Dean Koontz - Lightning

"They aren't elaborate forgeries," Stefan assured him. "If you will read any page at random, you'll recognize your own unique and unmistakable voice. You will—"

"I've no need to read them. I believe you, Stefan Krieger." He pushed the books away and leaned back in his chair. "And I believe I understand why you've come to me. You want me to arrange an aerial bombardment of Berlin, targeted tightly to the district in which this institute of yours is located."

"Yes, Prime Minister, that's exactly right. It must be done before the scientists working at the institute have finished studying the material on nuclear weapons that's been brought back from the future, before they agree upon a means of introducing that information into the German scientific community at large — which they may do any day now. You must act before they come back from the future with something else that might turn the tide against the Allies. I'll give you the precise location of the institute. American and RAF bombers have been making both daylight and night runs on Berlin since the first of the year, after all—"

"There has been considerable uproar in Parliament about bombing cities, even enemy cities," Churchill noted.

"Yes, but it's not as if Berlin can't be hit. Because of the narrowly defined target, of course, this mission will have to take place in daylight. But if you strike that district, if you utterly pulverize that block—"

"Several blocks on all sides of it would have to be reduced to rubble," the prime minister said. "We can't strike with sufficient accuracy to surgically remove the buildings on one block alone."

"Yes, I understand. But you must order it, sir. More tons of explosives must be dropped on that district — and within the next few days — than will be dropped on any other scrap of land in the entire European theater at any time in the entire war. Nothing must be left of the institute but dust."

The prime minister was silent for a minute or so, watching the thin, bluish plume of his cigar smoke, thinking. Finally: "I'll need to consult with my advisers, of course, but I believe the earliest we could prepare and launch the bombardment would be two days hence, on the twenty-second, but perhaps as late as the twenty-third."

"I think that'll be soon enough," Stefan said with great relief. "But no later. For God's sake, sir, no later."

As the woman crouched by the driver's-side fender of the Buick and surveyed the desert to the north of her position, Klietmann was watching her from behind a tangle of mesquite and tumbleweed. She did not see him. When she moved to the other fender and turned her back to Klietmann, he got up at once and ran in a crouch toward the next bit of cover, a wind-scalloped knob of rock narrower than he was.

The lieutenant silently cursed the Bally loafers he was wearing, because the soles were too slippery for this kind of action. It now seemed foolish to have come on a mission of assassination dressed like young executives — or Baptist ministers. At least the Ray-Bans were useful. The bright sun glared off every stone and slope of drifted sand; without the sunglasses, he would not have been able to see the ground ahead of him as clearly as he could now, and he certainly would have put a foot wrong and fallen more than once.

He was about to dive for cover again when he heard the woman open fire in the other direction. With this proof that she was distracted, he kept going. Then he heard screaming so shrill and ululant that it hardly sounded like the screaming of a man; it was more like the cry of a wild animal gutted by another creature's claws but still alive.

Shaken, he took cover in a long, narrow basin of rock that was below the woman's line of sight. He crawled on his belly to the end of that trough and lay there, breathing hard. When he raised his head to bring his eyes up to the level of the surrounding ground, he saw that he was fifteen yards directly north of the Buick's rear door. If he could move just a few more yards east, he would be behind the woman, in the perfect position to cut her down.

The screaming faded.

Figuring that the other man to the south of her would lie low for a while because he would be spooked by the death of his partner, Laura shifted again to the other front fender. As she passed Chris, she said, "Two minutes, baby. Two minutes at most."

Crouching against the corner of the car, she surveyed their north flank. The desert out there still seemed untenanted. The breeze had died, and not even the tumbleweed moved.

If there were only three of them, they surely would not leave one man at the Toyota while the other two tried to circle her from the same direction. If there were only three, then the two on her south side would have split, one of them going north. Which meant there had to be a fourth man, perhaps even a fifth, out there in the shale and sand and desert scrub to the northwest of the Buick.

But where?

As Stefan expressed his gratitude to the prime minister and got up to leave, Churchill pointed to the books on the table and said, "I wouldn't want you to forget those. If you left them behind — what a temptation to plagiarize myself!"

"It's a mark of your character," Stefan said, "that you haven't importuned me to leave them with you for that very purpose."

"Nonsense." Churchill put his cigar in an ashtray and rose from his chair. "If I possessed those books now, all written, I'd not be content to have them published just as they are. Undoubtedly I would find things needing improvement, and I'd spend the years immediately after the war tinkering endlessly with them — only to find, upon completion and publication, that I had destroyed the very elements of them that in your future have made them classics."

Stefan laughed.

"I'm quite serious," Churchill said. "You've told me that my history will be the definitive one. That's enough foreknowledge to suit me. I'll write them as I wrote them, so to speak, and not risk second-guessing myself."

"Perhaps that's wise," Stefan agreed.

As Stefan packed the six books in the rucksack, Churchill stood with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly on his feet. "There are so many things I'd like to ask you about the future that I'm helping to shape. Things that are of more interest to me than whether I will write successful books or not."

"I really must be going, sir, but—"

"I know, yes," the prime minister said. "I won't detain you. But tell me at least one thing. Curiosity's killing me. Let's see… well, for instance, what of the Soviets after the war?"

Stefan hesitated, closed the rucksack, and said, "Prime Minister, I'm sorry to tell you that the Soviets will become far more powerful than Britain, rivaled only by the United States."

Churchill looked surprised for the first time. "That abominable system of theirs will actually produce economic success, abundance?"

"No, no. Their system will produce economic ruin — but tremendous military power. The Soviets will relentlessly militarize their entire society and eliminate all dissidents. Some say their concentration camps rival those of the Reich."

The expression on the prime minister's face remained inscrutable, but he could not conceal the troubled look in his eyes. "Yet they are allies of ours now."

"Yes, sir. And without them perhaps the war against the Reich wouldn’t have been won.”

"Oh, it would be won," Churchill said confidently, "just not as quickly." He sighed. "They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the alliances necessitated by war make stranger ones yet."

Stefan was ready to depart.

They shook hands.

"Your institute shall be reduced to pebbles, splinters, dust, and ashes," the prime minister said. "You've my word on that."

"That's all the assurance I need," Stefan said.