Monster: Tale Loch Ness (42 page)

They crossed the loch, flying over the foothills of the Monadhliath Mountains, then returned to Geminii base, boarded the jeep, and drove back toward Travis House.

"You're not happy," she declared as they passed the midpoint of the journey home.

"Why would you say that?" he asked, trying to brush away her concern.

"I've shared your bed," she said. "I know when you're troubled, and you're troubled now."

He ached to tell her the truth. "There's nothing really. Just intracompany problems. Pressures. We have to get the new web into position, and I've been working night and day."

"I'm not stupid. There's more. Are you still angry I spoke to MacGregor? Is there something more seriously wrong with us?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not. But we've seen very little of each other the last three weeks. We talk on the phone. We say romantic things. I know you're busy, but it's as if you've tried to avoid me."

"Now you're being paranoid."

"Does your unhappiness have anything to do with the submersible?"

Where did this come from? "What submersible?"

"There's an unsubstantiated rumor that a two-man sub went down in the loch."

"Unsubstantiated and untrue. If such a thing had happened, Energy inspectors would have been all over the place, and there would have been no reason for us to hide such a thing."

"No apparent reason!"

"Remember what I was? Remember how I found plots under every rock? Remember I said you reminded me of me? Well, it's happening again!"

"Sometimes you were right!"

"Rarely."

"What about the web?" She had asked Scotty to take her up in the helicopter so she could get a good look at the device.

She was suspicious. She'd been suspicious in council. The view from the air had not allayed her concerns.

"What about it?"

"What's it really for?"

Goddamn woman
, he thought! At times, he wished she wasn't so intelligent, so quick. "You heard everything there was to hear in council. You know everything there is to know."

They reached Travis House. Her car was parked outside. It was three-thirty.

"I wish you could stay, come in, relax," he said, though that was the last thing he could allow her to do. In fact, he'd been careful to keep her out of the house since it was full of documents and materials relevant to the trap operation. "But I have that important meeting at four, and I have to prepare."

"I know."

"I want you to know something."

"What?"

"I love you very much. Don't ever doubt it."

"I love you, too." Her voice was strained.

He smiled. "In a week or so, the work load will lessen." In actuality, the snatch would have been completed. "Then we're going to sit down, talk about us."

"I hope so," were her final words.

She sat in her car staring through the windshield. Travis House was visible, two blocks away. She was deep in thought, trying to piece together a myriad of impulses. It had been a strange three weeks. Before, their relationship had been almost idyllic. She'd never allowed herself to open up so. Then, suddenly, everything wonderful had screeched to a halt. Either Scotty had started to fall out of love, or sometking extraneous had occurred to interfere in his private life. She'd cried herself to sleep several times, but now, after spending the day with him, she'd begun to sense that sadness had been the wrong state of mind. Instead, curiosity and maybe even anger should have been the ruler of her actions. There was nothing she could point to in particular; rather, there had been an accumulation of puzzling developments: his behavior, the rumor about the lost submersible, the sudden rush to build the curious-looking web, and today, a very transparent effort to keep her out of Travis House. Was there something in the house he wished to hide? And what about the van occupied by a man and a very attractive woman that had driven up just after she'd departed? She'd seen the same van in front of his house several times over the last two months while passing by, but he'd never quite answered her request for a simple explanation. Was the van and its occupants part of the problem? Was she being overly paranoid, as he'd suggested, a mirror image of his former self? Was she jealous of the attractive woman? She didn't know, but her intuition had already raised a warning flag.

She looked at the note pad on her seat. She had scrawled down the license number of the van. At the very least, she was determined to find out something about its occupants. She would do it tomorrow.

Scotty looked out the fourth-floor window of Travis House. He could see Inverness Harbor below. Beyond, the Black Isle Bridge.

Sunday afternoon, navigation was light.

He chewed through the end of a new cigar, his attention recalled by Dr. Rubinstein, who had gruffly cleared his throat.

