The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [202]
Salettl was a seventy-nine-year-old bachelor who lived r with his sister in Salzburg, Austria. Born in 1914, he had been a young surgeon in Berlin University at the outbreak of the war. Later an SS Group leader, Hitler made him commissioner for public health; then, in the final days of the war, had him arrested for trying to send secret documents to the Americans and. sentenced him to be executed. Imprisoned in a villa outside Berlin awaiting execution, he was, at the last moment, moved to another villa in northern Germany where he was rescued by American troops. Interrogated by Allied officers at Camp Oberursel near Frankfurt, he was taken to Nuremberg, where he was tried and acquitted of “having prepared and carried out aggressive warfare.” After that, he returned to Austria, where he practiced internal medicine until the age I of seventy. Then he retired, treating only a few select patients. One of whom was Elton Lybarger.
“There it is again—” McVey finished reading and dropped the papers on the edge of the bed.
“The Nazi connection,” Remmer said.
McVey looked to Osborn. “Why would a doctor spend seven months in a hospital sixty-five hundred miles from home overseeing the recovery of one stroke patient? That make any sense to you?”
“Not unless it was an extremely severe stroke and Lybarger was highly eccentric or neurotic, or his family was, and they were willing to pay through the nose for that kind of care.”
“Doctor,” McVey said emphatically. “Lybarger has no family. Remember? And if he was sick enough to need a physician at his side for seven months, he would have been in no shape to have set it up himself, at least not in the beginning.”
“Somebody did. Somebody had to send Salettl and his medical crew to the U.S. and pay for it,” Noble added.
“Scholl,” Remmer said.
“Why not?” McVey ran a hand through his hair. “He owns Lybarger’s Swiss estate. Why shouldn’t we expect “he’d run his other affairs as well? Especially where his health was concerned.”
Noble wearily lifted a cup of tea from a room service tray at his elbow. “All of which brings up back to why?”
McVey eased down on the edge of the bed and for the umpteenth time picked up the five-page, single-spaced fax of the background dossiers on the Charlottenburg guests sent from Bad Godesberg. There was nothing in any of them to suggest they were anything other than successful German citizens. For a moment his thoughts went to the few names they had not been able to identify. Yes, he thought, the answer could be among them, but the odds were heavily against it. His gut still told him the answer was in front of them, somewhere in the information they already had.
“Manfred,” he said, looking at Remmer. “We turn around, we poke, we look, we discuss, we get highly confidential information on private citizens through one of the world’s most effective police agencies, and what happens? We keep coming up empty. We can’t even open the door.
“But we know there’s something there. Maybe it has something to do with what’s going on tomorrow night, maybe it doesn’t. But yes or no, sometime tomorrow, writ in hand, we’re going to put our big fat fannies on the line, corner Scholl and ask him some questions. We’re going to get one shot at it before the lawyers take over. And if we don’t make him sweat enough to roll over right then and confess, or at least bend him enough so that he gives us something we can use to keep coming after him, if we don’t know more at the end than we do at the beginning—”
“McVey,” Remmer said carefully, “why are you calling me Manfred when you always call me Manny?”
“Because you’re German and I’m singling you out. If this Lybarger thing should turn out to be a gathering of some kind of Nazi-like political force—what would they be about? Another shot at exterminating Jews?” McVey’s voice became softer, yet more passionate. It wasn’t that he expected an answer so much as an explanation. “Funding a military machine to blow through Europe and Russia with designs on the rest of us? A replay of what happened before? Why would anybody