The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [190]
96
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“PRIVATE DINNER . Black tie. One hundred guests. Invitation only.” Remmer was sitting in his shirt sleeves at a small table, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other. In the last hour a half-dozen calls had gone back and forth between Remmer and operatives at the Intelligence Division at Bundeskriminalamt—BKA—Headquarters in Bad Godesberg as they tried to work a profile of the affair at Charlottenburg Palace.
Osborn sat in the room with them, his sleeves rolled up, I watching McVey pace up and down in his stockinged feet. He’d decided the best thing would be to use McVey as McVey had used him. Quietly, unassumingly. Try to find some way to take advantage of-his situation without giving the police any sense of what he was thinking. The Hotel Palace, he’d learned, was part of the giant Europa-Center complex of shops and casinos smack in the heart of Berlin. The Tiergarten, directly across from them, was like Central Park in New York, huge and sprawling, with roads cutting through it and pathways everywhere. From what he’d been able to conclude from a variety of conversations between the policemen themselves and a battery of phone conversations with others, besides the plainclothes BKA detectives stationed in the hallway outside their room, others were downstairs working two-man shifts watching the lobby, two more were posted on the roof and backup radio-car units were on standby alert. A security check had been done on the guests occupying the six rooms in the wing across with sight lines into theirs. Four were occupied by Japanese tourists from Osaka, the other two by businessmen attending a computer trade show. One was from Munich, the other from Disney World in Orlando. All were who they said they were. What it meant was they were about as safe as they could be even if the “group” had discovered where they were and tried to do something about it. The problem was, it also meant Osborn’s chances of doing anything other than what McVey wanted were all but nil.
“A Swiss corporation called the Berghaus Group is giving it.” Remmer was reading from notes he’d scratched on a yellow legal pad. To his left, Noble was talking animatedly on the telephone, a pad like Remmer’s at his elbow.
“The occasion is a welcoming celebration for an—” Remmer looked at his notes again. “Elton Karl Lybarger. An industrialist from Zurich who had a severe stroke a year ago in San Francisco and has now fully recovered.”
“Who the hell is Elton Lybarger?” McVey asked.
Remmer shrugged. “Never heard of him. Or this Berghaus Group either. Intelligence Division is working on it, also on providing us with the guest list.”
Noble hung up and turned around. “Cadoux sent a coded message to my office saying he fled the hospital be cause he was afraid the police on guard had let Lebrun’s killer in. That they were part of the ‘group’ and would get him next. He said he would be in contact when he could.”
“When did he send it and from where?” McVey asked.
“It came in little more than an hour ago. It was faxed from Gatwick Airport.”
Held up by fog, Von Holden’s jet touched down at Tempelhof Airport at 6:35, three hours later than planned. At 7:30, he got out of a taxi on Spandauerdamm and crossed the street to Charlottenburg Palace, now dark and closed for the evening. He was tempted to go around and in through a side door to personally check out the final security preparations. But Viktor Shevchenko had done it twice today already and reported to him en route. And Viktor Shevchenko he would, trust with his life.
Instead, he stood