Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

He was still unconscious when they threw him off the edge of the cliff onto the rocks and the waters of the Atlantic far below.

Fitzduane slept a sound, dreamless sleep and woke up the following morning feeling cheerful and rested.

After Etan had left for the studios, he made himself a large pot of black coffee, put his feet up in front of the crackling fire, and began reviewing what he had learned so far. It came to him that if you're the kind of person who turns over stones – and most people learn not to early in life – what comes crawling out can be disconcerting.

He started with his meeting with Kilmara the previous evening. A computer search had thrown up the fact that Draker was more than a select school for the children of the rich and powerful. Out of a full complement of sixty pupils – now fifty-eight – no fewer than seventeen were designated "PT" on the Ranger computer printout.

"Computer people prefer to talk in bits and bytes," Kilmara had said, "but one of the advantages of getting in at the start of the Rangers was that I was able to twist the buggers' arms to make them take some cognizance of the English language. ‘PT’ stands for ‘possible target.’ It's not a high-level classification, but it means that, in theory, you take some precautions and you think twice when some incident occurs involving someone with ‘PT’ after his or her name."

"Tell me more," said Fitzduane.

"Do I detect a flutter of interest, Hugo?" said Kilmara. "Relax, my son. Thousands of people in Ireland have a designation of ‘PT’ or higher: politicians, businessmen, diplomats, visiting absentee landlords of the English variety, and God and the computer only know who else."

"But why these particular seventeen students?" asked Fitzduane.

"Oh, it has nothing to do with them as such," said Kilmara. "It has to do with families and backgrounds and the like. For instance, included in the Draker seventeen at present are a minor Saudi princeling – and there're thousands of those knocking around – a cousin of the Kennedy clan, two children of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the son of a Japanese automobile tycoon… Well, you get the drift."

"How about Rudi von Graffenlaub and the girl, Toni Hoffman?"

"In our baby computer system, nada," said Kilmara. "But that doesn't mean there shouldn't have been. It's a rough-and-ready classification. Deciding who might be a terrorist or criminal target is very much a matter of judgment. To make life more confusing, fashions change in the terrorist business. It's politicians during one phase and businessmen the next. For all I know, it will be garbage collectors after that – or pregnant mothers. It's all show biz in this game. It's the media impact that counts."

"So what do you do about these PTs, apart from giving them a couple of initials on computer input?"

"Well," said Kilmara, "if one of them drowns in the municipal swimming pool, we drain it a bit faster, but that's about the size of it. Basically it's the government contribution to the media game. It's called taking every reasonable precaution. It helps to cover the official ass if something does happen."

"Were you always so cynical?" said Fitzduane, "or did someone salt your baby food?"

Kilmara turned his cigarette lighter into a small flamethrower to work on his pipe. Success achieved, he stood up from his chair and walked across to a whiteboard screwed to the wall. He picked up a black dry-wipe felt pen and started to write.

"You find it odd, Hugo, that we don't do much more? Well, let me throw a few figures at you. They're a little rough, but they're accurate enough to make the point, and the same situation applies to most other Western European countries."

"We have about ten thousand police in this country to deal with about three and a half million people. Police work is a twenty-four-hour-a-day business and involves a great many things other than guarding against terrorism, so at any one time the force would be stretched to the extreme to free up from routine duties any more than a thousand, and even that would mean drawing manpower from all over Ireland. In the wee hours manpower resources are even more limited. At such times it's an interesting thought that the entire country's internal security is looked after by a mere few hundred.

"Now, to set against the resources I've described – and I have left the army out of the equation to keep things simple – we have more than eight thousand names classified ‘PT’ or higher, and remember ‘PT’ is only a judgment. We could probably triple that number if we did our homework. Now, it takes at least six trained personnel to provide reasonable security for one target. That means we would need a minimum total of forty-eight thousand trained bodyguards.

"We don't have them. We can't afford them. And we really don't need them. As I have mentioned before, there just aren't that many terrorist incidents – just enough to keep the likes of Gunther and me in reading and drinking money."

"Amen to that," said Gunther. He closed his copy of the book he had been reading, Winnie-the-Pooh, with a snap. "Great book," he said. "No sex and no violence. I'd be out of a job in Pooh Corner."

"Shut up and have a drink," said Kilmara, "and let's see if we can make some sense out of our Wiesbaden friends' enigmatic communication."

"Wiesbaden?" asked Fitzduane. "How does Wiesbaden enter the picture?"

Kilmara slid open the top drawer of his desk and removed his service automatic. Fitzduane noticed with some relief that the safety was on.

Kilmara gestured with his pistol. "People think this is how we fight terrorism. Not so." He tossed the weapon back into the drawer and closed it with a flourish. "Firepower plays a part, of course, but the real secret is intelligence, and the key to that, these days, is the computer."

He looked across at Gunther. "You tell him, Gunther. It's your Heimat, and you like the things."

"Wiesbaden is the headquarters of the BKA, the Bundeskriminalamt," said Gunther. "The BKA is, very roughly, the German equivalent of the FBI. It has primary responsibility for counterterrorism, with my old outfit, GSG-9, providing muscle when terrorists have been identified and located. The BKA has been very successful at hunting down terrorists, and one of the secrets of this success is the Wiesbaden computer" – he grinned – ”better known as the Kommissar."

"It's quite an installation," interjected Kilmara. "I was there a year or so ago. It's all glass and concrete and sits on a hill that, appropriately enough, used to be a place of execution. More than three thousand acolytes feed the beast in Wiesbaden alone, and the budget runs to hundred of millions of deutsche marks. They don't just record information. The positively vacuum it up. Names, descriptions, addresses, relatives, ancestors, contacts, personal habits, food preferences, sexual idiosyncrasies, speech patterns – you name it, anything that might in some way contribute to the hunt gets entered."

"Twelve million constantly updated files, and the number is climbing," said Gunther with pride.

George Orwell's 1984 has arrived, thought Fitzduane. It just hasn't been noticed. He took the whiskey Kilmara had poured him.

'Very interesting," he said, "but what has the Kommissar go to do with my modest investigation?"

Kilmara held up his glass. " Slainte!"

" Prosit!" said Gunther, similarly equipped.

"Ole!" said Fitzduane a little sourly. Games were being played.

Kilmara slid a file across the desk. "One of the twelve million," he said. "Reads kind of sanitized."

Fitzduane picked up the thin file. It was labeled: RUDOLF VON GRAFFENLAUB (DECEASED).

The young German tourist and his pretty Italian girlfriend had flown into Dublin the night before not he direct Swissair flight from Zurich. The German checked his Japanese watch when they landed. In the predictable, boring way of the Swiss, the flight had been on time.