Games of the Hangman (61 page)

"It's
Sangster," he said grimly.
 
"No
obvious signs of injury, but I doubt he died of boredom; most likely either
asphyxiation or poisoning, to judge by his face."

"There
were supposed to be two guards on duty," said the Bear.
 
He opened the trunk and looked at the
crumpled figure inside.
 
"There
were," he said quietly.
 
He looked at
Fitzduane.
 
"You
and your damn intuition.
 
This
means the Hangman or his drones are inside the farmhouse.
 
You'll need something a little heavier than a
tire iron."

Fitzduane
searched quickly through the car.
 
He
found two Browning automatic pistols and an automatic shotgun — but no
ammunition.
 
He guessed the attackers
must have tossed it into the snow, but there was no time to look.
 
He picked up the fallen terrorist's Skorpion
and a spare clip of ammunition.
 
He felt
as if he were reliving a nightmare.
 
It
wasn't rational, but he blamed himself for not having saved Rudi.
 
Now his twin sister was in mortal danger,
possibly because of his actions in involving her in the investigation, and he
was going to be too late again.
 
"Let's move it," he
said,
a break in
his voice.
 
His body vibrated with
tension.
 
He felt a hand on his arm.

"Easy,
Hugo," said the Bear.
 
"Take it
very easy.
 
It won't do the girl any good
if you get yourself killed."

The Bear's
words had the desired effect.
 
Fitzduane
felt the guilt and blind rage subside.
 
He looked at the Bear.
 
"This
is how we'll do it," he said, and he explained.

"Just
so," said the Bear.

They split up
and moved toward the farmhouse.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Sylvie had
endured the most brutal training, designed in part specifically to cauterize
her feelings, and she had been through Kadar's initiation ceremonies, which
were many times worse.
 
She prided
herself on being quite ruthless when carrying out an assignment — ruthless in
the full sense of the word, without pity — and yet the execution of Vreni von
Graffenlaub made her stomach churn.

Kadar had
seemed amused when he gave the orders, as if he were enjoying some private
joke.
 
"I want you to hang the
girl," he had said.
 
"Let her
die in the same way as her twin brother.
 
Very neat, very Swiss.
 
Perhaps we'll be establishing a new von
Graffenlaub family tradition, thought rather hard to perpetuate from generation
to generation under the circumstances.
 
Oh, well.
 
Her father should
appreciate the symmetry."

The locks on
the farmhouse door had given them little trouble; they were inside in less than
a minute.
 
They had found Vreni cowering
under a duvet in the living room that led off the small kitchen.
 
She had a lamb clutched in her arms, and her
eyes were tightly closed.
 
She wanted to
believe that it was all a horrible dream, that the sound of the door opening
and the footsteps were all her imagination, that the telephone still
worked,
that if she opened her eyes, everything would be
cozy and normal in the farmhouse.

Gretel had
torn the lamb away and slapped the cowering figure until she had been forced to
look at him.
 
Then, with one vicious
slash, he had cut the throat of the bleating animal, the blood gushing over the
petrified girl, her fear so great that they could smell it, the screams
stillborn in her paralyzed throat.

The living
room ceiling was too low for their purposes.
 
Instead Gretel prepared for the hanging.
 
He could watch the track leading from the village through the kitchen
window, and he could just see the shadow where Santine was standing in for the
security guards in the distance.
 
There
was some visibility thanks to a weak moon reflecting off the snow, but patches
of cloud were frequent.
 
At those times
it was hard to see anything with certainty, and imagination made shadows
move.
 
Fortunately he knew he would get
early warning from Santine in the Mercedes, so he gave in to the more
compelling distraction of the preparations for the hanging.

The Bear's
luck gave out when he tried to close in from the woodshed, which was located
only about twenty meters from the farmhouse.
 
The detective's movements, slowed by the snow that had banked up around
the shed, around the distracted Hansel, whose first action
was
to snatch up his walkie-talkie and swear at Santine.
 
He knew the gesture would be fruitless even
before his reflex movement was completed, so he dropped the silent radio,
shouted a warning to Sylvie and Gretel, and fired at the shadowy figure moving
toward him.

Unhit but
shaken by the blast of fire, the Bear rolled back into the cover of the
woodshed and sank into a snowdrift.
 
Emerging covered in snow but still crouched low, he was greeted by a
second burst of fire.
 
Rounds plowed into
the snow about him and thudded into the wood.
 
He couldn't see his attacker, but the window frame gave him a point of
reference.
 
He would be in one or the
other of the two lower corners unless he was an idiot or wearing stilts.
 
At this stage of the game the Bear wouldn't
have been surprised by either possibility.
 
Further muzzle flashes located the sniper in the left lower corner.
 
Looking like a giant snowman, the Bear moved
into firing position.
 
He fired the .44
Magnum four times.

The heavy
hand-loaded slugs smashed through the wooden walls of the old farmhouse
.
  
Two rounds missed
and shattered a jar of mung beans and a container of pickled cabbage.
 
The remaining two slugs hit Hansel in the
neck and the lower jaw.
 
The first round
smashed his spinal column, killing him instantly.
 
The second round nearly decapitated him.

Hearing
Hansel's warning shout, followed shortly by automatic weapons fire, Gretel, who
had been holding the petrified Vreni at the edge of the choust while Sylvie
adjusted the rope, immediately let go of his victim and jumped through the hose
onto the stove and into the living room below.
 
