Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
"I've got
a sprained wrist, and I'm bruised as hell," said Burke.
"It's no fun being shot."
Lucky she was
using a Skorpion," said Kilmara.
"It uses a piss-poor underpowered pistol cartridge.
It'll kill well enough, but it's got little
penetrating power."
"There is
a lot to be said for being dressed right for the occasion," said Burke,
indicating the scarred but otherwise undamaged Kevlar bullet-resistant vest
hanging on a hook on the wall.
He
suddenly went pale and rushed to the adjacent toilet.
They could hear the sounds of retching
through the door.
"He's
physically okay," said the doctor, "but there may be post-traumatic
stress involved.
He was bloody
lucky."
"Jung
also wrote:
‘Every process is partly or
totally interfered with by chance,’" said Fitzduane.
"Not everybody knows that."
"Good
grief," said the doctor, and drained his glass.
As Fitzduane
and Kilmara left the trailer, the two dead terrorists were carried by on
stretchers on the way to the morgue.
Fitzduane felt the good mood induced by the banter inside the Mobile
Surgery
trailer vanish
.
"A depressing waste," he said
soberly.
"I'd feel
a lot more depressed if it was us in those body bags," said Kilmara
cheerfully.
"You've got to see the
up side in this game."
*
*
*
*
*
They arrived
at Kilmara's house at just after five-thirty in the morning.
Inside the security perimeter all was quiet
until the Saab crunched to a halt on the gravel.
The two Irish wolfhounds came bounding around
the corner of the big Georgian house.
"One
would wonder if they were dogs or elephants with hair," said
Fitzduane.
"They're enormous bloody
brutes."
"You'd know
if you visited more often," said Kilmara.
"Now stay quiet until I identify you."
Fitzduane did
not need to be told twice.
He watched
while Kilmara called the two hounds to heel.
Each dog was well over a meter and a quarter high and, he guessed, weighed
at least as much as a fully grown man.
Long pink tongues lolled over sharp rows of teeth.
"Ailbe
and Kilfane," said Kilmara.
"Fairly recent acquisitions."
The two men
entered the house through the courtyard door and made their way to the large
country-house kitchen.
"Do you
know the story of the original Ailbe?"
"Remind
me," said Fitzduane.
"There
was a renowned Irish wolfhound called Ailbe in the first century," said
Kilmara, "owned by MacDatho, King of Leinster.
Now Ailbe was such a remarkable dog that he
could travel from one side of the kingdom to the other in a single day, and of
course he was unsurpassed in hunting and war.
Ailbe became so famous that both the King of Ulster and the King of
Connaught coveted him, and an offer of no less than six thousand milch cows, a
chariot with two fine horses, and the same again after a year was made.
This was an offer MacDatho could hardly
refuse.
At the same time he knew he still
had a problem because the king who did not get the hound would give MacDatho a
most difficult time.
It was a real
dilemma.
"So what
did MacDatho do?"
"MacDatho
promised the hound to both kings," said Kilmara.
"When they arrived to conclude the deal,
no sooner did they see one another than they forgot all about the hound and fell
to fighting.
MacDatho, in the manner of
a politician, watched the battle from a nearby hill, and an excellent battle it
was, with heroics and bravery all over the place and regular pauses for light
refreshment and harp playing.
However,
Ailbe, the bionic wolfhound, was no voyeur.
He
tossed
a
coin and entered the fray on the side of the King of Ulster — and had his head
chopped off."
"Is there
a moral to this story?"
"Pick
your battles."
Kilmara
gestured Fitzduane to a seat at the big kitchen table and then strode across to
the cast-iron range.
He poked the cooker
into life and stood for a moment enjoying the waves of heat coming from the
stove.
He donned an apron over his combat
fatigues and hummed as he cooked.
Fitzduane
dozed a little.
It was nearly dawn.
Images flickered through his mind.
He awoke with a start when Kilmara put a
plate of food in front of him.
"Bacon,
eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding, white pudding, and fried
bread," he said.
"You won't
see the likes of this in
He poured them both
coffee
from an enamel pot that looked as if it had been around since MacDatho's time.
Fitzduane
picked up his mug of coffee.
"That
book of mine you found in the terrorists' car—"
"Uh-huh,"
said Kilmara.
"You
thought it had to do with me?"
"It's a
possibility," said Kilmara.
"Maybe on one of your foreign forays you photographed some local
supremo from his bad side or something, and our friends were sent to teach you
a permanent lesson.
They didn't seem to
be slap-on-the-wrist types.
Well, who
knows?
I'll worry about the reasons
after I've had some sleep."
"I've got
another idea," said Fitzduane.
"Since you took this job, no photographs of you have been
published.
Right?"
"Right."
"So two
things," said Fitzduane.
