Deadly Code (Rhona MacLeod #3)

by Lin Anderson

  Rhona patted her arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. The main thing is, we have Spike back.’

  ‘And Esther?’

  ‘He says she’s gone back to Maley,’ Rhona said.

  ‘What about the bairn?’

  Rhona shook her head. She didn’t know. That was one part of the story Maley hadn’t told her.

  ‘I’ll take care of the baby,’ Mrs MacMurdo said firmly, ‘at least until we know.’ She looked at Rhona. ‘What will happen to Donald?’

  Spike’s confession had been genuine, Rhona was sure of that. Whether he was right and it was his fault that his father was dead, was another matter. They’d struggled and his father had gone overboard. When he didn’t reappear Spike had panicked, diving in himself, searching madly under and around the boat, but there was no sign of a body. He had stayed until daylight, submerging again and again until he gave up, exhausted.

  ‘If his father attacked him and Spike tried to defend himself, he doesn’t have anything to worry about,’ Rhona said, hoping it was true.

  Spike was staring through the windscreen, deep in thought. Rhona noticed his wrinkled skin was so thin, it was almost translucent.

  ‘Spike?’

  He turned.

  ‘There’s an American I think you should meet.’ Rhona carried on talking despite his evident desperation. ‘His name is Andre Frith. He knew your father.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Spike said. ‘I’ll take you to the lab, then I’m off. That’s what we agreed.’

  Rhona knew if she persisted he would be out the car and away and she would never see him again.

  ‘You’re right, that’s what we agreed,’ Rhona said quietly, knowing she had already betrayed him.

  When the mail had left the island that morning, it carried with it enough DNA from the sleeping boy to establish whether the body parts they’d found were his father’s. By tomorrow morning, Chrissy would have the sample along with the entire story.

  All Rhona had to do now was keep Spike with her until she found out the truth.

  Spike lapsed into silence until they were minutes from Brochel, then he told Rhona to turn down a dirt track and made her hide the car among some trees.

  The wind had dropped and the stillness had brought the mist creeping in from the sea again, drifting about them in long milky strands. Spike walked on ahead and Rhona concentrated on keeping his back in view. When she dropped too far behind, Spike stopped and waited, and Rhona was absurdly grateful each time his slight figure loomed out of the mist in front of her.

  ‘It would have been easier by boat,’ he said on the third occasion this happened.

  ‘Does the lab have a direct link to the sea?’

  ‘Of course,’ Spike said. “That’s how my father brought in what he needed.’

  ‘And what did he need?’

  Droplets of moisture hung from his hair making Rhona want to reach out and sweep them away.

  ‘You know what my father was.’

  She had stopped to catch her breath and Spike seemed in no hurry to move on. Rhona wondered briefly if he was lost, but quickly dismissed the thought. Everything she’d seen suggested Spike could move about this island like a deer, the landscape as familiar as a scent.

  ‘ReAlba was his life,’ he said bitterly. ‘He would talk of the Coming, how soon it would be. How the Men of the West would triumph.’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ His face was twisted and bitter. ‘All I know is that it didn’t include anyone who wasn’t a direct descendant of the clan.’

  He stood up.

  ‘The next bit’s hard,’ he said. ‘But there’s a tunnel from the loch over there.’

  Rhona glanced in the direction of his pointing hand. If there was a loch ahead, she certainly hadn’t spotted it.

  ‘It’s in a corrie,’ he told her, ‘You’ll see it in a minute. Loch na Minha - Loch of the Woman.’

  The loch was peat-coloured, an oval mirror reflecting the hill that surrounded it

  They walked past the blackhouse where, Spike told her, he’d stayed with Esther. He wouldn’t go inside but Rhona did, smelling the sweet heather beds and the fragrant scent of a peat fire. A bright splash of colour caught her eye. Outside again, she handed Spike the woollen baby hat she’d retrieved from the corner. He thrust it into his pocket without speaking.

