The Day After Tomorrow

  “A clandestine organization—that always remained unnamed and is peopled by members in countries all over the world—was formed by a handful of wealthy and powerful German businesspersons, patriots and expatriates alike, who were resolutely dedicated to the Nazi cause but who had never been exposed. Over the years the Organization grew, its members carefully screened.

  “The movement was to emerge slowly at first, as a small trickle within the German political right. Nationalism was its key word. The terms Reich, Aryan, Nazi were never used. It was to be done quietly and with careful calculation, driven by enormous wealth and popular influence across the broadest spectrum of German society, from left to right, from the elderly to the vibrant youth, from the successful businessperson to the intellectual to the displaced, to the uneducated and the unemployed. Then, as Germany reunited, the beat would become louder, a little more distinct, exploiting the confusion of reunification, the haves of the West against the have-nots of the former Communist East. A growing atmosphere of mistrust and anger would be fueled by a vast wave of immigrants pouring into Germany from the shattered remnants of the Soviet Bloc.

  “And Germany was not all. For years we had been working covertly with singular, sympathetic movements inside the established governments of the European community. From France were to come the first rumblings. Others, similarly seeded, were to follow at our instruction.

  “To show what we, as leaders, were capable of—done at first as a uniting point for ourselves, and then later, at the right moment when we chose to reveal it, for the rest of the world—we began on a highly ambitious technological program of our own.

  “Constructed during the war was an experimental medical facility hidden deep beneath the city of Berlin. Structurally safe from Allied bombers, it was called The Garden. It was there, at der Garten, we would develop our fountainhead. The program was given a top-secret code name, ‘Übermorgen,’ ‘the day after tomorrow,’ symbol of the day the Reich would reemerge as a terrifying and dominant world power. This time our strength would be economic, the military would be used merely as a police force.”

  Suddenly Osborn stopped the tape. His heart was pounding. He felt lightheaded, as if he were in a swoon and about to faint. Consciously he started breathing deeply, then got up and walked across the room. Turning back, he looked at the TV as if it had been playing a trick on him. But all he saw was a gray-white screen and the red glow of the VCR’s ready light.

  “Übermorgen!” The day after tomorrow!

  Salettl’s words hung like acid smoke in the quick of his mind. It wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be! He had to have heard incorrectly. Salettl must have said something else. Going back, he sat down and picked up the remote. Pointing it at the VCR, his thumb found “rewind.” The machine whirred. Immediately he hit “stop.” Then, taking a breath, hit “play.”

  “—der Garten, we would develop our fountainhead.” Salettl came to life. “The program was given a top-secret code name, ‘Übermorgen! the day after tomorrow.”

  Osborn’s thumb slipped off the control and the picture froze where it was.

  His mind flashed to the Jungfrau. He saw Von Holden standing above him, the machine pistol pointed at his chest. He heard himself ask the why of his father’s death and then heard Von Holden’s reply.

  “Für Übermorgen! he said. “For the day after tomorrow!”

  If that part of his experience had been a dream, an hallucination, how could he have known those words? By Salettl’s admission, they were top secret. Known only to the Organization and zealously guarded. And so the answer was, he wouldn’t. Unless—Von Holden had actually told him. And for Von Holden to have told him, Osborn would have had to have experienced a true out-of-body journey.

  Remmer had said the dogs found him. And he’d seen Vera in the station after his rescue. Yet, either in dream or reality, he was certain she’d been on the mountain. Could she have gone out there and then come back before the police arrived? And how could she have found Von Holden even if she had? Osborn’s mind swirled. Could it have been possible? His thumb touched “replay” and he watched Salettl again. And then again. And again. Übermorgen was the deepest secret within the Organization and had been for fifty years. How could he know about it if Von Holden hadn’t told him? The more he thought about it, the more things became real and less a dream.

  Unnerved and energized, Osborn looked to the screen once more. His thumb hit “play” and again he saw Salettl come to life.

