Monster: Tale Loch Ness (8 page)

"You're crazy."

"You've said that already."

"Look. I can see you and I have to have a long talk."

She leaned across and snapped down the handle of the door. "We've
had
a long talk, Mr. Bruce. Good day."

"Please . . ."

"Good day," she repeated, interrupting.

Scotty climbed out of the seat. MacKenzie turned on the engine, revved it momentarily, maneuvered the car out of the parking lot, then sped away.

Scotty closed the front door to Travis House, walked down the hall, and entered the den. Mrs. Munro was puttering about with a feather duster.

"Home early, aren't you, Mr. Bruce?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"You wouldn't be wanting me to fix up some food for you, would you now?"

"No."

"That's good. Very good. I only have two hands, and the dust is creeping over this place like the moor fog at night."

He bobbed into the kitchen, built an impressive turkey sandwich, then returned to the den, sitting down on the lounge.

"If you sit there, Mr. Bruce," Mrs. Munro said, waving feathers, "you're going to have a side order of dust."

"I'll cover up when you roam by."

He sipped his beer as Mrs. Munro whizzed past him, her plain drape of a dress catching nearly every article in the room.

"Do you know anything about the Scottish Nationalist Party?" he asked moments later.

Mrs. Munro stopped dusting and turned, a gaping expression on her face. "Now that's some question, Mr. Bruce. I'm Scottish. Was born and raised here. My poor dead husband, too. I'd be a boob if I didn't know about the Scottish Nationalists."

"That's fine, Mrs. Munro. Then perhaps you can give me some insight."

"The Scottish Nationalist Party is a political party," she said a trifle condescendingly, as if she had found his ignorance pathetic. "Just like Labour, the Tory Conservatives, and the Liberals."

"Are you a member?"

"No, but I'm a Nationalist. Everyone in Scotland is a Nationalist."

"What does the party stand for?"

"What do you think it stands for, Mr. Bruce? An independent Scotland! Scotland for the Scots!"

"Makes sense."

"Darn right it makes sense."

Having finished his sandwich, he laid his plate on the coffee table. "How do these Nationalists feel about the oil companies?"

"They don't like them much."

"Why is that?"

" 'Cause the oil companies bespoil the land. 'Cause they bring in foreign workers when it's the Scottish worker who should be in employ, and they take out Scottish oil and give it to the British government, which is controlled by the English. We get no benefit. Or almost none. The government in London bleeds Scotland dry, and when there's no oil left, it will let Scotland rot in the sun!"

"You don't really believe that, do you?"

Mrs. Munro was indignant. "Get a history book, Mr. Bruce. Read it! Then tell me whether I should believe it or not."

"Would you think the Nationalists disliked the oil companies enough to try to sabotage their installations?"

"I wouldn't know anything about that kind of thing, Mr. Bruce. I wouldn't even try to make a guess."

"I have one more question."

Mrs. Munro breathed deeply.

"What is that, sir?"

"Do you think the Loch Ness monster is a member of the Scottish Nationalist Party?"

Mrs. Munro stopped in her tracks and shook her head incredulously. "Geminii hired me out to a crazy man. A loon. Mr. Bruce! Monsters don't join political parties. They don't vote. Even if they exist, they don't do such things."

"Does it exist?" What a ridiculous question, he thought. Thank God Red hadn't heard it!

"I don't know."

"You must have an opinion."

"I believe in goblins. There are goblins in the mountains."

"That's very interesting. But I'm not asking about goblins. Just monsters. Does it exist?"

She stared. Then nodded.

"Thank you, Mrs. Munro," he said, walking out of the room.

The limousine glided quietly along the two-lane highway, heading east out of Inverness.

William Whittenfeld sat in the back seat reviewing the contents of a folder—a pair of lists that Pierre Lefebre had given him that afternoon. A security man was perched next to the driver. A tape cassette played softly.

Whittenfeld examined one list, then the other. The first contained the names of company opponents, the second the names of radical Scottish nationalist groups. In addition, there were detailed notes and recommendations as well as a special document, denoted
important
, describing the modus operandi of a group known to the authorities as the New Jacobite Coalition, a virulent nationalist organization that had broken away from the Scottish Nationalist Party several years before.

