The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [257]
“It’s the reality of what we’re dealing with,” Von Holden pressed. “Organized, highly trained neo-Nazi terrorists operating in Europe and the Americas. Osborn found out and came to us. We took him out of Germany for his own safety. The same is true for you.”
“Me?” Vera stared at him in disbelief.
“I am not the one they were after just now, it was you. They know of your involvement with Francois Christian. They will assume you know things whether you do or not.”
All too clearly Vera saw Avril Rocard approaching the farmhouse outside Nancy, the dead French Secret Service agents sprawled on the ground behind her.
“How did you know about François?” she asked painfully.
“Osborn told us. That’s why we got you out of jail, before McVey and his friends could extend their influence further.”
Now they were turning down a platform, walking in a crowd alongside a waiting train. Von Holden was looking for car numbers. A loudspeaker announced the arrival of one train, the departure of another. How had the police known he was on the train? He scanned the faces and body movements of the people around them. Attack could come from anywhere. In the distance came the blare of sirens. Then he saw the car he was looking for.
At 7:46, the Inter City Express pulled out of the Hauptbahnhof. Vera settled uncertainly into a crushed red velvet seat in a first-class compartment next to Von Holden. As the train accelerated, she leaned back and turned to look out the window. That McVey could have been other than what he seemed was impossible. Yet Lebrun was dead and so was Francois Christian. And Von Holden knew too much about all of it not to be believed. And now a hundred more had died in the Charlottenburg fire, to say nothing of the men Von Holden had killed in the railroad station. At another time, under other circumstances, she might have thought more clearly. But too much had happened, too quickly and too brutally.
Most terrifying of all, it had been done beneath the specter of a rising German political movement far too horrendous to contemplate.
133
* * *
FOR AN hour, the idea of anything but the immediate carnage disappeared as Osborn, first with Remmer’s help, then with the aid of the first arriving paramedics, worked emergency triage on the bloody tarmac of the autobahn. All his skills as a surgeon, everything he’d learned from the first day of medical school, he had to draw on. He had no instruments, no medicine, no anesthesia.
The blade of a truck driver’s Swiss Army knife held over a match for sterilization served as a scalpel for a tracheotomy that opened the windpipe of a seventy-year-old nun.
Leaving her, Osborn moved to a middle-aged woman. Her teenage son was near hysteria, screaming that her leg had been horribly cut and that she was bleeding to death. Only the leg wasn’t cut, it had been severed. Tearing off his belt, he used it as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but then had to call on her son to hold it tight. Remmer was yelling for him to help pull a young woman from under a small car that was so crushed it looked as if no one could have survived. They were down flat on the tarmac, Osborn easing her out, Remmer talking to her in German, using his legs to lift a pile of tangled steel. Then they had her out and it was only at that moment that they saw she had a baby in her arms. The baby was dead. When she realized it, she simply got up and walked away. Moments later, the driver of a smashed Volkswagen bus, cradling a broken arm himself, ran after her as he realized she was walking back past the rows of stopped cars and into oncoming traffic. Police cars, ambulances and fire equipment were still arriving, and a medevac helicopter was on its way from Frankfurt, when Remmer held the skeletal body of a young man in the last stages of AIDS in his arms while Osborn maneuvered to relocate his badly dislocated shoulder. The man never said a word, never cried out though the pain must have been excruciating. Finally he lay back and