  With each step they seemed to be moving further and further from the sea as they traversed the lochside to the steeper wall of the corrie.

  ‘We have to climb from here.’ Spike must have seen her worried look, because he added, ‘There’s a crevasse, big enough to scramble up. After that, it’s easy.’

  Easy? Rhona had heard that word before.

  Spike took her hand and led her to a break in the rockface and she saw that he was right. The fissure was three feet wide. It climbed in giant stepping-stones up the face of the rock. Spike went first and pulled her up after him.

  At the top, the corrie wall was dotted with caves like a forgotten shore. Spike led Rhona to an opening, then stooped and disappeared into the darkness.

  Rhona had lost all sense of direction. The tunnel wound like a snake through the hill, at times branching off in more than one direction, but Spike was always waiting for her at the crossroads.

  ‘Legend says the loch was once salt water. A waterhorse came through this tunnel from the sea and devoured a young girl. Her father, mad with grief, hunted the monster and tried to kill it, but when he found it, it was made of jelly.’

  Spike stood back to let Rhona pass through the metal door.

  The tunnel had reached its end.

  Rhona heard the switch and from semi-darkness her eyes were blasted into light; light that sprang like the sun from the metal tables and glass cabinets arranged neatly under the arched stone roof.

  Rhona had heard about such structures, had even crawled down Maeshowe’s long low tunnel in Orkney and emerged in its great amphitheatre, but nothing had prepared her for this.

  ‘It amused my father to use an ancient burial chamber to manipulate life,’ Spike told her.

  Their eyes were becoming accustomed to the light, and the gleaming emptiness told them the truth. They had found the lab, but whatever MacAulay had been working on was gone.

  ‘The bastards have taken it.’

  ‘Who has taken it, Spike? Who knew about the lab?’

  He sat down heavily, leaning his arms on a lab table. Rhona could read in his face what the last twenty-four hours had been for the boy. And he was a boy, despite the pinched face of an old man.

  She went over and rested her arm about his shoulders.

  ‘Do you know what your father was planning?’

  He looked past her, at the wall.

  The map sat behind a perspex screen. Orange, yellow brown and black shadings identified the racial predominance of each of the American states. Black, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Asian, Jew. White superiority under threat.

  To the right a smaller map, a group of islands, jewels in the western sea. Skye, Raasay; their racial story in coloured detail; Gael and incomer.

  ‘Spike, was your father going to do something here?’

  ‘I thought if he was dead, it would all end,’ he said. ‘But it hasn’t, has it?’

  ‘Is there any way out of here except by the tunnel?’

  He nodded at a duplicate metal door on the other side of the domed structure.

  ‘There’s a cave where the boat comes in.’

  Rhona pulled him to his feet

  ‘Go and see if we still have a boat.’

  Spike opened the door and Rhona heard the low boom of crashing waves.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he shouted.

  But Rhona was already too busy to hear. There was an office area at the back of the dome, cut off from the lab by a glass screen. The quickest way to find out what MacAulay had been working on would be to check his records. Much as she disliked the character Spike called father, there was no doubt the man
was a meticulous scientist. If he had been playing genetic wargames, the information could still be here somewhere.

  She lifted a pile of files from a cabinet and made for the desk. The wall in front of her was a patchwork of newspaper cuttings and extracts from scientific articles that made her skin crawl. They were grouped in chronological order, covering the last five years. The most recent was a UK cutting about a call for American public health officials to prepare for the possibility of a terrorist attack using biological weapons.

  Genetic modification by those with access to sophisticated laboratory facilities could lead to the development of GM pathogens with enhanced resistance to antibiotics or, in theory, genetically targeted to affect selected ethnic groups.

  It looked as though the columnist had been reading MacAulay’s mail.

  The rest of the articles were in a similar vein. Right-wing bombers in the US, the Japanese poison gas episode, the nail bomb in London.

