The Day After Tomorrow

42

“OY, MCVEY!” Benny Grossman said, then as quickly asked if he could call him right back and hung up. It was Saturday morning in New York, midafternoon in London.

McVey, back in the pocket-size room in the hotel on Half Moon Street Interpol had so generously provided for him, swirled two fingers of Famous Grouse in a glass with no ice—because the hotel had none—and waited for Benny to call back.

He’d spent the morning in the company of Ian Noble, the young Home Office pathologist, Dr. Michaels, and Dr. Stephen Richman, the specialist in micropathology who’d discovered the extreme cold to which the severed head of their John Doe had been subjected.

After careful inventory taken at behest of Scotland Yard, neither of the two cryonic suspension companies licensed in Great Britain, Cryonetic Sepulture of Edinburgh or Cryo-Mastaba of Camberwell, London, reported a head—or entire body, for that matter—of a stored “guest” missing. So, unless someone was running an unlicensed cryonic suspension company or had a portable cryocapsule he was hauling around London with bodies or pieces of bodies frozen to more than minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they had to rule out the possibility that Mr. John Doe’s head had been voluntarily frozen.

By the time McVey, Noble, and Dr. Michaels had had breakfast and arrived at Richman’s office/laboratory on Gower Mews, Richman had already examined the body of John Cordell, the headless corpse found in a small apartment across the playing field from Salisbury Cathedral. X rays of Cordell’s body revealed two screws securing a hairline crack in his lower pelvis. Screws that probably would have been removed once the fissure had properly healed had the subject lived that long.

Metallurgical tests Richman had had done on the screws revealed microscopic cobweb-like fractures throughout, proving conclusively that Cordell’s body had undergone the same extreme freezing—to temperatures nearing absolute zero—as had John Doe’s head.

“Why?” McVey asked.

“That’s certainly part of the question, isn’t it?” Dr. Richman replied as he opened the door from the cramped laboratory where they had gathered to view the comparative slides of the failed screws taken from Cordell’s body and the failed metal that had been the plate in John Doe’s head, and led them down a narrow, yellow-green hallway toward his office.

Stephen Richman was in his early sixties, stout but fit with the kind of solidity that comes from hard physical labor in youth. “You’ll excuse the mess,” he said, opening the door to his office. “I wasn’t prepared for a poker crowd.”

His working area was little more than a closet, half the size of McVey’s minuscule hotel room. Heaped helter-skelter among books, journals, correspondence, cardboard boxes and stacks of technical videos were dozens of vessels containing preserved organs from God knew how many species, some three or four to the jar. Somewhere among the clutter was a window and Richman’s desk and his desk chair. Two other chairs were piled high with books and file folders, which he immediately cleared off for his visitors. McVey volunteered to stand, but Richman wouldn’t hear of it and disappeared in search of a third chair. An exasperating fifteen minutes later, he reappeared, lugging a secretary’s chair with one caster missing, which he’d located in a basement storeroom.

“The question, Detective McVey,” Richman said as they all finally sat down, picking up McVey’s query asked nearly a half hour earlier as if he’d just now posed it—”is not so much ‘why?’ but ‘how?’”

“What do you mean?” McVey said.

“He means we’re talking about human tissues,” Michaels said, flatly. “Experiments with temperatures approaching absolute zero have been conducted primarily with salts and some metals, like copper.” Abruptly, Michaels realized he was overstepping courtesy. “Excuse me, Doctor Richman,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s quite all right, Doctor.” Richman smiled, then looked to McVey and Commander Noble. “What you have to realize is this all gets very muddied in scientific mumbo-jumbo. But the nut of it is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says science can never reach absolute zero because, among other things, it would then mean a state of perfect orderliness. Atomic orderliness.”

Noble’s face was blank. So was McVey’s.

“Every atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus, which is made of protons and neutrons. What happens as substances get colder is that the normal movement of these atoms and their parts becomes reduced, slowed, if you will. The colder the temperature, the slower their movements.

“Now, if we took an external magnet and focused it critically on these slowly moving atoms, we would create a magnetic field where we could manipulate the atoms and their parts, and make them do pretty much what we wanted. Theoretically if we could reach absolute zero, we could do more than pretty much, we could do exactly as we wanted because all activity would be stopped.”

“That only gets us back to McVey’s question,” Noble said. “Why? Why freeze decapitated bodies and a head to that degree, assuming you could get them to absolute zero?”

“To join them,” Richman said, wholly without emotion.

“Join them?” Noble was incredulous.

“It’s the only reason I could begin to give.”

Tugging at an ear, McVey turned away and looked out the window. Outside, the morning was bright and sunny. By contrast, Richman’s office felt like the inside of a musty box. Swiveling back, McVey found himself nose to nose with the labeled brain of a Maltese cat suspended in some kind of liquid preservative inside a bell jar. He looked at Richman. “You’re talking about atomic surgery, correct?”

Richman smiled. “Of sorts. Simply put, at absolute zero, under the application of a strong magnetic field all the atomic particles would be perfectly lined up, and under total control. If we could do that, we could perform atomic cryosurgery. Microsurgery beyond conception.”

“Elaborate a little, if you would, please,” Noble said.

