Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
Fitzduane kept
silent; he did not share Franze's optimism.
Every nerve ending screamed danger, and he concentrated on the elemental
task of staying alive.
When it happened,
it would happen fast.
There was the
sound of fumbling.
Fitzduane guessed
that Franze was looking for a lighter.
He moved from crouching on one knee to the prone position and began to
wriggle forward in combat infantryman's fashion, using his elbows,
holding
his
weapon
ready to fire.
Every two or three paces
he held his weapon in one hand and with his free hand felt around him.
The passage was widening.
He moved toward the middle so that he could
maneuver in any direction.
Franze's
lighter flashed and then went out.
Fitzduane could see that Franze, who was right-handed, was holding the
lighter in his left hand far out from his body.
His automatic was extended at eye level in his right hand.
It was not the posture of a man who thought
he was investigating a simple industrial accident.
Fitzduane hoped that Franze had the combat
sense to change positions before he tried the lighter again.
As he thought this, he rolled quickly to a
fresh location, painfully aware of how exposed they were.
Darkness was their sole cover.
He had a sense
that there was someone else in the tunnel with them.
He could hear nothing, but the feeling was
strong and his skin crawled.
He wanted
to warn Franze, but he remained silent, unwilling to reveal his position, ad
prayed that the policeman had detected the intruder as well.
He heard the faintest sound of metal rubbing
against stone.
The sound was to his
left, roughly parallel with Franze.
His
imagination was playing tricks.
He heard
the sound again and thought he could hear breathing.
The hell with appearing a fool, he
thought.
He heard the sound of Franze's
lighter again.
The policeman hadn't
moved from his original position.
"Drop
right, Franze!" he shouted, rolling right as he did so.
In a blur of movement he saw that Franze's
lighter had flared again.
For a split
second its light glinted off bloody steel before the lighter tumbled to the
ground, still gripped in the fingers of the policeman's severed left arm.
Franze screamed, and Fitzduane's mind went
numb with shock.
The sound of movement
down the corridor toward the outer door snapped him back to his senses.
He pushed
Franze flat on the cold stone floor as a flash of muzzle blast stabbed toward
them and bullets ricocheted off stone and metal.
He tried to sink himself into the solid
stone.
Two further bursts were fired,
and he recognized the sound of an Ingram fitted with a silencer.
The outer door clanged shut.
His left hand was warm and sticky, and Franze
was breathing in short, irregular gasps.
He felt again
with his left hand.
He touched inert
fingers and the warm metal of the lighter top.
He placed the shotgun on the ground and with his two hands removed the
lighter from the severed arm.
He needed
help
.
It seemed probable that whoever else had been
there, Krane
perhaps,
was gone.
He had thought that there had been two
people, but he couldn’t be sure.
Christ,
it was like
Sweat
broke out on his forehead, and he could feel the vibration of bombing in the
distance.
He fought to control himself
and realized that the vibration was a heavy truck grinding up the road outside,
where it was daylight and life was normal.
He flicked the
lighter, and the flame caught immediately.
Franze was slumped on the ground where he had been pushed, conscious but
in shock.
Blood was pouring from the
stump of his left arm.
It had been
severed above the elbow.
Fitzduane
removed his belt and tightened it above the stump until the flow had almost
stopped.
It was tricky work because he
needed both hands for the tourniquet, so he had to let the lighter go out and
work in darkness.
His hands and clothing
became saturated in blood.
He spoke
reassuringly to Franze, but there was no response, and the policeman's skin
felt cold.
He needed medical attention
immediately.
The wound itself wasn’t
fatal, but Fitzduane had seen lesser casualties go into deep shock and die
after the loss of so much blood, and the sergeant was no longer young.
He helped the
policeman back along the passage to the outer doorway.
His spirits lifted when he saw the glimmer of
light that signaled they were approaching the iron door and the road.
It was difficult work.
Franze was heavy.
He lacked the strength of help himself, so in
the end Fitzduane carried him in a fireman's lift.
When he tried to open the iron door, he found
with a sickened feeling that it was locked on the outside.
He moved the
policeman back about ten paces and then went to retrieve his shotgun.
Franze's arm lay close by.
He left it where it lay and then, not sure
what could be accomplished with
microsurgery,
took off
his ski jacket, wrapped the arm in it, and, with the shotgun in his other hand,
returned to Franze.
"Keep your head
down," he said.
The policeman
barely reacted.
Fitzduane had
little faith that the shotgun would have much effect against the iron door, but
it was worth trying.
He stood about two
meters back and pointed his weapon at the lock.
He fired twice, working the slide quickly to deliver two concentrated
blows in the minimum time.
The results
lived up to Kilmara's promise.
The
brittle iron of the door shattered like a shell casing when the XR-18's
450-grain sabot rounds struck it.
Shards
of iron clanged onto the roadway, and light flooded into the passage.
Fitzduane pushed the remains of the door open
and helped Franze outside.
A few yards up
the road Müller had just gotten out of his car.
The master cheese maker had a presentation box in his hand.
He looked at Fitzduane, shotgun still
smoking, covered in blood and supporting the policeman.
