A Time & Place for Every Laird

by Angeline Fortin

  “Dead on.” Both men looked at Sorcha, who just crossed her arms irritably.

  Ahh, she was adorable in a pique. Hugh returned his attention to her brother. “What vexes ye, Danny?”

  “You do, my friend. You do,” Danny said, looking over his shoulder to cast an accusing glare at Hugh before looking at his sister. “Be glad you didn’t drive into the city, Claire. There’s a BOLO out on your car.”

  “A BOLO?” Hugh and Sorcha said at the same time, but for different reasons. Understanding his question, she looked at him worriedly, and explained. “It means that the police, the authorities, are looking for my car. How did you find that out, Danny?”

  “Oh, I was doing a little light reading into that Fielding’s project and found out any number of interesting facts, including exactly why the NSA is involved.” Danny wove through the traffic, turning on to side street after side street to avoid the rush hour traffic with all the skill of a lifelong resident. “Got the name of one NSA Special Agent Phil Jameson and poked around in his files a little as well. Lo and behold, it is you the NSA is looking for, Claire. Not Hugh, as you said before. Why is that, do you suppose?”

  “They’re idiots?”

  “Beside the point,” Danny said but didn’t push the issue. “Anyway, I saw a report that says they spotted you on a traffic cam not far from here last week.”

  Chewing on her lip, as she tended to when worried, Sorcha looked at Hugh steadily for several long moments. He could see her thinking, plotting, planning, but he was doing some thinking of his own. “Is it only yer sister they search for, Danny?”

  Danny met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Who else would they be looking for? Hugh Urquhart, perhaps? Your name is nowhere in the files. But it wouldn’t be, would it?”

  “Nae, it wouldnae.”

  “Because they aren’t looking for you at all, or they don’t really know who they are looking for?” her brother asked perceptively.

  “Danny!” Sorcha protested, but Hugh took her hand and squeezed it comfortingly.

  “Dinnae fash yerself, lass,” he said calmly. “Yer brother isnae looking for an answer from ye. I would wager that he already knows all, perhaps more than we do.”

  Hugh met Danny’s gaze once more and the young man nodded. “You are pretty smart for a ‘bloody, unintelligible savage of unknown origins given to rage and violence at the smallest provocation.’ I’m thinking they didn’t mean bloody the way the Brits do. Had them fooled, didn’t you?”

  “Nae really,” Hugh shrugged, for he was all that and more while imprisoned. He had tried to kill them, he had raged against his imprisonment, and he had threatened to dismember them limb by limb even if they hadn’t understood his words. “When did ye figure it out?”

  “Suspected something was amiss when you looked at my setup as if you’d never seen a computer before … or was it the pizza?” Danny said. “Knew for sure when I read the files.”

  Hugh nodded. He had known from the moment he had met Sorcha’s brother that he was a sly one. Danny O’Bierne truly was a bit of a mastermind and would have made a troublesome adversary, but he would be an even greater asset if he were to assist them. “I appreciate yer silence on the matter.”

  “Oh, don’t get too excited,” Danny cautioned. “I haven’t decided if I trust you enough yet to keep that silence.”

  The warning didn’t concern Hugh. There was no doubt in his mind that Danny would do anything to protect his sister, even if it meant extending his trust to Hugh by necessity.

  “So what now?” Sorcha asked worriedly and slanted a glance at Hugh, whispering, “I knew I shouldn’t have left him those reports.”

  “You sound like you’d be surprised if I offered my help,” Danny said over his shoulder as he turned into the parking lot next to his warehouse. “Even knowing my feelings on government oversight. Shame on you. Besides, you’re my favorite sister. Why wouldn’t I help?”

  Sorcha sighed and shook her head as if she would never understand this brother of hers. She accepted Hugh’s assistance out of the van and went to her brother, giving him a soft peck on the cheek. “Only sister,” she whispered. “Thank you, Danny.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said and waved for them to follow him inside.

