by Allan Folsom
McVey stood up and took two photographs from his jacket pocket. “Mr. Goetz, would you mind asking your client to look at these?”
Osborn watched Goetz take the photos and study them.
“Who are these people?” Goetz said.
“That’s what I’d like Mr. Scholl to tell me.”
Osborn watched Goetz look to Scholl, then hand him the pictures. Scholl glared at McVey, then glanced at the photos in his hand. When he did, he started, but quickly covered it.
“I have no idea,” he said, directly.
“No?”
“No.”
“Their names are Karolin and Johann Henniger.” McVey paused. “They were murdered sometime today.”
This time Scholl showed no emotion at all. “I told you, I have no idea who they are.”
Handing the photos to Goetz, Scholl turned and started for the door. Osborn looked to McVey. Once he was through it, it would be the last they would see of him for a long time, if ever.
“I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us,” McVey said quickly. “I also know you appreciate the fact that Doctor Osborn has never been able to close the emotional door on his father’s killing. I promised him a question. It’s simple. Off the record.”
Scholl turned back. “You carry impudence beyond good manners.”
Goetz pulled open the door and Scholl was almost through it when Osborn spoke.
“Why did you have Elton Lybarger’s head surgically attached to another man’s body?”
Scholl froze where he was. So did Goetz. Then slowly, Scholl turned back. He looked—exposed. As if suddenly his clothes had been torn from him and he’d been sexually violated. For the briefest instant he seemed ready to crack. Instead, what seemed to be a self-willed mask descended over his face, from top to bottom. Exposure gave way to contempt and contempt to rage. And then, quickly, icily, terrifyingly, he brought it back to where he could control it. “I suggest you both turn to writing books of fiction.”
“It’s not fiction,” Osborn said.
Suddenly a door at the far end of the room opened and Salettl entered.
“Where is Von Holden?” Scholl commanded as Salettl approached.
Salettl’s shoes echoed on the marble floor as he walked toward them. “Von Holden is upstairs, waiting in the Royal Apartments.” The jumpiness, the deep intensity of earlier, was gone. In its place was a manner that was almost calm.
“Get him and bring him here now.”
Salettl smiled. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. The Royal Apartments and the Golden Gallery are no longer accessible.”
“What are you talking about?”
McVey and Osborn exchanged glances. Something was going on but they had no idea what. Scholl didn’t like it either.
“I asked you a question.”
“It would have been more fitting if you had been upstairs.” Salettl had crossed the room and was within a few feet of Scholl and Goetz.
“Get Von Holden!” Scholl snapped at Goetz.
Goetz nodded and was shifting his weight toward the door when there was a sharp report. Goetz jumped as if he’d been slapped. Grabbing at his neck, he pulled his hand away and looked at it. It was covered with blood. Wide-eyed, he looked at Salettl. Then his gaze ran down to his hand. A small automatic was clutched in it.
“You shot me, you fuck!” Goetz screamed at him. Then he shuddered and slumped back against the door.
“DROP THE GUN, NOW!” McVey’s .38 was in his right hand, he was using his left to ease Osborn out of the line of fire.
Salettl looked to McVey. “Of course.” Turned to Scholl, he smiled. “These Americans nearly ruined everything.”
“DROP IT, NOW!”
Scholl stared in utter contempt. “Vida?”
Salettl smiled again. “She’s been living in Berlin for nearly four years.”
“How dare you?” Scholl drew himself up. He was furious. Superior. Totally insolent. “How dare you take it upon yourself to—”
Salettl’s first shot caught Scholl just over his bow tie. The second tore into his chest at the top of his heart, exploding his aorta and showering Salettl with blood. For a moment Scholl tottered on his feet, his eyes rocked with disbelief, then he simply collapsed as if his legs had been kicked out from under him.
“DROP IT! OR I’LL SHOOT YOU RIGHT THERE!” McVey bellowed, his finger closing on the trigger.
