Steven looked at the receiver as it went dead. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he murmured. This sort of thing had never happened before. He made the modem connection and waited while an Internet connection was established. He downloaded an encrypted message from Sci-Med and deciphered it. It said simply, ‘Be at the Edinburgh Airport Hotel at 10pm. Ask at the desk for Mr Harvey Grimes.’ Steven looked at his watch and saw that he’d better get a move on.
Fortunately the traffic proved lighter than he’d feared as he crossed town and he swung into the airport hotel car park at three minutes to ten. Asking at the desk for Mr Harvey Grimes resulted in him being directed to a room on the third floor. ‘Mr Grimes is expecting you sir,’ said the desk clerk.
Steven knocked and waited, glancing first to the right and then to the left to see that the corridor was empty. He had no idea why he’d done that but then he had no idea why he was here. It was a case of being caught up in a melodrama and behaving accordingly. He thought he heard someone tell him to come in although it was a bit muffled. He entered anyway and found the room empty. ‘Hello, anyone there? Mr Grimes?’
‘Actually it’s me,’ said John Macmillan, director of Sci-Med, coming out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. ‘Take a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment. Help yourself to a drink.’
Steven poured himself a gin and sat down. What the hell was all this Harvey Grimes nonsense about? He’d never known Macmillan to play silly games before. He was one of the most sensible and practical people he knew.
Macmillan reappeared and sat down opposite him and read his mind. ‘Believe me I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff as much as you do,’ he said, ‘but I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Amsterdam right now and that’s what I want them to continue to believe.’
‘Them?’ asked Steven.
‘The people who don’t want you in Blackbridge.’
‘I don’t think I understand.’
‘I told you at the outset that I thought that I was being warned off. It was being done in a gentle, diplomatic way, I’ll grant you, but I was clearly being invited to read between the lines. I chose to ignore it and let the man on the ground make the decision. You called a code red and now the warnings are coming in thick and fast and the gloves are off.’
‘Where’s the flak coming from?’
‘That’s the most worrying thing,’ said Macmillan. ‘I can’t see the source and I haven’t been able to find out anything. That suggests to me that the unhappiness must be at a fairly high level.’
‘I’ve barely scratched the surface in Blackbridge,’ said Steven. ‘I haven’t had time to upset anyone at high level?’
‘You asked for a check on something called Sigma 5?’ said Macmillan. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s what did it. I’ve carried out a thorough check with our people and the guano hitting the fan coincides with them starting to ask around about Sigma 5 on your behalf.’
‘Well, well, good to know I’m on the right track, I suppose, even if I don’t know where it’s leading, unless of course, you’ve been ordered to spike the investigation?’
Macmillan shook his head. ‘No, that would involve our friends on high showing exactly who they are. The spear-carriers who have been relaying veiled threats don’t have the authority to order me to do anything so I show them the door and the impasse remains.’
‘So where does that leave me?’
‘That’s why I felt I had to come. I’m not at all sure where it leaves you and I’m starting to get a bad feeling about all this.’
‘What could they do to me?’ Steven asked sceptically.
‘That’s what I have the bad feeling about.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Steven.
‘Frankly, I just don’t know but I do feel it’s possible that you could be in some danger. We seem to be interfering in something that’s ‘already under control’ as I keep being told.’
‘I suppose things could be said to be under control in Blackbridge,’ said Steven thoughtfully. ‘In which case they’ve obviously ordered a bunch of civil servants to run around pretending it’s loonies’ sports day to cover up that fact.’
‘As bad as that?’
‘And then some.’
‘All the same I think you should consider pulling out.’
‘If I did that we’d lose our credibility,’ protested Steven. ‘You said when I joined the firm that Sci-Med were beholden to no one. I’d like to keep it that way.’
Macmillan said, ‘I sort of hoped you’d say that. It’s what I wanted to hear but I couldn’t ask you. I don’t have the right. You’re the man on the ground.’
‘So it’s settled, I stay.’
‘Just be bloody careful.’
‘You’re off to Amsterdam, then?’
‘Yes. I was never here.’
Steven walked back to his car, feeling a mixture of excitement and unease. It was the sort of feeling he’d had often enough before in his time with Special Forces, usually before setting off on a mission. If serious pressure was being put on Macmillan it must mean that there was something big to hide. The fact that the pressure was coming from somewhere in government — his own employer, when all was said and done — made it all the more exciting? Intriguing? No, scary was the word he was looking for.
TEN
In his own eyes, the Rev Robert Lindsay McNish was a failure. Worse than that, he was a fraud and a charlatan. He had lost his faith in his mid forties when his wife had run off with a car salesman, calling him in the process, ‘the most boring man who’d ever walked the Earth’ and he’d never quite recovered. Rather than own up to an ensuing and ever-growing cynicism regarding his fellow man and especially woman, he had soldiered on, motivated solely out of personal concern about his own livelihood. He didn’t feel that he could do anything else and the dog collar was a very necessary barrier between him and the rest of humanity.
For the past seven years, he had purveyed the promise of everlasting life to the rapidly dwindling band of pensioners that comprised his congregation at Blackbridge Parish Church, while no longer believing a word of it himself. He wasn’t at ease with the knowledge but felt trapped by circumstance. He was rolling slowly downhill in a steep-sided rut from which there was no escape. One day in the not too distant future, he would hit the buffers; the lights would go out and that would be that. Thank you and good night, Robert McNish.
The days when Blackbridge could sustain a church from its own population had long since gone. The building was still there but the congregation, such as it was, was now garnered from four neighbouring villages, all of which had a church building of their own. The Sunday service was therefore held in each one in rotation. It had been three weeks since the last service at Blackbridge so McNish had arranged for the local cleaner to come in a few days early to make sure it would be right for the Ferguson boy’s funeral. Happily there would be no extra cleaning bill as the service was due there on Sunday anyway.
A full house in Blackbridge Parish Church was something that McNish had not experienced at any time during his fifteen-year tenure and a full house it was going to be. This was mainly due to a large contingent of the boy’s friends and classmates coming from the High School over in Livingston where he had been a pupil. Although it was still the school holidays, the boy’s death and the circumstances of it had been reported widely in the local papers and on local radio and television. This had added a show business element to the death. People wanted to say that they had known Ian Ferguson, the boy on the television. Even a tenuous connection with fame was better than none.
McNish considered the prospect of a sea of faces before him with mixed emotions. He felt nervous but he also felt that he shouldn’t be after so long in the job. After all, all he really had to do was convince everyone there that the boy’s life had been worthwhile and that the Almighty had had a damned good reason for allowing a rat to half bite his foot off and give him a fatal disease into the bargain.