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pulled one young nurse out of the crowd.   She was tall and red-haired and
beautiful.   She still wore her white
uniform.   It happened so quickly.   One of the young Simbas — some were only
thirteen or fourteen and among the cruelest — picked up a panga and almost
casually hacked her head off.   It took
only a few blows.   It was quite a quick
death.   The nurse was Anne-Marie.   We'd been married just seven weeks."
    Etan had not
known what to say or do.   What she was
hearing was so truly terrible and so much beyond her experience that she just
sat there motionless.   Then she put both
her arms around her lover and drew him to her.   After he'd finished speaking, Fitzduane had remained silent.   The sun was now a dull semicircle vanishing
into the sea.   It had grown much
colder.   She could see the lights of the
castle keep.
    Fitzduane had
kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight.   "This is a damp bloody climate, isn't
it?" he had said.   To warm
themselves up, they played ducks and drakes with flat stones on the lake in the
twilight.   Night had fallen by the time
they made it back to Duncleeve, debating furiously as to who had won the
game.   The last few throws had taken
place in near darkness.

     

4

     
    The new Jury's
Hotel in
Dublin
looked like nothing so much as the presidential palace of a newly emerging
nation.   The original Jury's had vanished
except for the marble, mahogany, and brass Victorian bar that had been shipped
in its entirety to
Zurich
by concerned Swiss bankers as a memorial to James Joyce.
    Fitzduane
wended his way through a visiting Japanese electronics delegation, headed
toward the new bar, and ordered a Jameson.   He was watching the ice melt and thinking about postmortems and life and
the pursuit of happiness when Günther arrived.   He still looked baby-faced, so you tended not to notice at first quite
how big he was.   Close up you could see
lines that hadn't been there before, but he still looked fit and tough.
    A wedding
party slid in through the glass doors.   The bride was heavily swaddled in layers of white man-made fiber.   She was accompanied by either the headwaiter
or the bridegroom, it was hard to tell which.   The bride's train swished into the pound and
began to sink.   Fitzduane thought it was
an unusual time of year for an Irish wedding, but then maybe not when you
looked at her waistline.
    The bride's escort
retrieved her train and wrung it out expertly into the fountain.   He did it neatly and efficiently, as if it were a routine chore or he were used to killing
chickens.   The train now looked like a
wet diaper as it followed the bride into family life.   Fitzduane ignored the symbolism and finished
his Jameson.
    "You're
losing your puppy fat, Günther," he said.   "You're either working too hard or playing too hard."
    "It's the
climate here, and I'm getting older.   I
think I'm rusting."   The accent was
German and pronounced, but with more than a hint of Irishness to it.   He'd been in
Ireland
for some considerable
time.   The government had once borrowed
him from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), the West German antiterrorist force, and
somehow he'd stayed.
    "Doesn't it
rain in
Germany
?"
    "Only
when required," replied Günther.   "We're a very orderly nation."
    "The
colonel coming?" asked Fitzduane.   He patted the airline bag slung from Günther's shoulder and then hefted
it, trying to work out the weapon inside.   Something Heckler & Koch at a guess.   Germans liked using German products, and
Heckler & Koch was state of the art.   The weapon had a folding stock, and if he knew Kilmara, it was unlikely
to be a nine millimeter.   Kilmara had a
combat-originated bias against the caliber, which he thought lacked stopping
power.   "The model thirty-three
assault rifle?"
    Günther
grinned and nodded.   "You keep
up-to-date," he said.   "Very good.   But
the colonel is upstairs.   You're dining
in a private room; these