“McVey—DON’T!” he heard Osborn shout behind him. Then Salettl’s gun hand dropped to his side, and McVey’s finger eased off the trigger.
Salettl turned to face them. He was ghostly white and looked as if he’d been splattered with red paint. That he was wearing a tuxedo made it all the worse because it gave him the appearance of a grotesque, gruesome clown.
“You should not have interfered.” Salettl’s voice was resonant with anger.
“Open your fingers and let the gun fall to the floor!” McVey kept inching forward with no reservations about shooting the man dead if he had to. Osborn had yelled for fear McVey would fire and kill maybe the only remaining person who knew what was going on. In that he was right. But Salettl had just shot two men; McVey wouldn’t give him the chance at two more.
Salettl stared at them, the automatic still held loosely at his side.
“Let the gun fall to the floor,” McVey said again.
“Karolin Henniger’s real name was Vida,” Salettl said. “Scholl ordered her and the boy killed some time ago. I secretly brought them here, to Berlin, and changed their identities. She called me as soon as she ran from you. She thought you were the Organization. That they had found her.” Salettl paused. The next was barely a whisper. “The Organization knew where you went. Because of that they would have discovered her very quickly. And afterward, they would have come to me. And that would have sabotaged everything.”
“You killed them,” McVey said.
“Yes.”
Osborn took a step forward, his eyes glistened with emotion. “You said everything would have been sabotaged. What was it? What did you mean?”
Salettl didn’t reply.
“Karolin, Vida, whatever her name was. She was Lybarger’s wife,” Osborn pressed. “The boy was his son.”
Salettl hesitated. “She was also my daughter.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Osborn glanced at McVey. They both felt the same horror.
“Mr. Lybarger’s physical therapist will be on the morning plane to Los Angeles,” Salettl said abruptly, and wholly out of context, almost as if he were inviting them to join her.
Osborn stared at him. “Who the hell are you people? You murdered my father, your own daughter and grandchild and God knows how many others.” Osborn’s voice raged with anger. “Why? For what? To protect Lybarger? Scholl? This ‘Organization’ ?—WHY?”
“You gentlemen should have left Germany to the Germans,” Salettl said quietly. “You survived one fire this evening. You will not survive the next if you do not leave the building immediately.” He tried to force a smile. It didn’t work, and his eyes found Osborn. “This should be the hard part, Doctor. It isn’t.”
In the blink of an eye he raised the automatic to his mouth and pulled the trigger.
124
* * *
“PRIVATE ENTERPRISE,” Lybarger said into the microphone, his voice stabbing to the farthest corners of the gold and green-marbled rococo fantasy of the Golden Gallery, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy. It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.”
Pausing, he stood with both hands on the podium, studying the faces in front of him. His speech, although changed somewhat, was not original, and most there knew it. The original had been given to a similar group of business leaders on February 20, 1933, The speaker allying himself with moneyed institutions that wintery night had been Germany’s newly entrusted chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
On the dais, Uta Baur leaned forward, her strong chin resting on her hands, wholly enraptu
red by the wonder of what she was witnessing, the agony, doubt, the secret labor of fifty years standing alone, speaking triumphantly before her. Beside her, Gustav Dortmund, chief of the Bundesbank, sat ramrod straight, emotionless, an observer, nothing more. Yet inside, he could feel his bowels churning with the excitement of what was at hand.
Farther down on the dais, Eric and Edward, fists clenched, neck muscles pressing against the starch of their tight collars, hunched forward like matched mannequins, hanging on Lybarger’s every word. Theirs was a different exaltation. Who Lybarger was, within days, one of them would become. Which one was a decision yet to be made. And as the moment wound closer, as it did now with every word, every sentence, the anticipation of that moment when the choice would be made became almost unbearable.
HYDROGEN CYANIDE: an extremely poisonous, mobile volatile liquid or gas that has the odor of bitter almonds; a blood agent that interferes with oxygen in the blood tissues, literally taking the oxygen out of the blood and, in essence, suffocating the victim.
