The Day After Tomorrow

65

“I’M GOING secure now.” McVey punched a button and a light on the oversize “secure phone” in Lebrun’s private office at police headquarters came on confirming the line was safe from wiretap. “Can you still hear me?”

“Yes,” Noble said from a similar phone in the London Special Branch communications center. “Lebrun arrived about forty minutes ago, courtesy of the RAF. We’ve got him at Westminster Hospital under an assumed name. He’s not in the best shape but the doctors seem to think he’ll make it.”

“Can he talk?”

“Not yet. But he can write or at least scrawl. He’s given us two names. ‘Klass’ and ‘Antoine’—Antoine has a question mark after it.”

Klass was Dr. Hugo Klass, the German fingerprint expert working out of Interpol, Lyon.

“He’s telling us it was Klass who requested the Merriman file from the New York Police Department,” McVey said. “Antoine is Lebrun’s brother, supervisor of internal security at Interpol headquarters,” McVey said, wondering if the question mark after Antoine’s name meant Lebrun was concerned about his brother’s safety or that he might have been involved in the shooting.

“While we’re at it, let me enlighten you about something else,” Noble said. “We’ve got a name to go with our neatly severed head.”

“Say what?” McVey was beginning to think the term good luck had been snatched from his vocabulary.

“Timothy Ashford, a housepainter from Clapham South, which you may or may not know is a working-class district in South London. He lived alone and worked as a day painter from job to job. His only relative is a sister living in Chicago but evidently they didn’t have much to do with each other. He disappeared two years ago next month. It was his landlady who reported it. Came to the authorities when she hadn’t seen him in several weeks and he was behind in his rent. She’d rented his flat but didn’t know what to do with his belongings. He’d got his skull smashed by a billiard cue in a pub fight. It’s our luck he also punched a bobby. Patching him up, they had to put a metal plate in his head; it was a matter of police record.”

“That means you’ve got his fingerprints.”

“You are absolutely correct, Detective McVey. We’ve got his fingerprints. Trouble is, all we’ve got of the rest of him now is his head.”

There was a buzz and McVey heard Noble pick up the line to his office.

“Yes, Elizabeth,” McVey heard him say. There was a pause and then he said, “Thank you,” and came back on the line. “Cadoux is calling from Lyon.”

“Is he on a secure phone?”

“No.”

“Ian,” McVey said quietly. “Before you pick up. Can you trust him? No reservations.”

“Yes,” Noble said.

“Ask him if he’s at headquarters. If he is, find a way to tell him to leave the building and call your private line from a public phone. When you get him, plug me in, make it a three-way call.”

Fifteen minutes later Noble’s private line rang through, and Noble quickly picked up. “Yves, McVey is on the line from Paris. I’m putting him on with us now.”

“Cadoux, it’s McVey. Lebrun is in London, we got him out for his own safety.”

“I presumed as much. Although I must tell you the hospital security people as well as the Lyon police are more than a little upset about how it was done. How is he?”

“He’ll make it.” McVey paused. “Cadoux, listen carefully. You have a mole at headquarters. His name is Doctor Hugo Klass.”

“Klass?” Cadoux was taken aback. “He’s one of our most brilliant scientists. The one who discovered the Albert Merriman fingerprint on the glass shard taken from the Jean Packard murder scene. Why would—?”

“We don’t know.” McVey could see Cadoux, his burly frame squeezed into a public phone booth somewhere in Lyon, twiddling his handlebar mustache, as understandably perplexed as they were. “But what we do know is that he requested the Merriman file from the NYPD, via Interpol, Washington, some fifteen hours before alerting Lebrun that he’d even come up with a print. Twenty-four hours later, Merriman vas dead. And very soon after that so were his girlfriend in Paris, and his wife and her entire family in Marseilles. Somehow Klass must have learned Lebrun had come to Lyon and traced the file request. So he had him shut up.”

“Now it starts to make sense.”

“What does?” Noble asked.

“Lebrun’s brother, Antoine, our supervisor of internal security. He was found shot in the head this morning. It appears to have been suicide, but maybe not.”

McVey cursed to himself. Lebrun was in bad enough shape himself without having to be told his brother was dead. “Cadoux, I doubt very much you’re looking at a suicide. Something’s going on that involved Merriman but reached a lot further. And whatever it is, whoever’s behind it, is now killing cops.”

“Yves, I think it’s best you take Klass into custody as soon as possible,” Noble said, directly.

“Excuse me, Ian. I don’t think so.” McVey was standing up, pacing behind Lebrun’s desk. “Cadoux, find somebody you can trust. Maybe even from some other city. Klass doesn’t suspect we’re on to him. Get a wire on his private line at home and put a tail on him. See where he goes, who he talks to. Then work backward from Antoine’s death. See if you can follow the line from the time he died until the time Sunday he met Lebrun. We don’t know which side he was on. Finally, and very judiciously, find out who Klass got at Interpol, Washington, to make the Merriman file request to the New York police.”

“I understand,” Cadoux said.

“Captain—watch yourself,” McVey warned.

“I shall. Merci. Au revoir.”

There was a click as Cadoux hung up.

“Who is this Doctor Klass?” Noble asked.

“Beyond who he appears? I don’t know.”

“I’m going to contact M16. Perhaps we can find out a little about Doctor Klass ourselves.”

Noble clicked off and McVey stared at the wall, angered that he couldn’t get some definitive grasp on what was going on. It was as if he’d suddenly become professionally impotent. Immediately there was a knock at the door and a uniformed policeman stuck his head in to tell him in English that the concierge from his hotel was on the phone. “Line two.”

“Merci.” The man left and McVey turned from the “secure phone” to lift the receiver on Lebrun’s desk phone. “This is McVey.”

“Dave Gifford, Hotel Vieux,” a male voice said.

As he’d left his hotel earlier McVey had slipped the concierge, an expatriate American, a two-hundred-franc tip and asked to be informed of any calls or transmissions that came for him.

“I get a fax from L.A.?”

“No, sir.”

What the hell was Hernandez doing with the Osborn information, hand-delivering it to Paris? Sitting down, McVey flipped open a notebook and picked up a pencil. He had two calls from Detective Barras, an hour apart. One from a plumber in Los Angeles confirming his automatic lawn sprinklers had been installed and were working. But wanted McVey to call back and let him know what days and length of watering time he wanted them set for.

“Jesus,” McVey said under his breath.

Lastly there was a call the concierge felt was a crank. In fact the caller had rung back three times, wanting to speak to McVey personally. Each time he’d left no message, but each time he’d sounded a little more desperate.

He’d given his name as Tommy Lasorda.