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chest was forward, legs rigid with fear and exhaustion, and he was moving with glacial
slowness.
Rhona was making a slightly better job of the descent, but not by much. Awkwardly,
jerkily, but making progress of a kind, she trickled down the slope as slowly as she could,
trying not to get too far ahead of her miserable husband.
I waited.
At six hundred yards, I started to over-breathe, charging the blood with oxygen so I d be
ready to switch off the tap, and keep it switched off, from three hundred. I exhaled through the
side of the mouth, gently blowing away from the scope.
At four hundred yards, Dirk fell for about the fifteenth time, and didn t look in any hurry
to get up. As I watched him panting for breath, I pulled back on the knurled grip of the bolt,
and heard the firing-pin cock with a shatteringly loud click. Jesus, this shot was going to be
noisy. I suddenly found myself wondering about avalanches, and had to stop myself from
spinning into a wild fantasy of being buried under a thousand tons of snow. What if my body
wasn t found for a couple of years? What if this anorak was desperately unfashionable by the
time they hauled me out? I blinked five times, trying to steady my breath, my vision, my
panic. It was too cold for avalanches. For avalanches, you need a lot of snow, then a lot of sun.
We had neither. Get a grip. I squinted through the scope, and saw that Dirk was on his feet
again. On his feet, and looking at me.
Or at least, he was looking towards me, peering down into the trees while he scraped snow
out of his goggles.
He couldn t have seen me. It wasn t possible. I had buried myself behind a drift, digging
out the narrowest possible channel in which to rest the rifle, and whatever shape he was trying
to make out would have been disguised by the irregular jumble of trees. He couldn t have seen
me. So what was he looking at?
I gently eased my head down below the level of the drift and twisted round, checking for
some solitary langlaufer, or an errant chamois, or the chorus-line of No, No Nanette -
anything that might have caught Dirk s eye. I held my breath and turned my head slowly from
left to right, sweeping the hill for sounds.
Nothing.
I inched back up to the top of the drift, and squinted through the scope again. Left, right,
up, down.
No Dirk.
I bobbed my head up, the way they tell you never to do, and desperately searched the
stinging, blurring whiteness for some glimpse of him. My mouth suddenly seemed to taste of
blood, and my heart was hammering on the inside of my chest, frantic to get out.
There. Three hundred yards. Moving faster. He was having a go at a schuss, on a flatter
part of the slope, and it had carried him over to the far side of the piste. I blinked again, settled
my right eye to the scope, and closed my left.
At two hundred yards, I drew in a long, steady breath, pinched it off when my lungs
reached three-quarters full, and held it.
Dirk was traversing now. Traversing the slope, and my line of fire. I held him easily in the
sight - could have fired at any time - but I knew that this just had to be the surest shot of my
life. I nestled my finger on the trigger, taking up the slack of the mechanism, the slack of the
flesh between my second and third joint, and waited.
He stopped at about a hundred and fifty yards. Looked up at the mountain. Down the
mountain. Then turned his body towards me. He was sweating heavily, gasping with the effort,
with the fear, with the knowledge. I settled the cross-hairs on the exact centre of his chest. As
I d promised Francisco. As I d promised everyone.
Squeeze it. Never pull. Squeeze it as slowly and as lovingly as you know how.
Nineteen Good evening. This is the nine o clock news from the BBC. PETER SISSONS
We didn t leave Mürren for another thirty-six hours. That was my idea.
I told Francisco that the first thing they d do would be to check the train departures.
Anybody who left, or tried to leave, within twelve hours of the shooting, would be in for a hell
of a time, guilty or innocent.
Francisco had chewed his lip for a while, before gently smiling his agreement. I think that
staying in the village struck him as the cooler, more daring option, and coolness and daring
were qualities that Francisco definitely hoped to see one day, attached to his name in a
Newsweek profile. A moody picture, with the caption: Francisco: cool and daring .
Something like that.
The real reason I wanted to stay in Mürren was so that I could get a chance to speak to
Solomon, but I thought it probably best not to tell Francisco that.
So we hung about, separately, and gawped along with everyone else as the helicopters
arrived. First police, then Red Cross, then, inevitably, the television crews. Word of the
shooting was round the village in fifteen minutes, but most of the tourists seemed to be too
stunned to talk to each other about it. They wandered here and there, watching, frowning,
keeping their children close.
The Swiss sat in bars and murmured to each other; either they were upset, or they were
worried about the effect on business. It was hard to tell. They needn t have worried, of course.
By nightfall, the bars and restaurants were fuller than I d ever seen them. Nobody wanted to
miss out on an opinion, on a rumour, on any shred of interpretation they could hang on this
ghastly, terrible event.
First of all, they blamed the Iraqis, which seems to be standard procedure nowadays. The
theory lasted for an hour or so, until wise heads began to suggest that Iraqis couldn t have
done it, couldn t even have got into the village without people noticing. Accent, skin-colour,
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