Jak was surprised by the cheerful tone of her greeting.

“Yes, or at least I think so. I’m Jak McGee, and I’d like to see Mr MacKay.”

“Would that be Mr MacKay, the elder, or Mr Mackay, the Junior?” she asked.

“Err… I don’t know. I received this letter from you,” he said as he desperately tried to find it in his backpack.

After what seemed an eternity, but was probably only a second or so, he found the letter and handed it to the woman.

“Och, yes,” she said.
“I remember typing this. You’ll be wanting Mr Mackay Junior. He has a client with him at the moment, but he should be free in around 10 minutes if you’d care to wait?”

“Thanks. I’ll wait.”

Jak sat down and looked for something to take his mind off the big unknown that was lying ahead of him. He wasn’t successful. There wasn’t even a five-year-old and decidedly dog-eared copy of a magazine available for him to read.

“I can see a baggage tag on your case,” said the woman.
“Have you flown in today?”

Jak was slightly stunned by the directness of her question.
“Y… Yes, I did. I came up from London on the train.”

“Then you will be needing somewhere to stay tonight?”

“Errrr… Yes, I will.”

“Let me book you a room while you are with ‘young Mr MacKay.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble?”

“It is no trouble, I can assure you.”

She turned back to the computer, and after a bit of fiddling, she picked up the phone.

“Helen, it is Irene McCoist.”

“Yes, I’m fine, and so are the bairns.”

“I was wondering how you are fixed for guests?”

“You do?”

“Let’s start with a couple of nights. His name is Jak McGee, and he is visiting from America.”

“I’ll make sure he finds you ok.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“That’s all set, Mr McGee. Mrs McCoist runs a B&B on Ferry Road. There is a bus from the end of the road that will take you almost to her door.”

Jak didn’t look all that sure about it.

“I’m guessing that funds might be a bit tight? Some of the hotels in the city cost an arm and a leg for even a small room. Mrs McCoist does not charge the earth, and you get breakfast included.”

“How much is ‘not charging the earth’,” asked Jak, aware of how much he’d already spent that day getting up from Heathrow.

“Her best room with a view of the Castle is around £80 per night, including a ‘full Scottish’ breakfast.”

Inside, Jak breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thank you.”

“As I said, it is no trouble.”

A few minutes later, one of the heavy oak doors that led out of the reception area opened, and two people emerged.

“Don’t worry, Mrs Jackson. I’ll get the matter sorted. You very much have the law on your side. I’ll contact you in a few days about their response to your terms,” said the man.
Then he said to the receptionist.
“Irene, can you call a cab for Mrs Jackson?”

“Already ordered. It should be outside in around five minutes,” she said with a smile.

The man showed the older lady out of the office before returning to the reception.
“Donald, this is Mr Jak McGee.”

After a slight hesitation, a smile appeared on the face of Mr Donald MacKay.

“Mr McGee, welcome to Edinburgh. Won’t you please come through?”

Jak followed him into another oak-panelled room. This one had a view to the north over the river. He could even see a ship going upriver.

“Please, Jak, take a seat while I get your file… or rather, the file of your uncle, the late Calum McBride.”

Mr MacKay left him alone in the office. Once again, his attention turned to the view from the window. He could imagine him living in the city, but it reeked of money or at least the little that he’d seen so far.

His daydreaming was cut short by the return of Mr Mackay. In his hand, there was a folder at least four inches thick.

“Right, Mr McGee, let’s get down to business.”

That business would have to wait for at least a few minutes. The secretary arrived with a tray that contained some cups and, to his surprise, a teapot. On a plate, there were some shortbread biscuits. To Jak, this was the height of luxury.

With a cup of tea made with proper fresh milk and not powdered creamer in front of them, Mr Mackay opened the file.

“Mr Calum McBride was… shall we say, something of an eccentric person. He lived for the day, yet was a very successful entrepreneur when he put his mind to it. Let me give you an example.”

Jak was immediately intrigued, and somehow, he felt an affinity with his relative.

Donald handed Jak a photograph.
“That is your uncle at Woodstock in August 1969.”

Jak looked in awe at the image. It was of a man wearing what looked like a dress and with flowers in his hair and painted on his face. Jak guessed that he was still in his teens at the time.

“After that festival and the summer of love in California, he went back to New York, where he graduated from NYU in 1973 with a degree in Economics. That was when there was a break with the rest of his family. This was the time of Nixon and Watergate, plus the war in Vietnam, which was not going anywhere but badly for the USA. Calum decided that a trip to his ancestral home was better than being drafted and going to Vietnam. His eligibility for the draft had been deferred while he was a student.”

Donald looked up and saw a bit of a blank look on Jak’s face.
“This is all in his autobiography.”
“He wrote his life down?”

“He did. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t read it until after he’d died.”

“How did he… pass?”

“Here in Scotland, we pride ourselves on having the highest mountains in Britain. These are tiny when compared to those such as Mt McKinley or Mont Blanc. There is a sort of challenge amongst walkers and climbers to scale all of the peaks that are over 3000ft. We call them Munros and those who try to scale them all, ‘Munro Bagging or Baggers’. Calum had climbed all of the nearly 300 peaks in the early 1980s. He decided that it was time to repeat the feat. He'd just completed the two hundredth peak when, according to several witnesses, he just keeled over and died not long after arriving in Fort William from climbing the tallest of them, Ben Nevis.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“Heart failure was what the coroner ruled after an autopsy. His GP confirmed that he had been prescribed medication for a heart problem, but had declined to take it. That was when he set out to repeat his 1980s feat. It was almost as if he wanted to prove the doctor wrong or die trying.”

“GP?”

“Sorry. A GP is a general practitioner, or what you call a Family Doctor.”

“I get you. It sounds like he had a good life.”

“He did. His autobiography was self-published, and at the last count, it sold around thirty copies, most of which were to himself. I have a copy of it for you, plus an addendum that he was working on during the evenings while on the Munro quest. It gives an insight into his last few years.”

“Where did he live… in recent years?”

“For a part of the year, he lived a very simple life in a cottage over in Argyle near the Crinan Canal. I don’t expect you to know where that is, but I have prepared a package for you that lists the assets that he has bequeathed to you. Outside of that, he lived in a house in the City.”

Jak was pleased that things were moving on.

“Calum didn’t leave everything to you. He left his Edinburgh properties to his daughter.”

“He had a daughter?”

“He had an adopted daughter called Sarah. She lives in his home in Morningside. It was his base when he came here for the Festival and Fringe in the summer. Then, he’d stay until the spring.”

“Why me? I can’t recall ever meeting him. My father refused to talk about him or why they had a bust-up.”

“Calum’s autobiography may shed some light on it. It was, as usual in families, over money. We find that women and money cause more family breakups than anything. According to Calum, in the 1979/1980 timeframe, your father wanted Calum to invest in his coal mine, while Calum was more interested in putting his money into a couple of Tech Startups from California. The coal mine was a bust and simply ran out of coal in 1992 when your father lost all of his investment, but that was a minor dip in his finances. A huge transatlantic argument ensued, and the two never spoke again. According to his journal, the final straw was his decision to change his name from McGee to McBride, which is the surname of his maternal grandmother.”

Donald smiled.

“One of those startups was a then little-known company called Apple. Thanks to a tip from a former classmate of his, Calum was in on their original IPO and put in around $250,000. Calum started selling small bits of his stake in the company in 2010 when he bought the property that now belongs to his daughter. His remaining holdings are worth a considerable sum, as you might expect. The valuation at the time of his death is in the package that I will give you before you leave. Half of that is yours.”

“Ok, Mr MacKay, I’m guessing that there are some conditions to my inheritance? If there were not, then you would not have needed to tell me all this backstory?”

Donald smiled.
“That is true. As I said at the outset, your relative was slightly eccentric. However, I think that his main condition for you receiving your inheritance will not be that problematic.”

“What do you mean?”

“My instructions from Calum were clear. I have to show you this photo.”

Donald handed over a photo.

Jak looked at it, and for a moment, he nearly panicked. Then he relaxed.

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Is that you in the picture?”

“Yes. At last year’s Pride march in Boston. I know that the picture appeared in the Boston Globe, but… I have no idea how it got to Calum?”

“That is a mystery to me, but it did. After that picture appeared, he changed his will and divided it into two. Half for his daughter and half for you… if… You complete his challenge, that is.”

“Ok, Donald, out with it?”

“You are required to live in Scotland for a whole year as the woman you want to be. That isn’t so hard, is it?”

Jak shook his head.
“My visa is only for 90 days.”

“Calum thought about that. He bequeathed three of his companies to you. He named you not only the owner but also what you call the CEO. That comes with a salary that should satisfy the visa people, along with the supporting documents that we will supply.”

“All that help comes at a cost. How much? Lawyers the world over don’t come cheap. At the moment, I appear to be asset-rich or potentially so and cash-poor. I have around…”
He did a mental calculation,
“Around two hundred pounds to my name.”

“Calum was prepared for all this. Our costs and expenses have been paid up-front by Calum’s estate. His will identified the challenges of making parts of his will achievable. When he changed the will, we agreed on our costs for all our work. He was a man who knew what he wanted and was prepared to pay in advance for that to happen. We like people like Calum who know their mind. He drove a hard bargain, but both sides were happy with the outcome. We will make a small profit from dealing with his estate, but that is nothing when compared to the business he has given us over the years. We are not all money-grabbing shysters. Calum was family to me.”

Then he smiled.
“Calum was also a canny man. We only got half our costs on his death. Another 20% will be paid when you start the challenge, and the remainder after a year, success or failure. We tried hard to get more and sooner, but he was firm. The only change he was willing to make was to put all of our costs into escrow before we agreed to do it. The money is all there waiting for the stages to be reached. Another firm of Solicitors is handling all that, and their costs have already been paid by Calum. We were party to the agreement.”

“There is a lot to try to take in.”

“There is too much for one day, and judging by your body language, you need some proper food and sleep? Am I correct?”

Jak was feeling tired and way out of his league.

“You might be right. I’m sure that I’ll have a lot of questions tomorrow. I’d like, if it is possible, to meet his daughter?”

“She would like to meet you. Don’t worry; she’s not unhappy about sharing Calum’s inheritance. He made it clear to her a long time ago that it was to be shared, and there is more than enough to go around.”

“If I might ask, how much was in his estate? Approximately?”

“Jak, if you complete the challenge, then around one hundred and thirty million pounds will be yours, free and clear.”

Jak shook his head.
“Uncle Sam will want his take.”

Donald shook his head.
“That’s after paying your US tax liabilities which will be dealt with by a legal firm in Boston once you have signed on the dotted line here, but as Calum explained in a letter to you that I’ll give you in a minute, he hoped that you would make Scotland your home and, as he says, ‘like me, give Uncle Sam the finger’. He hoped that you would do that before accepting any of the capital from the estate. Calum used to misquote President Kennedy when he said, ‘Ask not what your country can take from you, ask yourself what you can keep for yourself. ’”

“Didn’t you say that Calum came here to avoid the draft? Would that not be awkward when it comes to revoking his citizenship?”

