Games of The Hangman f-1

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  The boat rolled unpleasantly without its normal cargo of fourteen hundred heavy cattle and the corresponding load of feed and water. The crew and more than seventy armed men, ammunition, explosives, surface-to-air missiles, and inflatable assault boats did not weigh enough to provide adequate ballast.

  The air-conditioning system coped admirably with the smell. The passengers were fully recovered as the boat approached the south of Ireland. They cleaned and recleaned their weapons and rehearsed the details of the plan.

  * * * * *

  The U.S. Cultural Attaché headed the crisis team that coordinated security for the embassy when a specific threat was involved. A diplomat largely occupied in his official duties with cultural exchanges, visiting baseball teams, and the arcane queries of scholars and writers might seem an unlikely choice for such a counterterrorist role, but the cultural attaché was also the senior CIA man on the spot and, even more to the point, had experience at the sharp end on several unpleasant occasions in Latin America.

  After the last experience, when his unarmored vehicle — a matter of budget cuts — had been sprayed with automatic-weapons fire in San Salvador and his driver killed, he had asked for a posting away from a high-risk zone. He had been sent to Ireland to get his nerve back and play some golf. Both his nerve and his golf had been doing fine until the attack warning had been received.

  Now he waited and sweated and drank too much to be good for either his liver or his career and hoped that the extra acoustic and visual monitoring equipment Kilmara had requested would turn up something — or, better still, nothing.

  He loathed the waiting, the sense of being a target on a weapons range. He knew too well what happens to targets. His driver in San Salvador had died holding his fingers against the hole in his neck, trying vainly to stop the gushing of arterial blood.

  * * * * *

  The weather still looked menacing in the morning, but it wasn't actually raining, so Fitzduane and Etan saddled up the horses and ambled around the island.

  The sense of fatigue that had dogged Fitzduane since his return seemed to have gone, and the wind in his face as they rode was invigorating.

  It was as they were returning that Fitzduane began to experience a feeling of anticipation that was familiar but that at first he could not identify. They had been chatting easily about their future. Now, with the castle in sight again, he lapsed into silence, his mind sifting and sorting a jumble of thoughts and snatches of conversation, trying to identify the source of this unsettling feeling.

  He had been too tired, he knew, the last couple of days to think rationally and to listen to his intuition; he had relegated his doubts and feeling of foreboding to the back of his mind. Now he ran through everything that had been said and tried to relate it to what he had either experienced or discovered himself.

  The theorizing and the computer assessments aside, Fitzduane was one of the few people involved who actually knew the Hangman. Perhaps knew was too strong a word to describe his relationship with the man, but there was no doubt that the time spent in his company had given him some insight into the terrorist's complex character.

  The Hangman rarely did anything without a reason, even if his rationale seemed obscure by conventional standards. He was a player of games with a finely balanced tendency toward self-destruction. He was a planner of genius with a useful ability to anticipate the moves of his opponents. He enjoyed teasing the opposition, leaving enough clues to excite his pursuers while at the same time taking steps to see that they would always put the pieces together too late. He was a master of feints and deception — a characteristic he shared with Kilmara. He had substantial resources, and he thought on a grandiose scale. Henssen's work with the Nose had suggested he was winding down many of his operations and working toward some final grand slam.

  Was it credible that the slaughter in Balac's studio was actually part of some intricate game devised by the man? If so, why? What was the Hangman's overall motivation apart from the satisfaction he seemed to obtain from beating the system? His motives weren't political. He was quite happy to use politically committed people for his own ends, but his constant, specific goal was money. Fitzduane doubted that he wanted money for itself, but rather as an impartial way of rating his performance — and it had the practical advantages of conferring power and freedom.

  A consistent theme in the Hangman's behavior — and a jarring counterpoint to his undoubted sense of humor, albeit rather sick humor — was savagery. He seemed to enjoy inflicting pain on society, as if trying to avenge himself for the slights he had undoubtedly received in earlier life.

