The Day After Tomorrow

140

COMRADE SENIOR Lieutenant they’d called him in the Spetsnaz. Who and what was Von Holden now? Still Leiter der Sicherheit, head of security, or a last, lone soldier on the most critical assignment of his life? Both, he thought. Both.

Beside him, Vera stared out at passing countryside, content, he guessed, simply to pass the time. Von Holden shifted in his seat and looked out. Moments before they had “ changed trains at Grindelwald, and now he heard the grind of the cogs as they took hold of the center rail and the train pushed steeply upward through a forest of lush alpine meadows dappled with wildflowers and grazing dairy cattle.

In another twenty minutes they’d reach Kleine Scheidegg where the meadows would abruptly end against the base of the Alps. There they would change once more, this time to the brown-and-cream-colored train of the Jungfrau Railway that would take them up into the marrow of the Alps, past the stops of Eigerwand and Eismeer, and finally into Jungfraujoch station. To Von Holden’s left was the Eiger, and beyond it the snow-covered summit of the Monch. Beyond them, not yet in view, but as familiar as the lines in his hand, was the Jungfrau. Its summit at thirteen and a half thousand feet was nearly half a mile higher than rail’s end at Jungfraujoch station. Looking back, he studied the Eiger’s harrowing north face, a sheer limestone cliff rising fifty-four hundred feet straight from the Eiger meadows to the top, and thought of the fifty or more true professionals who had died trying to climb it. It was a risk, like anything else. You prepared, you did your best, and then something unforeseen happened and you fell. Death, all around you, simply closed in.

Thun had been the first logical place the police would have intercepted the train. That they hadn’t left only Interlaken. But there had been no police there either, and that meant however Osborn had managed to catch up, he’d done it alone. How many trains per day passed through Interlaken, Von Holden didn’t know. What he did know was that a train for Lucerne had left ten minutes after his train had arrived from Bern. Lucerne was a major connecting point for destinations as disparate as Amsterdam, Belgium, Austria, Luxembourg and Italy. Jungfraujoch was a side trek, an interlude for tourists, Alpine hikers or serious mountaineers. Von Holden was a man on the run from the law and would hardly be expected to take a leisurely afternoon’s excursion into the mountains, especially where the destination was a dead end. No, he would be trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as possible. And if, in doing that, he could cross the border into a different country, so much the better.

Von Holden had abandoned the idea of killing Osborn at Interlaken as too risky. Instead, he’d turned Osborn’s trick against him and had him paged, with the intention of both throwing him off and frightening him. Muddle whatever cunning and instinct that had brought him this far and in the process send him scurrying, none too coherently, after the only thing left. Logic. After arriving from Bern, there were only two ways out of Interlaken, the train up into the mountains or the narrow-gauge train to Lucerne. And a train for Lucerne, Osborn would learn, had left Interlaken only minutes after Von Holden had arrived from Bern. Von Holden would have no choice but to be on it. Accepting that, Osborn would rush onto the next train after it in pursuit of a shadow.

Osborn jumped from the train at Grindelwald station and quickly crossed to the waiting cars of the train that would connect with one at Kleine Scheidegg and take him the final leg to Jungfraujoch. This time there was no hesitation. He was certain Von Holden would be on the train ahead of him, not lying in wait here. Von Holden was arrogant enough to think he’d thrown him off at Interlaken and believe he was either still there, frightened and wondering what to do, or, better yet, had done the most obvious and followed the train Von Holden should have been On to Lucerne.

Jungfraujoch station, he’d learned in a brief conversation with one of the American railroad buffs on board, consisted of a tiny post office and souvenir shop, a tourist exhibit called the Ice Palace with ice sculptures literally cut into glacier walls on which the station was built, a small, automated weather station, and the Inn-Above-the-Clouds restaurant. Most of these were on different levels and served by elevators. Other than that there was nothing but the mountain and the desolate expanse of the great Aletsch glacier that lay before it. If Von Holden was meeting someone to transfer the contents of the rucksack, it would be within the confines of the station. Who that Would be, or where it might take place, he had no idea. But there was nothing he could do until he got there.

With a sharp, grate of engine cogs, the train leaned into a curve, and for the first time Osborn saw the full expanse of the mountains above him, their peaks stark white against the late afternoon sky. Closest was the Eiger, and even at this distance he could see wind-driven snow devils dance just below its summit.

“We’re going straight up there, once we get past Kleine Scheidegg, darlin’.” A smiling bleached blonde, one of the American railroaders, was talking to him, referring to the summit he was looking at. It wasn’t hard to see she’d had a face-lift, nor, as she patted his knee with a ringless left hand, that she was single and making a point of it. “Right up into the wall of Eiger and a tunnel inside where you can look out and see this whole valley all the way back to Interlaken.”

Osborn smiled and thanked her for the information, then looked at her blankly until she took her hand away. It wasn’t that aggressive women bothered him, it was that he was thinking about something else. Wishing that besides McVey’s .38, he had at least one vial of the muscle-relaxing succinylcholine he’d prepared in Paris for his attack on Albert Merriman.