It was slow progress, but perhaps some progress was better than no progress at all.
-------------------
Alessandra's Hotel
Edinburgh City Centre.
6.10 p.m.
Alessandra had already used the very same method she was now going to employ to locate DCI Campbell McKenzie to track down two other targets in the past.
Both had been in hiding. Both had been found.
The strategy was simple.
She sent a letter directly to the person she was trying to locate.
Those closest to the target were made to believe that the letter was important. That the target must receive the letter.
The letter in itself seemed simple. It was obviously not a bomb, it did not contain much, and it was very light.
It looked official, and when it arrived, the letter had been expected, ... so the relatives felt there was little danger in forwarding the letter onwards to their loved one.
What the naive, caring relatives did not realise, however, was that the envelope was in actual fact a high-tech tracking device. Wired into the actual fabric of the brown, padded envelope, was a tiny battery, a microchip and a custom SIM card.
When the envelope was opened, the microchip would be activated and send a high-powered radio burst to the GSM network, resulting in an SMS being sent to a GSM account, detailing the geolocation of the envelope at the time it had been opened.
Upon receipt of the SMS message, the controller had several options:
1: to send a signal to the tracking device to switch on a tiny microphone embedded in the envelope. It would pick up several minutes of sound and broadcast it to the controller.
2: to tell the device to continue to broadcast its location at periodic intervals, until the battery died.
3: to switch the tracking device off.
There was a risk. Namely that the tracking device might not be able to find a signal upon activation, but the controller had to use their judgement whether that risk was acceptable.
In most cases, the battery was sufficiently powerful to find a network.
As far as Alessandra was concerned, it was one of several options open to her. It might work, or it might not.
DCI McKenzie may have gone abroad, or he may be in hiding in the UK, but either way there was a significant possibility that he would be in range of a mobile network. He would need to be contactable, and trackable by someone. And if somebody else could get a signal to contact him, she would gamble that she could too.
If not, she would have to try something else. But she would cross that bridge when she came to it.
The device she was going to use was used by many of the world's top law enforcement agencies. It was amazing technology, almost invisible, and it worked.
And she already had three of them ready to use, having ordered them and had them delivered with the initial shipment of supplies delivered to Stirling.
That evening she drove to a local electronics superstore in a shopping park on the outskirts of the city. She bought several items, including a printer.
After a quick meal, she drove back to the hotel, and drafted up some graphics and fake logos to represent the heir hunting company she was 'working for'.
She wrote a letter, from Jackie in the heir hunting company, explaining to Mr Campbell McKenzie that they were currently looking for relatives of their deceased client, who may be the beneficiaries of a sizable estate. In the first instance, she requested him to contact the number provided urgently, and to email them and provide answers to the questions given in the attached questionnaire. If he was indeed the Campbell McKenzie they were looking for, they would arrange a subsequent meeting in the near future to provide further details of the estate of which he may be entitled to receive a share. For now they would only say that it was a substantial amount.
Alessandra created the questionnaire, added the logos and the graphics, and embellished it all with sufficient small print and legal speak to make it sound plausible.
She even provided a real phone number. A dark web VoIP number.
If someone called it, she would be able to see the incoming call on her laptop, put on a headset and speak to whoever was calling. However, the call would not be traceable and at no point would anyone be able to connect the destination number with Alessandra.
When everything was ready, she assembled and addressed the envelope for Mr Campbell McKenzie, printed off a sticky label with the logo and address of the fabricated heir hunting company, and attached it to the envelope which she primed and made operational. The envelope was clearly marked 'PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL'.
She sealed it all, and then put it inside another branded envelope along with a short letter to McKenzie's wife, referring to the conversation they had had that day.
The hope was that Mrs McKenzie would receive the larger envelope, open it, read the letter, examine the outside of the smaller enclosed envelope and then forward it to Campbell McKenzie without opening it or examining it further. Ideally she would send it along with some other personal mail that he may need to see.
It was a simple plan. But the technology employed was high-tech and really rather brilliant. And it worked.
With any luck, greed and inquisitiveness would prevail, and within a few days she would know exactly where Campbell was.
There was one crucial element to the plan, however. The moment the envelope tracking beacon was activated, Alessandra had to move fast.
As soon as she discovered wherever he was in the world, she needed to get there fast. Find him. And kill him.
Chapter 34
Edinburgh
Friday 10.30 a.m.
Alessandra had slept well. After sending the envelopes to DCI McKenzie the night before, she had gone for a walk along Princes Street, found a place in a bar in George Street, and tried to relax.
For now, she had done everything she could do. The next step would depend on whether or not the tracker was forwarded on to McKenzie directly by an unsuspecting loved-one.
She had every reason to believe it would work.
With nothing else to do just yet, she'd given herself the rest of the night off. Except with Alessandra, it never really worked like that.
