The Day After Tomorrow

102

IT WAS just after two in the morning. Three hours and a dozen phone calls after they’d begun, Osbornand McVey, working with Dr. Herb Mandel in San Francisco and Special Agent Fred Hanley of the Los Angeles office of the I FBI, had put together a serviceable history of what had happened to Elton Lybarger while he was in the United States.

There was no record that any San Francisco area hospital had ever treated Lybarger as a stroke patient. But, in September of 1992, an E. Lybarger had been brought by private ambulance to the exclusive Palo Colorado Hospital in Carmel, California. He’d stayed there until March of 1993, when he had been transferred to Rancho de Piñon, I an exclusive nursing home just outside Taos, New Mexico. Then, barely a week ago, he’d flown home to Zurich accompanied by his American physical therapist, a woman named Joanna Marsh.

The hospital in Carmel had provided facilities but no staff. Lybarger’s own doctor and one nurse had accompanied him in the ambulance. A day later, four other medical attendants had joined them. The nurse and medical attendants carried Swiss passports. The doctor was Austrian. I His name was Helmuth Salettl.

By 3:15 A.M., Bad Godesberg had faxed Remmer four I copies of Dr. Helmuth Salettl’s professional credentials and personal history, and Remmer handed them around, this time including Osborn.

Salettl was a seventy-nine-year-old bachelor who lived r with his sister in Salzburg, Austria. Born in 1914, he had been a young surgeon in Berlin University at the outbreak of the war. Later an SS Group leader, Hitler made him commissioner for public health; then, in the final days of the war, had him arrested for trying to send secret documents to the Americans and. sentenced him to be executed. Imprisoned in a villa outside Berlin awaiting execution, he was, at the last moment, moved to another villa in northern Germany where he was rescued by American troops. Interrogated by Allied officers at Camp Oberursel near Frankfurt, he was taken to Nuremberg, where he was tried and acquitted of “having prepared and carried out aggressive warfare.” After that, he returned to Austria, where he practiced internal medicine until the age I of seventy. Then he retired, treating only a few select patients. One of whom was Elton Lybarger.

“There it is again—” McVey finished reading and dropped the papers on the edge of the bed.

“The Nazi connection,” Remmer said.

McVey looked to Osborn. “Why would a doctor spend seven months in a hospital sixty-five hundred miles from home overseeing the recovery of one stroke patient? That make any sense to you?”

“Not unless it was an extremely severe stroke and Lybarger was highly eccentric or neurotic, or his family was, and they were willing to pay through the nose for that kind of care.”

“Doctor,” McVey said emphatically. “Lybarger has no family. Remember? And if he was sick enough to need a physician at his side for seven months, he would have been in no shape to have set it up himself, at least not in the beginning.”

“Somebody did. Somebody had to send Salettl and his medical crew to the U.S. and pay for it,” Noble added.

“Scholl,” Remmer said.

“Why not?” McVey ran a hand through his hair. “He owns Lybarger’s Swiss estate. Why shouldn’t we expect “he’d run his other affairs as well? Especially where his health was concerned.”

Noble wearily lifted a cup of tea from a room service tray at his elbow. “All of which brings up back to why?”

McVey eased down on the edge of the bed and for the umpteenth time picked up the five-page, single-spaced fax of the background dossiers on the Charlottenburg guests sent from Bad Godesberg. There was nothing in any of them to suggest they were anything other than successful German citizens. For a moment his thoughts went to the few names they had not been able to identify. Yes, he thought, the answer could be among them, but the odds were heavily against it. His gut still told him the answer was in front of them, somewhere in the information they already had.

“Manfred,” he said, looking at Remmer. “We turn around, we poke, we look, we discuss, we get highly confidential information on private citizens through one of the world’s most effective police agencies, and what happens? We keep coming up empty. We can’t even open the door.

“But we know there’s something there. Maybe it has something to do with what’s going on tomorrow night, maybe it doesn’t. But yes or no, sometime tomorrow, writ in hand, we’re going to put our big fat fannies on the line, corner Scholl and ask him some questions. We’re going to get one shot at it before the lawyers take over. And if we don’t make him sweat enough to roll over right then and confess, or at least bend him enough so that he gives us something we can use to keep coming after him, if we don’t know more at the end than we do at the beginning—”

“McVey,” Remmer said carefully, “why are you calling me Manfred when you always call me Manny?”

