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Page 43.
 "You have it right, Miss." Lysander resumed the drive down into the village. "From what I'm told, BLUM Corp has leased some rights over there. All very stealthy. Built a fantastic underground and underwater facility, right under everyone’s noses."
The drive took them down to a small square on Pier Road, where sturdy stone houses looked like cats relaxing in warm sunshine—though they had the look of winter on them. It must get brutal here, Louis thought.
Lysander stayed at the dock with the car and luggage, but sent his three passengers into a restaurant nearby. This was a stone fastness in its own right, with guest rooms available in season. A nicely painted wooden sign swinging over the heavy door read: Kiltoch Arms.
Inside, tobacco smoke roiled up from a half dozen wooden benches. Village men and women were just having a meal at three of the tables. At a fourth table under an open window framed in geraniums, a group of village men played cards over beer, while laughing, talking, and smoking. A tall, dark-haired waiter with a long yellow-and-black striped apron led them to one of the two free tables, next to the card players.
Louis and Tissy ordered beers, while Mr. Kim gestured for a lemonade. The waiter offered the daily special—a hearty beef stew with tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and asparagus—which they ordered. Most of the smoke dissipated through the open window, but enough of it lingered in the tavern to sting the eyes of those unaccustomed to it. Laws against smoking in public were spreading around the world, but apparently the infoferry had not yet reached remote Barra.
Louis sat close with Tissy, under the window, while Mr. Kim sat opposite. Daylight played over his still-pale features. "Don't like to fly?" Louis said. Mr. Kim stared uncomprehendingly. Louis made wings of his arms and uttered a motor sound lasting a half minute, with an imaginative Immelmann barrel turn in the middle. Mr. Kim smiled in understanding and nodded. "Chick," he said. (Does he mean chic? Tissy wondered.) "Veddy chick." He too made wings and uttered a single-engine noise.
The stew dinners came. The men at the card table made appreciative noises at the fine aroma. As Louis ate, he overheard bits and snatches of conversation from the card players.
A very old man—who leaned over his cane, and wore a shabby old mariner's coat and faded first mate's cap with cracked, unadorned black bill—said the word Kisimul, and Louis perked up. He overheard words to this effect, rolling among the men:
"Brooding there on the water at night."
"Not fit for man or beast."
"Been sprouting antennas and satellite dishes, of late."
"Must be the damn government and the UFOs."
"It's all London, I tell ya."
“Give us complete independence, will ya?”
"You can hear strange sounds at night, though she be deserted."
"Must be ghosts of the tax collectors from long ago."
"More people go there than come back."
"Ever since the government got hold of it, it's been unholy."
The conversation shifted just as quickly to other topics. Louis finished his meal, as did his companions. Lysander poked his head in at the door. He silently gestured that it was time to go.
Back in the car, Tissy wiped her eyes as if she were crying. When Louis asked, she nodded over her little white hankie with its frilly edge. "The smoke in there," she said.
"It's all better now," Lysander reassured her.
"No more chick," Mr. Kim said.
"I remind you all of the need to keep mum and guard our secrets," Lysander said. He drove into the low mountains on winding switchback roads. Houses here kept low, with the hill slopes at their backs, to shelter them from storms and winter winds.
Tissy continued wiping her eyes with her hankie. Louis noted that her lips were quietly blubbering, her nose was runny, and her shoulders hove. Great tragic sighs escaped her melancholy breast. He held her close, and she buried her blonde head against his torso while clinging to him. Louis sensed that all was not well between Dr. Night, Black Umbrella, and this fledgling Alecto. She might be an angel of terror in training, but would she ever earn her wings? Remembering Alecto (Erin Yes) with her gunfire and cruel laughter, poor Tissy did not have it in her to be so mean or violent. Tissy was looking for a way out, and clung desperately to Louis as her only chance. Louis wondered if both he and Tissy might not wind up in the laser seat when they had ceased to be useful.
"This is Lomond House," Lysander announced as they drove up to a two-story house of granite boulders fitted together with out mortar. The front was steep and smooth, as if fortified. It had narrow windows, almost like gun or archery ports, secured under gray steel shutters. A gravel driveway curved in a long, gradual S to a hidden car port by the front door. The door itself was large, atop six broad stone steps worn with age.
"Was a farm house long ago," Lysander explained as they got out of the car. Two female commandos in dark fatigues came to fetch the luggage. Each wore a side arm and had roughly cropped hair—one blonde, the other brunette. "Don't speak to the troops unless they speak to you," Lysander said. "You stay with me. Mr. Kim and I will be your guides."
"This is where my widget will be brought?" Louis said, licking his chops.
"It's already been brought," Lysander said. "You'll be looking at it in half an hour."
They entered the ten-room lodging, which featured a kind of concierge desk with machine guns and no registry.
