The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [228]
Osborn rushed to them. Seeing Noble up close, he grimaced. “Get him down in a chair. Easy!”
McVey’s eyes were bright red from the smoke and they came up to Osborn and hung on him. “Pull the alarm,” he said carefully, as if making absolutely certain he was understood. “The whole top floor is burning.”
115
* * *
6:50 P.M.
“I AM comfortable tonight,” Elton Lybarger said, smiling easily, looking from Von Holden to Joanna beside him. Theirs was the middle car in a train of three armor-plated black Mercedes-Benz limousines traveling bumper to bumper across Berlin. Scholl and Uta Baur rode in the lead car; in the last were Salettl and the twins, Eric and Edward. “I am relaxed and feel confident. My thanks go to both of you.”
“It’s why we are here, sir. To make you feel at ease,” Von Holden said as the limousines turned onto Lietzen-burgerstrasse and sped off in the direction of Charlotten-burg Palace.
Brushing a piece of lint from the arm of his tuxedo, Von Holden picked up the phone from the backseat console I and dialed a number. Joanna smiled. If he’d been less distracted he might fully have appreciated the way she looked because she’d done it for him. Her makeup flawless, her hair was parted on the left, then teased up and dampened so that it fell in a natural cascade over the right I side of her face, setting off the stunningly seductive Uta Baur creation she wore—a floor-length white-and-emer-aid gown, closed at the throat but then open again nearly to the sternum in a teasingly erotic display of her breasts, With a short black mink coat thrown over her shoulders, she looked, on her last night among European aristocracy, as if she were part of it.
Von Holden smiled thinly back at her while the phone continued to ring on the other end. Abruptly a recorded voice interceded in German. “Please call back, the vehicle is unattended.”
Von Holden let the phone slip through his fingers and he hung up slowly, trying not to show his frustration. Once again came the feeling that he should have argued more forcefully with Scholl, that his place was with the operation at the Hotel Borggreve, not delivering Lybarger to Charlottenburg. But he hadn’t, and there was nothing on earth he could do about it now.
At three that afternoon, he had forged the final details of his plan with the Stasi-trained operatives who would execute it—Cadoux, Natalia, and Viktor Shevchenko. Joining them had been Anna Schubart and Wilhelm Podl, explosives specialists and Libyan-trained terrorists, who had arrived by train from Poland.
Meeting in a dingy back room of a motorcycle repair shop near the Ostbahnhof, one of East Berlin’s two main train stations, Von Holden had used photographs and drawings of Hotel Borggreve, one of several buildings owned by a nonexistent company fronting the Berlin sector, to carefully blueprint the tactics and timing of what he wanted done. His planning had been so detailed as to include how Anna and Wilhelm, playing the role of her aging father, would dress, the type and number of weapons that would be used, and the size of the charge and the manner of detonation of the Semtex explosive.
McVey and the others had been handed a situation they could not afford to turn down. What gave Von Holden the only edge he would need was what Scholl had pointed out and what he had known from the beginning: that, capable as McVey and the others had proven, they were still policemen. They would think as policemen and prepare as policemen, cautiously but predictably. Von Holden understood this because many of his own operatives had been recruited f from the ranks of the police and he had found, early on, how completely unequipped they were in the terrorist mind-set, and how thoroughly retrained they had to be.
Understanding this, the process itself was simple. Cadoux, having reached them by telephone and given them enough truthful information to incriminate himself, would then promise them the intelligence they needed to pursue Scholl. Telling them he was afraid for his life at the hands of the men he had double-crossed,