  Revenge was part of his motivation.

  But the Hangman was dead. The Bernese weren't amateurs. The entire studio area had been sealed as thoroughly as possible. A body had been found. The autopsy would have been carried out with typical Swiss thoroughness. No error would have been made over the dental records. But were they the Hangman's dental records? The man specialized in switching identities, and obtaining a body would scarcely be a problem for him. Could he have anticipated the possibility of being detected and have turned such an apparent disaster into another misleading dead end?

  The trouble was, everybody wanted to believe that the Hangman was dead. They were sick and tired of the whole business; scared, too. The man was unpredictable and dangerous. He could turn on them at any time. Wives and children would be in danger. They would live in a climate of unending fear. No, of course he was dead. Massive resources had been deployed against him. No individual could win against the concentrated might of the forces of law and order.

  Like hell.

  An image of Balac came into Fitzduane's mind, as sharp and clear as if he were physically present: his eyes gleamed with amusement, and he was smiling.

  It was at that moment that Fitzduane knew for certain that it wasn't over — and that the Hangman was very much alive. Fear like pain ran through him, and Pooka whinnied and bucked in alarm. His face went white, and Etan stared at him in consternation. He looked ill, but they were almost back at the castle.

  When they rode into the bawn seconds later, they were met by the sight of Christian de Guevain, a Paris-based merchant banker who shared Fitzduane's interest in medieval weaponry — de Guevain's specialty being the longbow — getting out of a taxi festooned with fishing rods and other impedimenta.

  He gave a shout of greeting when he saw them, and then his expression changed as he saw Fitzduane's face.

  "But you invited me," he said anxiously, "and I wrote to you. Is there a problem?"

  Fitzduane smiled. He had forgotten completely about his invitation to his friend.

  "No problem," he said. "Or at least you're not it."

  He looked at de Guevain's tweed hat and jacket, which were covered with hand-tied flies in profusion. Their brightly colored feathers gave the impression that the Frenchman was covered with miniature tropical birds.

  * * * * *

  An embassy's grounds and building are considered by the host country to be the territory of the country concerned. Translated into security arrangements, that meant Kilmara's Rangers had to confine their activities to he U.S. Embassy's external perimeter. Internal security remained the responsibility of the U.S. Marines and of State Department security personnel.

  Kilmara and his CIA counterpart, the cultural attaché, disliked this artificial division in the deployment of their forces — especially in view of the vulnerability of the location — but neither the U.S. ambassador nor the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs was of a mind to waive the protocols of the Treaty of Vienna governing such arrangements.

  The initial breakthrough came when one of the rental agents — previously primed by the police at Kilmara's request — notified them that one of the apartments overlooking the embassy had been let for a short period to four Japanese who were going to be in Ireland for a limited time while looking for a suitable site for an electronics factory. They would like to move in immediately. The substantial advance pa
yment requested by the agent proved to be no problem. References were given to be taken up at a later date.

  All the empty apartments overlooking the embassy, and quite a few of the occupied locations, had been bugged in anticipation of some action of this nature. A relay station was set up in the embassy, but the actual monitoring was carried out from Ranger headquarters in Shrewsbury Road.

  The acoustic monitoring equipment was state-of-the-art, and the quality of the transmission excellent. Unfortunately, although there were a number of linguists in the Rangers who spoke among them some eighteen foreign languages — including Arabic and Hebrew, both much in demand since Ireland's involvement with the UN force in Lebanon — none of them spoke Japanese.

  Then Günther remembered that one of the Marine guards he had been chatting with was a Nisei. It didn't follow, of course, that he spoke Japanese — but he might.

  He did.

  Listening to the translation, Kilmara started to wonder if maybe he hadn't been too hasty in assuming the whole embassy thing was a blind; it looked as if something were going to happen there after all. Then the link was made with a convention of travel agents booked into the nearby Jury's Hotel for the following day. The travel agents were coming from the Middle East, and there were seventy-two in the party.

