Legacy of the Highlands (19 page)

John raked his hands through his hair. “Good
idea. Got any aspirin? My head’s killing me.” Diego nodded and
pointed toward the bathroom.

“I knew it! The bastard is connected to Will’s
murder and I bet he can even tell us whose hand held the knife.”
Diego’s eyes flashed with the primal thrill of a hunter with easy
prey in his sights until his gaze shifted to Alex. Her mascara was
smudged, there were stripes on her cheeks where tears had washed
makeup away, and she’d chewed off her lipstick.

“You look like hell,” he said as his tone
softened and concern filled his eyes. This gentle, compassionate
Diego was as comforting to her as his savage, bloodthirsty side was
frightening. Her feelings for him were as inconsistent as his
behavior toward her, so when he wrapped her in his arms and pressed
his lips to her cheek she surprised herself by returning his
embrace. And that’s when John walked out of the bathroom.

“So that’s how it is,” he crowed, grinning
smugly as he took a step toward them. “Already making time with
your best friend’s widow, eh, Navarro? Not that I’m surprised —
like father, like son,” he taunted, his voice dripping with venom.
“Can’t you Latin Don Juans keep it in your pants?”

Diego flew at him. He’d been waiting for a
reason to hit the older man and there was no holding him back.
John’s insult, not only to his honor, but also to Alex’s and his
parents’, gave him
carte blanche
to wreak the violence he’d
craved. The two men tumbled to the floor with a thud.

“Stop it! Cut it out!” Alex screamed but they
ignored her. She had to stop them before John was badly hurt or
they’d never find out why Will was killed and who did it. She
scanned the room for a weapon, grabbed the silver ice bucket, and
dumped its remaining cubes and freezing water over the two panting
men as they wrestled. Stunned, they both looked up at her.

“Will you behave or do I have to kick both
your asses?” Alex glared at both men and knew she had to seize
control if she were ever to hear the rest of John’s story. “Mr.
Navarro,” she began, her voice cold and filled with contempt as she
confronted him. Diego had the grace to look embarrassed. “Please
leave us alone. Go for a run or hit the gym or I don’t care what
until you work off some adrenalin and can control yourself.” He
opened his mouth to protest. “No! Don’t say a word, not even one.
Go. I’ll be fine, won’t I John?” The other combatant was still on
the floor, breathing heavily, but nodded his agreement. She knew
Will would have been amused by this scene and could almost hear his
laughter. Alex didn’t believe in ghosts, but — just then — she was
sure her husband’s was there.

James Mackinnon placed a “closed” sign in his shop’s
front window, locked up and drove out of Inverness, heading east on
the A96. He hated to lose a day’s income, but there was no one he
trusted to mind the store and today’s meeting in Elgin was
important.

The others would come from Craigellachie, in
the heart of the Speyside whiskey region; Aviemore, a ski and
hiking destination in the Cairngorm Mountains; and remote Boddam,
bordering the North Sea at Scotland’s craggy, easternmost point.
Each participant could make the round trip by car in a day. Their
absence would arouse no suspicion.

Mackinnon’s belly was comfortably full from
his usual breakfast of porridge, a fried egg, and a thick slice of
bread slathered in orange marmalade, washed down by two cups of tea
with milk. As a widower for the past ten years, he was used to
cooking for himself. It pleased him to eat what he wanted when he
wanted, not like other helpless old men who had to pay good coin to
some woman to prepare their food based on her tastes and her
schedule, not theirs.

Although it was summer, Mackinnon switched on
the car’s heater to remove the overcast day’s damp chill. He tapped
the radio’s “on” button, but BBC Scotland held no interest for him
so he switched to a Gaelic language station.

He smiled broadly as he recalled how proud he
was of his grandson. Their people in America had provided him with
a detailed description of the braw way the lad had carried out the
task he’d so diligently trained for. His Jamie had expertly
murdered John Cameron’s beloved son and he’d even had the wits
about him to leave the
sgian dubh
beside the body and
photograph his work. The contact in…Gloucester was it?...swore
there were no witnesses, but to be safe Mackinnon had sent young
Jamie to a friend’s sheep farm in the far north, near remote John
O’Groats, where he’d work for the next year. It was no sin to take
extra precautions to keep your kin from harm, was it?

