Osborn smiled and thanked her for the information, then looked at her blankly until she took her hand away. It wasn’t that aggressive women bothered him, it was that he was thinking about something else. Wishing that besides McVey’s .38, he had at least one vial of the muscle-relaxing succinylcholine he’d prepared in Paris for his attack on Albert Merriman.
141
* * *
VON HOLDEN, too, was watching the mountains, looking for a wisp of cloud or undue snow-devil activity that would indicate the wind was picking up and weather might be approaching. But he saw none and for a change it was a good sign. It would make things easier later on if there was a problem and he had to go out on the mountain.
Vera sat across, looking at him. He was somewhere else, lost in thought. Increasingly, something about him was troubling her. But it was vague and she couldn’t put her finger on it. Yes, he was a policeman. Yes, he was taking her to Paul Osborn. It had to be true because she’d been released from jail in his custody and he knew things that were unknowable if he was not who he said he was. Still, something wasn’t right and she wished she knew what it was. Glancing up, she saw his nylon rucksack riding in the luggage rack overhead. He’d been carrying it with him since Berlin and she’d never really thought about it until now—what it was, what was inside.
“Evidence,” Von Holden said quietly.
The train was climbing steeply now, with rock formations, rushing mountain streams and waterfalls dropping away sharply at either side.
“Documents and other things exposing the core of the neo-Nazi movement. Names, places, financial data.”
The car in which they rode had a half-dozen other passengers as did the car in front of them. The cog engine on the tiny, two-car train pushed from behind. Vera was becoming aggressive, and Von Holden didn’t like it. The trauma caused by her ordeal in Berlin and capped by the killings in Frankfurt was wearing off. She was becoming aware, beginning to examine her situation, to probe, maybe even doubt. It meant he had to stay a step ahead, offer something of himself to keep her trust.
“I think it’s safe to tell your our destination is Jungfraujoch station.” He smiled. “They call it the Top of Europe. You can send a card from the highest post office on the continent.”
“That’s where Paul is.”
“Yes, as well as a guarded repository for the documents.”
“What happens when we get there?”
“That’s not for me to say. My orders were to safely deliver you and the documents. After that”—he smiled again—”I will go home, hopefully.”
Suddenly the train plunged into a tunnel and the only light was from the electric lamps inside the train.
“Twenty minutes more,” Von Holden said. Vera relaxed and leaned back against the seat. For the moment she’s satisfied, he thought. Once they reached Jungfraujoch station they would leave the train with the other passengers, then go immediately to the weather station. After that, what Vera thought or did would make no difference, because once inside they would vanish into its depths and no one, on earth could find them.
Abruptly the train slowed and they came into Eigerwand, a small railway station carved into the rocky tunnel inside the north face of the Eiger. The train pulled effortlessly onto a siding and stopped, leaving the main rail free so that another train could pass on the way down. The driver opened the doors and invited everyone out to enjoy the view and take photographs.
“Come.” Von Holden smiled and stood up. “For the time being we’re tourists like everyone else. We should relax and enjoy it.”
Leaving the train, they crossed the platform with the other passengers and walked into one of several short tunnels where enormous windows had been cut into the face of the mountain. From there they could see for miles back across the sunlit valley floor toward Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald and Interlaken, the way they had come. Von Holden had seen it two dozen times and each time it was more impressive than the last, as if seeing the world from the mountain’s point of view. Behind them the driver sounded his whistle and the other passengers started back for the train.
It was then Von Holden saw the train behind them approaching Kleine Scheidegg. Suddenly his breath caught and he felt his heart begin to palpitate. There was a pulsing behind his eyes and curtains of red and green started to come.
“Are you all right?” Vera asked.
For a brief moment Von Holden wavered, then he exhaled sharply, pulling himself out of it.
“Yes, thank you. . . .” He took her arm and they started back. “The altitude, perhaps.” It was a lie. His attack had not been because of the altitude, or weariness, or anything else. It had been real. The “Vorahnung.” And it meant only one thing.
Osborn was on that train.
142
* * *
OSBORN FELT the press of gravity as the train began to move out of Kleine Scheidegg and start up the long grade toward the face of the Eiger. The bleached-blonde divorcee—her name was Connie and she was a divorcee, twice in fact—kept trying to talk to him. Finally he excused himself and went into the front car. He needed to think. In little more than forty minutes they would reach Jungfraujoch. He had to know what he was going to do, right from the moment the train came into the station and he stepped off. Once again he felt the heft of McVey’s .38 in his waistband. For some reason it made him think about avalanches. More than once a gunshot had set off a thundering avalanche. Mountain teams and ski areas used recoilless rifles to start them on purpose, to clear them away before opening the snow areas to the public. But it was barely mid-October and the weather was clear. An avalanche should be the last thing on his mind.
But it wasn’t.
His subconscious was working toward something. What was it? This was early October, but Von Holden was purposely going into snow country. Jungfraujoch was at an altitude of more than eleven thousand feet and built on top of or within a glacier. Inside were tourist sideshows, rooms carved out of the glacial ice.
