'No.'

'So what made you think I was?'

Ray hung his head, nothing left to lie for. When he looked down, he could see Rina's breasts, which reminded him that this wasn't as bad a moment as he might have begun to think.

'You're the first one I've been with.' He could feel tears forming, but didn't want to wipe them away for fear that he would only draw attention to them.

'No way,' she said, still laughing. 'No way that was your first time.' Then she noticed the tears, which had begun to run down his cheeks. 'Oh Christ, you're not kidding, are you?'

Ray shook his head.

'Well don't look so sad about it. I wasn't that bad, was I?'

He smiled back, sheepishly.

'Come here,' she said, pulling his head down to rest on her chest.

'I'm sorry, Rina, really, I-'

'Don't worry about it. Just don't do it again. Well, not unless I ask you.'

At which they both laughed, and Ray knew it was going to be all right.

This was confirmed by them doing it (obviously not all of it) again after a few giggly minutes of billing and cooing, this time to the unlikely musical accompaniment of Adam and the Ants on Rina's tape deck. This was, she explained, a bit of wish-fulfilment on her part, as Marco, 411.

Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and Yours Trulee had represented the zenith of stylised sexuality during her early Eighties pubescence, and she had youthfully imagined their music would be playing when she was grown- up enough to be finally doing it herself. Rina's previous sexual partner, whose name she could at that point not bring herself to utter, had been vocally appalled at the suggestion, an over-reaction she suspected was down to a number of albums she'd spotted in a pile back at his parents' house.

(Ray's own fantasy first-time soundtrack had been The Ronettes' heartbeat-booming Be My Baby. He'd have liked to be able to say that this was inspired by Mean Streets, but the truth was that he hadn't seen it by that point, and the notion in fact came from watching Moonlighting, specifically the episode in which Maddy and David finally got it on.) 'So you were my first too, in a certain way,' Rina told him in a near whisper.

'I like that,' he replied, stroking her hair. 'And I'm grateful old Adam isnae popular with the guys these days.'

'He was only unpopular with one,' she said, biting her lip in shy reaction to her oblique candour.

Ray held her that bit tighter. He was unsure what he was supposed or expected to find in the revelation, other than that she trusted him enough to make it, and that part knocked everything else into a cocked hat.

'You didn't have to tell me that, Rina. It's none of my business.'

'I wanted you to know, because I wish you'd been the first.'

'Attempts to come in your face notwithstanding.'

'Well, you were definitely the first to do that.'

412.

They both laughed.

'So are we going to be boyfriend-girlfriend?' she asked.

'I do hope so.'

'Because if we are, you'll have to stop calling me Rina. It's a silly playground name that I've never been able to get rid of. My real name is Katrina.'

'Katrina,' Ray repeated.

'But I'd prefer if you called me Kate.'Angelique phoned her boss on her hands-free to let him know where she was headed and why. Understandably, he wasn't recommending the entire Sunderland operation stand down on the basis of a suspicion that Ray was too gormless to have escaped the farmhouse through his own initiative. They had evidence, and it was incumbent upon them that they act on it, especially when it pointed to thirty thousand potential victims in a football stadium. Even Pinochet couldn't match those numbers.

Crianfada was a blink-and-miss-it wee village: just a few houses, a sub post-office and a pub. The nearby water- sports centre was the only reason most people would even notice the name, but even the sailors, windsurfers and divers tended to bed down along the road at the larger tourist destination of Cromlarig. Ray suspected Angelique had indeed blinked and missed it when she skited through the place at speed, as though having forgotten that she was imminently about to run out of road.

'First things first,' she said. 'I want a look at this bridge before we do anything else.'

They pulled up in front of a row of cones, beyond which two candy-striped barriers had been erected, just in case anybody had thought the 'ROAD AHEAD CLOSED' signs a hundred yards back were referring to 413.

some other thoroughfare. There were three guys in fluorescent yellow jackets and heavy black wellies standing next to the barriers, one of whom immediately set off towards them as they got out of the car, the unwelcoming look on his face suggesting they weren't the first to require individual assurance that the situation was indeed as described on the signs.

Angelique held up her warrant card to save him the speech.

