Silence sat in the room, an uninvited guest.
Jason Sin, still in black tie, had been speaking on the telephone for several minutes. He put down the receiver and stared sullenly at the photographs strewn over the surface of the table. Three men, Germans, stood facing him with their faces purposefully blank, not speaking until they were spoken to. They were his personal bodyguards and knew very well what was about to happen. A fourth man was sitting, slumped in a chair in front of Sin, his eyes cast down. This was the bodyguard that Bond had attacked outside the schloss. His gun had been taken from him. His jacket hung loose.
‘It is most unfortunate.’ Sin seemed to have taken several minutes to find the right formulation of words. He took off his wire-framed glasses and laid them on the desk. The brown eyes in the olive-skinned face were neither angry nor disappointed. They gave nothing away. ‘It would seem that half a dozen photographs have been taken. It is unclear whether the intruder knew what he was looking for but I would suspect that the theft was opportunistic. Certain documents are also missing but they were in Korean and were actually insignificant.’ He was speaking in English not German and although the four men were listening intently, it was not clear how much they understood. It didn’t matter. He was turning over the thoughts in his head, assessing the situation more for his benefit than theirs. ‘There was a danger that my associates would consider that the entire operation was now compromised but, fortunately, I have managed to persuade them otherwise.’ He paused. ‘You have let me down very badly, Herr Luther. I have to say I am disappointed.’
Luther was the man in the chair. He nodded slowly. As a result of the damage that Bond had inflicted on him, it would have been difficult to do otherwise. There was a dark mauve bruise around his neck and he had one arm clasped across his stomach. Even so, a glimmer of defiance remained in the bright blue eyes. Bond had guessed correctly. Luther’s pistol, the Sauer 38H, was a souvenir of the Luftwaffe. Luther had risen through the ranks, not as a flier but as a commander in one of the seven Feldregimenter. He had fought against the Soviets on the eastern front. He was a survivor. ‘I understand you completely, mein Herr,’ he said.
‘I really don’t know quite where to begin,’ Sin continued. ‘As Head of Security both at this castle and at my other businesses in Germany, it would have been your responsibility, at the very least, to check the names of the guests invited to this gathering tonight.’
‘The invitations were informal. Many of the guests came with friends. I was never given a complete list of names.’
‘That may be the case. But you should have demanded it. And as it happens, this man – Bond – was here under his own name.’ The tiniest furrow of anger picked at the skin above Sin’s eye but the rest of his face ignored it. ‘It now turns out that James Bond is well known to my colleagues in Moscow. He is a highly respected member of the British Secret Service. He was doubtless sent here to protect the racing driver Lancy Smith. It cannot be a coincidence that he was involved in the supposed accident at Nürburgring. We can only surmise what it was that drew him here tonight. My guess is that he probably saw me with Gaspanov.’ Once again, Sin spoke to himself. ‘I told him. I did tell him that he was making a mistake, forcing me to meet him here. But would he listen? The trouble is that his organisation has made too many mistakes and as a result he refuses to delegate. He has to go over everything face to face even though a telephone conversation would have more than sufficed. He must see for himself that everything is going according to plan. And what is the result? We draw attention to ourselves and now we have British intelligence on our backs.’
Sin’s eyes flickered as he remembered the man in the chair. ‘That is why we have to be so careful, Herr Luther. We cannot make mistakes at our end. And yet you have behaved in a manner which has been frankly amateurish.’ He paused. ‘What were you doing outside?’
‘I went out just for a minute,’ Luther said.
‘A dereliction of duty. I never gave you permission to leave the building. Your place was beside me. I might have been attacked while you were enjoying yourself in the night air and anyway it allowed Bond to creep up on you, to knock you unconscious, to use you as a diversion.’
‘I did not see the person. We cannot be sure it was Bond.’
‘Please, Herr Luther. Do not insult my intelligence. Who else could it have been?’ Sin ran a tongue along his lips. There was something slightly obscene about the gesture, the little grey knife cutting a slit through the flesh. ‘Bond carried you into the front hall and immediately, without any thought, the guard on the stairs abandoned his position.’
One of the three men stiffened but said nothing.
Luther was about to reply but Sin held up a hand. ‘I have almost finished. There were no guards on the upper corridor. The door to this room was unlocked, despite the most sensitive material remaining in plain sight following my meeting with Colonel Gaspanov. ‘Shi bai kepu seck yi!’ Koreans do not often swear but Sin had used one of the filthiest expressions that existed in his language. ‘There were no security measures taken at all.’
‘The pressure alarm was activated.’
‘Too little, too late. By the time your men reached the room – and it might have been sooner had they not been attending to you – Bond had gone. And just to conclude what had already been a disastrous series of events, they were unable to find him. Do you have any idea where he is now?’
‘We do not believe he is in the building.’
‘Lamentable. Truly lamentable.’
‘This has never happened before, mein Herr.’ The Head of Security knew that his words were futile but spoke them anyway. ‘It will not happen again.’
‘Of that much we can at least be certain.’
Jason Sin put his glasses back on, then reached into his inner pocket and took out a deck of playing cards. As soon as Luther saw them, he swallowed hard, the colour draining out of his face. Sin cleared a space on the table and then spread the cards out so that the backs were showing. They were very beautiful, each one decorated with images of birds, trees and flowers, painted in the Japanese style. ‘You have heard me speak before of Hanafuda,’ Sin continued. ‘They are playing cards which are very popular in Korea and which I often used as a child. Hanafuda translates as flower cards. As you can see, there are forty-eight of them. The suits are represented by the twelve months of the year and each suit has four different flowers. In Korea we used to play Hwatu, which means, literally, “the battle of the flowers,” but there were also other games such as Koi-Koi and Go-Stop.
