by Allan Folsom
Osborn didn’t look back. His lungs on fire, he ducked behind a row of parked cars and ran low for a half block, then cut down a side street. There was an intersection in front of him and a brightly lit street. Breathless, he turned the corner and pushed quickly down a sidewalk filled with pedestrians.
Shoving the gun into his belt, he covered it with his jacket and kept on, trying to gather his wits. Passing a Burger King, he turned and looked behind him. Nothing. Maybe they hadn’t come after him after all. Maybe it had been his imagination. He kept walking, moving with the crowd.
Several preposterously dressed teenagers passed him in the opposite direction and a dark-haired girl smiled at him. Why had he pulled the gun? All the man had done was turn around. For all he knew the second man might not even have been with him, just someone out for a walk. But the stranger’s unnatural stance, the way he had turned back so measuredly after saying good evening, made Osborn believe he was going to be attacked. That was why he had done what he had. Of course it was. Better safe than set upon.
A clock in a window read 10:52.
Until this moment he’d totally forgotten McVey. In eight minutes he was due back to the hotel, and he had no idea where he was. What now? Call him? Make up a story, say you were—turning a corner, he saw the Europa Center directly in front of him. Below it the lighted sign of the Hotel Palace hung over its motor entrance.
At six minutes to eleven, Osborn stepped into an elevator and pushed the button for the sixth floor. The doors closed and the elevator started up. He was alone and safe.
Trying to forget the men in the park, he glanced around the elevator. The wall next to him was a mirror, and he Crushed back his hair and straightened his jacket. On the Wall opposite was a tourism poster of Berlin with photographs of must-see attractions. Centermost was an expo-sure of Charlottenburg Palace. Suddenly he remembered what Remmer had said earlier “The occasion is a welcoming celebration for an Elton Karl Lybarger. An industrialist from Zurich who had a severe stroke a year ago in San Francisco and has now fully recovered.”
“Damn,” he swore under his breath. “Damn.”
He should have realized it before.
101
* * *
AT 10:58 exactly, Osborn knocked on the door to room 6132. A moment later McVey opened it. Five men stood behind him and they all stared in silence. Noble, Remmer, Detective Johannes Schneider and two uniformed members of the Berlin Police.
“Well, Cinderella,” McVey said flatly.
“I got separated from Detective Schneider. I looked for him all over the place. What was I supposed to do?” Ignoring McVey’s glare, Osborn crossed the room and picked up the telephone. There was a silence and then it rang through. “Doctor Mandel please,” he said.
Remmer shrugged and thanked the Berlin cops and McVey shook hands with Schneider, then Remmer saw the three men out and closed the door.
“I’ll call back, thank you.” Osborn hung up and looked to McVey. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” he said with an energy McVey hadn’t seen since they’d left England, “but from everything I’ve been party to, arrest warrant or not, the I chances of getting enough evidence to bring Scholl to trial, let alone get a conviction, are close to nil. He’s too powerful, too connected, too far above the law Right?”
“You have the floor, Doctor.”
“Then let’s look at it another way and ask why somebody like Scholl would come halfway around the world to honor a man who seems to hardly exist while at the same time apparently directing a wave of killings that snow-balls as this thing at Charlottenburg gets closer.”
Osborn glanced quickly at the others, then back to McVey. “Lybarger. I bet he’s the key to this. And if we I find out about him, I bet we find out a lot more about Erwin Scholl.”
“You think you can turn up something the German federal police can’t, help yourself,” McVey said.
“I hope I am, McVey.” Osborn nodded toward the phone. He was pumped up. Going it alone, he now knew, was impossible, but they weren’t going to keep him out of the game either.
“That call was to Doctor Herb Mandel. He’s not only the best vascular surgeon I know, he’s chief of staff at San Francisco General Hospital. If it’s true Lybarger had a stroke, he would have a medical history. And it would have begun in San Francisco.
Von Holden was angry. He should have shot Osborn on the approach, as he sat on the park bench. But he’d wanted to make sure he was the right man. Viktor and Natalia were both trustworthy, but they were only going by Osborn’s photo. The problem was not so much that he might have killed the wrong man as it was in thinking he’d killed the right man when he hadn’t. Which was why he’d come as close to Osborn as he had, even to the point of wishing him a good evening. Then Osborn had surprised him with the gun. It was something he should have been prepared for because it went hand-in-hand with Scholl’s assessment that Osborn was emotionally charged and therefore highly unpredictable.
Even so, he should have been able to kill him. His glance at Viktor had been deliberate, designed to make Osborn turn and follow it. That instant would have been all he needed. But instead, Osborn had stepped backward to take in both men and at the same time kept the Cz pointed at Von Holden. The fact that he’d eased back the hammer with the trigger pulled meant that if he was shot, his thumb would slip off the hammer, discharging the gun directly at Von Holden. And Von Holden had been much too close to risk being hit.
It was true that as Osborn fled, and they ran after him through the park, he’d had the opportunity for one clear shot. And if the American had stopped for so much as a millisecond instead of running full into traffic on Tiergartenstrasse, he would have had it. But he hadn’t, and the two cars that crashed together immediately afterward had taken away his line of fire as well as any second opportunity.
