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 Citröen 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 . . .

That word again, Ewie thought.

If.

If they were true, it was not only the expansion that would be threatened, but Cromarty’s very license to remain operational. The UK Atomic Energy Authority constabulary would shut down the plant in a blink, sending the area’s economic prospects into the deepest of holes.