by Allan Folsom
Crossing the room, he leaned back against the wall, just to the side of the door. He could feel the sweat build up in the grip of the gun. Whatever happened next was up to Whoever was in the hallway.
“Sorry, honey. Ya got the wrong damn room,” he heard McVey drawl loudly from outside the door. It was followed by a woman’s voice flailing in French.
“Wrong room, honey. Believe me. Try upstairs—maybe you got the wrong floor!”
French spat back, angry and indignant.
Then there was the sound of the key in the lock. The door opened and McVey came in. He had a dark-haired girl by the arm and a rolled-up newspaper sticking out of his jacket pocket.
“You want to come in, come in,” he said to the girl, then looked at Osborn.
“Lock it.”
Osborn closed the door, locked it, then slid the chain lock across.
“Okay, honey, you’re in. What now?” McVey said to the girl, who stood in the middle of the room with a hand on her hip. Her eyes went to Osborn. She was probably twenty, five foot two or three, and not the least bit frightened. She wore a tight silk blouse and a very short black skirt with net stockings and high heels.
“Fucky, fucky,” she said in English, then smiled seductively, looking from Osborn to McVey.
“You want to screw the two of us. Is that it?”
“Sure, why not?” She smiled and her English got a lot better.
“Who sent you?”
“I am a bet.”
“What kind of bet?”
“The night clerk said you were gay. The bellman said no.”
McVey laughed. “And they sent you to find out.”
“Oui.” And pulled several hundred francs from the top of her bra to prove it.
“What the hell’s going on?” Osborn said.
McVey smiled. “Aw hell, we was just funnin’ with them, honey. The bellman’s right.” He looked at Osborn. “Want to fuck her first?”
Osborn jumped. “What?”
“Why not, she’s already been paid.” McVey smiled at her. “Take your clothes off. . . .”
“Sure.” She was serious, and she was good at it. She looked them in the eyes the whole time. One and then the other and then back again, as if each piece as it came off was a special show for him alone. And slowly she took it all off.
Osborn watched open-mouthed. McVey wasn’t actually going to do it? Just like that and with him standing there? He’d heard stories about what cops have done in certain situations, everybody had. But who believed it, let alone thought they’d be firsthand party to it?
McVey glanced at him. “I’ll go first, huh?” He grinned. “Don’t mind if we go into the bathroom, do you, Doctor?”
Osborn stared. “Be my guest.”
McVey opened the bathroom door and the girl went in. McVey went in behind her and closed the door. A second later Osborn heard her give a sharp yelp and there was a hard bump against the door. Then the door opened and McVey came out fully clothed.
Osborn was dumbfounded.
“She came up here to get a look at us. She saw me in the hall, it was all she needed.”
McVey tugged the newspaper from his jacket pocket and handed it to him, then went over to gather up the girl’s clothes. Osborn unrolled it. He didn’t even see which paper it was. Only the bold headline in French— HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE SOUGHT IN LA COUPOLE SHOOTING! Beneath it, in smaller type, “Linked to American Doctor in Merriman Murder!” Once more Osborn saw the same Paris police mug shot of. himself that had been printed earlier in Le Figaro and beside it a two or three-year-old picture of a smiling McVey.
“They got that from the LA. Times Magazine. An interview on the everyday life of a homicide investigator. They wanted gristle, they got boredom. But they ran it anyway.” McVey put the clothes into a hotel dry cleaning bag and unlocked the door. Carefully he checked the hallway, then hung the bag outside.
“How did they know this? How could they even find out?” Osborn was incredulous.
McVey closed the door and relocked it. “They knew who their man was and that he was tailing one of us. They knew I was working with Lebrun. All they had to do was send somebody down to the restaurant with a couple of photographs and ask, ‘Are these the guys?’ Not so hard. That’s why the girl. They wanted to make sure they had the right Mutt and Jeff before they sent in the firepower. She probably hoped she could get a look, make up a story and walk away. But obviously she was prepared to do whatever she had to if it didn’t work.”
Osborn looked past McVey at the closed bathroom door. “What did you do to her?”
McVey shrugged. “I didn’t think it was too good an idea to let her go back downstairs right away.”
Handing McVey the paper, Osborn opened the bathroom door. The girl sat stark naked on the toilet, handcuffed to a water pipe on the wall beside it. A washcloth was stuck in her mouth and her eyes looked as if they were ready to pop from her head in fury. Without a word Osborn closed the door.
“She’s a feisty one,” McVey said, with the sliver of a grin. “Whoever finds her, she’s going to make a big stink about her clothes before she lets anyone pick up a telephone. Hopefully that delay will add a few more seconds to our increasingly limited life span.”
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 a
bout 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.
