The Day After Tomorrow

159

OSBORN LEFT downtown without remembering it, overwhelmed, his mind and emotions blurred together. He tried to separate them. Reflect on what he had just seen. Focus on the scope and history of what Salettl had revealed. To rage at what the Third Reich had done to the world. And at the audacity of what they had tried to do again! He wanted to shout at the horror of the extermination camps. He wanted to see the faces of the foul men in the dock at Nuremberg and superimpose over them the faces of Scholl and Dortmund and the others he knew only by name. He wanted to know if the Organization’s covert incursion into French politics had led directly to the death of Francois Christian.

In one breath he sought to acknowledge the singular burden Salettl had carried alone for so many years and for the dark heroism of his own “final solution.” And in the next, rage furiously at him for giving nothing of the details of the atomic surgery. How the temperatures at, or reaching, absolute zero had been attained. How the surgery had been done! How the recovery process worked! To medicine, to the alleviation of pain and suffering, that disclosure would have been priceless.

At some point it vaguely registered that he was on the Santa Monica Freeway headed toward home. It was rush hour and he was bumper-to-bumper in heavy traffic. But it made no difference, he was driving on autopilot. He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d left police headquarters. He could have turned north or south or east as easily as west. It would have made no difference. Somewhere he sensed he had reached the end of the freeway and was on the s-curves approaching McClure Tunnel. Then he was through it and out onto Pacific Coast Highway. In front of him the Santa Monica Mountains seemed to rise straight out of the sea and the ocean itself disappeared in the V of the setting sun on the horizon.

A sudden affection for McVey came over him. McVey had shown him the tape because he’d hoped it would finally kill the demon and help put his soul to rest. Help make some very real and cognizant sense of what had happened when before there had only been fragments. It had been a kind and decent gesture and he wished he could tell him that. He wished there was a way he could thank him. Even love him, if that were possible. As a son could love a father, even though they might have been at odds most of their lives.

But then his thoughts collapsed against the emotional whirlwind that had swept him as he watched the video. The thing that was sweeping him over the edge.

It was the thing Salettl had left out of his message. The thing forcing him to confront something he did not want to face. It was something McVey didn’t know, and never would. Nor would Noble or Remmer, or Vera or anyone else because there was no rational way Osborn could ever talk about it. Maybe Salettl had left it out because he thought he had taken care of it as he had taken care of everything else.

Suddenly Osborn realized traffic was backed up in front of him and he had to hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting the car in front of him. A police car and two tow trucks flew by in the center lane. It meant an accident up ahead. Traffic could be locked up for hours. He couldn’t sit there that long, because the only thing he could listen to would be his mind and he would go insane. He had to get out of there. To move and keep moving.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the center lane open. Stepping on the accelerator, he swung past the car in front of him, made a U-turn on the highway and roared back the way he had come. A moment later he cut a sharp right and pulled into a beach parking lot. For a moment he sat there staring at the ocean.

Then he got out. Crutches first, then pushing himself up until he was standing. Leaving the door open and the keys in the ignition, he moved out into the sand. The crutches sank in and the going became difficult. It didn’t matter. Motion was everything and he kept going, across the beach toward the breakers. His shoes filled with sand and he tore them off and left them. Then his feet touched hard, wet sand and he felt the water. In seconds he was knee deep, leaning forward on the crutches, a gentle surf soaking his trousers.

The audacity of it was that they could even conceive of such a thing, much less do it.

After thirty years, his father’s death had been resolved. But it was not a resolution he could have ever imagined or foreseen, not in his darkest hours. And were it not for Salettl’s video, it would have remained an extension of that part of his experience on the Jungfrau that he had until now fully accepted as illusion, an hallucinatory dream, filled with the honors of his own imagination. But now, having seen what he had, there was no doubt whatsoever that what he had experienced had been no dream. It had been real. And it made clear not only the reason behind his father’s death but the motivation for Von Holden’s journey to the glacier, and the hiding place deep within the ice.

Somewhere he heard Salettl’s voice—”We had raised two young men . . . Genetically engineered, pure Aryan from birth . . . among the finest physical specimens alive . . . age twenty-four . . . one of the two boys will be chosen . . . prepared for the surgical operation . . . messiah for the new Reich.”

“Hey, mister, you’re all wet!” a young boy yelled from the shore. But Osborn didn’t hear. He was on the Jungfrau, and Von Holden was falling toward him, the box he had brought with him from Berlin still cradled in his arms.

“Für Übermorgen! For the day after tomorrow!” He heard Von Holden scream and then the box slipped from his grasp and Von Holden plunged over the side, swallowed by the icy blackness as if he had been airbrushed out of existence. But the box landed near where Osborn lay in the snow, rolling over with its own weight and momentum. As it did, it came open and what was inside was revealed. And in the instant before it vanished over the edge, Osborn saw clearly what it was. It was the thing Salettl had left out. The thing Osborn could tell no one because no one would believe him. It was the real reason for Übermorgen. Its driving essence. Its center core. The severed, deep-frozen head of Adolf Hitler.