"Things have changed, but history is sliding back into its old groove. It looks like the State will be born right on time. The way we learned it, with Grandma and Grandpa colluding to make it happen. What scares me is that we might still change it. One slip. Anything that would keep Cash out of Prague, or from coming here to take over at the right time…
This United States would survive. Cash wouldn't dump his Chinese allies during their Russian adventure, because he hated that man Huang for what he did to his friend. He wouldn't fix it up with the Czech leadership while the Russians and Chinese are smashing each other. Prague would remain just another capital of an occupied satellite, not the European hub of the new order…"
How critically important this one man would be, Fiala reflected. He would shape the future as surely as Adolf Hitler had shaped the past.
Yet what she had heard about him, so long ago in her own future-past, made him seem a pretty ordinary man. Not at all a megalomaniac. Her grandmother had talked about him ceaselessly.
Michael Cash's driving forces had been a neurotic love and a devouring hatred, each targeted on one woman, one man. He would become powerful only to satisfy the two emotions.
And having done so, he would abdicate…
When had a dictator ever yielded his power voluntarily? Or forbid his family to have anything to do with politics afterward?
Even his wife. And she, chairing the European Party, had been as powerful as he.
That tangled skein fled her mind.
"The doorbell," Fial observed nervously.
"Must be the man with the luggage." Fiala squirmed in her chair, unaccountably nervous herself.
She would like to meet Michael Cash sometime, while the opportunity existed. The memories of a grandmother who had passed away nearly twenty years before their translation into the past, and a father who had seen little of the man, satisfied few of the questions she had today, when she could finally recognize and understand the issues of Cash's day.
Fial had known him too, though only as a child. Maybe he would want a look from an adult perspective. Maybe he would let her tag along.
Fial peered through a curtain. "It's a woman."
"A woman?"
"Yes. Late twenties, I'd say. Dark hair, long and straight. Dark skin. Attractive. Know anyone like that?"
"No. Maybe she's selling something."
The bell rang for the fourth time.
"She's sure determined."
"Well, get rid of her before the man with the luggage shows up."
Fial opened the door. "Of help to you I may be?"
The woman yanked the screen door.
And from a crouch against the outside wall a man lunged inside.
He had a gun.
Fiala swore murderously in German.
"Danke schцn." His grin was broad and evil.
XXIX. On the Y Axis;
1975
"Back door, Beth," said Cash, unable to stifle that terrible grin. "Watch yourself."
Pistol in hand, she drifted toward the rear of the house.
Norm backed up to a paisley-upholstered chair. He gestured with his weapon. "I will shoot. I have instructions to do so at the slightest excuse. We've stopped being polite. Whoa. Right there. Miss Groloch, move a step away from Fial."
Fial stared without expression. "This is which, Fiala?"
"Ca-Cash."
Fial regarded him with disconcerting intensity.
Beth returned with Segasture and Tran. Frank observed, "They don't look so mean, Norm."
"That's why they're so deadly. Especially her. Major, you want to look around? I haven't seen the servants."
"Greta and Hans, they have gone to shop," Fial said. Cash ignored him.
"Move a little to your left, Beth. We don't want to turn this into a Polish firing squad."
Neither prisoner tried to bullshit him. Fiala seemed too upset. Fial was, apparently, busy thinking.
Segasture and Tran soon returned. "Place is clean," Frank said.
"You see a phone anywhere?"
"No. Why?"
"Impulse. I wanted to call Railsback. To tell him I've got her."
"You've found her, you mean. You haven't gotten her yet. Now the legal hassles start. Extradition. Malone."
"Malone can have this one." He indicated Fial. "But the bitch is mine."
"Hey! Hello!" someone called from outside.
Cash whirled. A man in police blue leaned in the door. Norm relaxed. "Come on in."
"Frank Segasture?"
"Right here."
"Okay. I'm supposed to tell you that warrants and the wagon will be out when they're available. And to treat the prisoners right. Somebody from Washington wants to see them."
"Shit. That damned Malone again," Cash grumbled.
"And a cabbie just spotted the man you wanted to know about. Came over the radio when I was pulling up."
"Smiley?" Cash asked.
"Calls himself Augsberg. As in the Augsberg Pickle Company. Came in on a Lear jet with a couple other guys. Three more were here to meet him."
"That don't sound like my man."
"He fit the description."
"Watch him," Tran suggested. "You know what Malone said about him shifting identities."
"Good idea," Cash replied. "Frank, you think it'd be worth the trouble to find out where the real pickle king is?"
"We'd better. Officer, you got that?"
"I think so. Tail him. And find out if he's the real magilla."
"Check."
"I'll go call it in."
"This man, he would be from St. Louis?" Fial asked.
"That's right, Pop," Segasture told him. "Seems to have what you'd call an abiding interest in you people."
Fial wheeled on Fiala. "You said you weren't followed. You swore…"
Cash laughed. "She wasn't. Not by me. I was here waiting for her."