The Day After Tomorrow

124

“PRIVATE ENTERPRISE,” Lybarger said into the microphone, his voice stabbing to the farthest corners of the gold and green-marbled rococo fantasy of the Golden Gallery, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy. It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.”

Pausing, he stood with both hands on the podium, studying the faces in front of him. His speech, although changed somewhat, was not original, and most there knew it. The original had been given to a similar group of business leaders on February 20, 1933, The speaker allying himself with moneyed institutions that wintery night had been Germany’s newly entrusted chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

On the dais, Uta Baur leaned forward, her strong chin resting on her hands, wholly enraptured by the wonder of what she was witnessing, the agony, doubt, the secret labor of fifty years standing alone, speaking triumphantly before her. Beside her, Gustav Dortmund, chief of the Bundesbank, sat ramrod straight, emotionless, an observer, nothing more. Yet inside, he could feel his bowels churning with the excitement of what was at hand.

Farther down on the dais, Eric and Edward, fists clenched, neck muscles pressing against the starch of their tight collars, hunched forward like matched mannequins, hanging on Lybarger’s every word. Theirs was a different exaltation. Who Lybarger was, within days, one of them would become. Which one was a decision yet to be made. And as the moment wound closer, as it did now with every word, every sentence, the anticipation of that moment when the choice would be made became almost unbearable.

HYDROGEN CYANIDE: an extremely poisonous, mobile volatile liquid or gas that has the odor of bitter almonds; a blood agent that interferes with oxygen in the blood tissues, literally taking the oxygen out of the blood and, in essence, suffocating the victim.

“All worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen, the pure German people!” Lybarger’s words echoed off the hallowed walls of the Golden Gallery and into the hearts and minds of the people who sat within them.

“We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced with an iron fist! And in that we will restore our power, military and otherwise, to the highest levels—There will be no retreat!”

As Lybarger finished, the entire room came to its feet in a thundering ovation that made the one at his entrance seem like well-mannered applause. Then, perhaps because of his proximity to the rear of the room and the doors leading out of it, he was the first to hear what the others could not.

“Listen!” he said over the microphone, holding up both hands for silence.

“Listen! Please!”

It was a moment before anyone knew what he was talking about. Did he have more to say? What did he mean? Then they understood. He wasn’t asking them to be quiet. He was telling them something was happening.

A series of muted whirrings was followed by a half-dozen heavy mechanical thuds, and the room shook as if someone had pulled down weighted blinds around the outside of it. Then it stopped and everything, was silent.

Uta Baur was the first to get up. Moving behind Eric and Edward on the dais, she passed Dortmund and walked down the short staircase to an exit door in the corner of the room. Throwing it open, she suddenly stepped back, her hand clamped over her mouth. Frau Dortmund screamed. Where the open doorway should have been was a huge metal door, closed tight and locked solidly in place.

Dortmund came quickly down the stairs. “Was ist es?” What is this?

Moving to the door, he shoved at it. Nothing happened. A wave of uneasiness crossed the room.

Getting up quickly, Eric pushed past the anxious, jeweled Frau Dortmund. Climbing the podium, he took the microphone from Lybarger.

“Be calm. A security door has come down by accident. Walk to the main door and file out in orderly fashion.”

But the main door to the Golden Gallery was sealed the same way. As was every other door in the room.

“Was geht hier vor?”—What’s going on here?—Hans Dabritz yelled.

Major General Matthias Noll pushed back his chair and went to the closest door. Using his shoulder he tried to force it outward but he had no more luck than Dortmund had a moment earlier. Henryk Steiner added his stocky shoulder. Together he and Noll rammed the door. Two others joined them, but the door didn’t budge.

Then came the faintest scent of burnt almonds. People looked at each other and sniffed. What was it? Where was it coming from?

“Ach, mein Gott!” Konrad Peiper shrieked, as a tiny mist of amethyst-blue crystals suddenly rained down on his table from an air conditioning vent in the ceiling. “Cyanide gas!”

The odor became stronger as more of the crystals found their marks, vats within the ventilation pathwork containing distilled water and acid that would dissolve the crystals into deadly cyanide gas.

Suddenly people were crowding back from the ventilation openings. Pressed against the walls, each other, even the closed and locked steel doors, they stared up in silent disbelief at the grated vents so tastefully and carefully concealed in the gilded rococo ornamentation and green marbled walls of the grand eighteenth-century structure.

They were waiting to die. But not one of them believed it. How could it be? How could so many of Germany’s most influential and celebrated citizens, bejeweled and bedecked in clothing the worth of which would feed half the world for a year, and protected by a virtual army of security personnel, be helplessly trapped in a room in one of the most historic buildings in the nation, waiting for enough cyanide gas to collect to kill them all?

Outrageous. Impossible. A joke.

“Es ist ein Streich!” —It’s a prank!—Hans Dabritz laughed. “Ein Streich!”

Others laughed too. Edward moved to his chair on the dais and picked up his glass.

“Zu Elton Lybargerr!” he cried. “Zu Elton Lybarger!”

“Zu Elton Lybargerr!” Uta Baur lifted her glass.

Elton Lybarger stood at the podium and watched Konrad and Margarete Peiper, Gertrude Biermann, Rudolf Kaes, Henryk Steiner and Gustav Dortmund move back to their tables and raise their glasses.

“Zu Elton Lybarger!” The Golden Gallery shook with salutation.

Then it began.

Uta Baur’s head suddenly snapped back, then fell forward, her biceps and upper back trembling violently. Across the room Margarete Peiper did the same. Falling to the floor, she shrieked, writhing in agony, her muscles and nerves reacting in violent spasms, as if she were being jolted with fifty thousand volts of electricity, or thousands of insects had suddenly been released under her skin and were madly devouring one another in a frenzied race to survive.

Suddenly, and en masse, those who could stampeded toward the main door. Clawing and mauling each other, they tore at the massive steel door and the ornate wood framing around it. Gasping for air. Screaming for help and mercy. They dug fingers, nails, even gold watches into the unforgiving metal, hoping somehow to loosen it. The pounding of fists, shoe heels, even each other, reverberated over and over against it until all were finally overcome by the same writhing and horrid convulsions.

Of them all, Elton Lybarger was the last to die, and he did so sitting in a chair in the center of the room staring at the death massing around him. He understood, as they all did, finally, that this was a payback. They had let it happen because they didn’t believe it could. And when ultimately they did, it was too late. The same as it had been at the extermination camps.

“Treblinka. Chelmno. Sobibór,” Lybarger said, as the gas began to invade him. “Belzeč, Maidanek—” Suddenly there was a twitch of his hands and he inhaled deeply. Then his head snapped back and his eyes rolled into it. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . . ,” he whispered. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . .”