The Day After Tomorrow

71

Berlin, Monday, October 10,10:15 P.M.

“ES IST spät, Uta,”—It’s late, Uta—Konrad Peiper said edgily.

“I apologize, Herr Peiper. But I’m sure you realize there’s nothing I can do,” Uta Baur said. “I’m certain they will be here at any minute.” She glanced at Dr. Salettl, who didn’t respond.

She and Salettl had flown in from Zurich earlier that evening on Elton Lybarger’s corporate jet and driven directly here to make final preparations before the others arrived. In a normal situation she would have begun a half hour ago. Guests like those gathered here, in the private room on the top floor of Galerie Pamplemousse, a five-story gallery for “neue Kunst,” new art, on the Kurfürstendamm, were not the kind anyone kept waiting, especially this far into the evening. But the two men who were late were not men one insulted by leaving before they arrived, no matter who you were. Especially when you had come at their invitation.

Uta, dressed as always in black, got up and crossed the room to a side table upon which rested a large silver urn filled with fresh-ground Arabian coffee, plates of assorted canapés and sweets, and bottled waters, kept replenished by two exquisite young hostesses in tight jeans and cowboy boots.

“Refill the urn, please. The coffee is not fresh,” she snapped at one of them. Immediately the girl did as she was told, pushing through the door and going into a service kitchen.

“I give them fifteen minutes, no more. I’m busy too, don’t they realize?” Hans Dabritz set his stopwatch, put several canapés on a plate, and retreated to where he had been sitting.

Uta poured herself a glass of mineral water and looked around the room at her impatient guests. Their names read like a Who’s Who of contemporary Germany. She could visualize the shorthand descriptions.

Diminutive, bearded, Hans Dabritz, fifty. Real estate developer and political powerbroker. Real estate activity includes massive apartment complexes in Kiel, Hamburg, Munich and Düsseldorf, industrial warehousing and high-rise, commercial office buildings in Berlin, Frankfurt, Essen, Bremen, Stuttgart and Bonn. Owns square blocks of downtown Bonn, Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. Sits on the board of directors of Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank. Contributions to local politicians extensive and ongoing; controls a majority of them. Joke often told that the biggest influence in Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is in the hands of one of Germany’s smallest men. In the cold and sober back halls of German politics, Dabritz is looked upon as the dominant puppeteer. Almost never fails to get what he wants.

Konrad Peiper, thirty-eight—who with his wife, Margarete, had been aboard the lake steamer in Zurich two nights earlier as part of the welcome home celebration for Elton Lybarger—president and chief executive officer of Goltz Development Group, GDG, the second largest trading company in Germany. Under his auspices, established Lewsen International, a de facto holding company in London, With Lewsen as a front, GDG put together a network of fifty small and medium-size German companies that became Lewsen International’s main suppliers. Between 1981 and 1990 GDG, through the Lewsen front, secretly provided cash-rich Iraq key materials to wage chemical and biological warfare, upgrade ballistic missiles, and provide components for nuclear capability. That Iraq would lose most of what Lewsen had provided to Operation Desert Storm was of little consequence. Peiper had firmly established GDG as a world-class arms supplier.

Margarete Peiper, twenty-nine, Konrad’s wife. Petite, ravishing, workaholic. By twenty, a music arranger, record producer and personal manager of three of Germany’s top rock bands. By twenty-five, sole owner of the massive Cinderella, Germany’s largest recording studio, two record labels and homes in Berlin, London and Los Angeles. Currently, chairman, principal owner and driving force behind A.E.A., Agency for the Electric Arts, a huge, worldwide, talent organization representing top writers, performers, directors and recording artists. Insiders say Margarete Peiper’s guiding genius is that her psyche is permanently tuned to the “youth channel.” Critics see her ability to stay on top of a vast and growing young contemporary audience as more frightening than extraordinary because what she does teeters so precariously between creative brilliance and outright manipulation, of the will. A charge she has always denied. Hers, she maintains, is nothing more than a vigorous, lifelong commitment to people and to art.

Retired Air Force Major General Matthias Noll, sixty-two. Respected political lobbyist. Brilliant public speaker. Champion of the powerful German peace movement. Outspoken critic of rapid constitutional change. Held in high regard by a large population of aging Germans still ravaged by the guilt and shame of the Third Reich.

