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  Another two miles up the road, he signaled for the turnoff to the B852 and followed it the same as last time, to the left-hand jog that led them back toward Boleskine House. Beacher’s tension was palpable, but Bolan put it out of mind and concentrated on the narrow roads, alert for lay-bys and oncoming vehicles.

  A hundred yards before they reached the final turnoff to the sloping drive of Boleskine House, he saw a wrecker rumbling toward them, towing a sedan. Beside him, Beacher stiffened and muttered, “Marvelous.”

  It was the Benz, complete with shattered windshield, bullet scars and scorch marks on the hood, which had been lowered since they’d left it open after dousing flames beneath it. Bolan observed the car in passing, something any tourist on the road would do, and saw no body in the driver’s seat.

  “We missed the ambulance,” Beacher observed.

  “Or else they’ve laid the bodies out for an examination at the scene,” he said.

  “The medical examiner’s in Inverness,” she told him. “So is North Division headquarters for the Scottish Ambulance Service. Calculate arrival time from when the bodies were discovered.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bolan told her. “Someone heard the shots or noticed something afterward and called it in. If they were driving past, they cleared the road before we left. We’re good to go.”

  “Full speed ahead, then.” From her tone, Bolan could tell she wasn’t thrilled.

  “If you want me to, I’ll drop you back in Fort Augustus first. You can arrange for someone to come by and pick you up at the hotel.”

  “And tell my boss I did a runner halfway through the program? That should put a big smile on his face.”

  “Might be the best thing for you,” Bolan said.

  Keeping her eyes fixed on the narrow road ahead, she said, “Forget it, eh? I’m on for the duration.”

  “Right, then,” Bolan said, and motored south toward the waste treatment plant, where zigzag access roads would lead him back to the B852 northbound and Alastair Macauley’s mansion on the bluffs above Loch Ness.

  Chapter 12

  The damned police were back. It was a bloody inconvenience, most particularly at the present time, but Alastair Macauley was required to deal with them and show at least a modicum of courtesy for individuals so far below his station that their lives could barely be imagined.

  Bruce, his longtime butler, led them to the drawing room. This time it was two men in cheap suits off the rack, instead of uniforms. Macauley did not bother looking at the warrant cards they offered for inspection, but he made note of their names: Baikie and Clapperton.

  “And how may I assist you, Constables?” Macauley asked.

  “Inspectors,” Baikie said, correcting him. “We’re both with CID. That’s the Criminal—”

  “I recognize the acronym, of course,” Macauley said, cutting him off. “More questions is it, then? About my stolen car?”

  “In fact, we’ve found your car, sir. And a good deal more.”

  Macauley raised one bristling eyebrow, feigned incomprehension. “Meaning…what, exactly?”

  “Corpses, sir,” Clapperton said. “Two corpses.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Macauley said.

  “Are you familiar with a local spot called Boleskine House?” Baikie inquired.

  “Of course,” Macauley said. “It’s well-known. Infamous, in fact.”

  “And all the more after today, sir,” Clapperton advised him. “It’s the place your car was found, shot full of holes and partly burned. There was a dead man in the driver’s seat, armed with a pistol. Nearby, on the grounds, we found a second man shot dead. Two guns with that one. It’s a double homicide you see, sir.”

  Time for outrage mingled with confusion. “But I don’t… You mean…that is to say…who were these thieves?”

  “Thieves, sir?” Baikie was peering at him down a long, thin nose.

  “The pair who stole my car,” Macauley said to clarify. “Have you identified them?”

  Clapperton removed a little notebook from his pocket, opened it and riffled through its pages before answering. “The driver had an operator’s license in the name of Colin Reid MacGregor. Do you recognize the name, sir?”

  Stupid bastard! Macauley thought. But he said, after consideration, “I do not.”

  “The other carried no ID,” Baikie said. “He was thirty, more or less, with ginger hair and freckles. Something off about his ears, I’d say. Slender, of average height. Do you know anyone who might fit that description, sir?”

