Lightning (26 page)

His heart pounded furiously. This was the most dangerous part of his plan, the killing, because there were so many opportunities for something to go wrong before he finished with the gun and returned to his office to set the timer on the explosives.

Laura was a long way off, and he might never see her again.

On Monday afternoon Laura and Chris dressed in gray sweat suits. After Thelma helped them unroll the thick gym mats on the patio at the back of the house, Laura and Chris sat side by side and did deep-breathing exercises.

“When does Bruce Lee arrive?” Thelma asked.

“At two,” Laura said.

“He’s not Bruce Lee, Aunt Thelma,” Chris said exasperatedly. “You keep calling him Bruce Lee, but Bruce Lee is dead.”

Mr. Takahami arrived promptly at two o’clock. He was wearing a dark blue sweat suit, on the back of which was the logo for his martial arts school: QUIET STRENGTH. When introduced to Thelma, he said, “You’re a very funny lady. I love your record album. ”

Glowing from the praise, Thelma said, “And I can honestly tell you that I sincerely wish Japan had won the war.”

Henry laughed. “I think we did.”

Sitting on a sun lounger, sipping iced tea, Thelma watched while Henry instructed Laura and Chris in self-defense.

He was forty years old, with a well-developed upper body and wiry legs. He was a master of judo and karate, as well as an expert kick boxer, and he taught a form of self-defense based on various martial arts, a system which he had devised himself. Twice a week he drove out from Riverside and spent three hours with Laura and Chris.

The kicking, punching, poking, grunting, twisting, throwing, off-the-hip rolling combat was conducted gently enough not to cause injury but with enough force to teach. Chris’s lessons were less strenuous and less elaborate than Laura’s, and Henry gave the boy plenty of breaks to pause and recoup. But by the end of the session, Laura was, as always, dripping sweat and exhausted.

When Henry left, Laura sent Chris upstairs to shower while she and Thelma rolled up the mats.

“He’s cute,” Thelma said.

“Henry? I guess he is.”

“Maybe I’ll take up judo or karate.”

“Have your audiences been
that
dissatisfied lately?”

“That one was below the belt, Shane.”

“Anything’s fair when the enemy’s formidable and merciless.”

The following afternoon, as Thelma was putting her suitcase in the trunk of her Camaro for the return trip to Beverly Hills, she said, “Hey, Shane, you remember that first foster family you were sent to from Mcllroy?”

“The Teagels,” Laura said. “Flora, Hazel, and Mike.”

Thelma leaned against the sun-warmed side of the car next to Laura. “You remember what you told us about Mike’s fascination with newspapers like the National
Enquirer?”

“I remember the Teagels as if I lived with them yesterday.”

“Well,” Thelma said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s happened to you—this guardian, the way he never ages, the way he disappeared into thin air—and I thought of the Teagels, and it all seems sort of ironic to me. All those nights at Mcllroy, we laughed at nutty old Mike Teagel ... and now what you find yourself in the middle of is a prime bit of exotic news.”

Laura laughed softly. “Maybe I’d better reconsider all those tales of aliens living secretly in Cleveland, huh?”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is ... life is full of wonders and surprises. Some of them are nasty surprises, yeah, and some days are as dark as the inside of the average politician’s head. But just the same, there are moments that make me realize we’re all here for some reason, enigmatic as it might be. It’s not meaningless. If it was meaningless, there’d be no mystery. It’d be as dull and clear and lacking in mystery as the mechanism of a Mr. Coffee machine. ”

Laura nodded.

“God, listen to me! I’m torturing the English language to come up with a half-baked philosophical statement that ultimately means nothing more than ‘keep your chin up, kid.’”

“You’re not half-baked.”

“Mystery,” Thelma said. “Wonder. You’re in the middle of it, Shane, and that’s what life’s all about. If it’s dark right now ... well, this too shall pass.”

They stood by the car, hugging, not needing to say more, until Chris ran out from the house with a crayon drawing he had done for Thelma and that he wanted her to take back to LA with her. It was a crude but charming scene of Tommy Toad standing outside a movie theater, gazing up at a marquee on which Thelma’s name was huge.

