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.
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.
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 Pinon, 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
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
“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,
