The Day After Tomorrow

144

“A FIRE in the weather station, sir. It happened last night. No one was hurt but the station is beyond repair,” a railroad worker had said of the pile of charred debris stacked against the side of the tunnel.

Fire! Last night. The same as Charlottenburg. The same as der Garten. Von Holden had been increasingly apprehensive as they’d neared the Jungfraujoch station and he was fearful the attacks would come again. The source of his concern, he’d thought, was not so much Osborn as Vera. For the last part of the trip she’d been quiet, almost detached, and his sense had been that she’d caught on and was trying to make up her mind what to do. He’d countered that quickly by moving her out of the train and toward the elevator the moment they’d arrived. They were no more than three minutes from the weather station, four at most. Once there, everything would be all right because very shortly afterward she would be dead. It was then he’d seen the debris and been told of the fire. The destruction of the weather station was something he’d never considered.

“That’s where Paul was, up there—” “

“Yes,” Von Holden said. They were outside in the growing twilight, climbing a long series of steps toward the burned-out shell of what had been the weather station. Behind them was the brightly lit massive cement and steel structure that housed the restaurant and Ice Palace. On their right, falling away beneath them, was the ten-mile- long Aletsch glacier, a frozen, twisted, now darkening sea of ice and snow. Above them rose the nearly fourteen thousand-foot Jungfrau peak, its snowy crest blood red with the setting sun.

“Why are there no rescue workers? No firemen? No heavy equipment?” Vera was angry, afraid, incredulous, and Von Holden was grateful for it. It told him that no matter what else she might have been thinking, her main concern was still Osborn. That, in itself, would keep her off guard if he couldn’t reach the inner passageways he hoped had survived the fire and they had to go back outside.

“There is no rescue attempt because no one knows they are here. The weather station is automated. No one goes there except an occasional technician. Our levels are belowground. Emergency generators automatically seal each floor in case of fire.”

Then they were at the top and Von Holden tore aside a heavy sheet of plywood covering the entrance and they pushed past a frame of charred timbers. Inside it was dark, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and molten steel. The fire had been extremely hot. Hotter than any fire started by accident. A melted steel door in the back of an instrument closet attested to it. Finding a crowbar left by the demolition crew, Von Holden tried to pry it open but it was impossible.

“Salettl, you bastard,” he said under his breath. In disgust he threw the bar aside. There was no need even to attempt to open it; he knew what he would find inside. A ceramic-lined, six-foot-high titanium tunnel, melted into an impassable mass.

“Come on,” he said, “there is another entrance.” If the lower levels had been sealed off from the fire as they should have been, everything would still be all right.

Leading the way outside, Von Holden let Vera go down the steps ahead of him. As she did, the last rays of the sun touched her hair, bathing her in soft vermilion. For the briefest moment Von Holden wondered what it would be like to be an ordinary man. And in that he thought of Joanna, and the truth of what he had said to her in Berlin, that he didn’t know if he was capable of love and she had replied, “You are—” It was a thought out of time and it led to another: that however simple and plain she was, at heart she was truly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever known and he was astonished to think that maybe she was right, that he was capable of love and the love he held was for her.

Then his eyes were drawn to a large clock on the wall at the bottom of the steps. Its minute hand stood straight up. It was exactly five o’clock. At the same moment came the announcement of an arriving train. As quickly his dream vanished and something else stood in its place.

Osborn.

145

OSBORN STOOD back from the door, letting the other passengers go out first. Absently, he wiped perspiration from his upper lip. If he was trembling, he didn’t notice.

“Good luck, darlin’.” Connie touched his arm on the way out and then she was gone, following the last of the railroaders toward an open elevator at the far end of the tracks. Osborn looked around. The car was empty and he was alone. Lifting out the .38, he flipped open the chamber. Six shots. McVey had left it fully loaded.

Closing the chamber, he stuck the gun in his waistband and he let his jacket slide across it. Then, taking a deep breath, he stepped sharply from the train. Immediately he felt the cold. It was the kind of mountain cold you felt on ski trips when you stepped from a heated gondola and out into the half-open barn where the gondolas stopped.

He was surprised to see a second train in the station and he had to think that since the last train left at six, the second train must be for the help who would go down later, after they’d closed up.

Crossing the platform, Osborn joined several British tourists and took the same elevator Connie and the railroaders had taken. The car went one stop and the door opened, revealing a large room with a cafeteria and souvenir shop.

The Brits stepped out and Osborn went with them. Dropping back, he stopped at the souvenir shop and absently looked over an assortment of Jungfraujoch T-shirts, postcards and candy while at the same time trying to study the faces of the people crowding the cafeteria farther down the room. Almost immediately a short, chubby boy of maybe ten walked up with his parents. The family was American and both the father and boy wore identical Chicago Bulls jackets. In that one single instant Osborn felt more alone than at any time in his life. He wasn’t quite sure why was it that he had so distanced himself from the rest of the world that death, if it came at Von Holden’s hands or even Vera’s, would go wholly unnoticed, that no one would care that he had ever been? Or had the vision of the boy and his father only magnified the bitterness of what had been taken from him? Or was it that other thing, the thing that had eluded him his entire life, a family of his own?

Pulling himself from the depths of his own emotion, Osborn studied the room once more. If Von Holden or Vera were there, he didn’t see them. Leaving the souvenir area, he crossed to the elevator. Almost immediately the door opened and an elderly couple walked out. Scanning the room a last time, Osborn went into the elevator and pressed the button for the next floor. The door closed and he started upward. Several seconds later the elevator stopped, the door slid open, and he looked out at a world of blue ice. This was the Ice Palace, a long semicircular tunnel cut into glacial ice and filled with caverns holding ice sculptures. Ahead of him, he could see the last of the railroaders, Connie among them, as they walked along enchanted by the sculptures—of people, of animals, of a full-size car, a replica of a bar, complemented with chairs and tables and an old-fashioned whiskey barrel.

Osborn hesitated, then stepped out and started down the corridor, trying to blend in, to look like anybody else. As he walked, he searched the faces of tourists coming toward him. Maybe he’d made a mistake not staying with the, railroaders. Reaching out, he ran his fingers delicately along the side of the corridor, as if he doubted it was ice and might instead be some manufactured product. But it was ice. The same as on the ceiling and floor. The surrounding of ice intensified the thought that this place could have been the site of the experimental surgeries done at extreme cold.

But where? Jungfraujoch was small. Surgeries, especially surgeries as delicate as these would be, required space. Equipment rooms, prep room and surgery rooms, intensive-care post-op rooms. Rooms to house the staff. How could it be done here?

The only place out of bounds, Connie had told him, was the weather station. Fifteen feet away a Swiss guide stood by as teenagers posed for a photograph in the ice tunnel. Crossing to her, Osborn asked directions to the weather station. It was upstairs, she said. Near the restaurant and the outside terrace. But it was closed because of a fire.