  Backup units were alerted. Ranger leave was canceled. The next question was when to move in. It looked as if he might have thrown a scare into Fitzduane for nothing. Still, better scared than dead.

  Kilmara decided that maybe he was doing too much reacting to events and not enough thinking. He tilted his chair back and set to work on some serious analysis. After half an hour he was glad he had. He called up the rosters on his computer and began to do some juggling.

  * * * * *

  In the afternoon the skies abandoned any attempt at neutrality and proceeded to dump a goodly portion of the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of Ireland.

  Etan and Oona went to work out who would sleep where and with whom, and Fitzduane closeted himself in his study to plow his way through a two-month backlog of mail.

  There were several communications from Bern of no particular significance except that one correspondence had included a tourist brochure on current and future events in the city. He flipped through it idly, feeling surprisingly nostalgic about the place, when one small item caught his eye. It would normally have interested him about as much as a dissertation on yak hair, but his increasing feeling of unease linked with his current thoughts about the Hangman focused his mind.

  The item said that Wednesday, May 20, was Geranium Day — the day chosen that year for all the good people of Bern to festoon their city with that particular flower. A sudden display of crimson.

  The timing was too convenient for it to be merely a coincidence, and it fit precisely the Hangman's macabre sense of humor.

  He unpacked the radio and called Kilmara. Sound quality was good, but the colonel wasn't available. Fitzduane decided that a message about geraniums passed through an intermediary would only serve to convince Kilmara that he had temporarily gone round the bend.

  "Ask him to call me most urgent," he said. "Over and out."

  "Affirmative," said Ranger headquarters.

  Fitzduane went to help with the bed making. The Bear had phoned from the airport. He had brought his nurse with him — he hoped Fitzduane wouldn't mind — and Andreas von Graffenlaub had an Israeli girlfriend in tow. They were waiting for Henssen and overnighting in Dublin, then planned to leave early and arrive on the island in time for lunch.

  Fitzduane wondered if he had explained that his castle — as castles go — was really quite a small affair. The next unexpected guest was going to have to sleep with the horses.

  * * * * *

  The evening was going splendidly, but try as he might, Fitzduane couldn’t get into the right frame of mind to enjoy himself.

  He smiled and laughed at the appropriate times, and even made a speech welcoming his guests that was received well enough, but Etan wasn't fooled. His reply was that he was probably suffering from some kind of reaction to the whole Swiss affair didn't entirely satisfy her either, but she had Murrough's guest, Harry Noble, on her right to distract her and de Guevain flirting outrageously across the table, so Fitzduane was allowed to sit peacefully for a time, alone with his thoughts.

  When dinner had reached the liqueur stage — by which time the fishing tales were growing ever more incredible — Fitzduane excused himself and retired to his study to try Kilmara again. This time he was patched through immediately. He was not reassured by the conversation that followed.

  He was still staring into the fire when Etan came in. She sat on the floor in front of the fire and looked up at him.

  "Tell me about it," she said.

  He did, and this time he held nothing back. Her face was strained and silent when he finished.

  * * * * *

  Fitzduane slept fitfully and rose at dawn.

  He rode for several hours around the island, trying to see if the landscape itself would yield some clue to the Hangman's intentions. A picture of idyllic peace and harmony greeted his eyes and made him doubt for a time the now-overwhelming feeling of foreboding.

  The mist of dawn burned away in the sunlight, and it was shaping up to be a truly spectacular day. The sky was cloudless. The strong westerly had abated to the merest hint of a breeze. Washed by the recent rain, the air was clear and balmy. Insects buzzed, and birdcalls filled the air. Faced with this image of rural tranquility, Fitzduane found it hard to anticipate what the Hangman could have in mind, and he wondered if he wasn't letting his imagination run away with him.