He had tears in his eyes. “But do you really have to go, Aunt Thelma? Can’t you stay one more day?”

Thelma hugged him, then carefully rolled up the drawing as if in possession of a priceless masterwork. “I’d love to stay, Christopher Robin, but I can’t. My adoring fans are crying for me to make this movie. Besides, I’ve got a big mortgage.”

“What’s a mortgage?”

“The greatest motivator in the world,” Thelma said, giving him a last kiss. She got into the car, started the engine, put down the side window, and winked at Laura. “Exotic news, Shane.”

“Mystery.”

“Wonder.”

Laura gave her the split-finger greeting from Star Trek.

Thelma laughed. “You’ll make it, Shane. In spite of the guns and all I’ve learned since I came here on Friday, I’m less worried about you now than I was then.”

Chris stood at Laura’s side, and they watched Thelma’s car until it went down the long driveway and disappeared onto the state route.

Dr. Vladimir Penlovski’s large office suite was on the fourth floor of the institute. When Stefan entered the reception lounge, it was deserted, but he heard voices coming from the next room. He went to the inner door, which was ajar, pushed it all the way open, and saw Penlovski giving dictation to Anna Kaspar, his secretary.

Penlovski looked up, mildly surprised to see Stefan. He must have perceived the tension in Stefan’s face, for he frowned and said, “Is something wrong?”

“Something’s been wrong for a long time,” Stefan said, “but it’ll all be fine now, I think.” Then, as Penlovski’s frown deepened, Stefan pulled the silencer-equipped Colt Commander from the pocket of his lab coat and shot the scientist twice in the chest.

Anna Kaspar sprang up from her chair, dropping her pencil and dictation pad, a scream caught in her throat.

He did not like killing women—he did not like killing anyone—but there was no choice now, so he shot her three times, knocking her backward onto the desk, before the scream could tear free of her.

Dead, she slid off the desk and crumpled to the floor. The shots had been no louder than the hissing of an angry cat, and the sound of the body dropping had been insufficient to draw attention.

Penlovski was slumped in his chair, eyes and mouth open, staring sightlessly. One of the shots must have pierced his heart, for there was only a small spot of blood on his shirt; his circulation had been cut off in an instant.

Stefan backed out of the room, closed the door. He crossed the reception lounge and, stepping into the hall, shut the outer door too.

His heart was racing. With those two murders he had cut himself off forever from his own time, his own people. From here on, the only life for him was in Laura’s time. Now there was no turning back.

With his hands—and the gun—jammed in his lab-coat pockets, he went down the hall toward Januskaya’s office. As he neared the door, two of his other colleagues came out of it. They said hello as they passed him, and he stopped to see if they were heading for Penlovski’s office. If they were, he’d have to kill them too.

He was relieved when they stopped at the elevators. The more corpses he left strewn around, the more likely someone would be to stumble across one of them and sound an alarm that would prevent him from setting the timer on the explosives and escaping by way of the Lightning Road.

He went into Januskaya’s office, which also had a reception area. At the desk, the secretary—provided, as Anna Kaspar had been, by the secret police—looked up and smiled.

“Is Dr. Januskaya here?” Stefan asked.

“No. He’s down in the documents room with Dr. Volkaw.”

Volkaw was the third man whose overview of the project was great enough to require that he be eliminated. It seemed a good omen that he and Wladyslaw Januskaya were conveniently in the same place.

In the documents room, they stored and studied the many books, newspapers, magazines, and other materials that had been brought back by time travelers from scheduled jaunts. These days the men who had conceived of Lightning Road were engaged in an urgent analysis of the key points at which alterations in the natural flow of events could provide the changes in the course of history that they desired.

On the way down in the elevator, Stefan replaced the pistol’s silencer with the unused spare. The first would muffle another dozen shots before its sound baffles were seriously damaged. But he did not want to overuse it. The second silencer was additional insurance. He also quickly exchanged the half-empty magazine for a full one.