  The man revelled in disasters.

  Rhona opened the first file. Lists of names, some with amounts of money beside them under the headings ‘Donation’ or ‘Prepayment’. Some were for a couple of hundred dollars, others were in the thousands. There was no mention of what the money was for. The next two files were the same. Lists of people or lists of equipment. No mention of ReAlba, no mention of what had been going on here.

  Rhona went back to the cabinet and pushed her way through the files, scrabbling with sheets of paper that were no more unusual than her own office paperwork.

  She needed the lab-books. They would tell her what the hell had been going on.

  It was no use. There was a mountain of things to figure out here and it wasn’t her responsibility to do it. What she had to do was tell the authorities where the lab was and get off the island and go home. Even Phillips would be her friend when she told him what she’d found.

  Rhona left the glass enclosure.

  The insistent booming noise in the lab had intensified. It made her feel giddy. She began to feel as if she was on a fairground ride that would not stop. As she reached out and steadied herself against a metal table, her eyes were drawn upwards. The domed ceiling shivered with echoes.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  She staggered to a sink, the sharp acid taste of vomit in her throat.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The noise was no longer outside her. It was inside her brain.

  She clasped the table edge, her balance going. Her body felt light, so light. If she let go, she knew she would float.

  Spike’s voice broke the spell.

  ‘Hey, are you alright?’

  He had closed the seaward door and the deep resonant sound was gone. Rhona pulled her eyes from the ceiling and found she was holding tightly to the table edge.

  ‘That noise. It was inside my head,’ she said slowly, trying to understand. ‘I thought I was floating upwards,’ Rhona could hardly believe what she was saying.

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have closed the door,’ Spike explained. “The mound is built like an acoustic theatre. It manipulates sound, especially low continuous sound like chanting or …’

  ‘The sound of the sea,’ she finished for him. It was weird, like …’

  ‘Like a religious experience?’ Spike gave a grim laugh. ‘My father knew the right fucking place to play God.’

  The engine hummed into life. Spike untied the rope and manoeuvred them out of the cave, towards daylight. When they were well away from the cliff, Rhona tried her mobile, but there was no signal. If she wanted to make a call, she would probably have to get to a land line.

  ‘The nearest is at Brochel, if the line isn’t down from the storm,’ Spike told her.

  So they headed north, with Druim an Aonaich hanging over them, cutting the sun. Spike stayed parallel to the coast, keeping clear of the choppy waters at the cliff edge. Even then, they could feel the great pull of the undertow, as wave fought wave, to and from the rockface. When they reached Screapadal, Spike pointed towards the ruins of the village.

  ‘That’s where I fought with my father. I thought he would swim ashore and walk back to the cottage but he didn’t.’

  Rhona stared, thinking Spike must be wrong, that in the dark and horror of it all he must have forgotten where he had been.

  ‘Are you sure it was here?’

  Spike looked at her and Rhona knew for sure he was telling her the truth. Which could mean only one thing.

  ‘Spike, the foot was trawled up in Raasay Sound on the other side of the island,’ she said. ‘The first hand was found on Rigg Beach on Skye.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The other hand was found in a salmon cage in Loch Arnish,’ Rhona said. ‘How could your father’s body get to the other side of the island from here?’

  Rhona watched him trying to work it out. Even with tides and prevailing winds …

  Spike shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Rhona said slowly. ‘Your father didn’t drown. Well, not here anyway.’

  She could feel the possibility of that scenario sink in.

  ‘Which means you weren’t responsible for his death,’ she said gently.

  They sat in silence, the plop of the water as it broke against the bow the only sound between them.

  The big yacht came creeping into view over Spike’s shoulder. The sails were full of wind but it was the high-powered engine that was speeding the boat across the Inner Sound towards them from the direction of Applecross on the mainland. Chances were, it contained tourists cruising their way around the Western Isles.

  Spike was following her gaze, turning to get a better view.

