GAMES OF THE HANGMAN Page 7

  The trouble lay with the tree. Common sense dictated that it should be cut down. A tree from which one of your students had hanged himself was not the sort of thing one wanted to keep on the school grounds. It would provoke memories and impinge on school activities, and it would be a no-no on parents' day. And it might tempt someone else to experiment with the blue rope and a short jump. Danelle shuddered at the thought. One hanging was a tragedy. Two hangings were a major headache. Three hangings would knock hell out of his budget. The Draker tuition was, not small. Three sets of fees would be missed.

  The hanging tree had to go—but then again it couldn't. Von Draker had gone to the most elaborate lengths to establish his little forest in the first place, and he had clearly stated in his will that under no circumstances whatsoever were any trees on the estate to be cut down. The whole clause was then repeated in more extreme language to make sure that the trustees of the Von Draker Peace Foundation got the point, and to demonstrate the founder's faith in human nature, a relationship with their remuneration was referred to. Danelle got the point. Even in his grave, von Draker liked trees. It was infuriating. He was being dictated to by a dead man.

  Danelle decided that he would write to the trustees in Basel. Surely they would understand that you just can't have a freshly used gallows hanging—growing—on campus.

  Like fuck they'd understand. Those hollowheads in Switzerland weren't going to put their stipends at risk to save a not madly popular principal from embarrassment. He racked his brains, and then an idea blossomed, an idea that was dazzling in its scope and simplicity. An accident. Lightning, a forest fire; a maverick with a chain saw; a pyromaniac Boy Scout. The mind boggled. The possibilities were endless.

  He decided he would take a walk over the old oak tree to see what could be arranged. He pulled on his Wellington boots and waterproofs. It was raining.

  "St. Patrick's Day apart," said Kilmara idly, "people tend to forget about March in this country. I mean, everyone knows about January. It's the month when the first bank statement arrives after Christmas and bank managers decide to cut off your overdraft. Everyone remembers February. It's the Toulouse-Lautrec of months, and all the tennis club set go skiing with each other's wives. Everyone likes April. People skip around and procreate like mad and pick daffodils and eat chocolate Easter eggs. But March—March sort of sneaks in and hangs around and confuses the issue. I'm not sure I approve of March. It's a month with a lot of cold puddles—and it's too bloody long."

  He switched off the computer terminal and the screen went dull. Elsewhere, in air-conditioned, dust-free isolation, the mainframe's brain was still actively following its instructions, fine-tuning the duty roster and carrying out the myriad other tasks of an operational unit. "Günther," said Kilmara, who had been thinking laterally about his manpower problems and then about Fitzduane's proposed trip to Switzerland, "why didn't you join the Swiss Guards at the Vatican instead of the French Foreign Legion? The pay would have been better, the uniform more colorful, and no one shoots at you—though anything is possible in Rome."

  "Ah, but I'm not Swiss," said Günther, "and I am not celibate."

  "You amaze me," said Kilmara, "but what has celibacy got to do with it?"

  "Well," said Günther, "to qualify as a Swiss Guard, you have to be Swiss, have received Swiss military training, be Catholic, be of good health, be under thirty, be at least one hundred and seventy-four centimeters in height—and be celibate and of irreproachable character."

  "I can see your problem," said Kilmara.

  Pierre Danelle decided—too late—that the waning afternoon was the wrong time to be wandering around in a forest. He should have postponed his little expedition until the morning despite the fact that it was blindingly clear that the sooner that damned oak tree met with an accident, the better.

  He cursed von Draker for choosing to build his eccentric construction in such an out-of-the-way location as the west of Ireland. Marvelous scenery, it was true, if you liked a fickle and eerie landscape, but the weather! It was enough to choke the Valkyries. When an Irishman said it was a nice soft morning, he meant you didn't actually need an aqualung to keep from drowning in the rain.

  And apart from the weather—not that you could ever get apart from the weather in Ireland—there were the Irish, an odd lot who didn't seem to speak English properly and their own tongue not at all. Irish English seldom seemed to mean the same thing as English English. So often there seemed to be nuances and subtleties and shades of meaning he failed to grasp, most of which seemed to end up to his financial disadvantage.

