The Day After Tomorrow

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 Fuhrer. 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.

Remmer’s eyes darted around the room. He’d gone as far as he could, or would.

“The Nazis were more than Hitler, Manfred.” McVey was no longer the old country lawyer who didn’t get it, he was a voice piercing Remmer’s subconscious, demanding he dig deeper. “Powerful as he was, it wasn’t just him—”

Remmer was staring at the floor. Slowly he raised his “head, and when he did his eyes were filled with horror. “Like a religion, we believe the myths. They are primitive, tribal, inbred . . . and they lie just beneath the surface waiting for the moment in history when a charismatic leader will rise up to give them life. . . . Hitler was the last of them, and to this day we would follow him any-where. . . . It is the old culture, McVey—of Prussia and long before. Teutonic knights riding out of the mists. Full in armor. Swords thrust high in iron-covered fists. Thundering hooves shaking the ground, trampling everything in their path. Conquerors. Rulers. Our land. Our destiny. We are superior. The master race. Pure-blooded German. Blond hair, blue eyes and all.”

Remmer fixed McVey with a stare. Then, turning away, shook out a cigarette, lit it and crossed the room to sit down on a couch by himself. It was as far away as he could get from the others. Hunching forward, he pulled an ashtray toward him and looked at the floor. The cigarette between his nicotine-stained fingers remained untouched. The smoke from it wisped toward the ceiling.

103

OSBORN LAY in the dim light of daybreak listening to Noble’s heavy breathing as it rose from the bed across from him. McVey and Remmer were asleep in the other room. They’d turned out the lights at 3:30, it was now a quarter to six. He doubted he’d slept two hours.

Since they’d been in Berlin, he’d felt McVey’s growing frustration, even despair, as they’d tried to tear away the layers protecting Erwin Scholl. It was the reason McVey had put Remmer on the spot, trying, however brutally, to uncover some essential none of them had been able to grasp. And he had—it wasn’t Teutonic knights riding out of the mist Remmer had been talking about. It was arrogance. The idea that they or anyone could dub themselves the “master race” and then set out to destroy everyone else in order to prove it. The word fit Scholl like a condom, the conceit of a man who could manipulate and murder and at the same time tout himself as father confessor to kings and presidents. It was an attitude they would have to deal with when they met Scholl face-to-face. Yet that’s all it was, an angle, an edge up. It wasn’t concrete.

Lybarger was. And Osborn was certain he remained central to everything. Yet there seemed to be nothing more they could uncover about him than the little they already had. The only thing of promise was that Dr. Salettl was on the Charlottenburg guest list, but so far the BKA had been unable to find him anywhere. Austria, Germany, or Switzerland. If he was coming, where was he?

Somehow, some way, there had to be more. But what? And where to find it?

* * *

McVey was awake, making notes, as Osborn came through the door.

“We keep assuming Lybarger has no family. But how do we know for certain?” McVey said forcefully.

“I’m an Austrian physician in Carmel, California, working with a gravely ill Swiss patient for seven months. Little by little he’s getting better. A level of trust is developing. If he had a wife, child, brother—”

“He’d want them to know how he was,” McVey filled in.

“Yes. And if he was a stroke victim like Lybarger, he would have trouble with his speech and probably his