“Which brings us to your laird,” Bolan said.
“Not my laird,” Beacher replied. “But he exists, all right. And so far, he’s untouchable.”
“You want to talk about him? Hypothetically, of course.”
She sipped her coffee, nodded and began.
“He’s Alastair Macauley, last in line of a clan that fought with William Wallace against Edward Longshanks at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, then with Edward Bruce at Bannockburn. The movie that you may have seen compressed all that into a year or so, instead of seventeen.
“I missed it,” Bolan said.
“No matter,” Beacher said. “That’s Hollywood, not history. You wouldn’t know there was a second war for Scottish independence, if you trust the film. That one dragged on from 1332 to 1357, if you please, with our Macauley’s people in the thick of it. And, as you may have noticed, it left Scotland bound to England, no king of their own.”
“You think Macauley wants a rematch?” Bolan asked.
“I think he’s daft, but rich enough to make some hopeful idiots think that he can pull it off.”
“And break up the United Kingdom?”
Beacher shrugged. “When you think about it, how united is the British Commonwealth, these days? The queen’s in charge, but only as a figurehead, at least outside of England. How much weight do you suppose she really carries in Australia, Canada, South Africa, or India?”
Bolan wasn’t well versed in Scottish politics and didn’t want to be sidetracked. Instead of going down that road, he asked, “So, you think this Macauley has a chance?”
“To put himself in charge of independent Scotland?” Beacher answered. “Not a hope in hell. But while he’s trying, he and his goons can do untold damage.”
“You said he’s the last of his line?”
“There was a son, Jerome. He drowned when he was just a teenager. A swimming accident. The laird’s a widower. The last Macauley.”
“Age?”
“A strapping sixty. Perfect health, by all accounts. He’ll be around a while, yet.”
“Maybe not,” Bolan replied.
“Maybe it’s time I made that call,” Beacher suggested.
“Waking up the boss at this hour?”
“Or, I could call him from the road tomorrow, I suppose.”
“The road?” Bolan leaned backward from his empty plate and asked her, “Are we going somewhere?”
“Did you think a laird would come to us?”
“Where would we find him?”
“At his manor,” she replied. “Beside Loch Ness.”
Loch Ness, Scottish Highlands: 5:03 a.m.
RONALD MACTAGGART DIDN’T have to check his watch to know that he was running out of darkness. In an hour, more or less, the sun would rise over the Great Glen, burning off the mist. He had to be ashore and well away by then, before the water bailiff spotted him.
Prime poaching hours ran from midnight until four o’clock or so in the morning, but MacTaggart had enjoyed a luck streak this night. His catch included four sea trout, two Arctic char and one Atlantic salmon, which he’d sell to Bryce’s shop in Foyers for a weekend’s drinking money. Skip a night or two, then come back out and start again.
The lights of Inverfarigaig seemed almost close enough to touch from where MacTaggart sat in his small boat, three hundred yards out from the eastern shore. He gave his baited line a tug, hoping for one more bite before he called it quits, and thought about the dark water beneath his keel.
Loch Ness was Britain’s greatest lake. Loch Lomond had a larger surface area, but Ness was vastly deeper, with a maximum confirmed depth of 738 feet off Urquhart Castle, to the west. Some publications cited depths of 820 and 970 feet, but any way you measured it, Loch Ness contained more water than all lakes in England and Wales combined. It was deep enough to sink London’s BT Tower with at least 118 feet to spare, or you could sink the London Eye and have 295 spare feet of loch to swim around in, free and clear.
Someone had told MacTaggart that Loch Ness could swallow every man, woman and child on Earth three times over, before it filled up. He didn’t know if that was literally true, and didn’t rightly care, unless the murky waters tried to swallow him.
And then, there was the monster.
