The Falconer's Tale (36 page)

They looked after the van long after it had climbed the
hill and disappeared. Piat put an arm around Hackbutt's
shoulders. Tears were running down Hackbutt's nose.

The London Conference came around every year, and if you
were one of the ones who went you pissed and moaned but
in fact you knew that you were one of a very select group
in the intelligence community. It was what one old hand
had called a “love feast with the cousins,” but there was a
lot of acrimony these days, too. Nobody on either side had
come off well after Iraq; blame was inevitable.

For Alan Craik, it was a first time, and he was therefore
a little apart from the old Anglo-American irritations.
Nonetheless, nervous that he do it right, he had scheduled
himself to go over early, learn the ground, taking with him
a lieutenant-commander and Sergeant Swaricki as backup.
He landed at Heathrow on the Friday morning, less jet-lagged
than most because he was an old hand at sleeping on aircraft,
went right to the obligatory four-star hotel and was checked
in by eight-thirty. Uncle could pay for the extra half-day.
Uncle was getting his money's worth.

Leaving Swaricki to catch up on his sleep, he went to the
American embassy to touch base and introduce the lieutenant-
commander around, then MI5's glass castle on the
Thames to do the same, then out to an obscure suburban
business park where they went over the meeting rooms, got
briefed on security, found the johns and made sure there
would be coffee. Swaricki met them there and Craik left him
and the lieutenant-commander to establish a beachhead. By
lunchtime, he was ready to meet his British opposite
numbers—four of them—and the US deputy naval attaché
at somebody's club. He was back in his hotel by four.

He sat on his bed and let himself be tempted by the idea
of a nap. Another idea was more tempting, however: the
island of Mull, where Dukas said Partlow's perhaps kinky
operation was supposed to be preparing, only a few hundred
miles away:
Mull, Piat, Falconer
. He admitted to himself that
that proximity was the real reason he'd come to London on
Friday and sailed through his London responsibilities, the
idea of a visit always at the back of his mind. He could still
be in London in plenty of time for Sunday's pre-conference
brief—plenty of time, for that matter, to see Partlow if he
had to. Partlow was a fixture at the London Conference.

He pushed a pillow aside as if it represented the idea of a
nap and picked up the telephone. He could fly to Glasgow,
but not to the island, and a sleeper train left London at ten-
thirty and would put him in Glasgow sixish; he winced at
the price but made the reservation—no having to hustle to
and from airports, no super-early wake-up. Another call got
him a rental car, and a few minutes on his laptop brought
him a ferry schedule to Mull and a reservation on the early
ferry. Piece of cake.

Then he called his wife and explained how easy the expense
was on a captain's salary.

He rolled the little car up the welted steel of the ramp and
off the ferry, and he was on Mull. The island had risen
around them as the ship had got close to it; then, coming
to it with his back to the sea, it looked like its own small
mainland, solid and self-sufficient. There were a shop and
a tourist center and a gas station and a pub, a big parking
lot and a lot of people waiting to walk on board—weekend
shoppers headed to the mainland, perhaps. He thought he
knew on sight that they weren't an American crowd, something
about posture and maybe clothes, although any notion
that the British were any longer bound by jacket-and-tie
dress codes was nonsense. The faces looked pink—sea mist
and cold air—hospitable, very alive. The women in the information
center were absurdly helpful and—the only word
for it—
nice
.

Craik drove north toward Tobermory, the only town of
any size (all of a thousand people?), wondering where Piat
was right then. To find out, he'd have to start where he and
Piat had last left off—fishing. Piat had seemed pretty dedicated
to the sport; if he was living on the island now, Craik
thought, he had to be doing some fishing. Unless he was
that good—so adept at cover that he could completely shed
the old skin of himself, including even his hobbies.

Tobermory's Tackle and Books was the place for fishing,
according to all the tourist brochures. It was at the far end of
the town's main street, thus not easy for the novice to find
by sight. Nevertheless, a few minutes' walking found it. He
took it in at a glance, made sure Piat himself wasn't in there,
entered; a tall man looked up from a counter and grinned and
went back to explaining something about a USB stick to a
frowning, middle-aged woman. Alan waited, hung about,
looked at a book or two, came back when no customers were
at the counter.

