The Adept (24 page)

All the while she was speaking, she had been pressing forward. Before Finlay knew it, she was across the threshold and in the entry hall. This discovery was slightly disconcerting, but a Scottish gentleman could hardly ignore the pleas of a lady in distress.

“Och, aye, we’ll go up and take a wee look ‘round,” he said indulgently, with a sidelong glance at his wife. “I didnae see any keys in the drawing room, but mayhap Mrs. MacCrimmon has found ‘em downstairs. If they’re anywhere about, we’ll find ‘em, never fear.”

“Oh, thank you so much!” their visitor exclaimed. “I really am sorry, to disturb you this way, after closing time and all. I don’t know how I could have been so silly! I’m not usually this scatterbrained.”

“Och, dinnae worry, dearie,” Margaret said comfortably. “I must’ve done the same myself half a dozen times or more. On ye go now, Fin, and see what’s tae be done. I’ll wait for ye down here, tae lock up.”

Finlay led the way back up the wide stone stairs, flipping on lights as he went. At the top he paused to unhook the guard-rope that had been placed there to direct the flow of tourist traffic left, toward the dining room rather than right, toward the drawing room. As soon as the rope was down, the brown-haired woman slipped past him and threw open the drawing room door. Taken slightly aback, Finlay sprang after her.

“Here—gi’ us a moment,” he admonished, and reached for the light switch just inside the doorjamb.

The room sprang to life again. Without waiting for Finlay, the brown-haired woman darted over to the left-hand window bay, plopping her bag on the piano and feeling across its surface.

“I remember resting my bag here while I went after my guide book,” she said over her shoulder to Finlay, “They aren’t here, though. Maybe they fell on the floor.”

Together they made a search around and under the piano on hands and knees, though without success. The brown-haired woman sat back on her heels with a sigh of mingled apology and exasperation.

“Well, they don’t seem to be
here”
she said. “Maybe I
did
leave them in the gift shop—though I could have sworn I only took out my change purse down there.”

Finlay repressed an avuncular impulse to cluck his tongue at such carelessness. “Mrs. MacCrimmon’ll no’ hae gone home yet,” he said. “I’ll take ye down and let ye have a word with her.”

“You’re very kind.” The brown-haired woman beamed at him gratefully and made a move to get up, giving a small
shriek as her hand inadvertently snagged the strap of her shoulder bag and pulled it off the piano, spilling its contents onto the polished wooden floor. Cosmetics and toiletry items scattered, and loose change bounced in all directions.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “How could I be so clumsy?” Finlay wondered the same thing, but a gentleman did not say that to a lady in distress, Murmuring reassurances, he left his companion to gather up the more personal items while he chased after errant coins and pens that had gone farther afield. With his back turned, he did not see her take a swift sidestep to the window and trip the latch that unlocked it. By the time he rejoined her, she had gone back to returning her scattered belongings to her purse.

“Thank you so much,” she murmured, as she got to her feet. “I really don’t know what’s come over me. I broke a mirror, too.” She showed him the shattered glass in a cheap pink plastic compact. “They say that’s seven years of bad luck.”

“Och, dinnae worry about that, miss,” Finlay reassured her. “Here at Dunvegan, ye have the luck o’ the MacLeods to cancel out any bad luck. We’ll go down now an’ see if Mrs. MacCrimmon has yer keys.”

They left the room as they had found it, in darkness. Unaware that anything suspicious had occurred, Finlay ushered his companion down the stairs and into the gift shop, where a birdlike little woman with silvered black hair was making notes in a well-worn ledger.

“Hullo, Mrs. MacCrimmon,” he said genially. “Ye’ve no’ found a set of keys lyin’ about, have ye? This young lady’s lost hers, an’ she thinks she may ha’ dropped ‘em in h—”

His good-humored explanation faltered as he realized that Mae MacCrimmon’s face had suddenly gone white and stiff. She was staring not at him but past him, at the young woman with the brown hair. Nonplussed, Finlay turned his head to see what she was staring at—and found himself gazing down at a very lethal looking automatic pistol leveled at his midsection.