  “Okay, here we go.” Danny rocked back in his chair and gestured to the bank of monitors. “May I present Mr. Rupert Waldroup. Environmental consultant. Resident of Inverness. Age thirty-four … sorry if I overshot, man. I had to take a ballpark guess. Nothing personal.”

  “No offense taken. It was a good guess.”

  Sorcha looked at him in surprise. “I can’t believe I never asked. How old are you?” Hugh tilted his head toward the monitor and raised a brow. “How old are ye?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “So she says,” Danny interjected. “Seems to me you’ve been stuck there for a while.”

  “Don’t pay attention to him. I’m not one of those women who hit twenty-nine and stopped counting.”

  Sorcha was studying the information on the screen, and Hugh studied her in turn, trying to see something he might have missed. It was surprising to discover that Sorcha was nearly thirty. She certainly did not appear so old to him. Her skin was fresh and unlined, her magnificent body firm and youthful. Naturally most women of his time did not “exercise,” as Sorcha did, but all had used any means to retain their appearance of youth with not half her success. At Frederick’s court, many would have pursued the young widowed beauty, begged her to become their lover.

  A quick calculation told him that Sorcha had been widowed at twenty-six, and he wondered how long she had been married. Had she married young? Given the many young, unescorted women he had seen on his two excursions into Seattle, Hugh didn’t believe that was the case, but he was reluctant to raise any topic that referred to her lost husband again.

  Her blatant elation when Hugh had arrived at her brother’s office building had been all for him, her kiss his only. In that moment, Sorcha had belonged to him, and Hugh had savored the moment. He wanted more, so much more. Even when he was sure he would have to let her go, he only wanted her more.

  Hugh unconsciously reached out and placed a possessive hand at the small of her back. She looked up at the gentle pressure and smiled, leaning into him before turning back to her brother.

  “So this is the temporary guy you made up for us?”

  Danny snorted at that. “Even with my excellent imagination, I couldn’t come up with a name like that. No, Rupert Waldroup, poor guy, already exists in the records. Arrived in Vancouver from Glasgow last Thursday. His blog says he’s there on business for the next two weeks or so, traveling all through British Columbia and Alberta.”

  “But that’s Hugh’s picture,” Sorcha said, pointing to Hugh’s image on the screen.

  With a nod, Danny rocked back in his chair. “For the next couple days, yes it is.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said with a frown, but oddly enough Hugh did, and he offered a nod to her brother. Aye, he was a cunning lad.

  “Yer brother has offered me an alias. A legitimate means of traveling incognito.”

  Danny nodded. “That’s right. Hugh gets to go to Scotland as a real person with a personal history, Facebook page, and blog that would have taken me weeks to create. The bonus is that this guy has already come into Canada. I didn’t even think about it before, you know? Getting him out without record of him ever having come in? That might have raised a few flags.”

  Sorcha pursed her lips as she glanced up at Hugh, and he had to wonder what she was thinking. “So, what now? If we have the guy, can’t we just forge a passport?”

  “Perhaps Danny isnae any more familiar wi’ the seedy underbelly of yer country than ye are,” Hugh offered with a smile.

  “Oh, I’m sure he is.”

  “I am,” Danny said agreeably. “I am getting to that. It is all part of the grand plan. Hugh will go home as Rupert Waldroup, nice and legal-ish, but when he gets there, he’s
going to become someone else entirely.”

  “Myself,” Hugh said.

  “Right,” Danny said, nodding with approval. “Really not a savage, are you? Too bad. That might have been more interesting.”

  “Ye would hae done nae more than fear for yer sister if that were the case.”

  “Who says I’m not?” Danny shrugged and turned back to the screen. “So, you’ll go to the British Consulate—thought you would have to do San Francisco before. Linear thinking and all that. Forgot that there is one in Vancouver. You’ll get some emergency travel documents as our guy and off you’ll go. Poor old Rupert might have a hell of a time later explaining how he needs to leave Canada twice when he only arrived once, but, hey, that’s the challenge of life, right?”

  “And then?” Hugh asked.

  “Soon as you are safely in Scotland, I can erase all trace of your photo from the system and voilà,” Danny waved his hands in the air. “The journey is as if it never happened. You’re a ghost, a vague image on bad airport security footage. Best part is, you never even have to pass through American customs, where the NSA is probably watching.”

