Games of The Hangman f-1

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  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.

  There was a smashing of glass and the sound of a body dropping outside, then another. Fitzduane looked out the bedroom window and saw a figure running toward the small barn located at the end of the track farthest away from the village. It had sounded as if both terrorists had jumped out of the ground-floor window when they discovered they were being fired upon from both sides — so where was the second one?

  Wood splintered, and the front door was smashed off its hinges to hit the floor with a reverberating crash. There was a shout from below. Fitzduane looked down through the choust to see the Bear grinning up at him, looking pleased with himself. He held up the Magnum.

  "Seems to work," he said, "but if I'm going to travel around with you, I'd better learn to carry more ammunition. I'm out."

  "Your timing's off," said Fitzduane. "One's still in close; the other legged it for the barn. I don't think peace has broken out yet."

  A round black object came hurtling through the broken living room window and rolled across the wooden floor. Fitzduane flung himself away from the choust.

  There was a vivid flash, and a wave of heat blasted up through the hole, knocking Fitzduane backward. The hanging rope, severed by flying shrapnel, came tumbling down, engulfing him in its coils and invoking an instant feeling of revulsion, as if the rope itself were contaminated. He disentangled himself and crawled to the side of the window. He looked around the frame cautiously and could see a figure zigzagging toward the barn. He fired repeatedly, but he was still shaken from the shock of the explosion — and then the gun was empty.

  He ducked down behind the windowsill as return fire coming from the barn bracketed his position. No ammunition. A bloody unhealthy situation that was heading toward terminal unless he could com up with some answers. Think.

  He remembered something from his last visit: the incongruity of Peter Haag's army rifle hanging in the bedroom. He fetched it. It was a substantial weapon compared with the Skorpion, but not of much use unless he could find the ammunition. Somewhere in the house there would be twenty-four rounds in a special container, but where? Regulations said ammunition should be stored separately from the weapon. He checked the bedroom closet just in case, but in vain. Peter Haag might have been a terrorist, but he was Swiss, and he would have followed regulations.

  Clasping the assault rifle, Fitzduane wriggled down through the choust to the living room below. He found the Bear lying on the floor, semiconscious and muttering in Bernese dialect. The heavy metal stove seemed to have protected him from the full force of the blast, but it hadn’t done him much good either. "For the love of God, Heini," Fitzduane muttered as he searched through the living room, "this is no time to try to teach me your bloody language."

  No ammunition.

  Heavier-caliber fire started to rip through the farmhouse walls from the direction of the barn, and Fitzduane realized that the terrorists must have concealed some backup weaponry there. One of them had something like a heavy hunting rifle. Obviously he was no expert with bolt action, but the slowness of his fire was compensated for by the fact that the wooden walls gave no protection at all against the new weapon. It was only a matter of time before he or the Bear or Vreni got hit. The sniper was methodically quartering the farmhouse, and it wasn't too big a building to cover. He pulled the Bear further behind the wood stove and tried not to think of Verni's frail body totally exposed to the rifle fire. The desecration of the dead. Did it really matter?

  Desperately he scoured the shelves and cabinets for the ammunition. He wondered if it would be hidden behind the marmalade, as it had been at Guido's.
Did followers of the Steiner philosophy even eat marmalade? If he didn't strike pay dirt soon, he might get the chance to ask the long-dead Steiner personally.

  A rifle bullet plowed into a second jar of mung beans, filling the air with organically approved food mixed with less friendly shards of broken glass. Brown rice was blasted into the air like shrapnel. He reached out for the lethal locally distilled spirit he remembered. Behind the rear bottle lay the ammunition. He ripped open the sealed container and fed in the rounds one by one, hoping that the rifle's mechanism wasn't jammed up with brown rice or lentils or the like. Crouched low, he went out the kitchen door. He found a firing position by the wall facing the barn. He extended the assault rifle's bipod and activated the night sight. His front was substantially protected by a bag of some sort of organic manure; whatever it was, it wasn't odorless.

