Dean Koontz - Lightning

Hitler sat in silence for perhaps a minute, staring at the Luger on his desk, thinking intently.

Overhead the bombing began to escalate once more, rattling the paintings on the walls and the pencils in the copper pot.

Stefan waited anxiously to discover if he would be believed.

"How have you come to me?" Hitler asked. "How could you use the gate now? I mean, it has been so closely guarded since the defection of Kokoschka and the other five."

"I didn't come to you by way of the gate," Stefan said. "I came to you straight from the future, using only the time-travel belt."

This was the boldest lie of all, for the belt was not a time machine, only a homing device that could do nothing but bring the wearer back to the institute. He was counting on the ignorance of politicians to save him: They knew a little bit about everything that was done under their rule, but there were no matters that they understood in depth. Hitler knew of the gate and of the nature of time travel, of course, but perhaps only in a general sense; he might lack knowledge of most of the details, such as how the belts actually functioned.

If Hitler realized that Stefan had come from the institute after returning there with Kokoschka's device, he would know that Kokoschka and the other five had been dispatched by Stefan and had not been defectors, after all, at which point the entire elaborate tale of conspiracy would collapse. And Stefan would be a dead man.

Frowning, the dictator said, "You used the belt without the gate? Is that possible?"

Dry-mouthed with fear but speaking with conviction, Stefan

LIGHTNING 325

said, "Oh, yes, my Furhrer, it is quite simple to… adjust the belt and use it not merely to home in on the beacon of the gate but to skip through time as one wishes. And we are fortunate that such is the case, for otherwise, if I'd had to return to the gate to get here, I would have been stopped by the Jews who control it."

"Jews?" Hitler said, startled.

"Yes, sir. The conspiracy within the institute is organized, I believe, by staff members who have Jewish blood but have concealed their heritage."

The madman's face hardened further in a look of sudden anger. "Jews. Always the same problem. Everywhere, the same problem. Now in the institute as well."

Upon hearing that statement, Stefan knew that he had pushed the course of history back toward the proper path.

Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.

Laura said, "Chris, I think you better hide under the car."

Even as she spoke, the gunman to the southwest of her rose from concealment and sprinted along the edge of the arroyo, angling toward her and toward the meager cover offered by another low dune.

She leaped to her feet, confident that the Buick would shelter her from the man at the Toyota, and opened fire. The first dozen rounds kicked up sand and chips of shale at the running man's heels, but then the bullets caught up with him, tearing into his legs. He went down, screaming, and was hit on the ground as well. He rolled twice and fell over the edge of the arroyo to the floor thirty feet below.

Even as the gunman slipped over that brink, Laura heard automatic fire, not from the Toyota but behind her. Before she could turn to meet the threat, she took several bullets in the back and was thrown forward, facedown on the hard shale.

"Jews," Hitler said again, angrily. Then: "What of this nuclear weapon that they say may win the war for us?"

"Another lie, my Furhrer. Though many attempts to develop such a weapon were made in the future, there were never any successes. This is a fantasy the conspirators have created to further misdirect the resources and energies of the Reich."

A rumbling came through the walls, as if they were not underground but suspended high in the heavens, in a thunderstorm.

The heavy frames of the paintings thumped against the concrete.

The pencils jiggled in the copper pot.

Hitler met Stefan's eyes and studied him for a long time. Then: "I suppose that if you were not loyal to me, you'd simply have come armed and would have killed me the instant you arrived."

He had considered doing just that, for only in killing Adolf Hitler might he expunge some of the stain on his own soul. But that would have been a selfish act, for by killing Hitler he would have radically changed the course of history and would have put the future as he knew it at extreme risk. He could not forget that his future was also Laura's past; if he meddled sufficiently to change the series of events that fate ordained, perhaps he would change the world for the worse in general and for Laura in particular. What if he killed Hitler here and, upon returning to 1989, found a world so drastically altered that for some reason Laura had never even been born?

He wanted to kill this snake in human skin, but he could not take the responsibility for the world that might follow. Common sense said that only a better world could result, but he knew that common sense and fate were mutually exclusive concepts.

"Yes," he said, "had I been a traitor, my Furhrer, I could've done just that. And I worry that the real traitors at the institute may sooner or later think of just such a method of assassination."

Hitler paled. "Tomorrow, I shut the institute down. The gate will be closed until I know the staff is purged of traitors."

Churchill's bombers may beat you to the punch, Stefan thought.

"We will win, Stefan, and we'll do so by retaining faith in our

great destiny, not by playing fortune teller. We will win because it is our fate to win."

"It's our destiny," Stefan agreed. "We're on the side of truth." Finally the madman smiled. Overcome by a sentimentality that was strange because of the extremely sudden change of mood, Hitler spoke of Stefan's father, Franz, and the early days in Munich: the secret meetings in Anton Drexler's apartment, the public meetings at the beer halls — the Hofbrauhaus and Eberlbrdu. Stefan listened for a while, pretending to be enthralled, but when Hitler expressed his continued and unshakable faith in the son of Franz Krieger, Stefan seized the opportunity to leave. "And I, my Furhrer, have undying faith in you and will be, forever, your loyal disciple." He stood, saluted the dictator, put one hand under his shirt to the button on the belt, and said, "Now I must return to the future, for I've more work to do in your behalf."

"Go?" Hitler said, rising from the desk chair. "But I thought you'd stay now in your own time? Why go there now that you've cleared your name with me?"

"I think I may know where the traitor Kokoschka has gone, in what corner of the future he's taken refuge. I've got to find him, bring him back, for perhaps only Kokoschka knows the names of the traitors at the institute and can be made to reveal them."

He saluted quickly, pushed the button on the belt, and left the bunker before Hitler could respond.

He returned to the institute on the night of March 16, the night that Kokoschka had set out for the San Bernardinos in pursuit of him, never to return. To the best of his ability, he had arranged for the destruction of the institute and had almost ensured Hitler's distrust of any information that came from it. He would have been exhilarated if he had not been so worried about the SS squad that apparently was stalking Laura in 1989.

At the programming board, he entered the computer-derived numbers for the last jaunt that he would ever make: to the desert outside of Palm Springs, where Laura and Chris waited for him on the morning of January 25, 1989.

Even as she fell to the ground, Laura knew that her spinal column had been severed or shattered by one of the bullets, for she felt no pain whatsoever — nor any sensation of any kind in any part of her body below the neck.