mouth filled with an unpleasant taste. He wiped his lips and clammy face with a handkerchief.
A well-shaded light clicked on, apparently activated from the outside. The steel door opened. Von Graffenlaub sat in the darkness of his corner of the room and silently watched Erika enter.
She removed her evening coat of dark green silk and tossed it over a chair. Its lining was a vivid scarlet red that reminded von Graffenlaub sickeningly of the blood of her victims. Her shoulders were bare, and her skin was golden. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror strategically positioned at the entrance to the living room and with a practiced movement slipped out of her dress and threw it after the coat. She stared at the image of her body and caressed her breasts, bringing her fingers down slowly over her rib cage and taut stomach to the black bikini panties that were the only clothing she still wore.
Von Graffenlaub tried to speak. His throat was dry. Only a strangled sound emerged.
Erika tossed her head in acknowledgment but didn't turn. She continued to examine her reflection. 'Whitney,' she said. 'Darling, dangerous, delicious Whitney. I hoped you wouldn't be late.' She eased her panties down her thighs. Her fingers worked between her legs.
'Why?' repeated von Graffenlaub hoarsely. This time the word came out. She started violently at the sound of his voice but didn't turn for perhaps half a minute. Then, with a quick, animal gesture, she slipped her panties off her thighs and kicked them into a corner.
'And who is this Whitney?' said von Graffenlaub, gesturing at the pile of photographs beside him. 'Who is this partner in murder?'
Erika faced him naked. She had regained some of her composure, but her face was strained under the tan. She laughed harshly before she spoke. 'Whitney likes games, my darling hypocrite,' she said. 'And not all the players are volunteers. Look very closely at those photos. Don't you recognize the pristine body? Aren't those long, elegant fingers familiar? Beat, my darling, aren't Vaybon drugs wonderful? My companion in murder – well, in some of the photographs anyway – was you, my sweet. You must admit that does somewhat limit your options.'
A dreadful cry came from von Graffenlaub. He brought the Walther up in a gesture of ultimate denial and fired until the magazine was empty. The gun dropped to the carpet. Erika lay where she had been flung, looking not unlike the blood-spattered images I her photographs.
They left the car in the village and walked along the track toward Vreni's farmhouse. The Bear carried a flashlight. When he was about thirty meters away from the Mercedes, he focused it on the windows and flashed it half a dozen times. The front door opened on the passenger side, and a figure got out. He was carrying some kind of automatic weapon.
The flashed the light again. 'I don't want to scare them to death,' he said in a low voice to Fitzduane. He stopped and shouted to the figure by the Mercedes. 'Police,' he said. 'Routine check. Mind if I approach?'
'You're welcome,' said the figure by the Mercedes. 'Dig your ID out and come forward with your hands in the air.'
'Understood,' said the Bear. He moved ahead, hands in the air, the flashlight in one of them. Fitzduane walked beside him about ten meters to the right. His hands were extended also. When they were close, the Bear spoke again. 'Here's my ID,' he said, shining his light on it and handing it to the bodyguard. Fitzduane moved forward a shade after the detective offered him his ID as well. The bodyguard looked briefly at the Bear's papers and then pitched into the snow as Fitzduane smashed the tire iron against his head.
'No countersign, no partner backing him up from a safe fire position, and a Skorpion as a personal weapon,' said the Bear. 'Good reasons to take him out, but I hope we're not dealing with an absentminded security man.'
'So do I,' said Fitzduane. He felt the fallen man's body. 'Because he's dead.'
'Jesus!' exclaimed the Bear. 'I thought I was keeping you out of trouble by not giving you a firearm.'
Fitzduane grunted. Keeping the flashlight well shaded and with the automatically activated interior light switched off, he examined the person who was apparently asleep in the passenger seat. Almost immediately it was clear that the sleep was permanent. He went through the pockets of the corpse and compared the ID he found there with the bloated face.
'It's Sangster,' he said grimly. 'No obvious signs of injury, but I doubt he died of boredom; most likely either asphyxiation or poisoning, to judge by his face.'
'There were supposed to be two guards on duty,' said the Bear. He opened the trunk and looked at the crumpled figure inside. 'There were,' he said quietly. He looked at Fitzduane. 'You and your damn intuition. This means the Hangman or his drones are inside the farmhouse. You'll need something a little heavier than a tire iron.'
Fitzduane searched quickly through the car. He found two Browning automatic pistols and an automatic shotgun – but no ammunition. He guessed the attackers must have tossed it into the snow, but there was no time to look. He picked up the fallen terrorist's Skorpion and a spare clip of ammunition. He felt as if he were reliving a nightmare. It wasn't rational, but he blamed himself for not having saved Rudi. Now his twin sister was in mortal danger, possibly because of his actions in involving her in the investigation, and he was going to be too late again. 'Let's move it,' he said, a break in his voice. His body vibrated with tension. He felt a hand on his arm.
'Easy, Hugo,' said the Bear. 'Take it very easy. It won't do the girl any good if you get yourself killed.'
The Bear's words had the desired effect. Fitzduane felt the guilt and blind rage subside. He looked at the Bear. 'This is how we'll do it,' he said, and he explained.
'Just so,' said the Bear.
They split up and moved toward the farmhouse.
Sylvie had endured the most brutal training, designed in part specifically to cauterize her feelings, and she had been through Kadar's initiation ceremonies, which were many times worse. She prided herself on being quite ruthless when carrying out an assignment – ruthless in the full sense of the word, without pity – and yet the execution of Vreni von Graffenlaub made her stomach churn.
Kadar had seemed amused when he gave the orders, as if he were enjoying some private joke. 'I want you to hang the girl,' he had said. 'Let her die in the same way as her twin brother. Very neat, very Swiss. Perhaps we'll be establishing a new von Graffenlaub family tradition, thought rather hard to perpetuate from generation to generation under the circumstances. Oh, well. Her father should appreciate the symmetry.'
The locks on the farmhouse door had given them little trouble; they were inside in less than a minute. They had found Vreni cowering under a duvet in the living room that led off the small kitchen. She had a lamb clutched in her arms, and her eyes were tightly closed. She wanted to believe that it was all a horrible dream, that the sound of the door opening and the footsteps were all her imagination, that the telephone still worked, that if she opened her eyes, everything would be cozy and normal in the farmhouse.
Gretel had torn the lamb away and slapped the cowering figure until she had been forced to look at him. Then, with one vicious slash, he had cut the throat of the bleating animal, the blood gushing over the petrified girl, her fear so great that they could smell it, the screams stillborn in her paralyzed throat.
The living room ceiling was too low for their purposes. Instead Gretel prepared for the hanging. He could watch the track leading from the village through the kitchen window, and he could just see the shadow where Santine was standing in for the security guards in the distance. There was some visibility thanks to a weak moon reflecting off the snow, but patches of cloud were frequent. At those times it was hard to see anything with certainty, and imagination made shadows move. Fortunately he knew he would get early warning from Santine in the Mercedes, so he gave in to the more compelling distraction of the preparations for the hanging.
The Bear's luck gave out when he tried to close in from the woodshed, which was located only about twenty meters from the farmhouse. The detective's movements, slowed by the snow that had banked up around the shed, around the distracted Hansel, whose first action was to snatch up his walkie-talkie and swear at Santine. He knew the gesture would be fruitless even before his reflex movement was completed, so he dropped the silent radio, shouted a warning to Sylvie and Gretel, and fired at the shadowy figure moving toward him.
Unhit but shaken by the blast of fire, the Bear rolled back into the cover of the woodshed and sank into a
