Lightning (49 page)

The prime minister happened to be looking directly at Stefan when he materialized, but the man in uniform—a sergeant—became aware of him because of the discharge of electrical energy that accompanied his arrival. Thousands of bright snakes of blue-white light wriggled away from Stefan, as if his very flesh had generated them. Perhaps deep crashes of thunder and bolts of lightning shattered the sky in the world above these underground rooms, but some of the displaced energy of time travel was expended here, as well, in a sizzling display that brought the uniformed man straight to his feet in surprise and fear. The hissing serpents of electricity streaked across the floor, up the walls, coalesced briefly on the ceiling, then dissipated, leaving everyone unharmed; the only damage was to a large wall map of Europe, which had been seared in several places but not set aflame.

“Guards!” the sergeant shouted. He was unarmed but evidently quite sure that his cry would be heard and answered swiftly, for he repeated it only once and made no move toward the door. “Guards!”

“Mr. Churchill, please,” Stefan said, ignoring the sergeant, “I’m not here to do you any harm.”

The door flew open and two British soldiers entered the room, one holding a revolver, the other an automatic carbine.

Speaking hastily, afraid he was about to be shot, Stefan said, “The future of the world depends on your hearing me out, sir, please.”

Throughout the excitement, the prime minister had remained seated in the armchair at the end of the table. Stefan believed that he had seen a brief flash of surprise and perhaps even a glimmer of fear on the great man’s face, but he would not have bet on it. Now the prime minister looked as bemused and implacable as in every photograph that Stefan had ever seen of him. He raised one hand to the guards: “Hold a moment.” When the sergeant began to protest, the prime minister said, “If he had meant to kill me, certainly he would have done so already, on arrival.” To Stefan he said, “And that was
some
entrance, sir. As dramatic as any that young Olivier has ever made.”

Stefan could not help but smile. He stepped out of the corner, but when he moved toward the table, he saw the guards stiffen, so he stopped and spoke from a distance. “Sir, by the very manner that I’ve arrived here, you know I’m no ordinary messenger and that what I have to tell you must be ... unusual. It’s also highly sensitive, and you may not wish to have my information conveyed to any ears but yours.”

“If you expect us to leave you alone with the PM,” the sergeant said, “you’re ... you’re mad!”

“He may be mad,” the prime minister said, “but he’s got flair. You must admit that much, Sergeant. If the guards search him and find no weapons, I’ll give the gentleman a bit of my time, as he asks.”

“But, sir, you don’t know who he is. You don’t know
what he
is. The way he exploded into- ”

Churchill cut him off. “I know how he arrived, Sergeant. And please remember that only you and I
do
know. I will expect you to remain as tight-lipped about what you’ve seen here as you would about any other bit of war information that might be considered classified.”

Chastened, the sergeant stood to one side and glowered at Stefan while the guards conducted a body search.

They found no weapons, only the books in the rucksack and a few papers in Stefan’s pockets. They returned the papers and stacked the books in the middle of the long table, and Stefan was amused to see that they had not noticed the nature of the volumes they’d handled.

Reluctantly, carrying his pencil and dictation pad, the sergeant accompanied the guards out of the room, as the prime minister had instructed. When the door closed, Churchill motioned Stefan to the chair that the sergeant had vacated. They sat in silence a moment, regarding each other with interest. Then the prime minister pointed to a steaming pot that stood on a serving tray. “Tea?”

Twenty minutes later, when Stefan had told only half of the condensed version of his story, the prime minister called for the sergeant in the corridor. “We’ll be here a while yet, Sergeant. I will have to delay the War Cabinet meeting by an hour, I’m afraid. Please see that everyone is informed—and with my apologies.”

Twenty-five minutes after
that,
Stefan finished.

The prime minister asked a few more questions—surprisingly few but well-thought and to the heart of the matter. Finally he sighed and said, “It’s terribly early for a cigar, I suppose, but I’m in the mood to have one. Will you join me?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

As he prepared the cigar for smoking, Churchill said, “Aside from your spectacular entrance—which really proves nothing but the existence of a revolutionary means of travel, which might or might not be
time
travel—what evidence do you have to convince a reasonable man that the particulars of your story are true?”

Stefan had expected such a test and was prepared for it. “Sir, because I have been to the future and read portions of your account of the war, I knew you would be in this room at this hour on this day. Furthermore I knew what you would be doing here in the hour before your meeting with the War Cabinet.”

Drawing on his cigar, the prime minister raised his eyebrows.

“You were dictating a message to General Alexander in Italy, expressing your concerns about the conduct of the battle for the town of Cassino, which has been dragging on at a terrible cost of life.”

Churchill remained inscrutable. He must have been surprised by Stefan’s knowledge, but he would not provide encouragement even with a nod or a narrowing of his eyes.

Stefan needed no encouragement because he knew that what he said was correct. “From the account of the war that you will eventually write, I memorized the opening of that message to General Alexander—which you had not even finished dictating to the sergeant when I arrived a short while ago: ‘I wish you would explain to me why this passage by Cassino Monastery Hill, et cetera, all on a front of two or three miles, is the only place which you must keep butting at.’”

The prime minister drew on his cigar again, blew out smoke, and studied Stefan intensely. Their chairs were only a few feet apart, and being the object of Churchill’s thoughtful scrutiny was more unnerving than Stefan would have expected.

At last the prime minister said, “And you got that information from something I will write in the future?”

Stefan rose from his chair, retrieved the six thick books that the guards had taken from his rucksack—Houghton Mifflin Company’s trade-paperback reprints published at $9.95 each—and spread them out on the end of the table in front of Winston Churchill. “This, sir, is your six-volume history of the Second World War, which will stand as the definitive account of that conflict and be hailed as both a great work of history and literature.” He was going to add that those books were largely responsible for Churchill’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, but decided not to make that revelation. Life would be less interesting if robbed of such grand surprises.

The prime minister examined the covers of all six books, front and back, and permitted himself a smile when he read the three-line excerpt from the review that had appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement.
He opened one volume and swiftly riffled the pages, not pausing to read anything.

“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.”