The Day After Tomorrow

80

CHIMES WOKE Benny Grossman from a sound sleep. It was 3:15 in the afternoon. Why the hell was the doorbell ringing? Estelle was still at work. Matt would be at Hebrew school, and David would be at football practice. He was in no mood for solicitations; let whoever it was knock on somebody else’s door. He was starting to doze off when the chimes rang again.

“Christ,” he said. Getting up, he looked out the window. No one was in the yard and the front door was out of sight directly beneath him.

“All right!” he said as the chimes sounded again. Pulling on a pair of sweatpants, he went down the stairs to the front door and looked out through the peephole. Two Hasidic rabbis stood there, one young and smooth shaven, the other old, with a long graying beard.

“Oh, my God,” he thought. “What the hell’s happened?”

Heart pounding, he yanked the door.

“Yes?” he said.

“Detective Grossman?” the older rabbi asked.

“Yeah. That’s me.” For all his years as a cop, for everything he’d seen, when it came to his own family, Benny was as fragile as a child. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is it Estelle? Matt? Not David—”

“I’m afraid it’s you, Detective,” the older rabbi said.

Benny didn’t have time to react. The younger rabbi lifted his hand and shot him between the eyes. Benny fell back inside like a stone. The young rabbi went in after htm and shot him again, just to make sure.

At the same time, the older rabbi went through the house. Upstairs, on Benny’s dresser, he found the notes Benny had used when he phoned Scotland Yard. Folding them carefully, the rabbi put them in his pocket and went back downstairs.

Next door, Mrs. Greenfield thought it odd to see two rabbis coming out of the Grossman house, closing the door behind them, especially in the middle of the afternoon.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked as they opened Benny’s front gate and started past her down the sidewalk.

“Not at all. Shalom,” the younger rabbi said pleasantly as they passed.

“Shalom,” Mrs. Greenfield said, and watched as the younger rabbi opened a car door for the older man. Then, smiling at her once more, he got behind the wheel and, a moment later, drove off.

The six-seat Cessna dropped through a heavy cloud deck and settled down over the French farmland.

Pilot Clark Clarkson, a handsome, brown-haired former RAF bomber pilot with huge hands and a broad smile, held the small craft steady through the variable turbulence as they dropped even lower. Ian Noble was harnessed into the copilot’s seat beside him, head pressed against the window looking toward the ground. Directly behind Clarkson, dressed in civilian clothes, was Major Geoffrey Avnel, a field surgeon and British Special Forces commando fluent in French. Neither British military intelligence nor Captain Cadoux’s woman in the field, Avril Rocard, had been successful in obtaining any information on the fate of McVey or Paul Osborn. If they had been on the train, for all intents they had disappeared from it.

Noble was banking on. the theory that one or both had been hurt and; fearing further attack from whoever had blown up the train, had crawled away from the wreckage. Both men knew the Cessna would come back for them today, which meant, if Noble was right, that they could be anywhere between the airfield and the wreckage site some two miles away. That possibility was the reason Major Avnel had come along.

Ahead of them was the town of Meaux, and to the right, its airfield. Clarkson radioed the tower and was given permission to land. Five minutes later, at 8:01 A.M., Cessna ST95 touched down.

Taxiing to a stop near the control tower, Noble and Major Avnel climbed out and went into the small building that served as a terminal.

In his mind Noble had no idea what he would face. The hazards of police work were drummed into every cop from his first day of duty. London was no different from Detroit or Tokyo, and the death of any cop killed in the line of duty was the death of any police officer in uniform because it could as easily have been him or her. It could happen to any one of them, on any day in any city on earth. If you were in one piece at the end of each day you were lucky. And that’s how you took it, a day at a time. If you made it all the way through, you took your pension and retired and slipped into old age trying not to think of all the cops still out there, the ones who wouldn’t be so fortunate. That was a policeman’s life, what he or she did. Yet it was not McVey’s. He was different, the kind of cop who would outlive everybody and still be on duty at ninety-five. That was a fact. It was how he was seen and what he believed himself, no matter how often he grumbled otherwise. The trouble was, Noble had a feeling. Tragedy was in the air. Maybe that was why he’d come along with Clarkson and brought Major Avnel, because he felt he owed it to McVey to be there.

There was a leadenness to his step as he approached the Immigration desk and flashed his Special Branch I.D. at the officer on duty. He felt it all the more as he and Avnel pushed grim-faced through the glass doors and into the terminal area itself.

Which was why the last thing he ever expected to see was McVey seated across from him, wearing a Mickey Mouse baseball cap and EuroDisney sweatshirt, reading the morning paper.

“Good God!” he exclaimed.

“Morning, Ian.” McVey smiled. Standing up, he folded the paper under his arm and put out his hand.

Twenty feet away, Osborn, hair slicked back, still wearing the French firefighter’s jacket, looked up from a copy of Le Figaro and watched Noble take McVey’s hand, then saw Noble shake his head, step back and introduce a third man. As he did, McVey glanced in Osborn’s direction and nodded. Then almost immediately, Noble, McVey and Major Avnel started back toward the door leading out to the-tarmac.

Osborn joined them and they walked twenty yards to the Cessna. Clarkson fired up the engine and requested permission for takeoff. At 8:27, without incident, they were airborne.