It took twenty years for Mackinnon to reach
the upper echelon of the Group of One Hundred, the ancient alliance
that took its name from a portion of the 1320 Declaration of
Arbroath:

“
For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive,
never will we on any condition be brought under English rule. It is
in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are
fighting, but for freedom, for that alone, which no honest man
gives up but with life itself.”

The organization’s present-day members were all
direct descendents of the document’s original signers. Every one of
them, including that traitor John Cameron, had taken a blood oath
to fight for Scotland’s nationhood and to never reveal the identity
of the other ninety-nine members.

Over the centuries, the One Hundred’s methods
had often been brutally violent, but in modern times they employed
intellect and money instead of broadswords. Throughout history
bloodshed had rarely advanced the goal of a sovereign Scotland and
was now forbidden. But the group’s unity had fractured in recent
years, mired in conflict over how to achieve their objective
peacefully. Some, including Mackinnon, argued that the political
process embraced by the group was agonizingly slow and that less
civilized tactics must not be ruled out. The vast majority of its
members, however, continued to work for independence within a
political framework. After all, they argued, Scotland had her own
Parliament again. That was progress, wasn’t it? They seemed blind
to the fact that real power still rested in London, despite the
occasional crumbs the English would toss to the Nationalists.
Mackinnon was convinced that Westminster would never willingly
remove the yoke from Scotland’s neck and set her free.

Today’s meeting of the splinter group in
Elgin would remain a secret to all but the three who, like
Mackinnon, were en route and one other who couldn’t attend. The
remaining ninety-five members would never tolerate his thirst for
vengeance and would cast him and his out for spilling blood in
their name. Easy for them, he reasoned. It was his son, not theirs,
who rotted in prison because of John Cameron’s treachery.

Mackinnon never understood why the majority
of Scots kowtowed to a foreign oppressor, which is how he viewed
England. Sheep, the lot of them, he thought derisively. He’d
cheered when
Sinn Féin
President Gerry Adams declared that
he would never enter the chamber of Parliament in London because
“it’s a foreign parliament and I am an Irish person.” And I’m a
Scot, by God, yet I’ve got English pounds in my pocket and my
passport says I’m British, Mackinnon thought with disgust.

He rolled the car’s window down a few miles
east of Inverness and spat as he passed the turnoff to the Culloden
Battlefield — which he still called by its old name, Drommossie
Moor. “I curse you, Charles Edward Stuart, and damn you, Butcher
Cumberland!” Mackinnon shouted into the wind as strands of his
white hair blew into his watery blue eyes. It was a ritual begun as
a boy, imitating the actions of his Da who’d told him how the
Bonnie Prince’s ego and incompetence as a military leader led to
the savage slaughter of the starving and exhausted — but always
courageous — Highland clans on that very spot in April 1746. His
Mackinnon ancestors fought in the midst of the front lines, and
only three escaped with their lives.

As for the Duke of Cumberland, well, what
could a man say about Cumberland? Mackinnon spat again, more
forcefully this time, then rolled up the old car’s window.
Cumberland had been the worst kind of sadist, an English General
who wasn’t satisfied to just win the doomed battle that ended the
Jacobite Rising of ’45. Oh, no. After the victory, he’d ordered the
massacre of survivors, even the wounded. His troops brutalized,
raped, pillaged and burned, leaving women and children to starve.
Tartans were banned along with bagpipes, weapons, the Gaelic
language and all things Highlanders held dear, effectively ending
the clan system.

If it had happened today, Mackinnon mused, it
would have been condemned by the world as ethnic cleansing or
genocide. And if my folk had won, if only they had won, he thought,
I’d no be on my way to a meeting to plot murder and plan for the
day Scotland finally rids herself of England’s greed and
domination. In his dreams, he sometimes visualized his homeland
actually breaking away from its geographical tether, to float free,
strong and independent once more.

Ah, my bonnie Scotland, he sighed. More than
a thousand years have passed and we still fight the same enemy. So
many dead, may their souls rest in peace. He crossed himself then
lit a cigarette as he reached the outskirts of Elgin.