  “The rebirth of the Reich from the dead was to be symbolized by our own manipulation of life’s process,” he Continued. “Transplants of human organs had been performed or years. But no one had transplanted a human head. That’s what we set, out to do. And finally, what we did.

  “The critical juncture came in 1963 when eighteen males were selected from thousands unknowingly tested. The criterion was that they be as close a match to the genetic fingerprint of Adolf Hitler as possible—personality characteristics, physical and psychological makeup, et cetera. None had any idea of what was happening to them, some were allowed to rise, as Hitler rose, from obscurity to power, others were left on their own so that we might observe their growth in the natural scheme of things. Their ages spanned more than a decade, thereby giving us time to experiment, to fail and then to make adjustments. Ten days after a subject reached his fifty-sixth birthday, he was injected with a powerful sedative. His head was severed and deep-frozen, his body was cremated. Very soon afterward his family—” Salettl paused, and one could see his personal hurt surface, then he collected himself and went on. “—his family, or anyone closely allied with him, either died in an accident or simply disappeared, thereby removing any connecting traces.

  “As I have said, many experiments failed. Then, with the man you know as Elton Lybarger, we were successful. The celebration at Charlottenburg is to be a demonstration of that success. And the faithful of the party. The highest ranking, the most committed, all fully aware of the history of “the plan, are to attend.

  “To reach this fantastic pinnacle took fifty years. Over that time, many innocent people who unknowingly helped us were put to death because we dared not leave a trail. We hired professional murderers to kill them and then our own security killed the killers. We had an enormous number of ordinary people working for us. Some who peripherally believed in the Aryan cause, others who were bullied or beaten into working for it, still others who were on legitimate business payrolls and had no idea what they were doing. The process, as I have said, took fifty years. And when at last we succeeded, the time was ripe for the second phase of Übermorgen.

  Second phase? Osborn’s heart skipped a beat. He slid his chair closer to the screen.

  “We had raised two young men, twin brothers. We sent them to the finest academic institutions and then, in the years just prior to reunification, we sent them to the Eastern sector’s elite College for Physical Culture in Leipzig. Genetically engineered, pure Aryan from birth, they are today among the finest physical specimens alive. At age twenty-four, each is ready and eager to make the supreme sacrifice.

  “The presentation of Elton Lybarger at Charlottenburg will be a scientific and spiritual affirmation of our intent. Proof of our commitment to the rebirth of the Reich. At the end of the festivity, a second ceremony is scheduled to take place in the mausoleum on the palace grounds in the company of only the most select guests. There, one of the two boys will be chosen to take Lybarger’s place and become the messiah for the new Reich. At the moment of choosing, Lybarger is to be killed by the chosen boy who will then be prepared for the surgical operation that will, within two years, make him our leader.

  “Myself, Erwin Scholl, Gustav Dortmund and Uta Baur are the elder members of the inner circle. We are the ones who carried on after Nuremberg, after Martin Bormann, Himmler and the rest.

  “In fifty years Scholl, Dortmund and Uta Baur have grown rich and powerful, while I have stayed in the background to oversee the experiments. In fifty years t
hey have become old and, as we neared fruition, exceedingly cruel and filled with conceit.

  “The success of the Lybarger transplant enabled Scholl to pick a date for his presentation at Charlottenburg. That left seven of those originally selected still alive but no longer needed. It was Scholl’s directive to kill them in the manner of the others but instead of cremating the bodies to leave them scattered across Europe. Their families were, left unharmed to suffer in anguish, while the media had a, field day covering the gruesome murders for the public. It was disdain at its highest flung in the face of the world. Human life became nothing when it no longer served the Organization. To Scholl it was a glorious echo of the past. One, he was certain, that would soon come again.

  “In fifty years, I have had time to reflect on what we have done. What we are doing. What the future holds. We attempted the impossible and succeeded. That very fact is “testimony to our skills. Working in almost total isolation from the rest of the world we developed a process of atomic surgery utilizing a supercold technology unheard of in modern medicine or modern physics. Its purpose was to show our brilliance. Our ingenuity. That in a world craving more and more technology, no one could match us. Not the Japanese. Not the Americans. The marketplace would be ours without question. And that this was only “the beginning.”

