read, puzzled over, a hardcover collection of old Barbarella cartoons —
“Mom, what does orgasm mean?”
“What’re you reading? Give me that.”
— and generally entertained himself without a fuss. He came to the den once in a while and stood for a minute or two at a time. watching them use the computer. After about a dozen visits he said, “In Back to the Future they just had this time-traveling car, and they pushed a few buttons on the dashboard, and they were off—Pow!— like that. How come nothing in real life’s ever as easy as it is in the movies?”
On Tuesday, January 19, they kept a low profile while the gardener mowed the lawn and trimmed some shrubbery. In four days he was the only person they had seen; no door-to-door salesmen had called, not even a Jehovah’s Witness pushing Watchtower magazine.
“We’re safe here,” Stefan said. “Obviously, our presence in the house never becomes public knowledge. If it did, the Gestapo would have visited us already.”
Nevertheless Laura kept the perimeter alarm system switched on nearly twenty-four hours a day. And at night she dreamed of destiny reasserting itself, of Chris erased from existence, of waking up to find herself in a wheelchair.
They were supposed to arrive at eight o’clock to give them plenty of time to reach the location at which the researchers had pinpointed the woman and the boy, if not Krieger. But when Lieutenant Klietmann blinked and found himself forty-five years beyond his own era, he knew at once that they were a couple of hours late. The sun was too high above the horizon. The temperature was about seventy-five, too warm for an early, winter morning in the desert.
Like a white crack in a blue-glazed bowl, lightning splintered down the sky. Other cracks opened, and sparks flashed above as if struck from the hooves of a bull loose in some celestial china shop.
As the thunder faded, Klietmann turned to see if von Manstein, Hubatsch, and Bracher had made the journey safely. They were with him, all carrying attache cases, with sunglasses stuck in the breast pockets of their expensive suits.
The problem was that thirty feet beyond the sergeant and the two corporals, a pair of elderly, white-haired women in pastel stretch pants and pastel blouses were standing at a white car near the rear door to a church, staring in astonishment at Klietmann and his squad. They were holding what appeared to be casseroles.
Klietmann glanced around and saw that he and his men had arrived in the parking lot behind the church. There were two other cars in addition to the one that seemed to belong to the women, but there were no other onlookers. The lot was encircled by a wall, so the only way out was past the women and along the side of the church.
Deciding that boldness was the best course, Klietmann walked straight toward the women, as if there was nothing whatsoever unusual about his having materialized out of thin air, and his men followed him. Mesmerized, the women watched them approach.
“Good morning, ladies.” Like Krieger, Klietmann had learned to speak English with an American accent in hopes of serving as a deep-cover agent, but he’d been unable to lose his accent entirely, no matter how hard he studied and practiced. Though his own watch was set to local time, he knew he could no longer trust it, so he said, “Could you please be so kind as to tell me what time it is?”
They stared at him.
“The time?” he repeated.
The woman in yellow pastel twisted her wrist without letting go of the casserole, looked at her watch, and said, “Uh, it’s ten-forty.”
They were two hours and forty minutes late. They couldn’t waste time searching for a car to hot-wire, especially not when a perfectly good one was available, with keys, right in front of them. Klietmann was prepared to kill both women for the car. He could not leave their bodies in the parking lot; an alarm would go up when they were found, and shortly thereafter the police would be looking for their car—a nasty complication. He’d have to stuff the bodies in the trunk and take them with him.