His brain couldn’t take in the situation at
first, his face registering total disbelief; then he dropped the presentation
box and ran forward.
Together they
helped Franze into the car and covered him with a blanket.
"A
flashlight?" said Fitzduane.
Have
you got one?"
He searched for the
right word in German and cursed his lack of languages.
He pantomimed what he wanted.
Müller nodded, opened the trunk of his car,
and extracted a powerful battery searchlight.
Fitzduane grabbed it and pushed Müller into the driver's seat.
"Hospital
and police —
Hospital und Polizei
—
go!" shouted Fitzduane.
He banged
on the roof of the car, and Müller roared away, one arm extended in a wave of
acknowledgment.
Fitzduane
replaced the two spent cartridges and moved back into the passage.
He advanced up it in combat fashion, the
Remington held at the ready.
He doubted
that there was any remaining danger, but he could see no reason for behaving
like a total fool.
He knew if he had any
real sense of self-preservation, he would have waited for the police, but he
hadn't the patience.
He saw that
every light along the passageway had been systematically broken.
This served the double purpose of providing
the cover of darkness for an escape and an early-warning system; any new
arrival would have to crunch across the glass.
The door into the cheese maturing room was open.
It was a long, narrow room filled with row
after row of wooden racking, each rack filled with wheels of cheese and graded
by type and age and size.
There was a
pair of large porcelain sinks in the far corner of the room.
He shone the powerful light toward them.
The sinks and the tiling around them were
splashed with fresh blood.
He played the
beam downward, following the splash marks.
A body, dressed in a once-white overall now sodden with blood, lay
slumped on the floor.
The corpse was
headless.
Fitzduane moved closer to
examine the body but remained several paces away.
The tiled floor was sticky with blood.
It looked as though the victim had been bent
headfirst over the sink as if for a ritual execution.
Fitzduane could imagine the horror of the
doomed man as his neck was pressed against the cold surface.
He looked into
the sinks, but there was no sign of the head.
He examined the floor, also with negative results, and began to wonder
why the head had been taken away.
As
proof of a job completed?
To the bizarre
sense of humor displayed there, and he knew what he would find.
He moved the light back to the racks of
cheeses and began examining each row of impeccably aligned wheels.
It didn't take long.
Though he was prepared for the sight, the
reality made his stomach turn.
Felix
Krane's head stared at him from between two maturing wheels of Müller's Finest
High Pasture.
Fitzduane went
back to the road and waited for the police.
The parked van was gone.
He
didn’t remember its being there when he had emerged from the tunnel with
Franze.
The presentation box of cheese
lay on the ground where Müller had dropped it.
Fitzduane left it there.
*
*
*
*
*
"Be
prepared," said Kadar to no one in particular, for he was alone, and he
gave a three-fingered Boy Scout salute.
The deep
freeze, a catering-size chest unit over two meters long, was kept in a
concealed and locked storage room in the adjoining premises, owned by Kadar but
registered to a cutout.
In fact, in
keeping with his normal practice of having an escape route always available,
Kadar owned the entire small block.
By
way of hidden doors, he could travel from one end of the block to the other
without ever having to use the street.
Kadar wasn't entirely happy having the freezer with its incriminating
contents so near, but he considered his precautions reasonable, and the
important point was that he could get at what he wanted without delay.
He entered the
small, brightly lit room and closed and relocked the door behind him before
punching in the code that would release the freezer lid.
He glanced at the abundance of food
inside.
The top layer was sorted by
category in wire baskets.
He liked
things neat.
He removed a wire basket of
frozen vegetables and then one of fish.
The next contained poultry.
The
last basket was filled with game birds, mainly pheasant although quail and
several other species were also represented.
He had gone though a pheasant phase not so long ago, until he chipped a
tooth on a piece of buckshot — the idiot hunter must have thought pheasants
were the size of vultures because the shot was from a number four load — and
was forced to visit the dentist.
This boring
experience had not been without its advantages, though it had put him off
pheasant for a while.
While lying back
in the dentist's chair, he had begun to plan his own death.
This exercise was not unenjoyable, despite
the circumstances, for it involved the dentist's death, too.
He admitted to
himself that the basic idea wasn't original, but he didn't suffer from the
classic engineers' disease of NIH — “Not Invented Here,” and therefore
useless.
In any case he had improved on
the original pattern, thanks to his casual discovery — through the one-sided
small talk that dentists enjoy while the victim lies gagged and helpless — that
this particular dentist, the appallingly expensive but highly successful Dr.
Ernst Wenger, was an unusually prudent man.
Swiss to the core and Bernese from toe to toupee, he not only kept
excellent dental records in his office — what else would you expect of someone
who was also a supply officer, a major in fact, in the Swiss Army
?
—
but
kept a reserve set, updated
weekly, in his bank.
Dr. Wenger kept a
substantial portfolio of bearer bonds and other securities in the same
location, but considering the success of his practice, if he had been asked to
choose which he would prefer to lose — dental records or financial papers — it
would have been no contest.
His dental
records were the key to what he called his “private gold mine.”
Dr. Wenger enjoyed his little jokes.
His patients, on average, did not.