  “But—” Abruptly, as if a shroud had suddenly fallen, Salettl became pensive and somber. In a matter of seconds he seemed to age a decade. “The objective behind what we were doing was the same that led to the death of six million Jews and to the deaths of uncountable millions more on a thousand battlefields and in a thousand towns under falling bombs. The same machination that left the great cities of Europe in ruins.

  “I stood in the dock at Nuremberg in 1946 surrounded “by many who had caused it. Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Von Papen, Jodl, Raeder, Donitz—once proud and contemptuous, they were now old, dreary and muddled men. Standing with them, I remembered a warning I received not to go to the Vernichtungslager, the extermination camps. Don’t go because you will not be permitted to describe what you have seen there. Well, I did go. To Auschwitz. And the warning was correct. Not because I was not permitted to describe what I had seen but because I could not describe what I had seen. The piles of glasses. The piles of shoes. The piles of bones. The piles of human hair. I thought that I had never seen the kind of thinking that did this, that I had never seen this kind of reality. Not in movies, not in theater. Yet it was real.

  “And here was I, a key member of a secret underground, plotting, even before its demise, its rebirth. It was hideous. Impossible. But had I spoken out or tried to leave, I would have been shot and it would have gone on anyway. So I decided to say nothing and let it grow into adulthood, at the same time raising myself to a rank above suspicion. Then, at the proper time, I would destroy it.

  “The German writer Günter Grass has said that we, as Germans, must understand ourselves. We are perhaps the finest technical craftsmen history has ever known. We are capable of making miracles. But nothing we ever do can escape Auschwitz or Treblinka or Birkenau or Sobibór or any of the others, because they are ours, they belong to us—they are in our soul, and we must know what they are, and understand why, and never—ever—allow it to happen again.

  “By the time you view this everything we have created will have been destroyed. The new Reich will have been ended. At Charlottenburg. At der Garten. At the station in Switzerland, hidden in the recesses of the glacier beneath Jungfraujoch.

  “There will be no Übermorgen.”

  With that Salettl simply stood, walked past the camera and out of sight. A moment later the screen went black.

  159

  * * *

  OSBORN LEFT downtown without remembering it, overwhelmed, his mind and emotions blurred together. He tried to separate them. Reflect on what he had just seen. Focus on the scope and history of what Salettl had revealed. To rage at what the Third Reich had done to the world. And at the audacity of what they had tried to do again! He wanted to shout at the horror of the extermination camps. He wanted to see the faces of the foul men in the dock at Nuremberg and superimpose over them the faces of Scholl and Dortmund and the others he knew only by name. He wanted to know if the Organization’s covert incursion into French politics had led directly to the death of Francois Christian.

  In one breath he sought to acknowledge the singular burden Salettl had carried alone for so many years and for the dark heroism of his own “final solution.” And in the next, rage furiously at him for giving nothing of the details of the atomic surgery. How the temperatures at, or reaching, absolute zero had been attained. How the surgery had been done! How the recovery process worked! To medicine, to the alleviation of pain and suffering, that disclosure would have been priceless.

  At some point it vaguely registered that he was on the Santa Monica Freeway headed toward home. It was rush hour and he was bumper-to-bumper in heavy traffic. But it made no difference, he was driving on autopilot. He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d left police headquarters. He could have turned north or south or east as easily as west. It would have made no difference. Somewhere he sensed he had reached the end of the freeway and was on the s-curves approaching McClure Tunnel. Then he was through it and out onto Pacific Coast Highway. In front of him the Santa Monica Mountains seemed to rise straight out of the sea and the ocean itself disappeared in the V of the setting sun on the horizon.