  Thinking of financial disadvantage reminded him of the alimony he'd been saddled with, and then of his mother-in-law in Alsace. On reflection, perhaps he was better off in Ireland after all.

  "Do you ever miss the mercenary life, Günther?" asked Kilmara. He decided to light his pipe. It was that hour of day, and he was in that sort of mood.

  "I'm not sure the Legion qualified as mercenary," replied Günther. "The pay was terrible."

  "I wasn't referring to the Legion," said Kilmara. "I was thinking of that little interlude just afterward."

  "Ah," said Günther, "we don't talk about that."

  "I merely asked you if you missed it."

  "I've matured, Colonel," said Günther. "Before, I fought purely for money. Now I have higher ideals. I fight for democracy and money."

  Kilmara was busy for a few moments with pipe cleaners and other gadgets. Pipe smoking is not an impetuous activity. "What does democracy mean to you?" he asked when order was restored.

  "Freedom to make more money," said Günther with a smile.

  "I like a committed idealist," said Kilmara dryly. "Pearse would have been proud of you."

  "Who was Pearse?"

  "Padraig Pearse," said Kilmara, "Irish hero, poet, romantic, and dreamer. He was one of the leaders of the 1916 uprising against the British that led to independence in 1922. Of course, he didn't live to see the day. He surrendered after some bloody fighting and was put up against a wall and shot. He had company."

  "Romantics and dreamers tend to get shot," said Günther.

  "Good evening," Fitzduane broke in from the doorway.

  "Speak of the devil," said Kilmara.

  Danelle did not like to admit, even to himself, that he felt uneasy. There was no good reason for a highly educated, rational, cosmopolitan twentieth-century man to be prey to such a feeling so close to home on land he knew well. Nonetheless, there was a certain atmosphere in the wood that was, at best, unsettling. Oddly, there were no bird sounds, and indeed, everything was quite remarkably silent. His boots made no noise on the thick mulch. It was ridiculous, of course, but it was as if he could hear his heart beating.

  There was, from time to time, a sudden rustling of what must have been a large animal—either a fox or a badger—but otherwise the oppressive silence continued.

  Danelle wished he had brought a colleague. He was not fond of his fellow faculty members, but they had their uses, and on this occasion even the most obnoxious of his fellows would have been welcome. Slowly he recognized the unsettling sensation that gripped him. It was an old ailment of humankind and could be swelled as well as felt. Fear.

  It was darker in the wood than he expected. These short, gloomy March evenings of Ireland. He wished that he were somewhere farther south, somewhere warm and sunny and dry—especially dry. A raindrop slithered down the back of his neck, and soon there were others. He began to feel cold and shivery.

  The feeling he had was changing. It was no longer fear. He stumbled on through the gloom and gathering darkness, branches and briars whipping and dragging at his face and body. The feeling identified itself. There remained little doubt about it. It bore a distinct resemblance to absolute, all-encompassing, mind-dominating, blind panic.

  He stopped and tried to get his nerves under control. With great deliberation, his hand shaking as if he had malaria, he removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the cold swe
at and rain and streaks of dirt from where the branches had whipped him. The action, calmly carried out, made him feel better. He felt more in control. He told himself that he was being ridiculous and that there was no rational reason for this extraordinary terror.

  He walked on. The undergrowth became particularly dense, and the twisty path began to incline upward. He realized he was near the old oak tree, God rot it, the source of all his trouble. His feeling of relief was canceled abruptly when his foot caught on a protruding root and he tumbled headlong into the dank mulch. He rose slowly, his heart pounding from the shock.

  A sudden vile stench assailed his nostrils, and he gagged. It was like rotting flesh mixed with the acrid smell of sulfur, the tang of hell.

  There seemed to be light coming from behind the old oak tree. He thought at first that it was the last gesture of the setting sun, but he realized now that it was too late for the sun, and anyway, this was different, a strange glow, and its source was from below, not from the sky. He wanted to turn and run, but he felt compelled to move forward. He walked as if in a trance, his steps slow and faltering.