'Who's in charge?' she asked.

'Douglas is the engineer,' he replied. 'Come on through and I'll get him. He's down in the drink just now. And watch your step or you'll find yourself in with him.'

They were led through the barriers, beyond which the road simply disappeared as though a bite had been taken out of it, leaving jagged teeth-marks in the tarmac. Across the gap, the two-lane blacktop continued on towards Dubh Ardrain and Cromlarig with the undisturbed innocence of a calmly retreating shoplifter.

The engineer emerged from below, helped up from a ladder by one of the wellingtoned fraternity. Angelique introduced herself while Ray tried not to look like a spare tool.

'I'm fairly baffled at this stage,' he heard the engineer telling her. 'If there was widespread fatigue in the structure, I'd have expected it to come down when a heavy vehicle passed over it; an oil truck maybe. But there was nobody around. It passed inspection a year ago, and now it just appears to have spontaneously collapsed.'

'And what could have caused that?'

'Hard to tell. I'll know more when I can get some of the materials analysed. The problem is, a lot of the debris has already been washed further out into the loch.'

414.

'Is sabotage a possibility?'

'Until I know more, anything's a possibility. Sabotage, aye, that's a possibility. I'm not sure it's a plausibility, though.

Who would want to demolish the road to Cromlarig?'

'How aboot the Blairlethen shinty team?' asked one of the welly brothers. 'They always get skelped when they go there.'

Angelique said her thank-yous and they headed back to the car.

'You think it looks like Simon's work?' Ray asked as they pulled away.

'Did it look like subsidence to you?'

'More like Godzilla had popped by for a nibble.'

'My thoughts as well. How are your sea legs?'

'I can just about handle a pedalo. Or the rowin' boats at Rouken Glen.'

'You'll be fine. We've got to get a closer look at this place.'

'Out of interest, just what are you plannin' if we get a closer look and we find something?'

'Depends what we find, but my prediction would be to stand back and call in the cavalry.'

'And how are the cavalry going to get there?'

'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.'

'There is no bridge, remember? That's my point.'The watersports centre was on the near side of Crianfada, a low wooden building with a large car park and a concreted slipway. There were half a dozen sail dinghies lined up on the shore, alongside four jet-skis and a rack of windsurf boards. Ray could see a couple of windsurfers in the water right then, out beyond the two moored motorboats that were bobbing at the edge of the loch in front of the building. Angelique had a worryingly long look at one 415.

of the power launches, then proceeded into the reception area, where a sandy-haired teenage girl hailed them both from behind her desk with a smile.

Ray hung back as Angelique did the talking, taking a stroll around the reception area's centrepiece: a scale three- dimensional model of Loch Fada and Glen Crom, from Blairlethen at one end to Cromlarig at the other. Dubh Ardrain power station was marked out on the glass of the display case, though there was little to represent it on the model unless you already knew the significance of the sprawling corrie loch and the dam holding it back.

There was a rack of tourist leaflets next to a bench against the window, advertising the usual highland and island attractions, including a tour of Dubh Ardrain. At the end of the bench was a pile of copies of the local newspaper, a flimsy free-sheet covering a radius of at least a hundred miles but a population of only a few thousand. Having yesterday stared with alienated detachment at the irrelevant headlines in the national press, he could hardly think of anything less pertinent to his current predicament.

But he was wrong to a near-absolute degree.

'GAMES HOMECOMING FOR SCOTS LEADER' said the front-page headline.'NEW First Minister Andrew MacDonald will be on home ground as the guest of honour at this year's Cromlarig Highland Games. In twenty-four years as the area's MP and more recently MSP, Andrew has never missed the annual event, but this will be the first time he has attended since his election as First Minister in March, and the red carpet will be rolling out to meet him.

416.

The trappings of his new office mean that Andrew will be arriving from Edinburgh by helicopter, a far cry from those days in the Seventies when his Hillman Hunter was a familiar site around the glens . . .'Ray checked the date on the paper, which stated only 'September', the free-sheet being a monthly publication. The travel bulletin replayed in his head.

'If you're planning to attend today's Highland Games, you'd better get your skates on.'

