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 attache, 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.
All the empty apartments overlooking the embassy, and quite a few of the occupied locations, had been bugged in anticipation of some action of this nature. A relay station was set up in the embassy, but the actual monitoring was carried out from Ranger headquarters in
Shrewsbury Road .
The acoustic monitoring equipment was state-of-the-art, and the quality of the transmission excellent. Unfortunately, although there were a number of linguists in the Rangers who spoke among them some eighteen foreign languages – including Arabic and Hebrew, both much in demand since Ireland's involvement with the UN force in Lebanon – none of them spoke Japanese.
Then Gunther remembered that one of the Marine guards he had been chatting with was a Nisei. It didn't follow, of course, that he spoke Japanese – but he might.
He did.
Listening to the translation, Kilmara started to wonder if maybe he hadn't been too hasty in assuming the whole embassy thing was a blind; it looked as if something were going to happen there after all. Then the link was made with a convention of travel agents booked into the nearby Jury's Hotel for the following day. The travel agents were coming from the Middle East, and there were seventy-two in the party.
Backup units were alerted. Ranger leave was canceled. The next question was when to move in. It looked as if he might have thrown a scare into Fitzduane for nothing. Still, better scared than dead.
Kilmara decided that maybe he was doing too much reacting to events and not enough thinking. He tilted his chair back and set to work on some serious analysis. After half an hour he was glad he had. He called up the rosters on his computer and began to do some juggling.
In the afternoon the skies abandoned any attempt at neutrality and proceeded to dump a goodly portion of the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of Ireland.
Etan and Oona went to work out who would sleep where and with whom, and Fitzduane closeted himself in his study to plow his way through a two-month backlog of mail.
There were several communications from Bern of no particular significance except that one correspondence had included a tourist brochure on current and future events in the city. He flipped through it idly, feeling
