The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [157]
79
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VON HOLDEN sat alone near the back of the Art Deco bar in the Hôtel Meaux sipping a Pernod and soda, listening to stories of the rail disaster from the noisy crowd of media types who’d spent the day covering it. The bar had become an end-of-the-day hangout for veteran reporters, and most were still connected via beeper or walkie-talkie to colleagues who’d remained on the scene. If anything new happened, they—and Von Holden—would know it in a millisecond.
Von Holden looked at his watch and then at the clock over the bar. His LeCoultre analog watch had kept precision time with a cesium atomic clock in Berlin for five years. A cesium atomic clock has an accuracy rate of plus or minus one second every three thousand years. Von Holden’s watch read 9:17. The clock over the bar was one minute and eight seconds slow. Across the room, a girl with short blond hair and an even shorter skirt sat smoking and drinking wine with two men who appeared to be in their mid-twenties. One was thin and wore heavy rimmed glasses and looked like a graduate student. The other had a sturdier build and wore expensive slacks and a maroon cashmere sweater, accented by a mop of long curly hair. The way he tilted back on the legs of his chair, talking and gesturing with both hands, stopping now to light a fresh cigarette and toss the match in the direction of the ashtray on the table, gave him the casually spoiled look of a wealthy playboy on holiday. The girl’s name was Odette. She was twenty-two and the explosives expert who had set the charges along the track. The thin man in the glasses and the playboy were international terrorists. All three worked out of the Paris sector and were there awaiting Von Holden’s direction should either Osborn or McVey be discovered alive.
Von Holden felt they were lucky to be there at all. It had taken the Paris sector several hours to locate McVey and Osborn. But shortly after 6:00 A.M., a EuroCity ticket seller had spotted them at the Gare de l’Est and Von Holden had been alerted that they had tickets for the 6:30 train to Meaux. He had briefly debated trying to kill them in the station, then decided against it. There was too little time to mount a proper attack. And even if there had been, there was no guarantee of success and they would risk an onrush of antiterrorist police. It was better to do it differently.
At 6:20, ten minutes before the Paris-Meaux train left the Gare de l’Est, a lone motorcyclist rode out of Paris on Autoroute N3 to a rendezvous with Odette at a railroad grading two miles east of Meaux. He carried with him four packets of C4 plastic explosive.
Working together, they laid the explosive and set the charge just as the train reached the grading, then immediately disappeared into the countryside. Three minutes later, the full weight of the engine compressed the detonators, sending the entire train careening down the embankment at seventy miles an hour.
It might have been argued that they could have as easily moved one of the rails out of alignment, had the same effect, yet made the whole thing look like an accident.
Yes and no.
A train wreck, accidental or deliberate, did not ensure the death of those targeted. A moved rail could easily be overlooked in a preliminary investigation and a follow-up might or might not uncover it. A flagrant act of terrorism, however, could be laid to a hundred different causes. And a-bomb, later thrown into a hospital ward packed with survivors, would only serve to validate the act.
Glancing at his watch once again, Von Holden got up and left the room without so much as a glance at the threesome, then took the elevator to his room. Before leaving Paris, he’d secured enhanced photographs of the front-page newspaper photos of Osborn and McVey. By the time he reached Meaux, he’d studied them carefully and had a much stronger sense of whom he was dealing with.
Paul Osborn, he decided, was relatively harmless if it ever came to