The Day After Tomorrow

131

VON HOLDEN woke precisely at six. Across from him, Vera still slept. Getting up, he went into the small bathroom and closed the door.

Washing his face, he shaved with the toiletries provided. As he did, his thoughts went to Charlottenburg. And the ‘more he considered what had happened, the more he believed the betrayal had to have come from someone, maybe several, within the Organization. Thinking back, he remembered Salettl’s ghastly appearance outside the mausoleum. How nervous he’d been when he’d told Von Holden the police were there with a warrant for Scholl. How deliberate he’d seemed when he’d ordered him to take the box and wait in the Royal Apartments, thereby putting him in a situation where he would have died had he not seized the initiative and left.

Yet the idea that Salettl-could have been the one seemed absurd. The doctor had been with “Übermorgen” since its inception in the late 1930s. He had overseen every medical aspect of it, supervised the surgical beheadings and the experimental operations. Why, at the height of everything he’d devoted himself to for more than half a century, would he suddenly turn and destroy it all? It made no sense. Still, who else had as much access as he, not just to Charlottenburg, but to the deepest inner workings of “Übermorgen”?

The sound of the train’s whistle brought Von Holden out of his reverie. In forty minutes they would arrive in Frankfurt. He’d already decided to avoid the airports and rely on the train as far as it would take him—which was, with any luck, the rest of the way. At 7:46 there was an Inter City Express that would get them to Bern, Switzerland, at twelve minutes after noon. From there it would be an hour and a half to Interlaken and then the last changes to the cogwheel trains of the Bernese-Oberland Railway for the breathtaking climb into the Alps and then the final ascent to the top on the Jungfrau Railway.