and above it, a white fleshy thigh. A soft breeze washing in through the front door worked at cleansing everything, but couldn’t. In the space of no time, Osborn had killed three people, one of them a woman. He tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. Finally, in the distance, he “ heard sirens.
Then, real time lurched back.
A grinding sound to his right was followed by a heavy thud. Swinging around, he saw the elevator door start to open. Heart racing, he stepped back, wondering in the same instant if he had any ammunition left. Abruptly a figure started out.
“HALT!” he yelled, trying desperately to think of the ‘German, his finger closing on the trigger, the ugly snout of the Cz coming up to fire.
“OSBORN! JESUS CHRIST, DON’T SHOOT!” McVey’s voice rang out at him. They staggered forward out of the elevator, retching and coughing, trying to suck in fresh air. McVey and Remmer, bloody, tattered and reeking of smoke, with Noble, painfully burned and semiconscious, somehow propped between them.
Osborn rushed to them. Seeing Noble up close, he grimaced. “Get him down in a chair. Easy!”
McVey’s eyes were bright red from the smoke and they came up to Osborn and hung on him. “Pull the alarm,” he said carefully, as if making absolutely certain he was understood. “The whole top floor is burning.”
115
6:50 P.M.
“I AM comfortable tonight,” Elton Lybarger said, smiling easily, looking from Von Holden to Joanna beside him. Theirs was the middle car in a train of three armor-plated black Mercedes-Benz limousines traveling bumper to bumper across Berlin. Scholl and Uta Baur rode in the lead car; in the last were Salettl and the twins, Eric and Edward. “I am relaxed and feel confident. My thanks go to both of you.”
“It’s why we are here, sir. To make you feel at ease,” Von Holden said as the limousines turned onto Lietzen-burgerstrasse and sped off in the direction of Charlotten-burg Palace.
Brushing a piece of lint from the arm of his tuxedo, Von Holden picked up the phone from the backseat console I and dialed a number. Joanna smiled. If he’d been less distracted he might fully have appreciated the way she looked because she’d done it for him. Her makeup flawless, her hair was parted on the left, then teased up and dampened so that it fell in a natural cascade over the right I side of her face, setting off the stunningly seductive Uta Baur creation she wore—a floor-length white-and-emer-aid gown, closed at the throat but then open again nearly to the sternum in a teasingly erotic display of her breasts, With a short black mink coat thrown over her shoulders, she looked, on her last night among European aristocracy, as if she were part of it.
Von Holden smiled thinly back at her while the phone continued to ring on the other end. Abruptly a recorded voice interceded in German. “Please call back, the vehicle is unattended.”
Von Holden let the phone slip through his fingers and he hung up slowly, trying not to show his frustration. Once again came the feeling that he should have argued more forcefully with Scholl, that his place was with the operation at the Hotel Borggreve, not delivering Lybarger to Charlottenburg. But he hadn’t, and there was nothing on earth he could do about it now.
At three that afternoon, he had forged the final details of his plan with the Stasi-trained operatives who would execute it—Cadoux, Natalia, and Viktor Shevchenko. Joining them had been Anna Schubart and Wilhelm Podl, explosives specialists and Libyan-trained terrorists, who had arrived by train from Poland.
Meeting in a dingy back room of a motorcycle repair shop near the Ostbahnhof, one of East Berlin’s two main train stations, Von Holden had used photographs and drawings of Hotel Borggreve, one of several buildings owned by a nonexistent company fronting the Berlin sector, to carefully blueprint the tactics and timing of what he wanted done. His planning had been so detailed as to include how Anna and Wilhelm, playing the role of her aging father, would dress, the type and number of weapons that would be used, and the size of the charge and the manner of detonation of the Semtex explosive.
McVey and the others had been handed a situation they could not afford to turn down. What gave Von Holden the only edge he would need was what Scholl had pointed out and what he had known from the beginning: that, capable as McVey and the others had proven, they were still policemen. They would think as policemen and prepare as policemen, cautiously but predictably. Von Holden understood this because many of his own operatives had been recruited f from the ranks of the police and he had found, early on, how completely unequipped they were in the terrorist mind-set, and how thoroughly retrained they had to be.
Understanding this, the process itself was simple. Cadoux, having reached them by telephone and given them enough truthful information to incriminate himself, would then promise them the intelligence they needed to pursue Scholl. Telling them he was afraid for his life at the hands of the men he had double-crossed, he would give them an address where they could find him, and then hang up.
When they came, he would start to give them the information they needed, then excuse himself to go to the John. Not wholly trusting him, one of the men would accompany him. And he wouldn’t protest. As soon as they’d left the room, Natalia would trigger the plastic explosive by remote control. Cadoux would shoot the man with him and Natalia would take out any policemen waiting in the hall way outside. Viktor, Anna and Wilhelm Podl would handle the traffic in the lobby and outside the building. Overall it was exceedingly simple. They were leading their victims into a small box and then exterminating them.
At 3:45 exactly, the meeting broke up. The others went to the hotel and Von Holden drove Cadoux to the grocery nearby to make the call. Once done, they went directly to the hotel, ran over the plan one more time and planted the explosives. Then, telling the others he wanted to talk with Cadoux privately, he closed the door to room 412.
What he’d wanted to do was make Cadoux feel important, that there were no hard feelings from his earlier mistake, because he knew how much Avril Rocard meant to him. Wishing him well, he’d started to go, then turned back realizing he had forgotten to provide Cadoux with a weapon. Opening his briefcase, he took out a nine- millimeter automatic pistol, an Austrian made Glock 18. The Glock 18 could be switched to fully automatic fire and was fitted with a magazine that carried thirty-three rounds, and Cadoux had brightened at the sight of it. “Good choice,” Von Holden remembered him saying.
“One other thing,” Von Holden had said before handing him the gun. “Mademoiselle Rocard is dead. She was killed at the farmhouse near Nancy.”
“What?” Cadoux roared in disbelief.
“Unfortunate. Especially from my point of view.”
“Your point of view?” Cadoux was ash white.
“She was in Berlin at my invitation. We were lovers, or didn’t you know? She enjoyed a good fuck, not the impossible thing she tolerated from you.”
Cadoux came at him in a rush. Screaming with rage. Von Holden did nothing until Cadoux reached him, then he simply lifted the Glock and squeezed off three quick rounds. Cadoux’s body had muffled the report, the slugs barely making a sound. After that he’d put him on the couch in a sitting position and left.
In the distance, Von Holden could see the brightly lit facade of Charlottenburg as they approached. Picking up the phone once more, he punched in the number and waited as it rang. Again he got the same answer. The vehicle was unattended. Hanging up, he stared off. His instructions had been rigidly clear. Immediately following the detonation of the Semtex and what should have been the simple mop-up operation afterward, the four were to leave the hotel and drive off in a blue Fiat delivery truck parked diagonally across the street. They were to go south away from the area, until Von Holden contacted them by car phone for a report. Afterward, they were to leave the truck on Borussiastrasse near Tempelhof Airport, and go off alone and in different directions. By ten o’clock, they were to have been out of the country.
“Is something wrong, Pascal?” Joanna asked.
“No, nothing,” Von Holden smiled at her.
Joanna smiled back. Then they were swinging through the iron gates, over the pavement stone of Charlottenburg’s entryway, and around the equestrian statue of the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm I. In front of them Von Holden could see Scholl’s limousine, and Scholl and Uta Baur getting out. Next, his driver was pulling up. The limousine stopped. The door was opened and a heavyset security guard in a tuxedo extended his hand to
