The Day After Tomorrow

the collar ‘ of his jacket, asking for medical help immediately.

“Amyl nitrite!” Osborn said, then, turning away, bent over and vomited in the grass.

Remmer rode with them in the ambulance as the drug began to take effect. The German paramedic who had administered it and two other paramedics were with them as well. An oxygen mask covered McVey’s nose and mouth. His breathing was returning to normal. Osborn lay beside him, an IV in his arm like McVey, staring up at Remmer, listening to the staccato crackle of his police radio that overrode the singsong of the ambulance siren. It was all in German, but somehow Osborn understood. Charlottenburg and nearly everyone in it had perished in the fire. Only he and McVey and a few of the help and security guards had escaped. The Golden Gallery was still sealed by the metal doors, now a molten, twisted mass. It would be hours, even days, before rescuers with gas masks could go inside.

Lying back, he tried to push away the vision of McVey in the grass. That, as a grown man, he had acquired the skills of a doctor meant nothing. He’d been helpless to do anything but watch—finally to run, screaming, for help. It was the same precious little he’d been able to do for his own father as he lay in the gutter of the Boston street so many years before.

He felt the shudder of an uncontrolled sob as he realized that the enigma of his father’s death was ended, entombed in the fiery rubble of Charlottenburg. The most he’d been able to gain from all that had happened was that his father, and any number of others, had been victims of a complex and macabre conspiracy involving a secret, elitist Nazi group’s experiment in low-temperature atomic surgery. One that, if McVey’s theory about Elton Lybarger was true, had apparently been successful. But for the why of it, he still had no answer. Perhaps what he had learned was already too much. He thought of Karolin Henniger and her son, running from him in the alley. How many more had died because of his own personal quest? Most had been totally innocent. In that, the guilt was his. The nightmare of his existence had been extended unfairly to others. Lives that should never have crossed, tragically had.

Whatever God that had deserted him when he was ten, deserted him still. Even to Vera, who, for a single few days, had been a light he’d never dreamed of. What had this God done about her but brand her a conspirator, tear her away and cast her in prison.

Suddenly he visualized her under the terrible glare of the ever-present lights. Where was she at this moment? What were they doing to. her? How was she managing against them? He wanted to reach out and touch her, comfort her, tell her that eventually everything would be all right. Then the thought came that even if he could tell her, she would pull back, recoiling from his touch, no longer trusting him. Had everything that had happened destroyed that too?

“Osborn . . .” Suddenly McVey’s voice rasped out through the oxygen mask. Looking over, Osborn could see Remmer’s face lit by the interior lights of the ambulance. He was watching McVey. He wanted him to live, to be well again.

“Osborn’s here, McVey. He’s all right,” Remmer said,

Pulling off his own oxygen mask, Osborn moved to take McVey’s hand and saw the detective staring up at him. “We’ll be to the hospital soon,” Osborn said, trying to reassure him.

McVey coughed, his chest heaved painfully and he closed his eyes.

Remmer looked to the German doctor.

“He’ll be okay,” Osborn said, still holding McVey’s hand. “Just let him rest.”

“The hell with that. Listen to me.” Abruptly McVey’s grip tightened on Osborn’s hand and his eyes opened. “Salettl—” McVey paused, breathed deeply, then went on. ‘—said—Lybarger’s physical therapist—the girl—would be on—”

“The morning plane to L.A.!” Osborn finished for him, his words coming in a rush. “Jesus Christ, he said it for a reason! She’s got to be alive. And here, in Berlin!”

“Yes—”

128

THE PRIVATE room on the sixth floor of Universitats Klinik Berlin was dark. McVey had been checked into the room and then taken to the burn unit, Remmer had gone to have his broken wrist X-rayed and set, and Osborn had been left alone. Dirty and exhausted, hair and eyebrows singed so short he thought he could have passed for Yul Brynner or a marine grunt, he’d been examined, bathed and put to bed. They’d wanted to give him a sedative but he’d refused.

Berlin police scouring the city for Joanna Marsh, Osborn should have simply drifted off, but he didn’t. Maybe he was overtired, maybe a minor case of cyanide poisoning had a side effect that nobody knew about and worked like an adrenaline rush that kept you pumped up. Whatever it was, Osborn was wide awake. He could see his clothes along with McVey’s rumpled suit hanging in the closet. Past them, through the open door, he could see the central nurses’ station. A tall blonde was on duty, talking on the phone and at the same time making an entry into a computer workstation in front of her. Now a doctor came in making late-night rounds, and Osborn saw her look up and wink as the doctor stopped to scrutinize some paperwork. How long had it been since he’d made hospital rounds? Had he ever? It seemed he’d been in Europe for eons. A doctor in love had, in quick turn, become a pursuer, a victim, a fugitive and, finally, a pursuer again with policemen from three countries as allies. And in that he had shot to death three terrorist gunmen, one of whom had been a woman. His life and practice in California existed only in vague memory. There, but not. In a way it mirrored his life. There, but not. It had all happened because he had never been able to put to rest the death of his father. And after everything, it was still not done. That was what was keeping him awake. He’d tried to find the answer on the bodies of Scholl and Salettl. There was none. And it had seemed to be journey’s end until McVey had remembered what Salettl had said. He may or may not have been telling them to find Joanna Marsh. She might have some kind of answer, she might be completely innocent. But she was a piece still hanging, as Scholl had been after the death of Albert Merriman. So the journey was not yet done. But with McVey down and out for who knew how long, the question became—How to continue?

129

BAERBEL BRACHER, her small dog tugging at his leash, Stood talking to homicide inspectors from Polizeiprasidium, Berlin’s central police station. Baerbel Bracher was eighty-seven and it was 12:35 in the morning. Her dog, Heinz, was sixteen and had bladder problems. She walked him as often as four times a night. Sometimes five or more on a bad night. Tonight had been a bad night; she’d been out for the sixth time when she’d seen the police cars and then the policemen and teenagers gathered around the parked taxi.

“Yes, I saw him. He was young and handsome and wearing a tuxedo.” She stopped as the coroner’s van arrived and the coroner and white-coated assistants got out and approached the cab. “At the time I thought it strange a good-looking man in a tuxedo should be getting out of a taxi, throwing the keys inside and walking away.” She watched them bring over a gurney and body bag, then open the trunk and lift out the body of the young taxi driver, put her in the bag and then zip it closed over her head.

“But then, it’s none of my business, is it? He had a big white case over his shoulder, too. Something else I thought strange, a young man in a tuxedo, lugging an awkward-looking box like that. But anything can happen these days. I don’t think about anything anymore. I have no opinions.”

The tuxedo was the thing that connected him to Charlottenburg, and by 1:00 A.M. Baerbel Bracher was at police headquarters looking at photographs. Because of the Charlottenburg connection, the BKA was notified. Immediately, Bad Godesberg contacted Remmer.