‘These cards are, however, different. I have had them customised to my needs and as you are very well aware, Herr Luther, I am not intending to play with you. These cards are going to decide the manner of your death.’
‘Please—’
Before Luther could say any more, Sin raised a hand. ‘Do not speak. Do not attempt anything rash. I am armed. There are three men, your former colleagues, standing behind you. Let us try to do this with dignity. It may go better for you.’
He composed himself, his hands crossed in front of him. The High Priest. The fortune teller.
‘There is nothing more random nor more certain than death. I will die. You will die. The only questions – and they are very important ones – are when and how? I have had experience of death, Herr Luther. I have come face to face with it in a way that few people could describe and so these questions have become something of a preoccupation. When and how. That is the great power of death. It is what makes death so fearsome. And I have taken that power upon myself.
‘Right now, in front of you, there are forty-five different ways to die. They are printed on the backs of these cards. Some of them demand your own co-operation. You may be asked to take poison or to slit your wrists. Some of them are fast and painless. There is a decapitation card – which is messy but dramatic – and there is also the option of a bullet to the head. A few are prolonged and unpleasant. A month ago, in America, we tortured a man to death, an experience that took several days. In your case, you might be electrocuted or drowned. Let me assure you that I have no particular preference. I have no malice towards you. I am punishing you because you need to be punished but, speaking for myself, I feel nothing.’
Luther sat there, breathing heavily. He was staring at the colourful backs of the cards with utter loathing, as if they were the ugliest things he had ever seen.
‘Pick a card,’ Sin commanded.
Luther didn’t move. ‘Please, sir, I have worked for you for two years. I have done everything you ever asked me.’
‘Do not make me choose one for you, Herr Luther. Because if you do, you’ll make me angry and I can assure you that I will choose something very nasty. But perhaps you have forgotten – I have permitted you a very small chance of escape. I said that there were forty-eight cards but only forty-five of them carry what you might call methods of execution. Three cards are blank. Should you happen to choose one of them, we will forget this whole unpleasant business and say no more about it. A one in sixteen chance. Not great odds, but better than no chance at all. You have thirty seconds to make your choice.’
Still Luther seemed to take an age to decide. His chest rose and fell as he stared at the row of brightly coloured illustrations, almost trying to see through them. Nobody spoke. There was no clock in the room. Time was measured by heartbeats. At the last moment, almost without thinking, Luther reached out and turned over a card near the centre of the spread. It was not blank. There were two words printed in capital letters, in English.
Luther threw himself forward, his hands reaching out for Sin, but the other three men had been waiting for this moment. As one they were onto him, pinning him down as Sin stood up and moved away from the table. ‘We will need a rope,’ he said.
Two men held their former colleague while the third left the room, going downstairs and out to the jetty. He returned a few minutes later carrying a thick coil of rope that had been used to tie the boats. Sin glanced up at the ceiling. A single beam ran the full width of the room, made from wood felled from a tree two hundred years before. He took hold of the chair on which he had been sitting and carried it round, placing it beneath the beam.
‘I will not do this!’ Luther hissed. His face was white. He was swaying slightly on his feet. ‘It is madness!’ He turned to the other men and spoke to them rapidly in German. The men looked away. It was as if they had not heard him. He turned back to Sin and now there were tears in his eyes. ‘Herr Sin. This is not my fault – what happened tonight. It was the responsibility of all of us. Please, sir. I have a wife and two sons. I beg of you!’
‘Do I look as if I’m about to change my mind?’ Sin interrupted. ‘It’s late and I want to go to bed. I’d get on with it, if I were you. There are many worse cards you could have chosen and if you won’t play by the rules, you will regret it. Come on, now. You’ve seen all this before. You need to make a noose.’
‘No.’
‘If you refuse me, I will bring your wife and children here. You will see them die first.’
Luther was shaking. ‘I don’t know how . . .’
‘It is not difficult. Any knot will do. It just has to go around your neck.’
There is a moment when every fighter knows his time has come, when he is trapped in a situation from which there is no way out or when he has been wounded and knows that the blood will not be staunched. Luther had arrived at that moment and something went out of his face, as if a switch had been thrown. Sensing it, the two men eased their grip. At the same time, the third produced a gun, stepping aside to have a clear line of fire. Luther took the rope. It lay in his hand like something dead. He stared at it, then, with a series of short, jerky movements tied a knot, leaving a loop large enough to pass over his head. Finally he climbed onto the chair and attached the other end of the rope to the beam. The noose hung in front of him.
‘Herr Sin, will you say to my wife and to my sons . . .’ Luther addressed the Korean, his face framed by the rope that was about to kill him.
‘I will tell them that you died in an accident, nothing more nothing less. How old are your children?’
‘Nine and fourteen.’
‘Very young to lose a father. But there you are . . .’
Luther put the rope around his neck. He searched for some last words to say but couldn’t find them. Feebly, he rotated his legs, trying to topple the chair. It didn’t move. He tried again. It toppled to one side. His body came crashing down.
Sin went back to the table and gathered up the card. He tapped the ends to straighten the pack and returned them to their box. Finally, he glanced at the German who had been holding the gun. He was the youngest of the three. His face was filled with horror. ‘Your name?’ Sin asked.
‘Artmann, mein Herr.’
‘All right, Artmann. I’m promoting you. You’ll take over Herr Luther’s responsibilities. Start by getting rid of the body in the lake. Make sure it’s properly weighted down.’
‘Jawohl, mein Herr.’
‘Good night.’ Sin slipped the cards back into his pocket and left the room.