"Here's a representational graphic," Dr. Rubinstein said, pointing to an Inverness Firth Navigational chart on the wall.

Scotty moved closer. They were in the Travis House attic, which Scotty had set up as an alternative headquarters to their offices at Geminii base, where they could work, free from Geminii oversight.

"You'll notice the flags," Dr. Fiammengo said. "They represent each of the dives already made."

They had established five dive teams to explore the Inverness Firth for the cavern entrance. Dr. Rubinstein had drawn up the suggested dive points. It had been over a week since the first dive.

"Has anything looked promising?" Scotty asked.

"Not really," Dr. Rubinstein replied. "One team of divers picked up some current anomalies." He pointed to the chart. "But they proved to be red herrings."

Scotty turned to Dr. Fiammengo. "Did you get the quake seismic material?"

She held up a looseleaf notebook. "All that was available. All the Richter readings. We spent yesterday going over them. It doesn't seem promising. All the known faults have had significant sesmic activity. If there's an offshooting unknown geologic fault that's hollowed out, it would have to be seismically inactive, and that's unlikely."

Scotty licked his lips; they were tension dry. "I take it the land work has also been unproductive."

"Totally," Dr. Rubinstein said.

"Damn," Scotty cursed.

"Where do we go from here?" Dr. Fiammengo asked.

"We continue to look," Scotty answered. "Unless you both tell me it makes sense to go ahead with the snatch without finding the creature's access tunnel."

Dr. Rubinstein shook his head. "Based on your concerns, Whittenfeld's concerns, Geminii's concerns, no."

"You're not concerned about the drill ship and the lives of the men?" Scotty asked, cuttingly.

"Of course, I am, and I resent that inference every time you make it."

"It's not an inference. It's a fact. And I don't give a shit if you resent it or not!" Damn! He was doing it again. He'd promised himself he would deal with the researchers and even Whittenfeld as if he were pleased to have joined them in the hunt. It made sense. He had a better chance to see the trap scheme through to fruition if he didn't rock the passengers in the boat too hard. But it was difficult, and there were times he just couldn't hold in his resentment, anger, impulses.

"Scotty," Dr. Fiammengo pleaded. "We're scientists. There's no way we could have allowed this opportunity to pass. You detest us. I know. But if we had done things any other way, your way, we would never have had the opportunity we have now, the opportunity to capture the creature."

"It is a beast!" Scotty suddenly snapped, the image rocketlng into his head out of nowhere. "The beast!"

"All right. A beast. The beast. But it's the greatest discovery in the history of science. Legend come to life. And we are going to catch it. Catch it for the world. It will be our accomplishment. Yours as well. You realize that or you wouldn't have decided to help. And we promise you, no one will be hurt."

"Beyond those who've already died."

"If I could bring them back, I would."

What's the use
, Scotty thought. "We'll continue to look," he said.

Dr. Rubinstein poured himself a glass of water.

"You're sure the cavern exists?" Scotty asked.

"Absolutely," Dr. Fiammengo said. "It has to."

Scotty left the room and returned several minutes later holding two reams of charts, which he placed on the table.

"Let's try these wiggle and variable-density seismic sections," he suggested. "The ones we use to locate petroleum and gas traps."

"How can they help?" Dr. Fiammengo asked.

"They're compiled by measuring the rebound angle and speed of sound waves introduced to the ground and reflected off underlying formations. The measurements help us determine the depth to and nature of the formations. If the sound source penetrates an air interface, we should pick it up due to a decrease in sound velocity."

"Why didn't we look at these before?" Dr. Rubinstein asked.

"Near-surface readings aren't very accurate."

"Then why look now?" Dr. Fiammengo asked.

"A thought occurred to me. What if our theoretical cavern did not run transversely near the surface but proceeded like a roller coaster? We might suddenly have an air interface at several thousand feet, exactly where there shouldn't be any, and it might just have been overlooked on the sections."

"How do we go about it?" Dr. Fiammengo asked.