  “Half of the Highland Scots,” Macauley said, “except that funny bit about the ears.”

  The two inspectors smiled politely at his small bon mot. Clapperton said, “I’m sure that’s true, sir. Now, about these guns…”

  Macauley echoed, “Guns?” Best to seem ignorant, for the time being.

  “The weapons found with these two deaders and your car,” Baikie said. “Those would be two semiautomatic pistols, banned under the 1997 Firearms Act, and one twelve-bore Remington shotgun lacking proper certification as required under the 1968 Firearms Act. Any knowledge of those items, Mr. Macauley?”

  “Certainly not,” he replied, with just the right measure of bruised dignity.

  It was Baikie’s turn again. “Aside from those guns—two of which apparently were fired at persons still unknown—the men found with your car were shot with what appears to be a semiautomatic, or perhaps a fully automatic rifle.”

  “A machine gun, do you mean?” Macauley asked.

  “Perhaps, sir,” Clapperton replied. “Which would be banned under the 1937 Firearms Act. Semiautomatic rifles are proscribed under the Firearms Act of 1988. Illegal either way, sir.”

  “Quite. Well, gentlemen, I wish you both the best of luck in finding those responsible for this atrocity.”

  “We’re thinking, sir,” Baikie replied, “that we may be referring this to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Under the circumstances.”

  “Absolutely right, too,” Macauley said.

  “Now, about your car, sir—”

  “Sounds like it’s a total loss,” Macauley said. “I’ll need a copy of your constable’s report for my insurance carrier, of course.”

  “Of course, sir,” Baikie said. “If you have any further information—”

  “You will be the first to know. I won’t detain you, now.” Macauley pressed a button on the wall to summon Bruce, and watched the CID inspectors leave.

  Two stupid bastards dead, he thought, but it would take some time to link him with them, if the police ever did. Meanwhile, Macauley had more pressing matters on his mind.

  He had a salvage operation to get started, on the loch.

  BOLAN SAW the police car leave Macauley’s driveway, watching from concealment in the woods beside the narrow road that passed the laird’s estate from Foyers. Beacher had dropped him a half mile beyond, to the south, and gone on in the Camry while Bolan hiked back to his target.

  The cops were plainclothes, some kind of detectives, which meant they had been summoned from Inverness after the Benz and the bodies were found. Macauley would be sweating, worried about exposure of whatever he was doing on the loch and his connection with the Tartan Independence Front, but whether that would slow him was anybody’s guess.

  The Executioner was skeptical.

  In any case, whether the laird backed off or not was beside the point. He had a gang of terrorists employed on some chore at Loch Ness, and breaking off with them—assuming that he even wanted to—would cause more problems than it solved. Smart money said the plot would forge ahead.

  All Bolan had to do was find out what the plan involved, then put a stop to it.

  Easy as falling off a log.

  I
nto an open grave.

  He let the unmarked CID car fade from sight northbound, then rose and moved out toward the fence that ringed Macauley’s property. It was a heavy-duty chain-link number—not electrified or fitted with alarms, as Bolan soon discovered—but the spear points he had seen along the highway were replaced inside the forest by an overhanging barbed-wire coil that would make scaling doubly difficult.

  No matter. When you couldn’t go over, go straight through.

  He used wire cutters purchased at the hardware store in Fort Augustus, made himself a gate and wriggled through it, then secured the flap with twist ties bought from the same small shop. The job should pass a casual inspection, from a distance. If someone came by and took a closer look…well, they’d still have to find him on the wooded grounds.

  And no one stalked Bolan with impunity.

  He knew his relative position to the manor house from satellite images he’d zoomed in on using Beacher’s laptop back at the Inchnacardoch Lodge.