  Hugh was impressed by the lad’s skills, which clearly were abnormal even in this time of technological wonder. “Yer brilliant, Danny. Really, ye hae my thanks.”

  “No problemo,” Danny said with a modest nod.

  “No,” Sorcha countered. “Big problemos. Mondo huge problemos. I could fill a supertanker with them.”

  Hugh looked curiously between Sorcha and her brother, to whom he said, “We speak the same language but sometimes I dinnae comprehend a word she says.”

  Danny grinned. “I have that same issue.”

  “Oh, ha ha,” she said, slapping her brother on the back of his head. “You know what I’m talking about. There are holes everywhere in this! Hugh can’t get into Canada without the passport he’s going there to get! And how am I supposed to go there with him? If I flash my passport at the border, I might as well call up Jameson myself and tell him where I’m going.”

  Danny’s eyes widened with mock surprise. “Kudos on the big brain, Sis. Is that all?”

  Claire was still shaking her head. “No, that’s not all. What does Hugh do in Scotland after he’s there? He can’t get a job or an apartment or even a bank account.”

  Her brother rifled through some papers on his desktop and came up with a slim envelope, from which he withdrew a passport. “Seeing as the only Hugh Urquhart in the entire UK is a four-year-old kid, I figured we’re safe letting him use his own name.” Claire thumbed through the small book before handing it to Hugh with a nod. She was impressed that Danny had accomplished so much in less than a week, but was even more so when he pulled out a birth certificate as well that looked suitably worn to Hugh’s age. “You’ll have to hide those well on the way over, in case he’s searched. It would be hard to explain. I’ve started building records for Hugh Urquhart in all the normal UK databases and should have it done by the time he gets there. He’ll have to pull his same story back home to replace his other ‘lost’ documents like his driver’s license or NHS card, or maybe a tragic fire will have burned down his family home. I’ll build him such a solid life that there will be nothing to link him to Rupert Waldroup or Mark-Davis’s lost science experiment.”

  “Okay, fine. But what about Canada?” she asked, concerned on that one sticking point. “Surely San Francisco would have been easier.”

  “That’s a fourteen-hour drive,” Danny pointed out.

  “A fourteen-hour drive in the same country.” She met Hugh’s gaze and read the question there. “Vancouver is less than three hours from here but it is in Canada, and to get in there these days, you need a passport,” she explained before turning back to her brother. “I told you we should have just made him American!” Claire caught his incredulous look and shrugged. “Fine, you said make him an American, but why didn’t you then? Since you decided to just replace some random guy with Hugh’s picture, wouldn’t it have been easier to get him a passport here instead?”

  “Really? Think about what you just said.”

  Damn, she hated it when someone was smarter than she was, and there had been a lot of that going around lately. “Because in the U.S. you can’t just get an emergency passport to fly out of the country. Fine, I got it. So how do you propose we get into Canada?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Claire glared at her brother. Nothing was obvious any more, other than the fact that she had gotten in way over her head. She had no idea what Danny might be referring to. Hugh must have sensed her impulse to tackle her obtuse brother to the ground, because he laid a calming hand on her shoulder and leveled one of his haughty, ducal glares at her brother. “Come now, lad, this is nae time tae rile yer sister so. Tell us yer idea.”

  Danny sighed impatiently. “Claire, when was the last time your car was searched going over the border?”

  “You want to sneak him into Canada?” Claire asked incredulously.

  “What’s the big deal? You’re trying to sneak him out of here, aren’t you?” Danny snapped back. “Or have you suddenly drawn some fine line between legal and illegal that I don’t know about?”

  “Enough.” Hugh’s calm command halted both the siblings, and they turned to him with identical expressions of surprise. “Arguing will accomplish nothing. Sorcha, yer brother has been naught but our ally thus far. Trust that he has a plan. Danny, lad, dinnae provoke yer sister unnecessarily. She’s had much tae deal wi’ these past days.”