Ice.
Cold. Deep cold. A glacier was as cold as you got in nature. Especially if you could get deep inside it. Men and animals had been found in it, perfectly preserved for centuries. Was it possible Jungfraujoch was the place where the experimental surgeries had been done? Was Jungfraujoch, seemingly a tourist attraction, really a cover for a secret medical facility deep within the glacier itself?
The grinding of the engine cogs and the click, click of the wheels over the rails became more pronounced.
Suddenly Osborn was pushing back into the other car.
“Connie,” he said, sliding onto the seat next to her. “You’ve been to Jungfraujoch before.”
“Sure have, darlin’.”
“Is there any place that’s off limits to tourists?”
“What you got in mind, darlin’?” Connie smiled and teasingly ran her fake ruby red nails along the top of his thigh.
Osborn was sure she was a riot after a couple of martinis, but that was something he never wanted to find out.
“Look, Connie. I’m just trying to get some information. Nothing—with a big N—else. Okay. Now, please be a good kid and try and remember.”
“I like you.”
“I know.”
“Well, lemme think.”
Osborn watched as she got up and stood looking out the window. It wasn’t easy, the car was climbing the face of the Eiger and tilted at almost a forty-degree angle. Abruptly everything went dark as they entered a tunnel.
Five minutes later Osborn and Connie were looking out of the cutouts in the Eiger wall at Eigerwand station. Connie had her arm through his and was holding tight.
“I don’t like to admit it, but I do get dizzy.”
Osborn looked at his watch. Von Holden should be there now, or almost there anyway. Maybe he had been wrong about the medical facility. Maybe Von Holden was simply meeting someone there as he’d thought earlier. If that were the case, Von Holden could give him whatever he was carrying in the rucksack and take the
next train down. The whole thing could be done in a matter of minutes.
“There’s a weather station.”
“What?” Connie was speaking to him and at the same time they were being called back to the train.
“A weather station, you know some kind of observatory.”
Now they were crossing the platform toward the train. As they did, a train was coming down from Jungfraujoch, passing their train on the siding, slowly winding its way by on the lone track.
“Darlin’, you listenin’ to me or am I just talkin’ to entertain myself?”
“Yes, I hear you.” Osborn was straining to see inside the passing train. It was going slowly enough for him to see faces. He recognized none.
Then they were back in the train and sitting down and the train was moving into the tunnel and upward. Picking up speed.
“I’m sorry. You said something about—”
“A weather station. Did you or did you not ask if there was a place where the public couldn’t go. Well, there’s a weather station there. Upstairs, I think. Must be run by the government or something. ‘Course there’s the kitchen.”
“What kitchen?”
“For the restaurant. Why do you want to know this anyway?”
“Research. I’m—writing a—book.”
“Darlin’—” Connie put her hand on his thigh again and leaned so close her lips were brushing his ear. “I know you’re not writin’ a book,” she whispered. “Because if you were you’d wait to find out what you’re askin’ till we get there and you could see for yourself. I also”—she blew a knot of hot air into his ear— “know you’ve got a gun stickin’ in your belt. What’re you gonna do with it, shoot somebody?” Connie sat back and smiled. “Darlin’, will you promise me one thing? Yell first. I’d like to get the fuck out of the way.”
143
* * *
EISMEER WAS the last station before Jungfraujoch, and like Eigerwand the train stopped while the passengers got out to take pictures and ooh and aah from the cutouts in the rock. But the view from Eismeer was different from Eigerwand and everything else they had passed. Instead of rolling meadows and lakes and deep green forests bathed in lazy autumn sunshine, here was a white, frozen landscape. Vast rivers of snow and glacial ice ran from view or stopped hard against jagged rock cliffs. In the distance, driven snow on a topmost peak was blushed rose red by a dying sun, while overhead hung a thin and endless sky broken only by the smallest wisps of cloud. In the morning, or at midday, it might have looked different. But now, in the last hour before dark, it seemed cold and ominous: a vast and foreign place where man did not belong. The feeling seemed a natural warning: that if, by some accident or design, he were to wander out there, away from people, away from the trains, he should understand that this place was not his. He would be on his own. And God would not protect him.
The whistle sounded for reboarding and the passengers turned back toward the train. Osborn looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five. It would be just five when they arrived in Jungfraujoch and the last train down left at six. By then it would be pitch dark. At most he would have an hour to find Von Holden and Vera and do his business with them. And, if he lived, to catch the last train down.
Osborn was the last to board. Immediately the door closed behind him, there was a lurch and he felt the cog gears catch on the rail beneath him. Leaning back, he took a deep breath, and then absently glanced around the car.