Henryk Steiner, forty-three. Number-one groundshaker in the new Germany’s not so quietly rumbling labor unrest. Father of eleven. Stocky, immensely likable. Cut from the mold of Lech Walesa. Dynamic and extraordinarily popular political organizer. Holds the emotional and physical backing of several hundred thousand auto and steelworkers struggling for economic survival within the new eastern German states. Imprisoned for eight months for leading three hundred truck drivers in a strike protesting dangerous and underrepaired highways, he was only two weeks out of jail before leading five hundred Potsdam police in a token four-hour work stoppage after red tape had left them unpaid for nearly a month.

Hilmar Grunel, fifty-seven, chief executive, HGS-Beyer, Germany’s largest magazine and newspaper publisher. Former ambassador to the United Nations and vociferous conservative, oversees daily operation and controls editorial content of eleven major publications, all of which take a strong and heady view from the right.

Rudolf Kaes, forty-eight. Monetary affairs specialist at the Institute for Economic Research at Heidelberg and key economic adviser to the Kohl government. Lone German representative on the board of the new European Economic Community’s central bank. Vigorous advocate for a single European currency, acutely aware of how thoroughly the German mark already dominates Europe, and how a single currency based on it would only serve to enhance German economic might.

Gertrude Biermann (also a guest on the lake steamer in Zurich), thirty-nine. Single mother of two. A predominant force in the Greens, a radical leftist peace movement tracing its roots to the attempt to keep U.S. Pershing missiles out of West Germany in the early 1980s. Influence reaches deep into a German conscience disturbed by any attempt at all to align Germany with the military West.

There was a buzz and Uta saw Salettl pick up the telephone at his elbow. He listened, then hung up and glanced at Uta.

“Ja,” he said.

A moment later the door opened and Von Holden entered. Briefly he scanned the room, then stood aside.

“Hier sink sie”—Here they are—Uta said to the guests, at the same time glancing sharply at the hostesses, who immediately left through a side door.

A moment later, a strikingly handsome and exceedingly well-dressed man of seventy-five entered. “Dortmund is tied up in Bonn. We will go on without him,” Erwin Scholl said in German to no one in particular, then sat down next to Steiner. Dortmund was Gustav Dortmund, chief of the Federal Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank.

Von Holden closed the door and crossed to the table. Pouring a glass of mineral water, he handed it to Scholl, then stepped back to stand near the door.

Scholl was tall and slim, with close-cropped gray hair, a deep tan and startlingly blue eyes. Age considerable fortune had done nothing but add character to an already chiseled face of broad forehead, aristocratic nose and deeply cleft chin. He possessed an old-style military bearing that commanded attention the moment he appeared.

“The presentation, please,” he said quietly to Uta. A curious blend of studied shyness and complete arrogance, Erwin Scholl was the perfect American success story: a penniless German immigrant who had risen to become baron of a vast publishing empire, and, in turn, had taken on the mantle of philanthropist, fund-raiser, and intimate of U.S. presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. Like most of the others here, he depended on the masses for his wealth and influence but, out of choice and careful orchestration, was all but unknown to them.

“Bitte”—Please—Uta said into an intercom. Instantly the room darkened and a wall of abstract paintings in front of them broke into thirds and pulled back, revealing a flat, eight-by-twelve-foot high-definition television screen.

Immediately, a razor-sharp image appeared. It was a close-up of a soccer ball. Suddenly a foot flew into the frame and kicked it. As it did, the video camera zoomed back to reveal the manicured lawns at Anlegeplatz and Elton Lybarger’s nephews, Eric and Edward, playfully kicking the soccer ball between them. Then the camera moved to the side to see Elton Lybarger standing with Joanna, watching them. Abruptly, one of the boys kicked the ball in Lybarger’s direction and Lybarger gave it a healthy kick back toward his nephews. Then he looked at Joanna and smiled proudly. And Joanna smiled back, with the same sense of accomplishment.

