The Assassin's Gift

by C. P. IRVINE, IAN

  Even though no one had yet come looking for, and although everyone believed Salvador to be a man, there would possibly come a day when she would look into a crowd and see two eyes staring right back at her.

  She remembered one of Vincenzo's many sayings, all of which were given to her to help her stay alive: 'The best way to get out of a trap, is never to walk into one in the first place.'

  He had taught her the fundamentals of staying alive, and the essentials skills for becoming a professional assassin. Skills which she had been constantly refining over the years through further training and from experience.

  Although she had learned to relax, like many of the SAS soldiers she had received training from in Cyprus, many years before, she was constantly primed and ready to react instantaneously to any threat she may perceive from her surroundings.

  Her subconscious was constantly on the lookout, and if anything was spotted, an alarm bell would ring in her head and her whole body would immediately go on full alert.

  For now though, everything was fine. To everyone else around her, she appeared like any other tourist visiting the main town at the southern edge of Loch Ness.

  She had taken the indirect route to Fort Augustus, driving as before, up the A887 to Invermoriston, a small town sitting on the edge of the loch further up towards Inverness. When she’d got there, she’d turned right and driven south down past where she’d kept her vigil for Kuznetsov, on the side of the loch directly opposite where his boat had been moored up.

  As she had driven along the road near to where she had lain in the forest, she had been alarmed to find the place a hive of police activity. Her pulse had quickened, fearing at any moment that her car would be stopped, but the traffic had not slowed, and she had simply driven past a row of eight police cars and vans, parked on the side of the road.

  Quickly scanning left and right to capture as much information as possible about what was going on, it became obvious the police attention was all centred on the strip of land and loch below the road.

  There didn't seem to be any activity visible through the trees on the right, going up towards where she had lain hidden in the grass.

  At one point the forest on her left had cleared, and for a few seconds she’d had a clear view of the loch.

  A line of policemen were walking along the loch shore, scanning the ground, obviously looking for signs of previous activity that could be related to what they would have discovered on the boat.

  Looking across the loch to the other side, Kuznetsov's boat was gone. Others now filled the cove, but before she could look at them properly, the trees blocked her view.

  His boat had most likely been towed away somewhere for detailed forensics, away from the press and out of the public eye.

  Carrying on along the road, she took a deep breath and took a modicum of comfort from the fact that the police search was cold. Very cold indeed. Although she knew that could quickly change.

  By the time she arrived at Fort Augustus a few minutes later and pulled into the car park, her mind had already wandered onto other things: food, and her sighting of the monster.

  Gathering her camera from the boot, and making sure she had her rain jacket with her just in case the weather changed, she locked the car and started to stroll slowly to the fish and chip shop on the edge of the car park.

  She was starving.

  The conversation last night with Young Angus had been both an inspiration and rather depressing. It was obvious from the light in his old eyes and the passion which he showed whenever he spoke of what he had seen, that he'd truly seen something. Something he firmly believed to be the 'lady of the loch' as he had so casually described her towards the end of their conversation. But Angus had not been so sure about her own experience. Which rather curiously, disappointed her.

  Alessandra realised then that she actually wanted to believe that she had seen something. She wanted to believe that she had seen the 'beast'.

  Which is why she had taken Angus's advice and contrary to her standard best practices, had probably rather stupidly got in a car and driven back to within a spitting distance of where she’d just completed her previous mission.

  She knew it was madness. By all rights, she should be heading to Ireland now, escaping Scotland via the back door. The last place she should be just now was here. But she needed to know more about what she had seen, and if possible she was hoping to be able to convince herself that she had seen something special. Which she would hopefully be able to do by visiting the Loch Ness Visitor Centre and spending time in the exhibition there.

  Angus had also given her specific instructions to ask for a man called Gavin and say that Angus had sent her. Gavin was reliably one of the most informed experts in Scotland and had himself apparently also once seen the monster.

  Paying for her fish and chips, she grabbed a few extra sachets of the surprisingly free tomato ketchup from the counter, and walked briskly through the town centre to the bridge spanning the canal which split the town in two.

  Fort Augustus was famed not only for being on the edge of Loch Ness, but also for the fact that it was the location of an amazing feat of Victorian engineering - a set of five sequential canal locks that lifted boat traffic up the side of the mountain to the level of the Caledonian Canal, which ran along the Great Glen across the backbone of Scotland connecting the North Sea with the Firth of Clyde, and beyond that to the North Atlantic Ocean.

  Turning right at the bridge, Alessandra stood for a moment to marvel at the sight of the locks, then hurried up two flights of steps and sat down on some grass beside one of the locks, where she tucked into her fish and chips.

  As soon as she opened up the wrapped newspaper, and the smell of the vinegar and the chips hit her, she realised just how ravenous she truly was.

  For the next ten minutes she was oblivious to the world around her, only beginning to take notice of her surroundings again when half the meal was gone.

