Siege of Stone Read online

  "You want to make England bleed," Mulcifer said, "and you think that I'm the one to do the job."

  "Aye, in a nutshell. We're all set up to harass and terrorize England. The better job of it we can do, the faster they'll be willing to grant total sovereignty. And you'll have all the English blood you can spill, so long as you restrict your actions to government targets—English military and police. We don't want civilian casualties. And we sure as hell don't want slaughtered families."

  The creature turned and looked at Colin, and his grin made his dark and handsome face seem like a skull. "I'll try not to disappoint ye . . . brother." The voice was an exact rendition of the highland dialect, but even more, it rang in Colin Mackay's ears like the echo of his own voice, though neither Angus nor Rob nor James seemed to notice.

  Colin tried to concentrate on the road ahead, and asked Mulcifer, "So where were you headed, going east like you were?"

  "I was going to try and find another friend," he said. "But then you lads came along, and I think you'll prove to be far better friends than ever I had before."

  And I'll prove a far greater enemy than any you've ever known. I'll make your English foes look like little girls in lace. But first I'll twist your soul and make you wish you'd never even heard of me from your damned father . . .

  This was ideal, Mulcifer thought, for that was how he would think of himself as well. The architect of hell, the one who would turn this earth into a slaughterhouse where souls were forgotten, where men and women and children were only meat, pure flesh to suffer and feed his hungry spirit.

  The havoc would be wonderful, but equally grand would be his revenge upon Sir Andrew Mackay through the destruction of his son. The man would know all the torments of the damned and more, before Mulcifer finally struck him down.

  As they were driving on the Pennsylvania turnpike late that evening, there was a call on the car's cell phone. Brian, back at the New York headquarters, had received a letter from an Inverness firm of solicitors. The letter had been shuttled through the usual channels before it had arrived at their Manhattan mail drop.

  "Open it and read it to me," Colin told him.

  The letter stated that as Mr. Francis Scobie's father, Alister Scobie, had not been heard from by the firm of Dingwall, McCord, Pollock and Herrie within the time period set forth by the elder Mr. Scobie, that all his accrued wealth and the ownership of Castle Dirk in County Ross and Cromarty settled upon the younger Mr. Scobie. The letter further requested Francis Scobie to report to the solicitors' office and take possession of the property.

  "Thank you," Colin said, and ended the call. He took a deep breath. The news meant that his father, who had owned Castle Dirk for centuries, and for the past thirty years under the name of Alister Scobie, was dead. He was to contact the solicitors every six months, and were he to miss such a contact, Colin was to be alerted by the solicitors, and to assume that Sir Andrew was dead.

  Colin had thought it likely his father had perished in the mass deaths in upstate New York. But since only eleven bodies had been found, he thought it possible that his father might have survived. If he had, he was gone now. It was possible that whoever had killed the other Templars might have done for Sir Andrew as well.

  Colin was ambivalent about the news. He had no tears for his father. After almost a hundred years of life, he had no tears for anything. And how could one truly mourn the death of a man who had lived nearly a millennium? His father'd had his fill of life, Colin had seen that in his eyes the last time they had met, fifteen years earlier.

  Although Colin didn't particularly believe in the god his father had defended since the reign of the Bruce, he saw some guiding hand here, some act of destiny that, within hours, provided him not only with a terrible new weapon, but also with a stronghold from which he might wield it. He had sworn to go back to Scotland only when he was ready to free it, and that time had come. What better center of operations than a castle?

  "We're going back now," he said to the others. "And we have a place to go back to." He told them about Castle Dirk, but not about the death of his father. They knew his real name, but not his ancestry, and not the truth about his age. Angus had said many times, "Ye're wise beyond your years, Colin," but he didn't know that Colin Mackay's years numbered ninety-eight.

  "It'll be grand to see the old land again," Angus said softly, or at least as softly as he could speak, with his growl of a voice.

  "Aye," said Colin. "We'll take a few days to finish things up here and have the place prepared for our coming."

  "Like Prince Charlie coming back over the water," Rob said, recalling the Jacobite dream. "But we'll have better fortune than poor Charlie."

  Colin hoped so. Charlie might have had a better chance had he had a devil beside him, thirsty for English blood.

  Chapter 9

  Several days after Colin Mackay drove to New York City with the being known as Mulcifer, Laika Harris received an encrypted message in her e-mail. It instructed her, Joseph Stein, and Tony Luciano to come fully packed to the front door of their building at ten thirty that evening, where a white van labeled "Portobello Limo Service" would pick them up. That was all.

  The van was there at the appointed time. Following standard operating procedure, they had transferred all the files on the desktop computers with which they had been supplied onto their laptops, then used a special Company program to completely destroy the hard drives of the desktops. Not that it mattered, since Laika knew that Company cleaners sent by Skye would come in to do a sweep of the place only minutes after the operatives had departed.

  The van driver said nothing, nor did they speak to him. He took them to one of the private hangars at Philadelphia International Airport, where they took their luggage into a small waiting lounge with no windows. There, seated on a chair covered in gray cloth, was Richard Skye. He still looked like an underfed water rat, Laika thought, with his little brown mustache over his pursed lips. Those lips drew up in a purposefully insincere smile as he gestured to them to sit down.

