The Ludwig Conspiracy (51 page)

“Just the two of us, girlie,” he said at last. “Looks like it’s time for the showdown.”

The giant hummed a tune, and it took Sara some time to work out that it was supposed to be Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water
.
” Lancelot put his two guns down on the ground in front of him and came toward Sara, still humming, his huge hands raised. He looked like the crazed priest of some ancient, forgotten deity.

Keep your head clear,
she thought.
This guy is a sadist pumped full of testosterone, a fit fighting machine, a murderous mercenary, but apart from that, he’s a perfectly normal human being. And human beings make mistakes.

“‘When darkness comes,’” sang Lancelot in his deep growling bass, “‘and pain is all around . . .’” He smiled broadly. “I don’t need a gun for what comes next. I’ll be doing it by hand. And tomorrow morning I’m booking the flight that will take me to my yacht in the Caribbean. Too bad you won’t be able to come, too.”

Sara stood in the middle of the bridge, which vibrated slightly under Lancelot’s footsteps. The giant was only a few feet away.
She looked frantically around, trying to calculate her chances of flight. They were very few. The situation was, to put it mildly, hopeless.

If I turn around and run for the forest on the other side of the gorge, he’ll pick up his Uzi and shoot me. If I stay where I am, he’ll throw me off the bridge. If I fight, he’ll throttle me. Which would hurt less?

Day had dawned now, and the first rays of sun were bathing the bridge in an almost unreal light. The chest-high handrails to the left and right were made of metal, and the planks of the bridge were solid, stable timber with narrow cracks between them. Through one slightly wider crack, Sara could see that the bridge rested on an arched iron structure anchored in the rock on both sides of the gorge. Suddenly she stopped short.

Could
that
offer a chance?

Looks like I don’t have any choice . . .

Quick as lightning, Sara kicked off her impractical shoes, then feinted a movement to the right, and the next moment climbed over the handrail on her left. Lancelot was so surprised that he let valuable time pass before finally moving after her with a roar. When he reached the middle of the bridge, Sara had already climbed down to one of the iron girders. The giant leaned over the handrail and stared at her, his one sound eye full of hatred.

“That won’t get you anywhere, you bitch!” he shouted. “I’ll pick you off like a bird with a broken wing!”

Running back to the two weapons, which were still lying on the planks of the end of the bridge nearer the castle, he thrust the Glock into his belt and reached for the Uzi semiautomatic. Meanwhile, Sara made her way hand over hand farther down her girder, and from there she climbed down onto a horizontal strut directly under the bridge. She held two posts firmly, one in each hand, and now ventured a brief glance down.

The sight made her suddenly feel nauseated. For a brief moment, the strength went out of her fingers. She just barely managed to cling to the iron.

Some three hundred feet below her, the waterfall poured through a small basin and into the valley. The walls of rock dropping to the bottom were breathtakingly steep. A slight wind blew through her hair and tugged at her clothes.

Now the bridge itself began to swing. It took Sara a moment to realize that the swinging was not the work of the wind but of Lancelot, who was running along the planks with all his weight. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him all the more clearly for that.

“Where are you? Where?” he shouted into the wind. “Have you flown away, little birdie? Damn it, where are you hiding?”

Sara breathed a sigh of relief. Obviously Lancelot couldn’t see her from where he was behind the guardrails. She heard his heavy boots stamp over the planks, back and forth, faster and faster as he looked for his victim.

“Bloody woman.”

Suddenly the Uzi semiautomatic barked. In alarm, Sara looked up and saw with horror that several bullets had come through the planks. One shot hissed by close to her ear.

“Where are you, Sara?”

Lancelot’s voice was almost cracking. Once again, several planks splintered. Sara pressed her lips together to keep from screaming, and thus giving her hiding place away. What now? It was only a matter of time before one of the bullets hit her. Below her, on the north side of the bridge, she saw an iron basket structure about six feet wide, presumably fitted for building workers. Maybe she could take refuge there? But how on earth was she to travel the hundred feet or so to the structure below the bridge? Sara knew that if she looked down again, everything would probably go black before her eyes. Moreover, any movement would give away her whereabouts. There had to be some other way to do it.

