The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  “Fishing?”

  “Oh, yes, lots of fishing. Sea or freshwater? Awfully good sea fishing now, couple of big skate the last few days.”

  “Fresh. A friend recommended it.”

  “Oh, I’m glad to hear that!” The man went down a list of waters, pros and cons, then got a flat book like a ledger from under the counter and went over a couple of pages, a long finger tracking down a set of columns. He seemed to have great enthusiasm for his work. And for the fishing, a lot of which he seemed to know firsthand.

  “Salmon?” Alan said. He thought that Piat had been salmon-fishing in Iceland.

  The man made a quick clown grimace. “Not much right now, I’m afraid. The Aros, maybe—” He sounded doubtful. “Lots of excellent trout, though! The Mishnish Lochs—”

  Somebody else was asking a question; the man excused himself and moved down the counter to the other customer. Alan without hurry spun the book around and glanced down the open pages. Days of the week across the top, fishing down the left side. Here and there, names penciled in—not many people fished, he thought—with now and then the number of fish caught. One set of entries jumped off the page—a single venue where somebody had fished again and again. He turned back a page and saw the same pattern; back another, and back to the week when he had called Dukas because Partlow had wanted Piat back. That’s where the entries started; the week before, there were none.

  “Find anything?” the man behind the counter said. “Sorry about that—somebody’s computer problem—where were we?”

  “This loch—you say loch?—where this, I suppose it’s a man, Mister Michaels been fishing every other day.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, Jack Michaels! Yes! He loves it up there! Hard spot to reach, half an hour’s walk in and it’s mostly uphill, but he loves it. Getting quite nice trout, too, he says.” He gave Alan his big grin and looked apologetic. “But if you’re just here for a day or two, there’s lots of easier places to get to. If it’s a matter of time, I mean.”

  Alan asked where the loch was; a map was produced, the loch identified. He could see from the contours how rugged the walk in would be. If “Michaels” was in fact Piat, he was in good shape. The loch wasn’t big but would be magnificently isolated, certainly a virtue for somebody like Piat. At one end, there was a small extension of the lake, almost a second, smaller lake, and a penciled circle.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, that’s the crannog. Michaels was interested in it, too. They are rather neat, actually—man-made island. Bronze Age. Bit special.” The grin came again. “Long walk to see it, though. There’s a more accessible one in Loch Squabain.”

  Alan said he’d think about the fishing, and he veered off to the flat boxes of flies that sat on the counter, bought a mixed dozen, bought an Ordnance Survey map, and said he’d be back after he’d talked to his wife. This seemed to please the man behind the counter as much as if he’d taken all the fishings for a month and he liked nothing better than spending his time explaining things to strangers.

  The path to the loch would have been almost invisible except for recent use. Craik supposed it was all Piat’s comings and goings. He’d seen at the bottom of the hill where Piat parked his car—flattened strips in the coarse grass—and had left his own nearby. He was chancing Piat’s seeing it, but the book in the tackle shop had told him that Piat never came here on a weekend. And if he saw the rental car, he mightn’t get too wrung out over it. The island was full of rental cars.

  His respect for Piat’s fitness grew as he climbed. The path was steep and rough, in places no more than broken, pale grass growing in uneven tussocks. Sheep used it, too; in muddy spots, there were deeply stamped hoof marks, and, in one high above the gorge of a small burn, clear human footprints. Piat’s, he was sure, but somebody else’s, too—there were two tread patterns. He was careful not to add his own to them. He found himself walking too fast, pushing himself, feeling the exhilaration of a completely free day and a completely new place. He was smiling.

  He came in at the head of the loch, which lay in a bowl with at first shallow sides, then rapidly steeper ones as the mountains loomed above it. A stream ran out on his left, doubtless the burn he had seen below. Ahead at the far end of the loch was the little extension and its supposedly man-made island. He headed for them.

  He knew that Piat sometimes dealt in antiquities. He knew that Piat was a crook. Those things might add up to interest in a Bronze Age island in the back of nowhere. Something other than trout must be bringing Piat way up here, he thought, and there were no houses to hold attractive women.

