The Linz Tattoo (52 page)

It was a mistake. He had to catch himself to
keep from toppling over, and the instant the strain was off his
arms they felt as if they were made of stone. He thought perhaps he
had never lifted anything in his life as heavy as his own
hands.

He couldn’t go on. There was just no way he
could go on. He would hang there for maybe another minute and then
he would fall. He was as good as dead, and he hardly minded at
all.

When the fifteen seconds—or what felt like
fifteen seconds—were over, he reached back up, his arms breaking,
and took the line again. One more pull. What the hell, he wouldn’t
be any deader for falling that extra foot and a half. One more
pull.

And then another, and another after that. He
no longer tried to open his left hand; he just let it slide up the
rope. It seemed to slip just a little more each time. One more
pull.

Finally, when he was finished for good, when
there was nothing more inside him, he saw where the line seemed to
dig into the cliff face and then vanish. It was the top. It had to
be the top.

One more pull. Just one more.

With his left hand he reached up and felt
the flat surface of the bluff. A few more feet, just that, no more,
and he could rest.

One more pull.

Christiansen lay there, his face buried in
the fallen pine needles, trying to catch his breath and summon up
the courage to move. He pulled his arm down toward his head and
looked at his watch. It was two minutes after four—he had made the
climb in eight minutes. The sentry would be walking straight over
him in another minute and a half.

Get up. Get up, get up. Get up or they’ll
kill you while you lie there with your nose in the mud, feeling
sorry for yourself. Get up.

He got up. First to his knees—one doesn’t
rush these things—and then, finally, to his actual and authentic
feet.

The grappling hook had landed almost ten
feet back from the edge of the cliff and had caught on a tree root.
Christiansen just had time to pick it up and to press his back
against the tree when he saw the first tentative jabs of yellow
light from the sentry’s flashlight. Within a few seconds he could
hear the sound of the man’s boot breaking a fallen twig. He held
the grappling iron in both hands and waited. There wasn’t any time
and he was just too fucking tired to try anything fancy.

Almost at once the little trail was as well
lit as the back terrace at an evening party. The sentry would come
right by Christiansen’s tree—they would practically brush
shoulders. Christiansen held his breath and waited.

The man was muttering to himself, something
about the goddamned sergeant and missing his tea. Just a word or
two. Just enough to make him human. He was just out for a night’s
forced patrol. He carried his Mauser over his shoulder like a
parcel.

Christiansen let him pass, waiting one
heartbeat, and then stepped out into the trail and swung down on
him. One of the grappling iron’s prongs caught the man square in
the side of the head and just tore it away.

The sentry was dead at once. He didn’t even
stiffen. He just fell straight down. There was blood everywhere,
spattered around like paint. It was gushing out just over the dead
man’s right ear, from a trench you could have stuck your whole hand
into. Christiansen was wet to the elbows—he even had to wipe some
of it out of his eyes.

But there was no time for horror. There was
no time for anything. The sentry’s flashlight was lying on the
ground, still on. He picked it up, switched it off, and dropped it
into his pocket. Then he grabbed the corpse by the arms and dragged
it into the bushes and out of sight.

The grappling hook was lying on the ground,
right where Christiansen had dropped it. He picked it up again and
dug it into the tree root. He took the line and shook it wildly.
That would be Itzhak’s signal to start up.

When the line went tight, Christiansen sat
down with his back against the tree and closed his eyes. For a few
minutes at least there was nothing he could do about anything. And
he couldn’t remember when he had been so tired. He had been in
Spain less than forty-eight hours. He had killed nine, maybe ten
men—he couldn’t even remember. It was all beginning to seem just a
little pointless. What could be worth all this? What had he done
with his life that he was sitting under a tree, trying to clean a
total stranger’s blood off his face?

Finally he decided he was weary of his own
low spirits, so he went over to the cliff edge to see how Itzhak
was doing on the line. He wasn’t doing very well.

“Give me a hand, can you?”

