The Day After Tomorrow

77

IT WAS eight in the morning and Benny Grossman had just come home from work. He’d met Matt and David, his teenage sons, just as they were leaving for school. A quick “Hi, Dad, ‘bye, Dad” and they were gone. And now his wife, Estelle, was leaving for her stylist’s job at a Queens hair salon.

“Holy shit,” she heard Benny say from the bedroom. He was in his jockey shorts, a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other, standing in front of the television. He’d been in the precinct Records & Information Division all night working the phones and computers and enlisting the aid of some very experienced computer hackers to get into private databases, trying to fill McVey’s request on the people killed in 1966.

“What’s the matter?” Estelle said, coming into the room. “What’s the holy shit about?”

“Shhh!” he said.

Estelle turned to see what he was looking at. CNN coverage of a train derailment outside Paris.

“That’s terrible,” she said, watching as firemen struggled to carry a blood-covered woman up an embankment on a stretcher. “But what’s it got you in such an uproar about?”

“McVey’s in Paris,” he said, his eyes on the set.

“McVey’s in Paris,” Estelle said flatly. “So are a million other people. I wish we were in Paris.”

Abruptly he turned to her. “Estelle, go to work, huh?”

“You know somethin’ I don’t?”

“Honey, Estelle. Go to work. Please—”

Estelle Grossman stared at her husband. When he talked like that, it was cop talk that told her it was none of her business.

“Get some sleep.”

“Yeah.”

Estelle watched him for a minute, shook her head, then left. Sometimes she thought her husband cared for his friends and family too much. If they asked, he’d do anything, no matter how much it knocked him out. But when he got tired, as he was now, his imagination worked as much overtime as he did.

“Commander Noble, this is Benny Grossman, NYPD.”

Benny was still in his underwear, his notes spread out over the kitchen table. He’d called Noble because McVey had told him to, if he hadn’t called. And he had a real, almost psychic, sense that McVey wasn’t going to be calling, not today anyway.

In ten minutes he’d laid out what he’d uncovered:

—Alexander Thompson was an advanced computer programmer who had retired to Sheridan, Wyoming, from New York in 1962 for health reasons. While there, he was approached by a writer doing research for a science-fiction movie on computers to be made by a Hollywood studio. The writer’s name was Harry Simpson, the studio was American Pictures. Alexander Thompson was given twenty-five thousand dollars and asked to design a program that would instruct a computer to operate a machine that would hold and accurately guide a scalpel during surgery, in effect replacing the surgeon. It was all theory, science fiction, futurism, of course. It just had to be something that would actually work, even on a primitive level. In January 1966, Thompson delivered his program. Three days later he was found shot to death on a country road. Investigators found there was no Harry Simpson in Hollywood, nor was there a company called American Pictures. Nor was there any trace of Alexander Thompson’s computer program.

—David Brady designed precision tools for a small firm in Glendale, California. In 1964, controlling interest in the firm was bought by Alama Steel, Ltd. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brady was put to work to design a mechanical arm that could be electronically driven, that would have the same range of motion as a human wrist and be capable of holding and controlling a scalpel with extreme precision during surgery. He had completed his working drawings and turned them in for review just forty-eight hours before he was found in the family swimming pool. Drowning was ruled out. Brady had an ice pick in his heart. Two weeks later, Alama Steel went out of business and the company closed down. Brady’s drawings were never found. As far as Benny had been able to ascertain, Alama Steel never existed. Paycheck stubs were traced back to a company called Wentworth Products Ltd. of Ontario, Canada. Wentworth Products went out of business the same week Alama Steel did.

—Mary Rizzo York, Ph.D., was a physicist working for Standard Technologies, of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, a firm specializing in low-temperature science and under contract to T.L.T. International, of Manhattan, a company involved in the shipping of frozen meat from Australia and New Zealand to Britain and France. At some time during the summer of 1965, T.L.T. moved to diversify, and Mary York was asked to develop a working program that would allow shipment of liquefied natural gas in refrigerated supertankers. The idea was that cold liquefies gas, and since natural gas could not be sent across oceans by pipeline, it could be liquefied and sent by ship. To do that, Mary York began experiments with extreme cold, working first with liquid nitrogen, a gas that liquefies at minus 196 degrees centigrade or, approximately, minus 385 degrees Fahrenheit. After that she experimented with liquid hydrogen and later with liquefying helium, the last gas to liquefy as the temperature is reduced and becomes liquid at minus 269 degrees centigrade or minus 516 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, liquid helium could be used to reduce other materials to the same temperature. Mary York was six months pregnant and working late in her lab when she vanished on February 16,1966. Her lab had then been set on fire. Four days later, her strangled body washed ashore under the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. And whatever notes, formulas or plans she’d been working on either burned in the fire or were taken by whoever had killed her. Two months later, T.L.T. International went bankrupt after the company president committed suicide.

“Commander, two more things McVey wanted to know,” Benny said. “Microtab Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. It went belly up in May of the same year. The second thing he wanted to know was—”

* * *

Ian Noble had recorded Benny Grossman’s entire conversation. When they were through, he’d had a transcript made for his private files and took the tape and tape player to Lebrun’s heavily guarded room at Westminster Hospital.

Closing the door, he sat down next to the bed and turned on the recorder. For the next fifteen minutes Lebrun, oxygen tubes still in his nose, listened in silence. Finally they heard Benny Grossman’s New York accent finish—

“The second thing he wanted to know was what we had on a guy named Erwin Scholl who, in 1966, owned a big estate in Westhampton Beach on Long Island.

“Erwin Scholl still owns his estate there. Also one in Palm Beach and one in Palm Springs. He keeps a low profile but he’s a real heavy hitter in the publishing business and is a mucho-bucks major art collector. He also plays golf with Bob Hope, Gerry Ford and once in a while with the president himself. Tell McVey he’s got the wrong guy, this Scholl. He’s very big. Very. An untouchable. And that, by the way, came from McVey’s pal, Fred Hanley, with the FBI in L.A.”

With that Noble shut down the machine. Benny had ended with a note of worry, bordering on deep concern for McVey, and Noble hadn’t wanted Lebrun to hear it. As yet he hadn’t been told of the train incident. He’d taken the news of his brother’s death badly; there was no need for more.

“Ian,” Lebrun whispered. “I know about the train. I might have been shot but I am not yet dead. I spoke with Cadoux myself, not twenty minutes ago.”

“Playing the tough cop, are you?” Noble smiled. “Well, here’s something you don’t know. McVey shot the gunman who killed Merriman and tried to kill Osborn and the girl, Vera Monneray. He sent me the dead man’s thumbprint. We ran it and came up blank. He was clean, no record. No I.D.

“For obvious reasons I couldn’t use the services of Interpol for more extensive help. So I called on Military Intelligence, who kindly provided me with the following—” Noble took out a small notebook and flipped through the pages until he had what he wanted.

“Our shooter’s name was Bernhard Oven. Address unknown. They did, however, manage to find an old telephone number: 0372-885-7373. Appropriately, it’s the number of a butcher shop.”

“Zero three seven two was the area code for East Berlin before unification,” Lebrun said.

“Correct. And our friend, Bernhard Oven, was, up until it disbanded, a ranking member of the Stasi.”

Lebrun put a hand to the tubes running in and out of his throat and whispered, hoarsely, “What in God’s name are the East German secret police doing in France? Especially when they no longer exist.”

“I hope and pray McVey will soon be around to tell us,” Noble said soberly.