The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [247]
Suddenly, and en masse, those who could stampeded toward the main door. Clawing and mauling each other, they tore at the massive steel door and the ornate wood framing around it. Gasping for air. Screaming for help and mercy. They dug fingers, nails, even gold watches into the unforgiving metal, hoping somehow to loosen it. The pounding of fists, shoe heels, even each other, reverberated over and over against it until all were finally overcome by the same writhing and horrid convulsions.
Of them all, Elton Lybarger was the last to die, and he did so sitting in a chair in the center of the room staring at the death massing around him. He understood, as they all did, finally, that this was a payback. They had let it happen because they didn’t believe it could. And when ultimately they did, it was too late. The same as it had been at the extermination camps.
“Treblinka. Chelmno. Sobibór,” Lybarger said, as the gas began to invade him. “Belzeč, Maidanek—” Suddenly there was a twitch of his hands and he inhaled deeply. Then his head snapped back and his eyes rolled into it. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . . ,” he whispered. “Auschwitz, Birkenau . . .”
125
* * *
REMMER HAD no idea what to expect as he and the two BKA detectives who had seen Schneider to the helicopter turned into the Charlottenburg courtyard and got out of the BMW. Immediately they were approached by uniformed security guards.
“We’re back,” Remmer said, flashing his I.D., and pushing past them toward the main entrance. The only hard information he had was that neither McVey nor Osborn had come out of the palace. With any luck, he thought as he reached the door, McVey and Scholl are still downstairs having at each other. Either that or McVey is surrounded by a herd of criminal lawyers demanding his scalp, in which case he will be in prodigious need of help.
It was then that the first incendiary device went off. Remmer, the two detectives, and the security guards were thrown to the ground as a fusillade of mortar and stone rained down around them. Immediately a dozen more fire bombs detonated. One after the other. Rapid-fire, like a string of high-explosive firecrackers, they circled the palace’s entire upper perimeter on the side housing the Golden Gallery. Bursting inward, the charges ignited a furnace of gas jets embedded in the gilded molding along the room’s floors and ceiling and in the apartments immediately adjacent.
McVey pulled back against the door, forcing Goetz’s body aside, giving them enough room to get out. The explosions had toppled books from shelves, shattered priceless eighteenth-century porcelain and cracked one of the marble fireplaces. With a final tug, McVey forced the door open. A blast of heat hit him, and he saw the hallway ouside and the stairway beyond it wholly engulfed in flame. Slamming the door, he turned in time to see a wall of fire race down the outside of the building, sealing off any chance they might have to escape into the garden through the French doors. Then he saw Osborn, on his hands and knees, blindly tearing through Scholl’s pockets like some madman rifling a corpse for whatever plunder he could find.
“What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here!”
Osborn ignored him. Leaving Scholl, he began the same with Salettl, tearing through his jacket, his shirt, his pants. It was as if the fire raging around them didn’t exist.
“Osborn! They’re dead! Leave them, for Chrissake!” McVey was on top of him, wrestling him to his feet. The dead men’s blood smeared Osborn’s hands and face. He was staring crazily, almost as if he were the one who had done it. He was demanding an answer to his father’s death from the only men left who could give it. That they were dead was secondary. They were the