  ‘Fuck!’ He grabbed at the wheel, turning it full circle so that Rhona was thrown hard against the metal rail.

  ‘What is it?’ she shouted, knowing the answer before he said it.

  ‘Maley.’

  Spike’s voice was faint above the noise of the forced engine. The dinghy rose, fighting the swell and the sudden change in direction. For a moment the stern hung in space, then it dropped, the propeller churned water and they were heading back the way they had come.

  The big yacht cut the distance between them with the speed of a bullet.

  Chapter 31

  The room was white, brightened by the light from the porthole above her. Rhona tried to sit up, but the movement of her head brought a sharp stab of pain and with it the memory of what had happened to Spike.

  The yacht bearing down on them, the worry as Spike sailed too close to the cliff edge. The frantic search for the opening, knowing the big yacht couldn’t follow them into the cave. She had watched him struggle to keep the tiller steady, his eyes searching for the shadow that spelled the hidden opening to the lab.

  Then they saw it, the outcrop that split the surface of the water with four, maybe five jagged points, just north of the opening. On the way out they had sailed due east, then turned, avoiding the outcrop. Now they were being washed through it, the submerged rock slicing the hull.

  All she remembered after that was her own scream and the cold sea closing above her.

  The pain in Rhona’s head had dropped to a dull throb. She threw back the covers and swung her legs out of bed, grabbing the white bathrobe that lay on a nearby chair and staggering to the washbasin, knowing that throwing cold water in her face wouldn’t change anything.

  The fact was, Spike was probably dead because of her. If she had waited and let Andre come with them or brought in the police, instead of thinking she could do it all by herself, he would be alive now.

  Rhona lay back down, legs quivering with exhaustion and distress. She had to believe Spike had either made it to shore or was somewhere on this yacht. Either way, she would find him.

  The yacht was moving again, the engine vibrating like a drill. She closed her aching eyes and wished herself a hundred miles away, sitting at her kitchen window watching the sun set on the gardens of the convent. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but now.

  When th
e door opened, she was lying curled on top of the bed. A thickset man smiled down at her, a smile that roamed like a hand over her body. Rhona swung herself upright to show him she still had the strength to hurt him if he dared come near.

  He laughed contemptuously, then threw her some dry clothes.

  The cabin was luxurious and empty. The man showed her inside, then left. Rhona looked about, spotting the ship’s decanter and crystal glasses behind a polished brass rail. She poured a small whisky in a glass, downed it, and immediately poured another, knowing that this would be the only nice thing to happen to her on this boat.

  Someone had pulled her from the water, undressed her and put her to bed. Not the sort of good Samaritan action she expected from Maley. If he had saved her from drowning, it was because he had something else planned for her. Something worse.

  Rhona walked round the cabin, looking out of the windows, trying to recognise the coastline. They were well offshore, but she spotted the pinnacle that was Brochel to the south, which meant they were passing Sithearn Mor on their way north towards the islands of Rona and Eilean Tigh.

  Rhona’s heart sank. There was nothing but rocks and seagulls where they were headed.

  She reached for the decanter again. Maybe being drunk wasn’t such a bad idea after all. When the door opened five minutes later, she was ready for him.

  Except it wasn’t Maley after all.

  ‘Dr MacLeod, I’m so glad you’re okay.’

  Dr Lynne Franklin came towards her, smiling that too perfect smile. Rhona was already on her feet.

  ‘Okay?’ Rhona didn’t even try to control her anger. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing? Your damn yacht drove us onto the cliff.’

  Franklin’s perfect smile disappeared.

  ‘I assure you, Dr MacLeod,’ she said sharply, ‘we had no intention of harming you when we approached your boat. If you remember, you left me a text message saying you wanted to speak to me urgently. I was in Scotland on business and called your lab. Your assistant told me you were on Raasay. I have sailed these islands many times and keep a yacht up here with a friend of mine. I decided I would come and find you.’