The Day After Tomorrow

103

OSBORN LAY in the dim light of daybreak listening to Noble’s heavy breathing as it rose from the bed across from him. McVey and Remmer were asleep in the other room. They’d turned out the lights at 3:30, it was now a quarter to six. He doubted he’d slept two hours.

Since they’d been in Berlin, he’d felt McVey’s growing frustration, even despair, as they’d tried to tear away the layers protecting Erwin Scholl. It was the reason McVey had put Remmer on the spot, trying, however brutally, to uncover some essential none of them had been able to grasp. And he had—it wasn’t Teutonic knights riding out of the mist Remmer had been talking about. It was arrogance. The idea that they or anyone could dub themselves the “master race” and then set out to destroy everyone else in order to prove it. The word fit Scholl like a condom, the conceit of a man who could manipulate and murder and at the same time tout himself as father confessor to kings and presidents. It was an attitude they would have to deal with when they met Scholl face-to-face. Yet that’s all it was, an angle, an edge up. It wasn’t concrete.

Lybarger was. And Osborn was certain he remained central to everything. Yet there seemed to be nothing more they could uncover about him than the little they already had. The only thing of promise was that Dr. Salettl was on the Charlottenburg guest list, but so far the BKA had been unable to find him anywhere. Austria, Germany, or Switzerland. If he was coming, where was he?

Somehow, some way, there had to be more. But what? And where to find it?

* * *

McVey was awake, making notes, as Osborn came through the door.

“We keep assuming Lybarger has no family. But how do we know for certain?” McVey said forcefully.

“I’m an Austrian physician in Carmel, California, working with a gravely ill Swiss patient for seven months. Little by little he’s getting better. A level of trust is developing. If he had a wife, child, brother—”

“He’d want them to know how he was,” McVey filled in.

“Yes. And if he was a stroke victim like Lybarger, he would have trouble with his speech and probably his handwriting. Communicating would be a problem, so he’d, ask me to do it for him. And I would. Not a letter, but a call. At least once a month, probably more.”

Remmer, awake now, sat up. “Telephone company records.”

Little more than an hour later, a fax came in from FBI Special Agent Fred Hanley in Los Angeles.

Page after page of telephone calls initiated from Salettl’s private line at the Palo Colorado Hospital in Carmel, California. Seven hundred and thirty-six calls in all. Hanley had circled in red the more than fifteen separate numbers around the world made to Erwin Scholl, most of the rest .were either local, or to Austria or Zurich. Interspersed among them, however, were twenty-five calls made to country code 49—Germany. The city code was 30— Berlin.

McVey put down the pages and turned to Osborn. “You’re on a roll, Doctor.” He glanced at Remmer. “It’s your town, what do we do?”

“Same as L.A. We look her up.”

7:45 A.M.

“This Karolin Henniger,” McVey said, as Remmer pulled the Mercedes up in front of the expensive antique gallery on Kantstrasse. “I don’t think we can assume she’s a direct connection to Lybarger. She could be a relative of Salettl’s, a friend, even a lover.”

“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” McVey opened the door and got out. The plan was his and McVey let him run with it. He was an American doctor trying to locate a Dr. Salettl for a colleague in California. Remmer was a German friend, along to translate if Karolin Henniger, did not speak English. Whatever she said, they’d take it from there.

McVey and Noble watched from the Mercedes as they went into the building. Across the street, backup BKA detectives kept surveillance from a light green BMW.

Earlier, as Remmer had-run down Karolin Henniger’s name and address, McVey had called an old friend in Los Angeles, Cardinal Charles O’Connel. Scholl, McVey knew, was Catholic and a major fund-raiser for both the New York and Los Angeles archdioceses and therefore would know O’Connel well. This was the one area where Scholl was like any other Catholic. If a cardinal made a personal request, it was granted, graciously and without question. McVey was in Berlin, he’d told O’Connel, and asked if the cardinal could arrange a late-afternoon meeting between himself and Scholl, who was also in Berlin. It was important. O’Connel did not ask why, only said he would do what he could and get back.

“It’s important to understand,” Remmer said, as he and Osborn climbed up the narrow stairs to the apartments on the gallery’s top floor, “this woman has committed no crime and is under no obligation to answer questions. If she doesn’t want to talk, she doesn’t have to.”

“Fine.” Legal restrictions were something Osborn didn’t want to think about. They were running out of time; getting some kind of a step up on Scholl was all that mattered.

Apartments 1 and 2 were immediately right and left at the top of the stairs. Apartment 3, at the end of a short hallway, was Karolin Henniger’s.

Osborn reached the door first. Glancing at Remmer, he knocked. For a moment there was silence, then they heard footsteps, the dead bolt was thrown and the door opened to the chain lock. An attractive woman in a business suit looked out at them. She had short salt-and-pepper hair and was probably in her mid forties.

“Karolin Henniger?” Osborn asked politely.

She looked at Osborn, then past him to Remmer. “Ja—” she said.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes.” She glanced at Remmer again. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name is Osborn. I’m a doctor from the United States. We’re trying to locate someone you might know— a Doctor Helmuth Salettl.”

Suddenly the woman went white. “I know no one by that name,” she said. “No one, I’m sorry. Auf Wiedersehen!”

Stepping back, she shut the door. They heard the dead bolt fall and she shouted someone’s name.

Osborn pounded on the door. “Please, we need your help!”

From inside, they heard her talking, her voice trailing away. Then came the distant thud of a door slam.

“She’s going out the back.” Osborn turned for the stairs.

Remmer put out a hand, restraining him. “Doctor, I warned you. She’s within her rights, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Maybe you can’t!” Osborn pushed past him.

McVey and Noble were in an exchange about the likelihood that “Salettl himself might be the surgeon responsible for the headless bodies when Osborn came out the front door on the run.

“Come on!” he yelled, then cut a corner and disappeared down an alley.

Osborn was going at full speed when he saw them. Karolin Henniger had unlocked the door to a beige Volkswagen van and was hurrying a young boy inside.

“Wait!” he yelled. “Wait! Please!”

Osborn reached the car just as she fired the engine.

“Please, I have to talk to you!” he begged. There was a screech of tires and the car accelerated forward. “Don’t!” Osborn was running alongside. “I won’t harm you—”

It was too late. Osborn saw McVey and Noble jump back as the car reached the end of the alley. Then it fish-tailed onto the street and was gone.

“We took a chance, it didn’t work. Sometimes it doesn’t,” McVey said, minutes later, as they got into the Mercedes and Remmer drove off.

Osborn looked at Remmer in the mirror; he was angry. “You saw her face when I mentioned Salettl. She knows, dammit. About Salettl and, I bet, Lybarger.”

“Maybe she does, Doctor,” McVey said quietly. “But she’s not Albert Merriman, and you can’t try to kill her to find out.