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  GOING DARK

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  STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND

  Annie Henderson definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Louisiana, for that matter. Edge of the world was more like it.

  Seated in the guest house pub (or more accurately, the pub with a few rooms above it) in the small seaport village on the Isle of Lewis—at least she thought it was the Isle of Lewis, but it could be Harris, as the two islands were apparently connected—after three flights, including a harrowing, white-knuckled forty-five-minute ride from hell in a plane not much larger than a bathtub, Annie was feeling a long way from home and distinctly out of her comfort zone.

  But that was good, right? Doing something important and making a difference couldn’t be done from her living room couch by getting upset with what she saw on TV. She had to get out there. Do something.

  “It will be an adventure,” her boyfriend, Julien, had assured her. “Don’t you want to help? Do you want to see more dead dolphins and seabirds covered in oil?”

  The memories brought her up sharp. Of course she didn’t. What she’d seen on the Louisiana shoreline after the BP oil disaster had moved her so deeply it had changed her life. The wide-eyed Tulane freshman who thought she wanted to be a veterinarian had switched her major to environmental science, and after graduating pursued a PhD in marine ecology. When Annie hadn’t been studying, most of her free time was devoted to the ongoing cleanup effort and the attempt to return the local habitat to its natural state.

  She never wanted to see anything like that happen again. Which was why she was here. Although initially when Julien and his friends announced plans to go to Scotland to join a protest against North Sea Offshore Drilling’s exploratory drilling west of the Scottish Hebrides, Annie had refused. Activism wasn’t new to her, but it wasn’t like her to follow a man she’d known only a short time four thousand miles away from home to a place she’d never heard of before.

  But after Julien had shown her pictures of the white-sand beaches of Eriskay, the rocky promontories and seashores of Lewis, and the giant granite rock outposts in the open waters of the North Atlantic such as Rockall and Stac Lee near St Kilda that served as nesting places for fulmars, gannets, and other seabirds, she knew she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the vacation she’d planned to visit her mother in Key West. So she’d thrown caution to the wind and joined her new boyfriend and his friends.

  Just because so far her “adventure” wasn’t exactly what she’d expected didn’t mean she should overreact. She hadn’t made a mistake in coming. So what if she felt a little bit like Dorothy wondering how the heck she’d gotten here? Scotland wasn’t Oz and Jean Paul La Roche wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West—even if right now they both kind of seemed that way.

  She supposed she couldn’t really blame the Islanders for not holding out the welcome mat to the activists who’d descended en masse to the remote island. Oil brought jobs, and the Islanders considered the drilling a local matter. The activists were outsiders—who were they to interfere? But Annie hadn’t expected to feel quite so . . . conspicuous. Which was a nicer way of saying “pariah.” Her group stuck out even in the height of the summer tourist season. The dour, unsmiling locals had turned to stare at them as they entered the bar, and although they’d eventually turned away, it still felt as if their eyes were on her.

  But it wasn’t just the locals. The man whom Julien had been so excited for her to meet, his mentor, and the person he spoke of with such reverence she’d half expected the pope to walk in, had been a shock. She didn’t know Jean Paul well enough to dislike him, but her first impression of a weasel or a ferret hadn’t improved any in the two hours since they were introduced. “Bad vibe” was an understatement.

  She also didn’t like how he was staring at her. It was as if he was sizing her up for something. Coldly. Mercenarily. In a way that a pimp might size up a prostitute.

  It made her uneasy. He made her uneasy.

  Julien Bernard, the French graduate student who’d swept her off her feet when she met him two months ago, seemed to have picked up on his former teacher’s disapproval as well. He seemed to be trying to “sell” her to Jean Paul by singing her praises. If he mentioned her “brilliant” PhD dissertation—which was the last thing she wanted to talk about after just defending it—one more time . . .

  On cue, Julien said, “Did Annie tell you about her research—”

  Annie looked around for a distraction—any distraction—and her eye caught on the headline of a newspaper left behind by the prior occupants of the wooden booth. “Look at this,” she said, holding it up and cutting him off. “The story has made it across the pond.” Did people still say that? She started to read from the article. “The Lost Platoon. Like Rome’s famous lost Ninth Legion, the secret SEAL Team Nine has disappeared into thin air.” Annie put the paper back down on the table. Allegedly the navy didn’t have a SEAL Team Nine, although suspiciously they acknowledged the existence of every other number from one to ten. “I wonder what happened to them.”

  “Who cares?” Julien said. He gave her that charming and oh-so-French shrug and raising of the brows that made him look even more like his countryman, the actor Olivier Martinez. She’d always thought Halle Berry’s ex was incredibly sexy and could admit that that might have been what initially had caught her eye at the fund-raiser a couple of months ago. But it had been their shared passion for the environment and horror at the devastation wrought on the Louisiana coastline after the disaster that forged the real bond between them.

  “You shouldn’t read that trash, ma belle. It’s all lies and gossip.”

  At least it was entertaining. Which was more than she could say about the independent newspapers and political publications that he and his friends devoured. Annie did enough scholarly reading for her research; she didn’t need it for her pleasure reading, too.

  Although Julien’s European charm and modern-day beatnik intellectualism were what had drawn her to him—she’d never met anyone who seemed to know so much about everything—he could definitely be a cultural snob sometimes.

  She couldn’t help teasing him a little. “I don’t know.” She flipped the paper back to the front. “The Scottish Daily News looks pretty good to me. And they have lots of pictures that make it so much easier to follow along.”

  Only Julien realized she wasn’t serious. The others at the table looked alternatively appalled and embarrassed—except for Jean Paul. He looked . . . wicked.

  “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”

  Maybe if she tried imagining him with a green face and a pointy hat—he already had the long nose and beady eyes—she would stop thinking about far more nefarious bad guys from Mafia and cartel movies.

  No luck. At least a handful of years older than the rest of them, who were all in their mid-twenties, Jean Paul looked like a villain right out of a mob movie, even down to the slicked-back hair, mole, leather jacket, and gold chains.

  Men shouldn’t wear bracelets. It should be a rule.

  As for the others at the booth, she didn’t really know any of them that well. She’d met Marie, Claude, and Sergio at Julien’s apartment in New Orleans many times before they’d all traveled to Scotland together, but they’d never really welcomed her into their cabal. They weren’t rude or unfriendly, just not inclusive. She took it to be a foreign thing, as they were all international graduate students like Julien, who was also a teaching fellow at the University of New Orleans.

  Despite her eight years at Tulane, she hadn’t held that against him for too long.

  Julien smiled and shook his head, reaching for her hand to bring it to his mouth. “Forgive me. I was being a little condescending, wasn’t I?”

  She gave him a look that said, You think?

  He laughed and picked up the paper. “Very well. We will discuss these missing soldiers.”