“It turned out that Calum was not selected by the draft lottery, so his coming here was… well, he didn’t need to have come, but he soon came to love this country as I am sure that you will when you see his cottage in Argyle. He became a British citizen in 1979 and nixed yours that same year. None of his investments here resulted in paying even one cent of tax to Uncle Sam. He was very proud of that. It made saying no to the demands that would come from your father every few years for one crackpot scheme after another easy to refute. I have another file, at least four inches thick, that records all those requests. Some of the language used by your father is quite… quite ripe to say the least. There was no love lost between them. Calum was never clear about what the last straw was between them, but whatever it was, it was big.”

“Do you know it yourself? This place in… Argyle?”

“Me? I’ve never been to it, but I have been to the area when I was younger. It is not like the city. The pace of life is like a snail, even compared to Edinburgh, and there are no carry-out shops on every corner.”

“Carry out?”

He grinned.
“Sorry, in your part of the world, they are takeaways. In that part of the world, ‘Fast food’ is what you make yourself.”

“I think I get the idea. What time can we resume in the morning?”

Donald looked at a large desk diary. Jak almost rolled his eyes. Even he had his calendar on his phone.

“May I suggest after lunch? Say around 2 pm? That will give you time to digest things and get a look at the city.”

A worried look came over Jak’s face.
“I didn’t think things through very well when I got your letter. I had enough funds to get here and for a few days, and that’s it.”

Donal didn’t reply but instead started looking through Calum’s file. He pulled out an envelope from the top and gave it to Jak.

Jak read the wording on it.

“Jak,
I know that money might be tight with that skinflint of a father cutting your allowance. If you get to Edinburgh, then this is for you. I know that you will spend it wisely. Calum.”

“Do you know how much is in here?”

Donald shook his head.
“I’d leave it until you are in your room. The fewer people who know about the money, the better, if you get my meaning?”

“Thanks, Donald. I’ll sleep on it and see you tomorrow afternoon.”

The two men shook on the deal to meet the following day.

Just as Jak was leaving the room, Donald said,
“Jak, I forgot to give you this.”
He picked out a blue folder from the large one on his desk.

“You seem to have been prepared for me to come?”

“Calum was insistent that we were fully prepared for you to come. When we received notice of his passing, I had to identify him at the hospital in Fort William, as his daughter was abroad. When I returned, I went through his instructions in fine detail and prepared everything for your arrival.”

“Thanks. He sounds like quite a man.”
“He was. He loved to dress unconventionally when he came to the city. He always brightened up the office when he visited us.”

Jak was escorted to his B&B by the secretary. He had one of the rooms that gave a great view of the city, including the castle, not that he enjoyed much of it that day. He lay down on the bed, and before he knew it, it was 05:00 the following morning.

Feeling guilty for not studying the information in the folder that he’d been given the previous day, he settled down to it after taking a much-needed shower.

The ‘full Scottish’ breakfast provided by the landlady was more than welcome, as were the copious amounts of coffee. That allowed him to finish reviewing the documents in the folder by 10:00.

Zak walked back into the city through the ‘New Town’ and up the hill into the ‘Old Town’. The difference to him was pretty dramatic. He went for a coffee to kill some time when a loud bang put him on alert. It was the same bang as he’d heard the previous day.

“What was that bang?” he asked someone who was sitting at the next table.

“That was the one o’clock gun. It goes off almost every day from the castle.”

Jak relaxed. The place grew stranger than ever. Strange but very different from anywhere he’d been before. He tried to imagine what Calum had seen and felt when he came here for the first time. From what he knew of their family tree, his branch was a more recent emigrant from Scotland to the USA. Perhaps… he wondered… did Calum feel at home in the city, and that was why he stayed?

Zak walked down the hill towards Princes Street, smiling. The place seemed to be growing on him. He imagined that it was much the same for Calum.

[to be continued]

That night, Jak had a nightmare. The size of Calum’s estate had been so big that it took hours for the numbers to register. He’d gone from literally counting nickels and dimes to being a multi-millionaire. What caused the nightmare was the vision of his father exploding when he found out about his brother’s legacy and that Jak would be right there in the firing line and… The actions that his father would take terrified the life out of him.

Eventually, he put it to the back of his mind. Any encounter with his father was for the future. He had to concentrate on the here and now, the estate, meeting Calum’s daughter and then the big one, his challenge.

Jak arrived at the Solicitor’s offices a few minutes before two still thinking about the enormity of the task ahead.

“Hellooo again, Mr McGee. Mr Mackay will be free in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you, Irene.”

“How was the B&B?”

He smiled.
“The bed was very comfortable, and the breakfast was huge. I didn’t need to stop for anything other than some coffee in… in the old town, I think that’s what you call it.”

“That is good. You are looking a lot more alert today.”

“I was rather tired yesterday, but today is another day and with another set of challenges.”

She chuckled.
“There speaks a ‘forever optimist’!”

Just then, a light on the small switchboard on her desk started to flash.

“Mr Mackay will see you now,” she said matter-of-factly.

Jak went towards the door of the office that he’d been in the previous day. As he approached, it opened to reveal the smiling face of Donald Mackay.

“Come on in. I have someone for you to meet.”

Feeling slightly bemused, Jak went inside, and Donald closed the door.

“Jak, this is Sa’ana or Sarah. She is Calum’s adopted daughter.”

The woman that Donald was talking about was not what he’d expected at all. For starters, she was black. A deep black skin emphasised her beauty. There was no doubt that she would turn heads wherever she went. A flawless complexion didn’t need much makeup to make her the most beautiful woman that Jak had ever seen, let alone met. Her huge lashes fluttered in his direction, making him go weak at the knees.

“He… Hello, Sarah,” he said stutteringly.

She smiled at him. Her perfect white teeth just made it worse for Jak.

“Pleased to meet you, Jak. Calum told me a lot about you.”

Her soft voice was like that of an enchantress to Jak.
“I thought that it might be good for the two of you to meet sooner rather than later. Calum wanted you to work together in the future.”

There had been nothing in the folder that Donald had given Jak the previous day about this. This was the moment that Jak began to understand that Calum’s affairs were far more complicated than he’d imagined when he boarded the flight to London.

“What sort of work would that be?”

Donald smiled.
“That is for the long term if Calum’s plans work out. In the meantime, Sarah will be here to help you with the challenge that he has set for you.”

Jak had been very, very, very deep in the closet regarding his desire to become a woman, apart from one day at the Boston Pride march and the three days he’d spent in New York the previous year at their pride event, where he didn’t dress up apart from wearing a rainbow shirt. He’d returned to Boston feeling both liberated and depressed. Liberated, in that people had just accepted him as who he was, and depressed because he’d have to return to hiding his true self again.

“Jak,” said Sarah,
“It will be fine, I promise you. Dad was very clear to me that you were in the closet, and if you are going to be a success as one of us, then we’d have to take it in small steps.”

Her soft voice was music to his ears.

“Jak, there is a lot to do before you can even think about starting to become the person you desire. For starters, there is the little matter of a visa. You can’t apply for it here, but we can provide you with all the information that you will need. Calum anticipated this, which is why Sarah is here,” said Donald.

“I… I don’t quite follow you?”

“You will need to apply for a work visa when you go back to the USA. For that, you will need a job to go to and as my number two and as the Managing Director of three companies in your own right, that will qualify you for the visa.”

“Ok, I am beginning to understand. Calum was prepared for almost everything.”

Sarah laughed.
“That’s an excellent description of Dad.”

Then she added,
“Dad wanted you to cut all ties to your father.”

Jak nodded.
“They aren’t very strong at the moment, but he keeps on trying to get me to go back home and work for him. The day after your letter about Calum arrived, there was another one from his legal team reminding me that I have a student debt that will need repaying.”

Donald shuffled some papers on his desk and handed Jak a sheet of paper.

“Is that approximately the amount that you owe in student debt?”

Jak looked at the figures. His dire financial position was laid bare for all to see.

“Yes. I need a job fast.”

“You can forget about the debt. Calum instructed us to pay it in full if you came here. No strings at all. You are here, so we can pay that off. Will that get your father off your back?”

Jak shook his head.
“He’ll want to know where the money comes from. He owns the bank where I got the loan from.”

Donald grinned.
“Do you play the lottery?”

Jak began to understand.
“Sometimes. I could say that I won a prize in the lottery and he’d have to accept it! Brilliant.”

Donald shook his head.
“Not me. Calum knows your father and left us the instructions on how to do it. We have an associate legal company that has offices in Boston and New York. We will wire the funds to them, and they’ll handle the transaction. If you visit their offices in Boston and become a client of theirs, then the rules of client confidentiality will come into play.”

He paused for a few seconds before saying,
“Actually, I think that you should become a client of the US Law Firm. They’ll handle the visa application paperwork. Because they work with us, we can supply them all the data they’ll need once you sign on as a client.”

Jak began to see just how different Calum was from his father. Calum really had left nothing to chance, from getting his affairs in order before going off trying to scale all those Munros to planning how to deal with Jak’s student debt. While that was good, it was going to be rather daunting trying to live up to his legacy.

“Jak,” said Sarah.
“Let’s get out of here. I’m cooking tonight, and I have a spare room that you can stay in until you go back home.”

Jak’s face dropped.
“I don’t have the money to get home. Or rather, get to Heathrow. I have a return to JFK after that; I am stone cold broke.”

“Did you open that envelope I gave you last night?” asked Donald.

“Oh, sorry. I fell asleep almost as soon as I got into my room, and I forgot all about it.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just let us know when you want to fly back, and we’ll book your flights. The same when you have your visa and want to return.”

“Don’t tell me… Calum anticipated this?”

Sarah laughed.
“Dad was like that. There were times when I was a teenager that I wanted to kill him, but it was him being him. After a bit, I accepted that he was not going to change at all. He was always there for me, and I could not have wanted a better parent. You will get used to his unconventional way of looking at life and preparing for everything he could. I fought it to begin with. Then, I knew that was Calum being Calum, and I’d better get with it because fighting against his will was useless.”

“Once the paperwork is done, you will be an employee of my company, and we’ll fund your flights and travel expenses. Your father can’t touch that.”

Jak was once again shocked at how much Calum knew about his life and how he knew how he would react in this situation. It was almost as if he’d been tracking him everywhere he went in the past few years.

He shook his head in disbelief, but it was just downright unnerving. Had Calum been a closet tranny? Was that the real reason for his bust-up with Jak’s father all those years ago? He decided to bide his time on that question. Then thought again. The picture that Calum had drawn of him was all there out in the vast realm of public information if you knew where to look.

Jak and Sarah left the offices of Mackay, Mackay and Browne half an hour later and walked back to Jak’s B&B via the Botanic Gardens. Even in early autumn, it was an oasis in the middle of the city.

When they reached a quiet spot, Jak, who had been fairly quiet since they’d said goodbye to Donald Mackay, said,

“Was Calum in the closet?”

Sarah stopped and looked Jak in the eye.
“Yes. She would come out for special occasions such as Pride weeks, birthdays and such. We’d go out to dinner together, and no one would comment on her.”

“What did she call herself?”

