The Day After Tomorrow

125

REMMER HAD no idea what to expect as he and the two BKA detectives who had seen Schneider to the helicopter turned into the Charlottenburg courtyard and got out of the BMW. Immediately they were approached by uniformed security guards.

“We’re back,” Remmer said, flashing his I.D., and pushing past them toward the main entrance. The only hard information he had was that neither McVey nor Osborn had come out of the palace. With any luck, he thought as he reached the door, McVey and Scholl are still downstairs having at each other. Either that or McVey is surrounded by a herd of criminal lawyers demanding his scalp, in which case he will be in prodigious need of help.

It was then that the first incendiary device went off. Remmer, the two detectives, and the security guards were thrown to the ground as a fusillade of mortar and stone rained down around them. Immediately a dozen more fire bombs detonated. One after the other. Rapid-fire, like a string of high-explosive firecrackers, they circled the palace’s entire upper perimeter on the side housing the Golden Gallery. Bursting inward, the charges ignited a furnace of gas jets embedded in the gilded molding along the room’s floors and ceiling and in the apartments immediately adjacent.

McVey pulled back against the door, forcing Goetz’s body aside, giving them enough room to get out. The explosions had toppled books from shelves, shattered priceless eighteenth-century porcelain and cracked one of the marble fireplaces. With a final tug, McVey forced the door open. A blast of heat hit him, and he saw the hallway ouside and the stairway beyond it wholly engulfed in flame. Slamming the door, he turned in time to see a wall of fire race down the outside of the building, sealing off any chance they might have to escape into the garden through the French doors. Then he saw Osborn, on his hands and knees, blindly tearing through Scholl’s pockets like some madman rifling a corpse for whatever plunder he could find.

“What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here!”

Osborn ignored him. Leaving Scholl, he began the same with Salettl, tearing through his jacket, his shirt, his pants. It was as if the fire raging around them didn’t exist.

“Osborn! They’re dead! Leave them, for Chrissake!” McVey was on top of him, wrestling him to his feet. The dead men’s blood smeared Osborn’s hands and face. He was staring crazily, almost as if he were the one who had done it. He was demanding an answer to his father’s death from the only men left who could give it. That they were dead was secondary. They were the end of the line and there was no other place to go.

Suddenly there was a rocking blast overheard as a gas conduit exploded with the heat. Instantaneously the ceiling ignited in a rolling fireball that went from one end of the’ room to the other in a millisecond. A second later the firestorm started by roaring gas knocked them off their feet, sucking everything in the room toward its center to feed it. Osborn vanished from sight and McVey grabbed onto a leg of the conference table, burying his head in the crook of his arm. For the second time that night he found himself surrounded by fire, this one a holocaust a thousand times more furious than the first.

“Osborn! OSBORN!” he screamed.

The heat was unbearable. His facial skin, so badly burned in the first fire, was now being literally fried against his skull. What little air there was seemed to be coming from the interior of a furnace. Any breath at all seared the lungs raw.

“Osborn!” McVey cried out again. The thundering of the flames was like roaring surf. There was no way anyone could be heard. Then he caught the odor of burnt almonds. “Cyanide!” he said out loud.

He saw something move in front of him. “OSBORN! IT’S CYANIDE GAS! OSBORN! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” But it wasn’t Osborn. It was his wife, Judy. She was sitting on the front porch of their cabin above Big Bear Lake. The peaks, purple behind her, were touched with snow at the crest. The grass was long and golden and the air around her was punctuated with tiny insects. It was clean and pure and she was smiling. “Judy?” he heard himself say. Suddenly someone else’s face dropped into his, as close as you could get. He didn’t recognize it. The eyes were red and the hair was singed and the face was like blackened Creole fish.

“Give me your hand!” the face yelled.

McVey was still watching Judy.

“Goddammit!” the face screamed. “Give me your hand!”

Then McVey drew himself away and reached Out. He felt a hand, then heard breaking glass. Suddenly he was up and half on his feet. The face had an arm under him and they were climbing out through shattered French doors. Then he saw thick fog and cold air filled his lungs!

“Breathe! Breathe deep! Come on! Breathe, you son of a bitch! Keep on breathing!” He couldn’t see him but he was sure Osborn was yelling at him. He knew it was Osborn. It had to be. It was his voice.