"All this area here was once a thick pinewood," said Wallace Breckenridge, waving his walking stick at the sparse pines and the clumps of heather and gorse, amid which hares were bouncing about and a white-tail deer gazed at them from behind a stretch of peat bog.
This was to their left on the rocky highland trail they had been following for the past three hours. To their right the hill sloped steeply down to a green mossy vale.
MacGalt unslung his knapsack and set it on a patch of cropped grass that the deer had been nibbling when they had come around the outcrops a hundred yards further down.
"Might get a spit of rain soon," he remarked. "Let's take a breather now while we can. Would you like a ginger ale?"
"Mineral water for me, Gerry," said Wallace, leaning on his stick. "The trail climbs up a stiff grade from here, with a cliff on our starboard. Narrows some, too. Yes, a rest will put us in good mettle for some serious climbing."
The day before, at ten in the morning, Sanguineus parked his Dart behind the Chockdaw, a junk yard cluttered with wrecked vehicles, empty oil drums, mounds of the miscellaneous offscourings of a big city, with compressed bales of assorted metals.
He was in time to see Smitchee come out from the tin-roofed office building and detour his way between the ungainly piles to where the yardmen parked. He carried a lumpy gunnysack.
Sanguineus walked up to him at a pair of portable outhouses.
"I hope this is what you want, San," Smitchee said, holding open the sack.
Inside was a modified Ruger Magnun .22 air rifle, sniper-scoped, with a flanged muzzle, and a plain cardboard box of a dozen broad-head studs with thin two-inch stems.
"This will do," Sanguineus said, putting the rifle and studs back in the gunnysack after a quick examination. He placed the sack in the Dart's trunk. "How much?"
"McFarland was up most of the night. Two hundred ten pounds."
Sanguineus leaned against the car, rolling a smoke. "I've another favor to ask," he said. "If a woman comes to you, calling herself Tanya or Valentina, tell her I'm staying in room 204 of the Holyrood. If she wants to know where I'll be tomorrow, tell her this--"
He lit his cig and took out a small notepad and pen. "The highlands. About a mile north of Newbigging, on the A93, there's a bridge over the river, the Old Military Road. A dirt road leads off it for a few miles. She's to take the dirt road, slow and easy. She'll come to my Dart."
He wrote down the directions, tore off the slip of lined yellow paper and gave it to Smitchee. "Tell her to wait there for me. But if she'd rather hang out at the Holyrood, the staff will let her in my room. I've arranged it."
Smitchee screwed up his whiskered face. "You think it certain, this?"
"No, but if one or the other wants to find me, she knows you're the one to pump. And tell her I'll be gone from dawn to dusk, but that I should finish my business in the highlands by noon, if she goes that route."
"Right, then," Smitchee said, holding out the debit card.
By sunrise the Dodge Dart was passing the ski resort on A93. Tanya looked at him with a smile. "A helicopter. Do you think it's them?"
Sanguineus slowed, pulling off on the side and peering through the speckled windshield at the craft that seemed no bigger than a blood-gorged mosquito against the mass of grey clouds. It was angling northwest. The splayed rays of the sun glinted off the tail boom and the sleek white canopy.
"Probably so," he said. "They'll be landing about six miles southwest of the hit site. There's a ranger cabin there. They'll have breakfast before starting up the trail."
"How much time do we have to set up?"
"I'd say an hour for their breakfast, and three hours of hiking. We've got a good four and a half hours. MacGalt knows he's to drag his feet and suggest two rest stops before they get to the cliff area. I'll be parking about a half mile from the sniper site."
"Well, splendid. I hope you like corned beef sandwiches. Did you buy some drinks?"
"The ice chest in the back seat."
They passed Newbigging in the dreary light of a promised rainy day, and a minute later came to the Old Military bridge on their left. All around was ruffled green earth scarred with brooks under a blanket of clouds that held their moisture stubbornly.
The concrete bridge cast no shadow over the sluggish Clunie river that spread its muddy green water over a wide gorge. A short drive and the dirt road appeared like a grainy ribbon stretching northward to what are called mountains in Scotland.
Sanguineus drove leisurely over the dips and bumps. "Thirsty? A Coke or ginger ale? We've four of each."
"Want one?"
"A Coke for me. And I'll try one of your sandwiches."
Tanya scrunched around between the seats and reached back for the styrofoam chest, taking out a Coke and a ginger ale.
"I put horseradish on the sandwiches," she said. "You all right with that?"
"You know I am."
She tilted back her seat and watched him eat as he drove with one hand resting on the steering wheel.
She compared his coldly serious expression with the look on his face last night in bed, in the Lornaglen cottage where he had insisted on spending the night, despite the longer drive they would have in the morning. She had marvelled at his brutal coldness as he pinned her down, ripping her flimsy gauze nightie free of her breasts, the collar scorching her neck as it gave way. A moment after feeling his hand pushing the hem up to her stomach, his stout length of selfish eagerness drove into her, a warm friction on her inner thighs as she pretended to resist him. But the powerful waves of pleasure coming from such a passionate fierceness defeated the pretense, and for once she gave in to him completely.
The previous night had been like a series of storms, a calculated savagery designed to urge the truth out of her. She smiled at that now, watching the green boulderous mountains growing inch by inch as the Dart ambled toward them. But last night it had been different. He was not calculating. He had abandoned every doubt, every suspicion, and ravaged her as if the world was soon to end.
Why the change? she wondered, glancing at him; a break in the dark clouds spearing him with a brief thrust of sunlight. Was it what he had seen in the cottage? Had that changed him? Had the interior looked like a place alien to what he knew of her? Of Tanya Wilde the tomboy?
The dirt road followed an incline between two jagged 3,000 foot mountains, rising sharply in places, levelling out in others. Pine trees and dwarf willows lined the slopes that were studded with saxifrage, creeping tendrils of azalea, and, in the lower reaches, bog cotton. In the background the clouds were a silvered ruddish smoke, visibly churning in the intermittent gusts.
Sanguineus saw it, a quartermile further, a line of white rocks like a prehistoric fence going up along a shelf in the southern face of the mountain.
He said, "That's it. We've got some hiking of our own to do now."
"You're sure? You've been here before?"
"Where's your intuition? Don't you feel I'm right?"
"I'm just nervous, you bastard. Have you forgotten what I went through in the Cave?"
Sanguineus pulled off, under a willow. "Get your mountain climbing legs on," he said, and getting out he went around to the trunk.
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