The Day After Tomorrow

98

GERD LANG was a good-looking, curly-headed, computer software designer from Munich, in Berlin for a three-day computer arts show. He was staying in room 7056 in the new Casino wing of the Hotel Palace. Thirty-two and coming off a painful divorce, it was only natural that, when an attractive twenty-four-year-old blonde with an engaging smile struck up a conversation with him on the showroom floor, and began asking him questions about what he did and how he did it, and how she could develop skills in that direction, he would invite her to discuss it over a drink and perhaps dinner. It was an unfortunate decision because, after several drinks and very little dinner, and feeling emotionally cheered after a very long depression over his divorce, he was hardly in a state to be fully prepared for what would happen when she accepted his invitation for an after-dinner drink in his room.

His first thoughts, as they’d sat on the couch touching and exploring each other in the dark, had been that she was simply reaching out to stroke his neck. Then her fingers had tightened and she’d smiled as if she were teasing and asked him if he liked it. When he started to reply, they’d locked in a vise grip. His immediate reaction had been to reach up and jerk her hands away. But he couldn’t—she was incredibly strong and she smiled as she watched his attempt, as if it were some sort of game. Gerd Lang struggled to throw her off, to tear out of her iron grasp, but nothing worked. His face turned red and then deep purple. And his last living thought, crazy and perverse as it was, was that the whole time she never stopped smiling.

Afterward, she carried his body into the bathroom, put him in the tub and pulled the curtain. Coming back into the living room, she took a pair of day/night field binoculars from her handbag and trained them on the lighted window of room 6132 at an angle across and one floor below. Adjusting the focus, she could see a translucent curtain had been pulled across it and what appeared to be a man with white hair standing just inside it. Switching to night vision, she swung the glasses up toward the roof. In the greenish glow of the night scope she could see a man standing just back from the edge, an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Police,” she breathed and swung the glasses back toward the window

Osborn sat on the edge of a small table, listening as! McVey gave Remmer a basic primer on cryonic physics, then told him the rest: about what appeared to be an attempt at joining a severed head to a different body through a process of atomic surgery that was performed at I temperatures at or near absolute zero. It was a narrative that, as Osborn now heard it, bordered perilously on science fiction. Except it wasn’t, because someone was either doing it, or trying to do it. And Remmer, standing with one foot on a straight-backed chair, the blue steel automatic dangling from his shoulder holster, hung, fascinated, on McVey’s every word.

Suddenly it all faded as Osborn was hit by the stark and overwhelming thought that McVey might not be able to pull it off. That as good as he was, maybe this time he was in over his head and that Scholl would get the upper hand as Honig had suggested. What then?

The question was no question at all because Osborn knew the answer. Every inch he had gained, as close as he had finally come, it would all blow up in his face. And with it would go every ounce of hope he ever had in his life. Because from that moment on no one from the outside world would ever get that close to Erwin Scholl again.

“Excuse me,” he said abruptly. Getting to his feet, he brushed past Remmer and went into the room he was sharing with Noble and stood there in the dark. He could hear their voices filtering in from the other room. They were talking as they had before. It made no difference if he was there or not. And tomorrow it would be the same when, warrant in hand, they would walk out the door to visit Scholl, leaving him behind in the hotel room, with only a BKA detective for company.

For no reason the room suddenly felt unbearably close and claustrophobic. Going into the bathroom, he switched on the light and looked for a glass. Seeing none, he cupped his hand and bent over and drank from the faucet. Then he held his wet hand to the back of his neck and felt its coolness. In the mirror he saw Noble enter the room, pick something off the dresser, then glance in at him before going back to the others.

Reaching to shut off the water, his eyes were drawn to his own image. The color was gone from his face and sweat had beaded up on his forehead and upper lip. He held out his hand and it was trembling. As he stood there, he became aware of the thing stirring inside him again and at almost the same time heard the sound of his own voice. It was so clear that for a moment he thought he’d actually spoken out loud.

“Scholl is here in Berlin, in a hotel across the park.”

Suddenly his entire body shuddered and he was certain he was going to faint. Then the feeling passed, and as it did one thing became unequivocally clear. This was something McVey was not going to steal from him, not after everything. Scholl was too close. Whatever it took, however he had to circumvent the men in the other room, he could not and would not live another twenty-four hours without knowing why his father had been murdered.