The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [201]
“Vorahnung.”
It was a word that had haunted him since youth. It meant premonition and for him carried with it the portent of an untimely and terrible death. It was a feeling he had no control over. Something that seemed to exist on its own all around him. Strangely, the more he worked for Scholl, the more he began to realize that he too was under the same spell, and that his road, and the road of those who followed him, was ultimately doomed to catastrophe. Though certainly there was no proof, or even hint of it, because everything Scholl touched went the way he guided it, and had for years. Yet, the feeling remained.
There were times the sensation would ebb. Often for days, even months. But then it would come back. And with it would come terrible dreams, where great surreal curtains the translucent red and green of the Aurora Borealis and rising thousands of feet high would undulate up and down in the vortex of his mind like gigantic pistons. The terror came in their sheer size, and that he was helpless to do anything to control their existence.
And when he woke from these “things”—as he called them—he would be in a cold sweat and shivering with horror and he would force himself to stay awake the rest of the night for fear that if he slept, they would come again. He often wondered if he were ill with some chemical imbalance or even a brain tumor but knew that couldn’t be because of the long periods of good health in between.
And then they’d vanished. Simply vanished. For almost five years he had been free of them and he was certain he was cured. In fact, in the last years he’d given them almost no thought whatsoever. That was until last night, when he’d learned McVey and the others had left London by private plane. There was no need to guess their destination, he already knew. And he’d gone to bed, afraid to sleep, knowing in his soul the “things” would come back. And they did. And they’d been more terrifying than ever.
Entering the apartment, Von Holden nodded to the guard and turned down a long hallway. When he reached the bank of secretaries’ desks, a tallish, plump-faced woman with dyed red hair looked up from a computer check she was running of Charlottenburg’s electronic security system.
“He is here,” she said in German.
“Danke.” Von Holden opened the door to his office and a familiar face smiled at him.
Cadoux.
102
* * *
IT WAS just after two in the morning. Three hours and a dozen phone calls after they’d begun, Osbornand McVey, working with Dr. Herb Mandel in San Francisco and Special Agent Fred Hanley of the Los Angeles office of the I FBI, had put together a serviceable history of what had happened to Elton Lybarger while he was in the United States.
There was no record that any San Francisco area hospital had ever treated Lybarger as a stroke patient. But, in September of 1992, an E. Lybarger had been brought by private ambulance to the exclusive Palo Colorado Hospital in Carmel, California. He’d stayed there until March of 1993, when he had been transferred to Rancho de Piñon, I an exclusive nursing home just outside Taos, New Mexico. Then, barely a week ago, he’d flown home to Zurich accompanied by his American physical therapist, a woman named Joanna Marsh.
The hospital in Carmel had provided facilities but no staff. Lybarger’s own doctor and one nurse had accompanied him in the ambulance. A day later, four other medical attendants had joined them. The nurse and medical attendants carried Swiss passports. The doctor was Austrian. I His name was Helmuth Salettl.
By 3:15 A.M., Bad Godesberg had faxed Remmer four I copies of Dr. Helmuth Salettl’s professional credentials and personal history, and Remmer handed them around, this time