“Because you’re German and I’m singling you out. If this Lybarger thing should turn out to be a gathering of some kind of Nazi-like political force—what would they be about? Another shot at exterminating Jews?” McVey’s voice became softer, yet more passionate. It wasn’t that he expected an answer so much as an explanation. “Funding a military machine to blow through Europe and Russia with designs on the rest of us? A replay of what happened before? Why would anybody want that? Tell me, Manfred, because I don’t know.”

“I—” Remmer clenched a fist. “—don’t know either. . . .”

“You don’t.”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

The room was deathly silent. There were four men in it and not one moved. They barely breathed. Then Osborn thought he saw Remmer take a step backward.

“Come on, Manfred McVey said lightly. But it wasn’t intended lightly. He’d hit a nerve and he’d meant to, and it had caught Remmer off guard.

“It’s unfair, Manfred, I know,” McVey said quietly. “But I’m asking anyway. Because it just might help.”

“McVey, I can’t—”

“Yes you can.”

Remmer glanced around the room. “Weltanschauung,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “Hitler’s view of life. That it was an eternal struggle where only the strongest survived and the strongest of the strong ruled. To him, the Germans had once been the strongest of the strong. Therefore destined to rule. But that strength had become weakened over the generations because the true (Germans race mixed with others far less superior. Hitler believed that throughout history the mixing of bloodlines was the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures. That was why Germany lost the first war, because the Aryan had already given up the purity of his blood. To Hitler, the Germans were the highest species on earth and could again become what they once were—but only through exceedingly careful breeding.”

The hotel room had become a theater with an audience “of three, and Remmer the sole actor on the stage. He stood with his shoulders thrown back. His eyes glistened and sweat stood out on his forehead. His voice had risen from a whisper to an oratory so concise it seemed, for the moment, to have been learned. Or, more rightly, learned, and then consciously forgotten.

“At the beginning of the Nazi movement, there were eighty-some million Germans; within a hundred years he envisioned two hundred and fifty million, maybe more. For that, Germany would need Lebensraum—living space, a lot of it, enough to assure the nation room for total freedom of existence on its own terms. But living space and the soil beneath it, Hitler said, exist only for the people who possess the force to take them. By this, he meant that the new Reich must again set itself along the road of the Teutonic knights. Obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow, and bread for the German stomach.”

“So they set themselves back on the straight and narrow by wiping out six million Jews to keep them from sleeping around?” McVey sounded like an old country lawyer, as if somehow he’d missed something and didn’t get it. He played it light because he knew Remmer would push back, defending what had happened. Defending his guilt.

“You have to understand what was going on. This was after a shattering defeat in World War One: the Treaty of Versailles had taken away our dignity, there was huge inflation, mass unemployment. Who was going to challenge a leader who was giving us back our pride and self-respect?— He enamored us and we became swept up in it, lost in it. Look at the old films, the photographs. Look at the faces of the people. They loved their Führer. They loved his words and the fire behind them. And because of that, it was totally forgotten that they were the words of an uneducated, demented man—” Remmer’s expression went blank and he stopped, as if he’d suddenly forgotten his train of thought.

“Why?” McVey hissed like an offstage prompter. “We’ve had the history lesson, Manfred. Now tell us the truth. Why did you get swept up in Hitler’s words? Why did you get lost in the ideas of and passion of an uneducated, demented man? You’re blaming it all on one guy.

Remmer’s eyes darted around the room. He’d gone as far as he could, or would.

“The Nazis were more than Hitler, Manfred.” McVey was no longer the old country lawyer who didn’t get it, he was a voice piercing Remmer’s subconscious, demanding he dig deeper. “Powerful as he was, it wasn’t just him—”

Remmer was staring at the floor. Slowly he raised his “head, and when he did his eyes were filled with horror. “Like a religion, we believe the myths. They are primitive, tribal, inbred . . . and they lie just beneath the surface waiting for the moment in history when a charismatic leader will rise up to give them life. . . . Hitler was the last of them, and to this day we would follow him any-where. . . . It is the old culture, McVey—of Prussia and long before. Teutonic knights riding out of the mists. Full in armor. Swords thrust high in iron-covered fists. Thundering hooves shaking the ground, trampling everything in their path. Conquerors. Rulers. Our land. Our destiny. We are superior. The master race. Pure-blooded German. Blond hair, blue eyes and all.”

Remmer fixed McVey with a stare. Then, turning away, shook out a cigarette, lit it and crossed the room to sit down on a couch by himself. It was as far away as he could get from the others. Hunching forward, he pulled an ashtray toward him and looked at the floor. The cigarette between his nicotine-stained fingers remained untouched. The smoke from it wisped toward the ceiling.