  He used some harsh navy language as he came around the loch: there was no track, foul footing. The wind blew in his face, rippling the water so it looked dark and hostile. A light rain was falling. At the top of the mountain on the other side, water began to run down slender rock faces like silver threads.

  Everything was rock, so there were no footprints near the water. The little loch was shallow, however, and sheltered from the wind; he could see rocks under the water that looked like stepping stones heading out to the crannog, which looked to him quite natural, eternal, wild, except that it was perfectly round. And had those stepping stones leading to it.

  He walked along the bank, studying the crannog through binoculars. Something yellow showed between the clumps of grass. Bright yellow, the yellow of slickers and plastic technical gear. Not natural or wild or eternal. Near it was a cone of what appeared to be mud. Like the crannog itself, it was round, but unlike it looked man-made—too perfect, too bare of grass.

  He looked at the stepping stones and guessed that the water was too deep to jump from one to another. And too deep to wade. He looked up into the drizzle of rain. Cloud was blowing up the valley and swallowing the mountains.

  Craik sighed. Then he laughed. He was going to do a silly thing for the sheer exuberance of the day.

  He stripped down to underwear and T-shirt and waded in.

  The water was even colder than he had expected. The bottom was ooze with rock under it, gooey and insecure. He waded deeper, feeling goose flesh rise on his chest and arms. The water reached his groin. He groaned, leaned forward, and pushed himself into a glide, the cold like a harsh embrace; then three hard strokes and he was pulling himself up the crannog’s side. Close to, its rock structure showed—an island piled up stone by stone three thousand years ago.

  The mud cone that he had seen was some kind of tailing made up entirely of tiny particles. Rubbed in the fingers, it felt like wet dough. Sifted, he thought. Nearby, as if tossed aside, was a wooden frame with a wire-mesh screening. Not very high tech. Still, it would work—one or two men shoveling mud into it, then shaking it, wetting it.

  The bright yellow he’d seen was the tube of a snorkel. Careless. That didn’t sound like Piat. The other footprint in the path meant that he had at least one helper—a somewhat careless helper. Or, more likely, more than one, to work while Piat did whatever he was doing with the falconer.

  Under a camouflage tarp was a machine with a plastic hose and a funnel-like end. The big, bulging part was an air compressor, he was sure (a metal plate on the side said “Hibernia Compression Limited”). A paste-on label told him the name of the rental company that had supplied it. He didn’t need to be an underwater specialist to see that the thing was a kind of vacuum cleaner—the mud went in the wide end of the funnel and got spat out—perhaps into the sifter—at the other. At least two men. Under the tarp with the contraption was a metal detector, two sets of black swim fins, air tanks. He wondered if they used the compressor to refill the tanks, too—it was a long haul up here with more of them. It must have been a long haul getting the stuff here in the first place.

  He was shivering almost violently by then. His exhilaration persisted—near-naked under a threatening sky, wind blowing, rain; it was great!—but his body was objecting.

  He swam back, rubbed himself as hard as he could with his sweater, put his digital camera and a pencil and a scrap of p
aper from a brochure into the plastic sack he’d carried lunch in, and went back into the water. When the water hit his chest, he knew he should have done it all in one trip.

  One of the brochures he’d picked up at the tourist center was for a place called Wings Over Mull, which raised and showed falcons. It wasn’t all that far from Piat’s fishing loch, in fact. He didn’t think that it would be where he’d find Piat’s falconer—he didn’t want it to be where he’d find Piat’s falconer—because it looked too public and too smooth. His hair was still wet from the loch when he pulled into their parking area; although he’d got over shivering on the walk out, his skin still felt damp and clammy to him under his clothes.

  He walked around a couple of buildings, looking for life. The wind was raw now, the drizzle turned to real rain. He started to shiver again. At last, life found him.

  “Help you?” a girl said from the corner of a building. She might have been fifteen, might have been twenty-two, pink-cheeked, small-chinned, smiling. “You’re a bit wet.”

  “Been swimming.”

  She laughed. “Feels like it, doesn’t it.” Her voice went up and down like the island roads. You could really learn to like living here, he thought.

