The winter’s night was crisp and frosty, and the forecast had threatened snow. As Ben drove to the airport he kept glancing at his phone in its cradle on the dash, plumbed into the car’s speaker system in readiness for Mirella’s call to say that she’d finally received contact from Boonzie and all was well. He would have loved nothing more than to be able to turn back towards home. But the call didn’t come, and turning back was not an option. He chain-smoked Gauloises cigarettes all the way to Cherbourg to alleviate his worry. That didn’t do much good, either.

Ben’s plane was on time, for what it was worth. The flight was a frustrating twelve-hour marathon that took him a staggered route via Lyon and Amsterdam and soon made him wish that he’d just driven the thousand or so kilometres direct. He checked his phone at each stop-off. Nothing from Mirella. Then, after a delay to clear snow from the runway, he finally boarded the KLM jet for the third leg of his journey.

Every wasted hour only made him fret all the more. When they eventually got into the air, Ben closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t force his mind to relax. Old memories flooded his thoughts. Some good, some less good. Some very nasty indeed.

A number of years had passed since his last journey to the Scottish Highlands. It had been back in 2004, at a time when he’d not long been out of the regiment. His objective on that occasion had been to spring an unannounced visit on a former Special Forces commanding officer, a man named Liam Falconer. That trip had not gone well, at least not for Falconer and several of his entourage. That was the price he’d paid for having involved himself in some secret operations he shouldn’t have, dark and shadowy even by the standards of the black-ops world Ben had just left.

Men had died. Ben had been the one who had killed them. He did not enjoy taking lives. It was something he had been trained to do out of necessity, and he did it proficiently enough to have ensured that he’d been the only person to walk out of that situation.

He hoped nothing bad awaited him in Scotland this time around, but he sensed that he was hoping in vain. The feeling of foreboding had not left him. It was growing deeper and more threatening with every mile he came nearer to his destination. The same familiar adrenalin-tinged dread he’d experienced so many times in the past as a soldier heading into the heart of war.

Boonzie McCulloch, where the hell are you?

Chapter 14