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.