  Bolan was traveling light on this probe, armed with his Beretta 93-R and the KA-BAR fighting knife, and his sole surveillance tool, the cell phone he had used to photograph the DeepScan at Macauley’s private dock. He didn’t know what to expect, what he might find, but simple logic told him that the laird had secrets he was anxious to conceal—by killing, if it came to that.

  A sentient shadow in the forest, Bolan moved out toward the manor house.

  “YOU GONNA TELL ME what it is, then?” Danny Bain inquired.

  “It’s need-to-know,” Wallace replied. “Right now, you don’t.”

  “A fine thing that is,” Bain groused, but he was used to taking orders. He wouldn’t make an issue of it.

  They’d completed three more passes in the DeepScan of the sunken object since alerting Macauley to their find. It didn’t budge an inch from currents at the bottom of the loch, more than six hundred feet below the vessel’s keel. The sonar couldn’t substitute for underwater cameras, but Wallace knew the object was inanimate. And from his limited research, it measured roughly seven times the length of any so-called monster ever glimpsed by witnesses around Loch Ness—220 feet, or damned close to it by his calculations from the seabed scanner, and some twenty feet in diameter. Off to the port side, a protrusion added ten or eleven feet more at one point, which fit with what he’d been told to expect if the thing had rolled off to one side on impact.

  Bloody amazing, that, he thought. To find it after all the time, money and effort that Macauley had invested. Still, he’d only done the easy part so far. Retrieval was another story altogether.

  Displacement of the object, spanking new and on the surface, had been registered at 1.56 million pounds. Submerged, boost that to 1.77 million. Wallace, trying to imagine all the gear they would require to hoist it from the depths, knew that a ship designed to carry it could never pass along the Caledonian Canal. Toss in the need for secrecy, and raising it was not an option.

  More bad news: they would be going deep for salvage, working at the bottom of the loch where sunlight never reached and any failure of the gear meant instant death. Macauley had a pair of specialists for that, but someone from the TIF contingent would be chosen to accompany them.

  Not me, he thought, almost a mantra. Please, not me.

  But Wallace knew that he would do as he was told, risk everything as he’d agreed to do when he and Fergus Gibson organized the Tartan Independence Front. He’d known that death was possible when they began.

  But Wallace hadn’t counted on it happening six hundred feet below the surface of Loch Ness.

  WALKING THE LAND and keeping track of what went on there was a basic part of Ewan MacKinnon’s routine. As ghillie of Laird Macauley’s estate, he was tasked with preserving its wildlife—at least until the big man or his guests were in a killing mood—and protecting the grounds from trespassers. To that end, he inspected every yard of the perimeter each day, unless his duties took him somewhere off the estate—like safeguarding delivery of certain shipments to the manor, for example. Or delivering a token of the laird’s displeasure to someone who had offended him.

  The latter situation was uncommon. Folks in Foyers, Fort Augustus and environs mostly knew their place. The great majority respected Highland history, tradition and the contributions Macauley had made to the local economy. If he was sometimes abrupt and high-handed, well, what did any Scot expect from minor royalty?

  This morning, MacKinnon was checking the estate’s perimeter more closely than usual. The previous night’s events had riled the laird, not only costing him a pricey vehicle and two men who were scarcely worth their salt, but bringing the police onto his doorstep with their prying questions. That spelled trouble—and it told MacKinnon that the risks of an intrusion had increased.

  He didn’t know who’d killed the pair of clumsy Lowlanders, except that those responsible might also threaten Laird Macauley. It was his job to protect the big man and his property against all enemies, whether the adversary was a local poacher or a gun thug up from Glasgow with a score to settle on behalf of Frankie Boyle.

  MacKinnon knew about the recent trouble there, and was determined that it wouldn’t interfere with Laird Macauley’s life or his ongoing work. Particularly when they were so close to ultimate success.