Sara’s brain was working at top speed as bullets pinged off the metal structure around her. At last she formed something like a plan in her head, clouded as it was by adrenaline. She had once done some judo as a child. She didn’t remember much about it, but one rule stuck in her memory.

Your opponent’s weight is your own strength . . .

Sara nodded grimly. More than two hundred pounds could mean a lot of strength.

She took off the belt of her dress, a thin polyacrylic cord that had been nipping at her waist. Experimentally, she tugged at her improvised rope. It seemed as if it would take some weight. The question was, how much?

Holding her breath, she pushed herself in the direction of the guardrail until she was back on the vertical girder by which she had climbed down. Finally, she crawled up, centimeter by centimeter, as if on a climbing pole, until she was directly below the sides of the bridge.

Lancelot peppered the planks with bullets, the floor of the bridge shattering into hundreds of wooden splinters. The noise was so infernal that Sara was afraid she would go deaf. The shots must have been heard down in the valley, but it would certainly be too late for her by the time anyone placed them. She had to act now.

And she did.

In a brief pause between two volleys of shots, she gave a quiet little whimper. It was a very slight sound, but loud enough for her to be sure that Lancelot would hear it.

“What the devil . . .”

She heard his footsteps marching over the bridge, coming toward her faster and faster. Nine feet, six feet, one foot. . . Now he must be directly above her. Sara let out one last whimper, and then Lancelot’s arm, holding the Uzi, appeared over her head. He was bending over the side of the bridge. The semiautomatic, his finger on the trigger, his hairy arm . . . At last she saw Lancelot’s face as he leaned over the guardrail, which came only up to his stomach. He squinted his one sound eye, aiming at her face.

“Game over, baby,” he growled. “Now you’ll find out what . . .”

At that moment, Sara seized the wrist of the giant just above her with her right hand. Closing her eyes, she took her other hand off the girder . . .

And let herself drop.

In a fraction of a second, Lancelot’s expression changed to panic. He waved his free arm about; he staggered; then his heavy body toppled over the guardrail like a block of stone. A shot went off, and Sara felt a burning sensation on her right temple. For a brief moment their eyes met, and then Sara let go of Lancelot’s hand. Screaming, he fell to the depths below with outstretched arms, while the Uzi and the Glock fell after him like a couple of plastic toys.

The scream stopped abruptly as the giant’s head smashed into a rocky wall. His body turned over in the air a few times, and then he fell into the rushing water in the stone basin. Like a rotten piece of wood, he bobbed up and down, until the falling water washed him down in the direction of the valley.

Sara hung from the cord belt of her dress, swaying gently back and forth at a height of almost three hundred feet.

“Yacht in the Caribbean, eh?” she shouted down into the gorge as tears ran down her face. “Have a good trip down the river, asshole! And you’d better not try to haunt me. Then I’ll . . .”

An ugly tearing sound stopped her. One by one, the threads of her cord belt were giving way. She spun helplessly in the wind. She moved her legs, then rocked back and forth, trying to reach the safety of the iron girder diagonally above her. More threads gave way. She desperately reached out her right arm; she wriggled and twitched, until she finally managed to catch hold of the iron with her hand and pull herself up.

Sara clung to the thick pole like a child clinging to its mother. The cord of the belt was almost entirely gone but for one thin thread. Almost lifelessly, she slid down the iron pole, pressing her legs to the cold metal and closing her eyes.

She felt an overpowering sense of faintness rise in her, and the gorge rushed toward her like a fist ready to strike.

W
HILE THE SUN ROSE
in the sky, a glowing red globe to the east, Luise, Steven, and his two guards went up a well-worn flight of stone steps to the peak of the Falkenstein. The entire Alpine mountain chain stretched out before their eyes like a never-ending ribbon of rock running all the way to the horizon. The abyss dropped steeply away beside Steven’s feet; only a step farther and he would fall more than one hundred sixty feet to the depths.

