The laird didn’t stop walking, but he turned to face McConnell. “Is that a fact, now? And your last name?”
“McConnell.”
“Hm. Mostly Irish, that.”
“My grandmother was a Cameron.”
“Well, there’s two sets of Camerons hereabouts. The Camerons of Lochiel, and the Camerons of Erracht.” Sir Donald winked at McConnell. “Let’s hope she was a Lochiel, eh?”
The two men emerged from the Dark Mile into lambent winter light. The cool spray of falling water misted the air. The laird led McConnell onto an arched stone footbridge and gestured up toward two waterfalls that cascaded into a peaty brown pool below the bridge. He took a deep, satisfied breath.
“I suppose the men have been giving you a lot of trouble about this pacifist business?”
McConnell hesitated. “A bit.”
“Don’t think you’re cut out for battle, eh?”
“I just think there must be a better way to solve problems.”
The laird smiled wistfully. “Aye, you’d think so, after all this time. Men are bloody-minded creatures though.”
The light was changing fast on the falls, the frothing white turning silver in the twilight.
“When Bonnie Prince Charlie started to raise the rebellion,” Cameron said, “my ancestor — the Gentle Lochiel, they called him — rode straight on to talk the prince out of it. An ill-timed enterprise, he called it.”
“Did he succeed?”
“Oh, no. The rebellion was born, and Lochiel fought like the rest. But he knew it was doomed from the start, ye see. Ended in blood and death at Culloden.” Sir Donald nodded slowly at McConnell. “My point, lad, is that a man isn’t measured by how regularly he struts around beating his chest. A wise man loves peace better than war.” He raised his forefinger. “And a wise man picks his battles. When he can, leastways.”
McConnell was surprised to hear such a philosophy from a Highland Chief, a warrior breed if ever there was one.
“It’s a strange world,” the laird mused. “In 1746 the redcoats burned our old castle. Now Charlie Vaughan and his English commandos have occupied the new one. I don’t like it, but it’s in a good cause. Hitler, I mean. I’ve no use for the man. No use for a German at all, to be honest. Going to Germany yourself, are ye?”
McConnell felt a shock of disbelief. Brigadier Smith had certainly not confided the target of the mission to a civilian, even if he was the landlord.
“Don’t look so surprised, lad. Not much gets by me. Why else would you be paired with that German Jew? And dinna be worryin’. I’m no’ a talker.”
“It’s true,” McConnell said, feeling an almost confessional relief.
“Must be important, then.” The laird’s blue eyes bore into McConnell’s. “Going into the enemy camp means bloodshed. I guess you know that.”
“I’m figuring it out.”
“Well . . . if they picked you for this job, you must be the right man.”
Mark set his elbows on the stone rail of the bridge. “I didn’t think so at first. But now I have a queer feeling. Almost like . . . well, destiny or something. Take the name Cameron. Right now I may be standing on land my ancestors walked, and only because of this mission.”
Sir Donald nodded. “You listen, lad. When the time comes — when you get to the sharp end of things — you’ll know what to do. I heard how you saved that Frog down by the river.”
“That was my medical training. I’m not trained for this.”
Cameron’s bright eyes flashed. “Bugger all that! If you’ve got Cameron blood in your veins, ye’ve got the fight in ye. You’ll bear up when the time comes.”
He leaned his staff against the bridge rail and pulled a deer-skinning knife from the stocking of his right leg, then looked McConnell in the eye. “I wish I were going with you, that’s God’s truth. But I’m too old now. My son is about your age. He’s with the Lovat Scouts. In any case, you’re a Cameron by one branch or the other, and you’re entitled to wear the tartan.”
McConnell watched in amazement as the laird sliced off a six-inch swatch of his heavy woolen kilt.
“You take this, Doctor,” he said. “Might bring ye luck in the hard places.” He slipped the knife back into his stocking. “There’s not a Hun in the world could stand before a Cameron with his blood up. Mark my words.”
McConnell stood straight and carefully folded the green, red, and yellow cloth into the pocket of his army denims. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I’ll keep it close by.”
“You do that, lad.”
The light was nearly gone. In the distance McConnell heard a muffled explosion, yet another prelude to the great cataclysm that would soon smash to rubble what was left of Europe.
He leaned on the bridge rail and watched the water sluice over the falls. You could lose yourself in that sound, he thought. In the sound, and the smell of wet stone and woodsmoke and mist. As he stared, a great salmon leaped from the shadowy pool below the falls. Its sides gleamed like pewter dipped in oil, and its tail flashed darkly in the dusk.
“Did you see that!” he cried, looking to his right.
No one was there. Only the empty stone bridge, and the lane leading back into the mossy tunnel of the Dark Mile. The Laird of Achnacarry had vanished. As crazy as he felt doing it, McConnell reached into his pocket to make sure the swatch of tartan was still there, to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated the whole damned thing.
He hadn’t. The cloth felt reassuringly coarse against his fingers. He started back toward the castle, thinking of what Lochiel had told him.
McConnell slung his book bag over his shoulder and broke into a run, feeling his temples throb with frustration. He’d had it up to the neck with training. It was time to get on with it.
While McConnell ate alone in the solitary hut behind the castle, Jonas Stern sat in Colonel Vaughan’s office, still half expecting to be raked over the coals by the colonel for stealing the bicycle. It was not Charles Vaughan who appeared at the door, however, but Brigadier Smith. The SOE chief wore a heavy raincoat and his stalker’s cap, but tonight he carried no map case. He sat down heavily in Vaughan’s chair, pulled a bottle of single-malt whiskey and two glasses from a file cabinet, and poured two fingers into each glass.
“Drink that,” he ordered Stern.
Stern sat motionless. “What’s wrong? You haven’t scrubbed the mission?”
“Scrubbed it? I should say not. McShane and his men are flying toward Germany as I speak.”
“What is it then?”
Smith’s voice carried a note Stern had never heard from him before. Almost . . . compassion. “I drove over from the takeoff point just to see you,” he said. “We’ve had some news out of Germany. It may concern you.”
“How?”
The brigadier pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his inside coat pocket. “Three days ago, SOE scraped a Pole off a Baltic ice floe. He’d worked wonders for us, but he was blown. He managed to bring out one last haul. Among his papers were several lists of names. People who’d died at certain camps. One of those camps was Totenhausen.”
Stern nodded slowly. “And?”
Smith handed the sheet across the desk. Scanning it quickly, Stern saw about fifty names, some obviously Jewish, others not. There were numbers beside each name. He found it near the bottom of the page, a name that stood out like letters of fire among the others:
Stern cleared his throat. “How old is this list?” he asked in a shaky voice.
“We don’t know. Could be months, could be as recent as a week. Is it your father, lad?”
“How the hell do I know?” Stern exploded. “There could be a hundred Avram Sterns inside concentration camps!”