"I'll put two of our senior geophysicists on it. I'll study the charts, too. In the meantime, we'll continue with the dives and surface work and get the trap into position."

"What if the seismic charts show nothing?" Dr. Rubinstein asked, concerned.

Scotty expelled a whoosh of breath. "We'll face the problem when we come to it."

They returned to the ground floor.

"Did we overlook anything?" Dr. Fiammengo asked as they prepared to leave.

"No," Scotty replied. "I'll call you as soon as we've analyzed the information."

A summons from Scotty Bruce came the following day. The researchers immediately drove to Geminii base. Scotty's office was inundated with charts.

Scotty looked visibly tired; he'd had little sleep.

"Is the news good?" Dr. Rubinstein asked as he admired the ivory elephant, still on the shelf.

Scotty opened a map of the Inverness region.

"This is the Inverness area between Loch Ness and the Inverness Firth. As you can see, few areas were left unmapped. No matter how the cavern might run, somewhere along its oourse it would have to have crossed one of our seismic grids." He pointed to the charts. "We pored over these things like bookworms."

"And?" Dr. Fiammengo asked, expectant.

"Nothing!"

"Then you think it doesn't exist?" Dr. Rubinstein questioned, disheartened.

"I didn't say that. I said these charts don't show it."

"Could you possibly have missed it?"

"I certainly could have. However, there's less of a chance the geophysicists did."

"How accurate are the soundings?"

"There's room for error."

"Then we continue to look?"

"Yes. We sink the trap. And we continue to look."

Mary MacKenzie arrived at constabulary headquarters shortly before noon. Detective Chief Inspector MacKintosh was waiting for her. She gave him the van's license number and asked if he could trace it and discover whatever he could about the identity of the owner, or as she suspected, the renter. He asked for a reason. Council business, she replied.

She left the building moments later, still bombarded by the questions that had continuously plagued her since the day before. Rolling in bed through the night, she'd reviewed her suspicions, the incidents that had raised her hackles. Paranoia? Maybe. A manifestation of her excessive zeal, the disease Scotty had so bluntly attributed to her? Panic in the face of an obviously dying relationship? Jealousy? Maybe those, too. Christ, there was little reason for her to have focused on the van. If she had catalogued suspicious vehicles in Inverness, even those near Travis House, she would have had a notebook full of license numbers. But something again had bothered her.

There was no use beating it to death.

MacKintosh would supply answers soon.

The day dawned pleasantly.

The
Magellan
lay still in the water.

Four large tugs churned around the drill ship's bow several hundred yards away. Behind them, attached to drag lines and supported by pontoons, was the trap.

It looked like a colossal black arachnid.

Bobbing on the water between the drill ship and the command barge were four yellow buoys. The trap would be set between them.

The three sonar tugs swept their sectors.

Scotty was on the
Magellan
's drill floor. Whittenfeld, Lefebre, and Spinelli were on the forward helipad watching the trap's progress. As far as Spinelli and even Foster knew, Scotty had returned to the fold voluntarily and enthusiastically.

"You know what Red would have said?" Grabowski remarked as he and Nunn moved with Scotty.

"It's a goddamn waste of time and money!" Scotty suggested.

"That's right," Nunn observed; he and Grabowski had just been briefed.

"He would have been wrong," Scotty added.

They watched the tugs swing around.

"There's a hell of a lot that can go wrong here," Grabowski declared.

"I'm aware of it," Scotty said.

"You're telling us something," Nunn charged, smiling obliquely.

"What do you mean?"

"Your tone of voice. The message is clear. Don't ask too many questions, it says!"

"Sorry, but that's the way it has to be right now. You'll get a full rundown before any attempts. For the time being, though, just go about your jobs and keep your mouths shut."

Whittenfeld and Lefebre, who had left the helipad, appeared below them.

"We're ready," Whittenfeld called.

Scotty climbed off the drill floor and joined Whittenfeld and Lefebre in a launch.

The launch pilot maneuvered the craft away from the drill ship and slid it parallel to the trap, which had nearly been set into position.