The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [265]
“Who is it? Who’s calling you?”
“I don’t know.” Von Holden looked over his shoulder. He saw no one he recognized. They turned a corner and started up the stairs toward the tracks. Then they were at the top of the stairs and onto the platform. At the far end of the station a train was waiting.
Osborn hung up and headed for the tracks. If Von Holden had been in the station he hadn’t answered the page, nor had Osborn seen him in the crowds going toward the tracks. If he was there, the only thing left was that he was already on the platform, either on a train or waiting to board one.
Now Osborn was in the corridor leading to the trains. Stairs went up to his left and right, and he had to choose between at least four platforms. He went for the third, knowing it would put him on a platform somewhere toward the middle of the station.
His heart was pounding as he reached the top of the stairs. He expected to see the station filled with people, as it had been when he’d arrived. To his amazement it was all but deserted. Then he saw a train at the far end of the station, two tracks away. A man and a woman were walking rapidly toward it. He could see neither clearly, but he could tell that the man had a pack of some kind thrown over his shoulder. Osborn ran down the platform he was on. He didn’t dare jump the track because he was afraid that if it had a third rail he would be electrocuted. Now, ‘the couple were almost to the train; both had their backs to him. Osborn was running as fast as he could and very nearly coming abreast of them. He saw them reach the train and the man help the woman on, then the man turned back and looked across. As he did, Osborn slid to a stop. For the briefest moment they stared at each other, then the man pulled himself up and disappeared inside the train. A moment later the train gave a lurch and “started forward. Then it picked up speed and pulled out of the station.
Osborn stood frozen where he was. The face that had stared back at him from the train was the face that had stared back at him that night in the Tiergarten. The same face that glared out of the video enhancement taken at the house on Hauptstrasse. It was Von Holden.
The woman he’d only glimpsed for a second as she boarded the train. But in that instant his world and everything in it was destroyed. There was no question who it had been. No question at all.
Vera.
137
* * *
“PASCAL,” SCHOLL had said, “be most respectful of the young doctor. Kill him first.”
“Yes . . . ,” Von Holden had answered.
But he hadn’t done it. For whatever myriad of reasons he hadn’t done it. But reasons made no difference when they were excuses. Osborn was alive and had followed him to Bern. How he had accomplished that was beyond comprehension. But it was a fact. It was also a fact that he would be on the next train behind them.
***
“Interlaken,” a railway supervisor on the platform had told Osborn when he asked the destination of the train that had just left the station. Trains to Interlaken left every half hour.
“Danke,” Osborn said.
He went downstairs and into the main station in a daze. He wanted to believe Vera was Von Holden’s prisoner and being held against her will. But it wasn’t like that and he knew it, not the way they were walking together toward the train. So what he wanted to believe made no difference. The truth was there and McVey had been right about it. Vera was part of the Organization and wherever Von “Holden was going, she was going too. Osborn had been a fool to believe her, to fall in love.
Reaching the ticket window, he started to buy a ticket to Interlaken when he had the thought that maybe it was only a stop along the way. They might change trains, once, twice, even more. He couldn’t stop to buy a ticket each time. So instead of one ticket, he used a credit card and bought a pass for five days. It was now 1:15, a quarter of an hour before the next train for Interlaken.
Crossing to a restaurant,