The Day After Tomorrow

74

TEN SECONDS later, McVey, and then Osborn, stepped cautiously into the hallway and closed the door behind them. Both had guns in their hands but there was no need—the hallway was clear.

As far as they could tell, whoever had sent the girl was Still waiting for her, probably downstairs. That meant whoever had sent her had only suspected who they might be, and wasn’t sure. They were also giving her time. She was a professional and if she’d had to play sex with the suspects, she would. But McVey knew the time they would give her wouldn’t be much.

The interior hallways on the fifth floor of Hotel St.-Jacques were painted gray and had dark red carpeting. Fire stairs were at the end of each corridor, with a second set near the center of the building surrounding the elevator shafts. McVey chose the far stairs, farthest from the elevators. If something happened, he didn’t want them caught in the middle.

It took them four and a half minutes to reach the basement, go through a service door and take a back alley to the street. Turning right, they walked off down the boulevard St.-Jacques through a thickening fog. It was 2:15 A.M., Tuesday, October 11.

At 2:42, Ian Noble’s red bedside phone buzzed twice, then stopped, its signal light flashing. Careful not to disturb his wife, who suffered from painful arthritis and hardly slept, he slipped out of bed and pushed through the black walnut door that separated their bedroom from his private study. A moment later he picked up the extension.

“Yes.”

“McVey.”

“It’s been a damn long ninety minutes. Where the hell are you?”

“On the streets of Paris.”

“Osborn still with you?”

“We’re like Siamese twins.”

Touching a button under the overhang of his desk, Noble’s desktop slid back, revealing an aerial map of Great Britain. A second press of the button brought up a coded menu. A third, and Noble had a detailed map of Paris and its surrounding environs.

“Can you get out of the city?”

“Where?”

Noble looked back to the map. “About twenty-five kilometers east on Autoroute N3 is a town called Meaux. Just before you get there is a small airport. Look for a civil aircraft, a Cessna, with the markings ST95 stenciled on the tail. Should be there, weather permitting, between eight and nine hundred hours. The pilot will wait until ten. If you miss it, look for it again, same time, the next day.”

“Gracias, amigo.” McVey hung up and walked out to meet Osborn. They were in a corridor outside one of the entrances to a railroad station, the Gare de Lyon on the boulevard Diderot, just north of the Seine in the northwest quadrant of the city.

“Well?” Osborn said, expectantly.

“What do you think about sleep?” McVey said.

Fifteen minutes later, Osborn put his head back and surveyed their accommodations, a stone ledge tucked up under the Austerlitz Bridge over the Quai Henri IV, and in full view of the Seine.

“For a few hours we join the homeless.” McVey pulled his collar up in the darkness and rolled over on his shoulder. Osborn should have settled in too, but he didn’t. McVey raised up and saw him sitting against the granite, his legs out in front of him, staring at the water, as if he’d just been plunked down in hell and told to sit there for eternity.

“Doctor,” McVey said quietly, “it beats the morgue.”

Von Holden’s Learjet touched down at a private landing strip some thirty kilometers north of Paris at 2:50 A.M. At 2:37, he’d been radioed that the targets had been identified by the Paris sector leaving the hotel St.-Jacques at approximately 2:10. They had not been seen since. Further information would be provided as it became available.

The Organization had eyes and ears on the streets, in police stations, union halls, hospitals, embassies and boardrooms of a dozen major cities across Europe, and a half-dozen more around the world. Through them Albert Merriman had been found, and Agnes Demblon and Merrinman’s wife and Vera Monneray. And through them Osborn and McVey would be found as well. The question was when.

By 3:10, Von Holden was in the backseat of a dark blue BMW on Autoroute N2 passing the Aubervilliers exit, moving into Paris. A commanding officer impatiently waiting to hear from his generals in the field.

To kill Bernhard Oven, this McVey, this American policeman, had to have been either very lucky or very good or both. To slip from their fingers just as he was discovered was the same. He didn’t like it. The Paris sector was first rate, highly regarded and highly disciplined, and Bernhard Oven had always been one of the best.

And Von Holden would know. Though several years younger, he had been Oven’s superior, both in the Soviet Army and, later, in the Stasi, the East German secret police, in the years before reunification and the Stasi’s dissolution.

Von Holden’s own career had begun early. At eighteen he’d left home in Argentina and gone to Moscow for his final years Of schooling. Immediately afterward he’d started formal training under KGB direction in Leningrad. Fifteen months later, he was a company commander in the Soviet Army, assigned to the 4th Guards Tank Army protecting the Soviet embassy in Vienna. It was there he became an officer in the Spetsnaz special reconnaissance units trained in sabotage and terrorism. It was there too, he met Bernhard Oven, one of a half-dozen lieutenants under his command in the 4th Guards.

Two years later Von Holden was officially discharged from the Soviet Army and became assistant director for the East German Sports Administration assigned to oversee the training of elite East German athletes at the College for Physical Culture in Leipzig; among them had been Eric and Edward Kleist, the nephews of Elton Lybarger.

At Leipzig, Von Holden also became an “informal employee” of the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. Drawing on his training as a Spetsnaz soldier, he schooled recruits in clandestine operations against East German citizens and developed “specialists” in the art of terrorism and assassination. It was at this point he requested Bern-hard Oven from the 4th Guards Tank Army. Von Holden’s appreciation of his talent did not go unrewarded. Within eighteen months, Oven was one of the Stasi’s top men in the field and its best killer.

Von Holden remembered vividly the afternoon in Argentina when, as a boy of six, his entire career had been decided. He’d gone riding with his father’s business partner, and on the ride the man had asked him what he planned to do when he grew up. Hardly an extraordinary question from a grown man to a boy. What was uncommon was his answer and what he’d done afterward.

“Work for you, of course!” Young Pascal had beamed, giving heels to his horse and racing off across the pampas. Leaving the man sitting alone astride his own horse, watching, as the tiny figure with sure hands and an already impertinent disposition coaxed his big horse up and off the ground, and in a flying leap cleared a high growth of vegetation to disappear from sight. In that instant Von Holden’s future was cast. The man who’d asked the question, his riding partner, had been Erwin Scholl.