The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [139]
Not only was the hair standing up on McVey’s neck, it felt as if someone had poured ice cubes down his spine. “Somebody was going to do surgery at extreme temperatures. Using some kind of computer-driven gizmo that would hold your father’s scalpel and do the actual work?”
“I don’t know. You have to remember that in those days computers were gigantic, they took up whole rooms, so I don’t know how practical it would have been even if it worked.”
“The temperature business.”
“What about it?”
“You said extreme temperatures. Would that be hot or cold or both?”
“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 spät, 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 Kurfürstendamm, 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 canapés 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 canapés 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 Düsseldorf, 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