Chapter 9

The watcher crept down from his hilltop, a sense of deadly purpose written across his face. He knew the price of failure would be high and that he had to do something about the fact that the couple had escaped from the burning cottage. He also knew he still had to try to make their deaths look like an accident but believed there was still time to use the fire to his advantage.

The man and woman were both lying on the grass, their chests heaving as they tried to suck in life-giving air. The watcher had a sturdy tree branch in his hands and he intended to use it to try and render them both unconscious before tossing them back into the blazing cottage.

Mark and Flick were already close to passing out from exhaustion, the adrenaline rush having sapped their strength. The watcher was on them before they knew it and Mark opened his stinging eyes to see the thick branch hurtling towards his head. He rolled to the side and felt the air around his head move as the branch narrowly missed him, thudding instead into the turf at his side.

Mark lashed out with both feet, catching his attacker just below the knee. The man cried out and fell to the ground. Anger and fear for Flick's safety lent Mark new reserves of energy and he leapt forward. There was no conscious thought on his part, he just acted instinctively.

"UGGGGHHHHHH!"

The watcher felt a white-hot pain lance through him. He gave another strangled cry and then his body went limp, Mark's fishing knife buried deep in his chest.

Mark rose to his knees and looked down at the slumped body and felt the urge to attack the man who had clearly been intent on killing both himself and Flick. He lashed out with his fist, striking a vicious blow to his attackers face.

"Mark! What are you doing?" screamed Flick.

Mark came to his senses and crawled over to her, taking her in his arms and hugging her tightly. The bond between them had already been strong but as they shared each life threatening moment together it grew stronger and deeper. A look passed between them but no words were needed to express how they felt about each other in that moment.

"Dear god, are we ever going to be safe?" Flick blubbed. "Is he dead?"

"I'm not sure, but if he isn't he soon will be!" Mark replied.

He managed to free himself from Felicity's tight embrace and made his way back over to the body lying on the grass. Kneeling down, he felt for a pulse at the exposed neck and was satisfied when there wasn't one.

"I'm pretty sure he's dead," he said.

"Oh god. What are we going to do now?" Flick asked.

"Help is only ever one phone call away as they say," Mark replied.

He pulled his mobile phone from the pocket of his jeans and hit one of the speed dial buttons.

"I'm sorry to phone this late at night Drew but I didn't know what else to do," he said.

"What's happened?" MacIntosh snapped, clearly still half asleep.

"Something woke me up and I realised the cottage we are staying in was on fire. We just managed to get out without being burned to death and then a man appeared out of nowhere and attacked me.

"I had my fishing knife in my hand, I'd tried to use it to weaken the seal on the double-glazing. I swear to you that I didn't think about it, I just stabbed the guy in defence. "Drew, I'm pretty sure I've killed him."

MacIntosh was stunned at this latest development. He shook himself to try and clear the cobwebs of sleep from his head and get his thought processes working properly.

"Don't touch anything. Just sit tight and don't touch anything. Where exactly are you, you've never told me," he rapped out.

"We're at a cottage in Ratagan, just at the foot of Glen Shiel," Mark answered, adding directions for how to find the cottage.

"I'll be there as quickly as I can," Drew advised.

"We can't stay here. The cottage is gone and I'm not sure this guy was on his own. Mt first priority is to make sure Felicity is safe. I'll phone you once we've found somewhere," Mark responded.

Drew found that he was now wide-awake. He sat up in bed and ran his fingers through his greying hair as he thought about what to do next. If Mark and Felicity were leaving the scene he wasn't sure there was much point in him rushing off to the highlands. His decision reached, Drew picked up the phone from the bedside table and dialled a number from memory.

"Ronnie, don't ask me how I know but within the last hour there's been an arson attack and a death at a little village in the highlands called Ratagan. Could you contact the nearest station - it'll probably be Inverness - and make sure they get somebody onto it? I'll tell you more when I get in," he said.

Drew passed on the directions to the cottage that Mark had given him and then ended the call. He dressed quickly and made his way downstairs, snagging his car keys from the hall table as he left the house and got into his car. The new developments raced through his mind as he drove and he guessed that whoever was after MacGhee must have followed him to the highlands.

"Somebody really wants you dead Mark. Just what have you stirred up?" he thought to himself.

Twenty minutes later, after a drive through the largely deserted nighttime streets of Glasgow, Drew parked in the station car park and made his way up to his office. During the journey he had decided that he needed to spend more of his time on the Hamiltons. He was convinced it was the brothers who were behind the attacks on MacGhee and if he didn't do something, if he didn't make a breakthrough soon their next attempt might be successful. Drew didn't want the deaths of the journalist and his girlfriend on his conscience.

He spent the next hour providing his colleagues with as much detail as he could about Mark and what had happened over the past few weeks leading up to the phone call he had received earlier. The fact that someone had been killed had led to Drew's superiors contacting their counterparts in Inverness. It seemed that a team of detectives was already on its way to Ratagan and Drew confirmed he had no idea of where Mark and Felicity might be now.

Once he had that out of the way he got himself a coffee from the drinks machine in the corridor and returned to his own office. He retrieved the box containing all of the papers taken during a search of Welsh's house when he had been arrested for the botched attack on Mark. Drew began to sort through the contents of the box with no idea of what he was looking for. He wasn't even sure why he had returned to Welsh, just that there was something about him that didn't add up and that bothered him.