“All worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen, the pure German people!” Lybarger’s words echoed off the hallowed walls of the Golden Gallery and into the hearts and minds of the people who sat within them.
“We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced with an iron fist! And in that we will restore our power, military and otherwise, to the highest levels—There will be no retreat!”
As Lybarger finished, the entire room came to its feet in a thundering ovation that made the one at his entrance seem like well-mannered applause. Then, perhaps because of his proximity to the rear of the room and the doors leading out of it, he was the first to hear what the others could not.
“Listen!” he said over the microphone, holding up both hands for silence.
“Listen! Please!”
It was a moment before anyone knew what he was talking about. Did he have more to say? What did he mean? Then they understood. He wasn’t asking them to be quiet. He was telling them something was happening.
A series of muted whirrings was followed by a half-dozen heavy mechanical thuds, and the room shook as if someone had pulled down weighted blinds around the outside of it. Then it stopped and everything, was silent.
Uta Baur was the first to get up. Moving behind Eric and Edward on the dais, she passed Dortmund and walked down the short staircase to an exit door in the corner of the room. Throwing it open, she suddenly stepped back, her hand clamped over her mouth. Frau Dortmund screamed. Where the open doorway should have been was a huge metal door, closed tight and locked solidly in place.
Dortmund came quickly down the stairs. “Was ist es?” What is this?
Moving to the door, he shoved at it. Nothing happened. A wave of uneasiness crossed the room.
Getting up quickly, Eric pushed past the anxious, jeweled Frau Dortmund. Climbing the podium, he took the microphone from Lybarger.
“Be calm. A security door has come down by accident. Walk to the main door and file out in orderly fashion.”
But the main door to the Golden Gallery was sealed the same way. As was every other door in the room.
“Was geht hier vor?”—What’s going on here?—Hans Dabritz yelled.
Major General Matthias Noll pushed back his chair and went to the closest door. Using his shoulder he tried to force it outward but he had no more luck than Dortmund had a moment earlier. Henryk Steiner added his stocky shoulder. Together he and Noll rammed the door. Two others joined them, but the door didn’t budge.
Then came the faintest scent of burnt almonds. People looked at each other and sniffed. What was it? Where was it coming from?
“Ach, mein Gott!” Konrad Peiper shrieked, as a tiny mist of amethyst-blue crystals suddenly rained down on his table from an air conditioning vent in the ceiling. “Cyanide gas!”
The odor became stronger as more of the crystals found their marks, vats within the ventilation pathwork containing distilled water and acid that would dissolve the crystals into deadly cyanide gas.
Suddenly people were crowding back from the ventilation openings. Pressed against the walls, each other, even the closed and locked steel doors, they stared up in silent disbelief at the grated vents so tastefully and carefully concealed in the gilded rococo ornamentation and green marbled walls of the grand eighteenth-century structure.
They were waiting to die. But not one of them believed it. How could it be? How could so many of Germany’s most influential and celebrated citizens, bejeweled and bedecked in clothing the worth of which would feed half the world for a year, and protected by a virtual army of security personnel, be helplessly trapped in a room in one of the most historic buildings in the nation, waiting for enough cyanide gas to collect to kill them all?
Outrageous. Impossible. A joke.
“Es ist ein Streich!” —It’s a prank!—Hans Dabritz laughed. “Ein Streich!”
Others laughed too. Edward moved to his chair on the dais and picked up his glass.
“Zu Elton Lybargerr!” he cried. “Zu Elton Lybarger!”
“Zu Elton Lybargerr!” Uta Baur lifted her glass.
Elton Lybarger stood at the podium and watched Konrad and Margarete Peiper, Gertrude Biermann, Rudolf Kaes, Henryk Steiner and Gustav Dortmund move back to their tables and raise their glasses.
“Zu Elton Lybarger!” The Golden Gallery shook with salutation.
Then it began.