All his life, MacTaggart had heard stories of the water horse or kelpie dwelling in Loch Ness. The tales went back some fifteen hundred years, to Saint Columba’s time, when Erin’s greatest missionary crossed the Irish Sea to proselytize the heathen Picts. According to Columba’s legend, he was traveling along the River Ness when he met locals burying a victim of the kelpie who’d been killed while swimming. Furious, but still a cautious man, Columba used one of his followers to bait the monster, then commanded it to flee. Columba’s drenched disciple came ashore intact, but how effective could the ban have been, MacTaggart wondered, when the water beast kept showing up in Loch Ness to the present day?
He sipped a shot of consolation from his flask, then started reeling in his line. The night’s catch was better than average, and any morning that he went home safe and dry ranked as a victory.
Make no mistake about it, there was danger on Loch Ness. The water’s average temperature was forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, which kept the loch from freezing up in winter, but was cold enough to bring on hypothermia in swimmers—or a fisherman who fell out of his boat. Cold enough to give Loch Ness its reputation as a body of water that rarely surrendered its dead.
Rain squalls were common on the loch, with a record seventy-five inches per year at Fort William and forty-two inches per year at Fort Augustus. Floating logs were hazardous in daylight, doubly so at night. And there were waves that rose without apparent cause to jostle smaller boats, strong enough to tip a passenger—and more likely to dunk one who was tipsy, to begin with.
Race driver John Cobb had died on the loch in 1952, while trying to set a new water speed record in his jet-powered Crusader, caught on film as the boat struck something at 206 miles per hour, bounced twice like a skipping stone and then disintegrated. A monument to Cobb stood on the western shore, near Achnahannet—and some folk still believed that the Crusader ran afoul of Nessie.
MacTaggart had an outboard motor on his small craft, but he used the oars instead to pull his way shoreward. There was no point in making any extra noise in case the water bailiff might be up early, or working late. Using the lights of Inverfarigaig to guide him, veering slightly to the south, MacTaggart reckoned he would be ashore and on his way before the first pale light of dawn exposed him to suspicious scrutiny.
But what was that? A burbling sound behind him made MacTaggart ship his oars and listen, then turn on his padded seat to scan the water’s surface. Not that he could see much, with a bank of clouds obscuring the quarter moon. It might have been a fish, or gas erupting from a mat of rotting vegetation somewhere far below.
Except that, there it was again.
So, what the hell?
MacTaggart’s only weapon was the boning knife he carried in his tackle box—and what good would it do against a burping lake? He turned back to his oars and put his back into the rowing, pulled for half a dozen strokes before some large and heavy object struck the hull and nearly jarred him from his seat.
A jolt of panic chilled MacTaggart worse than any night wind off the loch. Dropping the oars, he clutched the small boat’s gunwales, hanging on as if sheer force of will could stabilize the rocking craft. Too late, MacTaggart realized that he was going over, and his startled cry deprived him of the chance to draw a final breath before he plunged headfirst into the dark maw of the loch.
Chapter 6
Glasgow: 6:15 a.m.
Bolan and Colleen Beacher spent what was left of the night at the government safehouse. She offered Bolan the second bedroom, but he
slept on the living room couch with an angle of fire on both doors, in case someone dropped in overnight.
No one did.
Bolan allowed himself three hours’ sleep and woke, from long experience, without resorting to an alarm clock. He was showered and preparing breakfast—eggs again, but fried this time with bacon—by 6:15 a.m. when Beacher emerged from her bedroom, ready to roll.
It went against the grain for Bolan to leave Glasgow without taking care of Frankie Boyle, but he’d agreed with Beacher that the mobster could wait. He sold arms to the TIF and was involved in countless other dirty businesses, but Bolan had a sense that Boyle wasn’t going anywhere. Glasgow was that malignant toad’s home pond, and if he strayed too far beyond it, other predators might eat him up with tea and scones.
Or was it haggis?
They left Glasgow in Bolan’s Camry, following the A82 through various towns to Loch Lomond. It was scenic all the way from there, with vast blue water on their right for miles, but Bolan didn’t see a lot of it, forced as he was to focus on the narrow, winding, two-lane road. Blind curves appeared to be the rule, leaving him sandwiched between oncoming traffic and ancient stone walls.