Richman’s eyes brightened and McVey could almost feel his pulse quicken. The whole idea of what he was discussing excited him tremendously. “What it means, Commander, assuming we could freeze people to that degree, operate on them and then thaw them out with no damage to the tissues, is that atoms could be connected. A chemical bond would be formed between them so that a given electron is shared between two different atoms. It would make a seamless connection. The perfect seam, if you will. It would be as if it had been created by nature. Like a tree that grew that way.”

“Is somebody trying to do that?” McVey asked quietly.

“It’s not possible,” Michaels interjected.

McVey looked at him. “Why?”

“Because of the Heisenberg Principle. If I may, Doctor Richman.” Richman nodded at the young pathologist, and Michaels turned to McVey. For some reason he needed the American to know that he knew his business, that he knew what he was talking about. It was important for what they were doing. And beyond that, it was his way of showing and, at the same time, demanding respect.

“It’s a principle of quantum mechanics that says it’s impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object—say an atom or a molecule—at the same time with infinite precision. You can do one or the other but not both. You might tell an atom’s speed and direction but you could not, at the same time, say precisely where it was.”

“Could you do it at absolute zero?” McVey was giving him his due.

“Of course. Because at absolute zero everything would be stopped.”

“Detective McVey,” Richman interjected. “It is possible to get temperatures to less than one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. It has been done. The concept of absolute zero is just that, a concept. It cannot be reached. It’s impossible.”

“My question, Doctor, was not if it can or it can’t. I asked if someone was trying to do it.” There was a decided edge to McVey’s voice. He’d had enough of theory and now wanted fact. And he was staring at Richman, waiting for an answer.

This was a side of the L.A. detective Noble had never seen and made him realize why McVey had the reputation he did.

“Detective McVey, so far we’ve shown that the freezing was done to one body and one head. X rays have shown metal in only two of the remaining six cadavers. When we have that metal analyzed, we might be able to arrive at a more conclusive judgment.”

“What’s your gut tell you, Doctor?”

“My gut is strictly off the record. Accepting such, I’d venture that what you have are failed attempts at a very sophisticated type of cryosurgery.”

“The head of one person fused to the body of another.”

Richman nodded.

Noble looked at McVey. “Someone is trying to make a modern-day Frankenstein?”

“Frankenstein was created from the bodies of the dead,” Michaels said.

“Good Lord!” Noble said, standing and nearly knocking over a vessel containing the enlarged heart of a professional soccer player. Steadying the jar, he looked from Michaels to Richman. “These people were frozen alive?”

“It would appear so.”

“Then why the evidence of cyanide poisoning in all the victims?” McVey asked.

Richman shrugged. “Partial poisoning? A part of the procedure? Who knows?”

Noble looked at McVey, then stood. “Thank you very much, Doctor Richman. We won’t take more of your time.”

“Just a second, Ian.” McVey turned to Richman. “One other question, Doctor. The head of our John Doe was thawing from the deep freeze when it was discovered. Would it make any difference when it was frozen as to its appearance and pathological makeup when it thawed?”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Richman said.

McVey leaned forward. “We’ve had trouble learning John Doe’s identity. Can’t find out who he is. Suppose we’ve been looking in the wrong place, trying to find a man who’s been missing for the last few days or weeks. What if it had been months, or even years? Would that be possible?”

“It’s a hypothetical question—but I would have to say that if someone had found a means of freezing to absolute zero, then nothing molecular would have been disturbed. So when it thawed there would be no way to tell if the freezing had been done a week ago or hundred years ago or thousand, for that matter.”

McVey looked to Noble. “I think maybe your missing-persons detectives better go back to work.”

“I think you’re right.”

The telephone ringing at McVey’s elbow brought him back and he snatched it up.

“Oy, McVey!”

“Hello, Benny, and cut that out will you? It’s getting repetitive.”

“Got it.”

“Got what?”

“What you asked for. The Interpol, Washington, request for the Albert Merriman file was time-stamped by the sergeant who took it at eleven thirty-seven A.M., Thursday, six October.”

“Benny, eleven thirty-seven A.M. Thursday in New York is four thirty-seven Thursday afternoon in Paris.”

“So?”

“The request was for that file, nothing else—”

“Yeah—”

“It wasn’t until about eight A.M., Paris time, Friday, that the inspector in charge of the case for the Paris P.D. got a photocopy of the print. Just a print. Nothing else. But fifteen hours before that, somebody at Interpol not only had the print, they had a name and a file to go with it.”

“Sounds like you got interior trouble. A cover-up. Or private agenda. Or who knows—But if something goes wrong it’s the investigating cop who’s on the line because you can bet four ways from Sunday there won’t be any record of who got the first transmission.”

“Benny—”

“What, boobalah?”

“Thanks.”

Interior trouble, cover-up, private agenda. McVey hated those words. Something was going on somewhere inside Interpol, and Lebrun was holding the bag without knowing it. He wouldn’t like it, but he had to be told. The trouble was when McVey finally got through to him in Paris twenty minutes later, he didn’t get that far.

“McVey, mon ami” Lebrun said, excitedly. “I was just about to call you. Things are suddenly very complex around here. Three hours ago Albert Merriman was found floating in the Seine. He looked like a big cheese chewed over with an automatic weapon. The car he’d been driving was discovered about ninety kilometers upstream, close to Paris. Your Doctor Osborn’s prints were all over it.”