Please, God, Zoe prayed. Let my aim be true. Save us.

She aimed her revolver at Stratton’s chest and pulled the trigger. The gun rewarded her with a deafening roar and a flare of flame that reached halfway across the room. The slug slammed into Stratton’s shoulder just as he fired the Colt, causing his shot at Seth to go wild. He dropped the Colt on the floor as the bullet’s impact spun him around. Zoe fired again. Her second shot struck Stratton in the back with enough force to slam him against the broad expanse of glass that overlooked the Inn Valley.

As they looked on in stunned silence, the window buckled under the impact of Stratton’s body. The shattering glass sounded like crackling thunder, but its intensity paled under Stratton’s screams as he teetered against the sill for a second, then toppled from the window in a hail of glass fragments. They heard his steady wailing scream for several seconds.

THIRTY-EIGHT

When he got out of the gondola car at the top of the cliff Rolf looked up at the helipad, puzzled that the cardinal hadn’t already taken off. He was usually out like a flash. Never liked to wait Rolf shook his head slowly and started up the steps to the chalet, listening to the lazy shwoop-shwoop of the idling helicopter blades.

The next thing Rolf Engels heard was the crashing of glass and the screams. As sturdy as the chalet was, with its stone walls and thick wood, it was not surprising that he failed to hear the shots fired in the council meeting room.

But the screams and the glass; something was definitely amiss. As he stealthily let himself into the chalet, he checked off the available men he could summon. Three men were taking their shift off by going into Innsbruck. One was by the gondola shed. That left him with two men on duty up here plus three more sleeping in the barracks.

It would be enough, he thought, as he slipped quietly into the grand foyer that had once been the lobby back in the days when the chalet had been a resort. From within the building, Rolf heard the excited murmurings of the domestic staff. The housekeeper came running down the hall.

“Oh, Herr Engels,” she cried, “I am so glad you’re here. Something has happened in the council meeting room. I heard breaking glass, and a loud noise. It could have been a gunshot or perhaps an explosion of some kind.”

Explosion? That surprised him. He had heard no explosion. Immediately, he thought of the new natural gas logs the cardinal archbishop had recently installed in the huge fireplace in the council meeting room. Rolf had been against it from the start. It was unsafe, he had argued unsuccessfully. Hadn’t the cardinal read of all the stories about homes and office buildings—sometimes entire blocks of buildings—that had been destroyed because some undetected gas leak had been allowed to build up and then had exploded from a minuscule spark? Rolf had lost that battle.