“Emilia. That is after his great-grandmother. She came from humble stock. She was in service at a big house in the town of Hawick, which is to the south of here. She ran away with the youngest son of the owner of the house. They married at a place called ‘Gretna Green’ before getting on a ship that was bound for New York from Liverpool. That’s how one part of your family ended up stateside in 1911.”

“I’ve heard of Emilia, but she’s been virtually erased from our family history. No one will say why this was, but I was told by my grandmother not to mention her mother ever again,” said Jak.

He continued,
“As for outing Emilia, I expect that every man in the room would be, and I’m being honest here, lusting after you. Sa’ana, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, let alone met. They would not give Emilia a second glance, in my honest opinion.”

“Thank you, Jak. Thank you for being honest. Dad warned me about men who lust after beautiful women. He paid for me to take self-defence classes. I’m a 2nd Dan Black Belt in Karate. He was very proud of me.”

Her voice tailed off.
“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Every day, but he told me that life has to go on. I never had the chance to properly grieve my family in Kenya, but Dad’s funeral let me do that for everyone I have lost.”

Jak sighed.
“I.. I already regret not meeting him in person, but already, I see in you a person of wisdom and I guess that a lot of that comes from him.”

“It does. Without his guidance, I would not have been able to carry on with the charity work that he started.”

Jak looked at Sarah. This time is was with a new appreciation of her qualities.

“Sa’ana, I could never be anywhere near as beautiful as you. Not even 5% as downright gorgeous. Add in your intelligence, and I see a formidable woman.”

“Jak… Calum told me that you were like him, and I brushed him off. My experiences with men are not good ones. They see someone like me, and their neanderthal part takes over. They want just one thing. I can see that you are not like that.”

Then she looked skywards.
“Calum, if you are listening, I’m sorry. Sorry for doubting you. You told me that Jak was different, but I never believed you.”

To his surprise, she added,
“I know that right at this very moment, if you were offered me on a plate, you would not say no. Am I right?”

Jak could not look her in the eye.
“No sane person would, but I would never take advantage of you or even try to make you do anything that you didn’t want to do.”

“Calum, forgive me for what I’m about to do,” said Sarah.

Before he could react, she kissed him right there, in the middle of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. It was not a short kiss either.

“Don’t tell me that Calum decreed this?” said Jak after they’d broken apart.

Sarah laughed and shook her head.

“No, that was all me. You seemed so… so buttoned up, tight. So… in need of opening up.”

“I enjoyed it, and yes, I was on edge. Being with a beautiful woman does that to me. My mother was a former Miss USA. She was so beautiful… until my father drove her to drink because he was caught with his pants down with a hooker. The cops raided the brothel when he happened to be there at the time. Mum became an alcoholic, and after treatment, they were divorced, and she moved out of state. I was six and thought that it was all my fault.”

“Did your mother know about the other you?”

Jak nodded.
“She caught me wearing one of her skirts one day. I thought that she’d get angry, but she didn’t. Instead, she promised that it was to be our secret.”

“Where is she now?”

“The last I heard, she was in Boston, but as hard as I tried, I could not find her, nor could I find anyone who had seen her. She could be anywhere above or below ground.”

“Do you think that she could be dead?”

He shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know what to think, but at the moment, I have other things to think about.”

“There is a lot to take in, isn’t there?”

“Calum was very devious, wasn’t he?”

“He was. Here, I have a bit of a confession to make. I was with Calum when he was told about his heart problem. That night, he told me how he was preparing me for life when he was no longer with us. I knew of his desire to ‘bag all those Munros’ again. So, after one last trip together, he set off. I only saw him twice after that, but that isn’t important. The trip we took was to Boston. We watched you from afar. I was the one who took those photos that Mr Mackay showed you yesterday.”

“Why? Why didn’t you make yourself known to me?”

“I think that was the plan, but do you remember that man you marched with?”

“Yes, he said, that his name was Alex and that he came from Miami. Why?”

Sarah smiled.
“His real name is Jared King. He is a Private Eye based in DC. Your father engaged him to get to know you and to find out what your plans were…”

“Shit… I told him everything. All the pressure from my father since then makes sense now.”

“And because he stuck to you like glue, we both agreed that we should back off. We, as in Calum and I, could not let it be known to your father that he was taking an interest in your life.”

“He’d blow his top even more than he did.”

“Did you see this Alex character after the end of Pride?”

“Yeah. I ran into him a couple of times while out jogging along the Charles River. He said that he’d left Florida because of the growing MAGA movement.”

“He was probably just checking up on you. Now, imagine if Calum had contacted you. Is it probable that you would have told him about Calum?”

“I get you now. He said on more than one occasion that if he found out that Calum was back stateside, he would find him and finish the job. By that, I mean kill him. That was how much they hated each other.”

Sarah shook her head.
“Calum didn’t hate his brother. It was more like he pitied him for not seeing how the world was changing around him. He made that clear in the addendum to his autobiography that he was writing while climbing all those hills.”

“I have a lot to learn about Calum,” commented Jak.

“He was a wonderful man. In time, you will get to understand that.”

“Devious as well. Throwing us together. It was almost as if he wanted us to become a couple, but I don’t know how that can be. Donald said that the company he wants me to run is based somewhere called Kennacraig. I have no idea where that is. My search on Google Maps turned up nothing more than a ferry terminal that is hours away from here, on the other side of the country.”

Sarah laughed.
“Let’s carry on walking.”

Jak didn’t object so Sarah continued.

“You are right about Kennacraig. It is a ferry port. I went there once with Calum, not long after I came to the UK. It was winter, and I froze. Calum laughed, but I never went back other than for the odd day or so in Summer, but it was never a place of joy to me. My reluctance didn’t stop him from telling me about the place. The salmon farms that you will soon legally own are spread out around the places near where the ferry goes from that port. That sort of makes sense to have the HQ somewhere where you can get the ferry to all the business locations. Calum was devious, as you said, but he was a man of simple desires. He lived simply and downright frugally. He would just smile at me when I commented on it. Then he’d say, ‘All the more for you when I’m gone, my dear.’”

“That means a lot of travelling, then? I don’t have a car or a local driving license. Calum’s list of things to do includes getting a license for the UK.”

“If you are based at the ferry port, then it seems to be the perfect place for a base. It is not that far away from his cottage hideaway, so if you are based there, then there is not a lot of travelling to do…”

“I know nothing about fishing, let alone salmon farming.”

Sarah laughed. Jak stopped dead.
“Why the laugh?”

“Calum knew nothing about it when he bought the business. I remember his frustrations and the long days driving there and back while he kept me in school here. I think that was when I stopped taking him for granted and began to love him as a person rather than someone who had rescued me from a warlord in Somalia.”

Jak had never expected Sa’ana to open up like that. They’d only met an hour or so before, yet she’d kissed him and now this. His mind was going up and down like a rollercoaster.

“Don’t look so blank. Shouldn’t you be happy?”

“I am just confused by it all. It shouldn’t be happening to me like this.”

“Like what? Having a pretty woman on your arm who wants to be with you?”

“You are just saying that to be nice to me. I’m mentally a mess.”

Sarah smiled and took Jak’s arm.

“Let’s get your things from your B&B? I’m beginning to get hungry.”

[one hour later]

“We just made it in time,” said Sarah.
They’d had to run from the nearby bus stop to her home in the Murrayfield area of the city due to a rain shower that seemed to appear from nowhere in an otherwise cloudless sky.

“Hang your jacket up on the back of the chair to dry. Your room is up the stairs, on your right,” said Sarah.

“Thanks,” said Jak as he wiped the water off his glasses.

Sarah smiled back at him and headed towards the kitchen.

“That was very nice,” said Jak after the meal that Sarah had cooked up in what seemed almost no time at all.

“Thank you. Since Calum went off on his Munro trip, I’ve not had the chance to cook for someone.”

Jak looked at Sa’ana before saying,
“From my limited understanding of Somalia, it is an Islamic country. So far, nothing that you have said or done tells me that you are a Muslim.”

Sarah laughed.
“I’m not. The War Lord, who was going to sell me as a child bride to an associate, came into my village in Kenya and killed all the men and male children. Then they raped the women and kidnapped the girls to use as sex slaves or to sell for profit. Those whom they sold to men like them were circumcised to make sure that they were pure. Calum rescued me just as my captors were starting to talk about doing it to me. I didn’t know the words that they used, but the doctors who examined me in Nairobi asked me about the others who had had it done. Once they explained what it was, I was able to tell them.”

“That is horrific. How did Calum get involved?”

“He was spending some time close to the border with Somalia, where the charity that I now run works and heard about me and that I was going to be sold. He came back a few days later with a stack of fifty-dollar bills and bought me. At first, I was terrified of him, but once I saw that we were back in Kenya, I began to hope that I might have a life. With lots of care and love from Calum and the people at his charity, I am about as normal as I can get. Calum and I went back to my village a few years ago. I felt that I had unfinished business there. There was nothing left of it. It had gone. The buildings, the people, everything. Only a single bullet-ridden sign showed us where it was.”

“That must have been awful?”

“At the time, it hurt. Thanks to Calum, I have a future here free from those despots.”

Jak wanted to hug her, but something held him back.

Sarah saw that Jak was hesitating.

“About earlier and that kiss?”

“Sorry,” said Jak.

“There is nothing to be sorry for. I wanted to see how you kissed without thinking about it.”

Jak smiled.
“So, it wasn’t my fault then?”

“No, Jak, it wasn’t.”

Then she asked softly,
“When was the last time you kissed a girl?”

“The last time was…”
He went very red in the face.
“At my High School Prom.”

“Was she your date?”

Jak went even redder in the face.
“No. She was the date of the Hockey Captain. He was not amused and slugged me. I woke up in the local emergency department, handcuffed to a bed. Her father was accusing me of rape. I called my father, who sent in a team of lawyers. The whole thing had taken place in full view of the school principal. The cops soon dropped all charges. I found out later that she had asked me to kiss her just to make her date jealous. The last time I heard anything about her was that she was mistress to a State Senator in Memphis, and Hockey Captain sells bargain basement used cars for cash in Nashville.”

“The things we do to impress our dates?”

“Was that the end of it?”

Jak shook his head.
“My dear father gave me a lot of grief for the whole thing, and then he had to go to court to get my arrest record expunged. Even though I was stitched up, a record of an arrest for suspected rape would have stopped me from going to almost every university in the country.”

“That’s mad. You were never charged with anything, let alone found guilty?”

“I learned while at college that the USA has a monster phobia when it comes to even the merest mention of sex. A whole bunch of my classmates ended up on the scrap heap when they held a frat party with loads of booze. One of the hookers that they hired was beaten to a pulp by one of them, who was high on drugs. They were all charged with attempted rape and battery. One by one, they caved and pointed the finger at the culprit, who was tried and sent to jail, but their arrest records were there forever.”

“How did you not get involved?”

