The Tangled Web(144)

"I don't think it's a good idea. What can be so important? Brahe has to know that the Irishmen are in here. He's right outside the walls. With a lot of new friends."

"One more time, with where the various units are quartered and how much ammunition they have. Our commanders do not know about the gunpowder in the city armory. Once more, only."

"I guess we might as well try it. This opening isn't very big, though."

Heisel tossed out the rock tied to the end of the wire and started to swing it, aiming for enough momentum to get it over the roof. Ten feet or so below the window, the wire caught on a spike that someone, at an unknown date, for a long-forgotten reason, had pounded partway into the mortar about six inches above the window on the floor below. The rock jerked back, breaking the window.

The window happened to belong to the room assigned to Father Taaffe, who called a guard. That guard called some more guards, one of whom had a clever idea. He went outdoors and looked up while father Taaffe signaled from the window. Then he counted from the end of the building and identified the window above the priest's chamber. He identified the ones on either side of it, too, just to be on the safe side.

"Go," Brandt said. "My quarters are in this room. Yours are not. Go."

Heisel, a sensible man, went.

A group of guards caught Brandt, and hauled him in front of Butler, who turned him over to Gruyard for questioning. After some time, under extreme stress, he revealed Heisel's name.

Heisel's reaction to his own arrest was, "Well, tough shit."

Butler concluded that much of the "bad luck" that plagued him throughout this entire campaign had really been caused by these men and their tuna tin. He demanded information on when they were embedded with him, by whom, why, and what they were doing all along."

Gruyard went contentedly back to work.

Butler was truly astonished to hear that all this trouble and fuss was being made about the death of Schweinsberg and the raid into Fulda the autumn before.

"Talk about ancient history," he complained to Deveroux.

"Keep at them," he said to Gruyard.

The answers the two men reluctantly provided during the next session directed the interviewers toward Countess Anna Marie von Dohna's favored servant Dislav.

There was considerable discussion among those present in the torture chamber about whether or not Colonel Butler would really want to know this.

The conclusion was that even though he might not want to, he really needed to.

This was followed by considerably more discussion on the general topic of belling the cat.

Eventually they bucked it up the chain of command to Deveroux.

Butler was furious.

Butler's wife was even more furious when the guards came to arrest Dislav and transport him to the torture chamber.



Two of Deveroux's more mechanically inclined aides stared at the tuna tin.

"I am not an engineer, nor did I ever wish to be one," Turlough O'Brien said.

Ned Callaghan shook it. "The man whom Gruyard is questioning told the truth about one thing, at least. The object is dead."

"It certainly seems to be. It should be safe to open it, I guess."

An hour later, they stared at numerous small, oddly shaped, pieces of . . . unidentifiable stuff.

"Perhaps we shouldn't have taken it apart after all," Callaghan said. "Or, at least, maybe we should have taken notes and drawn a picture of how it looked when we first opened it."

"Maybe we should try to put it back together."

"Let's at least put it all back in the tin. After all, Colonel Butler doesn't have any idea what it looked like inside before we removed the lid."

Neither of them connected the tuna tin with the rock on a wire that had broken Father Taffe's window. Irish dragoon regiments in the service of Bavarian dukes were not exactly hotbeds of cutting edge technology.

Then it occurred to O'Brien to take the tuna tin to Geraldin's farrier, who was known to have a mechanical turn of mind. "Maybe he can figure it out," he said.

The farrier was in the middle of shoeing a horse, so they left it with his apprentice. Peter Schild realized right away that something really bad must have happened to Heisel and Brandt.

"I don't have the slightest idea what it is," he said. "You'll have to wait until Master Nugent can look at it." His bewilderment seemed very sincere. Caspar Zeyler might be a natural-born liar, but Schild was no slouch. What's more, he had been practicing the skill for months, now.



"Does this strike you as sort of, 'meanwhile, back at the ranch'?" Jeffie asked Hertling. "Just camping here and staring at a set of walls after we've been chasing all over the map?"

"We can only hope the ones you call 'the high mucky-mucks' are plotting something good. Something outstanding or excellent, even. I thought you enjoyed talking to your friends who came with you in the Ring of Fire."