  "You're leaving the country for a time," he said without preamble in his tight, prissy voice. "Your recent activities in the wild west have gained you some notoriety among some of our . . . investigatory colleagues in the government." He paused, as though he expected one of them to say something, but they all only looked at him. "Do you know who Joshua Yazzie is?" Skye asked flatly.

  Laika was glad to see that her colleagues' faces were unreadable masks. "Yes," she said. "He was a tribal policeman who assisted us in Arizona."

  "He was Brian Foster," Skye said. "An FBI agent."

  Laika made her eyes widen slightly. "Sonofabitch," she said softly.

  "Mmm. He also seems to be missing. From a deep-cover FBI file that we intercepted, I learned the last anyone heard of him was when he was heading for Utah, apparently on your trail, Agent Harris."

  "We were unaware of any such surveillance, sir."

  For a moment, Skye looked at her as if he wanted to call her a liar. But instead he took a deep breath and looked up at the fissured ceiling panels. "At any rate, I've also learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is very anxious to confront you three. I don't really know whether your usefulness in this country is at an end, or if this is something the gray-suited shits will get over shortly. But I'm sending you abroad just the same, out of their jurisdiction.

  "Frankly, I would have done so anyway. This is a very intriguing situation. It sounds like Ghost Central." Skye handed her a thick, sealed dossier. "To be read in transit. Surprisingly, news of all this hasn't yet begun to leak to the tabloids over here, possibly because of the general isolation of the area and the attitude toward outsiders. So it should be some time before they're running ghost excursion flights to your destination. However, as always, the sooner you come up with an answer, the better.

  "You also have new covers for this assignment. You are an archeological team from Princeton University. Agent Harris, you are Dr. Brown . . ."

  "F
oxy or Jackie?" said Laika under her breath.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Nothing, sir."

  "Dr. Frances Brown," Skye clarified. "Agent Stein, you are Dr. Charles Witherup, and Agent Luciano, being the youngest, you are a graduate student, Mr. David Angelo."

  "And if anyone checks with Princeton?" Laika asked.

  Skye gave her an angry look again. "Agent Harris, do you know of any cover from my division ever being broken?"

  ". . . No sir."

  She had hesitated just a bit too long, and Skye jumped on it. "Are you implying something?"

  "Sir, it's just that . . . I've heard there have been cases where your agents have been left in the cold. But if true, I would assume those incidents were due to the agents' own carelessness rather than faulty covers."

  "You would assume correctly," Skye answered curtly. "Now I think you should board the plane. You'll find your covers quite adequate. Have a pleasant trip."

  The way Skye said it, it sounded more like, "Go to hell." He turned and stalked through the door to the outside.

  The plane was a ten-seater, fast and comfortable. "I thought the Company's budget was going down," said Tony when they were on board.

  "This isn't a Company plane," said Joseph in a whisper, probably thinking about bugs. Laika knew what he meant. It damn well wasn't a plane of the Company, anyway, and Laika wondered who Skye called in a marker from to get this bird.

  An uncomfortable silence fell on the three of them as they waited for takeoff. After the episode in the southwest, they had talked long and hard about whether they could trust the man who was running them, and come to the conclusion that Skye was holding out on them major league. They felt certain that he knew about the existence of the Prisoner, even though they had not told Skye about it, due to their lack of trust in him. He was using the ops to hone in on real paranormal occurrences caused in some way by the Prisoner. Laika, Joseph, and Tony were Skye's hunting dogs, but they were not as ignorant as he had hoped.

  Someone was running Skye the way he was running them, she felt sure of it. But while they were following orders, she was afraid that Skye had been turned, the same way that Michael LaPierre's money had turned Popeye Daly, a CIA agent who had tried to kill the three of them. But who, if she was right, was behind Skye?

  She thought there might be a clue in the plane, but there were no identifying corporate logos emblazoned on the leather seats, nor any annual reports stuck in with the magazines, none of which had subscription labels. She had noticed the exterior was equally anonymous, except for the registration number that was required by the FAA on every plane. They could check on that later.

  The steward came back into the cabin before Laika got settled enough to open the dossier. There was something about him, a lack of intensity perhaps, that made Laika think he wasn't Company. "Mind telling me where we're headed, or is it a secret?" she asked.

  "Oh no, ma'am, not at all. We'll be landing in Inverness Airport in Scotland."

  "Scotland again," said Joseph. "Wonderful. I just love rain and lake monsters." Laika smiled at the memory. Skye's first assignment for them had been to debunk a phony psychic in front of his audience. The psychic had set his demonstration in Drumnadrochit on Loch Ness, but the only monster anyone had seen was the psychic when the operatives got through with him.

  Afterward, they had met with Richard Skye on western Scotland's Isle of Skye, a meeting place whose name proved unconditionally the size of Skye's ego. There he had explained to them the purpose behind their continuing mission. They had believed it then, but were less gullible now.

  "So what are we up to?" Joseph said. "Finding Nessie, or laying the ghost of Glamis Castle?"

