The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [269]
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COMRADE SENIOR Lieutenant they’d called him in the Spetsnaz. Who and what was Von Holden now? Still Leiter der Sicherheit, head of security, or a last, lone soldier on the most critical assignment of his life? Both, he thought. Both.
Beside him, Vera stared out at passing countryside, content, he guessed, simply to pass the time. Von Holden shifted in his seat and looked out. Moments before they had “ changed trains at Grindelwald, and now he heard the grind of the cogs as they took hold of the center rail and the train pushed steeply upward through a forest of lush alpine meadows dappled with wildflowers and grazing dairy cattle.
In another twenty minutes they’d reach Kleine Scheidegg where the meadows would abruptly end against the base of the Alps. There they would change once more, this time to the brown-and-cream-colored train of the Jungfrau Railway that would take them up into the marrow of the Alps, past the stops of Eigerwand and Eismeer, and finally into Jungfraujoch station. To Von Holden’s left was the Eiger, and beyond it the snow-covered summit of the Monch. Beyond them, not yet in view, but as familiar as the lines in his hand, was the Jungfrau. Its summit at thirteen and a half thousand feet was nearly half a mile higher than rail’s end at Jungfraujoch station. Looking back, he studied the Eiger’s harrowing north face, a sheer limestone cliff rising fifty-four hundred feet straight from the Eiger meadows to the top, and thought of the fifty or more true professionals who had died trying to climb it. It was a risk, like anything else. You prepared, you did your best, and then something unforeseen happened and you fell. Death, all around you, simply closed in.
Thun had been the first logical place the police would have intercepted the train. That they hadn’t left only Interlaken. But there had been no police there either, and that meant however Osborn had managed to catch up, he’d done it alone. How many trains per day passed through Interlaken, Von Holden didn’t know. What he did know was that a train for Lucerne had left ten minutes after his train had arrived from Bern. Lucerne was a major connecting point for destinations as disparate as Amsterdam, Belgium, Austria, Luxembourg and Italy. Jungfraujoch was a side trek, an interlude for tourists, Alpine hikers or serious mountaineers. Von Holden was a man on the run from the law and would hardly be expected to take a leisurely afternoon’s excursion into the mountains, especially where the destination was a dead end. No, he would be trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as possible. And if, in doing that, he could cross the border into a different country, so much the better.
Von Holden had abandoned the idea of killing Osborn at Interlaken as too risky. Instead, he’d turned Osborn’s trick against him and had him paged, with the intention of both throwing him off and frightening him. Muddle whatever cunning and instinct that had brought him this far and in the process send him scurrying, none too coherently, after the only thing left. Logic. After arriving from Bern, there were only two ways out of Interlaken, the train up into the mountains or the narrow-gauge train to Lucerne. And a train for Lucerne, Osborn would learn, had left Interlaken only minutes after Von Holden had arrived from Bern. Von Holden would have no choice but to be on it. Accepting that, Osborn would rush onto the next train after it in pursuit of a shadow.
Osborn jumped from the train at Grindelwald station and quickly crossed to the waiting cars of the train that would connect with one at Kleine Scheidegg and take him the final leg to Jungfraujoch. This time there was no hesitation. He was certain Von Holden would be on the train