“Is this the high road or the low road?” he inquired after a tour bus swept past them, shivering the Camry in its wake.
“It’s neither high nor low, unless you think about our purpose,” Beacher said. “For where we’re going, it’s the only road. Be thankful that we have two lanes and lay-bys every hundred yards. If we were heading out to Mallaig, now, you’d see a narrow road.”
“I’ll pass on that, then,” Bolan said. But he was already beginning to relax behind the wheel, getting the feel of it. “You make that call yet?”
“Still rehearsing it,” she said.
“Well, if you plan to change your mind, you need to do it soon.”
“My problem,” she informed him. “Did I mention that Macauley’s got an expedition up to hunt for Nessie?”
“What? The Loch Ness monster?”
“Aye,” she answered, putting on a Highlands accent. “That would be the very same.”
“So, he is crazy.”
“Like a fox, maybe.”
“Come on. The monster is a hoax,” Bolan replied.
“Don’t swallow everything you read without a grain of salt,” Beacher suggested. “Years ago, an old man claimed he’d hoaxed one famous picture of the creature. Two reporters held the story back until he died, so nobody could cross-examine him, and even so the story had some gaping holes.”
“You think the monster’s real?” Bolan asked.
“All I’m saying is, the famous hoax you’ve read about turned out to be a hoax itself. As for the beastie…well, you know? They’ve got two exhibitions side-by-side, at Drumnadrochit on the loch. One says the creature’s real, the other claims it’s not. Both have their share of so-called evidence.”
“Okay,” Bolan allowed. “But what’s Macauley’s interest, if he’s not a total flake? How does the monster’s legend serve his war for Scottish independence?”
“Wish I could answer that,” she said. “All I can tell you is that he’s financed an expedition with a research boat, new scanning gear and all, to sweep the loch for evidence.”
“Of living dinosaurs?”
“Of something,” Beacher said. “It needs a closer look.”
They cleared Ardlui, at the far-northern tip of Loch Lomond, and stayed on the A82 bearing north toward Crianlarich, billed as the Gateway to the Highlands. From there, Bolan knew, their path continued northward on the fringe of Rannoch Moor, Glencoe, said to be the “Glen of Weeping” for a massacre one clan had perpetrated on another there, more than three hundred years earlier.
More history. More blood.
They passed more lochs along the way, each dark expanse of water making Bolan think of serpents rising from the depths, that vision giving way to images of settlers huddled over fires, in thatch-roofed huts, plotting intrigues against their neighbors when they weren’t at war with Longshanks and his soldiers.
And it would seem that in present day, a madman had invoked those memories to spill more blood on Scottish soil. And why?
Bolan looked forward to an explanation from the horse’s mouth.
BREAKFAST AT MACAULEY Manor had been prepared in buffet style, laid out in the grand dining room. The offerings included poached eggs, bacon, link sausage, black pudding, fried bread, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, beans and porridge. All the basics to begin a day.
It was a lot of food for just four men, but three of them had heaping plates when they sat down in high-backed chairs at one end of a table built for twenty diners. The fourth man, a withered gnome in a motorized wheelchair, took more modest portions, passing on the pork.
Their host, Alastair Macauley, was a burly man in his midsixties, barrel-chested, with a round head planted on a thick neck over broad shoulders. He was dressed in classic tweed, his shock of white hair—only recently receding slightly at the temples—was at odds with his iron-ray mustache and shaggy brows. His ruddy face wore an expression trapped somewhere between a question and a frown.
When all of them were settled, knives and forks in hand, the laird addressed his three companions from the table’s head. Bypassing the charade of grace, he growled, “Has any of you heard the news from Glasgow overnight?”
“You mean regarding Boyle?”
The question came from Fergus Gibson, cofounder and commander of the Tartan Independence Front.
“Who else?” Macauley countered.
“He came through all right,” Gibson replied. “You can relax about him spilling his guts. It’ll never happen.”
