The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [204]
Remmer fixed McVey with a stare. Then, turning away, shook out a cigarette, lit it and crossed the room to sit down on a couch by himself. It was as far away as he could get from the others. Hunching forward, he pulled an ashtray toward him and looked at the floor. The cigarette between his nicotine-stained fingers remained untouched. The smoke from it wisped toward the ceiling.
103
* * *
OSBORN LAY in the dim light of daybreak listening to Noble’s heavy breathing as it rose from the bed across from him. McVey and Remmer were asleep in the other room. They’d turned out the lights at 3:30, it was now a quarter to six. He doubted he’d slept two hours.
Since they’d been in Berlin, he’d felt McVey’s growing frustration, even despair, as they’d tried to tear away the layers protecting Erwin Scholl. It was the reason McVey had put Remmer on the spot, trying, however brutally, to uncover some essential none of them had been able to grasp. And he had—it wasn’t Teutonic knights riding out of the mist Remmer had been talking about. It was arrogance. The idea that they or anyone could dub themselves the “master race” and then set out to destroy everyone else in order to prove it. The word fit Scholl like a condom, the conceit of a man who could manipulate and murder and at the same time tout himself as father confessor to kings and presidents. It was an attitude they would have to deal with when they met Scholl face-to-face. Yet that’s all it was, an angle, an edge up. It wasn’t concrete.
Lybarger was. And Osborn was certain he remained central to everything. Yet there seemed to be nothing more they could uncover about him than the little they already had. The only thing of promise was that Dr. Salettl was on the Charlottenburg guest list, but so far the BKA had been unable to find him anywhere. Austria, Germany, or Switzerland. If he was coming, where was he?
Somehow, some way, there had to be more. But what? And where to find it?
* * *
McVey was awake, making notes, as Osborn came through the door.
“We keep assuming Lybarger has no family. But how do we know for certain?” McVey said forcefully.
“I’m an Austrian physician in Carmel, California, working with a gravely ill Swiss patient for seven months. Little by little he’s getting better. A level of trust is developing. If he had a wife, child, brother—”
“He’d want them to know how he was,” McVey filled in.
“Yes. And if he was a stroke victim like Lybarger, he would have trouble with his speech and probably his handwriting. Communicating would be a problem, so he’d, ask me to do it for him. And I would. Not a letter, but a call. At least once a month, probably more.”
Remmer, awake now, sat up. “Telephone company records.”
Little more than an hour later, a fax came in from FBI Special Agent Fred Hanley in Los Angeles.
Page after page of telephone calls initiated from Salettl’s private line at the Palo Colorado Hospital in Carmel, California. Seven hundred and thirty-six calls in all. Hanley had circled in red the more than fifteen separate numbers around the world made to Erwin Scholl, most of the rest .were either local, or to Austria or Zurich. Interspersed among them, however, were twenty-five calls made to country code 49—Germany. The city code was 30— Berlin.
McVey put down the pages and turned to Osborn. “You’re on a roll, Doctor.” He glanced at Remmer. “It’s your town, what do we do?”
“Same as L.A. We look her up.”
7:45