Page 79 (1/2)
She led hi the dock to a small skiff with an outboard motor “You kno to handle yourself on the water?”
He smiled “Since I was a kid” Pitt pulled the starter rope, and the little outboard fired right up
“Just be wary of the wind if it starts to pick up,” she said with a wink “Best fishing is generally off the castle”
“Much obliged” Pitt gave the woated into the loch He glanced through the trees toward the main road and spotted the BMW pulled off to the side
Pitt motored offshore in clear view, then turned east toward Inverness He traveled a short distance, then cut the motor and let the boat drift as he asse and retrieving his line The BMW, he saw, had tracked his position
He lingered for half an hour, then started thethe inlet to Drumnadrochit, he fished in front of Urquhart Castle for an hour, then hopscotched west until reaching the waters off McKee Manor He eyed the doors to the boathouse, which were painted to match the castle’s stone walls As he studied theits view of his boat
Pitt an to bite his line In quick succession he hooked a trout and two bass, which he prolued across the lake On the opposite shore, through the trees, the lab was just barely visible To Pitt’s favor, the current was carrying hiradually drifted closer
It wasn’t so much the lab he was interested in, but the offshore activity The tanker he’d seen was now gone, replaced by another of similar size Like the first, it sat moored a short distance from the shore There was no name on the ship, only the Roman numeral IX
He spotted a pair of worked with some sort of equiphed anchor and made its way southwest down the loch toward the town of Fort Augustus
Pitt continued to fish, reeling in a sht As he released the hook and slipped the fish over the side, Pitt looked up to see yet another tanker creeping up the loch from the direction the other had just sailed It pulled up to a tiny red float and moored in the exact same spot This ship was identified as XVII
Pitt pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture, then sent it to Rudi Gunn in Washington A fewwith a call from Gunn
“Is that a tanker of Scotch whisky you’re sending home?” Gunn asked
“You’ve been hanging around Hira, I wouldn’t want to drink it on the rocks”
“Was the photo taken on Loch Ness?”
“About fivewith Perkins and the discovery of the hidden lab “Can you tap some satellite reconnaissance on these tankers and see where they’re going? They ustus and running into the Atlantic”