  The screech of police car sirens drew her attention, and she turned to her right to see three police vehicles sweep through the town along the loch. They were in a hurry, and Alessandra had a good idea of where they were going.

  She stood up, and continuing to eat her food, followed the path up the side of the locks, until she was at the top, level with the canal, looking down over the town and the edge of Loch Ness.

  Alessandra found it incredible. Using nothing more than water power, before the days of lorries and mass transport, a heavy, coal-laden canal barge could be lowered hundreds of feet down the side of the hill and let out gracefully into the mouth of a small river that ran out into the loch below.

  Nowadays the industrial barges had long since mostly been replaced by pleasure boats and cabin cruisers, but at the very bottom there was a single token barge visible, waiting its turn to be carried upwards.

  Her eyes took in the vista, the bright sun shining on the purple heather on the hills all around her, and the sweet smell in the air. She closed her eyes, and in the distance somewhere she could hear someone playing the bagpipes.

  It was magical. Truly magical.

  The Loch Ness Visitor Centre was situated on the left at the bottom of the flight of locks, on the other side of the bridge, near the edge of the loch.

  Half of the building was given over to a museum which housed the Loch Ness Monster Experience, which promised to provide its visitors with all the information they needed for them to be able to make up their own minds whether the monster existed or not.

  Alessandra willingly paid the rather expensive entrance fee and spent the next three hours walking slowly around all the exhibits, reading and digesting everything she could.

  In a rather small cinema, twenty people at a time could see a video summarising Nessie's history, and showing interviews with several people who had seen her.

  She smiled almost excitedly when Young Angus appeared on the screen, recounting his experiences, almost verbatim as had told her.

  The last person who
appeared in the interviews was a young man, Gavin MacDonald, whom Alessandra immediately recognised as the man who had sold her the ticket at the entrance.

  After watching the video, Alessandra wandered back into one of the rooms where a large wall was given over to the display of hundreds of photographs that people had taken of the monster over the years.

  The wall was divided into three sections. On the far left there were many photographs hung on a purple background. These were photographs, which upon expert examination, were easily explainable, and which when viewed with the written explanation in mind, Alessandra couldn't help but agree with. They showed many things... but none of which were Nessie: upside-down boats, dinghies, tree trunks, people swimming, deliberately deployed fake models of the monster, even an aircraft which had crashed onto the loch and was in the process of sinking.

  The middle of the wall, with an amber background, was covered with photographs which were not so simple to explain. Experts had made suggestions as to what the images represented, but their explanations were given only as that - they were purely suggestions. She counted thirty photographs.

  The far right had sixteen photographs on a red background. These were the photographs for which the experts could offer no credible explanation. These were the real photographs of Nessie, the Lady of the Loch, the Beast. Supposedly.

  Probably.

  Maybe.

  One thing was certain however. They were the photographs which had spawned the modern legend of the monster and built the multi-billion pound Nessie industry upon which a significant portion of Scottish tourism thrived.

  As she had entered this part of the exhibition, her pulse had quickened, and she couldn't believe how simultaneously nervous and excited she had felt.

  She had spent a long time examining the photographs on the far right, comparing them with the images which she so preciously guarded in her own mind.

  Sadly, none of them compared to what she had seen.

  Relegating herself to the amber background, she felt the disappointment creep over her as she began to recognise similarities in some of the photographs to what she had herself seen.

  Alessandra stepped back from the wall, as far back as possible, and stared at those in the middle section.

  She closed her eyes, running through the sequence of images she had seen, again and again.

  Then she returned to the wall, and pragmatically began to admit to herself that she had probably, although not definitely, found an explanation for her sighting of the monster.

  Five of the photographs on the wall, - although she had surprisingly not wanted to initially admit it - were actually probably similar enough to her own sightings to spawn further considerable doubt in her mind.

  "Find anything interesting?" a man's voice startled her, so deep was she lost in her thoughts.

  She turned and found that it was Gavin.

  "Ah...," she smiled, "I was just about to come looking for you. Young Angus in Plockton said I should look you up when I came here, and I recognised you from your interview on the film."

  "How's he doing? I haven't seen him in a few weeks."

  "Entertaining. And full of stories. Interesting stories."

  "That sounds like Angus! But you haven't answered my question, though. Are any of these similar to what you saw?"

  Alessandra laughed and stared at him.

  "What makes you think that I saw anything?"

  "I've been working here long enough now to separate the wheat from the chaff, the tourists who come here because they want to see Nessie, and those who come here because they already have. From the hour you've spent in this one room, and the way you're digesting each and every photograph, I can tell which group you belong to."

  "It's that obvious?"

  "Even more so. The fact is, you're undecided. You keep flitting backwards and forwards between the amber and the red. Am I right?"

  "Almost," she laughed again.

  "Do you have a name?" Gavin asked, rather forwardly. "Any friend of Angus's is a friend of mine."

  Alessandra hesitated. Melting into the background was always her policy. Making herself known and of interest to a leading local only less than a mile or two from where she'd just killed three people was hardly a smart or clever thing to do. But making herself more mysterious by not answering his direct question, was probably now just as bad.