Shock rendered Finlay momentarily speechless. The pistol had been fitted with a silencer—which meant that this woman was no amateur. A part of him noted that he had taken similar weapons off Gestapo officers at the end of the war. It probably was a fairly small caliber, but the muzzle looked like it would fire cannonballs, seen from the business end. His heart gave a queer fluttering lurch, reminding him why his doctor had been cautioning him for months to retire.

With a curt motion of the barrel of the gun, the woman beckoned Mrs. MacCrimmon to join them. Wide-eyed as a rabbit, the older woman did not move, apparently paralyzed with fright.

“Come on!” their captor snapped. “I haven’t got all night.”

She pointed the weapon at Mrs. MacCrimmon, finger tense on the trigger. Hastily, Finlay reached out for Mrs. MacCrimmon’s arm and drew her from behind the counter, glaring at their captor with all the dignity he could muster.

“All right,” he said sourly. “We can see ye’ve got a gun. If ye want tae go ahead and empty the till, neither of us will try tae stop ye.”

The young woman with the brown hair smiled thinly. “Some other time, perhaps. Right now, I’d like you both to put your hands on your heads and move slowly towards the door.”

Mrs. MacCrimmon’s face went a shade paler, and Finlay was afraid she might faint.

“Wh-where are you taking us?” she stammered.

“Upstairs to the drawing room,” said their captor. “If you do as you’re told, you won’t be harmed. Now
move,
while I’m still in the mood to be polite.”

Not daring to disobey, Finlay mutely hurried Mrs. MacCrimmon up the steps, conscious all the while of the gun aimed at the small of his back. If she fired, the bullet would likely go right through him and hit Mrs. MacCrimmon as well.

A chilly stream of air came rushing down the stairwell to greet them as they ascended. When they reached the top and made the turn back toward the drawing room, Finlay was surprised to see the drawing room door standing open, and the lights on. He was even more surprised, when they
entered the room, to see the fire-escape window gaping wide, with curtains billowing wildly in the cold sea wind.

“Over there, by the piano,” their captor ordered.

Finlay obeyed, herding Mrs. MacCrimmon with one hand and keeping his other hand raised. Glancing aside at the window, he saw smears of mud on the broad sill where a second intruder evidently had gained entry by way of the fire-escape. In the same moment, they all heard a scuffle of movement below, and footsteps started up the stairs from the direction of the front hall. A voice that Finlay recognized as his wife’s said indignantly, “It’s well for ye that the Chief himself’s no’ at home just now. Otherwise, ye wouldnae be havin’ things all yer own way!”

Ah, feisty Margaret.
She was first through the door into the drawing room, but Finlay’s hope that the intruders might have missed out on Mrs. McBain, the library docent, died stillborn when she stumbled across the threshold a step behind his wife, looking terrified. The second member of the intruder’s party was a man in a ski mask, dressed in the sort of tight-fitting black clothes that Finlay had seen worn by spies and cat burglars in the movies. However theatrical his appearance might be, there was nothing fanciful about the silenced pistol he, too, was carrying. His close-set black eyes ranged briefly over Finlay and Mrs. MacCrimmon before meeting the gaze of his counterpart.

“Any trouble?” he inquired.

The brown-haired woman shook her head, her expression disparaging. “No. They came along like lambs.”

The man in black nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to the prisoners to gesture with his gun.

“Now then, all of you: Over there.”

To Finlay’s consternation, the intruders herded the four of them into the adjoining guardroom. From here, a heavy trapdoor gave access to the castle’s fourteenth-century dungeon: a steep-sided pit nearly fifteen feet deep, cut right into the castle rock. The man in black caught Finlay by the shoulder and gave him a shove in the direction of the closed trapdoor.

“Pull it up,” he commanded.

Mae MacCrimmon made a small noise between a gasp and a sob. “Oh, not down there,
please
!” she whimpered. “There might be rats, and—”

The man in black turned to face her squarely, raising the silenced muzzle of his pistol to point directly at her forehead.

“Perhaps you’d prefer the alternative?” he suggested.

Mrs. MacCrimmon wilted into shivering silence, cowering with the shaking Mrs. McBain in the circle of Margaret’s arms as the man returned his attention to. Finlay.

“How about you?”

