The Day After Tomorrow

101

AT 10:58 exactly, Osborn knocked on the door to room 6132. A moment later McVey opened it. Five men stood behind him and they all stared in silence. Noble, Remmer, Detective Johannes Schneider and two uniformed members of the Berlin Police.

“Well, Cinderella,” McVey said flatly.

“I got separated from Detective Schneider. I looked for him all over the place. What was I supposed to do?” Ignoring McVey’s glare, Osborn crossed the room and picked up the telephone. There was a silence and then it rang through. “Doctor Mandel please,” he said.

Remmer shrugged and thanked the Berlin cops and McVey shook hands with Schneider, then Remmer saw the three men out and closed the door.

“I’ll call back, thank you.” Osborn hung up and looked to McVey. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” he said with an energy McVey hadn’t seen since they’d left England, “but from everything I’ve been party to, arrest warrant or not, the I chances of getting enough evidence to bring Scholl to trial, let alone get a conviction, are close to nil. He’s too powerful, too connected, too far above the law Right?”

“You have the floor, Doctor.”

“Then let’s look at it another way and ask why somebody like Scholl would come halfway around the world to honor a man who seems to hardly exist while at the same time apparently directing a wave of killings that snow-balls as this thing at Charlottenburg gets closer.”

Osborn glanced quickly at the others, then back to McVey. “Lybarger. I bet he’s the key to this. And if we I find out about him, I bet we find out a lot more about Erwin Scholl.”

“You think you can turn up something the German federal police can’t, help yourself,” McVey said.

“I hope I am, McVey.” Osborn nodded toward the phone. He was pumped up. Going it alone, he now knew, was impossible, but they weren’t going to keep him out of the game either.

“That call was to Doctor Herb Mandel. He’s not only the best vascular surgeon I know, he’s chief of staff at San Francisco General Hospital. If it’s true Lybarger had a stroke, he would have a medical history. And it would have begun in San Francisco.

Von Holden was angry. He should have shot Osborn on the approach, as he sat on the park bench. But he’d wanted to make sure he was the right man. Viktor and Natalia were both trustworthy, but they were only going by Osborn’s photo. The problem was not so much that he might have killed the wrong man as it was in thinking he’d killed the right man when he hadn’t. Which was why he’d come as close to Osborn as he had, even to the point of wishing him a good evening. Then Osborn had surprised him with the gun. It was something he should have been prepared for because it went hand-in-hand with Scholl’s assessment that Osborn was emotionally charged and therefore highly unpredictable.

Even so, he should have been able to kill him. His glance at Viktor had been deliberate, designed to make Osborn turn and follow it. That instant would have been all he needed. But instead, Osborn had stepped backward to take in both men and at the same time kept the Cz pointed at Von Holden. The fact that he’d eased back the hammer with the trigger pulled meant that if he was shot, his thumb would slip off the hammer, discharging the gun directly at Von Holden. And Von Holden had been much too close to risk being hit.

It was true that as Osborn fled, and they ran after him through the park, he’d had the opportunity for one clear shot. And if the American had stopped for so much as a millisecond instead of running full into traffic on Tiergartenstrasse, he would have had it. But he hadn’t, and the two cars that crashed together immediately afterward had taken away his line of fire as well as any second opportunity.

Climbing the last steps to the apartment on Sophie-Charlottenstrasse, Von Holden was troubled not so much by his failure—because such things happened. What bothered him was an uneasiness in general. Osborn’s isolation had been a gift and he, of all people, should have been able to carry through. But he hadn’t. It seemed to be a pattern. Bernhard Oven should have eliminated him in Paris. He hadn’t. Bombing the Paris-Meaux train should have resulted in the deaths of both Osborn and McVey, either in the crash itself or by the assassination team he’d assembled to kill them if they’d survived. But they were still alive. It wasn’t luck as much as something else. And to Von Holden personally, it was something far more foreboding.

“Vorahnung.”

It was a word that had haunted him since youth. It meant premonition and for him carried with it the portent of an untimely and terrible death. It was a feeling he had no control over. Something that seemed to exist on its own all around him. Strangely, the more he worked for Scholl, the more he began to realize that he too was under the same spell, and that his road, and the road of those who followed him, was ultimately doomed to catastrophe. Though certainly there was no proof, or even hint of it, because everything Scholl touched went the way he guided it, and had for years. Yet, the feeling remained.

There were times the sensation would ebb. Often for days, even months. But then it would come back. And with it would come terrible dreams, where great surreal curtains the translucent red and green of the Aurora Borealis and rising thousands of feet high would undulate up and down in the vortex of his mind like gigantic pistons. The terror came in their sheer size, and that he was helpless to do anything to control their existence.

And when he woke from these “things”—as he called them—he would be in a cold sweat and shivering with horror and he would force himself to stay awake the rest of the night for fear that if he slept, they would come again. He often wondered if he were ill with some chemical imbalance or even a brain tumor but knew that couldn’t be because of the long periods of good health in between.

And then they’d vanished. Simply vanished. For almost five years he had been free of them and he was certain he was cured. In fact, in the last years he’d given them almost no thought whatsoever. That was until last night, when he’d learned McVey and the others had left London by private plane. There was no need to guess their destination, he already knew. And he’d gone to bed, afraid to sleep, knowing in his soul the “things” would come back. And they did. And they’d been more terrifying than ever.

Entering the apartment, Von Holden nodded to the guard and turned down a long hallway. When he reached the bank of secretaries’ desks, a tallish, plump-faced woman with dyed red hair looked up from a computer check she was running of Charlottenburg’s electronic security system.

“He is here,” she said in German.

“Danke.” Von Holden opened the door to his office and a familiar face smiled at him.

Cadoux.