"We're in totally private territory," Lysander said. "BLUM Corp bought the property a few years ago, as part of a liaison with Scottish separatists. Scotland has been able to field its own national parliament in Edinburgh since 1999, so the inevitable path seems to full nationhood. With rich offshore oil fields, we will not be lacking for exports. You should sympathize with us, Mr. Cartouche."
"I do indeed," Louis said. He pondered ever more deeply the meaning of this new home he had found with Black Umbrella, and its significance for the future world developing before his eyes. Was he on the ground floor of the next great thing? Or was he on the precipice of his own demise? Louis Cartouche shuddered as he squeezed Tissy's smooth caramel paw, and she squeezed back. Louis closed his eyes and inhaled deeply of Tissy's light citrus fragrance. Even her sweat smelled like lilac soap.
Lysander took them to their suite—Tissy and Louis together in corner rooms with a U.S. style king-sized bed. Then he explained: "This was a farm house for sheep ranchers long ago. It was a dank, cold place of stone corridors where the wet winds blew freely, even with the shutters on the end windows chained shut. BLUM bought it about ten years ago and began converting it into a safe house with all the amenities. At that time, it was planned to be a strategic redoubt that could hold off government troops for days or weeks. BLUM officials were mindful of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh separatist movements even then, as potentially useful allies."
The elevator opened with a gentle ding sound.
As they stepped inside, Louis saw that the elevator was pleasantly done in gray and maroon carpeting, with lit buttons and mirrors just as in a luxury hotel in a big city.
On the ride down, Lysander continued: "We knew that the black islet, where Kisimul stands, had its own natural wells. They deliver fresh water from the adjoining mainland, below the salt water table. That led us to explore further, and the result is as you'll see." As the elevator continued its slow descent, a good ten stories under ground through solid granite, Lysander said: "Today, we lease space on top to keep our satellite dishes and antennas for your device, Mr. Cartouche, and Black Umbrella's Project Gemini.
After a long ride down, the elevator stopped with a final ding. Its door opened on what looked like an underground garage, lined in massive banks of concrete. Fluorescent lighting flooded the air, almost too garishly, over asphalt surfaces among round pillars about eight feet in diameter. "We followed the water channel from an underground stream. This took us under the town, under the beach, under the bay, and to the granitic footing of the islet on which Kisimul perches. The authorities have no idea we have this underground—or should I say underwater—facility going on. Scotland will declare her total independence soon. She will form a powerful alliance with other Gaelic or greater Goidelic speaking states and islands, including on the French coast and in the Pyrenees. BLUM Corp will be the benefactor of a powerful new contra-nationalist confederation that can start swinging its own weight with the global corporations. The work we are doing here at Kisimul is an important stepping stone."
So saying, he led his group to a cart seating up to eight passengers under a colorful canvas roof. Mr. Kim, surprisingly, took over as driver, as if he'd been here before. Louis and Tissy held each other as the wagon lurched into motion. They whizzed along an underground tunnel lit by wire basket lights. Louis could hear water dripping noisily as they passed under the bay.
In ten minutes, the vehicle emerged in a small concrete tomb under Kisimul Castle. Several armed guards in black commando camouflage patrolled the roughly circular open space. Several doors led off at tangents into the bedrock of the islet. A door marked Lift opened as Lysander brushed his hand in the air. "Welcome to Gemini West," he said as he led his charges into the elevator. After a short ride upward, they emerged in a jarringly, pleasantly sunlit room.
"We are in the bowels of Kisimul," Lysander announced. "Nobody outside BLUM knows that this facility exists. From here, we will soon begin ruling the world."
The windows were narrow slots looking low over murky water penetrated by wan sunlight as coppery-golden as fish scales. Directly outside were wet, barnacled rocks overgrown with dark green slimy seaweed. Here and there, through thick plate glass windows, one could see saltwater fish swimming about with stubby copper bodies and huge lower lips made for scooping up stray nourishment.
The floor was of gleaming concrete covered with a syrupy sheen of dry, hard shellac.
Technicians, engineers, and scientists purposefully moved about. All wore variously hued lab coats or surgical scrubs. Some sat before wide banks of computers, while others worked on high banks of electronic equipment. The walls were covered with monitors offering both digital readouts and analog images. Some of the images appeared to be of outer space, while others were orbital and looking toward the earth.
All of this swirl of motion and importance focused on one central object: Louis Cartouche's invention, Castor, which sat bolted, like a small extraterrestrial minivan, to a steel laboratory table in the midst of the control room. From it sprawled a network of cables, relays, and monitors onto surrounding work tables amid heavily reinforced steel shafts and studded girders.
Louis understood completely. Somewhere else in the world, BLUM had already installed its twin, Pollux.
Working in tandem as Louis had designed them, the two control units would manage the deadly Capricorn satellite in orbit over the Tropic of Cancer. Its targets would not so much be Third World dictators as First World corponational CEOs plus popular civic and religious leaders or heads of state.
Dr. Night was all set to rock and roll.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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