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. Sobibor,” Lybarger said, as the gas began to invade him. “Belzec, 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.
“Osborn! OSBORN!” he screamed.
The heat was unbearable. His facial skin, so badly burned in the first fire, was now being literally fried against his skull. What little air there was seemed to be coming from the interior of a furnace. Any breath at all seared the lungs raw.
“Osborn!” McVey cried out again. The thundering of the flames was like roaring surf. There was no way anyone could be heard. Then he caught the odor of burnt almonds. “Cyanide!” he said out loud.
He saw something move in front of him. “OSBORN! IT’S CYANIDE GAS! OSBORN! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” But it wasn’t Osborn. It was his wife, Judy. She was sitting on the front porch of their cabin above Big Bear Lake. The peaks, purple behind her, were touched with snow at the crest. The grass was long and golden and the air around her was punctuated with tiny insects. It was clean and pure and she was smiling. “Judy?” he heard himself say. Suddenly someone else’s face dropped into his, as close as you could get. He didn’t recognize it. The eyes were red and the hair was singed and the face was like blackened Creole fish.
“Give me your hand!” the face yelled.
McVey was still watching Judy.
“Goddammit!” the face screamed. “Give me your hand!”
Then McVey drew himself away and reached Out. He felt a hand, then heard breaking glass. Suddenly he was up and half on his feet. The face had an arm under him and they were climbing out through shattered French doors. Then he saw thick fog and cold air filled his lungs!
“Breathe! Breathe deep! Come on! Breathe, you son of a bitch! Keep on breathing!” He couldn’t see him but he was sure Osborn was yelling at him. He knew it was Osborn. It had to be. It was his voice.
126
JOANNA LOOKED out from her hotel room. Berlin was obscured, enclosed in an ever-thickening shroud of fog. She wondered if her plane would be able to take off in the morning. Going into the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and then swallowed two sleeping pills.
Why Dr. Salettl had so abruptly and rudely changed her plans, she had no idea. Why Von Holden had said nothing of leaving with Mr. Scholl immediately after the ceremony troubled her deeply, and she wondered even if it were true.
Who was Salettl anyway? What power did he have that he could control the comings and goings of someone like Von Holden, or even Scholl for that matter? Why he had even bothered to give her a present was beyond her. She meant no more to him than a mosquito clinging to a screen, to be suddenly snapped free or crushed at will. He was cruel and manipulative, and she was certain the dreadfully dark sexual incident with Elton Lybarger could be traced directly to him. But it didn’t mater. Von Holden was the one, he had made everything else that happened seem merely a dream.
She went to bed thinking of him. She saw his face and felt his touch, and knew that for the rest of her life she would never love anyone else.
Von Holden’s entire being bordered on complete exhaustion. Never, through all his training with the Spetsnaz, the KGB and the Stasi, had he experienced such mental and physical weariness. They could take his Spetsnaz evaluation—that he “performs constantly, under the highest stress, with calm and clear judgment”—and send
Immediately following his encounter with Salettl outside the mausoleum, he had gone to the apartments within the Golden Gallery complex to wait for Scholl as ordered.
But the moment he’d closed the door he’d felt the stab I of the
