The Day After Tomorrow

“YOU ARRANGED?” McVey was incredulous.

Osborn didn’t reply. Instead he set his glass on the bar and started down a dingy corridor past the toilets toward a pay phone in the rear of the cafe. He was almost there when McVey caught up with him.

“What’re you gonna do, try and call her?”

“Yes.” Osborn kept going. He hadn’t thought it through, but he had to know she was all right.

“Osborn.” McVey took him hard by the arm and pulled him around. “If she is there, she’s probably okay, but the detectives with her will be monitoring the line. They’ll let you talk while they trace the call. If the French police are involved, you and I won’t get five feet out that door.” McVey nodded toward the front. “And if she’s not there, there’s nothing you can do.”

Osborn flared. “You don’t understand, do you? I have to know.”

“How?”

By now Osborn had an answer. “Philippe.” Osborn would call him, have Philippe call Vera, then call Osborn back. They couldn’t trace the second call.

“The doorman at her apartment?”

Osborn nodded.

“He helped you get out of the building, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And maybe arranged the tail on you when you left?”

“No, he wouldn’t. He’s—”

“He’s what? Somebody let the tall man know Vera was, the mystery girl, and somebody told him where she lived. Why not him? Osborn, for now, your peace of mind is going to have to wait.” McVey glared at him long enough to make his point, then looked past him for a way out the back.

A half hour later, paying cash and using an alias—saying their luggage had been lost at the train station— McVey checked them into connecting rooms on the fifth floor of the Hotel St.-Jacques on the avenue St.-Jacques, a tourist hotel less than a mile from La Coupole and the boulevard du Montparnasse.

Obviously American and without luggage, McVey played upon the French disposition for amour. Entering the rooms, McVey gave the bellman an extra-large tip, telling him shyly but very sincerely to make certain they weren’t disturbed.

“Oui, monsieur.” The bellman gave Osborn a knowing smile, then closed the door behind him and left.

Immediately McVey checked out both rooms, the closets and bathrooms. Satisfied, he drew the window curtains, then turned to Osborn.

“I’m going down to the lobby and make a phone call. I don’t want to make it from here because I want nothing traced to this room. When I get back, I want to go over .everything you remember about Albert Merriman, from the moment he killed your father until the last second in the river.”

Reaching into his jacket pocket, McVey took out Bernhard Oven’s Cz automatic and put it in Osborn’s hand. “I’d ask you if you knew how to use it, but I already know the answer.” McVey’s glare was enough, the edge in his voice only added to it. He turned for the door. “Nobody comes in but me. Not for any reason.”

Easing open the door, McVey looked out, then stepped into a deserted hallway. The elevator was the same. At the lobby the doors opened and he got out. Except for a group of Japanese tourists coming in off a bus tour and following a leader carrying a little green and white flag, the area was all but deserted.

Crossing the lobby, McVey looked for a public phone and saw one near the gift shop. Using an AT&T credit card number billed to a post office box in Los Angeles, he dialed Noble’s voice mail at Scotland Yard. A recording took his message.

Hanging up, he went into the gift shop, briefly looked at the selection of greeting cards, then bought a birthday number with a large yellow bunny on it. Back in the lobby, he took out the cardboard notebook cover with Bernhard Oven’s dried bloody thumbprint and slipped it in with the card, addressing it to a “Billy Noble” care of a post address in London. Then he went to the front desk and asked the concierge to send it by overnight mail.

He’d just paid the concierge and was turning back for the lobby when two uniformed gendarmes came in from the street and stood looking around. To McVey’s left were a number of tour brochures. Casually, he walked over to them. As he did, one of the policemen looked his way. McVey ignored him and thumbed through the brochures. Finally, he chose three and walked back across the lobby in full view of the police. Sitting down near the telephone, he started to look through them. Barge tours. Tours of Versailles. Tours of wine country. He counted to sixty, then looked up. The police were gone.

Four minutes later, Ian Noble called from a private residence where he and his wife were attending a formal dinner for a retiring British army general.

“Where are you?”

“Paris. The Hotel St.-Jacques. Jack Briggs. San Diego. Wholesale jewelry,” McVey said in monotone, giving him the location and the name he was registered under. A movement to his left caught his eye. Shifting his stance, he saw three men in business suits coming across the lobby toward him. One seemed to be looking directly at him, the other two were talking.

“You remember Mike, doncha?” he said with verve, opening his jacket, playing the extroverted American salesman, his hand inches from the .38 at his waist. “Yeah, I brought him along with me.”

“You have Osborn.”

“Sure do.”

“Is he trouble?”

“Hell, no. Not yet anyway.”

The men passed, going into the alcove toward the elevators. McVey waited until they entered and the door closed, then turned back to the phone and quickly ran down what had happened, adding that he had just put the jail man’s thumbprint in the overnight mail.

“We’ll run it straightaway,” Noble said, then added he’d had words with the French charge d’affaires, who had demanded to know what the hell the Brits thought they were doing shanghaiing a seriously wounded Parisian inspector from his hospital room in Lyon. Further, they wanted him back, posthaste. Noble had said he was appalled, that he’d never heard of such an incident and would look into it immediately. Then, changing subjects, he said they’d come up blank trying to find anyone in Britain experimenting in advanced cryosurgery. If such practice was going on, it was wholly out of sight.

McVey glanced around the lobby. He hated paranoia. It crippled a man and made him see things that weren’t. But he had to face the reality that anyone, in uniform or not, could be working for this group, whoever or whatever they were. The tall man would have had no compunction about shooting him right there in the lobby and he had to assume his replacement would do the same. Or if not right then, at least report where he was. By lingering, he was pressing his luck on either account.

“McVey, are you there?”

He turned back to the phone. “What’d you find out about Klass?”

“M16 could find nothing but an exemplary record. Wife, two children. Born in Munich. Grew up in Frankfurt. Captain in the German Air Force. Recruited out of it by West German Intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, where he developed his skills and reputation as a fingerprint expert. After that, went to work for Interpol at Lyon headquarters.”

“No. No good,” McVey reacted. “They missed something. Go deeper. Look into people he associates with, outside his daily routine. Hold on—” McVey thought back, trying to remember Lebrun’s office the day they had first received Merriman’s fingerprint from Interpol, Lyon. Somebody else had been working with Klass—Hal, Hall, Hald— Halder!

“Halder—first name Rudolf. Interpol, Vienna. He worked with Klass on the Merriman print. Look, Ian, do you know Manny Remmer?”

“With the German Federal Police.”

“He’s an old friend, works out of headquarters in Bad Godesberg. Lives in an area called Rungsdorf. It’s not too late. Get him at home. Tell him I said for you to call. Tell him you want anything he can find on both Klass and Halder. If it’s there, he’ll get it. Trust him.”

“McVey—” There was concern in Noble’s voice. “I think you’ve managed to open a rather large can of very disagreeable worms. And, frankly, I think you should get out of Paris damn quick.”