Siege of Stone Read Online Free Page B

I . . . I took it out, shook it, opened it up—you don't think . . ."
    She shrugged. "You might have taken a pretty strong dose, Tom. I suggest you have the doc take a look at you. I'd better take that box with me. And you'd better fill in that hole. You're on private ground here, you know. At least I assume you know, otherwise you'd have been here during daylight. Am I right?"
    "Uh, yes, ma'am . . . Inspector."
    "Now I won't cite you, Tom, but I will confiscate that box, and whatever else you've found out here. So come on, carry it over to my car."
    Tom picked up the box gingerly and held it at arm's length during the long walk to the Inspector's little English Ford. There, he put it in the boot, and handed over the coins and tools he had found. "Give you a lift back to your car, Tom?"
    He looked skittishly at the closed boot lid and shook his head. "No thanks, mum. I'm fine."
    "All right then. Stay off private land from now on, you hear? Next time you'll visit the magistrate."
     
    M olly Fraser put her car into gear and pulled out onto the one-lane road. Between her threat and the radiation scare, she doubted Tom Kerr would be digging the castle's land anytime soon.
    She had been out tonight, driving the lonely roads of the Gairloch peninsula, for the usual reasons. She couldn't rest, and figured she might as well tend to her flock as sit in her cottage and stew. Ninety-nine nights out of a hundred, she found nothing amiss, but when she had seen a quick flicker of light far across the fields, she'd known something was afoot. The old caretaker of Castle Dirk never would have been abroad at midnight.
    Sure enough, Young Tom Kerr was scavenging again, this time on private property. At least he hadn't been on any land held by the National Trust. Then she would have had to hobble him for sure.
    She had already caught a few people hunting for treasure over at the Mellangaun Stones, on the eastern side of the peninsula. When she'd found them, they hadn't uncovered a thing except for some modern coins and ginger beer can tabs. Still, she'd had to arrest them.
    No worries about the Stones now, though. There was an archeological bunch up from Edinburgh University doing a full dig all around the stone circle, and about time, too, Molly thought. Though not as impressive as Callanish, the Mellangaun Stones still had the power to awe. The stones, like those at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, were sharp edged, alarmingly vertical stone teeth, canines as opposed to the ground-down molars of most stone circles.
    It was to these university nobs that she would take the box in the morning, along with the tools and coins. Mr. Scobie of Castle Dirk had no claim upon them, for they were now archeological treasures, property of the government. She wondered what they would say about the cloth. It probably wasn't at all dangerous, as she had led Tom Kerr to believe. She knew that all things luminescent gave off some sort of radioactivity, but most at very low levels. Still, why had the thing been sealed in lead?
    It might, she thought, be something that her old bosses in MI5 might be interested in. Then she dismissed the thought. After all, she had come on her drive to forget MI5. God, it was hard enough. Nearly fifteen years she had spent in the British Security Service, coming in under Sir John Jones and leaving with relief after Mrs. Rimington's tenure as director-general had ended.
    The game had changed too much for Molly's taste. The great majority of the service's resources were spent combating counterterrorism. The divisions in which Molly had gained her expertise, counterespionage and countersubversion, had become, with the downfall of Soviet communism, poor relatives. Although an official statement from MI5 in 1993 said, ". . . the old threat no longer exists, but it is equally true that spying continues," you'd never have known it from Molly's assignments.
    In 1996, when Stephen Lander took over from Mrs. Rimington, the writing was on the