  A sudden affection for McVey came over him. McVey had shown him the tape because he’d hoped it would finally kill the demon and help put his soul to rest. Help make some very real and cognizant sense of what had happened when before there had only been fragments. It had been a kind and decent gesture and he wished he could tell him that. He wished there was a way he could thank him. Even love him, if that were possible. As a son could love a father, even though they might have been at odds most of their lives.

  But then his thoughts collapsed against the emotional whirlwind that had swept him as he watched the video. The thing that was sweeping him over the edge.

  It was the thing Salettl had left out of his message. The thing forcing him to confront something he did not want to face. It was something McVey didn’t know, and never would. Nor would Noble or Remmer, or Vera or anyone else because there was no rational way Osborn could ever talk about it. Maybe Salettl had left it out because he thought he had taken care of it as he had taken care of everything else.

  Suddenly Osborn realized traffic was backed up in front of him and he had to hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting the car in front of him. A police car and two tow trucks flew by in the center lane. It meant an accident up ahead. Traffic could be locked up for hours. He couldn’t sit there that long, because the only thing he could listen to would be his mind and he would go insane. He had to get out of there. To move and keep moving.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the center lane open. Stepping on the accelerator, he swung past the car in front of him, made a U-turn on the highway and roared back the way he had come. A moment later he cut a sharp right and pulled into a beach parking lot. For a moment he sat there staring at the ocean.

  Then he got out. Crutches first, then pushing himself up until he was standing. Leaving the door open and the keys in the ignition, he moved out into the sand. The crutches sank in and the going became difficult. It didn’t matter. Motion was everything and he kept going, across the beach toward the breakers. His shoes filled with sand and he tore them off and left them. Then his feet touched hard, wet sand and he felt the water. In seconds he was knee deep, leaning forward on the crutches, a gentle surf soaking his trousers.

  The audacity of it was that they could even conceive of such a thing, much less do it.

  After thirty years, his father’s death had been resolved. But it was not a resolution he could have ever imagined or foreseen, not in his darkest hours. And were it not for Salettl’s video, it would have remained an extension of that part of his experience on the Jungfrau that he
had until now fully accepted as illusion, an hallucinatory dream, filled with the honors of his own imagination. But now, having seen what he had, there was no doubt whatsoever that what he had experienced had been no dream. It had been real. And it made clear not only the reason behind his father’s death but the motivation for Von Holden’s journey to the glacier, and the hiding place deep within the ice.

  Somewhere he heard Salettl’s voice—”We had raised two young men . . . Genetically engineered, pure Aryan from birth . . . among the finest physical specimens alive . . . age twenty-four . . . one of the two boys will be chosen . . . prepared for the surgical operation . . . messiah for the new Reich.”

  “Hey, mister, you’re all wet!” a young boy yelled from the shore. But Osborn didn’t hear. He was on the Jungfrau, and Von Holden was falling toward him, the box he had brought with him from Berlin still cradled in his arms.

  “Für Übermorgen! For the day after tomorrow!” He heard Von Holden scream and then the box slipped from his grasp and Von Holden plunged over the side, swallowed by the icy blackness as if he had been airbrushed out of existence. But the box landed near where Osborn lay in the snow, rolling over with its own weight and momentum. As it did, it came open and what was inside was revealed. And in the instant before it vanished over the edge, Osborn saw clearly what it was. It was the thing Salettl had left out. The thing Osborn could tell no one because no one would believe him. It was the real reason for Übermorgen. Its driving essence. Its center core. The severed, deep-frozen head of Adolf Hitler.

  Acknowledgments

  For technical information and advice I am especially indebted to Detective John “Jigsaw” St. John, Los Angeles Police Department Homicide, retired, Lieutenant John Dunkin of the Los Angeles Police Department, Danny Bacher of the Swiss National Tourist Office, Robert Abrams of San Francisco, Imara of Denver, and James W. Howatt, M.D., Bert R. Mandelbaum, M.D., Robert N. Mohr, D.P.M., Herbert G. Resnick, M.D., and Norton F. Kristy, Ph.D.