  "Alice. My friends call me Alice." She smiled and turned back to the wall. "You're very observant Gavin, but in this case I'm actually probably verging more to the amber wall than the red. I want to believe that what I saw was something special. But the reality is, what I saw was probably something quite like these... probably..." She stepped forward and pointed to two of the photographs.

  "But you're not sure?"

  "Not completely."

  "So what did you see?" he prodded.

  "Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing."

  "Listen, I'm afraid we're just closing up. But, if you've got some time, we could go to the pub next door and get a coffee? How about I meet you there in twenty minutes?"

  --------------------

  Alessandra sat in the corner of the pub, looking out of the window onto the Loch.

  It seemed so peaceful and calm today. The water was still, almost mirror like, and there was no wind.

  After leaving the exhibition she had wandered down to the foreshore and looked left along the loch to where Kuznetsov's boat had been moored, studying the hive of activity on the water and the shore just behind.

  She counted about six boats anchored around where his boat had been, with several others on the loch shore. From where she was she couldn't count the number of police officers, but she could see them like ants moving in and out the forest, their bright yellow jackets clearly visible against the trees and ferns.

  She found it strangely interesting. This was the first time, ever, that she had hung around after a mission had been completed, and even though she knew it was madness being there, it was also curiously exciting.

  Turning around and walking back along the side of the river that ran into the loch from the locks in the middle of Fort Augustus, she walked past the Loch Ness Visitor Centre towards the pub. There were a few lights still on in the visitors’ centre, so she knew Gavin was still inside.

  Approaching the pub, her common sense told her to walk straight past, get in her car and drive back to her safe house in Plockton. However, she realised that she didn't want to. And she wasn't going to.

  She had questions. She needed answers. Gavin could maybe help her find them.

  Sitting in the pub she watched the people around her as they came and went. Tourists most of them. A few locals.

  One of them looked across at her. She smiled back, then turned and directed her attention out of the window, avoiding more inquisitive looks.

  "Sorry I'm late," Gavin's voice caught her by surprise a few minutes later. "A couple of policemen turned up at the centre and wanted to ask me a few questions."

  He had her attention.

  "No problem. I was just enjoying the view." She paused, feigning as much innocence as possible, "I can't imagine that there is much crime here in such a small town. Yet, I've seen quite a few police cars zooming around along the loch. Is there something up?"

  "Looks like there's been a murder. A tourist was found dead on one of the hire boats. That's all any of the locals know. They brought his cruiser in yesterday. According to the skipper of one of the day-trip boats who passed it on the loch as they were bringing it in, the deck was apparently covered in blood. Everyone was talking about it last night at the bar."

  "Ouch. I came on holiday to get away from that sort of stuff. People die in Chicago every day. You would have thought if there was anywhere on earth you could escape, you could do it here in the middle of nowhere."

  "We're not exactly in the middle of nowhere. Fort Augustus is one of the largest towns in the highlands, and the biggest round here."

  "Sorry," Ale
ssandra smiled, continuing the act. "I didn't mean to insult you. It's just, compared to Chicago, or New York, ... well, you know what I mean."

  "Don't worry, I'm only teasing. So, what are you drinking?"

  "A coffee will do fine. I'm driving."

  "Coming up. But I'm having a whisky. I need one."

  As he wandered over to the bar, Alessandra's eyes followed him.

  He wasn't at all unpleasant to look at. Quite the reverse, in fact. Brown hair, a moustache and a beard. Dark brown eyes. And the kilt he was wearing also made him rather attractive. She watched it sway from one side to the other as he walked, and found her eyes moving up past the kilt, to his shoulders, and then back down to his bottom, where her eyes lingered a little longer, and didn't seem in a hurry to go anywhere else.

  When he returned, Alessandra accepted the coffee and thanked him.

  "I've just realised that I've never actually talked to a man in a skirt before!" she said, laughing.

  "Then don't worry. You still haven't. This isn't a skirt."

  He winked at her, then, and took a sip of his whisky, settling down in his seat and letting out a little 'Aaahhh...' as the alcohol slid down his throat, reminding Alessandra of a cat purring with contentment.

  Alessandra put the coffee cup down and leant forward.

  "So, what did you see?" she asked him.

  "I saw 'her'. The monster."

  "Why is everyone so damned sure it's a 'she' and not a 'he'? Why is it that big dangerous horrible monsters are always male, and cute, curious, mysterious ones are always female?" Alessandra asked.

  "Good question. And I don't know the answer. But all I can tell you was that from the moment I saw her, I have always felt it was a female. Maybe because it was slender and delicate... and beautiful."

  "Beautiful?" she paused. "So what did you see?"

  "It was about seven o'clock in the evening one night in June. Still daylight. I was flying my microlight along the loch just enjoying the summer evening, about twenty metres above the water, in the middle of the loch... and suddenly there she was. Below me."