  The firing from the barn ceased. A single figure appeared, moving cautiously but somehow conveying the impression that it didn't expect any more opposition — scarcely surprising after the grenade and the barrage of heavy-rifle fire and the lack of response from the defenders.

  Fitzduane waited. The figure was close now and moving more confidently. Fitzduane tried to figure out where the backup sniper would be and had just settled on the most probably location when the barn doors opened and a powerful motorcycle emerged. They were going to check out the farmhouse and make their getaway. The remaining question was, were there only two of them left or were there more surprises?

  Fitzduane supposed that legally he should probably shout, "Police," or "Hands up," or some such crap, but he wasn't feeling either legal or charitable. He shot the walking terrorist four time through the chest, sending the body spinning off the track and then down the mountainside like a runaway sled.

  The motorcycle engine roared, and submachine-gun fire sprayed the farmhouse. The bike's headlight blinded him. The machine leaped toward him, but it hit a rut and flew through the air, skidding past him before the rider expertly corrected.

  He shot the motorcyclist as the bike was approaching the security guards' Mercedes. The machine barreled into the car, flinging the wounded terrorist into the snow. Fitzduane fired again very carefully at the flailing figure until there was no sign of movement.

  Fitzduane was holding Vreni in his arms when the villagers arrived minutes later, assault rifles at the ready. She was limp and still, and her body was cold, but the Irishman was smiling.

  * * * * *

  He felt his shoulder being shaken, but he didn't want to leave the warm cocoon of sleep. His shoulder was shaken again, this time less gently. "Chief," said a familiar voice. "Chief," we've got a name."

  The Chief Kripo reluctantly reentered the real world. He'd already forgotten what he'd been dreaming about, but he knew it had to have been better than the maelstrom that his waking hours had turned into. On the other hand, perhaps he was being too pessimistic. He recalled being agreeably surprised at the progress being made by Project K, so much so that there would be some kind of breakthrough. And it was a legitimate way of avoiding the flak he knew awaited him on his return to the office.

  "A name?" He opened his eyes, blinked, and then opened them wider. "My God," he said to Henssen. "You look terrible."

  "My circuits are fucked," said Henssen. "After this is over, I'm going to sleep for a month."

  The Chief Kripo unraveled himself from the couch and sipped at the black coffee Henssen had brought him. He could hear computer sounds in the background. He looked at his watch.

  "It's tomorrow," said Henssen. "You've been out only a few hours, but there have been some developments. It's kind of good news and bad news."

  The Chief remembered something had been nagging at him before he fell asleep. "The Irishman and the Bear," he said. "Are they back?"

  "Not exactly," said Henssen, and he told the Chief what they'd heard through the local canton police.

  The Chief shook his head. He looked dazed. "Incredible. I must still be dreaming. Is that the good news or the bad news?"

  "It depends how you look at it."

  "With a jaundiced eye," said the Chief, who actually wasn't quite sure of his reaction. He put down his coffee and stood up. "You mentioned a name," he said to Henssen. "You mean your machine has stopped dithering? You've found the Hangman?"

  Henssen looked mildly uncomfortable. "We've got a couple of strong possibilities. Come and see for yourself."

  "The Chief Kripo followed Henssen into the main computer room. Only one terminal was live, the one with a special high-resolution screen that Henssen found was a little easier on his eyes when he was tired. There was a name on the screen followed by file references. The Chief looked at it and felt he was going crazy.

  The name on the screen read: VON GRAFFENLAUB, BEAT.

  "You're all loopy," said the Chief. "Your fucking machine is loopy."

  Henssen, Kersdorf, and the other bleary-eyed men in the room were too exhausted to argue. Henssen played with the keyboard. There was a brief pause. Then the high-speed printer started spitting back the machine's reasoning. The computer wasn't too tired to argue. It outlined a formidable case.

  * * * * *

  He'd forgotten about the radiophone. By reflex he picked it up in answer to its electronic beep. Erika lay there lifeless, her blood congealing. He had no idea of the time or of what he was going to do next. He merely reacted.

