by Allan Folsom
McVey glanced around the lobby. He hated paranoia. It crippled a man and made him see things that weren’t. But he had to face the reality that anyone, in uniform or not, could be working for this group, whoever or whatever they were. The tall man would have had no compunction about shooting him right there in the lobby and he had to assume his replacement would do the same. Or if not right then, at least report where he was. By lingering, he was pressing his luck on either account.
“McVey, are you there?”
He turned back to the phone. “What’d you find out about Klass?”
“M16 could find nothing but an exemplary record. Wife, two children. Born in Munich. Grew up in Frankfurt. Captain in the German Air Force. Recruited out of it by West German Intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, where he developed his skills and reputation as a fingerprint expert. After that, went to work for Interpol at Lyon headquarters.”
“No. No good,” McVey reacted. “They missed something. Go deeper. Look into people he associates with, outside his daily routine. Hold on—” McVey thought back, trying to remember Lebrun’s office the day they had first received Merriman’s fingerprint from Interpol, Lyon. Somebody else had been working with Klass—Hal, Hall, Hald—Halder!
“Halder—first name Rudolf. Interpol, Vienna. He worked with Klass on the Merriman print. Look, Ian, do you know Manny Remmer?”
“With the German Federal Police.”
“He’s an old friend, works out of headquarters in Bad Godesberg. Lives in an area called Rungsdorf. It’s not too late. Get him at home. Tell him I said for you to call. Tell him you want anything he can find on both Klass and Halder. If it’s there, he’ll get it. Trust him.”
“McVey—” There was concern in Noble’s voice. “I think you’ve managed to open a rather large can of very disagreeable worms. And, frankly, I think you should get out of Paris damn quick.”
“How? In a box or a limo?”
“Where can I reach you in ninety minutes?”
“You can’t. I’ll reach you.”
It was past 9:30 before McVey knocked on the door to Osborn’s room. Osborn opened the door to the chain and Peered out.
“Hope you like chicken salad.”
In one hand McVey balanced a tray with chicken salad in white plastic bowls with Stretch-Tight across the top, in tie other he juggled a pot of coffee along with two cups, everything purchased from an irritable counter clerk at the hotel coffee shop as he was trying to close for the night.
By ten o’clock the coffee and chicken salad were gone and Osborn was pacing up and down, absently working the fingers of his injured hand, while McVey sat hunched over the bed, using it for a worktable, staring at what he’d written in his notebook.
“Merriman told you that an Erwin Scholl—Erwin spelled with an E—of Westhampton Beach, New York, paid him to kill your father and three other people sometime around 1966.”
“That’s right,” Osborn said.
“Of the other three, one was in Wyoming, one in California, and one in New Jersey. He’d done the work and been paid. Then Scholl’s people tried to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all he said, just the names Of states. No victims’ names, no cities?”
“Just the states.”
McVey got up and went into the bathroom. “Almost thirty years ago a Mr. Erwin Scholl hires Merriman to do some contract killing. Then Scholl orders him knocked off. The game of kill the killer. Make certain whatever’s been taken care of is permanent, with no loose ends that might talk.”
McVey tore the sanitary wrapper off a water glass, filled it, then came back into the room and sat down. “But Merriman outsmarted Scholl’s people, faked his own death, and got away. And Scholl, assuming Merriman was dead, forgot about him. That was, until you came along and hired Jean Packard to find him.” McVey took a drink of the water, stopping short of mentioning Dr. Klass and Interpol, Lyon. There was only so much Osborn needed to know.
“You think Scholl is behind what’s happened here in Paris?” Osborn asked.
“And Marseilles, and Lyon, thirty years later? I don’t know who Mr. Scholl is yet. Maybe he’s dead, or never was.”
“Then who’s doing this?”
McVey hunched over the bed, made another note in his dog-eared book, then looked at Osborn. “Doctor, when was the first time you saw the tall man?”
“At the river.”
“Not before?”
“No.”
“Think back. Earlier that day, the day before, the day before that.”
“No.”
