The Power (65 page)

'Dynamite sticks,' Cardon commented. 'That collection
adds up to one big bomb, powerful enough to blast the
stone bridge and any vehicle on it sky-high.'

'It can hardly work by pressure of a vehicle crossing the
bridge,' Paula mused. She was scared stiff and kept talk
ing to conceal her reaction. 'Otherwise a farm wagon
could have set it off at any time.'

'Correct,' Cardon agreed. 'A bit diabolical this one.
See that grey cable running from the bomb to the other
end of the arch near where the cat is? Butler, who has a
nasty mind, scraped away snow from the base of one of
the old buildings near the climb to the castle. He found
more of that cable. The snow kept people indoors last
night, now it's concealing the cable this morning.'

'Where does the cable end? Can we cut it?'

'My guess is that if we did it would blow us sky-high. It
runs to the top of the castle keep - where someone
watching can press the button at the right moment.'

Butler took long careful strides through the snow as he reached the heavy wooden door leading into the castle rearing up above him. The snow was a giveaway - other footprints had preceded his to this same doorway.

He turned the iron ring-handle slowly, making not a sound as he pushed the door inwards inch by inch. For a
sturdily built man Butler could move with deadly silence.
He held the Luger in his right hand as he padded inside,
closed the door with the same care behind him.

Waiting while he listened, while his eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light, he heard nothing. Ahead of him a stone staircase climbed alongside the outer wall of
the castle. He used a large handkerchief to clean snow off
the soles of his shoes. If it came to a showdown he did not want his feet slipping from under him. He began to mount
the staircase, following a trail of snow patches which he
guessed the man above him had left behind off his own
soles when he'd made the same ascent.

Butler came to a point where an archway led off the
main staircase to another narrower staircase which curved
up constantly. He guessed that this led up round the sides
of the looming turret to the high roof where he'd glimpsed a man with a weapon. Again Butler knew he was heading
in the right direction - a fresh tell-tale trail of snow
patches smeared the well-worn stone steps, steps
smoothed down by footfalls over the centuries.

A draught of even colder fresh air warned him he was
near the exit at the summit. It was freezing cold on the
spiral staircase and the snow patches had frozen solid. He
took a firmer grip on the Luger as he edged round a
corner and saw an archway framing the clear blue sky
beyond. He had to get there in time - he knew Cardon
would be investigating what the opposition had planted
underneath the bridge.

'You really should get the hell out of here, Paula,' Cardon
warned. 'I make one false move deactivating
this bomb
and we both end up playing harps in the sky.'

'You mean two and a quarter of us,' Paula joked to
hide her fear. 'Don't forget Puss. He would take a fancy
to me at this moment.'

The cat had come running back to her, had reached up
with its forepaws on her right leg. She'd picked it up and
tickled it under its ear while Cardon made his preliminary
examination with a pencil torch. Philip, she thought,
always seemed to carry a complete tool-kit with him.

'Can't I help you in some way?' she pressed.

'Well...'

He was reluctant to agree, but he knew it would be
safer if he had an extra pair of hands. No, he decided,
scare her well away from this potential tomb before he
started experimenting. He gestured with the secateurs
he'd taken from a small cloth hold-all.

'Look, Paula, this is the score. I count six sticks of
dynamite - probably stolen from a stone quarry. Plenty of them with explosives stores in the Vosges. Now - to
neutralize, make them inert sticks of nothing - I have to cut six cables attached to six detonators. It's a crude but effectively improvised bomb. So I cut each of the green
cables...'

'Not the red ones?' The cat was still purring as she
tickled it under the ear. 'I always thought red was for
danger.'

'That is the crude trick they played.' Cardon turned his
pink healthy face towards Paula and grinned. 'I've
checked this thingumajig carefully. To render it harmless
I've got to snip through six
green
cables. That was their idea of a boobytrap. Assuming, of course, I know what
I'm doing. You know what an explosives expert will tell you? That you can never rely on explosives reacting as
they're supposed to. Still want to risk hanging about here?'

'What can I do to help?'

'It's your funeral - mine too. See this canvas bag I
brought from the bike? As I snip a cable I'll take hold of a
stick of dynamite and hand it to you. Then you lay it
carefully in the bottom of the bag. Put the next jigger alongside it.'

'What are we waiting for?' Paula enquired as she placed the cat in the snow.

'I don't like it,' Tweed said from his seat in the Espace.
'Philip has found something under that bridge - and Paula
is down there with him. I'm going to see what's going on.'
Newman grasped him by the arm, forced him down
back into his seat.

