Mission Critical

After ten minutes behind flashlights’ beams, they arrived at a long room full of stored banquet tables, stepped into a square stone room just past an archway with a gate above it, and arrived at their final destination.

As soon as the Five Eyes conference was announced for Castle Enrick, Mars had begun studying the location, reading over every single reference to the castle to find a way to disrupt the meeting. In his studies on the facility, Mars read that a tunnel had been dug during the construction of the keep by a wealthy owner who wanted the option of a quick escape in case of attack. The tunnel, one old tome revealed, traveled at a forty-five-degree angle through the dirt and rock that led from the subterranean level of the main keep down to the water’s edge, providing clandestine and quick access to Loch Ness. Those residing in the castle could, in the event of siege, escape down the stairs in the old tunnel to waiting boats at the bottom of the cliff, some 150 yards away.

The stairwell tunnel had been mentioned in passing in a few other writings as late as the eighteenth century, but later maps and media contained no reference to the shaft. It seemed clear that the passage itself had been closed off, probably sometime in the 1800s.

This gave Mars an idea. He knew he had one chance to catch the Five Eyes leadership together, one chance to bring Dr. Won and her creation into his fight, and he’d believed from the beginning that there was too much riding on this to trust the entire mission to a single crop duster, flying in unpredictable weather, slipping past any security monitoring the skies and dousing the castle with plague spores.

He needed a secondary option, so he sent a team of Russian Bratva members who were also construction foremen and engineers to Loch Ness, not to the castle itself, but to the waterline below the cliff. There, under cover of darkness, they moved through the trees along the bank, inland no more than twenty meters, where the cliff face began.

It took the team of eight men over three hours to find a door-sized portion of the cliff that didn’t fit the color or texture of the rest of the rock. It had instead been added; stone and mortar. Chipping away at this, as quietly as possible, two men labored an entire arduous day, but when they were through they found a rusted iron door, two feet wide and four feet high.

The rest of the team returned the second night, and with an acetylene torch they cut the door from its hinges, and a flashlight was shined inside.

Broken steps went up at a forty-five-degree angle, just as had been described in the ancient book Mars read. The pathway was not completely clear. There had been numerous cave-ins over the centuries, but the Russians secretly returned three times over the next month and a half, cleaning out the debris, dumping it in the loch, and fortifying the walls and ceiling of the passage.

Finally Roger Fox himself arrived, and he was the first to climb to the top. Here he found an old iron door, identical to the one hidden at the base of the cliff. He did not dare try to open it; he merely determined that the acetylene torch would do the trick.

But no one knew what lay on the other side of the door. Could it be a brick wall, private quarters that could be filled with armed security during the Five Eyes meeting, or something else that would ruin any opportunity for a stealthy ingress to the conference?

The small room where Fox and Mars now stood was lined with leaning folding chairs. And on the far side, behind a stack of chairs, sat a four-foot-high steel door at ground level.

GPS told them this was the access point to the long-forgotten tunnel.

An old, rusty lock built into the door looked daunting, but Fox assured Mars a torch would make short work of it.

Fox added, “Certainly the security people for the conference will know about this passage.”

Mars nodded. “It is a fair assumption you’re right. Just an inspection of the basement could reveal this easily enough.” He looked over the door a moment. “There will be security posted down here, I shouldn’t think more than one or two men. Perhaps the sleepers we will have planted inside the security force here will be able to volunteer for this work.”

Mars added, “It is also possible security will do something to block the door, so we’ll have to tell our friends to bring some explosives for that eventuality.”

Fox said, “It continues to worry me that our infiltration team and their equipment won’t arrive until the day before the operation.”

The two men turned to return to the stairwell. “Men like that . . . you can’t just put them in Scotland, leave them be for long, without them drawing attention to themselves. They are professionals; they will be here when we want them here, and it’s better that way than trying to hide them away somewhere till the time is right.”

As they began ascending the stairwell, flipping off the flashlight, Fox said, “And what of Dr. Won? Does she have any suspicions?”

“I think she is focused on the fermentation process. She has it in her head that her crop duster will take care of the matter, and she is reveling in the fact that an Englishman tied to Russia will be blamed for it all.”

Fox climbed the stairs, a low chuckle in the back of his throat.

CHAPTER 38

PRESENT DAY

Court woke in pain, the injuries from the night before clawing their way back into his conscious mind. His back still hurt, though he didn’t remember why, as did his jaw and his ribs on both his left and right sides. These blows he had no trouble recalling. But his eye felt okay, he could see through it, and the bruises all over his shoulders and neck weren’t bothering him much anymore, at least while he lay here still.

He turned his head and saw Zoya facing him, but her dark disheveled hair hid her face. He couldn’t allow this; he brushed her hair back behind her ear. She stirred a little, and he just looked at her.

Court still had all his clothes on, and she wore a T-shirt and panties. They’d had moments of intimacy before they fell asleep, but nothing physical beyond a few kisses, because Court was just simply beaten too badly to move. He cursed the big boxer who’d put him in this state, because there was nothing more in the world he wanted to do right now than to roll over to the Russian woman and wake her up with his touch.

But that would involve physical labor that required muscles he could not employ right now to save his life, so instead he slowly and painfully rolled in the other direction, out of the bed, and lumbered for the shower.

While the hot water did nothing at all for his ribs, it did loosen his back some, indicating that he was dealing with pulled muscles more than bruising back there, and with this new mobility he slowly changed into jeans and a threadbare gray and black Fulham FC Soccer T-shirt he’d bought at a used clothing store when he’d arrived in the city.

He brewed instant coffee in the kitchen, restarting the process when he realized he’d forgotten to double his usual portion of coffee and water to account for his guest.

Court didn’t have a lot of sleepovers.