“Fishing?”

“Oh, yes, lots of fishing. Sea or freshwater? Awfully good
sea fishing now, couple of big skate the last few days.”

“Fresh. A friend recommended it.”

“Oh, I'm glad to hear that!” The man went down a list of
waters, pros and cons, then got a flat book like a ledger from
under the counter and went over a couple of pages, a long
finger tracking down a set of columns. He seemed to have
great enthusiasm for his work. And for the fishing, a lot of
which he seemed to know firsthand.

“Salmon?” Alan said. He thought that Piat had been
salmon-fishing in Iceland.

The man made a quick clown grimace. “Not much right
now, I'm afraid. The Aros, maybe—” He sounded doubtful.
“Lots of excellent trout, though! The Mishnish Lochs—”

Somebody else was asking a question; the man excused
himself and moved down the counter to the other customer.
Alan without hurry spun the book around and glanced down
the open pages. Days of the week across the top, fishing
down the left side. Here and there, names penciled in—not
many people fished, he thought—with now and then the
number of fish caught. One set of entries jumped off the
page—a single venue where somebody had fished again and
again. He turned back a page and saw the same pattern; back
another, and back to the week when he had called Dukas
because Partlow had wanted Piat back. That's where the
entries started; the week before, there were none.

“Find anything?” the man behind the counter said. “Sorry
about that—somebody's computer problem—where were
we?”

“This loch—you say loch?—where this, I suppose it's a
man, Mister Michaels been fishing every other day.”

“Oh, yes, yes, Jack Michaels! Yes! He
loves
it up there!
Hard spot to reach, half an hour's walk in and it's mostly
uphill, but he
loves
it. Getting quite nice trout, too, he says.”
He gave Alan his big grin and looked apologetic. “But if
you're just here for a day or two, there's lots of easier places
to get to. If it's a matter of time, I mean.”

Alan asked where the loch was; a map was produced, the
loch identified. He could see from the contours how rugged
the walk in would be. If “Michaels” was in fact Piat, he was
in good shape. The loch wasn't big but would be magnificently
isolated, certainly a virtue for somebody like Piat. At
one end, there was a small extension of the lake, almost a
second, smaller lake, and a penciled circle.

“What's that?”

“Oh, that's the crannog. Michaels was interested in it, too.
They are rather neat, actually—man-made island. Bronze
Age. Bit special.” The grin came again. “Long walk to see it,
though. There's a more accessible one in Loch Squabain.”

Alan said he'd think about the fishing, and he veered off
to the flat boxes of flies that sat on the counter, bought a
mixed dozen, bought an Ordnance Survey map, and said
he'd be back after he'd talked to his wife. This seemed to
please the man behind the counter as much as if he'd taken
all the fishings for a month and he liked nothing better than
spending his time explaining things to strangers.

The path to the loch would have been almost invisible except
for recent use. Craik supposed it was all Piat's comings and
goings. He'd seen at the bottom of the hill where Piat parked
his car—flattened strips in the coarse grass—and had left his
own nearby. He was chancing Piat's seeing it, but the book
in the tackle shop had told him that Piat never came here
on a weekend. And if he saw the rental car, he mightn't get
too wrung out over it. The island was full of rental cars.

His respect for Piat's fitness grew as he climbed. The path
was steep and rough, in places no more than broken, pale
grass growing in uneven tussocks. Sheep used it, too; in
muddy spots, there were deeply stamped hoof marks, and,
in one high above the gorge of a small burn, clear human
footprints. Piat's, he was sure, but somebody else's, too—
there were two tread patterns. He was careful not to add his
own to them. He found himself walking too fast, pushing
himself, feeling the exhilaration of a completely free day and
a completely new place. He was smiling.

He came in at the head of the loch, which lay in a bowl
with at first shallow sides, then rapidly steeper ones as the
mountains loomed above it. A stream ran out on his left,
doubtless the burn he had seen below. Ahead at the far end
of the loch was the little extension and its supposedly man-
made island. He headed for them.

