“At Mariya’s insistence, we employ a gardener, fellow name of Lemuel Steptoe and his son, who live up the road in Manakin. And then there’s my chauffeur cum bodyguard cum the best goddamned automotive mechanic anybody has ever had … but hell, Rupen, you know him! Seraphino Mineo, the hard man my attorney got to help us with that Evelyn Mangold business, years ago, though for some reason I never pried into, that’s not the name he’s using now.”
“What does he call himself these days, Boghos? Mr. Cobra?”
Boghos shook his head. “No, all his IDs are in the name of Anonimo Beccacciniero. Maybe that was his real name all along, huh?”
“Not hardly,” said Rupen. “The literal translation of that name comes out as ‘Nameless Sniper.’ He’s a deeper man than you think he is, Boghos. The last time I saw him was in 1960, and he then was working for the … well, let’s just say he was with an American intelligence group. How long has he been with you?”
“About two and a half years, off and on, Rupen.”
“Off and on, Boghos? What do you mean?” asked Rupen.
“Well, there have been two or three times when he’s had to leave for Italy to visit his mother, who seems to be in very poor health. Those trips usually take him about a month. Also, he has relatives in New York City and he drives up there every so often, but he’s never gone more than a week at a time on those trips.”
Rupen just nodded. “And I’ll bet he leaves when he leaves at the drop of a hat, with little or no prior warning, eh, Boghos?”
“Why, yes … usually, Rupen. How did you know?”
Rupen did not answer the question, just asked another. “And why do you put up with an employee who disappears from time to time with no notice?”
“Because when he is around he’s invaluable, Rupen. I told you, he’s a fantastic mechanic, and with our nine cars, plus a pickup and two jeeps, he earns what I pay him and more. And if that were not enough, Anonimo saved my life last year, in Alaska.
“It was this brute here, Rupen.” The doctor gestured toward the mounted head of what must have been a near-record brown bear. “I’d dropped him from a stand at about a hundred yards with my Westley-Richards .425, then the guide and I trotted over and he put a soft-nose .30-06 into him at close range, while I was setting up my Leica on a folding tripod for a remote shot.
“All of a sudden, that ‘dead’ bear roared and jumped up, coughing blood, and knocked that guide ass over biscuit and started shuffling toward me. Rupen, the only weapon of any kind that I had on me was a belt knife. The Westley-Richards was back at my stand, the guide had rolled to the bottom of a gully, and the bear was between me and his rifle.”
“What did you do, Boghos?” asked Rupen.
“I wet my pants, for one thing,” admitted the physician, without shame. “And I think I started to pray. The stand that Anonimo was on was more than two hundred yards away, you see. We’d been communicating by walkie-talkie. Mine was back with my rifle and the guide’s was on him at the bottom of the gully.
“The bear was only ten feet away from me—we measured that distance, later—when he squalled and reared up on his hind legs. Then, just about the time I heard the first shot, the second one sent the fur and tissue flying, blew out a section of his spine at the very base of his skull. He dropped like he’d been poleaxed, almost at my feet.”
“And it was Cobr . . . Anonimo who shot him, at two hundred yards?” queried Rupen.
Boghos nodded. “He apologized, later, for making me wait so long, Rupen. His scope wasn’t working right and it had taken him a couple of minutes to get the thing off and flip the open sights up, then make the shot. Two hundred yards, Rupen, a downhill shot at a moving target, with open, iron sights; the first shot smashed the bear’s left shoulder, the second one killed him outright! Rupen, even should I find out that that man is actually Adolf Hitler’s bastard son, he still would have that apartment over the garage, a decent income, and work when he wants it, those things, plus my friendship and deep respect.”
“And where is this paragon of virtue now?” asked Rupen. The shoe was on the other foot with him and Mineo-Cobra-Beccacciniero. He’d shot and likely killed several men to save the mysterious Italian’s life on that CIA business years back, not the other way about.
“He took the pickup into Richmond to bring back some parts for the Jag. God, but those Limeys are slow—six months ago those parts were ordered!”
“Mere imported sports cars and luxury sedans, Boghos?” mocked Rupen. “Teh, tch, tch! Don’t you know that one is not truly of the landed gentry until one’s holdings include a stable of real thoroughbred horses, usually horses with pedigrees longer than one’s own?”
The search for the ten missing guests—Arsen and his group—went on for three days. Horsemen, dismounted men with keen-nosed hounds, all worked out from the center of the archbishop’s estate in ever-widening circles. But no single trace of the six men and four women was turned up.
Neither Rupen nor red-haired Jenny Bostwick could think of any slightest reason why Arsen and Haigh and the rest would have left without first contacting them.
“Der Hal,” said Rupen earnestly, “I just don’t think they’d have taken off like this, not if they’d had a choice in the matter. For one reason, the biggest and best reason, we ail of us have a lot of trouble even understanding the dialect you folks speak, much less trying to speak it ourselves. Even to my ear, the language you all call English sounds more to me like a bastard concoction of Plattdeutsch, Old French, and Lowland Gaelic; I think I’m finally getting the hang of speaking it fairly fluently, but neither Arsen nor any of the rest are blessed with my linguistic abilities. So could it be possible that they were taken away by force?”
“Now it is just barely possible,” Archbishop Harold told Bass Foster an hour or so later, in private, “that they snapped back to where they were projected from the same way your house eventually did. But 1 sincerely doubt that that is what happened to them, for if it is, why then Rupen and the other woman would have snapped back as well.
“No, Bass, 1 think that the threats of a dying woman are being carried out. I think that Gamebird has gotten a second projector into Whyffler Hall, that they have used it—possibly, unknowingly—to project this latest batch of unfortunates God alone knows where, for as I told you long ago, even to the projector staff at Gamebird, this project is still in only an advanced experimental stage.
“I also think that you had best inform your host to be ready to ride out for Strathtyne on tomorrow’s dawn. This time, I shall be accompanying you, along with my own guards and servants and staff. I think we’ll take along Rupen Ademian, too, if you don’t mind—who knows but what his lifetime of experiences so different from our own and his flexible mind will be of value to us.”
“Hal,” began Bass, “the king expects me to—”
“Yes, yes, that Irish business. Don’t worry, I’ll send a galloper to his majesty immediately, telling him that I have preempted you and your services for a few more weeks on matters every bit as urgent as the earlier ones. There’ll then be no difficulty, you’ll see.”
What with the archbishop’s horse litter and coach and wagons, the shorter, faster, but far more rugged cross-country route used by Bass and the galloglaiches on their last trip up to Whyffler Hall was out of the question this time around. Perforce, the long, slow column had to make its way up the Pennines “road” down which Bass had traveled on a winter trek that had removed the then-vital, then-endangered Royal Gunpowder Works from Whyffler Hall to the relative safety of York. The road which the Scots army had used both on its march to and its retreat from the Battle of Hexham.
The weather turned foul only a single day out of York and so remained for all save the last two days of the trip, with rain, mist, fog, and unseasonably cold, biting winds to add to their wet discomfort in the higher elevations of the mountain chain.
Twice during the protracted journey, they were attacked by robber bands who, what with the poor visibility and the cloaked and hooded manner in which everyone was riding, did not until it was far too late realize just what manner of beasts they were awakening. The cold, wet, miserable galloglaiches proved themselves ever more than willing to impart to these intemperate Sassenach amateur banditti lessons that were almost invariably fatal in nature.