Page 55 of Nobody's Hero

‘I thought you said staging three murders was a tall order.’

‘Until I can rule it out, I’m ruling it in.’

‘I assume you don’t want me going through Smerconish for this?’

‘We keep the circle as small as we can.’

Draper nodded. ‘I’ll call my operations manager. He’s been with me from the start, and I trust him completely. He’ll get us everything there is.’

The door opened. Carlyle walked in. A gust of wind followed her. It rattled a newspaper and blew Draper’s hair into her eyes.

‘Did you see Margaret?’ Koenig said. ‘She went looking for you.’

‘I must have missed her.’

Carlyle took a seat. She drained the teapot. Managed to get half a cup of lukewarm tea. She threw it down her neck like a shot of Jack. The door opened again. More wind. Margaret stepped in. She shut the door. The wind stopped.

‘Ah, there you are, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘You must have taken the scenic route back.’

‘I needed to think.’

Margaret glanced at Koenig and Draper. ‘She does that sometimes,’ she said. ‘I’ve told her, self-indulgence is not at all British. Imagine if Churchill had taken scenic walks instead of bullying you Yanks into joining the war. We’d all be speaking German. So please, less of that nonsense, Elizabeth. And I bet you’ve forgotten the eggs.’

‘The store was shut. We’ll have to make do.’

‘We’re wheels up in ten hours,’ Koenig said. ‘We’ll eat on the plane.’

Draper passed Koenig his SIG. The weapon he’d thought was Draper’s. He put the firing pin back in. He grabbed the empty shell casing from the bullet Draper had fired into the ceiling. He filled the base with candle wax, slotted it into the SIG’s chamber, and dry-fired it. The impression in the wax was deep and true. It was the next best thing to firing the weapon.

Koenig preferred Glocks to SIGs. They were both good weapons. Accurate and reliable. Decent magazine capacity. He preferred Glocks because they were smaller, lighter and easier to conceal. The Glock’s boxy shape wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the SIG, but who the hell cared what a tool looked like? He still liked SIGs, though, and had trained extensively with them. Like the Glock, the SIG had no safety to disengage. It was ready to fire. All you had to do was point it at the bad guy and squeeze the trigger.

Chapter 58

The airstrip was one hundred miles from Carlyle’s cottage. A ninety-minute drive on normal roads, but the Scottish Highlands didn’t have normal roads. If you thought of the UK’s transport network as being like the body’s circulatory system, the highways would be the arteries. The A, B and C roads would be major and minor veins. And roads in the Highlands would be capillaries. The thinnest blood vessels in the body. Like the ones in the whites of the eyes.

Koenig figured it would take three hours to get there. Carlyle said it would be closer to six. She said progress would be slow. There would be animals on the roads. Sheep and cattle. Wild animals like deer and feral goats. And worst of all, tourists. Thousands of them, crawling over the Cairngorms like a fungal rash.

The airstrip had sheep on it. That was Koenig’s first thought. His second was that as these werelivingsheep, they must know when to get off the grass and onto the heather. Plane versus ruminant would end badly for both. Like a ground-zero bird strike. If the bird was the size of a large woolly suitcase. And if the plane was at the statistically most vulnerable part of the flight.

He and Draper had tucked themselves into a crevice on one of the Cairngorms foothills. The airstrip was below them. It looked as flat as a road. It was surrounded by gorse, as thick as a hedge and twice as tall. It had been cut back at each end of the airstrip, probably in case of overruns. The only things moving were the sheep and a solitary guy manning the fuel station. The wind sock was as limp as a patched sock. The ground was dry. It was quiet.

So far, so good.

‘It’s a grass airstrip,’ Koenig said. ‘Can the G6 land on grass?’

‘I guess,’ Draper replied, her eyes fixed to her monocular. ‘I’ve never been in one that has, but my pilot knows what he’s doing. He wouldn’t have chosen an airstrip he couldn’t use.’ Her phone buzzed. She reached into her pocket and read the message. ‘We’re on,’ she said.

They backed out of the crevice and made their way to where they’d left the Jag. Carlyle was watching out for them. She seemed anxious. Margaret was asleep.

‘It’s been a tiring few days,’ Carlyle explained. ‘She puts on a brave face, but she’s in a lot of pain now.’

‘We’ll try not to wake her, but the pilot’s on his approach,’ Draper said. ‘And I want to get there before he lands.’

Chapter 59

With few exceptions, runways are aligned with the most common prevailing wind. In Scotland that was south-west. The wind blows over the North Atlantic and is warmed by the North Atlantic Current. It’s why Scotland is milder and wetter than countries of a similar latitude. Common sense would suggest the pilot would approach from the north-east. Land against the wind to help with the shorter runway. But the air was still. The moon had more atmosphere. Koenig figured it wouldn’t matter which way he came in.

Draper pointed at the sky. ‘There he is,’ she said.