  The obvious target was Draker, and given the Hangman's proclivities, the objective would be kidnapping. God knows —and the Hangman surely did — that the students' families were rich enough to make the game well worth playing.

  There was some security now. Discreet lobbying by Kilmara meant that six armed plainclothes policemen had been temporarily assigned to the college. They lived in the main building and should be able to deal with any threat — or at least buy time until help could be summoned. The Achilles' heel of that arrangement was, of course, the length of time it would take to get assistance to the island. The location was isolated — none more so in Ireland — and it would be several hours at best before specialist help could arrive. The local police might get there sooner, but what they could do against terrorist firepower was another matter.

  Fitzduane had suggested to Kilmara that the parents, if they were so rich, might be persuaded to finance some extra security. He hadn't been thinking when he made the suggestion. The facts of life were explained to him: If the parents received the slightest hint of danger, all the students would be whipped away back to Mommy and Daddy in Saudi or Dubai or Tokyo faster than a bribe vanishes into a politician's pocket. No students would mean no college, and no college would mean no income for the local community. Without proof to back up these vague theories of a threat, it was not a good suggestion; downright dumb, in fact.

  The sea, often so gray and menacing, now presented an image of serenity. The color of the day was a perfect Mediterranean blue — a deceptive ploy, Fitzduane thought, since the temperature of the Atlantic waters, even at this time of year, was only a few degrees above freezing.

  "All this peace and harmony is an illusion," he said to Pooka. "But how and when the shit is going to hit the fan is another matter." The horse didn't venture a reply. She went on chewing on a tuft of grass.

  Smoke was trickling from the chimney of Murrough's cottage. He distracted Pooka from her snack and cantered toward the house. Murrough leaned over the half door as he drew near, and Fitzduane could smell bacon and eggs. He suddenly felt ravenously hungry.

  "You're up bright and early," said Murrough. "What happened? Has Etan slung you out?"

  Oona's face appeared over Murrough's shoulder. "Morning, Hugo," she said. "Don't mind the man — he's no manners. Come on in and have some breakfast."

 
; Fitzduane dismounted. "I'm persuaded," he said. "I'll be in in a minute. I just want to pick Murrough's brains for a moment."

  Oona grinned and vanished toward the kitchen. "Best of luck," she called over her shoulder.

  Murrough opened the bottom half of the door and ambled out into the sunlight. "I must be dreaming," he said. "There's not a cloud in the sky."

  "Murrough," said Fitzduane, "last night, when you were bringing me up-to-date on the local gossip, you mentioned that a plane had landed here recently. I didn't pay much heed at the time, but now I'm wondering if I heard you right. Did you meant that a plane landed on the mainland or right here on the island?"

  Murrough took a deep breath of morning air and snapped his braces appreciatively. "Oh, not on the mainland," he said. "The feller put it down on this very island, on a stretch of road not far from the college, in fact."

  "I didn't think there was room," said Fitzduane, "and the road is bumpy as hell."

  "Well," said Murrough, "bumpy or not, the feller did it — several times, in fact. I went up to have a look and talked to the pilot. He was a pleasant enough chap for a foreigner. There were two passengers on board — relatives of a Draker student, he said."

  "Remember the student's name?" said Fitzduane.

  Murrough shook his head.

  "What kind of plane was it?"

  "A small enough yoke," said Murrough, "but with two engines. Sort of boxy-shaped. They use the same kind of thing to fly out to the Aran Islands."

  A Britten-Norman Islander," said Fitzduane. "A cross between a flying delivery van and a Jeep. I guess with the right pilot one of those could make it. They only need about four hundred yards of rough runway, sometimes less."

  "Why so interested?" said Murrough.

  "I'll tell you after we've eaten," answered Fitzduane. "I don't want to spoil your appetite." He followed Murrough into the cottage. Harry Noble was sitting at the pine table with his hands wrapped around a mug of tea.