We beat his security system and we got into his head and onto his mountain but all the same, here, at the line, he won.

Fair and square.

Clap clap clap.

One of the G-Wagen guys says something fast in French: “You want us to kill them now?”

There is a version of this moment where we dialogue as dueling bad guys should and Eiger is totally up for that. I can see him shaping up to it like moohoohaha like so:

“I have raised the canton against you Mr. Price. You have done well to get this far into Die Festung and I am quite honestly impressed, but here it ends. Even if you should overcome these men, which you will not, you cannot escape. Your exit would be a running gun battle from here to—”

And Doc could maybe tell him she is wearing a phial of modified respiratory transmission hantavirus or I could say something about something but—

But none of that happens because Hans Eiger has crossed a line. Volodya told me that Swissness was a thing but I did not get it until I came here. You cannot get it from outside. Now I do and the thing is that sometimes it’s easier to see the landscape when you don’t have a house there. Hans Eiger does not realize it because as far as he is concerned people like him are the fountain, or wellspring, his national identity, but Swissness is a way of being, not something you just are. He has crossed a line in the Swiss. He brought anti-social Nazis into the federal capital and in the end—despite all this country’s bad moments and sometimes regrettable choices, which let us be honest it shares with every other country in the world—there is nothing anywhere that is more fundamentally un-Swiss than a fucking Nazi. If you’re going to Nazi about the place in a serious way, well, you may as well get your chicken out and fuck it right there on the Junkerngasse.

Eiger stops clapping and looks at us like he’s fixing this moment in his head forever.

He says: “Ja.”

Or he tries to.

But he can’t because a wide, fat metal blade has just gone into the space between two of the vertebrae in his neck and severed his spine.

Eiger folds downward, taking the oyster knife with him. Behind him in the silence Evil Hansel looks pale and tiny.

Doc says:

“Price, you total fuck.”

I say:

“The Demons have a new client Doc.”

The sound of the first gunshot is really loud.

—