The Day After Tomorrow

81

AS THE Cessna climbed into the cloud cover over Meaux and disappeared from ground view, McVey explained how they’d escaped the train wreck, spent the, night in the woods near the airstrip, then come into the terminal just before seven-thirty. Acting the tourist, he’d bought the hat and sweatshirt and a packet of toiletries, then gone into the men’s room where Osborn waited, and changed in a stall. McVey shaved and got rid of his suit coat for the ĖuroDisney sweatshirt. Osborn had changed his appearance simply by slicking back his hair. With his stubble beard and fireman’s coat he looked like an exhausted rescue worker come to meet someone arriving by plane. All they’d had to do then was wait.

Noble shook his head and smiled. “McVey, you are an amazing fellow. Amazing.”

“Uh uh.” McVey shook his head. “Just lucky.”

“Same thing.”

Noble gave McVey a few minutes to relax, then brought out a copy of the taped conversation with Benny Grossman. By the time they touched down two hours later, McVey had read it twice, digested it, and thrown it out for scrutiny and comment.

The facts they had were as follows:

Paul Osborn’s father had designed and built a prototype scalpel capable of remaining razor-sharp even at the most exotic and improbable temperatures, most likely extreme cold. Category: HARDWARE.

The following, according to Benny Grossman were facts: Alexander Thompson, of Sheridan, Wyoming, designs a computer program that allows a computer to guide a machine built to hold and guide a scalpel during advanced microsurgery. Category: SOFTWARE.

David Brady, of Glendale, California, designs and builds an electronically driven mechanism with the range motion of a human wrist, capable of holding and controlling a’ scalpel during surgery. Category: HARDWARE.

Mary Rizzo York, of New Jersey, experiments with gasses that can bring temperatures down and cool surroundings to at least minus 516 degrees Fahrenheit. Category RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT.

All this happened during the period 1962 through 1966. Each scientist worked alone. As each project was completed, its inventor or scientist was terminated by Albert Merriman. By Merriman’s admission to Paul Osborn, the person who hired him and. paid him for his work was Erwin Scholl. Erwin Scholl, the immigrant capitalist who by then had acquired the means and the business acumen to fund, through dummy corporations, the experimental projects. This was the same Erwin Scholl, who, according to the FBI, is now, and has been for decades, an esteemed personal friend and confidant of a series of United States presidents, and is, therefore, all but untouchable.

Yet what did they have in the freezer in the basement of the London morgue but seven headless bodies and one bodyless head. Five of which were confirmed to have been frozen to a degree approaching absolute zero, a figure close enough to Marry Rizzo York’s work to be of considerable significance.

Earlier McVey had asked eminent micropathologist Dr. Stephen Richman, “Assuming the state of absolute zero could somehow, someway, be reached, why freeze decapitated bodies and decapitated heads to that temperature?”

Richman’s clear-cut answer: “To join them.”

Had Erwin Scholl, nearly thirty years earlier, been bankrolling research into cryosurgery with the idea of joining deep-frozen heads to other, deep-frozen, bodies? If he had, what was so secret that he’d ordered his researchers killed?

Patents?

Possibly.

But as far as anyone knew—according to the investigation by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch throughout Great Britain and Noble’s recently concluded telephone conversations with Dr. Edward L. Smith, president of the Cryonics Society of America, and Akito Sato, president of Cryonics Institute, Far East—no similar cryonic surgical experimentations were being done anywhere in the world.

Now, as twilight settled over London, Noble, McVey and Osborn faced each other in Noble’s Scotland Yard office. McVey had discarded the Mickey Mouse ball cap but still wore the EuroDisney sweatshirt, and Osborn had traded Noble his French fireman’s coat for a well-worn dark blue cardigan with a gold Metropolitan Police emblem stitched over the lefthand pocket.

A patent search by RDI International of London had turned up no known patents worldwide on hardware or software designed for the kind of advanced microsurgery they were talking about.

A combination Moody’s/Dun & Bradstreet review of the corporate histories of the companies employing Albert Merriman’s victims had been requested through the Serious Fraud Office but had not yet been completed.

There was a light tap at the door and Noble’s forty-three-year-old, six-foot-tall, never-married secretary, Elizabeth Welles, entered. She carried a tray with cups and spoons, a small pitcher of milk, a silver dish holding cubes of sugar and a pot each of tea and coffee.

“Thank you, Elizabeth,” Noble said.

“Of course, Commander.” Drawing herself up to her full height, she glanced sidelong at Osborn and left.

“She thinks you’re quite the handsome chap, Dr. Osborn. Very highly sexed she is too. Tea or coffee?”

Osborn grinned. “Tea, please.”

McVey was staring out the window, absently watching a small man walk two large dogs down the street, and only vaguely aware of the brief comedy that had taken place behind him.

“Coffee, McVey?” he heard Noble ask.

