The Day After Tomorrow

70

“YOU ARRANGED?” McVey was incredulous.

Osborn didn’t reply. Instead he set his glass on the bar and started down a dingy corridor past the toilets toward a pay phone in the rear of the café. He was almost there when McVey caught up with him.

“What’re you gonna do, try and call her?”

“Yes.” Osborn kept going. He hadn’t thought it through, but he had to know she was all right.

“Osborn.” McVey took him hard by the arm and pulled him around. “If she is there, she’s probably okay, but the detectives with her will be monitoring the line. They’ll let you talk while they trace the call. If the French police are involved, you and I won’t get five feet out that door.” McVey nodded toward the front. “And if she’s not there, there’s nothing you can do.”

Osborn flared. “You don’t understand, do you? I have to know.”

“How?”

By now Osborn had an answer. “Philippe.” Osborn would call him, have Philippe call Vera, then call Osborn back. They couldn’t trace the second call.

“The doorman at her apartment?”

Osborn nodded.

“He helped you get out of the building, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And maybe arranged the tail on you when you left?”

“No, he wouldn’t. He’s—”

“He’s what? Somebody let the tall man know Vera was, the mystery girl, and somebody told him where she lived. Why not him? Osborn, for now, your peace of mind is going to have to wait.” McVey glared at him long enough to make his point, then looked past him for a way out the back.

A half hour later, paying cash and using an alias—saying their luggage had been lost at the train station— McVey checked them into connecting rooms on the fifth floor of the Hôtel St.-Jacques on the avenue St.-Jacques, a tourist hotel less than a mile from La Coupole and the boulevard du Montparnasse.

Obviously American and without luggage, McVey played upon the French disposition for amour. Entering the rooms, McVey gave the bellman an extra-large tip, telling him shyly but very sincerely to make certain they weren’t disturbed.

“Oui, monsieur.” The bellman gave Osborn a knowing smile, then closed the door behind him and left.

Immediately McVey checked out both rooms, the closets and bathrooms. Satisfied, he drew the window curtains, then turned to Osborn.

“I’m going down to the lobby and make a phone call. I don’t want to make it from here because I want nothing traced to this room. When I get back, I want to go over .everything you remember about Albert Merriman, from the moment he killed your father until the last second in the river.”

Reaching into his jacket pocket, McVey took out Bernhard Oven’s Cz automatic and put it in Osborn’s hand. “I’d ask you if you knew how to use it, but I already know the answer.” McVey’s glare was enough, the edge in his voice only added to it. He turned for the door. “Nobody comes in but me. Not for any reason.”

Easing open the door, McVey looked out, then stepped into a deserted hallway. The elevator was the same. At the lobby the doors opened and he got out. Except for a group of Japanese tourists coming in off a bus tour and following a leader carrying a little green and white flag, the area was all but deserted.

Crossing the lobby, McVey looked for a public phone and saw one near the gift shop. Using an AT&T credit card number billed to a post office box in Los Angeles, he dialed Noble’s voice mail at Scotland Yard. A recording took his message.

Hanging up, he went into the gift shop, briefly looked at the selection of greeting cards, then bought a birthday number with a large yellow bunny on it. Back in the lobby, he took out the cardboard notebook cover with Bernhard Oven’s dried bloody thumbprint and slipped it in with the card, addressing it to a “Billy Noble” care of a post address in London. Then he went to the front desk and asked the concierge to send it by overnight mail.

He’d just paid the concierge and was turning back for the lobby when two uniformed gendarmes came in from the street and stood looking around. To McVey’s left were a number of tour brochures. Casually, he walked over to them. As he did, one of the policemen looked his way. McVey ignored him and thumbed through the brochures. Finally, he chose three and walked back across the lobby in full view of the police. Sitting down near the telephone, he started to look through them. Barge tours. Tours of Versailles. Tours of wine country. He counted to sixty, then looked up. The police were gone.

Four minutes later, Ian Noble called from a private residence where he and his wife were attending a formal dinner for a retiring British army general.

“Where are you?”

“Paris. The Hôtel St.-Jacques. Jack Briggs. San Diego. Wholesale jewelry,” McVey said in monotone, giving him the location and the name he was registered under. A movement to his left caught his eye. Shifting his stance, he saw three men in business suits coming across the lobby toward him. One seemed to be looking directly at him, the other two were talking.

“You remember Mike, doncha?” he said with verve, opening his jacket, playing the extroverted American salesman, his hand inches from the .38 at his waist. “Yeah, I brought him along with me.”