Several hours later he made his first find and it left him scratching his head. A number of Welsh's bank statements were amongst the papers and Drew scanned the itemised accounts. He took in the details of how Welsh lived his day to day life from where he spent his money - grocery shopping at ASDA/walmart apparently, petrol from the store's petrol station, monthly payments for his mortgage and utilities, and a monthly donation to the Church of Cyberscience.

Drew recognised the name from his conversation with Felicity earlier. The Church of Cyberscience apparently owned the Glasgow casino where Mark and Flick had placed the Hamilton brothers. Drew wondered whether Welsh had membership at the casino and if this monthly payment was to cover that? He also connected Welsh's statement that he had tried to attack Mark for the Church. Could this be what he had meant? Putting the bank statements to one side, Drew made a mental note to visit Welsh and question him about the Church and the payments.

Fifteen minutes more of poring over the papers brought Drew to the bottom of the box and a buff cardboard folder. He opened the flap and pulled out a sheaf of documents. These proved to be Welsh's certificates showing his school examination results and his law degree from Glasgow University. Drew's pulse quickened for a moment until he saw that the name of the school Welsh had attended wasn't one of the schools Kenny MacGovern had taught at.

Kenny smiled to himself as he reviewed the figures on how many people had visited his latest web-site. Having sent out orders for all of his 'converts' to supply him with details of their close family and friends, he found himself with a growing list of young females who he could potentially use for the Sugar and Spice web-site. His only problem was how to get these youngsters involved in filming? A simple answer had occurred to him and that had him creating another web-site - this one very basic and not visible to the casual Internet browser.

The new site had only one function - to allow visitors to download and play a version of his mind-control brain defragmenter programme. It was easy to order his converts to pass on the web-site address to their young female friends and relatives and the figures he was now looking at confirmed that there was a high take-up of these youngsters downloading the programme. Kenny knew he would soon start to see more new converts sending messages to him to confirm that the programme had been successfully uploaded into their minds. After that he would be able to order them to do pretty much what he liked and he already had plans for them, plans that involved producing more footage for the Sugar and Spice web-site.

From following news threads, Kenny knew that law enforcement agencies were getting more and more sophisticated in their ability to track down Internet criminals. There was always a danger that he would be tracked down through someone identifying the girls he was using for the moneymaking Sugar and Spice web-site. Kenny's planned solution to that was to have his converts photograph and film his content for him - using their own friends and relatives as the models. That way he would have girls from different countries, filmed by different converts. There would be no possible link back to him and therefore the danger would be removed. With so many now on his database he knew that it would also mean a massive increase in the amount of material being generated.

He typed rapidly on his keyboard and called up the figures for how many people had taken out membership on the Sugar and Spice web-site. The smile on his face grew even larger when he saw that the total was already over four hundred and rising. What was more, virtually everyone who took out a membership had gone on to take out the Platinum membership too. A quick bit of mental arithmetic told Kenny that the Church was already gaining $40,000 dollars a month and that figure was only going to rise. With the amount of new content he would soon have available he knew he would be able to continually refresh things to keep members coming back.

Kenny closed things down on the computer and decided to finish work installing the surveillance cameras he had bought. He guessed whoever was controlling him must be using e-mail to send the trigger phrase. His normal routine was to check his mail every night before going to bed. Now that he was alert to the possibility he was being controlled, Kenny was conscious that some mornings he couldn't remember actually getting into bed the night before. He thought that might be because he had been 'controlled', made to do something and then ordered to bed to cover the time gap that would have arisen.

Mounting the two cameras was a straightforward job. He hooked them up to the controller that was wired up to a new PC he had bought specially for the purpose. This computer had no Internet link and it was therefore totally secure for what he wanted to use it for. Kenny's positioning of the cameras gave him one hundred percent coverage of the room. He called up the software that controlled them and made sure they were recording properly. Each camera had a motion sensor on its underside which activated the unit and that meant he wouldn't have to review hours and hours of recorded footage with nothing happening.

Once he was satisfied that everything was working as it should, Kenny decided to turn in for the night. He felt a little more in control again now that he had the cameras up and he was actively trying to find out what might be happening to him. With any luck he would soon have some answers and then he could figure out how to turn the tables on whoever was doing this. That would be sweet.

"What do we do now?" Flick asked.

"I'm not sure really. I mean, it's not every day someone tries to burn you to death, your friend's holiday cottage is torched around you and you're attacked and end up killing a man."

"Well, when you put it like that..."

Mark laughed out loud at the black humour of the moment.

"Seriously," he said, "I suppose the police will be looking for us now too. We've still no idea who is trying to kill us and now we're on the run from the killers and the police."

"I still don't get why you don't trust the police. I mean, I know it was strange that the car crash wasn't reported in the news but I don't think that means there's a huge conspiracy and all of Scotland's police forces are out to get you," said Flick.

Mark just shrugged in response, his concentration on the narrow and twisting A87 road North. He had taken the decision to remain in the remoter highlands of Scotland for a number of reasons, the foremost of which was that he hoped it would be easier to spot anyone who might be following them. Of course, it should also be easier to avoid being picked up by the police too and Mark was still keen to avoid them if at all possible.