"All right, Noel, go get Humphrey to come and help Gordon with map shuffling and the like," Philippa murmured, still mostly focused on the glass and the hand, "and then take Peregrine and go."
As thudding footbeats told of his compliance, Christopher smoothly changed places with Peregrine, so that when McLeod reappeared with Humphrey, the artist had already pulled on his coat and was stuffing reference books into his art satchel.
"Godspeed, Noel," Philippa whispered, as Julia began a whispered explanation to Humphrey of what was going on. "We'll ring you on one of the cell phones as soon as we've got a destination fixed. Now go! And pray God you get there in time!"
Chapter Thirty-Five
HERMITAGE Castle brooded on its foundations like a massive gargoyle, but the castle itself was not Raeburn's destination tonight; rather, the ruined remains of a small stone chapel, several hundred yards to the west. He had considered using the nearby Nine Stane Rig, where Soulis had met defeat so many years before at the hands of his enemies - and in reversing the results of that defeat, Raeburn intended to see his own latter-day disappointments avenged and undone - but the Black Mass he had chosen as a fitting framework for his revenge on Adam Sinclair required a site consecrated according to Christian rites. The chapel ruins were somewhat more in the open than Raeburn regarded as optimal, with most of the foundations standing no more than waist-high, but on the first night of February there was even less chance of interruption than there had been on New Year's Eve.
It had been dark for more than four hours when a white Land Rover rumbled across the bridge and whispered to a halt next to a second one parked a short distance from the start of the chapel ruins, screened from the road by a stand of winter-bare trees and almost invisible against the snow. Ahead, heavy snowfall had softened the ragged outlines of the stones and lent a deceptive tranquillity to the icy gloom of the winter's night.
As Klaus Richter materialized out of the darkness beside the driver's door, clad in snow-camouflage and with the mouthpiece of a radio headset protruding from under his balaclava helmet, the driver rolled down his window.
"All secure," Richter murmured, gloved hand resting on a compact semiautomatic weapon slung around his neck as he leaned down to glance at the three passengers in the back seat. "You can bring him on out and unload the rest of the equipment."
No lights showed as the vehicle's front doors swung wide and two of Richter's mercenaries bailed out, white-clad like himself, a back door opening more slowly for Derek Mallory to emerge, wearing a cowled black robe and a bronze medallion stamped with the head of a lynx. When he had pulled out his medical bag, he stood aside to let the men haul Adam from the car. Simultaneously, Angela alighted from the other side, the two bags of Adam's blood tucked under one arm, garbed incongruously in the black habit of a nun.
Adam gasped as his bare feet touched the snow, wincing as one of his handlers grabbed his left wrist where Mallory had pulled out the IV just prior to their arrival. With his drugs discontinued and most of a unit of dextran in him by then, Adam had rallied somewhat in the preceding hour; but he still was dangerously weak, and had to fight back a swooping episode of lightheadedness as Richter and Mallory half-walked and half-carried him between them toward the chapel ruins, dragging his bare feet along the snow-covered ground. The night was still, but the cold penetrated Adam's single layer of wool almost as if he wore nothing at all. Behind him, muffled thumps and grunts told of equipment being unloaded from the Rovers' rear compartments.
The chapel's interior was open to the sky, its ruined walls conveying the impression more of a paddock than a building. Snow lay heavy within, piled in drifts against the side walls downwind, but the area around the shattered altar in the eastern end had been shovelled clear, and a series of white-painted plywood sheets had been erected along the chapel's northern side, to further screen the inside from the road.
Adam was reeling by the time his handlers dragged him over to a clean-shovelled spot to the right of the altar, where one of Richter's white-clad underlings was shaking out a thick white blanket beside a pair of folding chairs. The blanket was a welcome weight around his shoulders as he was wrapped in it and lowered to sit on one of the chairs, Mallory remaining with one hand set solicitously on his shoulder. It was all that kept Adam upright. He drifted for a little while, huddled and shivering, until awareness of movement nearer the altar brought him back to remembrance of his peril.
They were preparing for the unholy work to come. The altar was largely ruined, but two of Raeburn's men had lifted several broken slabs back into place to form a roughly horizontal surface, and were draping the altar with a heavy cloth of black velvet. Another man brought two heavy wrought-iron candlesticks, as tall as a man.
From a capacious duffel bag came a battered wooden crucifix, a brass thurible and incense boat, and a massive chalice of tarnished bronze with matching paten. These Angela arranged on the altar, while a cohort shook out a set of Satanic vestments - black wool faced with scarlet silk, emblazoned front and back with a blood-red inverted cross.
These, too, were laid out in readiness, along with the bags of Adam's blood, an aspersing pot, and an aspergillum made from black goat's hair. The totality of this assemblage of paraphernalia left no doubt in Adam's fuddled mind that Raeburn intended to extract every iota of anticipation from his intended victim, who could not fail to recognize the trappings required for the promised Black Mass.
The soft, whistling chuffle of a helicopter descending beyond the ruins behind Adam heralded the arrival of Raeburn himself shortly thereafter, wearing a cowled black robe and the silver medallion which betokened his status as Lynx-Master. He gave Adam a steely-eyed nod as he entered the chapel accompanied by Barclay, also robed, and a tall, gaunt stranger with furtive, darting eyes - by his Roman collar and greasy black soutane, surely the requisite defrocked priest required for the night's undertakings.
Behind the priest came two more anonymous henchmen supporting another drugged and drooping figure between them, white-robed and barefooted like Adam, bowed head lolling forward on his chest. When Mallory had spread a second blanket on the chair beside Adam, the two deposited their charge and supported him while Mallory turned the newcomer's face upward to shine his pocket torch in the other's eyes.
Adam had a brief, dazed impression of glassy eyes, drooping moustaches, and thick braids falling to either side of the slack face. Memory supplied a name, previously attached only to photos: the missing lolo McFarlane. As Adam himself came briefly under Mallory's scrutiny, he found himself almost envying the young Druid, for it occurred to him that before too much longer, he might well wish to be equally insensible of what was happening around him.
The prospect became more probable as Mallory's place was taken by Raeburn, who smiled coldly as he produced a lynx medallion, near-mate to the one he was wearing, and reached out with both hands to slip the chain over Adam's head. The medallion felt heavier than stone where it fell on Adam's chest, and seemed to reverse some of the recovery he had made in the past hour, dragging him into renewed lethargy, setting him drifting….
Somewhere in the vicinity of Peebles, some twenty miles due south of Edinburgh, the ringing of McLeod's portable phone made itself barely heard above the mechanical roar of the chopper's powerful rotor-blades. Thumbing the On switch, McLeod jammed the instrument to his ear as Peregrine and Ximena leaned closer from adjacent seats. The red cabin illumination lent an infernal cast to their taut faces.
"McLeod."
"Noel, they think Raeburn may have gotten wherever he's going,'' Julia informed him excitedly through snaps and crackles of static. "Sir Gordon says you're to head straight for Gal-ashiels, then drop due south toward Hawick. Hand me to Peregrine while you're relaying that, and I'll give him exact map coordinates."