dead and wounded of Ground Branch, and the surviving members of the team in the helo gave them dirty looks for this. As Court sat there on the helo in Aaronson’s dark blue suit, he fully understood the looks he was getting. He would have felt the same way if someone on his team had died and a virtual stranger put on his clothes, but there was no way he could walk around the Five Eyes conference dressed like a commando.
His broken hand would draw attention, but when he unwrapped it to test it, he determined there was no way he could allow free movement of the broken bones in it, so he got Travers to reapply the metal brace and a fresh ACE bandage.
After landing they walked to the main gate and were searched by Scottish military and met by Suzanne Brewer, who showed their badges to the security force on duty there to get them checked in. Then she told them to follow her into the castle.
They all went directly to Hanley’s third-floor suite.
She told them, “We’ll put you right back out as soon as we have some clue as to where to send you. We will, at that time, request support from the United Kingdom. A squadron of paramilitaries from SAS, because clearly you’ve shown yourselves to be unable to handle Zakharov and his men without assistance.”
Jaws flexed in anger, and eyes narrowed in the group of hard men, but no one commented.
Brewer ignored the looks. “For now, blend in, try to look like typical security officers. I hope to have a target for you very soon.”
Inside the command center next to Hanley’s suite, over a dozen agency analysts pored over computers, checking satellite photos of the area, maps, traffic and security cameras, and the like, all desperate to find a group of men, probably traveling on the roads, probably moving in this direction, and probably carrying weapons. British intelligence was in on it now, after a fashion, with their leadership putting David Mars and his known cohorts in the national crime database and with the suspects involved in the mayhem at the church to the west being identified as an unknown group of military-aged Russian nationals.
Local police were on the lookout now, but there was a lot of area to cover in the Scottish Highlands, and much of it was remote or rural.
Outside the castle, British and Scottish security experts were told to be extra vigilant. A pair of police boats patrolled the waters of the loch, and helicopters flew patterns high above.
* * *
• • •
In the late afternoon, Zoya Zakharova stood on the banks of Loch Ness, next to a two-door Nissan she’d stolen in Inverness so she wouldn’t be driving a hunted van around.
She gazed up in the sky at the helicopters circling above Castle Enrick on a cliff on the opposite bank, just barely visible through the mist pouring off the water, even now in the afternoon. With binoculars she’d purchased at a store in Inverness she scanned the entire area, left and right.
She noticed two small patrol boats bobbing in the water at the bottom of the cliff, a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on each one, along with a crew of four.
Zoya wasn’t flying blind by being here now. She’d seen the scuba tanks in the back of one of the vans, so she knew this was how her father’s unit of commandos was going to infiltrate the conference. She couldn’t figure how they would do it, though. There seemed to be no other access up to the castle other than scaling that sheer cliff.
And even if they did scale the cliff, they would be completely exposed to security forces in the parapets of the castle wall overlooking a well-manicured lawn. It would be a shooting gallery for the defenders if the attackers chose that means for their ingression.
No, there had to be some other way into the castle grounds that could be accessed by water.
She was missing something, but she wouldn’t find it here, searching from across the loch. Instead she looked again at the map on her phone, trying to find the best place for someone to put a boat in the water nearby. Somewhere out of view of long-range spotters on the security force of the Five Eyes conference, but close enough to access the shore below the cliff.
After a minute thinking about it, she decided that her father’s divers would be in plain view of the castle