“He shot you because you were with Merriman and he didn’t want to leave a witness. That what you think?”
“What other reason would there be?”
“Well, for one, it could have been the other way around, that he was there to kill you and not Merriman.”
“Why? How would he know me? And even if that were the case, why would he kill all of Merriman’s family afterward?”
Osborn was right. Seemingly no one had known Merriman was alive until Klass discovered his fingerprint. Then the boom had been lowered. Most probably, as Lebrun had suggested, to keep him from talking, because they knew the police, once they had the print, would grab him in no time. Klass might have been able to delay release of the print, but he couldn’t deny it existed because too many people at Interpol knew about it. So Merriman had to be shut up because of what he might say after he’d been caught. And since he’d been out of business for twenty-five-odd years, what he might have said would have been about what he had done when he was in business. Which would have been almost exactly the same time he was under the hire of Erwin Scholl. Which was why Merriman, along with anyone else he was close enough to have confided in, had been liquidated. To keep him, or them, from talking about what he had done while he was in Scholl’s employ, or at the very least, from implicating Scholl in a murder-for-hire scheme. That meant they either didn’t know who Osborn was or had missed the connection that he was heir to one of Merriman’s victims and—
“Dammit?” McVey said under his breath. Why the hell hadn’t he realized it before? The answer to what was happening lay not with Merriman or Osborn, but with the four people Merriman had killed thirty years earlier, Osborn’s father among them!
McVey stood up in a surge of adrenaline. “What did your father do for a living?”
“His profession?”
“Yeah.”
“He—thought things up,” Osborn said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“From what I remember, he worked in what was probably then a kind of high-tech think tank. He invented things, then built prototypes of what he invented. Mostly, I think, it had to do with the design of medical instruments.”
“Do you remember the name of the company?”
“It was called Microtab. I remember the company name clearly because they sent a large floral wreath to my father’s funeral. The name of the company was on the card but nobody from the company showed up,” Osborn said vacantly.
McVey knew then the extent of Osborn’s pain. He knew he could still see the funeral, as if it had happened yesterday. It had to have been the same when he saw Merriman in the brasserie.
“This Microtab was in Boston?”
“No, Waltham, it’s a suburb.”
Picking up his pen, McVey wrote: Microtab—Waltham, Mass.—1966.
“Any sense of how he worked? By himself? Or in groups, four or five guys hammering these things out?”
“Dad worked alone. Everybody did. Employees weren’t allowed to talk about what they were working on, even with each other. I remember my mother discussing it with him once. She thought it was ridiculous he couldn’t talk to the person in the next office. Later, I assumed it had to do with patents or something.”
“Do you have any idea what he was working on when he was killed?”
Osborn grinned. “Yes. He’d just finished it and brought it home to show me. He was proud
of what he did and liked to show me what he was working on. Although I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to.”
“What was it?”
“A scalpel.”
“A scalpel?—as in surgery?” McVey could feel the hair begin to crawl up the back of his neck.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what it looked like? Why it was different from any other scalpel?”
“It was cast. Made of a special alloy that could withstand extreme variations in temperature and still remain surgically sharp. It was to be used in association with an electronic arm driven by computer.”
Not only was the hair standing up on McVey’s neck, it felt as if someone had poured ice cubes down his spine. “Somebody was going to do surgery at extreme temperatures. Using some kind of computer-driven gizmo that would hold your father’s scalpel and do the actual work?”
“I don’t know. You have to remember that in those days computers were gigantic, they took up whole rooms, so I don’t know how practical it would have been even if it worked.”
“The temperature business.”
“What about it?”
“You said extreme temperatures. Would that be hot or cold or both?”
“I don’t know. But experimental work had already begun with laser surgery, which is basically the turning of light energy into heat. So if they were experimenting with unexplored surgical concepts I would assume they would have been working in the opposite direction.”
“Cold.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly the ice was gone and McVey could feel the rush of blood through his veins. This was the something that had kept pulling him back to Osborn. The connection between Osborn, Merriman and the headless bodies.
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. Pershin
g 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.