The Day After Tomorrow

by Allan Folsom

  And settling over everything—the shouts, the screams, the distant sirens, the cries for help—was the pungent, overwhelming, odor of hot brake fluid as it leaked from sheared lines.

  The smell of it made Osborn cover his nose as he pushed through the tragedy around him.

  “McVey!” he cried out again. “McVey! McVey!”

  “Sabotage,” he heard someone say in passing. Turning, he found himself looking into a rescue worker’s face.

  “American,” he said. “An older man. Have you seen him?” The man stared back as if he didn’t understand. Then a fireman came up and they ran back up the hill.

  Stepping over broken glass, climbing over torn and ravaged steel, Osborn moved from one victim to another. Watching the doctors work on the living, lifting the blankets to stare at the faces of the dead. McVey was nowhere among them.

  Once, lifting the blanket to look at the face of a dead man, he saw the man’s eyes flicker once, then close again. Reaching, he felt for a heartbeat and found it. Looking up, he saw a paramedic.

  “Help!” he shouted. “This man is alive!”

  The paramedic came with a rush and Osborn moved back. As he did, he began to feel cold and lightheaded. Shock, he knew, was beginning to set in. His first thought was to ask the paramedic where he could get a blanket and he started to, but suddenly had enough presence of mind to realize that if the train had been sabotaged, the act could well have been meant for McVey and himself. If he asked for a blanket, they would know he’d been a passenger. They would demand his name and he would be reported alive.

  “No,” he thought and backed away. “Best to get out of sight and stay there.”

  Looking around, he saw a thick stand of trees near the top of the grade not far from where he stood. The paramedic had his back to him and the other rescue workers were farther down the hill. It became a major physical effort for him to climb the few yards to the trees, and he was afraid it was taking too long and he would be seen. Finally he reached them and turned back. Still, no one looked his way. Satisfied, he melted into the thick under-growth. And there, away from the hysteria, he lay down in the damp leaves and, using his arm for a pillow, closed his eyes. Almost immediately deep sleep overtook him.

  76

  * * *

  WORD OF the Paris-Meaux train derailment reached Ian Noble less than an hour after it happened. First reports indicated sabotage. A second report confirmed that an explosive device had been set off directly under the engine.

  That McVey and Osborn would be on the same route, at the same time, to rendezvous with Noble’s pilot at the Meaux airstrip was too coincidental. And since the pilot had landed, waited the allotted time and then taken off with no sign of them, there was every reason to believe McVey and Osborn had been on the train.

  Immediately, Noble put in a call to Captain Cadoux at his residence in Lyon and informed him what had happened. It was important he know what Cadoux had found out in his investigations into the German fingerprint expert, Hugo Klass, and the death of Lebrun’s brother, Antoine. Noble was going under the assumption that McVey and Osborn had been on the train and that whatever organization Klass was working for, or Antoine might have been involved with, was responsible for the derailment. It was another demonstration of just how far their intelligence network reached. Never mind they had found Merriman, Agnes Demblon and the others, and knew who Vera Monneray was and where she lived—that they’d been able to pinpoint McVey’s clandestine meeting with Osborn at La Coupole and then discover they were on the Paris-Meaux train was nothing short of astonishing.

  Cadoux was speechless, and the situation made his own frustration all the worse. The tail he’d put on Klass had so far turned up nothing more sinister than the fact that he’d gone to work as usual on Monday. A tap on his phone had given up nothing. As for Antoine, he’d come directly home Sunday night after a late dinner with his brother, and gone directly to bed. For some reason he’d gotten up and gone to his study before dawn, which was not his habit. And it was there his wife found him at 7:30. He was on the floor beside his desk with his nine-millimeter Beretta on the carpet beside him. The gun had been fired once and there was a single gunshot wound in his right temple. An autopsy-ballistics report proved the bullet had come from the same weapon. The doors leading outside were locked, but the latch in a kitchen window was open. So it was possible someone had both come in and gone out that way, though there were no signs of it.

  “Or just gone out,” Noble said.