Instead, she sat in the bar making plans.
Routinely, and subconsciously, she would scan those around her for memorable faces, or curious behaviour, or people she had seen before, but as always, she detected none.
Apart from those at the Loch Ness Hilton and in Plockton, she knew nobody in Scotland, and so far, nobody knew her. Which was the way it would hopefully remain.
According to her calculations, the best scenario she could expect was for the tracker to be delivered around mid-day in two days time. It all depended upon how long Mrs McKenzie hung on to the package before forwarding it on.
More realistically however, it would probably be about four or five days before McKenzie potentially got it, opened it and set off the location finder.
Nevertheless, she had to be primed and ready to act in any scenario.
She would be.
Her mind then wandered back to the Hilton, and her new friends there, and to Gavin.
And from there, her thoughts quickly, and quite naturally meandered on to the Gift.
The Gift. The choice of name which the monk had settled on for it went round and round in her head.
In what way could it be considered a Gift?
It was still very much a curse.
It angered her that she was still burdened with it.
What worried her, even scared her a little, was that the intensity of feeling that overcame her when she seemed to be given the energy to 'heal' or 'cure' someone, was overwhelming. It would build to a point where no rational thought was possible, and she couldn't function properly. It seemed unpredictable.
Or was it?
And then, in quick succession, the thought occurred to her momentarily, wondering for the first time, "does the energy for a 'healing' com
e to me, or is it given to me, from outside, from something else, or does it manifest itself within me, when I think I will need it?"
It was an interesting thought.
Was there something else actually going on here that she hadn't thought about?
Was she just a vessel through which healing took place, or did she control and create the circumstances under which it occurred?
In other words, could she choose who to heal, or was the target of a healing predestined, and she was just the person who turned up at the right moment to do it?
Was she just an unwilling vehicle or catalyst for something she had no power over, or, if she learned how to harness it, could she perhaps control it?
Could she 'harness' it?
That was another interesting word. An interesting concept.
But why would she ever want to?
What possible advantage could possessing the 'Gift' have?
Her mind went back to Auchterawe Castle.
She had gone to see the Laird with the full intention of killing him so that the future of the community could be protected.
Yet, she had left with her goal achieved, but without harming anyone. In fact, the very opposite. She had healed the daughter, and possibly also the father - at least emotionally if not also physically.
What would have happened if she had killed the father?
Who would have looked after the daughter for the rest of her short life?
Realising that she was on forbidden ground, contemplating the feelings and emotions of her victims, she immediately curtailed that train of thought.
Alessandra was a realist.
She knew now that she had to come to grips with the Gift whether it was a curse or not. If it continued to afflict her, she needed to come up with coping strategies.
Over time, hopefully she would learn when to expect it to afflict her, or how to 'harness' the energy. She liked the 'harness' concept, because that gave her more control. She needed to be in control of it.
When the energy came to her, she needed to find ways of dispersing it as soon as possible.
But how could that be done?
Would she need to line up a constant supply of sick people, knowing that when her fingers began to tingle, she could just grab a sick person, cure them, and then move on?
She realised that her thoughts were getting a little out of control, but that was the nature of this whole thing. She was losing control. And for someone like Alessandra that was potentially the most scary concept of all.
After finishing her drink, she left the bar and walked along the beautiful main street of Edinburgh. On the one side there was a beautiful facade of Georgian buildings running from one end of the street to the other.
Opposite, were two large open air gardens, set against the backdrop of the Old Town of Edinburgh, whose historic buildings were built upon a sloping, gently rising spur of land which had been left behind by ancient moving ice in the shadow of an ancient volcano. The Castle itself was built upon the ancient volcanic plug, dominating every vista in the city, and still standing proud and intact, even after many hundreds of years of exposure to battle, nature and swarms of tourists.
It was a warm evening. Beautiful.
When she got to the end of Princes Street, she stood underneath the clock tower built above the train station, and wondered what to do next.
It was just gone midnight.
Across the road, she saw a hill, with a set of ruins at the top of it. It reminded her of the Parthenon in Greece. Crossing the busy road, she found a set of steps that disappeared upwards into the darkness away from the street, and she took them. The city quickly disappeared behind her, swallowed up and hidden behind buildings past which the steps edged, but she soon came out onto a plateau at the top of the hill, underneath what seemed to be a massive ruin consisting of tall, gothic-like pillars of stone, forming what would have at one time been the end of a large Greek-like temple.
It was rather bizarre.
Turning around, however, she was stunned at what she saw. The city sprawled out before her, a dazzling display of sparkling, twinkling lights, the castle in the distance yet again dominating the streets around and beneath it.
Climbing up onto the ruins, she sat with her back against one of the tall stone columns and just stared.
Her mind emptied.
