"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 . . ."
"Foxy 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."
W
hen 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 powerfully 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.
It was eight in the evening when they drove into Gairloch. From there they went another three miles up the west coast of the peninsula, and turned left onto a dirt road that took them to the cottage that had been rented for them. It was a large, white, two-story house only a hundred yards from the rocky beach that looked out across the Minch, the body of water separating the mainland from the Isles of Harris and Lewis. There was not another cottage in sight.
They went into the house first and looked it over. Downstairs was a large living room with a television and sparsely filled bookshelves, a smaller parlor, a kitchen, and a dining room. Three computers sat waiting for them on the long dining room table. "Guess we eat in the kitchen," Joseph said.
The refrigerator and pantry were well stocked, and the closet just inside the front door was filled with rain gear in their respective sizes, as well as several pairs of rubber boots. Upstairs there were four small bedrooms and two baths.
Then they unpacked the van, taking the weapons, explosives, and covert supplies down into a windowless cellar accessible only from the kitchen. Once locked, the heavy door to the cellar would need a well-placed charge to open it.
Afterward, they had a supper of sandwiches. Laika and Tony had tea to finish, and Joseph helped himself to the single malt Scotch thoughtfully provided by whoever had prepared the place for Skye. Joseph smacked his lips after the first sip. "I'd forgotten how much I liked Scotland," he said.
"Better be careful," Tony warned him. "You'll have bad dreams."
I
t wasn't a bad dream Joseph Stein had that night, but a good one. Joseph dreamed that he awoke in the middle of the night, and saw his father standing next to his bed, tall and strong, as he had been when Joseph was a boy. He seemed to be illuminated from within, and was smiling at Joseph.
His presence was comforting, and Joseph thought how nice it was of his father to come back from wherever it was that people went when they died. He probably wanted to reveal to him that there was life after death, and Joseph found that reassuring, despite the fact that he knew he would not believe it in the morning, no matter how real it felt now.