The old caretaker needed no further encouragement. Being dropped into the pit wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it was better than a bullet. Within seconds, he had the trap door open and was glancing up expectantly.

“Go ahead. Put ‘em in.”

Dutifully Finlay lowered the women into the chilly darkness of the pit—Margaret first, so she could help the other two land, for it still was a nasty drop, once he lowered them to arm’s length. It also got her farther away from the man’s gun. The women shrieked and cried out, but he wished they would save their breath; there was no one to hear them.

“All right, old man. Now it’s your turn,” the man said, when the women were down, gesturing with his gun.

Glowering like a thundercloud, and wishing he was twenty years younger, Finlay stiffly eased his way to a sitting position at the edge of the dungeon mouth, feet dangling over the edge, then turned to support himself on his hands and forearms and start lowering himself. Shoulders protesting, he had let himself down to hang by the length of his arms when the man in black gave his clutching fingers an impatient nudge with a boot.

Finlay lost his grip and plummeted into the midst of the shrieking women. He landed crookedly, and bit back a curse as his ankle turned under him. In the darkness of the dungeon Margaret MacLeod groped for her husband’s hand. The intensity of his grip told her he was in pain.

“A curse on ye, whoever ye are!” she shouted up at then captor, a dark silhouette against the lighted opening above
their heads. “By the luck of the MacLeods, I hope and pray ye may get what ye deserve for this night’s work!”

The intruder’s response was a sneering laugh and then the hollow boom of the trapdoor being closed over the opening again, shutting out the light . . .

As soon as her male accomplice had herded his prisoners into the next room, the brown-haired woman set her weapon aside on the piano long enough to close the window and draw the curtains back into place again, to keep up appearances from the outside. That done, she slipped her weapon back into a zippered compartment in her bag and carefully drew out a small red snap-pouch of Chinese silk.

Inside was a heavy silver medallion slung from a silver chain. She slipped the chain over her head and turned toward the wall between the two seaward windows, where the Fairy Flag hung behind its sconced curtains. When she moved, the pendant caught the light, revealing a device like the snarling head of some predatory beast.

She opened the curtains and caught a brief, slightly distorted glimpse of herself mirrored in the glass that covered the Fairy Flag. She did not like this job. One of the stories the old man had told her tour group this afternoon was that anyone besides a MacLeod who touched the Flag would go up in a puff of smoke. That obviously did not refer to the frame or the glass, because she had touched both when the caretaker wasn’t looking, but she mistrusted these ancient legends. You could never tell when there might be a grain of truth to them, and she
had
broken her mirror . . .

But that was just as ridiculous as imagining that the medallion would afford her any protection, if the stories
were
true—though she wore it, because they had told her to. Still, when she reached out with both hands and grasped the ornamented sides of the frame, she smiled as nothing untoward happened.

She shifted it back and forth to test its weight, then took a firmer grip on the moulding and lifted the frame down off the wall. The frame was large, but it was not particularly heavy. Its size simply made it awkward to carry.

Resting it briefly against the wall, she closed the draperies again, so its absence would not be noticed immediately. Then, carrying her prize gingerly in front of her, she moved off toward the door that led to the stairs, making her way cautiously down to the front hall to wait for her accomplice.

She knew he was on his way down when the lights began to go out in the stairwell. When he had joined her, he let them both out through the front door, locking it with keys he had taken from the ticket-taker’s desk. It was nearly dark outside, so no one could see them cross over the castle bridge and climb down the embankment toward the single-lane drive normally used by the Chief and his family and staff.

She had left the car in the shadows under the trees, a dark coupe almost invisible in the gathering gloom. The man in black unlocked the car and got in on the driver’s side while his female associate carefully loaded the Fairy Flag into the back seat, covering it with a tartan lap rug. As she took the passenger seat in the front, the driver started the engine, driving without lights as they moved slowly up the lane in the direction of the main road.

A short drive brought them along the water’s edge to a little rock-bound inlet. At a wooden dock jutting out into the shallows, a small cabin cruiser floated quietly at her moorings.

The driver of the car flashed his headlamps. Aboard the cruiser, someone beamed an answering signal from one of the cabin ports. A moment later, two dark figures emerged onto the deck into the open air.