“I was the only member of the Frat that didn’t get fingered by the law. I wasn’t there simply because I was attending my grandmother’s funeral more than three hundred miles away. I even read the eulogy and had more than sixty witnesses to prove I was in Tennessee the night the party took place, including the local Chief of Police. The cops interviewed me six times because others kept pointing the finger at me as the organiser. I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter what I said. Only the threat of legal action by my father’s lawyers caused the cops to drop their pursuit of me. That was when my dear father decided that he wanted payback for getting me out of those legal scrapes. I managed to talk him into letting me do a master’s, but he made it clear that when I was done with that, I had to start working for the family energy business.”

“And that was not what you wanted to do?”

Jak shook his head.

“Living in two of the most liberal and diverse cities in the USA, New York and Boston, has had an effect on me. I decided during the first semester of my masters that I wanted nothing to do with what Trump called ‘Good Clean Coal’. It isn’t clean, and even though my family think so, it isn’t good. My dear father’s business is going down the tubes, and he refuses to see that burning coal for power generation is going the way of the animals and plants that died to make the coal in the first place. The quarterly reports show declining revenues and increasing costs. The father of a friend from school is the company’s Geologist, told me more than a year ago that the mine will run out of mineable coal deposits in 2026. That is a disaster that I want nothing to do with.”

Jak sighed.

“Until recently, all my job applications were unanswered or replied with a ‘We are not hiring at the moment’ message, despite them running ads that said otherwise. I have no proof, but I couldn’t help but feel the cold, hard hand of my father somewhere behind it. That’s when the letter from Mackay, Mackay and Browne came and saved the day.”

“Thanks to Calum and his feud with your father.”

“If I had a drink, I’d raise a glass to him. The more I learn about him, the crazier his life gets. He seemed to dabble in all sorts of things.”

“I asked him about all his different businesses once. He would always say something like ‘Diversification, my dear child, diversification while looking over his half-moon reading glasses. It was slightly comical, but I soon learned that if one business goes bad, then there are other ones to fall back on. That is unlike your father, who has bet all the family silver on coal.”

Jak smiled.
“Did you believe him?”

“I didn’t at the time. These days, I would put it down to him simply getting bored with one enterprise and starting a new one rather than having a definite plan. A few of them become real successes, like the Salmon Farming venture.

“That is exactly the picture that I got from the folder that I was given last night.”

“Are you game for trying to run the part of Calum’s empire that he carved out for you?”

“That’s the problem. I am way out of my depth. I’m a scientist… of sorts. I’m not a businessman. I have no idea how to read a balance sheet or create a business plan. Sure, I can read the top-level stuff, but running a business every day is like staring into an abyss and not having a safety rope.”

Sarah laughed.
“Calum made sure that I was ready to take over the charity and other businesses before he went off on his Munro quest. I fully intend to do the same for you. It is not that hard, especially when you have lawyers and accountants doing the hard work.”

Jak looked at this goddess who had fallen into his life and said a small prayer to his maker. If being with her meant living as the person he had always wanted to be, then he’d do it.

[to be continued]

After they’d eaten and cleared away,
“Is Calum’s ‘grand plan’ becoming a bit clearer?” asked Sarah.

“I can sort of understand why Calum invested in the Salmon farms. It is a growth area, but some of these other businesses seem a bit weird to me,” said Jak as he reviewed the descriptions of the businesses that he’d left them both.

Sarah chuckled.
“Calum was always reluctant to say why he bought a business or put money into it. All he’d say was, ‘It is my money, and I can do what I want with it.’ The thing is… they were almost all loss-making before he took them over. Now? They are almost all making a profit. Maybe not a lot, but a profit is a profit… It is as if he were a magician and able to cast a spell, and within a year, the losses were gone, and profits were back. I never did find out what it was, but it helped him make an awful lot of money, unlike your father.”

“I can understand that. Money was part of the reason for the breakup between him and my part of the family. Their great-grandmother left them each half of her estate. Calum got the money, and my father got the businesses. The value of the businesses was almost equal to the cash, so it seemed to be in equal measures. My father had assumed that Calum would want to invest in the family business, which, at the time, needed lots of cash to improve its productivity. Calum just walked off with the money. He told me that he never had any intention of helping his brother out. There was bad blood between them from an early age. Calum was always blamed for his brother’s mistakes.”

Jak smiled.
“Dad was pretty pissed off. I later found out that she’d planned it all that way. Great-great-grandmother Flora McCloud was a feared woman who produced huge amounts of bootleg Whiskey and supplied speakeasies in Chicago, New York and Cincinnati. There are tales of her driving the trucks and using surplus WW1 tracked vehicles to avoid the cops by going off-road. My mother once said to me that Calum was more like her than my father,” said Jak.

“That explains a lot.”

“But it does not explain his investment of £100,000 in a Blacksmiths?” asked Jak.

Sarah laughed.
“I can answer that. We were out together in Galloway when something went wrong with the car’s suspension. Calum muttered something about a control arm. We were in the middle of nowhere, and the only place around was this old and very decrepit blacksmith’s forge. The old guy was able to fix the car by welding something. Calum always visited the place when he was close by and would chew the fat with the smith.He called it a meeting of minds. A year or so later, he invested the money to train a new smith as well as update the forge so that they could make more saleable items. The apprentice qualified last year and has since taken on a new apprentice. I would not look for a return on that money. Calum wrote it off in his mind the day after he’d given it, but he was more interested in keeping the skill alive than getting a return on his investment. He… He had a hard side to him with business, but it was by no means all about profit and only profit at the expense of everything else.”

“That is good to know. The last thing I would want to do would be to barge in and demand the money back. If I were my father, then that would be exactly what he’d do. Even one measly dollar out on a report would send him into a rage, even if the primary sums were in the millions.”

“What will your father do when he finds out about you inheriting from Calum?”

Jak shook his head.
“I would not want to be anywhere near him. His opinion of Calum is that of a charlatan, a grifter and a general no-good son of a bitch who can’t be trusted one inch. I’d fully expect him to get into that private jet of his and come over here, intending to take me home with him even if I don’t want to go. Intent is the word here. I don’t want to go, and I don’t think that he can make me. The last time we met, he treated me as if I was a High School Junior, let alone about to be the holder of an advanced degree. If he met you, he’d probably explode on the spot. He is a fully signed-up member of at least one white nationalist group and a large donor to some right-wing Political Action Groups.

Sarah smiled.
“That is very close to Calum’s opinion of your father with that addition of a bigot and racist.”

“That I will agree with. If I even looked at a girl who wasn’t pure white, he would go mad. Some of his political donations have gone to far, far-right candidates and groups. In 2016, he tried to make sure that I voted for Trump. I told him that who I voted for was between me and my maker. He even came up to Boston in late October to check on who I was going to vote for. He was pissed because I registered to vote there and de-registered back home. He knew because he was the chair of the local GOP association. I’d already voted in early voting, which pissed him off even more.”

“He sounds like a control freak. Calum was very much the opposite. He let me make my own mistakes and learn from them. He was always there when things went wrong, like a real parent should be.”

Jak saw this as an opportunity to change the direction of their conversation. After taking a deep breath, he said,

“It is clear to me from everything that I’ve read and what you have said that Calum wanted us to try to be a couple.”

Sarah tried to interrupt, but Jak put his hand up to stop her.

“At first, I thought that it was because you were black, and that would be a huge red flag to my father. Then, I began to see the real person that you are and basically, fuck my family. I fancy you. To be honest, I’ve never met someone who has a brain and looks as good as you. Sure, there were beautiful-looking girls at college, but many of them were there just for husband shopping, just like my mother did with my father. I would consider myself very lucky to have you in my life in any way, romantic or not. They wanted husbands who could offer them a life of luxury just like their mothers and their mothers before them. Working a day would be a day too much for them. They would shudder in horror at the thought of going off to Africa and working to make the lives of others better. For many of them, going to the Salon for their hair, nails and eyes, followed by visits to the country club, is their world. That and obeying their husbands. That is not the sort of life I ever wanted. I saw how it destroyed my mother.”

Jak swallowed hard before adding,
“If you don’t want it, then we will have to remain friends to carry out the plans that Calum laid out for us. But… being perfectly honest, and this is coming from a place of ignorance. There has been the odd moment when I feel like selling the whole thing or at least letting the people who have been running the show since his death carry on. Then, I would have a chance to at least try to get to know you as a real person and not Calum’s daughter. As much as Calum meant well by bringing us together, there is only so much he can do from beyond the grave. Isn’t it up to us to forge a future for ourselves, but never forgetting who enabled us to come together?”

Sarah sat silently for what seemed like minutes.

“I… I don’t know,” said Sarah.

Jak smiled.
“Much like me at the moment. This is all very strange to me. I feel like a fish out of water, then I see you again, and suddenly I have a purpose in my life.”

“What if I can’t live up to your expectations? It was often hard for me to do that with Calum. While he was pretty easy-going, he had standards, and I had to adhere to them even as a child. If I made mistakes, he’d come to my rescue and forgive me. If I did it again, then and only then would he get angry. I soon learned that it was him being him, and everything he did was to prepare me to run the company. Me… a poor farmer’s daughter from Kenya. He loved me unconditionally, and that meant a lot to me.”

“I’m not like that. It seems at first glance that Calum was not that unlike my father when it came to raising a child. Then you say or do something that tells a very different story. There were so many times that I had to be at an event just to show that he was a ‘good Christian family man’. I would be under strict orders to be seen and not heard. It was hard. One time, I accidentally spilt my soda down my white shirt. When I got home, I was given the strap because he thought that it made him look bad with his so-called friends.”

Sarah shook her head.
“Calum would have just given me a hug and made me wash my shirt if I’d have done that. He never raised a hand to me, nor did he raise his voice to me in public. I have to admit that I messed up quite a few times as a child. He forgave me. That was Calum.”

After another awkward silence, Jak said,
“What if we cut and ran? Sell up and start again without any ties to the past?” suggested Jak.

“You would do that?”

“I would if it meant that we could be together. As it stands, I’d be lucky to see you for more than a day at weekends if I had to base myself over in this out-of-the-way place in Argyle. That is no way for a relationship to form, let alone last.”

“I hadn’t thought about doing something like that.”

“Don’t we owe it to ourselves to look at every possibility? Calum may have had some ideas about our future in his mind, but we are hopefully sentient beings who have minds of our own.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Let’s sleep on it. There is no rush because I need to have a job to get my visa, and then, if we decide to sell everything, it is going to take some time. If, and I know that it is a big if, we decide to do it, then we have time to plan a future for ourselves.”

“But… what if we can’t make it together and have no jobs or homes behind us?”

“There will be more than enough money for us to start again on our own. If that means working for another company for a bit, then so be it.”

“You have an incredibly positive view of the world?”

Jak shook his head.
“If I can cut the ties with my father, then I think that you can with yours. Children all over the world rebel against their parents all the time, and so far, the world has not come to an end. Think of all the people who paid for passage from Europe to the USA. Many of them left most, if not all, of their family behind and only had a few possessions with them. A lot didn’t make it, but many did.”

“I’m not like you. Calum was the only family I ever knew. I was four when I was taken by the warlord. Calum bought me four years later. I owe him everything.”

“And he will be with you for the rest of your life. Nothing can take that away.”