“See that little white mark over there?” Luise handed him a pair of field glasses. When Steven looked through them, he could indeed make out Neuschwanstein between the trees.

“You can see Falkenstein from the window of the throne room on a clear day,” the industrialist told him. “Ludwig immortalized the castle on a picture there of St. George.”

Steven remembered the model in the museum at Herrenchiemsee, the fairy-tale plaster castle with its battlements and bay windows. But the ruin up here on the peak was not in the least like a legendary king’s castle. He stared blankly at a ruinous wall, about sixteen feet high and made of crumbling blocks of stone. In many places empty windows and embrasures could still be seen. More recently, a stairway with a rail had been fitted inside so that visitors could enjoy the magnificent view from a platform. Otherwise, the castle looked more like the remains of a tower battered by wind and weather for many hundreds of years. Steven studied a rusty notice giving information that had been put up beside the ruin.

“In 1889 lightning struck here, and since then the whole of the eastern gable wall has been missing,”
he read aloud. “I assume that over the last century tourists have left no stone unturned here. So how are we supposed to find a single document? It probably fell to pieces long ago, and . . .”

“It exists and it is here!”

Luise’s shrill cry cut through the otherwise-peaceful morning silence, and even her two paladins turned around, startled.

“And if necessary, we ourselves will leave no stone unturned. Not a single stone. I have time. My family hasn’t waited more than a hundred years to lose patience now, at the last moment. If need be, we’ll stay here until we have dug up the entire peak.”

The glances exchanged by the two guards told Steven that they were far from enthusiastic at this prospect. Nonetheless, they obediently picked up their shovels and picks and began digging.

Meanwhile, the bookseller was staring across at the little white dot to the east that was Neuschwanstein. Steven’s thoughts were with Sara. What had Lancelot done to her? She had obviously been lying to Steven; yet he still loved her. Had she merely been using him to get her hands on the diary? Had it all been just an act? Sara had made him feel able to break away from his lonely, dusty world of books at last; she had made him feel young again. But the way it looked now, she was nothing but a fraud.

And probably dead already.

With tears in his eyes, Steven sat down beside a contorted old tree not far from the entrance to the castle and looked down into the yawning gulf. The damn diary had taken him back to his childhood and finally brought him here. Once again, he felt a desire to jump.

Then perhaps I’ll meet Sara again.

Tristan and Galahad picked about at the niches in the walls first and then began breaking several large blocks of stone out of the walls. Meanwhile, Luise prowled up and down the small courtyard of the castle like a panther in a cage.

“It must be here somewhere!” she cried. “Search, dig, keep those shovels working! Maybe Marot left a sign of some sort behind, something scratched on the rock,
something.
”

“Have you seen the gigantic heap of stones on the north side of the castle?” Steven asked, pointing behind him with a weary smile. “I suppose you’ve heard of Sisyphus, Luise?”

“Very funny, dear cousin.” Luise Manstein tossed him a shovel encrusted with mud. “I suggest you start in on that heap of stones right away. Galahad will go with you, so don’t get any stupid ideas.”

T
HEY DUG FOR
more than an hour, and in spite of the chilly fall wind, Steven soon had sweat running down his forehead. The mountain of rubble stretched the entire length of the castle ruins, a waste of limestone bedrock in pieces large and small, and to make matters more difficult, they were sometimes wedged together. Galahad kept looking at him darkly.

“Once we’ve found that bloody letter, it’ll be your turn,” he said. “I’ll stone you with my own hands. Every rock I have to turn over I’ll throw at your head.”

“This could take quite a while yet,” Steven replied, straightening up with a groan. His back ached from the unaccustomed manual labor. “If we’re out of luck, my beloved cousin will have us tear the entire castle apart.”

Steven went over to the contorted tree, where there were several bottles of water ready for them. As he drank deeply, he glanced down at the hotel. The helicopter still waited on its pad. A light drizzle of rain had set in, but all the same the pilot had already had to get rid of two early-morning hikers with Nordic walking sticks. Steven was briefly tempted to call to them for help. But probably that would have cost not just his own life, but also the lives of the innocent elderly couple.