Mackinnon yanked up the hood of his dark green
windbreaker as he walked from the car park toward what remained of
Elgin’s ancient cathedral. He had no interest in the books and
postcards displayed in the ticket office and dug in his pocket for
the £3.30 admission charged by Historic Scotland.

He resented paying good money to visit a
ruined church, but reasoned that the coin was needed to help
preserve his beloved country’s past. This rationale disappeared in
a flash as he shifted blame for the ticket price to the English. If
they weren’t stealing the profits from Scotland’s North Sea oil,
the country’s museums and historic sights wouldn’t need to sell
tickets — at least not to Scots. He didn’t give a damn how much
tourists paid here or for the trinkets they bought in his shop.
When Scotland was free…the phrase entered his mind unbidden, a
welcome obsession.

He walked purposefully down what was once the
center aisle of the cathedral, past the resting places of knights
and bishops entombed more than eight hundred years earlier. The
elements had worn away the nave’s stone floor and his shoes
squeaked as he walked over wet grass toward the shelter of the
octagonal chamber house where he was to meet the others.

“Whose daft idea was it to gather in this ice cold
place?” groaned Ian Lindsay the instant Mackinnon entered the gray
stone hall.

“We could have done our business in a pub or
at least at a cozy teashop, couldn’t we have?” added John Malcolm.
“My feet are fair frozen. A cuppa and a scone would be good about
now.”

“Christ, you lads sound like a bunch of
yammering women,” Mackinnon shot back. “And what have you to say,
young Duncan? What’s your complaint?”

The man he called young Duncan was no less
than forty, but the other men had been friends of his dead father,
so to them Duncan Buchanan would always be a lad.

“No complaints about the place, but what age
must a man reach before you stop attaching “young” to his name?”
Duncan asked peevishly.

Their good-natured laughter echoed off the
building’s stone walls and elaborate vaulted ceiling. Mackinnon
leaned against one of the massive columns that supported the
structure.

“Maybe this will help,” he said, grinning as
he pulled a flask from his pocket. “I know it will ease the ache in
my old bones.”

“Is it whiskey?” young Duncan asked
hopefully.

“Aye,’tis. And what else would I bring for
refreshment, a fizzy drink? Of course it’s whiskey,” he said as he
unscrewed the cap and raised the silver flask to his mouth before
passing it to the next man.

“I hope Michael arrives soon so we can begin.
Why didn’t he ride down with you?” John Malcolm asked Mackinnon.
“We’ve never held a meeting without him.”

“He sends apologies and thinks me capable to
act in his stead,” said Mackinnon somewhat peevishly. “One of
Michael’s bairns tumbled out of a tree this morning and apparently
broke his arm, so Michael’s off to hospital with the wee laddie. He
didn’t want us to delay on his account, so I’ll fill him in when I
return to Inverness.”

The other men nodded their understanding, but
there was some throat clearing to cover their grumbling. They’d
have to be satisfied that nothing they discussed this day would be
carried out without Michael’s okay. Mackinnon ran on emotion;
Michael Graham tempered his ruthlessness with intellect.

“Now to business,” said Mackinnon, pleased to
be in charge for once. “Ian, close those doors so we have some
privacy. We’ll have fair warning if some tourist comes along.”

Mackinnon paused until he was certain he had
their attention. “I’m pleased to report that the police in Boston
are still befuddled by the action we carried out and likely always
will be. Nothing leads back to my Jamie. We’re in the clear,
lads.”

“And what of Cameron?” Ian asked.

“Michael sent John Cameron a clear message
that his treachery was responsible for his son’s execution. But
we’ve no worries from him. Our man in Boston reports he’s behaved
like the coward he is. His Da, God rest his soul, would be ashamed
to have sired this particular Cameron. He’s not a man, or mayhap I
should say he’s nay a Scotsman. Life in America makes men soft. I
wager he’s the first Cameron who can’t even lift a broadsword, let
alone wield one. He’s taken to the bottle like a babe to his mam’s
breast.” The others harumphed their agreement.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so certain of that,”
cautioned Ian. “’Tis said that a Scot doesn’t fight until he sees
his own blood. The sight of his only son’s blood could give a man
like Cameron a thirst to spill ours.”