  What he saw, as he rounded the thick trunk of the old oak tree, was more than his brain could—or wanted to—grasp. In the clearing ahead, a large circle had been made out of stones, and the spaces between the stones were filled with greenery and flowers. Inside the circle of stones and flowers was another shape. It looked like a vast letter "A," its extremities touching the inside of the circle at three points. In the center of the circle a fire burned and flickered and slowly devoured something that had once been living. Entrails spilled in yellowing coils from the ripped-open stomach. The small, hot flame of the fire hissed and spit—and close up, the smell was nauseating.

  There was a flash and a sudden, sharp smell of sulfur from the fire, and the lower branches of the oak tree were lit up in the glow. Danelle raised his eyes. It was the last conscious vision of his life, and it was utterly horrible. Through the smoke of burning flesh and sulfur, he beheld the horned head of the devil.

  He was still unconscious when they threw him off the edge of the cliff onto the rocks and the waters of the Atlantic far below.

  Fitzduane slept a sound, dreamless sleep and woke up the following morning feeling cheerful and rested.

  After Etan had left for the studios, he made himself a large pot of black coffee, put his feet up in front of the crackling fire, and began reviewing what he had learned so far. It came to him that if you're the kind of person who turns over stones—and most people learn not to early in life—what comes crawling out can be disconcerting.

  He started with his meeting with Kilmara the previous evening. A computer search had thrown up the fact that Draker was more than a select school for the children of the rich and powerful. Out of a full complement of sixty pupils—now fifty-eight—no fewer than seventeen were designated "PT" on the Ranger computer printout.

  "Computer people prefer to talk in bits and bytes," Kilmara had said, "but one of the advantages of getting in at the start of the Rangers was that I was able to twist the buggers' arms to make them take some cognizance of the English language. 'PT' stands for 'possible target.' It's not a high-level classification, but it means that, in theory, you take some precautions and you think twice when some incident occurs involving someone with 'PT' after his or her name."

  "Tell me more," said Fitzduane.

  "Do I detect a flutter of interest, Hugo?" said Kilmara. "Relax, my son. Thousands of people in Ireland have a designation of 'FT' or higher: politicians, businessmen, diplomats, visiting absentee landlords of the English variety, and God and the computer only know who else."

  "But why these particular seventeen students?" asked Fitzduane.

  "Oh, it has nothing to do with them as such," said Kilmara. "It has to do with families and backgrounds and the like. For instance, included in the Draker seventeen at present are a minor Saudi princeling—and there're thousands of those knocking around—a cousin of the Kennedy clan, two children of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the son of a Japanese automobile tycoon.... Well, you get the drift."

  "How about Rufolf von Graffenlaub and the girl, Toni Hoffman?"

  "In our baby computer system, nada" said Kilmara. "But that doesn't mean there shouldn't have been. It's a rough-and-ready classification. Deciding who might be a terrorist or criminal target is very much a matter of judgment. To make life more confusing, fashions change in the terrorist business. It's politicians during one phase and businessmen the next. For all I know, it will be garbage collectors after that—or pregnant mothers. It's all show biz in this game. It's the media impact that counts."

  "So what do you do about these PTs, apart from giving them a couple of initials on computer input?"

  "Well," said Kilmara, "if one of them drowns in the municipal swimming pool, we drain it a bit faster, but that's about the size of it. Basically it's the government contribution to the media game. It's called taking every reasonable precaution. It helps to cover the official ass if something does happen."

  "Were you always so cynical," said Fitzduane, "or did someone salt your baby food?"

  Kilmara turned his cigarette lighter into a small flamethrower to work on his pipe. Success achieved, he stood up from his chair and walked across to a whiteboard screwed to the wall. He picked up a black dry-wipe felt pen and started to write.

  "You find it odd, Hugo, that we don't do much more? Well, let me throw a few figures at you. They're a little rough, but they're accurate enough to make the point, and the same situation applies to most other Western European countries.

