virtually never let his protectee out of his sight, Mars thought the six-foot-nine-inch behemoth to be too striking a presence in the middle of a covert intelligence mission.
They didn’t come here to be remembered.
Together they walked the grounds for over an hour. The three did their best to envision the intelligence summit that was soon to take place, to picture where the guests would be housed, seated for dinner and for meetings. They strolled through the gardens, looked out past the wall down on Loch Ness, lying out before them in beautiful turquoise, just at the bottom of a sheer cliff one hundred feet high.
It became obvious to Won that David Mars knew his way around this property.
“You’ve been here before?” Won asked.
Mars replied, “Oh yes. Twice already in the past three months. It’s a marvelous place for a holiday, even if it didn’t have value to me in other ways.”
Won was particularly interested in the air itself, the breeze drifting in from the water, the movement in the manicured trees around the property. At one point she turned to Mars. “We will check the conditions the day of, but if it is like this, then the pilot will have to make a low pass, flying just east of the castle, over the grounds but not over the building itself.”
Mars nodded, but he didn’t appear to be paying close attention.
Back inside they dined on venison and grouse in a dining room off the great hall. Won did not touch her wine, but Fox and Mars indulged in an easygoing and relaxed manner.
Both men were operational, but they also both knew how to operate in cover. Mars had been a spy in one capacity or another all his adult life, after all, and Fox was a Russian intelligence agent who’d infiltrated Russia’s notorious Solntsevskaya Bratva, so they were both exceedingly good at this.
Won was a trained intelligence asset, but the tradecraft she’d learned in the DPRK did not encompass dining out in the center of an intelligence target. No, she’d learned dead drops, countersurveillance, resistance to interrogation, and the like. The hard skills of a spy.
They retired to their rooms after dinner, but just twenty minutes later Mars and Fox stepped out in the hall and went downstairs.
They walked into a main hall, exchanging pleasantries with other guests and employees of the castle alike.
Moving on to the east wing of the large building, they kept an eye out for cameras or castle security; then, when the coast was clear, they slipped into an employee-access-only stairwell off the great hall. They descended two flights into increasing darkness and ended up on the bottom floor, engulfed in pitch black.
Fox turned on a flashlight and they saw that they were in the stone basement, a several-hundred-meter-long warren of halls and rooms. The castle dungeon had been here once, as well as catacombs to house the dead in the walls, a place to keep wine and dry goods, even an armory and a furniture and blacksmith’s shop, but now it was mostly used for storage for the hotel and conference center.
It was musty down here, the smell of water evident.
They walked along, passing under archways above which massive iron gates hung, held up by cordage as thick as Won’s arm.
The men knew where they were going, in general, but it was such a maze that Mars referred to a map. He’d studied everything ever recorded about this building, going back to sixteenth-century writings that described the original keep.
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