He ran into the kitchen toward Hansel, arriving just in time to see his
friend's head blown off.
 
Irrational with
shock, Gretel skidded across the blood-slicked wooden floor, flung open the
kitchen door and fired a long, low, scything burst into the darkness.

Vreni,
released by her captor but still bound hand and foot and blindfolded, tottered
at the edge of the choust.
 
Fascinated,
Sylvie watched as her terrified victim swayed back and forth and then, too
weakened from stress to recover her balance, dropped with sickening sound into
the hole.

The rope
snapped taut.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The old
farmhouse was set into the natural slope of the mountain.
 
The plan was that Fitzduane, being younger
and fitter than the Bear, would make his approach from the second-floor
level.
 
As he remembered it, an entrance
there led into a workroom and then into the bedroom.
 
It was possible to go from the living room to
the bedroom either by going through the choust or by leaving the house through
the kitchen and going up a steep path to the other entrance on the second
floor.

When the
firing started, Fitzduane, whose climb up the hill had taken longer than
expected, was not yet in position.
 
He
debated giving supporting fire from where he was, but the overhang of the roof
protected the terrorists inside the house from his line of fire, and he didn't
think ineffective noise alone would do much good.
 
The reassuring roar of the Bear's Magnum made
up his mind, and he concentrated on trying to get to the second-floor door to
take the terrorists from two sides.
 
There was a lull in the terrorists' fire; then it increased.
 
It was hard to be sure, but now there seemed
to be at least two automatic weapons firing at the woodshed behind which the
Bear was sheltering.

Fitzduane had
misjudged his angle of approach and was too far up the slope.
 
He slithered down inelegantly toward the
workroom door.
 
No window overlooked it,
which made him feel better.
 
He tried the
handle.
 
It was locked.
 
He waited for the next burst of firing and
opened up with the dead terrorist's Skorpion at the lock surround.
 
The silencer killed most of the noise, but
the door still held.
 
He cursed the
miserable .32 rounds.

He fired again
— this time a long burst — and the lock gave way.
 
He darted into the room and rolled to gain
cover, changing the clip and recocking the weapon as soon as he stopped.
 
He switched the fire selector from automatic
to single shot.
 
At a cyclic rater of 750
rounds a minute, he didn't think a single twenty-round magazine was going to do
him much good any other way.
 
He tried
not to think of what might have happened to Vreni.
 
The terrorists were still there, so there was
a chance they hadn't finished their business.
 
There was a chance she was alive.
 
He had to believe she was alive.

There was more
shooting from below him, and then a round smashed through the outer wall beside
him, flinging splinters into his face and causing him to drop to the floor.

"Terrific,"
he muttered to himself.
 
A virtually
simultaneous boom identified the shooter as the Bear.
 
That was always the risk with combining
high-powered weapons and strategies of encirclement.
 
You ended up shooting each other.

He wiped the
blood from his face.
 
The splinters
stung, but the injuries weren't serious.
 
He inched forward until he came to the bedroom door.
 
Using the long handle of a sweeping brush
he'd found in the workroom, he lifted the latch and opened the door very slowly.

He could see
nothing but a faint patch of night sky through the window.
 
He listened for any sounds of breathing or
movement from the room, but there were none.
 
He mentally tossed a coin and then flicked on the flashlight for a brief
look around the bedroom.

It was as he
remembered it, but none of that registered.
 
All he could grasp was one brief glimpse of Vreni hanging — and then
darkness.
 
For long seconds Fitzduane
fought to retain his sanity as one hanging face dissolved into another in an
endless kaleidoscope of horror.
 
The
words of the pathologist in
Cork
— it seemed an age ago — came back to him:
 
“He might still have been alive...”

He moved
forward instinctively, keeping under cover, and snatched one
more
brief
look with his flashlight.
 
Her lower body was concealed by the choust through which she had
dropped.
 
Her head and torso were still
in the bedroom.
 
Fitzduane felt the last
of his hope drain out of him.

He grasped
Vreni by the shoulders, hoisted her body out of the hole, and rested her legs
on the bedroom floor.
 
With some of the
weight now relieved, he was able to remove the noose from her neck.
 
Her body was limp and totally unresponsive,
but he could do no more for the moment.
 
He should try artificial respiration, but there was a gunfight going on
below him, and the Bear was in harm's way.
 
He lay on the floor and peered down through the choust into the sitting
room below.
 
He could just make out one
figure silhouetted against the window.
 
The Bear was still firing from outside, but Fitzduane knew he must be
running low on ammunition.

Fitzduane
considered dropping down through the choust but decided that there were easier
ways of committing suicide.
 
He'd be in
a crossfire
from the two terrorists and in the Bear's line
of fire — and he'd have to leave Vreni.
 
There was only one practical alternative:
 
he'd have to fire down through the
choust.
 
The angle was awkward, but by
using his left hand to balance himself, he was able to fire the Skorpion with
his right hand, pistol fashion.

The silhouette
at the window jerked when it was hit and then vanished below the window ledge
into the darkness.
 
Any illusions that
the wound was serious were shattered when a burst of flame spat from the
hole.
 
Rounds whined off the cast iron of
the stove and embedded themselves in the wooden walls and ceiling.