with them, laughed out loud at the vivid memory of running away to enlist in the Foreign Legion then being rejected and escorted abruptly back home by two real legionnaires because they were only fourteen. Cadoux’s smile was broad and he laughed often in a genuine attempt to cheer his wounded comrade:
All the while they talked, the index finger of Lebrun’s .right hand rested on the stainless steel trigger of a .25 caliber automatic, concealed beneath his bedclothes and pointed at Cadoux’s chest. The coded warning from McVey had been absolutely clear. Never mind that Cadoux was an old and cherished friend; there was every indication he was a major conspirator working with the “group,” as they were now calling it. Most likely, it was he who controlled the covert operations within Interpol, Lyon, and he who had ordered the execution of Lebrun’s brother and the attempted murder of Lebrun himself at the Lyon railway station.
If McVey was right, Cadoux had come visiting for one reason: to finish the job on Lebrun himself.
But the more he talked, the more convivial he became, and Lebrun began to wonder if McVey could have been wrong or his information incorrect. Further, how would he dare attempt it when there were armed police standing twenty-four-hour guard just a few feet away on the other side of the door, and the door itself open?
“My friend,” Cadoux said, standing. “Forgive me but I must have a cigarette and I know I can’t do that in here.” Gathering his cap, he started toward the door. “I’ll go down to the lounge and come back in a few moments.”
Cadoux left and Lebrun relaxed. McVey had to have been wrong. A moment later, one of the Metropolitan policemen outside his room entered.
“Everything all right, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Chap here to change your bed.” The policeman stood aside as a large man in the dress of a hospital orderly came in with fresh linens.
“Good day, sir,” the man said with a Cockney accent, setting the linens down on a chair next to the bed. The policeman went back into the hallway.
“We’ll have a little privacy, eh, sir?” he said and, taking two steps, closed the door.
Lebrun’s danger alarm went off. “Why are you closing the door?” he cried out in French. The man turned and smiled. Then suddenly reached across and jerked the tubes from Lebrun’s nose. A split second later, a pillow was shoved over his face and the man’s full weight came down on it.
Lebrun struggled frantically, his right hand digging for the automatic. But the large man’s weight, combined with his own weakness, made it a battle out of Lebrun’s favor. Finally his hand closed around the gun and he fought to bring it up so he could fire into the man’s belly. Abruptly the man’s weight shifted and the gun barrel caught in the sheets. Lebrun grunted, feverishly trying to jerk the pistol free. His lungs screamed for air but there was none. And in that single moment he realized he was going to die, as quickly everything faded to gray, then to an even darker gray that was almost black but wasn’t. He thought he felt someone take the gun from his hand, but he couldn’t be certain. Then he heard a muffled pop and saw the brightest light he’d ever seen.
It would have been impossible for Lebrun to see the orderly tug back the sheets, rip the automatic from his hand and put it to his ear beneath the pillow. In the same way, it would have been as impossible for him to see the bloody rush of his brains and pieces of his skull splatter off the wall next to his bed and cling to the white-painted plaster like so much flecked crimson Jell-O.
Five seconds later, the door opened. Startled, the orderly swung the gun toward it. Cadoux, entering, put up a hand and calmly closed the door behind him. Easing off, the orderly lowered the gun and nodded in the direction of Lebrun. As he did, he glimpsed the revolver as it cleared Cadoux’s service holster.
“What’s that?” he yelled. His cry was drowned out by a thundering explosion.
The Metropolitan police running in from the hallway heard two more shots and found Cadoux standing over the dead man. Lebrun’s .25 automatic still in the orderly’s hand. “This man just shot Inspector Lebrun,” he said.
89
Brandenburg, Germany.
“THIS CHARLOTTENBURG Palace, where Scholl’s attending this shindig. What is it?” McVey was leaning forward from the backseat as Remmer followed the lead car down a boulevard of magnificent autumn yellow trees and past the burgher houses of the fifteenth-century town of Brandenburg, heading east in bright sunshine toward Berlin.
“What is it?” Remmer glanced up at McVey in the mirror. “A treasure of baroque art. A museum, a mausoleum, a house of a thousand riches particularly dear to the German heart. The summer residence of almost every Prussian king from Friedrich the First to Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth. If the chancellor lived there now, it would be like the White House and all the great museums of America rolled into one.”
Osborn looked off. The morning sun was working its way higher, lifting a cluster of lakes from dark purple to a brilliant blue. The consummation of all that had happened in the last ten days—so quickly, so brutally, and after so many years—was numbing. The idea of what would unfold in Berlin was even more so. In one way he felt as if he’d been swept up in a surging tide over which he had no control. Yet, at the same time, he had the singular and calming sense that he’d been brought to this point because some unknown hand had guided him, and that whatever lay ahead, however obscure or dangerous or horrifying, would be there for a reason, and that instead of fighting it, he should trust in it. He wondered if that were true for the others, McVey and Noble and Remmer were disparate men, from different worlds, with more than thirty years spread across their ages. Had their lives and his been driven together by the same force he now felt? How could it, when barely a week before he’d never met any of them? Yet what other explanation was there?
Letting his mind drift, Osborn turned his gaze back to the passing countryside, a rolling, gently forested, pastoral land, forever dotted with lakes. Abruptly, and for the briefest moment, his. view was blurred by a large stand of conifers. As quickly they vanished and in the distance he saw sunlight touch the highest spires of a fifteenth-century cathedral. And the perception came that he was right, that they were all here—McVey, Noble, Remmer and himself—because of some greater design, that they were part of a destiny beyond their knowing.
Nancy, France.
THE MORNING sun peeked up over the hills, lighting the brown-and-white farmhouse like a Van Gogh.
Outside, Secret Service agents Alain Cotrell and Jean Claude Dumas relaxed on the front porch, with Dumas Cradling a mug of coffee in one hand and a nine-millimeter carbine in the other. A quarter mile down the long driveway, at the halfway point between the highway and the farmhouse, agent Jacques Montant, a French Famas assault rifle slung over his shoulder, leaned against a tree, watching a parade of ants march in and out of a hole at its base.
Inside, Vera sat at an antique vanity near the front bed-, room window, five handwritten pages of a long love letter to Paul Osborn already done. In them, she was trying to make some sense of all that was happening and had happened since they’d met, and at the same time using them as a diversion against the abrupt ending to his phone call the night before.
At first she’d thought it had been a problem with the telephone system and that he would call back. But he hadn’t, and as the hours stretched on she knew something had happened. What that might be, she refused to consider. Stoically, she’d spent the rest of the evening and most of the night reading over two medical journals she’d brought with her almost as an afterthought when she’d so hurriedly left Paris. Anxiety and fear were impossible companions, and this, she’d been afraid, might be a journey filled with them.
By daybreak, when she’d still had no word, she’d decided to talk to Paul. To say things on paper, she would say if he were there with her and they had time alone. As if; none of this had happened and they were everyday people, finding each other under everyday circumstances. It was all, of course, to keep from being overwhelmed by her own imagination.
Laying down her pen, she stopped to read what she’d written and suddenly burst out laughing. What was intended to have come from the heart was, instead, a rambling, long-winded, pseudo-intellectual treatise on the