Uta Baur’s head suddenly snapped back, then fell forward, her biceps and upper back trembling violently. Across the room Margarete Peiper did the same. Falling to the floor, she shrieked, writhing in agony, her muscles and nerves reacting in violent spasms, as if she were being jolted with fifty thousand volts of electricity, or thousands of insects had suddenly been released under her skin and were madly devouring one another in a frenzied race to survive.
Suddenly, and en masse, those who could stampeded toward the main door. Clawing and mauling each other, they tore at the massive steel door and the ornate wood framing around it. Gasping for air. Screaming for help and mercy. They dug fingers, nails, even gold watches into the unforgiving metal, hoping somehow to loosen it. The pounding of fists, shoe heels, even each other, reverberated over and over against it until all were finally overcome by the same writhing and horrid convulsions.
Of them all, Elton Lybarger was the last to die, and he did so sitting in a chair in the center of the room staring at the death massing around him. He understood, as they all did, finally, that this was a payback. They had let it happen because they didn’t believe it could. And when ultimately they did, it was too late. The same as it had been at the extermination camps.
“Treblinka. Chelmno. Sobibór,” Lybarger said, as the gas began to invade him. “Belzeč, Maidanek—” Suddenly there was a twitch of his hands and he inhaled deeply. Then his head snapped back and his eyes rolled into it. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . . ,” he whispered. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . .”
125
* * *
REMMER HAD no idea what to expect as he and the two BKA detectives who had seen Schneider to the helicopter turned into the Charlottenburg courtyard and got out of the BMW. Immediately they were approached by uniformed security guards.
“We’re back,” Remmer said, flashing his I.D., and pushing past them toward the main entrance. The only hard information he had was that neither McVey nor Osborn had come out of the palace. With any luck, he thought as he reached the door, McVey and Scholl are still downstairs having at each other. Either that or McVey is surrounded by a herd of criminal lawyers demanding his scalp, in which case he will be in prodigious need of help.
It was then that the first incendiary device went off. Remmer, the two detectives, and the security guards were thrown to the ground as a fusillade of mortar and stone rained down around them. Immediately a dozen more fire bombs detonated. One after the other. Rapid-fire, like a string of high-explosive firecrackers, they circled the palace’s entire upper perimeter on the
side housing the Golden Gallery. Bursting inward, the charges ignited a furnace of gas jets embedded in the gilded molding along the room’s floors and ceiling and in the apartments immediately adjacent.
McVey pulled back against the door, forcing Goetz’s body aside, giving them enough room to get out. The explosions had toppled books from shelves, shattered priceless eighteenth-century porcelain and cracked one of the marble fireplaces. With a final tug, McVey forced the door open. A blast of heat hit him, and he saw the hallway ouside and the stairway beyond it wholly engulfed in flame. Slamming the door, he turned in time to see a wall of fire race down the outside of the building, sealing off any chance they might have to escape into the garden through the French doors. Then he saw Osborn, on his hands and knees, blindly tearing through Scholl’s pockets like some madman rifling a corpse for whatever plunder he could find.
“What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here!”
Osborn ignored him. Leaving Scholl, he began the same with Salettl, tearing through his jacket, his shirt, his pants. It was as if the fire raging around them didn’t exist.
“Osborn! They’re dead! Leave them, for Chrissake!” McVey was on top of him, wrestling him to his feet. The dead men’s blood smeared Osborn’s hands and face. He was staring crazily, almost as if he were the one who had done it. He was demanding an answer to his father’s death from the only men left who could give it. That they were dead was secondary. They were the end of the line and there was no other place to go.
Suddenly there was a rocking blast overheard as a gas conduit exploded with the heat. Instantaneously the ceiling ignited in a rolling fireball that went from one end of the’ room to the other in a millisecond. A second later the firestorm started by roaring gas knocked them off their feet, sucking everything in the room toward its center to feed it. Osborn vanished from sight and McVey grabbed onto a leg of the conference table, burying his head in the crook of his arm. For the second time that night he found himself surrounded by fire, this one a holocaust a thousand times more furious than the first.