He knew that Piat sometimes dealt in antiquities. He knew
that Piat was a crook. Those things might add up to interest
in a Bronze Age island in the back of nowhere. Something
other than trout must be bringing Piat way up here, he
thought, and there were no houses to hold attractive women.

He used some harsh navy language as he came around
the loch: there was no track, foul footing. The wind blew in
his face, rippling the water so it looked dark and hostile. A
light rain was falling. At the top of the mountain on the
other side, water began to run down slender rock faces like
silver threads.

Everything was rock, so there were no footprints near the
water. The little loch was shallow, however, and sheltered
from the wind; he could see rocks under the water that
looked like stepping stones heading out to the crannog, which
looked to him quite natural, eternal, wild, except that it was
perfectly round. And had those stepping stones leading to it.

He walked along the bank, studying the crannog through
binoculars. Something yellow showed between the clumps
of grass. Bright yellow, the yellow of slickers and plastic technical
gear. Not natural or wild or eternal. Near it was a cone
of what appeared to be mud. Like the crannog itself, it was
round, but unlike it looked man-made—too perfect, too bare
of grass.

He looked at the stepping stones and guessed that the
water was too deep to jump from one to another. And too
deep to wade. He looked up into the drizzle of rain. Cloud
was blowing up the valley and swallowing the mountains.

Craik sighed. Then he laughed. He was going to do a silly
thing for the sheer exuberance of the day.

He stripped down to underwear and T-shirt and waded in.

The water was even colder than he had expected. The
bottom was ooze with rock under it, gooey and insecure. He
waded deeper, feeling goose flesh rise on his chest and arms.
The water reached his groin. He groaned, leaned forward,
and pushed himself into a glide, the cold like a harsh embrace;
then three hard strokes and he was pulling himself up the
crannog's side. Close to, its rock structure showed—an island
piled up stone by stone three thousand years ago.

The mud cone that he had seen was some kind of tailing
made up entirely of tiny particles. Rubbed in the fingers, it
felt like wet dough.
Sifted
, he thought. Nearby, as if tossed
aside, was a wooden frame with a wire-mesh screening.
Not
very high tech
. Still, it would work—one or two men shoveling
mud into it, then shaking it, wetting it.

The bright yellow he'd seen was the tube of a snorkel.
Careless
. That didn't sound like Piat. The other footprint in
the path meant that he had at least one helper—a somewhat
careless helper. Or, more likely, more than one, to work while
Piat did whatever he was doing with the falconer.

Under a camouflage tarp was a machine with a plastic
hose and a funnel-like end. The big, bulging part was an
air compressor, he was sure (a metal plate on the side said
“Hibernia Compression Limited”). A paste-on label told him
the name of the rental company that had supplied it. He
didn't need to be an underwater specialist to see that the
thing was a kind of vacuum cleaner—the mud went in
the wide end of the funnel and got spat out—perhaps into
the sifter—at the other.
At least two men
. Under the tarp
with the contraption was a metal detector, two sets of black
swim fins, air tanks. He wondered if they used the
compressor to refill the tanks, too—it was a long haul up
here with more of them. It must have been a long haul
getting the stuff here in the first place.

He was shivering almost violently by then. His exhilaration
persisted—near-naked under a threatening sky, wind
blowing, rain; it was
great
!—but his body was objecting.

He swam back, rubbed himself as hard as he could with
his sweater, put his digital camera and a pencil and a scrap
of paper from a brochure into the plastic sack he'd carried
lunch in, and went back into the water. When the water hit
his chest, he knew he should have done it all in one trip.

One of the brochures he'd picked up at the tourist center
was for a place called Wings Over Mull, which raised and
showed falcons. It wasn't all that far from Piat's fishing loch,
in fact. He didn't think that it would be where he'd find
Piat's falconer—he didn't
want
it to be where he'd find Piat's
falconer—because it looked too public and too smooth. His
hair was still wet from the loch when he pulled into their
parking area; although he'd got over shivering on the walk
out, his skin still felt damp and clammy to him under his
clothes.