The Day After Tomorrow

determined to become a major power once again. Last night one hundred of Germany’s most powerful and influential democratic Germans gathered at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. They were there to be enlightened about what was going on in their country and to pledge their support in fighting it.”

Glancing at the clock over the kiosk, Von Holden opened the newspaper. On the cover was a dramatic photo of Charlottenburg engulfed in flame. The headline, in German, read “Charlottenburg Brent! “—Charlottenburg Burns!

“It was fire-bombed. Everyone there, was killed. This new Nazi movement was responsible.”

“You have a reason for telling me.” Vera knew he was keeping something back.

In the distance, Von Holden saw a half-dozen uniformed police running toward the train they had just left. Again he glanced at the clock: 7:33.

“Walk with me, please.”

Taking her arm, Von Holden moved off toward a waiting train.

“Paul Osborn discovered the men he was with were not who they seemed.”

“McVey?” Vera didn’t believe it.

“For one, yes.”

“No, never. He’s an American, like Paul.”

“Is there some coincidence that the French policeman McVey was working with in Paris was shot and killed in a London hospital at almost the same hour yesterday that the body of the prime minister was found?”

“Oh God—” Vera could see Lebrun standing with McVey in her apartment. It was the horror of the German occupation of France all over again. Pick a thousand faces and trust not one. It was the essence of what Francois Christian had been fighting against in France. What he feared most—French sentiment slipping under the influence of Germany. While Germany itself, torn by strife and cavil unrest, sleepwalked into the hands of fascists.

“It’s the reality of what we’re dealing with,” Von Holden pressed. “Organized, highly trained neo-Nazi terrorists operating in Europe and the Americas. Osborn found out and came to us. We took him out of Germany for his own safety. The same is true for you.”

“Me?” Vera stared at him in disbelief.

“I am not the one they were after just now, it was you. They know of your involvement with Francois Christian. They will assume you know things whether you do or not.”

All too clearly Vera saw Avril Rocard approaching the farmhouse outside Nancy, the dead French Secret Service agents sprawled on the ground behind her.

“How did you know about Francois?” she asked painfully.

“Osborn told us. That’s why we got you out of jail, before McVey and his friends could extend their influence further.”

Now they were turning down a platform, walking in a crowd alongside a waiting train. Von Holden was looking for car numbers. A loudspeaker announced the arrival of one train, the departure of another. How had the police known he was on the train? He scanned the faces and body movements of the people around them. Attack could come from anywhere. In the distance came the blare of sirens. Then he saw the car he was looking for.

At 7:46, the Inter City Express pulled out of the Hauptbahnhof. Vera settled uncertainly into a crushed red velvet seat in a first-class compartment next to Von Holden. As the train accelerated, she leaned back and turned to look out the window. That McVey could have been other than what he seemed was impossible. Yet Lebrun was dead and so was Francois Christian. And Von Holden knew too much about all of it not to be believed. And now a hundred more had died in the Charlottenburg fire, to say nothing of the men Von Holden had killed in the railroad station. At another time, under other circumstances, she might have thought more clearly. But too much had happened, too quickly and too brutally.

Most terrifying of all, it had been done beneath the specter of a rising German political movement far too horrendous to contemplate.

133

FOR AN hour, the idea of anything but the immediate carnage disappeared as Osborn, first with Remmer’s help, then with the aid of the first arriving paramedics, worked emergency triage on the bloody tarmac of the autobahn. All his skills as a surgeon, everything he’d learned from the first day of medical school, he had to draw on. He had no instruments, no medicine, no anesthesia.

The blade of a truck driver’s Swiss Army knife held over a match for sterilization served as a scalpel for a tracheotomy that opened the windpipe of a seventy-year-old nun.

Leaving her, Osborn moved to a middle-aged woman. Her teenage son was near hysteria, screaming that her leg had been horribly cut and that she was bleeding to death. Only the leg wasn’t cut, it had been severed. Tearing off his belt, he used it as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but then had to call on her son to hold it tight. Remmer was yelling for him to help pull a young woman from under a small car that was so crushed it looked as if no one could have survived. They were down flat on the tarmac, Osborn easing her out, Remmer talking to her in German, using his legs to lift a pile of tangled steel. Then they had her out and it was only at that moment that they saw she had a baby in her arms. The baby was dead. When she realized it, she simply got up and walked away. Moments later, the driver of a smashed Volkswagen bus, cradling a broken arm himself, ran after her as he realized she was walking back past the rows of stopped cars and into oncoming traffic. Police cars, ambulances and fire equipment were still arriving, and a medevac helicopter was on its way from Frankfurt, when Remmer held the skeletal body of a young man in the last stages of AIDS in his arms while Osborn maneuvered to relocate his badly dislocated shoulder. The man never said a word, never cried out though the pain must have been excruciating. Finally he lay back and mouthed “Danke.”

After that, emergency workers took over. It had been daybreak when they’d started; it was light now. The carnage around them looked like a war zone. They were walking back toward the Mercedes in the soft shoulder off the pavement as the medevac helicopter set down in a roaring churn of dust. Rescue workers ran toward it carrying a litter, a paramedic running alongside holding an IV bottle overhead.

Osborn looked at Remmer. “I think we missed the train,” he said quietly.

“Ja.” Remmer’s hand was on the Mercedes’ door when its radio crackled. A brief staccato of code numbers was followed by Remmer’s name. Immediately, Remmer picked up the microphone and replied. Rapid-fire German followed. Remmer listened, then gave a terse answer and clicked off. “Von Holden shot three policemen at the Frankfurt railway station. All three are dead. Von Holden escaped.” Remmer finished the sentence but continued to stare at Osborn.

The look made Osborn uncomfortable. “You’re not telling me something. What is it?”

There was a woman with him.”

“So—”

“Vera Monneray was released from jail at 10:37 last night,” Remmer said over the squeal of tires as they sped from the accident scene. “The administrator responsible for her release was found dead less than an hour ago in the backseat of a car parked near the Berlin railway station.”

“You’re not trying to tell me Vera was the woman with Von Holden.” Osborn could feel the anger and resentment rise within him.

“I’m not making a judgment, merely giving you a fact. In the light of things it was important that you know.”

Osborn stared at him. “She was released but nobody knows what happened after that.”

Remmer shook his head.

“Remmer—what the hell is going on?”

“I wish I could tell you.”

Three people had seen a man and a woman leaving the Berlin-Frankfurt train shortly after it had reached the Hauptbahnhof. They had crossed the platform and disappeared into the station. All three had loud and differing opinions as to where they might have gone. However, the one thing they all agreed upon was that the man was the