  "We have about ten thousand police in this country to deal with about three and a half million people. Police work is a twenty-four-hour-a-day business and involves a great many things other than guarding against terrorism, so at any one time the force would be stretched to the extreme to free up from routine duties any more than a thousand, and even that would mean drawing manpower from all over Ireland. In the wee hours manpower resources are even more limited. At such times it's an interesting thought that the entire country's internal security is looked after by a mere few hundred.

  "Now, to set against the resources I've described—and I have left the army out of the equation to keep things simple—we have more than eight thousand names classified 'PT' or higher, and remember 'PT' is only a judgment. We could probably triple that number if we did our homework. Now, it takes at least six trained personnel to provide reasonable security for one target. That means we would need a minimum total of forty-eight thousand trained bodyguards.

  "We don't have them. We can't afford them. And we really don't need them. As I have mentioned before, there just aren't that many terrorist incidents—just enough to keep the likes of Günther and me in reading and drinking money."

  "Amen to that," said Günther. He closed his copy of the book he had been reading, Winnie-the-Pooh, with a snap. "Great book," he said. "No sex and no violence. I'd be out of a job in Pooh Corner."

  "Shut up and have a drink," said Kilmara, "and let's see if we can make sense out of our Wiesbaden friends' enigmatic communication."

  "Wiesbaden?" asked Fitzduane. "How does Wiesbaden enter the picture?"

  Kilmara slid open the top drawer of his desk and removed his service automatic. Fitzduane noticed with some relief that the safety catch was on.

  Kilmara gestured with his pistol. "People think this is how we fight terrorism. Not so." He tossed the weapon back into the drawer and closed it with a flourish. "Firepower plays a part, of course, but the real secret is intelligence, and the key to that, these days, is the computer."

  He looked across at Günther. "You tell him, Günther. It's your Heimat, and you like the things."

  "Wiesbaden is the headquarters of the BKA, the Bundeskriminalamt," said Günther. "The BKA is, very roughly, the German equivalent of the FBI. It has primary responsibility for counterterrorism, with my old outfit, GSG-9, providing muscle when terrorists have been identified and located. The B
KA has been very successful at hunting down terrorists, and one of the secrets of this success is the Wiesbaden computer"—he grinned—"better known as the Kommissar."

  "It's quite an installation," interjected Kilmara. "I was there a year or so ago. It's all glass and concrete and sits on a hill that, appropriately enough, used to be a place of execution. More than three thousand acolytes feed the beast in Wiesbaden alone, and the budget runs to hundreds of millions of deutsche marks. They don't just record information. They positively vacuum it up. Names, descriptions, addresses, relatives, ancestors, contacts, personal habits, food preferences, sexual idiosyncrasies, speech patterns—you name it, anything that might in some way contribute to the hunt gets entered."

  "Twelve million constantly updated files, and the number is climbing," said Günther with pride.

  George Orwell's 1984 has arrived, thought Fitzduane. It just hasn't been noticed. He took the whiskey Kilmara had poured him.

  "Very interesting," he said, "but what has the Kommissar got to do with my modest investigation?"

  Kilmara held up his glass. "Sláinte!"

  "Prosit!" said Günther, similarly equipped. "Olé!" said Fitzduane a little sourly. Games were being played.

  Kilmara slid a file across the desk. "One of the twelve million," he said. "Reads kind of sanitized."

  Fitzduane picked up the thin film. It was labeled: rudolf von graffenlaub (deceased).

  Chapter 7

  The young German tourist and his pretty Italian girlfriend had flown into Dublin the night before on the direct Swissair flight from Zurich. The German checked his Japanese watch when they landed. In the predictable, boring way of the Swiss, the flight had been on time.

  At the Avis desk in the arrivals area they rented a small, navy blue Ford Escort for a period of one week at the off-season rate. They opted for unlimited mileage and full insurance. They identified themselves as Dieter Kretz, aged twenty-four, from Hamburg, and Tina Brugnoli, aged nineteen, from Milan. They paid their deposit in cash.