The Day After Tomorrow

“I don’t know. But experimental work had already begun with laser surgery, which is basically the turning of light energy into heat. So if they were experimenting with unexplored surgical concepts I would assume they would have been working in the opposite direction.”

“Cold.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly the ice was gone and McVey could feel the rush of blood through his veins. This was the something that had kept pulling him back to Osborn. The connection between Osborn, Merriman and the headless bodies.

71

Berlin, Monday, October 10,10:15 P.M.

“ES IST spat, Uta,”—It’s late, Uta—Konrad Peiper said edgily.

“I apologize, Herr Peiper. But I’m sure you realize there’s nothing I can do,” Uta Baur said. “I’m certain they will be here at any minute.” She glanced at Dr. Salettl, who didn’t respond.

She and Salettl had flown in from Zurich earlier that evening on Elton Lybarger’s corporate jet and driven directly here to make final preparations before the others arrived. In a normal situation she would have begun a half hour ago. Guests like those gathered here, in the private room on the top floor of Galerie Pamplemousse, a five- story gallery for “neue Kunst,” new art, on the Kurfurstendamm, were not the kind anyone kept waiting, especially this far into the evening. But the two men who were late were not men one insulted by leaving before they arrived, no matter who you were. Especially when you had come at their invitation.

Uta, dressed as always in black, got up and crossed the room to a side table upon which rested a large silver urn filled with fresh-ground Arabian coffee, plates of assorted canapes and sweets, and bottled waters, kept replenished by two exquisite young hostesses in tight jeans and cowboy boots.

“Refill the urn, please. The coffee is not fresh,” she snapped at one of them. Immediately the girl did as she was told, pushing through the door and going into a service kitchen.

“I give them fifteen minutes, no more. I’m busy too, don’t they realize?” Hans Dabritz set his stopwatch, put several canapes on a plate, and retreated to where he had been sitting.

Uta poured herself a glass of mineral water and looked around the room at her impatient guests. Their names read like a Who’s Who of contemporary Germany. She could visualize the shorthand descriptions.

Diminutive, bearded, Hans Dabritz, fifty. Real estate developer and political powerbroker. Real estate activity includes massive apartment complexes in Kiel, Hamburg, Munich and Dusseldorf, industrial warehousing and high- rise, commercial office buildings in Berlin, Frankfurt, Essen, Bremen, Stuttgart and Bonn. Owns square blocks of downtown Bonn, Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. Sits on the board of directors of Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank. Contributions to local politicians extensive and ongoing; controls a majority of them. Joke often told that the biggest influence in Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is in the hands of one of Germany’s smallest men. In the cold and sober back halls of German politics, Dabritz is looked upon as the dominant puppeteer. Almost never fails to get what he wants.

Konrad Peiper, thirty-eight—who with his wife, Margarete, had been aboard the lake steamer in Zurich two nights earlier as part of the welcome home celebration for Elton Lybarger—president and chief executive officer of Goltz Development Group, GDG, the second largest trading company in Germany. Under his auspices, established Lewsen International, a de facto holding company in London, With Lewsen as a front, GDG put together a network of fifty small and medium-size German companies that became Lewsen International’s main suppliers. Between 1981 and 1990 GDG, through the Lewsen front, secretly provided cash-rich Iraq key materials to wage chemical and biological warfare, upgrade ballistic missiles, and provide components for nuclear capability. That Iraq would lose most of what Lewsen had provided to Operation Desert Storm was of little consequence. Peiper had firmly established GDG as a world-class arms supplier.

Margarete Peiper, twenty-nine, Konrad’s wife. Petite, ravishing, workaholic. By twenty, a music arranger, record producer and personal manager of three of Germany’s top rock bands. By twenty-five, sole owner of the massive Cinderella, Germany’s largest recording studio, two record labels and homes in Berlin, London and Los Angeles. Currently, chairman, principal owner and driving force behind A.E.A., Agency for the Electric Arts, a huge, worldwide, talent organization representing top writers, performers, directors and recording artists. Insiders say Margarete Peiper’s guiding genius is that her psyche is permanently tuned to the “youth channel.” Critics see her ability to stay on top of a vast and growing young contemporary audience as more frightening than extraordinary because what she does teeters so precariously between creative brilliance and outright manipulation, of the will. A charge she has always denied. Hers, she maintains, is nothing more than a vigorous, lifelong commitment to people and to art.

Retired Air Force Major General Matthias Noll, sixty-two. Respected political lobbyist. Brilliant public speaker. Champion of the powerful German peace movement. Outspoken critic of rapid constitutional change. Held in high regard by a large population of aging Germans still ravaged by the guilt and shame of the Third Reich.

Henryk Steiner, forty-three. Number-one groundshaker in the new Germany’s not so quietly rumbling labor unrest. Father of eleven. Stocky, immensely likable. Cut from the mold of Lech Walesa. Dynamic and extraordinarily popular political organizer. Holds the emotional and physical backing of several hundred thousand auto and steelworkers struggling for economic survival within the new eastern German states. Imprisoned for eight months for leading three hundred truck drivers in a strike protesting dangerous and underrepaired highways, he was only two weeks out of jail before leading five hundred Potsdam police in a token four-hour work stoppage after red tape had left them unpaid for nearly a month.

Hilmar Grunel, fifty-seven, chief executive, HGS-Beyer, Germany’s largest magazine and newspaper publisher. Former ambassador to the United Nations and vociferous conservative, oversees daily operation and controls editorial content of eleven major publications, all of which take a strong and heady view from the right.

Rudolf Kaes, forty-eight. Monetary affairs specialist at the Institute for Economic Research at Heidelberg and key economic adviser to the Kohl government. Lone German representative on the board of the new European Economic Community’s central bank. Vigorous advocate for a single European currency, acutely aware of how thoroughly the German mark already dominates Europe, and how a single currency based on it would only serve to enhance German economic might.

Gertrude Biermann (also a guest on the lake steamer in Zurich), thirty-nine. Single mother of two. A predominant force in the Greens, a radical leftist peace movement tracing its roots to the attempt to keep U.S. Pershing missiles out of West Germany in the early 1980s. Influence reaches deep into a German conscience disturbed by any attempt at all to align Germany with the military West.

There was a buzz and Uta saw Salettl pick up the telephone at his elbow. He listened, then hung up and glanced at Uta.

“Ja,” he said.

A moment later the door opened and Von Holden entered. Briefly he scanned the room, then stood aside.

“Hier sink sie”—Here they are—Uta said to the guests, at the same time glancing sharply at the hostesses, who immediately left through a side door.

A moment later, a strikingly handsome and exceedingly well-dressed man of seventy-five entered. “Dortmund is tied up in Bonn. We will go on without him,” Erwin Scholl said in German to no one in particular, then sat down next to Steiner. Dortmund was Gustav Dortmund, chief of the Federal Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank.

Von Holden closed the door and crossed to the table. Pouring a glass of mineral water, he handed it to Scholl, then stepped back to stand near the door.

Scholl was tall and slim, with close-cropped gray hair, a deep tan and startlingly blue eyes. Age considerable fortune had done nothing but add character to an already chiseled face of broad forehead, aristocratic nose and deeply cleft chin. He possessed an old-style military bearing that commanded attention the moment he appeared.

“The presentation, please,” he said quietly to Uta. A curious blend of studied shyness and complete arrogance, Erwin Scholl was the perfect American success story: a penniless German