Geminii had received three threatening letters from New Jacobite operatives within the last week, and although the Jacobites had historically confined their activities to the southern cantons of Scotland, the letters clearly indicated that the coalition had arrived in Inverness in force. An inquiry by Lefebre had uncovered evidence indicating that Jacobite operatives worked almost exclusively under the protective umbrellas of existing organizations—trade unions, merchant associations, business groups, and the like—but so far Lefebre had been unable to pinpoint the identity of any operatives, let alone the man who had written the letters. And a question certainly remained whether or not this group was involved in the
Columbus
conspiracy at all since Lefebre had uncovered no information as of yet creating an inference one way or the other.

The group deserved watching.

The limousine turned off the main road. Nearby, he could see the lights of the Inverness Airport. Beyond was the Inverness Firth. Ahead, the Culloden Moor.

Whittenfeld placed the folder in an attaché case as the limousine swept between gate posts. Beyond the posts stood the Culloden House. It had two stories, about fifty rooms, and was brightly lit by floodlights.

The limousine stopped in front of the main entrance, behind Scotty's jeep. Whittenfeld stepped out. Above him loomed the mansion's stone walls. There were numerous windows, turrets and parapets, too, as well as oblique turns of the architecture that hid clandestine stairways and nooks.

He climbed the main staircase and looked through the front door's glass partition. He could see the bar. Scotty Bruce was there, waiting. He looked at his watch. He was twenty minutes late. He did not like tardiness. Especially his own!

Quickly, he opened the door and entered.

"I've listened," Whittenfeld was saying as they attacked their main courses and sipped from partially filled glasses of Mouton Cadet. "I've heard it all. I've heard the scuttlebutt. That I'm consumed by Loch Ness . . . the prospect of finding oil . . . a bonanza. That the whole thing has become a fixation."

Scotty looked around the dining room. It was elegant. All the tables were filled, conversations subdued.

"Has it?" he asked.

Whittenfeld eased a grin. "Perhaps. But I don't find an intense commitment unwarranted. Loch Ness is important. To the world. To Geminii." He looked out the dining-room window. "And to me."

"That's understandable," Scotty said, staring at his host, who was dressed in an elegantly tailored black suit, white shirt, and black tie. "You did say you were here from day one.

"From day one and before," Whittenfeld declared. "I was comanaging director of the Dundee field when the Loch Ness oil slick was discovered. Sure, the Dundee field was special. You see, the North Sea represented my first opportunity to work outside the United States. But this loch thing; this was something else. It was . . . well . . . exciting. An incredible opportunity. Something a man waits for all his life. Though the company was skeptical, I grabbed for it, urged them to pursue. I led the first seismic crews and geology contingents. Hell, Scotty, I got my hands dirty. I was there with the doodle buggers, laying seismic cables. I rode the seismic launches. I spent nights awake, reading charts, knocking possibilities around." A look of pride crossed his face. "Damn,
I
was the one who cracked the puzzle. I pinpointed the anomalies. I
explained
the unexplainable!" He pounded the table. "My guts are riding with success. No, I will never allow the Loch Ness enterprise to fail. I won't allow it."

Scotty looked at Whittenfeld's eyes. He'd seen the look many times before. Obsession. But there was more. Contention. Whittenfeld was something other than just a company manager. He was a challenger who might very well have come to hate his opponent.

"I don't think you will fail here," he said.

"Is that a compliment?" Whittenfeld asked.

"Absolutely."

"I want you to feel like I do. I want you to be committed. To this place. To the loch. To the battle. The loch has thrown down a gauntlet. It has dared us to beat it. It is a vile little bitch!" He laughed smugly. "You know, I remember the licensing hearings. There was such a hue and cry from the hearing committee once its members had learned you can start a well in one place and directionally bend it to drill into a producing horizon many miles away. Why put a ship on the loch? they cried. Why drill down through the water? Why endanger Ness?" He shook his head. "I explained the facts of life. That you can only bend a well a few degrees at a time and that if a producing reservoir is too near the surface, you cannot directionally drill into it because you cannot drill deep enough to bring enough bend into play. And that the Loch Ness field fit the negative criteria precisely since it lay only four thousand feet below the surface. And I remember then thinking about just how clever this renegade was. To have insulated itself so well!"

