The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [162]
Osborn grinned. “Tea, please.”
McVey was staring out the window, absently watching a small man walk two large dogs down the street, and only vaguely aware of the brief comedy that had taken place behind him.
“Coffee, McVey?” he heard Noble ask.
Abruptly he turned and came back across the room. His eyes were sharp and there was temper in his walk.
“There’ve been times over the years where, at some point or other during an investigation, I’ve felt like a damned idiot because all of a sudden something hit me I should have seen from the start. But I’ll tell you, Ian, this time we may have missed the boat altogether. You, me, Doctor Michaels, even Doctor Richman.”
“What are you talking about?” Noble’s hand held a lump of sugar just over the lip of his teacup:
“Life. Dammit.” McVey glanced at Osborn to include him, then leaned on the desk in front of Noble. “Wouldn’t you assume that if someone had been working all these years to perfect some way to marry a severed head to a body, the end goal of that would not just be the act itself but bringing the result back to life? To make this creature, this Frankenstein, live and breathe!”
“Yes, but why?” Noble let the sugar drop into his cup.
“No idea. But why else do it?” McVey turned back to Osborn. “Imagine the whole process medically. How would it go?”
“Simple. In theory, anyway.” Osborn leaned against the back of a red leather chair. “Bring the frozen thing back to temperature. Back from nearly minus 560 degrees below zero to 98.6 degrees above zero. To do the operation, blood would have been drained off. As the thing thaws, blood is reintroduced. The difficult thing would be to get it to thaw uniformly.”
“But it could be done?” Noble asked.
“I would say that if they’d been able to find a way to do the first, the second would have already been taken care of.”
Immediately a sound emanated from the fax machine on the antique secretary behind Noble’s desk. The light switched on, and a moment later it began printing out.
It was the Moody’s/Dun & Bradstreet report requested from the Serious Fraud Office.
McVey and Osborn moved in behind Noble to watch as the information came in:
Microtab, Waltham, Massachusetts. Dissolved, July 1966. Owned by Wentworth Products, Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris. All of Boston, Massachusetts. All deceased 1966.
Wentworth Products Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Dissolved, August 1966. Privately held company. Owned by James Tallmadge of Windsor, Ontario. Tallmadge deceased 1967.
Alama Steel, Ltd. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dissolved, 1966. Subsidiary of Wentworth Products Ltd., Ontario, Canada. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris.
Standard Technologies, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Subsidiary of T.L.T. International, 10 Park Avenue, New York, New York. Board of directors: Earl Samules, Evan Hart, John Harris.
T.L.T. International, wholly owned subsidiary of Omega Shipping Lines, 17 Hanover Square, Mayfair, London, U.K. Principal stockholder, Harald Erwin Scholl, 17 Hanover Square, Mayfair, London, U.K.
“There it is!” Noble said triumphantly at the printout of Scholl’s name as the fax continued. .
T.L.T. International dissolved 1967.
Omega Shipping Lines bought by Goltz Development Group, S.A., Düsseldorf, Germany, 1966. Goltz Development Group—GDG—partnership. General partners: Harald Erwin Scholl, 17 Hanover Square, London, U.K. Gustav Dortmund, Friedrichstadt, Düsseldorf, Germany. President—since 1978—Konrad Peiper, 52 Reichsstrasse, Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany. (N.b. GDG acquired Lewsen International, Bayswater Road, London, U.K., a holding company, 1981.)
END OF TRANSMISSION
Noble swiveled in his chair and looked up to McVey. “Well, our dear Mr. Scholl may not be quite as untouchable as your FBI seems to think. You know who Gustav Dortmund is—”
“Chief of Germany’s central bank,” McVey said.
“Right. And Lewsen International was a prominent supplier of steel, weapons parts and construction supervisors to Iraq during