“The way he’s been acting, I’m not sure Rollie can—”
“I am,” Gordian interrupted. “And I would think you’d have faith in the rest of our local Sword team.”
“Not the issue,” Nimec said. “We’ve had some close calls in the past few months. And the snakes responsible are still holed away underground.”
Gordian kept his gaze on him.
“I don’t need constant babysitting, Pete,” he said. “What are your other concerns?”
Nimec paused. It had taken about five sentences to exhaust his arguments. That left him scuffling for a dignified surrender.
“My Corvette,” he said “You going to take care of her for me?”
The faintest of smiles touched Gordian’s lips.
“She’ll be okay.” He carefully put down the picture frame. “That’s promise number two.”
Nimec sat there looking at Gordian for about thirty seconds. Then he gave him an acquiescent nod, rose from his chair, and started out of the office.
“Pete, one final thing…”
He turned to face Gordian.
“An old friend of ours with NASA is due to shepherd a small delegation of reporters and Senators around Cold Corners. The timing couldn’t be worse, but it’s part of a government funding push that can’t be called off,” he said. “At any rate, give my regards to Annie.”
Nimec stood with his hand suddenly tight on the brass doorknob. “Annie?”
“Caulfield,” Gordian said. “You remember her, of course.”
Nimec swallowed.
“Sure, I’ll say hello,” he said.
And strode from the room.
THREE
As he emerged from his eighteenth-century estate outside Rosmarkie for his daily predawn walk, Ewie B. Cameron, whose fifth great granduncle was the eldest son of Sir Ewen of Lochiel of the Highland Camerons, could feel nothing of the legendary courage and fierceness of his ancestors, but only an awful nervous gnawing in his stomach that had worsened throughout the long, long night.
If the documents that plant supervisor had slipped him proved authentic…
No, no, he thought. Their authenticity was beyond question. He could not seek an out for himself by playing the willful fool…
If his interpretation of them proved accurate despite their many cryptic references, verifying the supervisor’s story…
And if the plant’s key stakeholders could not then provide an acceptable accounting of the transactions… which Ewie knew would be nearly impossible given their flagrant violation of Scottish and international regulations…
If, if,
Ewie reached the end of his private lane, where a holly hedge screened his lawn from the narrow country road rolling past, the brightness of its berries muted now in the crepuscular light. Stepping onto the shoulder of the road, he turned left against whatever traffic might happen by at this early hour, and strolled toward the stone embankment where it was his habit to do some leg stretches before intensifying his pace. The morning was cold but not at all blustery, with just enough bite to be invigorating. Though Ewie was prone to be an abstemious sobriety of temperament, it was the sort of weather that would usually lift his mood like the fine mist curling off the mature Archangel firs that rose a hundred feet into the air on either side of him.
Today he was only wishing the twist in his gut would slacken a bit, so he could summon the appetite for a minimal breakfast.
For if the evidence Ewie had obtained was what it seemed on its face, the apprehension he felt about this evening’s meeting was as nothing compared to his dread of its broader consequences. Indeed, his first impulse had been to keep the information to himself until he conducted a quiet personal investigation. But that would have been imprudent. Say word of the alleged goings-on at Cromarty Firth leaked in the meantime? Say his informant grew impatient and brought the hard copies elsewhere — another council member, an Energy Authority constable, some damned English bureaucrat with the Department of Trade of Industry? Lord knows, the man might even rashly trot off to the press. Were his own prior ken revealed, Ewie knew his reputation would be compromised. Or worse. He might well be patsied and have to forfeit his council post. Face civil and criminal prosecution.
It was a mad predicament he’d been tossed into. Absolutely mad.
Ewie had been walking for several minutes, bogged in thought, when he noticed that he’d almost missed the embankment. He frowned at his distraction and stepped off the dirt shoulder for his routine warmup exercises.
Standing close to the rock, he leaned against it with his forearms, rested his head on his hands, then bent his right leg forward and extended the other straight back, holding the stretch until he felt it in his left calf. Then he changed sides. After about a minute, he put one foot up on a projecting ledge and, hands on his hips, bent his knee to relax the hamstring and groin muscles…
Perhaps, Ewie thought, he should have shied away from the plant supervisor. Declined to attend their clandestine meeting at the pub, or at least refused to accept the envelope he was handed under the table. He could then have claimed ignorance with honesty. He was no hero. No warrior chieftain like his namesake Sir Ewen, seventeenth clan chieftain, slayer of the last wild wolf in Scotland, and Jacobite rebel who fought beside Bonnie Dundee at Killiecrankie, where it was said he’d torn the throat out of a ranking English officer with his bare teeth, drinking his blood as it pulsed from the wound. Nor would Ewie compare himself to his great and renowned forebear Major Allan Cameron, founder of the bold 79th Highlanders, which was later renamed the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, and then merged with the Seaforths to become the Queen’s Own Highlanders.
Ewie was simply Ewie. An estate legatee, resolute bachelor, and minor elected official appointed to the Land and Environment Select Committee, which reported to a policy committee, which in turn was under the higher control of a strategic committee of the district council. His usual issues of concern were sewage improvements, road and bridge repairs, traffic-light placements, and such. Ewie did not pretend he’d inherited the brave disposition of his forebears. Did not share their combative propensities. He was proudly content to have his fabled lineage charted in the social registry, and the family crest and tartan displayed on his mantelpiece.
Finished with his warmups, Ewie tarried by the ledge as the lights of an oncoming vehicle slid over the rise up ahead, on his side of the road. They glanced off the blaze-orange windbreaker he always wore on his morning rambles, a precaution that made it easier for motorists to spot him. The small Citroen that appeared moments later was familiar, belonging to a pretty young woman who owned the bakery just over the Kessock bridge. She slowed as she came closer, pulled out toward the opposite lane to give Ewie a comfortable berth, and exchanged a mannerly wave with him in passing.
Then the road was again empty. Ewie got on with his walk, feeling physically looser, and hoping he’d eased some of his mental tensions as well. But his thoughts soon drifted back to what he’d learned from the plant supervisor, and they were accompanied by unrelieved distress and anxiety.
It would have been easy for Ewie to rebuff the fellow with a smile, a shrug, and a polite tip of his glass before any secrets were divulged. Easy to shut his eyes to the whole scandalous deal. So why on earth hadn’t he?
The answer, Ewie knew, was that he was stuck with an inconvenient sense of responsibility. Both as public servant and citizen. The plant at Cromarty Firth employed almost fifteen hundred people from Black Isle down the coast to Inverness, and accounted for perhaps twenty-five million pounds per year in local wages, with millions more filtering into the economy through secondary commerce — a full thirty percent of the Gross District Product. At present the core workforce was involved in decommissioning prototype fast breeder reactors built in the 1950’s and ’60’s. But with the site a top contender for an experimental JET tokamak fusion laboratory, revenues had the potential to double in the next ten years.
If the disclosures were true, however…
