The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [135]
She was surprised by the pain. The noose fractured her larynx before sliding over it to a point under her jaw. Her eyes opened wide, staring at the white bricks of the far wall. That's when the panic hit her. Ideology has its limits. She couldn't die, didn't want to die, didn't want to.
Her fingers raced to her throat. It was a mistake. They fought to get under the mattress trim, but it was too thin, cutting so deeply into the soft flesh of her neck that she couldn't get a single finger under it. Still she fought, knowing that she had mere seconds before the blood loss to her brain it was getting vague now, her vision was beginning to suffer. She couldn't see the lines of mortar between the even German-made brickwork on the far wall. Her hands kept trying, cutting into the surface blood vessels of her throat, drawing blood that only made the noose slick, able to sink in tighter, cutting off circulation through the carotid arteries even more. Her mouth opened wide and she tried to scream, no, she didn't want to die, didn't - needed help. Couldn't anyone hear her? Could no one help her? Too late, just two seconds, maybe only one, maybe not even that, the last remaining shred of consciousness told her that if she could just loosen the bra holding her legs, she could have stood and
The detective watched the TV picture, saw her hands flutter towards the bra, searching limply for the clasp before they fell away, and twitched for a few more seconds, then stopped. So close, he thought. So very close to saving herself. It was a pity. She'd been a pretty girl, but she'd chosen to murder and torture, and she'd also chosen to die, and if she'd changed her mind at the end - didn't they all? Well, not quite all - that was merely renewed proof that the brutal ones were cowards after all, nicht wahil Abei naturlich.
"This television is broken," he said, switching it off. "Better get a new one to keep an eye on Prisoner Hassler-Bock."
"That will take about an hour," the guard supervisor said.
"That's fast enough." The detective removed the cassette from the same tape recorder he'd used to show the touching family scene. It went into his briefcase with the other. He locked the case and stood. There was no smile on his face, but there was a look of satisfaction. It wasn't his fault that the Bundestag and Bundesrat were unable to pass a simple and effective death-penalty statute. That was because of the Nazis, of course. Damned barbarians. But even barbarians were not total fools. They hadn't ripped up the autobahns after the war, had they? Of course not. So just because the Nazis had executed people - well, some of them had even been ordinary murderers whom any civilized government of the era would have executed. And if anyone merited death, Petra Hassler-Bock did. Murder by torture. Death by hanging. That, the detective figured, was fair enough. The Wilhelm Manstein murder case had been his from the start. He'd been there when the man's genitals had arrived by mail. He'd watched the pathologists examine the body, had attended the funeral, and he remembered the sleepless nights when he'd been unable to wash the horrid spectacles from his mind. Perhaps now he would. Justice had been slow, but it had come. With luck, those two cute little girls would grow into proper citizens, and no one would ever know who and what their birth mother had once been.
The detective walked out of the prison towards his car. He didn't want to be near the prison when her body was discovered. Case closed.
"Hey, man."
"Marvin. I hear that you did well with weapons." Ghosn said to his friend.
"No big deal, man. I've been shooting since I was a kid. That's how you get dinner where I come from."
"You outshot our best instructor," the engineer pointed out.
"Your targets are a hell of a lot bigger than a rabbit, and they don't move. Hell, I used to hit jacks on the move with my.22. If you have to shoot what you eat, you learn right quick to hit what you aim at, boy. How'd you do with that bomb thing?"