The Day After Tomorrow

144

“A FIRE in the weather station, sir. It happened last night. No one was hurt but the station is beyond repair,” a railroad worker had said of the pile of charred debris stacked against the side of the tunnel.

Fire! Last night. The same as Charlottenburg. The same as der Garten. Von Holden had been increasingly apprehensive as they’d neared the Jungfraujoch station and he was fearful the attacks would come again. The source of his concern, he’d thought, was not so much Osborn as Vera. For the last part of the trip she’d been quiet, almost detached, and his sense had been that she’d caught on and was trying to make up her mind what to do. He’d countered that quickly by moving her out of the train and toward the elevator the moment they’d arrived. They were no more than three minutes from the weather station, four at most. Once there, everything would be all right because very shortly afterward she would be dead. It was then he’d seen the debris and been told of the fire. The destruction of the weather station was something he’d never considered.

“That’s where Paul was, up there—” “

“Yes,” Von Holden said. They were outside in the growing twilight, climbing a long series of steps toward the burned-out shell of what had been the weather station. Behind them was the brightly lit massive cement and steel structure that housed the restaurant and Ice Palace. On their right, falling away beneath them, was the ten-mile-long Aletsch glacier, a frozen, twisted, now darkening sea of ice and snow. Above them rose the nearly fourteen thousand-foot Jungfrau peak, its snowy crest blood red with the setting sun.

“Why are there no rescue workers? No firemen? No heavy equipment?” Vera was angry, afraid, incredulous, and Von Holden was grateful for it. It told him that no matter what else she might have been thinking, her main concern was still Osborn. That, in itself, would keep her off guard if he couldn’t reach the inner passageways he hoped had survived the fire and they had to go back outside.

“There is no rescue attempt because no one knows they are here. The weather station is automated. No one goes there except an occasional technician. Our levels are belowground. Emergency generators automatically seal each floor in case of fire.”

Then they were at the top and Von Holden tore aside a heavy sheet of plywood covering the entrance and they pushed past a frame of charred timbers. Inside it was dark, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and molten steel. The fire had been extremely hot. Hotter than any fire started by accident. A melted steel door in the back of an instrument closet attested to it. Finding a crowbar left by the demolition crew, Von Holden tried to pry it open but it was impossible.

“Salettl, you bastard,” he said under his breath. In disgust he threw the bar aside. There was no need even to attempt to open it; he knew what he would find inside. A ceramic-lined, six-foot-high titanium tunnel, melted into an impassable mass.

“Come on,” he said, “there is another entrance.” If the lower levels had been sealed off from the fire as they should have been, everything would still be all right.

Leading the way outside, Von Holden let Vera go down the steps ahead of him. As she did, the last rays of the sun touched her hair, bathing her in soft vermilion. For the briefest moment Von Holden wondered what it would be like to be an ordinary man. And in that he thought of Joanna, and the truth of what he had said to her in Berlin, that he didn’t know if he was capable of love and she had replied, “You are—” It was a thought out of time and it led to another: that however simple and plain she was, at heart she was truly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever known and he was astonished to think that maybe she was right, that he was capable of love and the love he held was for her.

Then his eyes were drawn to a large clock on the wall at the bottom of the steps. Its minute hand stood straight up. It was exactly five o’clock. At the same moment came the announcement of an arriving train. As quickly his dream vanished and something else stood in its place.

Osborn.