  “When did you become the peacemaker?” Claire asked.

  “When I was eighteen and my uncle turned the dukedom’s courts over tae me,” Hugh said.

  “You’re a duke?” Danny asked. “I suddenly feel so humble.”

  “That would be a miracle,” Claire mumbled. “So, dear brother, what’s your plan? I hope it doesn’t involve the two of us in one trunk.”

  Danny grimaced. “It might have … Well, I suppose we’ll have to go with a boat then. Here’s what I was thinking. One of the minions has a brother who works a small fishing boat out of Blaine. It’s right on the Canadian border and he’ll do anything for a buck. So if you can be at the marina there by five a.m. one morning, he’ll take you up into Surrey. From there you’ll just have to take the bus or something.”

  “Or something?” Claire taunted. “Nice plan. What’s next? We grow wings?”

  “Am I expected to do everything?” her brother asked. “You don’t want the trunk, you get to use your imagination.”

  Hugh held up his hand once more, preempting another argument. “I imagine we’re clever enough tae make it the rest of the way. And then?”

  “I’ll book you a hotel room in Vancouver, prepaid but with your name on it. They’ll need ID but won’t run a card,” Danny continued, turning to shuffle through some papers on his desk before handing one to Hugh. It was a copy of Waldroup’s passport with Hugh’s image from his database. “I’ve printed this for backup. You can say it’s a photocopy of your passport that you carry with you or something. I hear they recommend that. I read the procedures for emergency travel, so when you get to Vancouver, the first thing you need to do is get robbed. Yes, your idea, Sis. Shouldn’t be too hard. I recently read that Vancouver is the eighth most dangerous city in Canada.”

  Claire scoffed at that. “Yeah, in Canada. Not like it’s L.A.” She looked down at the copy in her hands. “Couldn’t we just use this to get into Canada legally?”

  “Wouldn’t risk it,” Danny shook his head. “You only want one use on that thing, if possible. God, Sis, you’re worrying over the easiest part of the whole thing.”

  “I’d just hate to get caught before we even got started.”

  Danny rolled his eyes yet again and Hugh began to understand where Sorcha had developed the habit. “Anyway, I got a nice hotel already picked out in Gastown. Eastside downtown in an area heavily populated with vagrants and addicts looking for a handout or their next fix, so it shouldn’t be too hard
to get robbed there.”

  “Or killed,” Claire said dryly. “Great. I’m loving this plan.”

  Hugh laughed. “In my time, ye hae a better chance of getting robbed than avoiding it in many cities but why need we risk such a thing at all? What we need is merely the appearance of a robbery.”

  Both siblings looked at him curiously, their rivalry forgotten. “What do you mean?” Danny asked.

  “Might we not simply go tae the constable’s offices and report the ‘crime,’ as it were? I shall be this Waldroup fellow, in town on business. Sorcha shall be a mere witness tae the robbery.”

  Claire nodded while her brother looked at Hugh with growing respect. “With your accent, it would be easy to assume that there is no connection between us.”

  Danny chimed in as well. “Our friend Rupert is staying downtown at the Hotel Georgia. So in case they ask, you can tell them that to support the lie.”

  “You know where he’s staying?” Claire asked with raised brows.

  “Sis, I could tell you where he ate breakfast this morning.” Danny turned to Hugh. “But why would a guy from Scotland be hanging out alone in Gastown?”

  “Doesn’t that restaurant at the top of the Harbour Center attract a lot of upper-class businessmen?” Claire asked.

  Danny nodded. “Yeah, he could say he was having dinner with clients there or something. It will get him close but not close enough. Why would he be walking alone?”

  “To get somewhere no one else wanted to go,” Claire said and leaned across her brother to call up GoogleMaps, searching for nightclubs in that area of Vancouver. She hovered over the pinpointed options one by one, but Hugh stopped her search, pointing at the list on the left.

  “That one,” he said decisively. “The Blarney Stone. There isnae a person I’ve met beyond Scotland’s borders who could tell a Scotsman from an Irishman. I doubt there would be any question of a weary traveler longing for his homeland.”