Itzhak was stuck about twenty feet from the
top. If he rested a bit he would be able to make it, but there
wasn’t any time for resting. Christiansen took the line in both
hands and began pulling him in. At the end, he held the line in his
right hand and reached down for Itzhak with his left.

“Grab the wrist, not the hand. The hand
isn’t much good anymore.”

When they were both up, Christiansen lay
down on the soft ground, spent. He would never get up again. He was
sure of it.

And then he remembered the second
sentry.

“Do you know what it means to ‘make your
bones?” he asked. No, Itzhak hadn’t a clue what he was talking
about. “Well, you’re going to make your bones tonight, kid. Go hide
yourself by the trail and kill our friend when he comes by on his
watch. Did they teach you how to do that?”

“Yes.” Itzhak swallowed hard. “But couldn’t
you—?”

“No, I couldn’t. The way I am right now, I’d
muff it. He’s all yours.”

He made a vague gesture with his left arm.
He really was exhausted.

Itzhak took the knife Faglin had given him
out of his pocket and pressed the little lever on the hasp. The
blade shot out with a snap so that the thing nearly jumped from his
hand. He really didn’t seem to like the look of it.

“Fine—if you can’t you can’t. I’ll—”

“No, you’re right. I suppose I have to learn
sometime.” The forced grin in Itzhak’s face wasn’t fooling
anyone.

“Not if you really don’t want to.”

“I really don’t want to, but I think I’d
better.”

Christiansen nodded. “Okay. Go for the
heart. And don’t even try to be sporting, all right?”

“Sure.”

He disappeared—it wasn’t hard up there,
where you could stand shaded from the moonlight by a tree limb and
be shrouded in impenetrable black. But the Mossad must have taught
him something because Christiansen couldn’t even hear him moving.
It was a noiseless winter night, and he didn’t make a sound. After
a while, Christiansen went back over to the edge of the cliff and
began hauling up the equipment, which was about all he was good
for.

There was a slight scuffle, that was all.
You might not even have known it was going on if you weren’t
listening for it. And then Itzhak came back into the little
clearing by the cliff face and sat down. He didn’t have the knife
with him anymore, and there was a dazed look in his eyes.

“Any trouble?” .

“No. Nothing. It’s just. . . Is it always
like this?”

“Yes, it’s always like this. Not so bad
after the first time, but always just like this.”

The line pulled tight, which meant that
Faglin was on his way up. There was nothing for either of them to
do except to wait.

“My God! I won’t ever want to do that
again.”

Christiansen reached down over the edge,
grabbed Faglin by the arms, and dragged him up. They waited while
Faglin lay there on his face, trying to recover. They knew just how
he felt.

Finally he rolled over. He wasn’t ready to
do much more, but he wasn’t just waiting to die either.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“We see if you were bright enough to
remember to bring the coffee.”

Christiansen opened the knapsack, and there
it was. He unscrewed the thermos cap and filled it about half full.
The sides of the cap felt deliciously warm against his palms. Then
he decided that Itzhak probably needed it worse than he did and
passed it over to him.

Faglin was busy with the rest of their gear.
He took out the sections of a Sten gun and fitted them together.
There were also two pistols. The rest he left in the knapsack.

“Where’s my knife?” he asked, looking at
Itzhak. Itzhak only stared at him. He was still too engrossed in
his own private nightmare to be able to provide an answer. It had
been a heavy few hours for him.

“I imagine it’s sticking in a dead German,”
Christiansen said. “You might go have a look—the trail is back
there. Itzhak blooded himself tonight.”

Faglin got up to have his look. When he came
back he was carrying two Mauser rifles. Christiansen had forgotten
all about the rifles.

“I found my knife.” he said. “What happened
to the one with his head torn open?”

“The grappling hook. It was at hand.”

“Oh my God.”

When Itzhak was finished with the cup,
Faglin and Christiansen each had some coffee. It was almost like a
picnic, except they all knew there was very little time before one
or another of the sentries was missed.

