The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [194]
But not this one. This was a circle with a beginning but no end. It was round and kept going. The more information they garnered, the bigger the circle got and that was all.
“The headless bodies,” Noble said.
McVey threw up his hands. “All right, why not? Let’s ‘ work that angle.”
“What angle? What are you talking about—?” Remmer looked from Noble to McVey and back again.
Remmer’s Bundeskriminalamt, like all police agencies in the countries where the decapitated bodies had been found, received copies of McVey’s status reports to Interpol. Purposely, McVey had not informed Interpol about the bodies’ ultra-deep-freezing or the projections about the experiment. that lay behind the freezing. So naturally Remmer was in the dark; he didn’t know enough. Under the circumstances, now seemed an extraordinarily good time to tell him.
98
* * *
GERD LANG was a good-looking, curly-headed, computer software designer from Munich, in Berlin for a three-day computer arts show. He was staying in room 7056 in the new Casino wing of the Hotel Palace. Thirty-two and coming off a painful divorce, it was only natural that, when an attractive twenty-four-year-old blonde with an engaging smile struck up a conversation with him on the showroom floor, and began asking him questions about what he did and how he did it, and how she could develop skills in that direction, he would invite her to discuss it over a drink and perhaps dinner. It was an unfortunate decision because, after several drinks and very little dinner, and feeling emotionally cheered after a very long depression over his divorce, he was hardly in a state to be fully prepared for what would happen when she accepted his invitation for an after-dinner drink in his room.
His first thoughts, as they’d sat on the couch touching and exploring each other in the dark, had been that she was simply reaching out to stroke his neck. Then her fingers had tightened and she’d smiled as if she were teasing and asked him if he liked it. When he started to reply, they’d locked in a vise grip. His immediate reaction had been to reach up and jerk her hands away. But he couldn’t—she was incredibly strong and she smiled as she watched his attempt, as if it were some sort of game. Gerd Lang struggled to throw her off, to tear out of her iron grasp, but nothing worked. His face turned red and then deep purple. And his last living thought, crazy and perverse as it was, was that the whole time she never stopped smiling.
Afterward, she carried his body into the bathroom, put him in the tub and pulled the curtain. Coming back into the living room, she took a pair of day/night field binoculars from her handbag and trained them on the lighted window of room 6132 at an angle across and one floor below. Adjusting the focus, she could see a translucent curtain had been pulled across it and what appeared to be a man with white hair standing just inside it. Switching to night vision, she swung the glasses up toward the roof. In the greenish glow of the night scope she could see a man standing just back from the edge, an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Police,” she breathed and swung the glasses back toward the window
Osborn sat on the edge of a small table, listening as! McVey gave Remmer a basic primer on cryonic physics, then told him the rest: about what appeared to be an attempt at joining a severed head to a different body through a process of atomic surgery that was performed at I temperatures at or near absolute zero. It was a narrative that, as Osborn now heard it, bordered perilously on science fiction. Except it wasn’t, because someone was either doing it, or trying to do it. And Remmer, standing with one foot on a straight-backed chair, the blue steel automatic dangling from his shoulder holster,