The sound of the water is really loud so the suit must have been really heavy or maybe someone was trying to grip onto the floor.
Heave stomp heave stomp.
Heave stomp heave.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
I am at the far door and it is open onto the air lock and I step through and I look round.
I see the suit hanging there on the edge of the drop and I see Charlie working at the console to close the grille and I see the grille start to move and I hear the sound of the suit scratching its way past the closing grille and I can actually watch it just—just—
—vanish—
and then I look back into the air lock and there are six suits and one of them one of them is on all fours on the floor and I know if I look though the faceplate and I see the pig that means someone someone one of my people—
I look through the faceplate and see Doc’s face very pale but she is not a pig.
The door shuts.
Charlie cycles the air lock and we shed the suits.
Doc.
Charlie.
Saul.
Lucille.
Me.
And the pig.
One two three four five.
Once I caught a pig alive.
Six seven eight nine ten no there were only fiiiive then.
One two three four five.
One two three four five.
And a—
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
FUCK.
Again and again but it doesn’t matter how many times I count.
One of us is still the pig.
—
Rex’s mother lives in a place called Gullit I do not know why it is called that. She is not that old because she had Rex and Billy real young and in fact likely someone oughta be in jail over that. She has a nice car and a big house in Gullit and her boys are the light of her life or they were right up until Fred killed Billy for no good reason at all and now Rex is gone too and the common factor in these events is me.
People make choices you cannot stop them and you cannot take responsibility for those choices but likewise you got to recognize where your own momentum pushes someone along a new track and that is a thing that I do.
Rex was here because of me and now Rex is not here anymore.
Please do not get the idea that Rex will climb back out of the pit at a salient moment and save the day that happens in films sure but right now Rex has gone somewhere there is no coming back from. When you fuck up in the mountains there are not second chances and that goes double for water under the mountains just—
But we still have the pig so we can open the door and get to the vault section.
SCANNING—
Click.
The X8 swings back.
We’re through.
We’re alive.
And we’re going to win this fucker.
There is a noise like really slow popcorn.
Hans Eiger is standing in the room beyond.
He is clapping.
—
It’s a big room on two levels like an aircraft hangar and Eiger is on a kind of gantry in front of what can only be the final door. He has his guys around the place: lots of men in suits with him and they have many guns. You do not need many guns in this situation but they have them anyway. Eiger and his guys and some extras who are obviously G-Wagen men and yes, a little Sound of Music–looking motherfucker standing on a chair behind Eiger so he can get a decent view.
Clap clap clap.
Eiger is really loving this it matters to him. It is his win that he has always wanted. He has been tested and he has been found worthy by the bank robbery gods. He has beaten the Seven Demons.
Clap clap clap.
I wait for him to make a speech but he just keeps clapping until it is way past ironic or mocking he’s just clapping like he does not know how to stop.
Clap clap clap.
Now everyone is looking at Eiger to see if he’s okay and he is. He’s fine. He’s just—he’s having too much fun now to stop. This is just the best moment of his adult life.
He beat us.
Legit.
Fair and square.
We beat his security system and we got into his head and onto his mountain but all the same, here, at the line, he won.
Fair and square.
Clap clap clap.
One of the G-Wagen guys says something fast in French: “You want us to kill them now?”
There is a version of this moment where we dialogue as dueling bad guys should and Eiger is totally up for that. I can see him shaping up to it like moohoohaha like so:
“I have raised the canton against you Mr. Price. You have done well to get this far into Die Festung and I am quite honestly impressed, but here it ends. Even if you should overcome these men, which you will not, you cannot escape. Your exit would be a running gun battle from here to—”
And Doc could maybe tell him she is wearing a phial of modified respiratory transmission hantavirus or I could say something about something but—
But none of that happens because Hans Eiger has crossed a line. Volodya told me that Swissness was a thing but I did not get it until I came here. You cannot get it from outside. Now I do and the thing is that sometimes it’s easier to see the landscape when you don’t have a house there. Hans Eiger does not realize it because as far as he is concerned people like him are the fountain, or wellspring, his national identity, but Swissness is a way of being, not something you just are. He has crossed a line in the Swiss. He brought anti-social Nazis into the federal capital and in the end—despite all this country’s bad moments and sometimes regrettable choices, which let us be honest it shares with every other country in the world—there is nothing anywhere that is more fundamentally un-Swiss than a fucking Nazi. If you’re going to Nazi about the place in a