Abruptly he turned and came back across the room. His eyes were sharp and there was temper in his walk.

“There’ve been times over the years where, at some point or other during an investigation, I’ve felt like a damned idiot because all of a sudden something hit me I should have seen from the start. But I’ll tell you, Ian, this time we may have missed the boat altogether. You, me, Doctor Michaels, even Doctor Richman.”

“What are you talking about?” Noble’s hand held a lump of sugar just over the lip of his teacup:

“Life. Dammit.” McVey glanced at Osborn to include him, then leaned on the desk in front of Noble. “Wouldn’t you assume that if someone had been working all these years to perfect some way to marry a severed head to a body, the end goal of that would not just be the act itself but bringing the result back to life? To make this creature, this Frankenstein, live and breathe!”

“Yes, but why?” Noble let the sugar drop into his cup.

“No idea. But why else do it?” McVey turned back to Osborn. “Imagine the whole process medically. How would it go?”

“Simple. In theory, anyway.” Osborn leaned against the back of a red leather chair. “Bring the frozen thing back to temperature. Back from nearly minus 560 degrees below zero to 98.6 degrees above zero. To do the operation, blood would have been drained off. As the thing thaws, blood is reintroduced. The difficult thing would be to get it to thaw uniformly.”

“But it could be done?” Noble asked.

“I would say that if they’d been able to find a way to do the first, the second would have already been taken care of.”

Immediately a sound emanated from the fax machine on the antique secretary behind Noble’s desk. The light switched on, and a moment later it began printing out.

It was the Moody’s/Dun & Bradstreet report requested from the Serious Fraud Office.

McVey and Osborn moved in behind Noble to watch as the information came in:

Microtab, Waltham, Massachusetts. Dissolved, July 1966. Owned by Wentworth Products, Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris. All of Boston, Massachusetts. All deceased 1966.

Wentworth Products Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Dissolved, August 1966. Privately held company. Owned by James Tallmadge of Windsor, Ontario. Tallmadge deceased 1967.

Alama Steel, Ltd. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dissolved, 1966. Subsidiary of Wentworth Products Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris.

Standard Technologies, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Subsidiary of T.L.T. International, 10 Park Avenue, New York, New York. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris.

T.L.T. International, wholly owned subsidiary of Omega Shipping Lines, 17 Hanover Square, Mayfair, London, U.K. Principal stockholder, Harald Erwin Scholl, 17 Hanover Square, Mayfair, London, U.K.

“There it is!” Noble said triumphantly at the printout of Scholl’s name as the fax continued. .

T.L.T. International dissolved 1967.

Omega Shipping Lines bought by Goltz Development Group, S.A., Düsseldorf, Germany, 1966. Goltz Development Group—GDG—partnership. General partners: Harald Erwin Scholl, 17 Hanover Square, London, U.K. Gustav Dortmund, Friedrichstadt, Düsseldorf, Germany. President—since 1978—Konrad Peiper, 52 Reichsstrasse, Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany. (N.b. GDG acquired Lewsen International, Bayswater Road, London, U.K., a holding company, 1981.)

END OF TRANSMISSION

Noble swiveled in his chair and looked up to McVey. “Well, our dear Mr. Scholl may not be quite as untouchable as your FBI seems to think. You know who Gustav Dortmund is—”

“Chief of Germany’s central bank,” McVey said.

“Right. And Lewsen International was a prominent supplier of steel, weapons parts and construction supervisors to Iraq during the eighties. I’ll wager Messieurs Scholl, Dortmund and Peiper became very rich men in those years, if they weren’t already.”

“If I may.” Osborn approached with a current issue of People magazine he’d picked from among several on Noble’s sideboard. McVey watched perplexed as he set aside Noble’s teacup and opened a double-page advertisement on the desk in front of him. It was a provocative ad for the latest recording of a young and very popular female rock singer. She was soaking wet and wore a skintight see-through dress and rode the back of a killer whale as it sprang dramatically out of the water.

Noble and McVey looked to Osborn blankly.

“Don’t know, do you?” Osborn smiled.

“Know what?” McVey said.

“Your Konrad Peiper,” Osborn said.

“What about him?” McVey had no idea what Osborn was getting at.

“His wife is Margarete Peiper, one of the most powerful women in show business. She runs a giant talent agency and manages and produces this young lady on the whale as well as probably a dozen more of the biggest young names in rock and video. And”—he paused—”she does it all from the penthouse office of her restored seventeenth-century mansion in Berlin.”

“How in heaven do you know that?” Noble was astonished.

Osborn pulled the magazine back, folded it and tossed it back on Noble’s sideboard. “Commander, I’m an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. Probably half of my patients are kids under twenty who’ve been injured in athletics. I don’t have all those trendy magazines in my waiting room for nothing.”

“You actually read them?”

Osborn grinned. “You bet.”