The Day After Tomorrow

145

OSBORN STOOD back from the door, letting the other passengers go out first. Absently, he wiped perspiration from his upper lip. If he was trembling, he didn’t notice.

“Good luck, darlin’.” Connie touched his arm on the way out and then she was gone, following the last of the railroaders toward an open elevator at the far end of the tracks. Osborn looked around. The car was empty and he was alone. Lifting out the .38, he flipped open the chamber. Six shots. McVey had left it fully loaded.

Closing the chamber, he stuck the gun in his waistband and he let his jacket slide across it. Then, taking a deep breath, he stepped sharply from the train. Immediately he felt the cold. It was the kind of mountain cold you felt on ski trips when you stepped from a heated gondola and out into the half-open barn where the gondolas stopped.

He was surprised to see a second train in the station and he had to think that since the last train left at six, the second train must be for the help who would go down later, after they’d closed up.

Crossing the platform, Osborn joined several British tourists and took the same elevator Connie and the railroaders had taken. The car went one stop and the door opened, revealing a large room with a cafeteria and souvenir shop.

The Brits stepped out and Osborn went with them. Dropping back, he stopped at the souvenir shop and absently looked over an assortment of Jungfraujoch T-shirts, postcards and candy while at the same time trying to study the faces of the people crowding the cafeteria farther down the room. Almost immediately a short, chubby boy of maybe ten walked up with his parents. The family was American and both the father and boy wore identical Chicago Bulls jackets. In that one single instant Osborn felt more alone than at any time in his life. He wasn’t quite sure why was it that he had so distanced himself from the rest of the world that death, if it came at Von Holden’s hands or even Vera’s, would go wholly unnoticed, that no one would care that he had ever been? Or had the vision of the boy and his father only magnified the bitterness of what had been taken from him? Or was it that other thing, the thing that had eluded him his entire life, a family of his own?

Pulling himself from the depths of his own emotion, Osborn studied the room once more. If Von Holden or Vera were there, he didn’t see them. Leaving the souvenir area, he crossed to the elevator. Almost immediately the door opened and an elderly couple walked out. Scanning the room a last time, Osborn went into the elevator and pressed the button for the next floor. The door closed and he started upward. Several seconds later the elevator stopped, the door slid open, and he looked out at a world of blue ice. This was the Ice Palace, a long semicircular tunnel cut into glacial ice and filled with caverns holding ice sculptures. Ahead of him, he could see the last of the railroaders, Connie among them, as they walked along enchanted by the sculptures—of people, of animals, of a full-size car, a replica of a bar, complemented with chairs and tables and an old-fashioned whiskey barrel.

Osborn hesitated, then stepped out and started down the corridor, trying to blend in, to look like anybody else. As he walked, he searched the faces of tourists coming toward him. Maybe he’d made a mistake not staying with the, railroaders. Reaching out, he ran his fingers delicately along the side of the corridor, as if he doubted it was ice and might instead be some manufactured product. But it was ice. The same as on the ceiling and floor. The surrounding of ice intensified the thought that this place could have been the site of the experimental surgeries done at extreme cold.

But where? Jungfraujoch was small. Surgeries, especially surgeries as delicate as these would be, required space. Equipment rooms, prep room and surgery rooms, intensive-care post-op rooms. Rooms to house the staff. How could it be done here?

The only place out of bounds, Connie had told him, was the weather station. Fifteen feet away a Swiss guide stood by as teenagers posed for a photograph in the ice tunnel. Crossing to her, Osborn asked directions to the weather station. It was upstairs, she said. Near the restaurant and the outside terrace. But it was closed because of a fire.

“Fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did it happen?”

“Last night, sir.”

Last night. The same as Charlottenburg.

“Thank you.” Osborn continued on. Unless it was some great coincidence, what happened there, happened here. Meaning whatever had been destroyed there had been destroyed here, too. But Von Holden wouldn’t have known that or he wouldn’t have come, unless it was to meet someone. Suddenly something made Osborn look up. Vera and Von Holden stood at the end of the corridor bathed in the eerie blue light created by the ice. They looked at him a half second more, then abruptly turned down the corridor and vanished.

Osborn’s heart felt as if it was trying to pound through his ears. Gathering himself, he turned to the guide.

“Down there,” he pointed to where the two had stood. “Where does that lead?”

“Outside to the ski school and the dogsled area. But of course they are closed now for the day.”

“Thank you.” Osborn’s voice was barely a whisper. His feet were like stone, as if they had frozen to the ice beneath them. His hand slid into his jacket and took hold of the .38. The ice walls glistened cobalt blue and he could see his breath. Grasping the hand rail he moved cautiously ahead until he reached the turn in the tunnel where Von Holden and Vera had vanished.

The corridor ahead was empty, and at the end was a door. A sign for the ski school pointed toward it. There was another for dogsled rides.

You want me to follow you, don’t you? Osborn’s mind raced. That’s the idea. Through that door. Outside. Away from other people. Go out there! You do that, he’s got you. You won’t come in again. Von Holden will take what’s left of you and throw you over the side someplace. Into some deep crevasse. They won’t find you till spring. They may never find you.

“What are you doing? Where are you taking me?” Vera and Von Holden entered a small, claustrophobic room of ice in a passageway off the main corridor. He had held her arm going down the passage and stopped her the moment they’d seen Osborn. Purposely he waited until he felt her about to call out, then he’d pulled her around and they’d gone quickly back, turning into a side tunnel and then into the room.

“The fire was set. They are here, waiting for us. For you, for the documents I have.”

“Paul—”

“Perhaps he is one of them as well.”

“No. Never! He escaped somehow—”

“Did he?”

“He had to have—” Suddenly Vera flashed on the men posing as Frankfurt police moments before Von Holden shot them. “Where is the female officer? The policewoman?” they had asked.

“There is none,” Von Holden answered. “There was no time.”

It hadn’t been another fugitive that concerned them, it had been procedure! A male detective would not transport a-female prisoner alone in a closed compartment without the accompaniment of a policewoman!

“We have to find out about Osborn, or neither of us will leave here alive.” Von Holden’s breath hung in the air and he smiled gently as he came toward her. The nylon rucksack was over his left shoulder, his right hand at his waist. His manner was easy, relaxed, the same as it had been when he faced the men on the train. The same as Avril Rocard’s had been when she gunned down the French Secret Service agents at the Nancy farmhouse.

In that instant Vera understood—the thing that had troubled her since they’d left Interlaken, the thing she’d been too emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted to grasp beforehand, the thing that had been there all along. Yes, Von Holden had had all the right answers, but it was for a different reason. The men on the train had been police, it was not they who were Nazi killers, it was Von Holden.