  Laika opened the dossier and began to read. "You've got the ghost part right, Joseph. It seems that the Gairloch peninsula, up on the northwestern coast, has been auditioning for Ghostbusters III. There's been sighting after sighting of manifestations of some sort. Some of the witnesses do indeed call them ghosts, others say they don't know what the manifestations are, but they glow in the dark."

  "And where and when do these hauntings occur?" Joseph asked.

  "Day and night," Laika said, her eyes scanning the report. "Town and country, inside and out. There doesn't seem to be any pattern."

  "The lack of a distinct pattern," Joseph said with mock solemnity, "often signals the presence of the most meaningful pattern of all."

  "The Book of Joseph," Tony said. "Chapter nineteen, verse eight. Over how wide an area are these things being seen, Laika?"

  "Apparently the whole peninsula. About ten miles north to south and another five or six across."

  "That's nothing," said Joseph. "A few hoaxers could cover a territory like that easily enough."

  "These things have also been seen floating thirty feet in the air," Laika added.

  Joseph snorted. "Never underestimate the skill of a determined hoaxer—or the imagination of a terrified witness."

  "There's one thing that makes the sightings a little more complex," said Laika, "and that's an MI5 report the CIA intercepted and Skye got ahold of. It states that the night before all this started, a treasure hunter uncovered a luminescent and radioactive cloth that had apparently been buried for several hundred years. The next night the manifestations began. Curiouser and curiouser. But here's the kicker. The rays emitted aren't like any known radioactivity."

  "Of course not," Joseph said. "They're obviously ghost-producing rays. I suspect what was opened here was Pandora's Box." He chuckled. "Look, there's no such thing as scientific infallibility, any more than there is papal infallibility . . . no offense." He nodded deferentially to Tony, and Laika hoped he wasn't going to rise to Joseph's Catholic-baiting.

  But Tony didn't. "None taken," he said in a chilly voice.

  "As long as human beings are running the tests," Joseph went on, "mistakes are going to be made, and I suspect that's what happened here. They just got the results wrong. The glow and the radioactivity are probably just from a phosphorescent mold, or something."

  "You think scientists at Edinburgh University would make that simple a mistake?" Tony asked. "Not recognizing mold?"

  "Well, whether they did or not, we're going to be doing some archeological investigation during the next few days," Laika said. "There's a partly ruined stone circle on the peninsula that's called the Mellangaun Stones. It's what's known as a number three status for these things—'ruined but recognizable.' However, there's already an archeological party doing a dig there. But two miles west there's another circle. This one's in far worse shape—a number four. 'Badly ruined.' The MacLunie Stones, named after the farmer who discovered them. There was a dig done there, but in the late eighteen hundreds. The current MacLunie has been given enough money to persuade him to allow a small team from Princeton to do a dig there, without disturbing the stones."

  "I don't know squat about archeology," Tony said.

  "There's a small box of books on the subject with the luggage," Laika said. "Also, I had a course in it in college, as Skye reminds me here."

  "One of your native American culture courses?" Joseph asked.

  Laika nodded. "We should be able to fake it well enough. After all, it's only a cover. One of us stays at the site, while the others investigate the phenomena. There'll be tools and supplies when we land in Inverness."

  Chapter 10

  When they touched down at Inverness Airport just before noon, they found a van waiting for them. It contained archeological tools and supplies, along with detailed notes on how to use them and how to construct a dig site that would pass investigation by experts. Along with the gear was the usual assortment of weapons, covert operations equipment, and communications devices the operatives had come to expect.

  Beside the van, there was also a small Peugeot similar to the one they had used before in Scotland. Its compact size made it perfect for the narrow, twisting roads of the highlands, and the engine had been modified so that it would accelerate quickly and po
werfully up the country's steep hills.

  The maps showed that it was nearly 300 miles northwest to the peninsula. Most of the roads were one-lane, with passing places. With luck, they might be able to get there before dark.

  Joseph got into the Peugeot while Laika joined Tony in the van, and they headed up the A9, Tony in the lead. It was a sunny, welcoming day, and the highlands wore autumn hues of pale yellow and brown, highlighted by the green of the Scots pines that covered much of the hillsides.

  Tony was quiet, more so than he had been before their trip to the southwest and his involvement with Miriam Dominick, who had accidentally died in a shootout between the ops and some of LaPierre's hired thugs. Laika noticed that he still wore the silver cross that Miriam had given him. It dangled from a chain around his neck.

  She had tried to talk to him about it, thinking that if he opened up it might be easier for him to live with the loss. But he hadn't wanted to talk and she hadn't pushed him. Now they sat in silence, until he finally spoke.

  "This day reminds me of the first time we came here. But up here it's more like the Isle of Skye than Loch Ness. Hardly anybody around."

  "Sort of like the desert," Laika observed, thinking of the isolation of the southwest.

  "I like it better here," said Tony after a moment. "Trees and lakes instead of just desert. I don't know how anybody can live out there." Then he gave a short, barking laugh, and Laika knew he had just thought of all the deaths they had seen. And she knew whose death he was thinking about most.