75
* * *
The Smooth click of the wheels over the rails beneath was soothing, and Osborn sat back drowsing. If he’d slept at all during the two hours they’d spent huddled under Austerlitz Bridge, he didn’t remember. All he knew was that he was very tired and felt grubby and unclean. Across from him, McVey leaned against the window, dozing lightly, and he marveled that McVey seemed to be able to sleep anywhere.
They’d climbed from their perch over the Seine at five o’clock and gone back to the station, where they’d discovered that trains for Meaux left from the Gare de l’Est, fifteen minutes by cab across Paris. With time pressing, they’d chanced a taxi ride across the city, hoping the randomly chosen taxi driver was no more than he appeared.
Reaching the station, they’d entered separately and through different doors, each man all too aware of the early editions jamming the front racks of every news kiosk inside, bold black headlines hawking the shooting at La Coupole with their photos printed starkly and graphically underneath.
Moments later, nervous hands had reached for tickets at separate windows, but neither clerk had done more than exchange a ticket for money and serve the next customer in line.
Then they’d waited, apart, but within view of each other, for twenty minutes. Their only jolt came when five uniformed gendarmes had suddenly appeared leading four rough-looking, handcuffed and chained convicts toward a waiting train. It looked as if they were about to board the train to Meaux, but at the last minute they’d veered off and loaded their sullen cargo onto another.
At 6:25, they crossed the platform with a group of others and took separate seats in the same car of the train that left the Gare de l’Est at 6:30 and would arrive in Meaux at 7:10. Ample time for them to get from the station to the airfield by the time Noble’s pilot touched down in his Cessna ST95.
The train had eight cars and was a local, part of the EuroCity line. Two dozen people, mostly early commuters, rode in the same Second Class compartment as theirs. The First Class section was empty and had been avoided. Two men alone were easily remembered and described even if they sat seats apart in an empty compartment. The same two men sitting alone among other travelers were less likely to be recalled.
Pulling back a sleeve, Osborn looked at his watch. Six fifty-nine. Eleven minutes until they reached the station at Meaux. Outside, he could see the sun rising on a gray day that made the French farmland seem softer and greener than it already was.
The contrast between it and the dry, sun-scorched brush of Southern California was disquieting. For no particular reason, it conjured up visions of who McVey was and the tall man and the death that surrounded them both. Death had no place here. This train ride, this green land, this birthing of a new day was something that should have been enshrouded in love and wonder. Suddenly Osborn Was swept by an almost unbearable longing for Vera. He wanted to feel her. Touch her. Breathe in the scent of her. posing his eyes, he could see the texture of her hair and the smoothness of her skin. And he smiled as he remembered the almost imperceptible fuzz of hair on her ear-lobes. Vera was what mattered. This was her land he was passing through. It was her morning. Her day.
From somewhere off came a heavy, muffled thud. The train shuddered, and Osborn was suddenly being thrown violently sideways toward a young priest who, seconds before, had been reading a paper. Then the car they were in was turning over and they both fell. It kept rolling, like some horrendous carnival ride. Glass crashing and the wrenching of steel meshed with human screams. He glimpsed the ceiling just as an aluminum crutch glanced hard off his head. A split second later Osborn was upside down with a body on top of him. Then glass exploded above him and he was awash in blood. The car spun again and the person on top of him slid down his chest. It was a woman, an
d she had no upper torso at all. Then there was horrible grating as steel screamed over steel. It was followed by a tremendous bang. Osborn rocketed backward and everything stopped.
Seconds, minutes afterward, Osborn opened his eyes. He could see a gray sky through trees with a bird circling above them. For a time he lay there doing nothing more than breathe. Finally, he tried to move. First his left leg, then his right. Then his arm, until he could see his still-bandaged left hand. He moved his right arm and hand. Miraculously, he had survived.
Easing up, he saw the massive twist of steel. What remained of a railroad car was lying on its side halfway down an embankment. It was then he realized he had been thrown from the train.
Farther up the embankment, he could see the other cars, some driven, accordion-like, into each other. Others were piled, almost piggyback, one on top of another. Bodies were everywhere. Some were moving; most were not. At the top of the hill, a group of young boys came into view, staring down at the wreckage and pointing.
Slowly Osborn began to understand what had happened. “McVey!” he heard himself say out loud.
“McVey!” he said again, struggling to his feet. Then he saw the first rescuers push past the boys and start down the hill.
The act of standing made him dizzy. Closing his eyes, he grabbed onto a tree for balance and took a deep breath. Reaching up, he felt the pulse at his neck. It was strong and regular. Then somebody, a fireman, he thought, spoke to him in French. “I’m all right,” he said in English, and the man moved on.
Shrieks and cries of victims cleared his mind further, and he saw that everything around him was chaos. Rescue workers poured down the hillside. Climbed into cars. Began lifting people out through smashed windows, easing them out from beneath the wreckage. Blankets were tossed, in a rush, over the dead. The entire area became a frantic hill of activity.