Lightning

“Take it,” Laura said grimly.

He nodded. “You’re right. Who knows.”

“Too bad you don’t have a couple of grenades too,” Chris said. “Grenades would be good.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get that nasty back there,” Stefan said.

He switched off the pistol’s safeties and held it ready in his right hand. Gripping the canister of Vexxon by its heavy-duty, fire-extinguisher-type handle, he picked it up with his left hand and tested its weight to see how his injured shoulder would react.

“Hurts a little,” he said. “Pulls at the wound. But it’s not bad, and I’ll be able to control it.”

They had cut the wire on the canister’s trigger, which allowed the manual venting of the Vexxon. He curled his finger through that release loop.

When he finished his work in 1944, he would make a final jaunt to their time again, 1989, and the plan was for him to arrive only five minutes after he departed. Now he said, “I’ll see you very soon. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.”

Suddenly Laura was afraid that he would never return. She put a hand to his face and kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck, Stefan.”

It was not a kiss that a lover might have given, nor was there even a promise of passion; it was just the affectionate kiss of a friend, the kiss of a woman who owed eternal gratitude but who did not owe her heart. She saw an awareness of that in his eyes. At the core, in spite of flashes of humor, he was a melancholy man, and she wished that she could make him happy. She regretted that she could not at least pretend to feel more for him; yet she knew he would see through any such pretense.

“I want you to come back,” she said. “I really do. Very much.”

“That’s enough.” He looked at Chris and said, “Take care of your mother while I’m gone.”

“I’ll try,” Chris said. “But she’s pretty good at taking care of herself.”

Laura pulled her son to her side.

Stefan lifted the thirty-pound Vexxon cylinder higher, squeezed the release loop.

As the gas vented under high pressure with a sound like a dozen snakes hissing at once, Laura was seized by a brief panic, certain that the capsules they had taken would not protect them from the nerve toxin, that they would drop to the ground, twitching in the grip of muscle spasms and convulsions, where they would die in thirty seconds. Vexxon was colorless but not odorless or tasteless: even in the open air, where it dispersed quickly, she detected a sweet odor of apricots and a tart, nauseating taste that seemed half lemon juice and half spoiled milk. But in spite of what she could smell and taste, she felt no adverse effects.

Holding the pistol across his body, Stefan reached beneath his shirt with a free finger of his gun hand and pressed the button on the homing belt three times.

Von Manstein was the first to spot the black car standing in that expanse of white sand and pale rock, a few hundred yards east of the highway. He called it to their attention.

Of course, Lieutenant Klietmann could not see the make of the car from so far away, but he was sure it was the one for which they were searching. Three people stood together near the car; they were hardly more than stick figures at that distance, and they appeared to shimmer like mirages in the desert sun, but Klietmann could see that two of them were adults, the other a child.

Abruptly one of the adults vanished. It was not a trick of the desert air and light. The figure did not shimmer into view again a moment later. It was gone, and Klietmann knew that it had been Stefan Krieger.

“He went back!” Bracher said, astonished.

“Why would he go back,” von Manstein said, “when everyone at the institute wants his ass?”

“Worse,” Hubatsch said from behind the lieutenant. “He came to 1989 days before we did. So that belt of his will have taken him back to the same point, to the day that Kokoschka shot him—to just eleven minutes after Kokoschka shot him. Yet we know for a fact he never returned that day. What the hell’s going on here?”