  “Yes, we’d thought of that too,” Cadoux said in his heavy French accent. “That Antoine had let someone in the front door and relocked it. At that hour he would have known whoever it was or he would not have let them in. Then they killed him and went out the window. Still, there were no signs of it, and the coroner has officially ruled it a suicide.”

  Noble was as baffled as he’d ever been. Everyone who knew Albert Merriman was either dead or a definitive target, and the man who had discovered him through a fingerprint seemed completely innocent.

  “Cadoux. Interpol, Washington—who did Klass get there to request the Merriman file from the New York police?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Washington has no record of it.”

  “That’s impossible. They were faxed there directly by New York.”

  “Old codes, my friend,” Cadoux said. “In the past, top people at Interpol had private codes that gave them access to information no one else could get. That practice is no longer in effect. Still, there are those that remember them and can use them, and there is no way to trace it. The New York police may have faxed the material to Washington but it came straight to Lyon, somehow electronically by passing Washington.”

  “Cadoux—” Noble hesitated. “I know McVey is against it, but I think we’re running out of time. Have Klass quietly taken into custody and interrogate him. If you want, I’ll come myself.”

  “I understand, my friend. And I agree. You will let me know the moment you get word on McVey. For better or worse, eh?”

  “Yes, of course. For better or worse.”

  Hanging up, Noble thought a moment, then swiveled to a pipe tree behind his desk. Selecting a worn and yellowed Calabash, he filled it, then tamped the tobacco and lit it.

  If McVey and Osborn had not been on the Paris-Meaux train and had simply missed connecting with his pilot at the Meaux airstrip, then they would be there when he touched down tomorrow. But twenty-four hours was too long to wait. He had told Cadoux he’d had to assume they had been on the train. And that was what he would go with now. If they were dead, that was one thing, but if they were alive, they had to be gotten out of there now, before the other side discovered the same thing.

  A little after ten forty-five, almost four hours after the derailment, a tall, slim, very attractive reporter with press credentials from the newspaper Le Mond parked her car along the single-lane road with the other media vehicles, and joined the swarm of journalists already on the scene.

  French Garde Nationale troops had joined Meaux police and firefighters in the rescue effort that, so far, counted thirteen dead, including the train’s driver. Thirty six more were hospitalized, twenty in serious condition, and fifteen more had been treated for minor abrasions and released. The rest were still buried in the wreckage, and grim estimates ranged from hours to days before the accounting would be complete.

  “Is there a list of names and nationalities?” she said, entering a large media tent set up fifty feet back from the tracks. Pierre André, a graying medical adjutant in charge of victim identification for the Garde Nationale, glanced up from a worktable to the LeMond press pass around her neck, then looked at her and smiled, perhaps his only smile of the day. Avril Rocard was indeed a handsome piece.

  “Oui, madame—” Immediately he turned to a subordinate. “Lieutenant, a casualty accounting for madame, s’il vous plaît.”

  Selecting a sheet from inside one of several manila folders in front of
him, the officer stood smartly and handed it to her.

  “Merci,” she said.

  “I must warn you, madame, that it is far from complete. Nor is it for publication until the next of kin have been informed,” Pierre André said, this time without the smile.

  “Of course.”

  Avril Rocard was a Parisian detective, assigned to the French government as a counterfeit specialist. But her presence here, playing a correspondent for Le Mond, was not at the request of the French government or of the Paris Prefecture of Police. She was here because of Cadoux. For a decade they had been lovers, and she was the one person in France he could trust as he could trust himself.

  Walking off, she looked at the list. Most of the identified passengers had been French nationals. There were, however, two Germans, a Swiss, a South African, two Irish and an Australian. No Americans.

  Leaving the scene, she went to her car, unlocked the door and got in. Picking up the cellular phone, she dialed a number in Paris and waited while it rang through to Lyon.

  “Oui?” Cadoux’s voice was clear.

  “So far nothing. No Americans at all on the list.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “It looks like hell. What should I do?”

  “Has anyone questioned your credentials?”

  “No.”

  “Then stay there until all the victims have been accounted for—”

  Avril Rocard clicked off the phone and slowly set the receiver back in its cradle. She was thirty-three years old. By now she should have had a home and a baby. She should have at least had a husband. What the hell was she doing this for?

  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.”