“Let’s go find the barracks,” Faglin
said.

They had the flashlights, and there really
wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t use them. Anyone who saw would
just think it was one of the sentries making his rounds. They
followed the trail, and pretty soon it led out of the woods and
into a clearing. From there they could see Hagemann’s villa, its
white walls gleaming in the cold, hostile light of a series of
flood lamps—Hagemann wasn’t taking any chances. Across a lawn was a
squat little building that had one light on over the door but was
otherwise dark. This was where the guards slept. For the rest there
was only a chain link fence that stretched off into the darkness in
both directions.

They didn’t like the clearing very much.
There was too much light—all somebody would have to do was look out
through a window. The woods were safer, so they went back
there.

The minute they were protected behind the
shadowy line of trees, Faglin squatted down over his knapsack and
pulled out something that looked for all the world like a
bratwurst. It had wires coming out of either end, and he attached
these to a device shaped like a clock face except that it was the
approximate size of a tea saucer and in place of hands it had a
single dial.

“This will detonate ten seconds after
impact,” he said, twisting the dial around with a precise movement
that indicated a certain gingerly respect for the thing’s
destructive power. “Or if someone attempts to fiddle with
it—whichever happens first. I’ll toss it through the barracks
window. Believe me, we won’t have to worry about any interference
from those boys.”

There were probably ten or twelve men asleep
in that darkened building, and Faglin was proposing to kill them
all in one go. It would be abstract—he wouldn’t have to look into
their faces while they died. He wouldn’t have to have much of
anything to do with it, and it wouldn’t bother him a bit. That was
how murder was achieved in the modem world. Hagemann’s soldiers
would be no loss to the human race and, God knows, if Faglin didn’t
have a right to kill them they could live forever. Christiansen
wasn’t offering any criticism. He was just glad, for the state of
his soul, that he performed his homicides directly. He would rather
put up with the bad dreams.

“That will only leave whoever is in the main
house,” he said, trying not to remember that Esther was one of
them. “We’ll have to flush them out somehow. Do you suppose you’d
have enough of your modeling clay left over to start the right sort
of fire? Something with lots of smoke? Just for the sake of a
little excitement?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Christiansen avoided Faglin’s eyes—he didn’t
want to see what was there. Everything was settled. For good or ill
they had their plan, and now events would roll forward with a
momentum that would make everyone its victim.

If it came to it, and there was no other way
of keeping Esther out of Hagemann’s hands, Christiansen had decided
that he was going to kill her. If he didn’t, Faglin would—the
Mossad simply couldn’t afford to let the secret she carried get
away from them. Not a second time. And if it had to be done it was
better it be done by someone who loved her.

All he could do was hope that it wouldn’t
come to that.

He knew now why he was here, and that it had
nothing to do with events in Kirstenstad all those years ago—at any
rate, almost nothing. He wanted to kill Egon Hagemann, but that was
not what had brought him. He wanted to get Esther back. He wanted
the chance to go on with his life.

There were propane tanks outside the villa’s
kitchen. Faglin was that very minute huddled beside one in the
darkness, fixing a charge to the underside. It would cause one hell
of a fire.

First they would blow up the barracks, then
the villa—one right after the other. And then it was hunting
season, with every man for himself. Itzhak would cover the back of
the villa with his rifle, and Faglin and Christiansen would go in
the front from opposite sides. There was no knowing how everything,
in the end, would turn out.

Christiansen looked up at one of the windows
on the second story—still lit up, even at this hour of the
morning.

. . . . .

It had been several hours since Esther had
tasted any of the brandy, but she still carried the bottle around
with her, holding it by the neck in her right hand, hardly
remembering it existed.

It had done its work. Her headache was gone
and she felt almost calm. Everything seemed very simple now. She
had decided that she would kill Colonel Hagemann herself. It was
only a question of hitting on the means.

Provided they had no fear of death, anyone
could kill anyone. The strong were helpless against the weak—all
she had to do was decide how.