Climbing the last steps to the apartment on Sophie-Charlottenstrasse, Von Holden was troubled not so much by his failure—because such things happened. What bothered him was an uneasiness in general. Osborn’s isolation had been a gift and he, of all people, should have been able to carry through. But he hadn’t. It seemed to be a pattern. Bernhard Oven should have eliminated him in Paris. He hadn’t. Bombing the Paris-Meaux train should have resulted in the deaths of both Osborn and McVey, either in the crash itself or by the assassination team he’d assembled to kill them if they’d survived. But they were still alive. It wasn’t luck as much as something else. And to Von Holden personally, it was something far more foreboding.
“Vorahnung.”
It was a word that had haunted him since youth. It meant premonition and for him carried with it the portent of an untimely and terrible death. It was a feeling he had no control over. Something that seemed to exist on its own all around him. Strangely, the more he worked for Scholl, the more he began to realize that he too was under the same spell, and that his road, and the road of those who followed him, was ultimately doomed to catastrophe. Though certainly there was no proof, or even hint of it, because everything Scholl touched went the way he guided it, and had for years. Yet, the feeling remained.
There were times the sensation would ebb. Often for days, even months. But then it would come back. And with it would come terrible dreams, where great surreal curtains the translucent red and green of the Aurora Borealis and rising thousands of feet high would undulate up and down in the vortex of his mind like gigantic pistons. The terror came in their sheer size, and that he was helpless to do anything to control their existence.
And when he woke from these “things”—as he called them—he would be in a cold sweat and shivering with horror and he would force himself to stay awake the rest of the night for fear that if he slept, they would come again. He often wondered if he were ill with some chemical imbalance or even a brain tumor but knew that couldn’t be because of the long periods of good health in between.
And then they’d vanished. Simply vanished. For almost five years he had been free of them and he was certain he was cured. In
fact, in the last years he’d given them almost no thought whatsoever. That was until last night, when he’d learned McVey and the others had left London by private plane. There was no need to guess their destination, he already knew. And he’d gone to bed, afraid to sleep, knowing in his soul the “things” would come back. And they did. And they’d been more terrifying than ever.
Entering the apartment, Von Holden nodded to the guard and turned down a long hallway. When he reached the bank of secretaries’ desks, a tallish, plump-faced woman with dyed red hair looked up from a computer check she was running of Charlottenburg’s electronic security system.
“He is here,” she said in German.
“Danke.” Von Holden opened the door to his office and a familiar face smiled at him.
Cadoux.
102
* * *
IT WAS just after two in the morning. Three hours and a dozen phone calls after they’d begun, Osbornand McVey, working with Dr. Herb Mandel in San Francisco and Special Agent Fred Hanley of the Los Angeles office of the I FBI, had put together a serviceable history of what had happened to Elton Lybarger while he was in the United States.
There was no record that any San Francisco area hospital had ever treated Lybarger as a stroke patient. But, in September of 1992, an E. Lybarger had been brought by private ambulance to the exclusive Palo Colorado Hospital in Carmel, California. He’d stayed there until March of 1993, when he had been transferred to Rancho de Piñon, I an exclusive nursing home just outside Taos, New Mexico. Then, barely a week ago, he’d flown home to Zurich accompanied by his American physical therapist, a woman named Joanna Marsh.
The hospital in Carmel had provided facilities but no staff. Lybarger’s own doctor and one nurse had accompanied him in the ambulance. A day later, four other medical attendants had joined them. The nurse and medical attendants carried Swiss passports. The doctor was Austrian. I His name was Helmuth Salettl.
By 3:15 A.M., Bad Godesberg had faxed Remmer four I copies of Dr. Helmuth Salettl’s professional credentials and personal history, and Remmer handed them around, this time including Osborn.
Salettl was a seventy-nine-year-old bachelor who lived r with his sister in Salzburg, Austria. Born in 1914, he had been a young surgeon in Berlin University at the outbreak of the war. Later an SS Group leader, Hitler made him commissioner for public health; then, in the final days of the war, had him arrested for trying to send secret documents to the Americans and. sentenced him to be executed. Imprisoned in a villa outside Berlin awaiting execution, he was, at the last moment, moved to another villa in northern Germany where he was rescued by American troops. Interrogated by Allied officers at Camp Oberursel near Frankfurt, he was taken to Nuremberg, where he was tried and acquitted of “having prepared and carried out aggressive warfare.” After that, he returned to Austria, where he practiced internal medicine until the age I of seventy. Then he retired, treating only a few select patients. One of whom was Elton Lybarger.
“There it is again—” McVey finished reading and dropped the papers on the edge of the bed.
“The Nazi connection,” Remmer said.
McVey looked to Osborn. “Why would a doctor spend seven months in a hospital sixty-five hundred miles from home overseeing the recovery of one stroke patient? That make any sense to you?”
“Not unless it was an extremely severe stroke and Lybarger was highly eccentric or neurotic, or his family was, and they were willing to pay through the nose for that kind of care.”