  "Herr von Graffenlaub," said a voice. "Herr Beat von Graffenlaub?"

  "Yes," said von Graffenlaub. The voice was tense, anxious, and familiar. It was not someone he knew well but someone he had spoken to recently.

  "Sir, this is Mike Findlater at ME Services. I regret to say I have some very serious news to report, very serious indeed."

  Beat von Graffenlaub listened to what the security man had to say. Initial fear turned to relief and then absolute joy as he absorbed the key fact that Vreni, little Vreni, was alive. Tears of gratitude poured down his cheeks.

  He didn't hear the other entrance open.

  * * * * *

  Conventional policing in Bern took a backseat as the special antiterrorist force was assembled and sent into action. The von Graffenlaub premises were surrounded within thirty minutes of his name's flashing up on the screen, but it was more than six hours later before a highly trained entry group gained access. It had taken this long as a result of the most meticulous precautions designed to prevent the kind of surprises the Hangman liked to produce. Scanning equipment of various types was used to locate possible traps, and the entire block was searched to eliminate any chance of the terrorist's escaping through another exit.

  Despite protests from some of his most senior officers, the Chief Kripo insisted on leading the entry team on its final push inside. Mindful of booby traps and checking frequently by radio with the Nose, the men entered Erika's apartment not through the door but through a hole cut by a shaped charge in an internal wall — having previously scanned the area with metal detectors and explosive-sniffing equipment that could identify volatile substances in even the minutest volumes. Only traces of small-arms propellant were found by the probes. A second concealed entrance was also located. It led directly into an apartment in an adjoining house.

  Inside Erika's sanctum they found what they had been looking for, but not the way they had expected. Beat von Graffenlaub was present, to be sure, but in a fashion that transferred him from the suspect to the victim file of the Nose's memory banks. He lay across his wife, his blood mingled with hers, the point of a fifteenth-century halberd protruding a hand's width from his chest. The handle extended from his back as casually as a fork stuck in the ground.

  The Chief was sweaty in his bulletproof armor. "Loopy," he said.

  * * * * *

  The only good news out of this latest fiasco was that they were now down to one name on the computer's primary suspect list. The Chief radioed through for a progress report on his remaining quarry. He tried not to think of the awful tragedy of Beat von Graffenlaub. Mourning would have to
wait.

  They were now looking for someone called Bridgenorth Lodge. The computer said he was an American citizen living in Bern, with connections to the city from his earliest days. In fact, he'd been born there — which didn't, of course, make him Swiss. One of the heurisitics programmed into the computer was that the Hangman wasn't Swiss. The Chief had asked Henssen for the basis of what seemed to him to be pure guesswork, and he'd been referred to the Bear.

  The Bear had just shrugged. "He isn't Swiss," he'd repeated. He hadn't been able to give a reason, but the Chief went along with it. The whole business was crazy anyway, and in the Chief's experience, the Bear's hunches were every bit as good as any computer's.

  21

  Within minutes of his name's flashing up on the Project K computer screen, Lodge's house in the exclusive Bern suburb of Muri had been surrounded by heavily armed police. Only minutes away from both Kirchenfeldstrasse and police headquarters, Muri was a quarter occupied mainly by diplomats, senior bureaucrats, and the ex-wives of successful businessmen. The houses were solidly built and expensive even by Swiss standards and in many cases were discreetly set back from the road in the seclusion of their own grounds.

  Lodge's house wasn't just discreet; it was downright reclusive. It occupied a two-acre lot at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. A thick screen of trees and shrubbery rendered it invisible from either the road or its neighbors on either side, and the grounds at the back of the house not only were similarly screened but led in turn to a private fenced-off wood and through it to the River Aare. Further privacy was ensured by a four-meter-high perimeter wall topped with razor wire — sprayed green for environmental reasons. The wire was electrified. The main gates were the same height as the wall and were made from oak-faced steel plate. There was no doorbell.