“As you say, let’s sleep on it,” said Sarah.

Jak was half asleep when he heard a slight creak as the door to his bedroom opened. He sat up and saw a figure come in and slide into bed beside him.

“Sarah?”

“Lie down and relax,” she said in a soft voice.

She cupped him from behind and wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. At first, he was tense, but gradually, he relaxed.

Before they knew it, it was morning. While they had slept together, sex hadn’t been on the menu.

“Thank you for just lying there last night,” said Sarah as she prepared breakfast.

“Being with you was more important than anything else,” replied Jak.

“You mean sex?”

“When the time is right, then it may happen. Unlike many men, sex is not uppermost on my mind every minute of the day.”

“Is that related to you wanting to live as a woman?”

Jak shook his head.
“Not just live as a woman. As much as I can, I want to become one in time.”

She didn’t respond, but her body seemed to freeze for half a second.
“Did I say something wrong?”

Sarah sat down and looked at Jak.

“This wish to become a woman… Does it give time for you to father a child?”

Her words threw Jak completely.

“I… I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t think.”

“Typical man. There were times when Calum would act first, and only much later would he engage his brain, except when he was his alter-ego. Then something would kick in, and it was as if his brain was working in a very different way.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Before I came here, I hadn’t dated anyone since High School. Add to that my little secret, and having kids was about the last thing on my mind.”

Sarah took hold of his hand. He nearly jerked it away, but relaxed.

“It is ok, Jak. These things can be worked out in time. We have plenty of that, don’t we?”

“I… I just feel so… so manipulated by Calum.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“A good way, I think?”

“Good. Then, let’s go and take a look at your business empire. It will get us out of the city.”

“Don’t you have a job to go to?”

Sarah smiled.
“Being the boss has a few privileges.”

Jak knew when he was beaten.

Sarah grinned and said,
“You can open that envelope of money and buy me lunch… can’t you?”

Jak tried not to show it, but he enjoyed the trip to Argyle. He wasn’t expecting to have to take a couple of ferries along the way, but Sarah seemed to know where she was going.

While they waited for the second ferry to a place called Tarbert, Sarah said,
“Why don’t you book us somewhere to stay tonight?”

Jak hesitated.
“What’s wrong?”

“My credit card is just about maxed out. Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry. Just give Mr Mackay a call. He’ll make sure that it is paid off.”

“Don’t tell me… Calum?”

She shook her head.

“When Calum died, Mr Mackay had a Private Eye run a full financial search on you as instructed by Calum in the event of his death. The result of that investigation was that part of the cash on hand that Calum left was to get you out of your financial hole. That applied not only to your student debt but your credit cards as well.”

Jak didn’t look pleased, so Sarah tried a different approach.

“Calum used to tell me about when he arrived in Scotland. He had five hundred bucks to his name. Yes, he had a lot of money, but that was back in the USA, so he invested that, came here and started again. If he failed, then he could go home, cash in those investments and start again somewhere. His first job here was washing cars near the Murrayfield Rugby Stadium and sleeping on the floor of his boss’s front room. With the money he earned from that job, he bought an old VW Bus, and after doing it up, he lived in it for two months. In that time, he built up that five hundred bucks again and again until he was able to pay for an immigration lawyer. That lawyer enabled him to get his British Passport because his grandmother, your great-grandmother, was born here. He told me how he saved his money until he was able to land a job selling Land Rovers in the city. From then on, there was no stopping him. He could talk even the most reluctant customer into signing on the dotted line. The key to Calum’s whole business ethos was that he never had any debt. It took me a long time to get my head around that and to start to follow it. It wasn’t easy, but I got there, which pleased him and was the spur for him to set off on his last journey. That is why Calum left instructions for your arrival. If you came, then one of them was to clear all your debts if Mr Mackay or I felt that you were worth it. I think that you are worth it. Are you up for following in his footsteps?”

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Just be yourself. You are so like Calum. He never flashed the cash, and anyone who does that is no friend of mine, and so far, you have been as frugal as him. Call Mr Mackay, and he’ll get that card all paid off tomorrow.”

“But the charges for using it here are stupid.”

Sarah laughed.
“What did I say? Get it paid off and then cut it up, or at least put it away until you go home. I’m sure that Mr Mackay will have some more of Calum’s wisdom to share for this very situation…”

Then she grinned.
“Then, I’ll use the company credit card…” said Sarah with a smile.

The more Jak was with her, the more he liked her attitude to life, even if he kept putting his foot in his mouth.

[to be continued]

The HQ for the Salmon Farming part of Calum’s empire was something of a disappointment to Jak. The Kennacraig ‘HQ’ turned out to be nothing more than two ‘Portacabins’ located near the Ferry Terminal.

The real business of raising salmon and sea trout was in the sea lochs close to the various islands on the southern part of the Inner Hebrides. Sarah had been there before with Calum but had wanted to see Jak’s reaction to the place. This place was the complete opposite of a big city or even a small city like Edinburgh.

Sarah had met the Manager, Neil Sinclair, once before when he’d travelled to Edinburgh for a meeting with Calum. She introduced Jak to Neil and the three other staff and left Neil to go over the business with him.

Jak listened and asked a few decent questions. At the end of the briefing, he said,

“Neil, it is clear to me that Calum trusted you to run this end of the business. I don’t intend to rock the boat, at least until I can properly understand it. The last thing I want is to rush in and make a complete fool of myself… or beyond the one that I’m doing right now.”

It took a second for Neil to react.
“Jak, I think that we are going to get along fine. Calum was much the same. He knew about fish farming in general, but almost nothing about how it works and the problems it faces. If you take your time to learn the business like he did, then we will get along fine.”

“I hope so, Neil. I’m just starting to understand what sort of man Calum was. I know that I can’t even begin to fill his shoes. In time, there will probably be some changes. What they are, I simply don’t know.”

“Are you going to sell up? Calum told us that a new owner would probably do that,” said Neil.

Jak smiled.
“I don’t know. Far too early to say. For that to happen, a lot of other things are going to have to happen first. As to what they are? I have no idea.”

He paused for a second before saying,
“What I’m trying to say is that selling the business is not at the top or the bottom of my list of things to do.”

He looked at Sarah and back at the team before saying,
“Let me make you guys a promise. If I do decide to sell up, I’ll come and tell you face-to-face and give you guys first refusal. How does that sound? Ok?”

Neil smiled and shook Jak’s hand.

“Good. In the meantime, just carry on running the show. Calum would not want it any other way.”

“You did well back there,” said Sarah after they’d said their goodbyes to the people at Kennacraig.

“I was winging it.”

“You still did a good job.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

“I’ve booked us a hotel for tonight. Tomorrow, we can check out Calum’s cottage. I don’t know how Calum left it the last time he visited. That was right before he set out on his quest. Besides, there won’t be any food in the house unless there is anything in the freezer.”

Jak looked over at Sarah. Every time he did that, he could not believe what he was seeing. She was the most perfect specimen of womanhood he’d ever met.

“Good move, as long as the hotel serves food?”

Sarah grinned.
“If they don’t, I’ll treat you to a ‘fish supper’.

Jak had no idea what that was, but he didn’t really care. As long as he was with Sarah, his life was complete.

[Boston, USA]

“Sir,” said the Private Eye, who was standing outside where Jak used to live. He was on the phone to Jak’s father.
“According to his neighbours, he’s sold everything for pennies on the dollar and gone. He left a few days ago.”

“No, Sir… Well, not quite. One of them saw an Uber pick him up at around 11:00 pm.”

“No, Sir, he had no idea where it was going. All he said was that Jak had one suitcase and a backpack with him.”

“Yes, Sir. I think that he’s gone for good.”

“Sir, he could be almost anywhere in the world by now. He could have caught a flight to the West Coast and gone on from there. Who knows?”

“Yes, Sir, I have the details of the lockup. That is my next port of call.”

“I will report in when I have visited it.”

The P.I. looked at his watch.
“Sir, I should be in NYC in four to five hours. It all depends on traffic on I-95.”

He ended the call and sighed. He’d worked for Jak’s father off and on for ten years, and he always wanted everything done yesterday, even if it didn’t matter to the result. He’d nearly decided to drop him as a client, but he paid well and on time, which he soon learned was most certainly not his standard practice. This time, he could end up in the back of beyond on a wild goose chase, and there was little he could do about it.

[Six hours later]
“Fuck!” said the P.I.

He was in Yonkers and had just discovered an unlocked lockup. It was empty apart from a cardboard container that had once contained a car battery. It looked brand new. A single scrap of paper was lying on the floor. All it contained was a phone number. He quickly fed it into his computer. The address associated with the number was on Long Island. A picture of Jak’s movements began to form in his mind.

He paused for a moment and wondered if he should call his client. Instead, he decided to head off to Islip first and risk the wrath of Mr McGee, but in his mind, it was better to have run down all possible leads before reporting in. That way, there was less chance of his client mouthing off at him.

The P.I., Joe Younger, breathed a sigh of relief when he drove past the address. There on the front drive was the missing Camaro. It still had the NY plates on it from the time that Jak had owned it. He turned around and stopped outside the house. He could see a woman unloading groceries from an SUV that was parked next to the Camaro.

He kept his distance and said,
“Excuse me?”

The woman stopped and turned around. She looked suspicious. She didn’t say anything, so it was up to him to speak next.

“I’m trying to track down the former owner of the Camaro?”

“Sorry, I can’t help you there. My husband bought it last week. I never met the owner. All I know is that my husband gave him a lift to the LIRR station after the deal was done. The car was advertised on Craigslist at a very good price.”

“Thank you, and sorry to bother you.”

Several missing pieces of that picture had just been filled in. He got back into his car and headed for the LIRR Station. He soon learned that there were fairly frequent trains going into the city. The destination of the next train caught his eye. ‘Jamaica’. He smiled.

While it was a guess, he felt happy to suggest to Mr McGee that Jak was heading for JFK airport and to him, that meant one thing: Jak was going overseas. The proceeds from the sale of the Camaro could have easily funded a trip to Europe if he had got anywhere near its true market value.

He called Mr McGee from the car park at the station. It was not a long call, but as far as he was concerned, the job was complete, and he could send in his bill when he got back to Memphis.

[Jak’s Father’s home]
Jak’s father was not pleased with the suggestions that Joe Younger had made, but they made sense. As soon as the word ‘overseas’ was mentioned, he had a good idea where Jak had gone. He managed to quell his anger long enough to make a call to an assistant.

“Get the G-5 ready.”

“Fill her up. We are going to Scotland.”

“I am fucking well aware of the time difference. I don’t fucking well care if we arrive in the middle of the night or whenever. Do it! File the frigging flight plan. What’s that airport near that moron, Trump’s Golf Course? I pay that grifter over $500K a year to belong to Mar-a-Largo, I think that I should qualify as a temporary member.”

“Prestwick. That’s the place. Right in the middle of nowhere. Then make sure that there is a car… preferably a Suburban, waiting for us.”

He ended the call by ignoring the assistants’ complaints that it was Halloween. Such frivolities did not register with him. All he could think about was revenge. His older brother was going to pay for this.

He called his housekeeper.