Connie was sitting near the rear, talking to her railroaders, not so much as looking at him. That was good, he thought, one less thing to deal with. Then, strangely and quite surprisingly, he found himself wishing for her company. He thought that maybe, if he sat down, with an open seat next to him, she might get up and join him. Walking back toward the railroaders, he found a vacant double seat and sat down facing her. If she saw him she didn’t acknowledge it, just kept on talking. He watched her gesture, with her hands and wondered why she wore those long fake red nails. Or bleached her hair that awful blond. It was then he realized he was frightened to death. Remmer had clearly warned him to stay away from Von Holden. Noble had told him that after his encounter with him in the Tiergarten he was extremely lucky to still be alive. The man was a thoroughly schooled assassin who, in the last twenty or so hours, had sharpened his skills by murdering a nineteen year old-woman cabdriver and three German policemen. He knew who Osborn was and that he was following him. And having come this far, would Von Holden be so simple to think he was now blithely chugging his way toward Lucerne? Not likely. Since Von Holden had been on neither train coming down, it meant he was still at Jungfraujoch. And at Jungfraujoch there was no place but Jungfraujoch.
In less than five minutes, he thought, he was going to be delivered straight into a hell of his own creation. A stream of unfinished business spewed through him like an uncontrolled printout. Patients—house—car payments—life insurance—who arranges to get my body home? Who gets my things? After the last divorce I never made another will. He almost laughed. It was a comedy. Life’s loose ends. He had come to Europe to give a speech. He had fallen in love. And after that it was straight downhill. “La descente infernale,” he could hear Vera say in French. The ride to hell.
Vera—he was hearing her as he remembered her, not as who she was. Time and again she had come forward in his thoughts, time and again he’d forced her out. What was was and the way it stood. When the time came and he finally faced her, that’s when he would deal with the reality of it, but for now it was Von Holden who had to stay centered in his mind—
He felt the train slow. A sign passed by the window.
Jungfraujoch.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. Instinctively his hand touched the butt of the revolver. At least he still had that.
“Think of your father!” he told himself. “Hear the sound of Merriman’s knife hit him in the stomach! See the look on his face! See his eyes come to you, asking you what happened. See his knees buckle as he collapses on the sidewalk. Somebody screams! He’s scared. He knows he’s going to die. See his hand reach up to you. For you to take, to help him through it. See that, Paul Osborn. See that and do not fear what is ahead.”
There was a shriek of brakes, then a bump, and the train slowed more. There were two tracks and light at the far end, and they were almost there. The station was inside the tunnel like Eigerwand and Eismeer, Connie had told him. Only here the tracks did not continue through, they stopped at the end. The only way out was the way they were coming in. Back through the tunnel.
144
* * *
“A FIRE in the weather station, sir. It happened last night. No one was hurt but the station is beyond repair,” a railroad worker had said of the pile of charred debris stacked against the side of the tunnel.
Fire! Last night. The same as Charlottenburg. The same as der Garten. Von Holden had been increasingly apprehensive as they’d neared the Jungfraujoch station and he was fearful the attacks would come again. The source of his concern, he’d thought, was not so much Osborn as Vera. For the last part of the trip she’d been quiet, almost detached, and his sense had been that she’d caught on and was trying to make up her mind what to do. He’d countered that quickly by moving her out of the train and toward the elevator the moment they’d arrived. They were no more than three minutes from the weather station, four at most. Once there, everything would be all right because very shortly afterward she would be dead. It was then he’d seen the debris and been told of the fire. The destruction of the weather station was something he’d never considered.
“That’s where Paul was, up there—” “
“Yes,” Von Holden said. They were outside in the growing twilight, climbing a long series of steps toward the burned-out shell of what had been the weather station. Behind them was the brightly lit massive cement and steel structure that housed the restaurant and Ice Palace. On their right, falling away beneath them, was the ten-mile-long Aletsch glacier, a frozen, twisted, now darkening sea of ice a
nd snow. Above them rose the nearly fourteen thousand-foot Jungfrau peak, its snowy crest blood red with the setting sun.
“Why are there no rescue workers? No firemen? No heavy equipment?” Vera was angry, afraid, incredulous, and Von Holden was grateful for it. It told him that no matter what else she might have been thinking, her main concern was still Osborn. That, in itself, would keep her off guard if he couldn’t reach the inner passageways he hoped had survived the fire and they had to go back outside.
“There is no rescue attempt because no one knows they are here. The weather station is automated. No one goes there except an occasional technician. Our levels are belowground. Emergency generators automatically seal each floor in case of fire.”
Then they were at the top and Von Holden tore aside a heavy sheet of plywood covering the entrance and they pushed past a frame of charred timbers. Inside it was dark, heavy with the acrid smell of smoke and molten steel. The fire had been extremely hot. Hotter than any fire started by accident. A melted steel door in the back of an instrument closet attested to it. Finding a crowbar left by the demolition crew, Von Holden tried to pry it open but it was impossible.
“Salettl, you bastard,” he said under his breath. In disgust he threw the bar aside. There was no need even to attempt to open it; he knew what he would find inside. A ceramic-lined, six-foot-high titanium tunnel, melted into an impassable mass.
“Come on,” he said, “there is another entrance.” If the lower levels had been sealed off from the fire as they should have been, everything would still be all right.