'Angelique,' he called, lifting a copy and placing it faceup on the model display case. 'I think you should see this.' Angelique excused herself and turned away from the desk.

'The leader of our nation is headin' to Cromlarig this very afternoon for the Highland Games. Another wild coincidence, huh?'

Angelique gawped at the front page. 'The leader of ... The First Minister.'

'Not as prestigious as the Prime Minister at a football international, but you said it's his style to go for the less expected target.'

'It sure is. Not a head of state, but the closest thing Scotland's had for a long time. Your pal Simon's certainly got a sense of irony.'

'How?'

'General Mopoza threatened an attack on "the British state", quote unquote, and if you're right, it looks like our man's planning to take out a potent symbol of its gradual break-up.'

'Wrong,' Ray argued. 'On three counts. One, that bastard is not my friend. Two, you need a sense of self-awareness before you can have a sense of irony; and three, there's nothin' ironic about targetin' Andrew MacDonald.'

417.

'Why not?'

'Because he was Defence Secretary at Westminster during the Sonzolan conflict.'

Angelique's eyes widened. 'Of course. And he always goes to these bloody Highland Games in his constituency, doesn't he? It's the human-interest angle they wheel out about him every time. I remember him takin' flak for it from the tabloids during the war. Swarming off to drink whisky while "our boys" were in action, all that stuff.'

'So Simon would have had plenty of notice to come up with his plan.'

'If it was his plan,' Angelique questioned. 'Could have been Mopoza's idea.'

'No chance. Killing Scotland's man-in-charge would be far too pleasing to Scotland's biggest ego for him not to have thought of it himself. On top of that there's Dubh Ardrain: arguably Scotland's greatest engineering achievement, so who better to vandalise it.'

'We don't know Dubh Ardrain is part of the equation now though, do we. If MacDonald is the target, Darcourt could be planning something for the Highland Games. Security would be comparatively light, the way he likes it.'

'Dubh Ardrain is part of the equation,' Ray insisted, removing the newspaper to clear their view of the model.

'Otherwise, why would he take out the road before it reached the power station? It would have been far easier to block the route closer to Cromlarig. The road and bridges on the other side weren't widened or strengthened, because all the heavy plant was coming from the south. Simon doesn't want anybody to be able to reach Dubh Ardrain from this side, because this is the direction the cavalry would be coming.'

'And the ambulances,' Angelique added grimly. 'But 418.

what can he do at Dubh Ardrain that's going to affect MacDonald down in Cromlarig?'

Ray stared at the model, looking back and forth at the two locations Angelique was talking about. They were four or five miles apart along the tight and winding glacial glen, the power station hidden beneath the mountains and the postcard town sitting at the north-western shore where the long and narrow loch came to an end. At that scale, it looked like a landscape from Civilization or Populous, strategy games for the budding megalomaniac.

'No explosion at the power plant could be strong enough to do more than shake a few sporrans at the Games,' Angelique said, articulating Ray's very thoughts, with the exception of the sporran remark. 'And I can't think of any way he could use the electrical capacity, so what does that leave?'

Only one thing, Ray deduced, by process of elimination. If this was Populous, as a competing deity, you would have a number of cataclysmic means to visit destruction upon the town that had incurred your wrath. Simon, however, had only one, and it was the deadliest in the game.

'Water.'

'Water? How?'

Ray looked at the model once more. He already knew what he was going to say, but felt he needed a moment to let the insanity ferment before sharing it round.

'Like Anne Elk, I have a theory. You're not going to like it.'

'Just run it by me. And who's Anne Elk?'

'Never mind. I think he's going to blow the dam.'

'What would that do?' Angelique asked, then had another look at the scaled-down landscape. 'Oh fuck.'

'Yup,' Ray confirmed. 'However many million or billion 419.

gallons of water there are in the reservoir would come beltin' down the mountainside into Loch Fada, hittin' the opposite shore here where the glen bends inwards, which is gaunny channel the whole lot down between the mountains like a canal.'

'Won't it just raise the water level? I mean, Loch Fada's long. Surely it could accommodate-'

'Eventually, yes. But you'd get a massive wave effect first. And to amplify that effect, Loch Fada is artificially shallow along this stretch.' 'Artificially?'