“Daisy, prepare my clothes for a trip to Scotland.”

“No! I’m not going to play golf. I’m not a slacker like Trump. I have serious family business to attend to.”

“One week. Pack for a week.”

“And Daisy, please make sure that Jak’s room is ready.”

“Yes, I plan to bring him home where he belongs.”

He was fuming. The credit report that his P.I. had sent him showed that his student debt was still outstanding, but his credit card, which had been near its limit, had been paid off in full. All he could think of was ‘Calum’! He’d give his brother a good tongue-lashing when he saw him. Brother or no brother, he was not going to divert his son from his rightful destiny as boss of his coal mining company.

Three hours later, a Gulfstream G-5 took off from a local airport in rural Tennessee and headed northeast. After a brief refuelling stop at Bangor, Maine, it headed out across the Atlantic.

“Mr McGee, this is your pilot speaking.”

Jak’s father woke from the light sleep that had come only an hour or so earlier.

“What the fuck is it?”

“Sir, we have been refused permission to land at Prestwick. Due to noise controls, the runway is closed until zero five hundred.”

“What the hell is that in real-time?”

“Five AM local. Midnight Eastern Standard Time.”

“What do they expect us to do until then? Flap our arms in the hope of staying airborne?”

“Sir, Prestwick Tower have suggested that we divert to Shannon. They have 24-hour customs and immigration.”

“And where the hell is Shannon?”

“Sir, it is in the Irish Republic. We can land, clear immigration, refuel and fly on to Prestwick without having to clear customs or immigration again in Scotland. By the time we do that, they will be open for business.”

He cursed.
“Do it. I need to get some sleep.”

“Sir… I have to inform you that when we get to Scotland, both of us on the flight deck will be unable to fly for 24 hours at least.”

Jak’s father was about to sound off to the flight crew, but thought better of it. He remembered a horrible commercial flight that he’d taken to China as part of President Trump’s trade mission that was delayed by a typhoon, and the crew ran out of hours.

“Ok. Find a hotel once the plane is refuelled and be ready to fly home. I’ll call you when we need to leave… And don’t forget to restock the galley.”

Instead of getting some much-needed sleep, he was messaging his transport manager even if it was late at night in Tennessee. He wanted to check up on Jak’s credit card usage.

[Prestwick Airport, 09:30 am]
“I wanted a Suburban, and all you can get is this?” said Jak’s father.
He and his assistant were looking at a tiny Ford Focus, a 2-door version.

“Sir, the only Suburbans for rent here are in London, and the rental company could not deliver them here in time. That is over 400 miles away. This is all I could get locally, as there is a big expo in Glasgow. All the big cars are already rented, which includes Range Rovers and BMW X6S. Cars here are a lot smaller than back home.”

“And where am I going to sit? There is no for a miniature poodle in the back.”

“Sir? You can sit in the front with me.”

“Fuck that. I’m driving.”
Then he proceeded to go to the left-hand side of the car.

“Bloody Neanderthals. Can’t they even drive on the right side of the road in this miserable hellhole?”
A squall had moved in from the sea, making everything a uniform shade of grey.

It was a typical early winter’s morning with low clouds, drizzle and a stiff wind from the North West.

“Sir? Have you ever driven in the UK?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Sir, I have. Perhaps it might be more prudent for me to drive. The locals here are… are not the same as back home. The rules of the road are very different.”

“Nothing that waving a piece won’t solve…”

“Sir, we didn’t bring any guns.”

“Why the fuck not? This place is part of the civilised world, isn’t it?”

“Sir, people here do not feel the need to carry. There is no 2nd Amendment. There is no written constitution. They make it up as they go and have been doing so for hundreds of years. Anyone found carrying even a blade can get five years.”

“And that’s why we whipped their ass in the revolution. Neanderthals, the lot of them.”

Then he said…
“Drive.”
“We need to go to Edinboro’”.

Joel shook his head and got into the driving seat.

Two and a half rather fraught hours later, the car pulled up outside Sarah’s home in Edinburgh.

“Stay here. This won’t take long.”

Joel wisely said nothing but was on the lookout for traffic wardens. He’d parked on a double yellow line. Wisely, he’d not tried to explain to his boss about parking regulations in the city.

A banging on the front door of the house brought a smile to Joel’s face. There was no sign that anyone was home. Mainly, this was due to the lack of a car in the drive.

After a fruitless ten minutes, he returned to the car.
“Where to now, boss?”

“His fucking lawyers. They’ll know where the bastard is.”

“Are you sure about that, Boss? Client Confidentiality and all that stuff?”

“I’ll just threaten to buy their business. They’ll tell me soon enough.”

“Sir? Perhaps, just perhaps, these people can’t be bought?”

“Everyone can be bought if the price is high enough.”

Joel shook his head.
“If you don’t like it, then you can get out now!”

“Sir, this is not the USA. They do things differently here.”
Then he got out of the car and retrieved his bag from the back seat.

“You will regret this!”

“No, Sir, I will not. Money is not everything in life.”

“It fucking well it. The world runs on money, money that is powered by the US Dollar.”

He walked off, shaking his head. Thanks to an exchange visit to Oxford, the assistant knew at least how to start getting home. His first task was to get into the city centre. He’d heard about the tram opening when he was in Oxford, and he’d seen the tracks on their drive past the airport. After ten months of working for ‘him’, he suddenly felt free.

That didn’t last long. Deep down, he knew that his now-former employer would not let him leave quietly. Thankfully, he knew somewhere that he could drop out of sight. His company phone was in the rental car, along with the company laptop. That was a start. His now former boss could not stiff him for the cost of those items. Like the former POTUS, John McGee had a reputation for not paying his bills.

John McGee sat in the passenger seat of the tiny car and cursed long and loud. Two people walking by shook their heads as they passed him. He was stuck. The experience of driving over from Prestwick had disturbed him. It seemed that every driver had a death wish. There was no way that he was going to risk his life, so he abandoned the car, and thanks to some quirk of fate, a taxi with a ‘For Hire’ sign lit came along the road.

“Take me to a City Centre Hotel,” he commanded.

The cabbie looked at him in the mirror and mentally sighed.
“How much do you want to pay?”

“Does it matter that much?”

“Yes, it does. There is the Holiday Inn, The Caledonian, or if you want to push the boat out, there is the Balmoral, but that isna cheap if you get my meaning.”

He didn’t quite fully understand what he said, but said in response,
“The Balmoral sounds about right.”

“Ok, the Balmoral it is.”

[Tarbert, Argyle]
“Can you remember how to find the cottage?” asked Jak as they left the hotel where they’d stayed the night.

“I think so. I looked at the map last night and even Google Street View, but that ran out a mile out of town, but I know the general direction to go.”

Jak didn’t want to say anything, but the lack of roads made the choice of which way to go pretty easy unless you wanted to run into the sea.

Ten minutes later, Sarah suddenly let out a scream.
“There it is. That’s Calum’s car!”
She was pointing towards a small building off to the right. Sarah drove on and made a ‘U’ turn. At the right point, she turned off the road and went slowly up a drive that was full of potholes.
“This is the place all right. I remember the potholes.”

Jak didn’t reply.

“Here we are,” said Sarah proudly.

“Do you know how to get in? You know, like a key?”

“We don’t need a key. He never locked the back door.”

Jak shook his head as he followed Sarah around to the rear of the property.

Sure enough, a good shove on the door and it opened. Sarah smiled and went inside. Jak followed her.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Probably some food that has gone off in the fridge,” said Sarah with some confidence.

The interior was pretty dark. The small windows didn’t let in much light. Jak tried the light switch. Nothing happened.

“The power is off,” he volunteered.

“That’s Calum. He would always switch everything off when he left a room. I lost count of the times he left me in the dark when I was growing up.”

Jak shook his head as Sarah went outside for something. Suddenly, the light that he’d tried came on. Sarah returned smiling.
“He turned off the supply. Remind me to check with Mr Mackay that the bill has been paid. The last thing you need is for the power to be cut off when you least expect it.”

As they’d expected, there was a load of decomposing food in the fridge. They bagged it up, along with some other items like bread and cake, and put it in the back of the car. Sarah said that she’d seen a community waste disposal site a few miles outside of Tarbert.

With that done, Jak began to see how Calum lived while he was in this part of the world. There was only one word for it: simply. There was no phone connection or even a TV. A small radio was all the technology in the cottage. Outside, there was a small, overgrown lawn and not much else.

“I slept on the couch when I first came here… I think I was about fourteen or fifteen,” said Sarah.

“It does not look that comfortable?”

“It wasn’t, but when compared to some of the floors that I was made to sleep on in Somalia, then it is the height of luxury. My problem was with the cold.”

The mention of Somalia caused Jak to ask,
“I seem to remember hearing of people who returned to the US with children in tow, and those adults ended up being charged with child trafficking. How come Calum didn’t?”

Sarah smiled back at Jak.
“Calum bought me from the warlord and took me back to Kenya. There, he engaged a lawyer and an investigator to look for anyone from my village. I think I said that there was nothing left. They found only two survivors from the village. They only escaped because they’d travelled to another village for a family wedding. They identified where everyone was buried, including all of my family. It looked like I was going to be put into the Kenyan care system, but Calum worked some magic and obtained the right permits, and he brought me here. Thanks to having the right bits of paper from Kenya, Calum was granted custody of me and a year later, he formally adopted me. I know now that Calum paid off a lot of officials, but that was years ago. There were a few people here who thought that Calum was up to no good, but he never did anything wrong to me. He loved me, and I know that with all my heart. Loved me as a parent would do. He taught me proper English and came along to all the events I did, like any normal parent would.”

Then she sighed and wiped a tear from her eyes.
“More than once, Calum told me that I saved him from an early death. Before me, he’d been a workaholic. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had to step back or delegate to be there for me.”

“Thanks for telling me that. I would have loved to have met Calum. From what you have said, he was so different to my father.”

Sarah smiled and took Jak’s hand.
“If you meet Calum's challenge, then you will never have to see him again. From what you have said, he’d probably explode on the spot if he saw you in a dress.”

“True,” said Jak, smiling.

“On that subject,” said a grinning Sarah.

Jak’s heart always went racing when she looked at him like that.
“Shall we head back east? I have the perfect outfit for you to wear for your first trip out.”

“Eh?”

She grinned again.
“Yes, Jak, it is time to think seriously about starting the challenge, and don’t you dare give me that look!”

He didn’t say a thing.
“Don’t worry, where I plan to go with you for this first outing is very LGBT-friendly.”

Jak looked worried.
“I’ll be right at your side. You will be fine.”

[to be continued]

[Edinburgh early that evening]

“You look great,” said Sarah.
She’d just finished applying makeup to Jak. Both of them were dressed to go out on the town. While Jak’s clothes appeared to be a little dated, the addition of a brightly coloured shawl changed the look entirely.

The clothes were dated… that’s why the former owners had disposed of them in the plethora of charity shops in Morningside. The shawl was a vintage paisley-patterned silk shawl complete with a ‘Liberty’ label.

Sarah had put them all together and made an outfit that Jak was proud to wear.

