The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [163]
“If I may.” Osborn approached with a current issue of People magazine he’d picked from among several on Noble’s sideboard. McVey watched perplexed as he set aside Noble’s teacup and opened a double-page advertisement on the desk in front of him. It was a provocative ad for the latest recording of a young and very popular female rock singer. She was soaking wet and wore a skintight see-through dress and rode the back of a killer whale as it sprang dramatically out of the water.
Noble and McVey looked to Osborn blankly.
“Don’t know, do you?” Osborn smiled.
“Know what?” McVey said.
“Your Konrad Peiper,” Osborn said.
“What about him?” McVey had no idea what Osborn was getting at.
“His wife is Margarete Peiper, one of the most powerful women in show business. She runs a giant talent agency and manages and produces this young lady on the whale as well as probably a dozen more of the biggest young names in rock and video. And”—he paused—”she does it all from the penthouse office of her restored seventeenth-century mansion in Berlin.”
“How in heaven do you know that?” Noble was astonished.
Osborn pulled the magazine back, folded it and tossed it back on Noble’s sideboard. “Commander, I’m an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. Probably half of my patients are kids under twenty who’ve been injured in athletics. I don’t have all those trendy magazines in my waiting room for nothing.”
“You actually read them?”
Osborn grinned. “You bet.”
82
* * *
BECAUSE OF decreasing visibility, Clarkson had altered his flight plan and landed near Ramsgate on the English Channel, nearly a hundred miles southeast of his original destination. His chance maneuver had thrown Von Holden off.
An hour after the Cessna ST95 had flown out of Meaux, an airport custodian had found McVey’s discarded suit coat at the bottom of the trash bin in the airport men’s room. Within minutes the Paris sector had been alerted, and twenty minutes after that Von Holden had arrived to Claim his uncle’s misplaced jacket from lost and found. Smartly, McVey had torn the label out before getting rid of the coat. What he hadn’t realized was the constant chafing over the butt of his .38 had worn the lining just enough to be noticeable, and Von Holden knew from experience that the only thing that chafed a jacket there was the handle of a gun.
Von Holden retreated to his hotel in Meaux while the Paris sector scanned flight plans of aircraft leaving Meaux between sunrise and the time the jacket had been found. By 9:30, he’d established a six-passenger Cessna with the marking ST95 had flown in from Bishop’s Stortford, England that morning, landing at 8:01, and taken off for the same destination twenty-six minutes later, at 8:27. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was enough to alert the London sector. By three o’clock, operatives had located Cessna ST95 at Ramsgate field, and the London sector home office had traced its ownership to a small British agricultural company with headquarters in the western city of Bath. From there the trail had turned cold. The Cessna had been parked at Ramsgate field with the pilot leaving word he would return for the plane when the weather had cleared: After that he’d left, taking a bus for London in the company of another man. Neither had matched the descriptions of McVey and Osborn. That information was immediately forwarded to the Paris sector for transmission to “Lugo,” who had returned to Berlin. By 6:15 that evening, London sector had copies of the enhanced newspaper photographs of both men and was on full alert to find them.
At 8:35, McVey sat alone in his undershirt on the edge of his bed in a refurbished eighteenth-century hotel in Knightsbridge. His shoes were off, and a glass of Famous Grouse scotch whisky rested on the telephone table, at his sleeve. Special Branch had checked him in as Howard Nichol of San Jose, California. Osborn, under the name Richard Green of Chicago, had been checked into the