“You have Osborn.”

“Sure do.”

“Is he trouble?”

“Hell, no. Not yet anyway.”

The men passed, going into the alcove toward the elevators. McVey waited until they entered and the door closed, then turned back to the phone and quickly ran down what had happened, adding that he had just put the jail man’s thumbprint in the overnight mail.

“We’ll run it straightaway,” Noble said, then added he’d had words with the French chargé d’affaires, who had demanded to know what the hell the Brits thought they were doing shanghaiing a seriously wounded Parisian inspector from his hospital room in Lyon. Further, they wanted him back, posthaste. Noble had said he was appalled, that he’d never heard of such an incident and would look into it immediately. Then, changing subjects, he said they’d come up blank trying to find anyone in Britain experimenting in advanced cryosurgery. If such practice was going on, it was wholly out of sight.

McVey glanced around the lobby. He hated paranoia. It crippled a man and made him see things that weren’t. But he had to face the reality that anyone, in uniform or not, could be working for this group, whoever or whatever they were. The tall man would have had no compunction about shooting him right there in the lobby and he had to assume his replacement would do the same. Or if not right then, at least report where he was. By lingering, he was pressing his luck on either account.

“McVey, are you there?”

He turned back to the phone. “What’d you find out about Klass?”

“M16 could find nothing but an exemplary record. Wife, two children. Born in Munich. Grew up in Frankfurt. Captain in the German Air Force. Recruited out of it by West German Intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, where he developed his skills and reputation as a fingerprint expert. After that, went to work for Interpol at Lyon headquarters.”

“No. No good,” McVey reacted. “They missed something. Go deeper. Look into people he associates with, outside his daily routine. Hold on—” McVey thought back, trying to remember Lebrun’s office the day they had first received Merriman’s fingerprint from Interpol, Lyon. Somebody else had been working with Klass—Hal, Hall, Hald—Halder!

“Halder—first name Rudolf. Interpol, Vienna. He worked with Klass on the Merriman print. Look, Ian, do you know Manny Remmer?”

“With the German Federal Police.”

“He’s an old friend, works out of headquarters in Bad Godesberg. Lives in an area called Rungsdorf. It’s not too late. Get him at home. Tell him I said for you to call. Tell him you want anything he can find on both Klass and Halder. If it’s there, he’ll get it. Trust him.”

“McVey—” There was concern in Noble’s voice. “I think you’ve managed to open a rather large can of very disagreeable worms. And, frankly, I think you should get out of Paris damn quick.”

“How? In a box or a limo?”

“Where can I reach you in ninety minutes?”

“You can’t. I’ll reach you.”

It was past 9:30 before McVey knocked on the door to Osborn’s room. Osborn opened the door to the chain and Peered out.

“Hope you like chicken salad.”

In one hand McVey balanced a tray with chicken salad in white plastic bowls with Stretch-Tight across the top, in tie other he juggled a pot of coffee along with two cups, everything purchased from an irritable counter clerk at the hotel coffee shop as he was trying to close for the night.

By ten o’clock the coffee and chicken salad were gone and Osborn was pacing up and down, absently working the fingers of his injured hand, while McVey sat hunched over the bed, using it for a worktable, staring at what he’d written in his notebook.

“Merriman told you that an Erwin Scholl—Erwin spelled with an E—of Westhampton Beach, New York, paid him to kill your father and three other people sometime around 1966.”

“That’s right,” Osborn said.

“Of the other three, one was in Wyoming, one in California, and one in New Jersey. He’d done the work and been paid. Then Scholl’s people tried to kill him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all he said, just the names Of states. No victims’ names, no cities?”

“Just the states.”

McVey got up and went into the bathroom. “Almost thirty years ago a Mr. Erwin Scholl hires Merriman to do some contract killing. Then Scholl orders him knocked off. The game of kill the killer. Make certain whatever’s been taken care of is permanent, with no loose ends that might talk.”

McVey tore the sanitary wrapper off a water glass, filled it, then came back into the room and sat down. “But Merriman outsmarted Scholl’s people, faked his own death, and got away. And Scholl, assuming Merriman was dead, forgot about him. That was, until you came along and hired Jean Packard to find him.” McVey took a drink of the water, stopping short of mentioning Dr. Klass and Interpol, Lyon. There was only so much Osborn needed to know.

“You think Scholl is behind what’s happened here in Paris?” Osborn asked.

