The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [126]
“I understand.”
“Can you get him to London?”
“I’ll do what I can. . . .”
‘I assume that means ‘yes,’ “ McVey said, hanging up.
Two hours and seventeen minutes later a British Royal Air Force medevac jet landed at Aerodrome Lyon-Bron. As it did, an ambulance carrying a British diplomat who’d suffered a heart attack raced out to the tarmac to meet it.
Fifteen minutes after that, Lebrun was airborne for England.
* * *
At five minutes past seven, a car pulled up in front of Vera Monneray’s apartment building at 18 Quai de Bethune and Philippe, weary and ragged from a long, unsuccessful night of staring at photographs of known criminals, got out. Nodding to the four uniformed policemen standing guard at the front door, he entered the lobby.
“Bonjour, Maurice,” he said to the night man behind the desk he was late to replace, and begged an extra hour to shave and get a little sleep.
Pushing through a door and into the service hallway, he went down a flight of steps to his modest basement apartment at the far end of the building. His key was out and he was almost to the door when he heard a noise behind him and someone call his name. Starting, he whirled around in fear, half expecting to see the tall man standing there with a gun aimed at his heart.
“Monsieur Osborn,” he said in relief as Osborn stepped out from behind a door to a room that housed the building’s electrical meters.
“You should not have left your room. There are police everywhere.” Then he saw Osborn’s hand, bandaged and held like a claw near his waist. “Monsieur—”
“Where’s Vera? She’s not in her apartment. Where is she?” Osborn looked as if he’d barely slept. But more than that, he looked frightened.
“Come inside, s’il vous plaît.”
Quickly Philippe unlocked the door and they entered his small flat.
“The police took her to work. She insisted. I was only going to the toilet and then up to see if you were there. Mademoiselle was equally concerned.”
“I have to talk to her. Do you have a phone?”
“Oui, of course. But the police may be listening. They will trace the call back here.”
Philippe was right, they would. “You call her, then. Tell her that you are very concerned the tall man may find her. Tell her to ask the inspectors guarding her to take her to her grandmother’s house in Calais. Don’t let her argue. Tell her to stay there until . . .”
“Until when?”
“I don’t know—”Osborn stared at him. “Until . . . it’s safe.”
65
* * *
“I’M GOING secure now.” McVey punched a button and a light on the oversize “secure phone” in Lebrun’s private office at police headquarters came on confirming the line was safe from wiretap. “Can you still hear me?”
“Yes,” Noble said from a similar phone in the London Special Branch communications center. “Lebrun arrived about forty minutes ago, courtesy of the RAF. We’ve got him at Westminster Hospital under an assumed name. He’s not in the best shape but the doctors seem to think he’ll make it.”
“Can he talk?”
“Not yet. But he can write or at least scrawl. He’s given us two names. ‘Klass’ and ‘Antoine’—Antoine has a question mark after it.”
Klass was Dr. Hugo Klass, the German fingerprint expert working out of Interpol, Lyon.
“He’s telling us it was Klass who requested the Merriman file from the New York Police Department,” McVey said. “Antoine is Lebrun’s brother, supervisor of internal security at Interpol headquarters,” McVey said, wondering if the question mark after Antoine’s name meant Lebrun was concerned about his brother’s safety or that he might have been involved in the shooting.
“While we’re at it, let me enlighten you about something else,” Noble said. “We’ve got a name to go with our neatly severed head.”
“Say what?” McVey was beginning to think the term good luck had been snatched from his vocabulary.
“Timothy Ashford, a housepainter from Clapham South, which you may or may not know