  MacKinnon might have missed the flap cut in the fence if he’d been simply walking the perimeter to stretch his legs and get some air. Perhaps. But in defense mode, he was quick to spot the fresh cuts and the twist ties that had been applied to close the makeshift gate. He stopped there, knelt for an inspection of the grass and soil, then turned back toward the manor house with slow, determined strides.

  Tracking the enemy.

  He knew the way police worked. They’d have come with warrants if they meant to search the place, not sneaking through a hole cut in the fence. The method of approach meant he was dealing with a criminal, or possibly a spy from one of the so-called intelligence concerns. It came to the same thing, in any case.

  MacKinnon never walked the grounds without a rifle, his favorite being a bolt-action Husqvarna 9000 Crown Grade, chambered in 7 mm Remington Magnum. With 140-grain soft-point projectiles traveling 3,092 feet per second and striking with 2,971 foot-pounds of energy, the rifle could easily drop most four-footed prey—and would make short, bloody work of a two-legged target.

  Not that MacKinnon planned to kill the trespasser outright. He hoped to grill the prowler personally, then deliver him to Laird Macauley for interrogation, but there was a possibility of armed resistance.

  In which case, he would not hesitate.

  The intruder was stealthy, no question about it, but MacKinnon had faith in his decades of training and natural skill. He rarely came back empty-handed from a hunt, and never when the prey was human.

  This should be another easy score.

  SOFT PROBES TOOK TIME. Bolan had told Beacher to check along the road from Foyers every hour or so, and keep it casual. If he was clear, he’d flag her down. If not, she’d wait another hour, then return. And so on until noon, when he’d instructed her to call a cutout number in the States, identify herself and tell whoever answered that she’d lost contact with him.

  And here he was, eleven minutes in, and someone was already stalking him.

  He wondered if it was the ghillie Beacher had described, Ewan MacKinnon, or some other member of Macauley’s staff. The only difference would be degrees of skill and knowledge of the ground that gave the home team an advantage. Some of that was offset by the satellite surveillance photos Bolan had reviewed, but neither they nor topographic maps would give the feel of years spent on the ground, learning each wrinkle in the soil, its feel and smell.

  Disappointed that an enemy had found his trail so quickly, Bolan changed his plans. Instead of making for the house, he veered off to the west through woodlands, in the general direction of
Loch Ness, leading the hunter toward a place where he could choose the killing ground.

  Bolan likely could not have said exactly what alerted him to being followed. Had it been a muted sound? A fleeting shadow glimpsed in peripheral vision? A sixth sense for danger, honed on battlefields around the world? Perhaps some combination of them all?

  He didn’t know, and at the moment didn’t care. The fact of being hunted was what mattered, and the action he had to take to neutralize the threat.

  In that regard, it mattered whether he was facing one man or a crew. So far, Bolan had only sensed one tracker, but a two-way radio or cell phone could be used to summon reinforcements from the big house in a heartbeat. If that happened, if he was outnumbered and outgunned, then it became a very different scenario.

  Bolan had played both games and walked away victorious, but at the moment—in broad daylight, on hostile ground, armed as he was—he would prefer a round of one-on-one to facing down an army.

  So he would play it that way, until proved wrong, look for a place to spring a trap and turn Macauley’s hunter into Bolan’s prey. If he could pull it off without firing a shot, so much the better. Come what may, there would be only one survivor.

  And it had to be the Executioner.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER Bolan wound up going high, climbing a Scots pine and securing a perch some fifteen feet above the forest floor, screened from below by hanging boughs and needles. Not the perfect hideout, granted. Expert eyes could pick him out if they were searching overhead, but Bolan had walked past the tree, then doubled back to scale the west side of its trunk, away from the direction followed by his enemy.

  Better than nothing.

  Bolan waited, with the numbers running in his head, aware that if the adversary tracking him had called for help, he’d only made his situation worse by setting up an ambush. With a strike team on his trail, the wiser thing to do would be to evacuate while he still had time, before they boxed him in and sprayed his perch with automatic fire.