The Ludwig Conspiracy(147)

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.





42





WHILE 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.”