The first-floor corridor was a busy place, with people coming and going from one lab and research room to another. He kept his hands in his pockets and went directly to the documents room.

When Stefan entered, Januskaya and Volkaw were standing at an oak table, bent over a copy of a magazine, arguing heatedly but in low voices. They glanced up, then immediately continued their discussion, assuming that he was there for research purposes of his own.

Stefan put two bullets in Volkaw’s back.

Januskaya reacted with confusion and shock as Volkaw flew forward into the table, driven by the impact of the nearly silent gunfire.

Stefan shot Januskaya in the face, then turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. Not trusting himself to speak to one of his colleagues with any degree of self-control or coherence, he tried to appear to be lost in thought, hoping that would dissuade them from approaching him. He went to the elevators as quickly as possible without running, went to his third-floor office, reached behind the file cabinet, and twisted the dial on the timer as far as it would go, giving himself just five minutes to get to the gate and away before the institute was reduced to burning rubble.

By the time the school year began, Laura had won approval for Chris to receive his education at home, from a state-accredited tutor. Her name was Ida Palomar, and she reminded Laura of Marjorie Main, the late actress in the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Ida was a big woman, a bit gruff, but with a generous heart, and she was a good teacher.

By the Thanksgiving school break, instead of feeling as if they were imprisoned, both she and Chris had accommodated to the relative isolation in which they lived. In fact they had actually come to enjoy the special closeness that developed between them as a result of having so few other people in their lives.

On Thanksgiving Day Thelma called from Beverly Hills to wish them a happy holiday. Laura took the call in the kitchen, which was full of the aroma of roasting turkey. Chris was in the family room, reading Shel Silverstein.

“Besides wishing you a happy holiday,” Thelma said, “I’m calling to invite you down here to spend Christmas week with me and Jason.”

“Jason?” Laura said.

“Jason Gaines, the director,” Thelma said. “He’s the guy who’s directing this film I’m making. I’ve moved in with him.”

“Does he know it yet?”

“Listen, Shane,
I
make the wisecracks.”

“Sorry.”

“He says he loves me. Is that crazy or what? I mean, Jeez, here’s this decent-looking guy, only five years older than me, with no visible mutations, who’s a
hugely
successful film director, worth many millions, who could just about have any stacked little starlet he wanted, and the only one he wants is me. Now obviously he’s brain-damaged, but you wouldn’t know it to talk to him, he could pass for normal. He says what he loves about me is I’ve got a
brain—”

“Does he know how diseased it is?”

“There you go again, Shane. He says he loves my brain and sense of humor, and he’s even excited by my body—or if he isn’t excited then he’s the first guy in history who could
fake
an erection. ”

“You’ve got a perfectly lovely body.”

“Well, I’m beginning to consider the possibility that it’s not as bad as I always thought. That is, if you consider
boniness
to be the sine qua non of feminine beauty. But even if I am able to look at my bod in a mirror now, it’s still got
this
face perched atop it.”

“You’ve got a perfectly lovely face—especially now that it’s not surrounded by green and purple hair.”

“It’s not
your
face, Shane. Which means I’m mad for inviting you here for Christmas week. Jason will see you, and the next thing I’ll be sitting in a Glad trash bag at the curb. But what about it? Will you come? We’re shooting the film in and around LA, and we’ll finish principal photography December tenth. Then Jason’s got a lot of work to do, what with the editing, the whole schmear, but Christmas week we’re just
stopping.
We’d like you to be here. Say you will.”

“I’d sure like to meet the man smart enough to fall for you, Thelma, but I don’t know. I feel ... safe here.” .

“What do you think—we’re dangerous?”

“You know what I mean.”

“You can bring an Uzi.”

“What will Jason think of that?”

“I’ll tell him you’re a radical leftist, save-the-sperm-whale, get-toxic-preservatives-out-of-Spam, parakeet liberationist and that you keep an Uzi with you at all times in case the revolution comes without warning. He’ll buy it. This is Hollywood, kid. Most of the actors he works with are politically crazier than that.”

Through the family-room archway, Laura could see Chris curled up in the armchair with his book.