Fitzduane drained his glass. "Indeed," he said, "but there is the matter of proof, and nobody wants to upset the college further. It brings money into the area, and it's had a rough time recently. I think the police felt they couldn't press things."
Murrough digested what had been said. Etan had fallen asleep in front of the fire. He stood up to go. "So it's finished," he said.
Fitzduane looked at the dying embers. His reservations and his conversation with Kilmara seemed remote at this distance. Anyway, May would soon be over. He decided he'd sleep on the problem. "I hope so," he said, "I really do."
* * * * *
Ambassador Harrison Noble felt that things were going splendidly.
He lay back on his bed and congratulated himself on finding such a comfortable and practical place to stay. It was on the island, it was near his son's school, the woman of the house was a splendid cook, and this man Murrough said he would gillie for him.
Harrison Noble fell asleep within seconds of putting out the light. His sleep was that of a man contented and relaxed and at peace with the world.
* * * * *
Despite taking their travel sickness pills as instructed, most of the passengers on board the cattle boat Sabine were thoroughly ill as they crossed the Bay of Biscay.
The boat rolled unpleasantly without its normal cargo of fourteen hundred heavy cattle and the corresponding load of feed and water. The crew and more than seventy armed men, ammunition, explosives, surface-to-air missiles, and inflatable assault boats did not weigh enough to provide adequate ballast.
The air-conditioning system coped admirably with the smell. The passengers were fully recovered as the boat approached the south of Ireland. They cleaned and recleaned their weapons and rehearsed the details of the plan.
* * * * *
The U.S. Cultural Attaché headed the crisis team that coordinated security for the embassy when a specific threat was involved. A diplomat largely occupied in his official duties with cultural exchanges, visiting baseball teams, and the arcane queries of scholars and writers might seem an unlikely choice for such a counterterrorist role, but the cultural attaché was also the senior CIA man on the spot and, even more to the point, had experience at the sharp end on several unpleasant occasions in Latin America.
After the last experience, when his unarmored vehicle — a matter of budget cuts — had been sprayed with automatic-weapons fire in San Salvador and his driver killed, he had asked for a posting away from a high-risk zone. He had been sent to Ireland to get his nerve back and play some golf. Both his nerve and his golf had been doing fine until the attack warning had been received.
Now he waited and sweated and drank too much to be good for either his liver or his career and hoped that the extra acoustic and visual monitoring equipment Kilmara had requested would turn up something — or, better still, nothing.
He loathed the waiting, the sense of being a target on a weapons range. He knew too well what happens to targets. His driver in San Salvador had died holding his fingers against the hole in his neck, trying vainly to stop the gushing of arterial blood.
* * * * *
The weather still looked menacing in the morning, but it wasn't actually raining, so Fitzduane and Etan saddled up the horses and ambled around the island.
The sense of fatigue that had dogged Fitzduane since his return seemed to have gone, and the wind in his face as they rode was invigorating.
It was as they were returning that Fitzduane began to experience a feeling of anticipation that was familiar 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.