“He’s no concern of mine,” Macauley said, “considering that he’s your man. If he hangs anyone, it won’t be me.”
“I’m telling you, it’s fine,” Gibson said.
“In my dictionary, Mr. Gibson, ‘fine’ means excellent, superior, worthy of admiration, free of all impurities. Is that how you’d describe your Mr. Boyle this morning?”
Gibson flushed, began to answer, but Macauley cut him off.
“‘Fine’ can also mean finished,” the laird informed Gibson. “Completed. At an end. I trust that is the definition that you had in mind?”
Before Gibson could answer, Graham Wallace said, “We have a deal with Boyle, Mr. Macauley.”
“Laird Macauley,” their host said. “And I was not addressing you.”
“He’s got a point,” Gibson said, backing up his second in command. “I can’t just tell the man that we aren’t doing business with him any more.”
“Why tell him anything?” Macauley asked. “He’ll get the point when he receives no further orders, eh? And in the meanwhile, he should have his hands full with police, explaining why his men are all shot full of holes.”
“Not all of them,” Gibson replied. “He has enough left to make trouble for us, if he feels like it.”
“In which case,” Macauley said, “it is your responsibility to deal with him. I won’t have all my plans disrupted by the tantrums of a common criminal.”
“We still need weapons,” Gibson said.
“Try one of his competitors in that case. If you can’t find anyone in Glasgow, then move on to Edinburgh—or London, if it comes to that. I trust we understand each other?”
Gibson nodded, poking at his eggs. “We do.”
The stunted figure in the wheelchair made a noise that might have been a smothered giggle or a wheezing breath. At Gibson’s elbow, Wallace cleared his throat and said, “We had another glitch last night.”
Macauley raised eyes from his meal, fixed Wallace with a baleful glare. “Out on the loch, you mean?”
“’Fraid so,” Wallace replied.
“Expla
in,” the laird commanded.
As he listened, hot food cooling on his breakfast plate before him, Macauley felt his anger mounting. He was tempted to lash out at Wallace with his silverware, open his face and get some real blood pudding on the table. When he heard the old man in the wheelchair laughing, it was nearly the last straw.
“Would you explain what’s so goddamned amusing, Jurgen?” he demanded.
“These two,” the gnomish figure said, pointing the arthritic claw of his right hand across the table toward Gibson and Wallace. “They’re like a clown act in the kabarett.”
“Clowns, are we? If you weren’t so feckin’ senile, we’d have had it up by now, and—”
“Silence! That’s enough!” Macauley roared. “I’ll have no more goddamned mistakes, mishaps, or misadventures. The next man here who fails me will regret it for the last ten seconds of his life. I hope that’s crystal-clear to one and all.”
He looked around the table, getting nods from both the TIF men and a crooked smile from Jurgen. Satisfied, and doggedly determined not to waste good food, Laird Alastair Macauley turned back to his plate.
GLENCOE WAS a tourist magnet, drawing hikers, rock climbers and skiers in season, with legions of common sightseers. Long-distance hikers came on foot, crossing Rannoch Moor on the same West Highland Way used by British Field Marshal George Wade to chase Jacobite rebels during the mid-eighteenth century. Motorists bound for the north had no choice but to pass through Glencoe, and hundreds per day stopped to browse at its visitors’ center.
Clearing the pass, Bolan was greeted by a piper in full regalia, performing at a scenic turnout, a West Highland White Terrier sitting beside him. The haunting strains of “Amazing Grace” followed Bolan as he drove on past the crowded parking lot.
“What was the trouble here again?” he asked Beacher.
“A feud between the Clan MacDonald and the lowland Campbells. The MacDonalds were Jacobites, loyal to King James the Seventh of Scotland, formerly James the Second of England until he was deposed in 1688. The Campbells supported William of Orange, which prompted the Maclains of Glencoe—a branch of the MacDonalds—to raid Campbell land for livestock. William offered the Highlanders a pardon in 1691, and the Maclains accepted amnesty.”
Battle Cry Page 7