Lightning

"— but that will be a minor force, a diversion, to pull your elite Panzer divisions to the Normandy coast while the real front subsequently opens near Calais."

This information played to all of the dictator's prejudices and to his belief in his own infallibility. He returned to his chair and thumped his desk with one fist. "This has the feel of reality, Stefan. But… I have seen documents, selected pages from histories of the war that were brought back from the future—"

"Forgeries," Stefan said, counting on the man's paranoia to make the lie seem plausible. "Rather than show you the real documents from the future, they created forgeries to mislead you."

With luck, Churchill's promised bombardment of the institute would take place tomorrow, eradicating the gate, everyone who knew how to re-create the gate, and every scrap of material that had been brought back from the future. Then der Furhrer would never have the opportunity to conduct a thorough investigation to test Stefan's truthfulness.

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.