'You're going nowhere at all. What's the matter with
you? Lost your capacity for waiting? You've always been hot on that aspect of our work. How many times have you
told members of your team who were getting impatient that they must learn to wait?'

'I suppose you're right.'

'I know I am,' Newman said firmly. 'We may be under
observation. Two people under the bridge is enough. Just hope there's no big bang.'

Butler stood three steps below the archway leading out on
to the flat roof. He held the Luger gripped in both hands, aimed at the Norman arch. He was waiting to hear something that would tell him where the man - or men - who had climbed the tower before him were located.

The waiting was getting on his nerves. He couldn't
forget the cable he'd found by scraping his
foot along the
base of the stone wall of a house near the castle. He
couldn't forget that Cardon was probably now beneath
the bridge, fooling around with God knew what devilish
device.

The pressure was almost unbearable, the urge to dash out on to the roof, but he resisted the overwhelming
temptation. Then, without warning, the back of a heavily
built man clad in a windcheater and jeans appeared as he stood close to the edge of the low parapet. Butler realized
he was staring at something through binoculars. He spoke
to some unseen person. The twang was
American.

'Gary, that friggin' Espace is still stuck a distance from
the bridge. Looks like they could be staying there all day.
Would the bomb reach them? Debris from the bridge?
Great hunks of rock. Shall we give it a try?'

'Norton said to wait till it was on the bridge.'

'Gary, Norton is the friggin' Invisible Man. We can see
the situation. And that girl who was fooling with that cat
has gone to earth under the bridge. What say we give it a try? Hell, Norton is probably filling his belly in some upmarket restaurant in Strasbourg while we freeze.'

'If you say so, Mick. But it was you who...'

Butler jumped on to the platform. Mick, by the parapet,
reacted with the speed of a pro, hauled out an automatic
from inside his windcheater. He never had a chance to take
aim as two bullets from Butler's 9-mm. Luger slammed
into his chest. The force of the bullets toppled the thug
over the edge. Butler never saw his arms and legs splay in
his final fall into eternity. He had swung the Luger's muzzle
to where Gary was crouched over a square box with a
handle protruding a foot from the top. Gary's clawed
hands descended, ready to grasp the handle, to depress the
plunger.

Butler shot him twice in the left armpit. Gary jerked
upright, blood streaming over his windcheater, staggering
above the deadly box. Butler walked forward, used the
muzzle of his weapon to shove the reeling American to the
brink. He fell backwards and this time Butler saw what
looked like a matchstick man plunging into the depths,
both arms stretched out like a swimmer. He struck a
projecting rock, was thrown off it by his own momentum
and vanished into a tangle of deep undergrowth. No sign of
Mick. He must have vanished into the same wilderness.

Butler slid the Luger back inside his hip holster, bent over the detonating mechanism. Cardon had trained him
in explosives and Butler realized this was a crude
improvised effort, reminiscent of photographs he'd seen of
similar devices used in the First World War.

He took hold of the handle gently, twisted it slowly. It
unscrewed anti-clockwise. He lifted the handle clear of the
box, went to the edge of the parapet and threw the handle
into the undergrowth which now concealed two bodies.

* * *

Paula had taken five of the six sticks of dynamite from
Cardon and placed them carefully in the open canvas bag.
The danger came from a most unexpected direction.

'Here you are. That's the last one. All OK,' Cardon
said as he handed Paula the sixth stick of dynamite.

She had reached out her right hand, had grasped the
stick, when the fat cat appeared out of nowhere, leapt up
on to her left arm. It must have weighed almost nine
pounds and threw her off balance.

She performed several reflex actions at once. Moving
her right foot out, ramming it deep into the snow, she stood straddled in a desperate attempt to maintain her
balance. Still gripping the dynamite stick in her right
hand, she clutched at the great ball of fur and muscle with
her left hand, hugging it to her breast. The cat dug its forepaws into the shoulder of her padded jacket, which at
least relieved her of some of the weight. For Paula, the
last straw was when it began to purr with pleasure.

'I could kill you,' she said in a deliberately affectionate
tone which wouldn't disturb it.

'Stay just as you are,' Cardon said. 'I'm going to take the stick out of your hand. I'll tell you when to let go.
Easy does it
...
Now, I've got it. . .'

Crouching down, he slid the last stick alongside the others, used a collection of chamois cloths he kept inside
the bag to separate one stick from another. When he'd
zipped the bag closed he looked
up.

'I could throw this hunk into that frozen stream,' Paula
told him.

The cat, still purring, had closed its eyes. It was going to sleep - unlike Norton who was standing in the main
street of Kaysersberg, waiting expectantly.