She held her hand, and together, they looked at themselves in the full-length mirror that Calum had installed in his bedroom.

“Well?” asked Sarah.

“Pretty good.”

“Only pretty good?”

Jak smiled.
“Ok, very, very good indeed.”

“Now!” said Sarah.
“I can’t call you Jak looking like that. What do you call yourself?”

“I call myself Holly.”

Sarah smiled.
“Pleased to meet you, Holly. Shall we go? Our carriage awaits.”

They put on their coats and went to the front door. Sarah opened it and got a huge surprise. A man was about to knock on the door.

A smile spread over his face when he saw Zak/Holly.

“Well… Look at what we have here. The pervert cavorting with the hired help?”

A look of fear combined with surprise spread over Holly’s face.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for that no-good brother of mine, and I find you? Well, you are coming home with me, but not looking like something from the Rocky Horror Show.”

“Sorry, Dad. I’m not coming home with you. This is my home now. As for Calum, he passed away in the summer. He left me half of his business empire. The other half was left to his daughter. This is his daughter Sa’ana, or Sarah for short.”

Holly looked at Sarah.

“Her? Who’d leave anything to a blackie? Besides, she can’t be his daughter. I made sure of that nearly forty years ago.”

“I’m his adopted daughter, and you, sir, are not welcome here. So why not fuck off back to the shit hole, or rather your stupid coal mine and stay there,” said Sarah.

“Why, you little bitch,” said Robert. He made a step towards Sarah at the same time as raising his hand as if he was going to slap Sarah.

Holly reacted by grabbing a walking stick from the container by the side of the door and bringing it down hard on her father’s arm. The blow that was coming failed to reach its target.

“Why, you little bastard. I’ll make you pay for that!”

Holly didn’t wait for him to move. She slammed the front door in his father’s face.

“Call the cops. He tried to assault you,” said Holly.

Sarah shook her head.
“That won’t do any good. They’ll take ages to respond.”

“Then we can ignore him. He hates people ignoring him.”

“Do you think that he’ll go away?” asked Sarah.

“Not a chance, but it will wind him up something rotten. Then… he might make a mistake that could end up with him being arrested, but if his history was anything to go by, he seems to be covered in the same brand of Teflon as Donald Trump.”

The arrival of Jak’s father put an end to Holly’s first trip out. It was a huge letdown for her as she’d psyched herself up for the event.

“We should go and see Mr Mackay tomorrow. I’ll email him about the arrival of your father tonight.”

Holly sighed.
“It’s not the first time that he has turned up like that. He descended on my university graduation and demanded a seat in the front row. He didn’t like it when he was told to sling his hook by the vice dean. I had to grovel just to get my five seconds of fame when he handed me a scroll of paper. He has this effect on people if he does not get his way. That attitude is a large part of why I would never work for him. The rest of it is that I think that mining coal for power generation is a dead-end industry. We had had several stand-up rows over it. I was accused of being a rabid commie and a Marxist for my support of renewable energy. He won’t budge until the mine runs out of customers. The writing is on the wall, but he won’t see it.”

Sarah thought for a moment.
“There was something that your father said about making sure that Calum could not have children.”

“And?”

“Calum told me once… it was on the plane from Nairobi to London that he could not have children, and I was to be his one and only child. He doted on me and gave me the love that I never had until then.”

“Something must have happened between them when they were younger. My father is, by my estimate, around eleven years younger than Calum. I know from my gran that my father was in an accident, if you understand my meaning.”

Sarah nodded her head before saying,
“Jealousy is a strange beast. I had the hots for a boy at school. His brother had other ideas and deliberately broke his brother’s leg in full view of both their father and me, just so that he could go to the High School dance with me. I went with him and gave him the knee right where it hurts and walked out. His father went mad and threatened Calum with all sorts of retribution. Calum just took it on the chin and said, ‘If you hang your younger son out to dry like that, then you don’t deserve to be a parent. My daughter agreed to go to the dance with your younger son and not the jerk that is your older offspring.’”

“Ouch!”

“Yeah. Calum could be a ruthless bastard when it came to protecting me. That’s why I loved him so much. He’d let me make my own mistakes up to a point, but he always had my back.”

“I can tell that by the way your eyes go all watery when you talk about him like that. As for what happened between them, I will have to wait. We should think about the here and now and how to get him off our backs.”

“Agreed.”

“Any ideas?”

Sarah slowly began to smile.

“Yeah. We get married. From the evidence of our last close encounter of a parental kind, he does not like people with skin like mine. Am I right?”

“Yeah. He is an almost out-of-the-closet racist. He flies a ‘Proud Boys’ flag from the back of his truck. He… he’s way out there with the hard-right fascists. As for the wind turbines that I saw from the train, according to him, they need to be blown up.”

“Then having me in the family will really annoy him.”

Jak thought for a moment and then shook his head.

“Don’t you want to marry me?” asked Sarah.

“I do, but he’s a loose cannon. There is no telling what he would do next. If I thought that getting married would get him off our backs, then I’d do it in a flash. We are lucky that we aren’t stateside. He carries it everywhere he goes.”

“Carries?” asked Sarah.

“Sorry. He takes a gun everywhere he goes. The last time I was at home, he was carrying a Glock 17 pistol with a seventeen-round magazine around the house. He sleeps with it under his pillow. This place is a lot saner. His truck usually has a couple of AR-15s with 30-round ammo clips on a rack behind the driver. Those are semi-automatic rifles. I don’t like guns full stop.”

“What do we do then?”

“We go and see Mr Mackay in the morning and ask him what we can do. Then we go shopping.”

“What for?”

“A wardrobe for me, silly. I need to learn what works for me. Then, I’ll go home and start the ball rolling about a visa so that I can stay here. If anything has come out of this evening, then it is that I’m done with the old country.”

Sarah gave Holly a big hug.
“Are you a bit disappointed about not getting married?” asked Holly.

“Not really. It just seemed to be one way of getting him out of our hair.”

Holly smiled.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we look for a pair of rings? Then, we can show intent. As for the real thing, we both know that it will take some time for us to gel as a couple, but I do want you in my life until death do us part.”

Sarah gave Holly a big kiss.
“And you still have not tried to get me into bed!”

“Sarah, I know that this might sound strange, but why are you so accepting of me? Please don’t say Calum told me to!”

“Calum told me about you when he showed me the photos of you at the Pride March. I could tell right away that his dying wish would be for us to get together. I went along with him, but being CEO of a refugee charity, I have contacts all over the world. One of them from the US gave me a report on you. It said almost everything that you have told me about your fights with your family. It also said that you were a decent human being. Believe me, they are in short supply in many places that I’ve worked in, not to mention Somalia. I decided early on to play it cool when you came over. That went out the window that first day in the Botanic Gardens. I knew then that you were the one for me. Since then, it has, as they say, been all my own work.”

Both of them laughed. They were cool with each other.

Four days later, Sarah took Jak over to Glasgow airport for a flight to New York. She was pretty tearful as she said goodbye. Jak had been everything that she’d hoped and that Calum had promised.
“Don’t stay away for too long. I’ve grown to like having you in my life. I’d like you back here to meet me when I return from Africa.”

She’d discussed her forthcoming trip to Burundi with Jak. With any luck, it was to be her last one to that particular location. Someone as beautiful as her could and sometimes did attract the attention of the wrong sort of people. She was fearful of some of the ‘warlords’ in the DRC. The border between the two nations is very fluid, and that is on a good day. Memories of them from her time in Somalia were something she did not want to repeat in her lifetime.

“Just keep an eye out for my father. According to the ‘FlightTracker’ website, his jet is still at Prestwick after flying over from Shannon at the start of the week.”

“I will, darling, I will.”

Jak’s father had not been idle and had engaged a firm of Solicitors in Edinburgh to look into the affairs of his estranged brother Calum. They soon came back with the bad news.

“Mr McGee, your brother Calum died last summer while he was attempting to climb every peak over 3000 ft in Scotland. The cause of death was heart failure.”

“Why the hell was he trying to do something like that?”

“Mr McGee, this is a popular target for people in this part of the world. I can put you in touch with the Solicitors who are dealing with his estate. He knew that his time was almost up and wanted to go out doing something that he enjoyed.”

He began to understand why his son had come over to this, in his opinion, horrible place when he did.

“And they’ll tell me jack shit?”

“Mr McGee, there might be some sort of provision for you in his will. Unless you ask them, you will never know. We can’t do it for you naturally. It has to be done in person because you will need to prove your identity if there is a provision in his will for you...”

“Oh… very well. Who is handling the estate?”

“A Mr Donald Mackay. That would be the young Mr Mackay.”

“’ Young Mr Mackay?”

“There are two Mr Donald Mackay’s working there. They are father and son.”

He left the offices after reluctantly paying their bill, wondering what century this part of the world was living in. Why couldn’t they just use Junior?”

His opinion of Edinburgh went even further downhill when he found that he had to walk up five flights of stairs to reach the offices of MacKay, MacKay and Browne.

The mutterings he made under his breath as he climbed the steep stairs would make many a man blush.

He was quite out of breath by the time he reached the top. He cursed his brother once more before going into the offices. The cheeriness of the receptionist did nothing to make him feel happier.

“Ah yes, Mr McGee. Mr Mackay will see you now,” she said after a short phone call.

One of the oak-panelled doors opened, and a man in his early 30s stepped out.
“Mr McGee? I’m Donald Mackay. I have been dealing with Calum’s estate. Please come into my office.”

He showed Robert into his equally oak-panelled office. It was all too dark and threatening for him.

“Please, Mr McGee, take a seat.”

Donald sat down and took a file out of a drawer. Robert raised an eyebrow when he saw just how thick it was.

“Mr McGee… can I please see some identification. Your passport would be fine.”

Robert didn’t want to hand it over, but soon understood that Mr Mackay was just making sure that he was the real deal. He handed his passport over to Mr Mackay.

Donald checked the passport details against a sheet of paper in the file.

“Thank you, Mr McGee. We just have to check. Impostors have been known to try to obtain assets from recently deceased clients. I’m sure that you understand and that it is not personal.”

“Yes, I get you. Now, what’s this about my brother Calum climbing mountains?”

Donald resisted smiling.
“Your late brother was indeed trying to replicate a feat he achieved not long after coming to this country. There are almost 300 such peaks. He knew that he was on borrowed time, yet he wanted to die doing something he loved.”

“He was always rather odd like that. So? What about his will? As his next of kin, I think that I’m entitled to know it all?”

“Mr McGee, your brother did mention you in his will. Here is a copy of that document.”

Donald handed Robert a copy of the will that he took from the top of the file.

“In short, Mr McGee, you are not the only next of kin. He has a daughter.”

“No, he doesn’t. He was impotent. If you are talking about that woman, then she is an impostor. No McGee from our part of the world would be seen dead with someone like her.”

“She was his legally adopted daughter, Mr McGee. I am given to understand that you met her the other evening.”

“As I said, there is no way that a McGee could even think about adopting someone like that.”