Scotty sat back. "To state the obvious, the loch is definitely an emotional thing to you," he said.

"Yes. I'll confess. It is."

"I have to confess, too. I don't think I'll ever be able to generate the same kind of involvement."

Whittenfeld lifted his glass, bowed his head, sipped, then stared. "You will," he said. "If I have anything to say about it, you will!"

They finished dinner by nine o'clock, entered the lounge, and ordered two glasses of anisette.

"I respect devotion," Whittenfeld was saying. "I covet enthusiasm. I expect everyone on the Geminii payroll to work as hard as I do. But I don't mind eccentricity. In fact, Scotty, a little eccentricity is good. It makes men more creative. It makes them more valuable." He laughed. "But look who I'm talking to about eccentricity. Scotty Bruce. Famous football player. My God, you must have seen your share of talented eccentrics. From what I've read—and I'm not one for athletics, mind you—professional sports are filled with them."

"They're about," Scotty admitted as he popped some pretzels into his mouth. He glanced at his watch; it was almost ten o'clock. He looked through the parlor door into the hall. The place was very old, and there was a musty smell in the air, a peculiar sensation of history. If he'd never seen a candidate for haunting before, he'd seen one now. "But you have to be a little off the wall to pound your brains into the dust day in and day out, to beat your body black and blue, to literally risk your life."

"You did it. Did you consider yourself off the wall?"

Scotty stared; he knew Whittenfeld knew the answer already. "No," he said. "Not in the beginning. Not until my Götterdämmerung."

Whittenfeld smiled. "You're a smart man, Scotty. An asset. I made the right move bringing you here, and I want to clear the air right now. Set the record straight once and for all. I hired you because of what you are and what you've done and not in spite of it. Yes, I heard the worst. I heard you're one of the best engineers around, but also one of the most unreliable and dangerous. I heard you're too honest, too much a magnet for cause mongers, too quick to fight a battle of conscience. I know about all your crusades. I know where you succeeded and where you screwed up. I wasn't frightened. And I'm not now. Because I know everyone makes mistakes, and good men learn from them. Scotty., you're exactly the type of man we wanted, an honest man with principles. Because Geminii is an honest company with principles. A company that's not afraid to be questioned. Yes, you and Geminii were made for each other."

Scotty uncomfortably sipped his drink. Did Whittenfeld mean this? Or was it a speech born of necessity? "I told you when you hired me that those days were over. That I was tired of causes and bureaucratic battles. That I just wanted to mind my own business and do a good job. I said it then. I say it now. And I mean it."

"I know you do," Whittenfeld declared. "You're the gun fighter who's killed his last man, right? Put the guns away forever? Well, don't bury the guns completely because I want you to be able to take them out any time your conscience demands it. And I want you to keep them ready if we have to

tackle any violent radical groups."

"What's the chance of that?"

"Well, based on your experience with the
Columbus
, I'd have to say odds are good. Though I must also admit, in fairness, that the majority of the Scots have lost their ancient warrior personas." There was some disdain in his voice. "But you'll see. You will get to know the Scots very well."

"I hope so."

"Now I've got a confession to make."

"To me?"

"Yes."

"Are you joking?"

"No. I failed you."

"I don't understand."

"I wanted to welcome you with pride, not horror."

"Hell. The
Columbus
thing wasn't your fault."

Whittenfeld was adamant. "On the contrary. I am in charge. The Loch Ness project is my child. I gave birth to it. A father must not only love a child, he must protect it. I failed."

"I don't think an apology is needed."

Whittenfeld shook his head. "I'm being honest. Open. I'm declaring my trust. You're my new right hand, and I will always try to deal with you in a straightforward manner. Therefore, the apology." He lifted his glass, toasting. "To openness, honesty, trust!"