Abruptly the Aurora vanished and Von Holden stood trembling in the moonlight, the box still in his arms. A moment passed before he could hear his own breathing. A moment more, and he felt his pulse return to normal. Finally, he started forward out of the cul-de-sac. Then he was out and on the edge of the mountain overlooking the glacier. Below him he saw the clear trail to the air shaft. Immediately he started down it, the box still clutched in his arms.
By now the storm had passed and the moon and stars were stark in the sky. The clarity of the moonlight and the angle from which it came gave the snowy landscape a raw. timelessness that made it at once past and future, and Von Holden had the sense that he had demanded and been given passage through a world that existed only on some Jar-removed plane.
Within minutes he’d reached the split of rock that concealed the opening to the air shaft. The rock itself jutted put over the edge of the cliff and he had to step out and around it to enter. As he did, he saw Osborn sprawled on a snow covered shelf thirty yards downhill from where he stood, his left leg turned under him at an odd angle. Von Holden knew it was broken. But he wasn’t dead. His eyes were open and he was watching him.
“Don’t take another chance with him,” he thought. “Shoot him now.”
There was a puff of snow from Von Holden’s boot as he stepped closer to the edge and looked down. His movement had put him in deep shadow, with the full light of the moon on the Jungfrau above him. But even in the darkness Osborn could see him shift the weight of the box and cradle it in his left arm. Then he saw a secondary movement and the pistol come up in his right hand. Osborn no longer had McVey’s gun—it had been lost in the rush of the avalanche that had saved his life. He’d been given one chance, he wouldn’t get another unless he did something himself.
Grimacing in agony as his fractured leg twisted beneath him, Osborn dug in with his elbows and kicked out with his other leg. Unbearable pain shot the length of his body as he inched backward, squirming like a broken animal over the ice and rock, trying wildly to drag himself across the shelf and out of the line of fire. Suddenly he felt his head dip backward and he realized he had come to the edge. Cold air rushed up from below and he looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but a vast dark hole in the glacier beneath him. Slowly he looked back. He could feel Von Holden smile as his finger closed around the pistol’s trigger.
Then Von Holden’s eyes flashed in the moonlight. His gun bucked in his hand and he jerked sideways, his shots spraying off into space. Von Holden kept shooting and his entire body jumped with the rattle of the gun until it was empty. Then his hand went limp and dropped to his side and the gun fell away. For a moment he just stood there, his eyes wide, the box still cradled in his left arm. Then, ever so slowly, he lost his balance and pitched forward, his body plunging downward, sailing over Osborn, free-falling in the clear night air toward the gaping darkness below.
154
OSBORN REMEMBERED hearing dogs and then saw faces.
A local doctor and Swiss paramedics. Mountain rescuers who carried him in a litter up through the snow in the darkness. Vera. Inside the station. Her face white and taut with fear. Uniformed policemen on the train as he went down. They were talking but he didn’t remember hearing them. Connie. Sitting beside him, smiling reassuringly. And Vera again, holding his hand.
Then drugs or pain or exhaustion must have taken over because he went out.
Later he thought there was something about a hospital in Grindelwald. And an argument of some kind as to who he was. He could have sworn Remmer came into the room and after him, McVey in his rumpled suit. With McVey pulling up a chair next to the bed and sitting down, watching him.
Then he saw Von Holden back on the mountain. Saw him teeter on the edge. Saw him fall. For the briefest instant he had the impression that someone was standing on the ledge directly behind him. He remembered trying to think who it could be and realized it was Vera. She held an enormous icicle arid it was covered with blood. But then that vision faded to one infinitely clearer. Von Holden was alive and falling toward him, the box still clutched in his arms. He was falling not at normal speed but in some sort of distorted slow motion and in an arc that would send him over the edge and down into the fathomless darkness thousands of feet below. Then he was gone, and all that was left was what had been said before, just as the avalanche struck.
“Why was my father murdered?” Osborn had asked.
155
Berlin, Monday, October 17.
VERA SAT alone in the back of a taxi as it turned off Clay Allee onto Messelstrasse and into the heart of Dahlem, one of Berlin’s handsomest districts. A cold rain was falling for the second day and people were already complaining about it. That morning the concierge at the Hotel Kempinski had personally delivered a single red rose. With it had come a sealed envelope with a hastily scrawled note asking her to take it to Osborn when she visited him at the small, exclusive hospital in Dahlem. The note had been signed “McVey.”
Because of road construction, the route to Dahlem backtracked and she found herself being driven past the destruction that had been Charlottenburg. Workmen were out in the heavy rain, gutting the structure. Bulldozers steamrolled over the formal gardens clearing the ruins, pushing them into great piles of charred rubble that were then machine-loaded into dump trucks and driven away. The tragedy had made headlines worldwide and flags flew at half mast across the city. A state funeral had been planned for the victims. Two former presidents of the United States were to attend as was the president of France and the prime minister of England.
“It burned before. In 1746,” the cabdriver told her, his voice strong and filled with pride. “It was rebuilt then. It will be rebuilt again.”
Vera closed her eyes as the taxi turned on Kaiser Friedrichstrasse for Dahlem. She’d come down with him from the mountain and had stayed with him as long as they’d let her. Then she’d been given an escort to Zurich and told Osborn would be taken to a hospital in Berlin. And that’s where she’d gone. It had all happened in too little time. Images and feelings collided, beautiful, painful, horrifying. Love and death rode hand in hand. And too closely. It seemed, almost, as if she’d lived through a war.
Through most of it had been the overriding presence of McVey. In one way, he was a kind and earnest grandfather who cared for the human rights and dignity of everyone. But in another, he was his own sort of Patton. Selfish and ruthless, relentless, even cruel. Driven by pursuit of truth. At any cost whatsoever.
The taxi let her off under an overhang and she entered the hospital. The lobby was small and warm and she was startled to see a uniformed policeman. He watched her carefully until she announced herself at the desk. Then he immediately rang for the elevator and smiled at her as she entered.
Another policeman stood outside the second-floor elevator and a plainclothes inspector was outside the door to Osborn’s room. Both men seemed to know who she was, the last even greeting her by name.
“Is he in danger?” she asked, concerned at the presence of the police.
“It is simply a precaution.”
“I understand.” Vera turned to the door. Beyond it was a man. she barely knew, yet loved as if centuries had passed between them. The brief time they’d spent together had beer! like no other. He’d touched her on a level no one else ever had. Perhaps it was because when they’d looked at each other the first time, they’d also looked down
