Which meant the man had help. Who?
Maybe Lessing had seen something out in the water after all.
He pulled the walkie-talkie around and keyed the talk button. Liese was still staring at him, the same fixed expression on her face, in her eyes. She was, Spranger thought, an enigma even to him.
“Bruno, what is your situation down there?” he said softly into the microphone. “Have you seen anything else?”
He keyed the transmit button, and waited impatiently for Lessing’s reply. But there was no response.
“Bruno, do you copy?”
Still there was no answer.
“Bruno, come back,” he transmitted.
“What’s the matter, Ernst, are your friends deserting you?” McGarvey’s voice drifted down from the loft.
Spranger stepped back a half pace, as if he expected an apparition to appear at the head of the stairs, guns blazing. A ghost, incapable of being harmed, and yet supremely able to inflict death and destruction.
“Ernst…?” Liese said softly.
Magda was looking across at them, the big Russian assault rifle clutched in her arms.
Spranger dropped the walkie-talkie on the floor. “Get them,” he told Liese.
“The women?” she asked, blinking.
“Yes. Bring them here.”
Liese looked up toward the loft. “What do you mean to do, Ernst?” she asked. “Let’s leave now, while we still have the chance.”
“It would be the end of the project.”
“Fuck the Japanese,” Liese said urgently. “But we can take the women with us. At least the young one. She’s fit to travel.”
“Liese,” Spranger said. “Get them.”
She looked directly into his eyes for several long moments, a test of wills, but then her gaze dropped and she turned and hurried off.
When she was gone, Spranger laid his rifle down, took out the detonator, and motioned for Magda to take a position at the top of the stairs. She nodded her understanding and went up.
Spranger gave her a half minute to get into place, and then called up to McGarvey.
“I’m going to come up the stairs, Mr. McGarvey. Unarmed. I want to talk to you about saving the lives of your ex-wife and daughter.”
“What do you want out of it?” McGarvey answered.
“There are only four of us left. We would very much like to walk away from here with our lives.”
“Then go. Turn around and walk away.”
“Ah, but it’s not going to be that easy,” Spranger said, much calmer now that he had a plan. He started up the stairs. “Here I come, and as I say, I am unarmed. But I am carrying a small electronic device in my right hand. My thumb is on the button.
If the button is pushed a powerful explosion will destroy the room in which your wife and daughter are being held. There would be no chance of their survival in such a case. Do you understand?”
“No,” McGarvey said harshly.
Spranger stopped halfway up. “Do you believe that I am not serious, Mr. McGarvey?”
“What do you get out of it? You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I propose to give you the detonating device in exchange for Peter’s rifle and your pistol,” Spranger replied, smiling.
“Then you’ll kill me.”
“On the contrary, we will need you alive to effect our escape past your friends.”
The church was silent for a long time. Even the wind howling around the eaves seemed to have calmed down for that instant.
“Mr. McGarvey?” Spranger called.
“Come,” McGarvey said.
“I need your assurances that…?
“Come,” McGarvey repeated.
Holding the detonator away from his body, Spranger went the rest of the way up to the loft. “Here I come.”
He hesitated for a beat on the last stair, then stepped up, out of the deeper darkness.
At first he couldn’t make out much except for a few vague shapes. Something had been piled up in the middle of the loft.
“Put the detonator down,” McGarvey’s voice came from the darkness, but Spranger couldn’t pinpoint it. Had he made another mistake with this man?
“I cannot see you. Show yourself.”
“Do it,” McGarvey said, and this time Spranger was sure that the American was at the far end of the loft where he would see Magda if she showed herself.
“All right, I’ll do it,” Spranger shouted hastily. He had to distract the man’s attention for just a crucial second or two. “I’m putting it down, but you must lay your weapons aside.” He started to crouch down to place the detonator on the floor when Liese shouted at him from the nave, her voice desperate.
“Ernst! They’re gone!”
Magda Schey rose up out of the dark stairwell at that moment and brought her rifle up.
“Nein…?”
Spranger cried when McGarvey fired once, driving Magda backward, her weapon discharging in a long burst, the bullets ricocheting dangerously off the stone walls.
Then McGarvey fired again, this shot hitting Spranger in the right shoulder before he had time to react, shoving him off balance down the stairs, every fiber in his being raging at the surprise and injustice. It wasn’t supposed to end up like this!
Chapter 60
Spranger’s horribly burned left arm and collarbone broke in the fall down the stairs, and at the bottom his face smashed into the stone floor, crushing his nose and both cheekbones with a grinding agony.
For a seeming eternity he just lay there, sounds echoing interminably in his head.
But he was alive and conscious, though just barely, his world spinning, a deep nausea rising up making him gag and almost vomit.
“Christus, Chrtstus,” he muttered wetly, spraying the floor with blood as he tried to push himself upright with his wounded right arm.
The instant shot of sharply localized pain was like a burst of adrenalin to his system, momentarily clearing his head and his vision.
The detonator, its plastic case cracked, lay on the stone floor about two yards away.
Spranger started to pull himself toward it, everything within his being concentrating on the one thing: On the electronic device, on revenge.
McGarvey had brought him to this. The one man. And he would suffer the consequences of his actions. If he was still alive. If Magda hadn’t killed him: She’d managed to shoot.
He cocked an ear, but there was no gunfire for the moment. If McGarvey were dead, killing his wife and daughter wouldn’t matter.
But he would do it anyway, and in the doing he would be striking a double blow-at McGarvey, and at that bitch Liese. If she’d simply kept her mouth shut about the women being gone…
Spranger stopped for just a moment and turned that stray thought over in his head.
Liese had said something about the women being gone. But that was impossible. They could not have escaped from their cell. And even if they had, they couldn’t have gone anywhere.