Then the video cut and Lybarger was seen in his elegant library. Seated before a blazing fire, dressed casually in sweater and slacks, he was talking in detail to someone out of camera range about the axis Paris and Bonn had forged in making the new European Economic Community. Learned and articulate, the clear point he was making was that Britain’s assumed role of “detached moral superiority” only served to keep Britain a malcontent in the equation. And that continuing to play that character would serve neither Britain nor the Economic Community well. His opinion was that there must be a Bonn-London rapprochement for the Community to be the major economic force it was created to be. His discourse ended lightly with a joke that was not a joke. “Of course, what I meant to say was that it should be a Berlin-London rapprochement. Because, as everyone knows, wise lawmakers, refusing to turn back the clock on German unity, have kept the pledge of the last forty years and promised to return the capital to Berlin by the year 2000. In doing so, they have made her once again the heart of Germany.”

Then Lybarger’s image faded and was replaced by something else. Perpendicular and slightly arched, it covered nearly the entire eight feet of the screen’s height. For a moment nothing happened, then the thing turned, hesitated, moved determinedly forward. In that instant everyone recognized what it was. A fully engorged, erect penis.

Abruptly the angle shifted to the silhouette of another man standing in the darkness, watching. Then the angle shifted once more and what the audience saw was Joanna, unclothed and spread-eagled on a large poster bed, her hands and feet tied to the bedposts with lush strands of velvet. Her full breasts clung melon-like to either side of her chest, her legs were comfortably apart, and the dark V where they met undulated gently with the unconscious rhythm of her hips. Her lips were moist. Her eyes, open and glassy, were thrown back, perhaps in anticipation of some ecstasy to come. A portrait of pleasure and consent, she indicated nothing to suggest that any of this was against her will.

And then the man and penis were upon her and she took him wholly and willingly. A complex variety of camera angles recorded the authenticity of the act. The penis strokes were long and forceful, effective, yet unrushed, and Joanna reacted only with increasing pleasure.

A camera angle showed the other man as he stood back. It was Von Holden and he was completely nude. Arms folded over his chest, he watched indifferently.

Then the camera cut back to the bed, and a running time code, clocking the elapsed time from penal insertion to orgasm, appeared in the upper righthand corner of the screen.

At 4:12:04 Joanna visually experienced her first orgasm.

At 6:00:03, an electroencephalographic chart, tracking her brain waves, appeared in the upper middle of the screen. Between 6:15:43 and 6:55:03, she experienced seven separate excessive brain wave oscillations. At 6:57:23 an electroencephalographic chart appeared at the upper left of the screen, representing her male partner’s brain waves. From then until 7:02:07, they were normal. In that time, Joanna had three more episodes of extreme brain wave activity. At 7:15:22, the male’s brain activity increased threefold. As it did, the camera moved in on Joanna’s face. Her eyes were thrown back in her head until only the whites showed and her mouth was open in a silent scream.

At 7:19:19, the male experienced total orgasm.

At 7:22:20, Von Holden stepped into camera range and escorted the male from the room. As they left, two cameras simultaneously focused on the man who had participated in the sex act with Joanna. Documenting without doubt that the man who had been in the bed was the same man who was now leaving the room. There was no question at all who it was, and that he had fully and thoroughly completed the act.

Elton Lybarger.

“Eindrucksvoll!”—Impressive!—Hans Dabritz said as the lights went up and the triangle of abstract paintings slid back into place over the video screen.

“But we’re not going to be showing a video, are we, Herr Dabritz,” Erwin Scholl said sharply. Abruptly his gaze shifted to Salettl.

“Will he be capable of our performance, Doctor?”

“I would like more time, But he is remarkable, as we have seen.” In any other room in the world Salettl’s remark would have drawn laughter, but not here. These were not humorous people. They had witnessed a clinical study upon which a decision was to be based. Nothing else.

“Doctor, I asked you if he will be ready to do what is required. Yes or no?” Scholl’s rapier-like stare cut Salettl in two.

“Yes, he will be ready.”

“No cane! No one to assist his walk!” Scholl goaded him.

“No. No cane. No one to assist his walk.”

“Danke,” Scholl said with contempt. Standing, he turned to Uta.

“I have no reservations.” With that, Von Holden opened the door and he walked out.