"First,
our terrorist friends were killed no more than ten miles from this house while
heading in this direction.
Second, my
book contains a large photo of you at that reunion in
It's probably the most up-to-date picture of you that's freely available."
"You're
suggesting that I could have been the target?"
Kilmara had a forkful of bacon and black
pudding and fried bread poised for demolition.
"You're
sharp this morning," said Fitzduane.
Kilmara
munched away
.
"Ho and hum," he said.
"You really should leave such
suggestions until after breakfast."
The first
shading of dawn appeared through the windows.
Outside, a cock began to crow.
Book Two
The Hunting
"The distance is nothing; it is only
the first step that is difficult."
—Marquise du
Deffand,
Concerning the legend that St. Denis, carrying his head in his
hands, walked two leagues.
"Crime in
And the law is clear.
The traffic directions, for example, are
clear enough for a blind man to read, but, as a precaution, I have heard,
though I cannot consider my source reliable, they are considering writing them
in Braille."
—Vincent
Carter,
The
,
1973
9
A large harp,
comfortably secured by its safety belt, occupied the front first-class
passenger seat of the plane to
Fitzduane was curious.
Eventually he asked, and was not reassured by
the answer.
The harp, he was informed,
belonged to the pilot.
Fitzduane
raised an eyebrow,
then
fell asleep.
He hoped he would wake up.
Thirty-three thousand feet up was more of a
head start toward heaven than he really cared for, even without a pilot who
seemed more prepared for the afterlife than made for good airline public
relations.
Fitzduane
flew a great deal and did not like it much.
In the
In
been shot down.
In a series of other
wars he had gotten used to the idea that everybody shot at aircraft; whose side
they were on seemed to have nothing to do with it.
He awoke when
the BAC 111 was over the
looked out the window.
The wing was
still there, which made him feel better, and there were no fresh holes.
There was the crackle of a microphone, and an
android voice announced that they were flying at five hundred miles an hour and
that it was five degrees Celsius in
Fitzduane closed his eyes and slept again.
*
*
*
*
*
The man they
soon were to call the Hangman stood naked in front of the mirror and stared at
his reflection.
His face and upper body
were encrusted with drying blood.
His chest
and pubic hair were matted and sticky with it.
He had fallen asleep after the sex and the killing that had accompanied
their orgasms.
The room smelled of blood
and semen and sweat and, he liked to think, their victim's fear.
The mutilated body still lay in the room, but
neatly in one corner in a body-fluid-proof body bag.
The woman —
she had done the actual killing this time — lay sprawled on the bed, fast
asleep, exhausted after her endeavors.
Her satiety, he knew, wouldn't last long.
The man smiled
and stepped into the shower.
He looked
down at his body as the needles of pulsing water washed the last traces of the
boy's life off the gridded porcelain floor and then down through the drain into
the sewers of
So much for beautiful
Klaus.
The man — one
of his many names was Kadar — dried himself and donned a light robe of
silk.
The activity and the sleep that
had followed had done him good.
He went
into his study and lay back in his Charles Eames chair for his first session
with Dr. Paul.
The solution
had been so simple:
Since he could not
visit a psychiatrist without risk, he would do the job himself.
He would tap into his own considerable
resources.
He would be his own
expert.
He would be able to speak absolutely
frankly in a way that would otherwise be impossible.
And, as always, he would be in control.
Since
childhood Kadar had invented imaginary friends.
The first had been Michael, who had been pale-skinned with sun-bleached
golden hair.
He looked the way Kadar
wished to be but was not.
Other
creations followed.
As the years
passed, Kadar refined the process of creating a new person to ritual
.
Always the process started with his lying back, his eyes
closed and his body relaxed.
He would
focus his mind in a way he could not even describe to himself.
It was something akin to fine-tuning his
natural life-force.
When he was ready to
begin, he would see a wall of thin gray mist swirling gently.
The mist would have a glow as if lit from
within.
Slowly a shape
would appear in the mist, its details obscure.
Only one factor would be clear:
the height of the figure.
Kadar's
creations, regardless of their eventual age or sex or external appearance,
always started with height.
He often
thought that this first stage was the hardest.
It required such an infusion of energy.
Sometimes he would lie there for hours, his body drenched in sweat, and
the wall of mist would stay blank.
Once
the basic shape had appeared, the work would be easier and more
pleasurable.
He would mold and paint in
the details as if in an artist's studio, but use his tightly focused mind
instead of brushes or tools to achieve the result.
He would adjust the height and then work on
the general build.
Features would become
defined.
He would work on the
posture.
Clothing would be added, then
texture and color.
Finally the creation
would be complete but lifeless.
Then, in
his own time, he would breathe life into it — and it could talk and move if
that was his wish.