“Doctor,” McVey said emphatically. “Lybarger has no family. Remember? And if he was sick enough to need a physician at his side for seven months, he would have been in no shape to have set it up himself, at least not in the beginning.”
“Somebody did. Somebody had to send Salettl and his medical crew to the U.S. and pay for it,” Noble added.
“Scholl,” Remmer said.
“Why not?” McVey ran a hand through his hair. “He owns Lybarger’s Swiss estate. Why shouldn’t we expect “he’d run his other affairs as well? Especially where his health was concerned.”
Noble wearily lifted a cup of tea from a room service tray at his elbow. “All of which brings up back to why?”
McVey eased down on the edge of the bed and for the umpteenth time picked up the five-page, single-spaced fax of the background dossiers on the Charlottenburg guests sent from Bad Godesberg. There was nothing in any of them to suggest they were anything other than successful German citizens. For a moment his thoughts went to the few names they had not been able to identify. Yes, he thought, the answer could be among them, but the odds were heavily against it. His gut still told him the answer was in front of them, somewhere in the information they already had.
“Manfred,” he said, looking at Remmer. “We turn around, we poke, we look, we discuss, we get highly confidential information on private citizens through one of the world’s most effective police agencies, and what happens? We keep coming up empty. We can’t even open the door.
“But we know there’s something there. Maybe it has something to do with what’s going on tomorrow night, maybe it doesn’t. But yes or no, sometime tomorrow, writ in hand, we’re going to put our big fat fannies on the line, corner Scholl and ask him some questions. We’re going to get one shot at it before the lawyers take over. And if we don’t make him sweat enough to roll over right then and confess, or at least bend him enough so that he gives us something we can use to keep coming after him, if we don’t know more at the end than we do at the beginning—”
“McVey,” Remmer said carefully, “why are you calling me Manfred when you always call me Manny?”
“Because you’re German and I’m singling you out. If this Lybarger thing should turn out to be a gathering of some kind of Nazi-like political force—what would they be about? Another shot at exterminating Jews?” McVey’s voice became softer, yet more passionate. It wasn’t that he expected an answer so much as an explanation. “Funding a military machine to blow through Europe and Russia with designs on the rest of us? A replay of what happened before? Why would anybody want that? Tell me, Manfred, because I don’t know.”
“I—” Remmer clenched a fist. “—don’t know either. . . .”
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“I think you do.”
The room was deathly silent. There were four men in it and not one moved. They barely breathed. Then Osborn thought he saw Remmer take a step backward.
“Come on, Manfred McVey said lightly. But it wasn’t intended lightly. He’d hit a nerve and he’d meant to, and it had caught Remmer off guard.
“It’s unfair, Manfred, I know,” McVey said quietly. “But I’m asking anyway. Because it just might help.”
“McVey, I can’t—”
“Yes you can.”
Remmer glanced around the room. “Weltanschauung,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “Hitler’s view of life. That it was an eternal struggle where only the strongest survived and the strongest of the strong ruled. To him, the Germans had once been the strongest of the strong. Therefore destined to rule. But that strength had become weakened over the generations because the true (Germans race mixed with others far less superior. Hitler believed that throughout history the mixing of bloodlines was the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures. That was why Germany lost the first war, because the Aryan had already given up the purity of his blood. To Hitler, the Germans were the highest species on earth and could again become what they once were—but only through exceedingly careful breeding.”
The hotel room had become a theater with an audience “of three, and Remmer the sole actor on the stage. He stood with his shoulders thrown back. His eyes glistened and sweat stood out on his forehead. His voice had risen from a whisper to an oratory so concise it seemed, for the moment, to have been learned. Or, more rightly, learned, and then consciously forgotten.
“At the beginning of the Nazi movement, there were eighty-some million Germans; within a
hundred years he envisioned two hundred and fifty million, maybe more. For that, Germany would need Lebensraum—living space, a lot of it, enough to assure the nation room for total freedom of existence on its own terms. But living space and the soil beneath it, Hitler said, exist only for the people who possess the force to take them. By this, he meant that the new Reich must again set itself along the road of the Teutonic knights. Obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow, and bread for the German stomach.”
“So they set themselves back on the straight and narrow by wiping out six million Jews to keep them from sleeping around?” McVey sounded like an old country lawyer, as if somehow he’d missed something and didn’t get it. He played it light because he knew Remmer would push back, defending what had happened. Defending his guilt.
“You have to understand what was going on. This was after a shattering defeat in World War One: the Treaty of Versailles had taken away our dignity, there was huge inflation, mass unemployment. Who was going to challenge a leader who was giving us back our pride and self-respect?— He enamored us and we became swept up in it, lost in it. Look at the old films, the photographs. Look at the faces of the people. They loved their Führer. They loved his words and the fire behind them. And because of that, it was totally forgotten that they were the words of an uneducated, demented man—” Remmer’s expression went blank and he stopped, as if he’d suddenly forgotten his train of thought.
“Why?” McVey hissed like an offstage prompter. “We’ve had the history lesson, Manfred. Now tell us the truth. Why did you get swept up in Hitler’s words? Why did you get lost in the ideas of and passion of an uneducated, demented man? You’re blaming it all on one guy.