Games of the Hangman (77 page)

Etan looked at
him.
 
"Lace curtains on the
windows," she said, grinning, "and flowered wallpaper on the
walls."

"Over my
dead body," said Fitzduane.

"I think
I'd better be leaving," said Murrough, not moving but anxious to bring the
conversation back to more serious matters.

Fitzduane knew
his man.
 
"What's on your mind,
Murrough?" he said.

Murrough took
his time speaking.
 
"Those
kids from the college, reviving something best long forgotten.
 
What's happened about them?
 
You never said."

"Not an
entirely satisfactory outcome," said Fitzduane, but understandable, I
suppose, given the trauma in the college recently.
 
Information on what was going on was supplied
to the acting headmaster by the Rangers, working through the police.
 
I gather he was shocked but after reflection
chose to believe that it was little more than juvenile high spirits.
 
Above all, he wanted no more scandal.
 
He said he would deal with the matter in his
own way at the end of the term, and he'd appreciate if the police would leave it
at that, so the police did.
 
It isn't a
crime to dress up like the Wolfman and run around in the woods.
 
Anyway, the best efforts of all concerned
failed to identify the individuals involved."

"And how
about the small matter of our decapitated billy goat and the traces of
sacrifice you found?" said Murrough indignantly.
 
"Isn't that a little more than — what
did he call it — juvenile high spirits?"

Fitzduane
drained his glass.
 
"Indeed,"
he said, "but there is the matter of proof, and nobody wants to upset the
college further.
 
It brings money into
the area, and it's had a rough time recently.
 
I think the police felt they couldn't press things."

Murrough
digested what had been said.
 
Etan had
fallen asleep in front of the fire.
 
He
stood up to go.
 
"So it's
finished," he said.

Fitzduane
looked at the dying embers.
 
His
reservations and his conversation with Kilmara seemed remote at this
distance.
 
Anyway, May would soon be
over.
 
He decided he'd sleep on the
problem.
 
"I hope so," he said,
"I really do."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Ambassador
Harrison Noble felt that things were going splendidly.

He lay back on
his bed and congratulated himself on finding such a comfortable and practical
place to stay.
 
It was on the island, it
was near his son's school, the woman of the house was a splendid cook, and this
man Murrough said he would gillie for him.

Harrison Noble
fell asleep within seconds of putting out the light.
 
His sleep was that of a man contented and
relaxed and at peace with the world.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Despite taking
their travel sickness pills as instructed, most of the passengers on board the
cattle boat
Sabine
were thoroughly
ill as they crossed the
Bay of Biscay
.

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
payment requested by the agent proved to be no problem.
 
References were given to be taken up at a
later date.