The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [208]
Von Holden said nothing. How Americans loved the ugly vernacular, no matter who they were.
“Mr. Goetz,” Scholl said quietly. “Tell me how the federal police will become involved. What would they have to report? A middle-aged man recovered from a grave illness gives a mildly rousing, but in essence boring, speech to a hundred sleepy well-wishers at Charlottenburg and then everyone goes home. Germany is a free country for its citizens to do in and believe as they please.”
“But you still got three dead cops and a dead doctor Who put them onto this in the first place. What’re they fuckin’ gonna do about that, let it ride?”
“Mr. Goetz. The gentlemen in question, like you and Von Holden and myself, are in a major European city filled with any number of ambitious and nefarious people. Before the day’s end Detective McVey and his friends will find themselves in a situation wholly untraceable to the Organization. And when the authorities begin to put it together they will be quite surprised to find that these seemingly outstanding citizens have quite sordid, interconnected pasts, filled with dark and private secrets they successfully kept hidden from families and co-workers. In essence, not the kind of men who should be point accusing fingers at figures like myself or one hundred of Germany’s most respected friends and citizens, unless, of course, it were to be for private gain, for instance through blackmail or extortion. Am I not right, Pascal?”
Von Holden nodded. “Of course.” The isolation and execution of McVey and Osborn and Noble and Remmer was his responsibility; the rest Scholl would take care of through sector operatives in Los Angeles, Frankfurt and London.
“There, you see, Mr. Goetz. We have nothing at all to concern ourselves with. Nothing at all. So, unless you think I have overlooked something worth further discussion, I would prefer to return to the subject of our agency acquisition.”
Scholl’s telephone buzzed and he picked it up. Listening, he looked to Goetz and smiled. “By all means,” he said. “I am always available for Cardinal O’Connel.”
105
* * *
OSBORN STOOD under the shower trying to calm down. It was just after 9:00 A.M., Friday, October 14, eleven hours before the ceremony at Charlottenburg was scheduled to begin.
Karolin Henniger was a way in and they couldn’t use it. Remmer had checked again when they’d returned to the hotel. Karolin Henniger was a German citizen and single mother of an eleven-year-old boy. She had spent the late 1970s and most of the eighties in Austria, then returned to Berlin in the summer of 1989. She voted, paid her taxes and had no criminal record of any kind. Remmer had been right; there was nothing they could do.
Yet she knew. And Osborn knew she knew.
Suddenly the bathroom door banged open.
“Osborn!” McVey barked. “Get out here. Now!”
Thirty seconds later, naked and dripping, a towel around his waist, Osborn stood staring at the television McVey had on in the front room. It was a live news special from Paris showing extremely somber proceedings in the French parliament, one speaker after another getting up to make a brief statement before sitting back down. Over it was urgent narrative in German and then someone was being interviewed on screen in French and McVey heard the name François Christian.
“His resignation,” Osborn said.
“No,” McVey said. “They found his body. They’re saying he committed suicide.”
“Jesus Christ,” Osborn breathed. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Remmer was on one phone to Bad Godesberg, Noble on the other to London. Both wanted more details. McVey pushed a button on the remote and they got an English-language simulcast.
“The prime minister’s body was found hanging from a tree in the woods outside Paris by an early-morning jogger,” a female voice said over a long shot of wooded area cordoned off by French police.
“Christian reportedly had been despondent for days. Pressure for a United States of Europe had turned France against the French and he was a minority voice outspokenly against it. Because