hurtled through it and smashed on the pavement below, missing the Bear as he ran toward the entrance, pistol in hand. Sieman tripped on the splintered remains, cut himself messily on the spears of broken glass, picked himself up, and, pouring blood, ran after the Bear, who had by this time vanished into the building.
Fitzduane felt a sharp pain as the muzzle blast seared the side of his face. The bullet cracked past his right ear so close it drew blood, and it splintered the door behind him before embedding itself in the plaster of the first- floor landing.
'You stupid shit,' cried Fitzduane, shock, anger, and sheer naked terror combining to pump adrenaline into his bloodstream. He grabbed van der Grijn's wrists with both hands and deflected the Dutchman's aim toward the ceiling. Van der Grijn fired again and again as they struggled, hot shell casings showering across the room and plaster falling from the ceiling as the rounds bored their way in.
Knife leaped forward to help van der Grijn. Fitzduane swiveled van der Grijn around as the blade was thrust at him. He felt van der Grijn jerk and saw the shock in his eyes as the blade cut effortlessly through his leather jacket and entered his back. He bellowed in pain.
The second Dutchman had his revolver in his hand.
'Police!' yelled the bearded man. The voice was American. 'Drop it, motherfucker!' The man had dropped into the combat crouch and had his gun aimed at the second Dutchman.
Moving with unexpected speed, the second Dutchman whirled toward the American, dropped to one knee, and fired two rounds at him, hitting him once in the stomach.
The American's first shot went over the second Dutchman's head, but then he sagged with the impact of the bullet in his stomach, and his aim dropped. The next five slugs from his little Beretta went into the Dutchman's face and neck. In a bloody parody of a knight's posture, the Dutchman stayed on one knee for several seconds, his head bowed, blood spurting from his wounds, his gun still held in his drooping hand, and then slid sideways to the ground.
The Dutchman with the knife, appalled and confused by his error, left the knife in van der Grijn's back and leaped at Fitzduane. The force of his attack separated Fitzduane from van der Grijn, who still held the automatic in his hand. Though half blinded by the plaster dust from the ceiling and groggy with pain from the knife in his back, he was still just able to function. He tried to aim at Fitzduane, who was wrestling with Knife on the floor.
Ivo, who had flung a chair out the window to attract attention, now flung a second chair at van der Grijn. It missed. He dived under the table, encountering a mass of arms and legs belonging to people who had beaten him to it. Van der Grijn, momentarily distracted from Fitzduane, fired back twice. One round gouged into the graffiti on the wall; the second drilled through the table, hitting a seventeen-year-old runaway from Geneva in the left thigh.
The door bust open. ' Polizei! ' yelled the Bear.
Van der Grijn fired. The Bear shot him four times in the chest, the rounds impacting in a textbook group and flinging van der Grijn back across the room. He staggered, still upright, and the Bear fired again, this time assisted by Detective Siemann.
Van der Grijn reeled back against the window, smashed through the remaining jagged edges of glass, and fell one story onto the pointed tops of the fleur-de-lis cast-iron railings below. His vast body arched at the impact and twitched for a few seconds; then it lay unmoving, impaled in a dozen places.
The Bear smashed the one surviving Dutchman across the side of his face with his still-hot gun barrel. The Dutchman fell to the floor, his cheekbone broken, and lay on his back, moaning. The Bear flipped him over and pressed his gun into the back of his neck. 'Don't move, asshole!' The Dutchman became quite still; intermittently he trembled, and moaning sounds came out of his mouth. The Bear kept his gun in position and, using his left hand, handcuffed him.
Siemann pulled the table aside. Bodies intertwined in a confusion of limbs, began to separate. Terrified faces looked up at him. He held out his hand to help and realized he was still holding his gun. He holstered it and tried to say something reassuring. They stared at him, and he looked down at his bloodstained body. He shook his head and tried to smile, and the tension on the faces eased. One by one they rose to their feet. One figure remained unmoving, blood gushing from her thigh. Siemann leaped forward, ripped the belt from his waist, and began to apply a tourniquet. Once the bleeding eased, he unclipped his radio on and put in an emergency call. When he finished he caught the Bear's eye. The Bear nodded his head a couple of times and smiled fleetingly. He rested his hand on Siemann's shoulder.
'That was good, Kurt, that was very good.'
Siemannn didn't know what to say. He looked away and stroked the injured girl's forehead with his bloody hand. After twenty-five years on the force he no longer felt he had just a job: he felt accepted; he felt like a real policeman.
The Bear reached down to help Fitzduane to his feet. 'What was that all about?'
'I'm fucked if I know.' Fitzduane walked across to the bearded man, who was lying on the floor surrounded by a circle of people. Someone had put a folded coat under his head. His face under the beard was very white.
Fitzduane knelt down by his side. 'You'll be all right,' he said gently. 'That was some piece of shooting.'
The man smiled weakly. 'It's a paycheck,' he said. His eyes were going cloudy. 'The agency expects nothing less.'
'CIA?'
'No, not those bozos – DEA.' The man grimaced in pain.
'Help's coming,' said Fitzduane. He looked down at the man's stomach. The large-caliber hollow-nosed bullet must have hit bone and ricocheted. The entire lower part of his torso seemed to have been ripped open. He had his hands folded across his intestines in a reflex attempt to kept them in. Fitzduane wanted to hold his hand or somehow comfort him, but he knew if he did so, it could add to the pressure and cause more pain.
The man closed his eyes and then opened them again. They were unfocused. 'I can hear the dustoff,' he whispered. Fitzduane had to bend down and put his ear to the man's mouth to hear him. 'Those pilots have a lot of balls.'
The man gave a little rattling sound, and for a moment Fitzduane was back in Vietnam watching another man die, the sound of the medevac chopper arriving too late. Then he knew that the sound of the helicopter was real and that it was circling somewhere outside the building.
The Bear looked down at the American. 'He's dead,' he said. As he had with Siemann, he put his hand on Fitzduane's shoulder, but this time he didn't say anything. Fitzduane, still kneeling, stayed there looking at the man's body, the hands already folded as if in anticipation of an olive green body bag. The blue eyes were still open; they looked faded. Fitzduane gently closed the lids, then rose off his knees.
From outside the Youth House, a heavily amplified voice boomed at them: 'YOU INSIDE, THIS IS THE POLICE. LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.'
'Assholes,' said the Bear. 'It's the Federal Police from the building next door. They must be back from their coffee break.'
Examining Magistrate Charlie von Beck – wearing a large, floppy brown velvet bow tie to go with his cream shirt and three-piece corduroy suit – was talking. The Chief thought von Beck looked like a leftover from a late- nineteenth-century artist's colony. He wore his fair hair long so it flopped over one eye. His father was an influential professor of law at BernUniversity, he was rich, had connections in all the right places, and he was sharp as a razor. All in all, thought the Chief, Charlie von Beck would have made an ideal person to hate. It irritated him that he liked the man.
'Well, it doesn't make the crime statistics look too good, I admit,' said von Beck, 'but you have to agree: it's
