Chapter 10

Mark and Felicity enjoyed a couple of stress free days in Portree. Mark had been spot on in his assessment of what to expect in the hotel's bar of an evening and whisky and fiddle music had been the order of the day. The night before, Flick had enjoyed herself like never before as she tried to keep up with the pace of the traditional tunes. Many of the local men were interested in dancing with her and Mark chuckled to himself as he saw just how tired out she was becoming. At last he stepped in to save her and dragged her over to a corner table where he set a drink down in front of her.

Flick's legs still felt a bit wobbly when she woke up but somehow she managed to drag herself out of bed and have a shower before joining Mark downstairs in the hotel restaurant for breakfast. She loaded up a bowl with fresh fruit and asked for brown toast and a pot of breakfast tea.

Mark was just finishing what appeared to have been a full morning grill and she knew that normally made him very happy. Flick noticed that not only was he not smiling but he looked as if he was miles away.

"Earth to Mark. Earth to Mark. Can you hear us?" she joked.

Mark seemed to realise for the first time that she was there and he smiled in greeting.

"Sorry, I was thinking about something," he apologised.

"It must have been important to have you so focused. Care to share?" Flick asked.

"Marchmont phoned me back this morning to give me some information on where the Church of Cyberscience banks its funds. Perhaps to be more accurate I should have said where it used to bank its funds. Apparently it did bank with RBS but it's changed now and gone offshore," Mark said.

"Another dead-end then," scowled Flick.

"Maybe, maybe not," replied Mark, "Marchmont knows somebody who works at RBS and he's trying to get any details of the Church's account that he can. He seems to think that there will be archived material setting out all of the details of transactions from when the accounts were set up."

"And you think there might be something of interest in there?" Flick asked.

"Come on, baby. What do I keep telling you - follow the money! Of course there will be something interesting in those accounts. There are bound to be details of payments made to the Church and also names of who it in turn has on the payroll. I can't wait to get my hands on this stuff," said Mark excitedly.

Mark's excitement hadn't dimmed by the time his contact phoned him back again in the middle of the afternoon. He took Flick to historic Dunvegan Castle, home of the Clan MacLeod for some 800 years and they wandered the impressive stone structure and gardens, steeped in Scotland's past.

When the call came on Mark's mobile, Flick knew immediately by the look on his face that it was Mike Marchmont once more.

"Great! When can I have it? Really? Okay, I owe you Mike. See you soon, bye."

Felicity could see that Mark had suddenly become nervous and she thought she knew why.

"You want to go back to Glasgow now don't you?" she asked.

"Look, I'm sorry baby but Mike has managed to get access to the Church accounts. Why don't I drive back and pick them up while you stay here out of danger?" he suggested.

"No way, buster! When are you going to get it into that thick skull of yours that you can't keep treating me like I'm fragile? At the merest hint of trouble you try and drop me like a hot potato - well, I'm not having it. The best way of ensuring our safety is in catching the bastards who are trying to kill us and if that means going back to Glasgow, then let's get it on. Let's take the fight to them for a change. It'll certainly beat constantly looking over our shoulders waiting for the next attack," Flick said hotly.

A grin lit up Mark's face at her outburst. Once again he was struck by the character of the woman he loved, the pluck, the willingness to stand up for herself and to fight back.

"Okay my fiercesome valkyrie, let's go catch some bad guys!" Mark laughed.

A number of important things happened over the next week.

The Hamiltons found it easy to hire a contract killer to target MacGhee - anyone with a few thousand pounds could do that nowadays. All that they had to do now was locate the journalist as his whereabouts were presently unknown. Once they managed that, the killer wouldn't waste any time as there was a fat bonus in it for him if the hit was carried out quickly.

Mark's return to Glasgow with Felicity was quickly reported back to Duncan and the brothers felt that their worries would soon be at an end. The killer they had hired was coming north from Liverpool and Duncan was quick to make a call to get him on his way before MacGhee disappeared again.

Mark also took the first steps in what he hoped would be an important breakthrough. He met with Mike Marchmont who handed over a brown envelope bulging thick with papers of some kind. Mark handed over a smaller envelope, this one full of bank notes in payment for the services the money-man had given. Excited at the prospect of finding something that would help lead him to his attackers, Mark couldn't wait to begin to examine the Church of Cyberscience accounts and he immediately phoned DI MacIntosh.

"Drew? Don't ask me where or how I managed to get them - but I've got copies of the Church of Cyberscience's bank account details. Any chance you'd like to go through them with me?" he asked.

"Where are you Mark?" the detective asked in reply.

"I'm here in Glasgow. Do you have somewhere we could go where we wouldn't be disturbed?" Mark queried.

"Are you out of your mind!? Half of Glasgow seems intent on burying you and here you are wandering around the city."

"Drew, calm down. These accounts were just too important to pass up. I had to come back. Now, you can do your bit by finding us somewhere that Flick and I will be safe and where we can go through these papers to hopefully break this case open," Mark responded.

Although clearly still annoyed that Mark had chosen to return to Glasgow, Drew was just as intrigued by the possible contents of the Church's accounts. The journalist's excitement overtook his annoyance pretty quickly. He thought quickly about where he could take the pair. The station was out because even he knew the Glasgow gangs had policemen on their payroll. He was also pretty sure that the Hamiltons would already have Mark under surveillance so he would need to organise some diversions to get them safely out of Glasgow again.

"Okay, I think I know a place where we can go but listen Mark, the gangs will certainly have you on their radar. Don't be surprised if you already have a tail and we're going to have to deal with that and quickly," he said.

The Hamiltons were frustrated when their 'listening post' reported that Mark had returned to his apartment and had been overheard telling Flick they had to leave again immediately. Their contract killer wouldn't be in Glasgow quickly enough to try and take out the journalist before the pair were on the move again it seemed.

Kenny made a breakthrough of his own too. Waking up in the morning, he realised he once again had the funny feeling of not remembering actually going to bed the night before. A little shot of excitement mixed with fear surged through him, as he contemplated possibly having something to work with at last.

He forced himself to take his time showering and getting dressed, even lingering over a light breakfast of tea and toast before making his way to the computer room. He took his seat in front of his PC but didn't immediately turn it on. Instead he swivelled in the chair and booted-up the stand-alone computer that controlled the cameras.

It didn't take Kenny long to call up the file containing the recorded footage from the night before. As the cameras were controlled by motion detectors, they hadn't recorded anything else since he had gone to bed. He found the end of the clip and the first thing he noticed was that the clock on the wall behind the computer was at 01:37, well past the time he would normally have stayed up to unless he was programming.

His hands shook a little as he used the mouse to drag the recording back to an earlier point in the clip and then let it run again. Kenny found it extremely weird, even a little frightening to watch images of himself hunched over the computer without having any recollection of the events having taken place. He had no memory of this at all despite the fact that it had happened only hours earlier.

He dragged the little indicator further back into the clip and saw himself going through some of the Church's account details on-line. The screens for this were pretty easy to identify even on the recording - the colours and layout immediately recognisable. Kenny could remember doing this the night before so he knew that whatever had happened must have occurred after this point of the evening. He sat back and let the recording play on.

It was unnerving to watch himself on screen knowing that at some point in the near future someone was going to assume control of everything he did. The irony that he was doing the same thing to several thousand people around the world was completely lost on him at that moment.

Twenty minutes later Kenny watched himself on screen close down the account details and maximize the window for his e-mail account. He couldn't stop himself from hunching forward in his seat as he had felt all along that it was most likely an e-mail message that triggered whatever was happening to him. He could see the screen in the film scroll down until it stopped and he watched himself clicking to open a particular e-mail.