  “Mister Michaels said this was the best place on the island to see the birds.”

  “I don’t know a Mister Michaels. Is he a falconer?”

  “Friend of mine. American.”

  She shook her head. “No, sorry. But we’ve lots of birds! We’re closed just now, but we’re doing an exhibition at four o’clock; you can come back and see them flighted.”

  “Well—” He was trying to play the confused tourist, but he was shivering so hard he was having a hard time concentrating. “I’m sure my friend said there was this falconer on Mull he knew. That was the idea—a personal friend. Let me get close to the birds.”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that.”

  “Um.” He tightened his back to stop the shivering. “Is anybody else on the island into birds?”

  “Well, there’s the sea eagle project at Craignure. And there’s bird-watchers galore.” She giggled suddenly. “Well, there’s old Mister Hackbutt up at Killbriddy. But he’s—” She stopped as if it would be impolite to say what old Hackbutt was.

  “Yeah, Jack said he was a little—” Alan put a shaking hand out, rocked it back and forth.

  She giggled again. “I’ve never seen him m’self, but I’ve heard he can be a little dee-ficult. He’s American.”

  “We’re a difficult lot.”

  She laughed, not a giggle but an older, womanly sound. She looked at him and blushed, as if she might be saying, You’re far too old for me, but still— He got out his map and she showed him where Killbriddy was. He saw the double lines of the “highway”—a single-lane road—then the thread of what might be a sheep track leading to old Hackbutt’s farm. The rental-car company wouldn’t be pleased with what he was about to do, he thought.

  “You really helped.”

  “Come back at four.”

  “I’d like to.” He really meant it but knew he wouldn’t. But he left smiling, thinking how much he really would like to come back.

  The road to Hackbutt’s was not as bad as he’d feared, paved after a fashion, helped by the lack of other cars. He drove past the house that corresponded to Hackbutt’s location on the map and went over a hill, up and up, not passing another house, at last finding a place to turn around where a pasture gate made a little lay-by. He headed back past the place and pulled in over the brow of the next hill and walked back off the road, his pant legs wet from the knees down from the grass.

  He found himself a kind of snuggery in a rock outcrop and sat down. His waxed-cotton coat gave him a dry seat, but when he tried to stretch his legs out, the backs of his thighs were immediately soaked. He put his binoculars to his eyes and tried to look like a man watching birds.

  After an hour, a girl he thought to be in her teens came down the road on a bicycle from the other direction. She turned into Hackbutt’s and propped the bike against the house, prompting great enthusiasm in a black-and-white dog who had been lying near a fence. She didn’t go in but patted the dog and went around the back, then reappeared heading for some sort of shed, from which she emerged after fifteen minutes with a bucket whose weight pulled her far down to that side. He thought she was probably like the young girls you see around stables, who wouldn’t run a vacuum cleaner at home but were delighted to muck out horseshit for free. He watched the girl go to a series of pens, some invisible behind trees or other buildings, the bucket getting lighter as she worked. It took her forty-five minutes. He saw only two birds; the rest, he guessed, were inside the ramshackle coops that dotted the terrain behind the house. Then she took the dog for a quick walk beyond the fence and got back on her bike, rubbing her hands on her wet blue jeans—blood, he guessed, from raw meat for the birds—and pedaled up the long hill and out of sight.

  The falconer and Piat weren’t there, then. And they were away for at least the day and maybe more, or they wouldn’t have needed the girl.

  Craik walked down to the farm and looked in the house windows. A few items from Bali or someplace similar, souvenirs—Hackbutt had lived in Southeast Asia, perhaps. Another window showed him a not particularly clean kitchen, another a bedroom. The bedroom told him that a woman lived there, too.

  He caught the last ferry of the day and was on the late plane out of Glasgow for London. No sleeper trains on Saturdays. He was thinking about what he would tell Rose when he called home. He would say, I’ve found us a place to retire to.

  21

  To begin with, Piat’s flight was two hours late getting to Bahrain.

  Bahrain was, as usual, full of surveillance—it just wasn’t directed at him. He passed through several bubbles and noted their activity—local police, local military, American. All busy watching somebody else.