There was a magic in this place. Something special.
On her left, she could make out the silhouette of what she knew was a large hill, - perhaps even a small mountain - called Arthur's Seat, that formed the edge of the Old Town of Edinburgh, and rose sharply out of the ground, towering above the city beneath.
Edinburgh was a city of contrasts. Old and new buildings. Hills and valleys. Castles and churches. Young and old. In so many ways, it reminded her favourite cities of Italy, where the ancient mixed with the modern.
For the second time during her visit to Scotland she had found somewhere that touched her.
First there was Loch Ness, now here.
Almost inexplicably she felt a tear escape from the corner of her left eye.
A sadness overcame her, and she felt an emptiness within her.
She was lonely.
She thought of her mother. Her home. Of Sicily.
She felt the strength of her father's arms around her as she sailed into the wind.
As she wiped away the tear, she surveyed the city that rolled out before her from left to right, twinkling brightly in the warm air, and she realised what was missing in her life.
A home.
Alessandra had no home.
For the first time since she had left Italy, she longed for a place where her soul could be at ease.
A place of stability. Of tranquillity.
Curiously, she thought then of her little caravan on the side of Loch Ness, and a feeling of warmth engulfed her.
She thought of Gavin.
Strong, powerful, secure.
Standing up, Alessandra looked up at the night sky above her.
It wasn't like Sicily were you could see the Milky Way and the sky was a blanket of bright, twinkling lights, but she was surprised just how clear the sky was and how many stars she could see.
Alessandra smiled to herself.
Moments like this evening were special.
Rare.
And dangerous.
This was not who she was, or could be.
Feelings and experiences like these belonged to another life. Not hers.
Closing her eyes, she refocused her thoughts, wiped her mind clean, and took a long deep breath.
When she opened her eyes again, the smile was gone.
At the bottom of the steps, she hailed a passing cab, and went back to her hotel room.
An hour later she was fast asleep.
-------------------
Western General Hospital
Edinburgh.
11.05 a.m.
When Alessandra awoke the next morning, she pulled back the curtains and sat back against the headboard of her bed, drinking a cup of tea and staring out at the Castle.
Her hotel looked straight out onto the sheer vertical walls at the rear of the floodlit castle battlements: the view was amazing.
Closing her eyes, she tried to relax. It wasn't often she had free time on her hands, but for the next few days, until her laptop picked up any signals from the tracker, she didn't anticipate having much else to do. She already had some plans - a 'Plan B' for an alternative approach that she could adopt to finding McKenzie, should 'Plan A' fail, but there was nothing more she needed to do in the meantime.
Trying to relax and actually relaxing are two very different things.
Alessandra couldn't.
Her mind kept skipping back to the 'Gift'.
What happened if it came to her again at the moment she was going after McKenzie? It had happened once already. It could happen again.
How controllable was this thing?
So far, not very much, as it would s
eem.
A random, but perhaps logical question then occurred to her: "Does the ability to heal, -the Gift- materialise in the presence of sick people? If I find myself beside a sick-person will my fingers start to tingle? Will I want to heal them?"
She thought of Young Angus, and her little experiment which had turned into a disaster. Perhaps that experience would suggest that the answer was no, but on the other hand, maybe there was another aspect to it. Perhaps when she had tried to heal Angus, her batteries had not yet recharged? Perhaps she couldn't heal people willy-nilly, that there was a recharging period required during which the energy required to heal people built up inside her?
She hadn't healed anyone for days now. If there was an aspect to this concerning 'recharging', maybe she was on track for being able to heal someone else soon?
If so, it would definitely be good to get the energy out of her system before any further encounters with McKenzie.
'So', her internal dialogue continued, 'where can I find sick people?'
Forty minutes later, after a quick shower and some breakfast, she hailed a black-cab on the street and instructed the driver to take her to the cancer ward of the hospital in Edinburgh.
"Which cancer ward? And which hospital?" the driver asked.
Alessandra hesitated.
"The main hospital. Any cancer ward. I'm a journalist, and I need to talk to some of the nurses. I've got to start somewhere..."
The taxi-driver gave her a look, then turned his head and started to drive.
"Is that an American accent you've got there?" he asked, immediately diving into the usual friendly taxi-banter that British cabbie's were famous for. In America, Alessandra would be lucky to find a taxi-driver who spoke English, let alone one she could have a decent conversation with.
Except Alessandra didn't want any conversation.
She replied, engaged in a little small-talk, but made it abundantly obvious she was not interested in much more.
After a few minutes, the cab driver got the hint.
Alessandra admired the architecture of the amazing Georgian buildings of the New Town of Edinburgh as the cab swept along down past Princes Street, down through the area known as Stockbridge, and then out past what seemed to be another massive Castle set in acres of green land.
The Assassin's Gift Page 33