“And Marseilles, and Lyon, thirty years later? I don’t know who Mr. Scholl is yet. Maybe he’s dead, or never was.”

“Then who’s doing this?”

McVey hunched over the bed, made another note in his dog-eared book, then looked at Osborn. “Doctor, when was the first time you saw the tall man?”

“At the river.”

“Not before?”

“No.”

“Think back. Earlier that day, the day before, the day before that.”

“No.”

“He shot you because you were with Merriman and he didn’t want to leave a witness. That what you think?”

“What other reason would there be?”

“Well, for one, it could have been the other way around, that he was there to kill you and not Merriman.”

“Why? How would he know me? And even if that were the case, why would he kill all of Merriman’s family afterward?”

Osborn was right. Seemingly no one had known Merriman was alive until Klass discovered his fingerprint. Then the boom had been lowered. Most probably, as Lebrun had suggested, to keep him from talking, because they knew the police, once they had the print, would grab him in no time. Klass might have been able to delay release of the print, but he couldn’t deny it existed because too many people at Interpol knew about it. So Merriman had to be shut up because of what he might say after he’d been caught. And since he’d been out of business for twenty-five-odd years, what he might have said would have been about what he had done when he was in business. Which would have been almost exactly the same time he was under the hire of Erwin Scholl. Which was why Merriman, along with anyone else he was close enough to have confided in, had been liquidated. To keep him, or them, from talking about what he had done while he was in Scholl’s employ, or at the very least, from implicating Scholl in a murder-for-hire scheme. That meant they either didn’t know who Osborn was or had missed the connection that he was heir to one of Merriman’s victims and—

“Dammit?” McVey said under his breath. Why the hell hadn’t he realized it before? The answer to what was happening lay not with Merriman or Osborn, but with the four people Merriman had killed thirty years earlier, Osborn’s father among them!

McVey stood up in a surge of adrenaline. “What did your father do for a living?”

“His profession?”

“Yeah.”

“He—thought things up,” Osborn said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“From what I remember, he worked in what was probably then a kind of high-tech think tank. He invented things, then built prototypes of what he invented. Mostly, I think, it had to do with the design of medical instruments.”

“Do you remember the name of the company?”

“It was called Microtab. I remember the company name clearly because they sent a large floral wreath to my father’s funeral. The name of the company was on the card but nobody from the company showed up,” Osborn said vacantly.

McVey knew then the extent of Osborn’s pain. He knew he could still see the funeral, as if it had happened yesterday. It had to have been the same when he saw Merriman in the brasserie.

“This Microtab was in Boston?”

“No, Waltham, it’s a suburb.”

Picking up his pen, McVey wrote: Microtab—Waltham, Mass.—1966.

“Any sense of how he worked? By himself? Or in groups, four or five guys hammering these things out?”

“Dad worked alone. Everybody did. Employees weren’t allowed to talk about what they were working on, even with each other. I remember my mother discussing it with him once. She thought it was ridiculous he couldn’t talk to the person in the next office. Later, I assumed it had to do with patents or something.”

“Do you have any idea what he was working on when he was killed?”

Osborn grinned. “Yes. He’d just finished it and brought it home to show me. He was proud of what he did and liked to show me what he was working on. Although I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to.”

“What was it?”

“A scalpel.”

“A scalpel?—as in surgery?” McVey could feel the hair begin to crawl up the back of his neck.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what it looked like? Why it was different from any other scalpel?”

“It was cast. Made of a special alloy that could withstand extreme variations in temperature and still remain surgically sharp. It was to be used in association with an electronic arm driven by computer.”

Not only was the hair standing up on McVey’s neck, it felt as if someone had poured ice cubes down his spine. “Somebody was going to do surgery at extreme temperatures. Using some kind of computer-driven gizmo that would hold your father’s scalpel and do the actual work?”

“I don’t know. You have to remember that in those days computers were gigantic, they took up whole rooms, so I don’t know how practical it would have been even if it worked.”

“The temperature business.”

“What about it?”

“You said extreme temperatures. Would that be hot or cold or both?”

“I don’t know. But experimental work had already begun with laser surgery, which is basically the turning of light energy into heat. So if they were experimenting with unexplored surgical concepts I would assume they would have been working in the opposite direction.”

“Cold.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly the ice was gone and McVey could feel the rush of blood through his veins. This was the something that had kept pulling him back to Osborn. The connection between Osborn, Merriman and the headless bodies.