  He went to his hotel, a faceless modern high-rise, and right to his room to shower and try to wash off some of the jet lag. He put a cell phone where he could reach it from the shower—one call and the cell phone would be finished, but the call was an important one. It was the comm link with whoever had brought Bella into Bahrain.

  He had finished the shower and had dressed again and was lying on the bed thinking about how he would recruit Mohamed when the ditzy little jingling went off.

  “Yes?”

  “Uh—I’m calling about a bird.”

  That’s what the man was supposed to say, silly as it sounded. Piat said that birds could be found at the Manama zoo, which also sounded equally silly but was supposed to satisfy the guy at the other end.

  “Uh, yeah—well—”

  “Where and when?”

  “Uh, sir, well— Uh, there’s a small problem.”

  Small problem never meant small. Piat cursed silently and felt his blood pressure go up. What he was supposed to do next was walk the route he’d want Hackbutt to take next morning. “What kind of problem?”

  “Uh, sir, the bird is, uh, sick.”

  “Sick! Sick how?”

  “He looks sick. He isn’t eating. He’s, uh, kind of shaggy—”

  “It’s a she, not a he. Where have you got her? Is she in the animal quarters?” Bella was supposed to be in the special animal transfer facility at Manama International, or at least that was where Piat had expected her to be. They had a vet there, and they should know how to care for even an eagle that was off its feed.

  “No, sir. She didn’t come in to Manama. We have her at another location.”

  Unless she’d come over the causeway by truck or in some cockamamie boat by sea, that meant she had been landed at the Navy airfield. Piat could feel his blood pressure rising still farther. We spies avoid military installations like the plague. One or two visits to a military base, and you’re made. Then he realized that Partlow had probably saved money, and maybe time and trouble, by consigning Bella to the military.

  “I want to see her.”

  “Yes,
sir, that’s why I’m calling.”

  “At once.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was poor procedure. They were supposed to deliver the bird to him, and he was supposed to hand it over to Hackbutt. Piat had left a few hours for contingencies, although nothing like this; Hackbutt would fly in four hours from now. By then, Bella was supposed to be at Hackbutt’s hotel, which had been alerted that he would have a falconing bird in his room. Arabs understood things like that.

  Now this. So, the first phase of the op plan went out the window, and Piat heaved himself off the bed and went downstairs to wait for a man named Carl. When he appeared, Carl looked like somebody who might have come to fix the air-conditioner: he had thinning brown hair, a stoop, granny glasses, and a gray golf jacket that looked as if it ought to have his name over the pocket.

  “I’m Carl.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. Piat was to see a lot of that gesture in the next couple of hours. Carl offered ID, which was useless to Piat; it said his name was Carl Trost and his face looked much like that of the man in the glasses and the jacket. So what?

  “Let’s go.”

  “I got my car.”

  Piat didn’t want to get into Carl’s car—bad security, bad tradecraft, and danger. Getting into a car with a stranger was as stupid in an agent as it was in a teenage hitchhiker.

  Piat did it anyway. He did register the fact that Carl’s car was a rental. Significant? Did he care?

  Once they were in the car and rolling, Carl started to say again how sorry they were. Whoever “they” were. The transfer company, Piat thought. He was trying not to show signs of impatience or nervousness, but in fact he was in a rage because he wanted to focus on Mohamed. This part of the operation was supposed to run on automatic.

  Carl navigated a roundabout and passed Bahrain’s largest mosque. Piat was pretty sure they were headed for the military base. “Where are we going?”

  “Navy base. You know it?”

  Yes, he knew it, but he didn’t say so. It had been a while, because it was one of many places in Bahrain where he shouldn’t be seen. Piat changed the subject to Bella’s condition, which lasted for only a few seconds; then there was silence until the car rolled to a stop at the gate of the base. Carl showed a plastic ID. Piat concentrated on it—it wasn’t a military ID, and it had a red edge and a photo. Other than that, he didn’t recognize the type. Not State Department, not diplomatic security, not military. Absolutely not Agency. But as American as apple pie. Carl was passed through with a wave. Nobody had even requested Piat to show ID.