“Mr McGee… Your brother was heavily involved in charitable work in sub-Saharan Africa. It was there he met a child that he rescued from a Somali warlord and later adopted as his daughter. She inherited half of his estate. Your son Jak, the rest.”

“Him? Charity? Don’t tell me lies. He was always about the money.”

“I’m sorry, Mr McGee, Calum made his money legally in business in the city and around the country and used it for good causes. He did leave a letter for you in the event of his death and you presenting yourself here in person.”

Donald gave Robert a sealed envelope. It had his name on it.

“Do you know what this contains?”

“No, sir. Calum gave it to me for safekeeping before setting out on his last trip.”

“You call him ‘Calum’? Isn’t that a little unusual for a lawyer?”

“No, Mr McGee. Your brother was godfather to my two children and, therefore, a part of my family.”

“That man never had a dose of humanity in him.”

“He changed when he came here. He started with nothing and built a sizeable fortune all down to hard work.”

“Nothing? What happened to the three million dollars that our grandmother left him?”

“Mr McGee, once he was established here, he gave it all away to charity. To date, the total of his donations has run to more than ten million pounds. Most of the charities he donates to are related to the plight of immigrants and those who are illegally trafficked into this country.”

“In other words, the dregs of society and lowlifes who will never contribute to anything other than polluting the blood of the country.”

“Mr McGee, my wife was trafficked into this country from Mozambique. She is now a Professor of Economic Development at the University and the mother of two girls. I resent your last comment. I am going to have to ask you to leave these offices and never return.”

“You are nothing but a jumped-up clerk. I will have your law license for dinner.”

“Please leave, Mr McGee. You are welcome to complain to the Law Society, but I don’t think it will go anywhere. You clearly didn’t see the sign outside that says that all meetings are recorded. Those insults you just made against my family are very close to defamation. I think that I’ll have what you people call a ‘slam dunk case’ when it comes up in a Scottish Court.”

Donald gave Mr McGee a copy of Calum’s will and ushered a very red-faced man out of the office.

Donald returned to his desk and started writing down the details of what had just happened. He’d hardly started when his father came into the office.

“Well done, Son. Calum told us that he was a nasty piece of work. It looks like Jak and Sarah are going to be left alone from now on.”

“I hope so, and Dad, don’t we owe almost everything to Calum?”

“We do, son, we do, and we owe it to him to keep fighting his fight. Son, don’t forget to give Jak and Sarah a heads up about his visit.”

“I will do that as soon as I have finished my records of his visit.”

Sarah received the email just before she headed to Waverly Station and the start of a trip to Burundi. The charity that Calum had started and that she now ran, funded a small camp for refugees who had fled the intermittent fighting in the eastern part of the DRC. She shook her head and put the whole incident with him to the back of her mind. She was in a good mood, thanks to an email that she’d received from Jak about his visa application. Thanks to the documentation that Donald Mackay had provided, the process had gone smoothly so far. All he needed to do now was wait and lie low so that his father could not find him.

Her day was made even better when Jak emailed her during a stopover in Nairobi to say that his father’s plane had left Scotland and was heading west across the Atlantic Ocean.

Jak had left New York and had sent the email when he was on an Amtrak train to Albany. A college friend of his who lived in the neighbouring city of Troy had a cabin up near the Canadian border that was available for a few weeks. The friend had encountered the wrath of Jak’s father before and was prepared to lie to keep him from finding Jak. He had an old pick-up that Jak could use while he was in the area.

Danny Moeller met Jak at the station. At that moment, Jak’s father’s plane was landing at a small airport on Long Island. His P.I. had been tracking Jak’s spending since he returned to the city.

“Sir,” said the P.I.
“Your son bought an Amtrak train ticket to Albany. I found out from his university yearbook that one of his classmates lives across the river in Troy.”

“What are we waiting for, lets’ get back in the G5?”

“Sir?”

“We are flying to Albany… today.”
The PI knew that was what was going to happen, even if it would take some time to file a flight plan for the short flight. New York airspace is one of the most congested in the world.

Almost three frustrating hours later, the G5 took off bound for Albany.

Jak was already a long way from Albany on his way north. Danny Moeller was at home with his family and his lawyer brother. The ‘FlightTracker’ site showed that the private jet was on its way flying up the Hudson Valley. They were waiting for the storm to arrive. A CCTV camera had been set up to record the inevitable encounter with Jak’s father. Jak would be long gone, but that was part of the game of cat and mouse that was now in play.

[to be continued]

During his few hours in NYC and before heading to Albany, Jak had bought a second-hand iPhone and a PAYG SIM card at a shop near Grand Central Station. His old phone was wrapped in foil in his backpack in an attempt to stop his father from tracking it and, by implication, him.

Danny Moeller was sending regular messages explaining what Jak’s father was doing. He’d just passed the northern tip of Lake George when a message said,

“G5 landed in Albany 10 mins ago. Three black Suburbans were waiting for him and his party of six. They are all ex-military and are armed with a variety of long guns. They mean business.”

Jak replied with a simple ‘Thumbs Up’ emoji.

News that his father had reinforcements was no surprise to him. He’d had time during his transatlantic flight to organise some help in ‘bringing him home’. On his way north from the Albany area, Jak stopped at an outdoor store and purchased some clothing essentials. A nearby supermarket and a gas station provided the rest. He paid for the gas with his credit card, knowing that his father would be tracking his purchases. Everything else was paid for in cash. Luckily for him, he’d been up that way while he was a student at MIT with Danny and two others. Danny’s cabin was only going to be what crime writers call a ‘red herring’.

The plan was that Danny would reluctantly divulge the location of the cabin and how to get there from the place where he’d park the truck that he’d borrowed. What Danny was not going to say was that he was sure that Jak was at the cabin. It didn’t matter in the long run.

[at Danny Moeller’s home near Troy]
“Jak is my friend,” said Danny Moeller to an angry little man who’d said that he was Jak’s father.

“I let him borrow my truck, and that’s it. He didn’t say where he was going, and knowing him as I do, I didn’t ask. It was clear to me that he had a place to go because he didn’t even stop for a coffee. He did not divulge that location, and because of your arrival, I am glad that I didn’t ask.”

“You know more than you are letting on,” said Jak’s father.

One of the ‘support’ personnel showed them that he was carrying.

“Mr McGee,” said Danny’s brother Erik, who had been brought in for moral support.
“I’d think twice about trying to use force on my brother.”

Erik went on to say,
“Smile, Mr McGee. You are on camera and have been since you came through that door. The video is being sent to a safe place in another state. If one of us does not erase it, then it will be sent to the FBI. It was clear to me from what Jak said that you want to take him, an adult male, against his wishes, across state lines. That is felony kidnapping. With the video evidence that shows that you have come here uninvited and armed, you will be, as they say, ‘bang to rights’. Then, with all your ‘hired help, ’ charges of criminal conspiracy will be added to the felony kidnapping. That’s twenty-five to life in this state.”

Just then, the P.I. came into the room. He whispered something into the ear of Jak’s father. He smiled.

“It seems that Jak is, as you say, on the run north. He stopped for fuel at a gas station in Indian Lake. We have discovered that you own a cabin up near Lake Placid. That’s where we’ll head next.”

Danny didn’t react. He was a good poker player, and fooling Jak’s father was easy. He was all stoked up with the thought of finding his son. Danny wasn’t certain what he’d do if he managed to find Jak, but he would send his fears to the FBI as if Jak was kidnapped by his father; he’d take him across state lines.

The men left Danny’s house, climbed into their back SUVs and departed. Calm descended on the street once again.

Danny updated Jak about the departure by text message. Jak was nowhere near the cabin but didn’t reply. Danny was a good friend, but he was not sure how he’d react to Sarah and everything else. He needed the right time and place to update him, but being a good friend, he had not demanded chapter and verse before letting him borrow his truck.

After getting fuel, he’d headed east, back to I-87, and went north. With every mile that passed, he was closer to his destination, Hyde Park, Vermont.

Mr Donald Mackay, his lawyer in Edinburgh, had booked and paid for a cabin in a quiet part of the Hyde Park area. Jak had been skiing nearby when he was a student in Boston. As a result of that previous visit, he had some knowledge of what the area offered in terms of accommodation. It was quiet because the summer season had ended, and the first snows were yet to hit the peaks of the nearby Green Mountains and ‘quiet’ was what he needed right now.

Jak was leading his father on a journey. After turning off I-87, he crossed over into Vermont at a place called ‘Chimney Point’. That was a turning point in his trip. Until that point, he’d been using his US Bank-issued credit card. He knew from past encounters that his father kept tabs on his spending. He guessed that was how he’d found out that he had gone to Europe.

It was past being useful except to lead his father, as Sarah said when they planned his return to the USA, ‘up the garden path’. With all the available ‘evidence’ pointing towards Lake Placid, Jak was miles away and preparing to hunker down for a week. The cabin had been booked and paid for out of the funds that Calum had left for him. By using the Edinburgh Solicitors’, he could not be tracked, unlike his US-issued credit card.

His father arrived at the Lake Placid Cabin late that evening and was dismayed to find that it was all closed up. Jak had not been there, and there had been no further use of his credit card. No one in the area had seen Jak, which pissed him off no end. Jak had not used his debit card to draw cash from an ATM. Jak had over $500 in cash, which he’d obtained from a bureau de change at Glasgow Airport using the cash that Calum had provided for him. By using his borrowed truck sparingly and then only paying for things with cash, it would be hard, if not impossible, for his father to find him.

Once he was settled into the cabin and the truck was parked well out of sight of the nearby road, Jak fired up a laptop that he and Sarah had bought for cash from a second-hand shop in Edinburgh. He connected to the internet via the phone’s ‘hotspot’ and fired up a VPN. He chose Miami for his location and began to post messages on Facebook and Twitter, slagging off his father. He posted only the truth. Everything that he posted was backed up with evidence.

Jak had been slowly collecting ‘dirt’ on his father for years. After a while, he changed the location to Maui. He posted things that he should have never known about his family, let alone made public, were now out there. It would not be long before his father became aware of these posts. He’d blow his top big time. One of the bits of dirt was about the deal that his father had done with the operator of a coal-fired power station. Jak had obtained the information on his last visit home just before he told his father yet again that he was not going to work for him. He posted the contract on the Internet. Because the power station was in a different state, the deal had broken all sorts of interstate commerce regulations. To Jak, the more dirt that he could dish, the better.

His last action was to send an email from a throw-away account to the editor of the local newspaper in his hometown. The editor was no friend of his father. All the email did was provide links to the dirt that he’d posted. He didn’t leave a name. It was now up to others to act… or not.

Jak signed off and immediately wiped both the software and data from the laptop. Then he booted up a copy of ‘Ghost’ and restored a clean image of the system that he’d created for the trip. All that was missing was the VPN software. Only a very deep forensic investigation at the FBI deep dive level would discover what he’d done.

He hoped that the posts would, while making his father very, very angry, eventually get through to him that Jak was not messing about.

His final task for the day was to call Sara using Zoom.

While the connection wasn’t great, just seeing her face made him very happy. Her trip was going well, and she should be on a plane home in three days. He signed off by saying,
“I miss you lots.”

Jak’s father and his entourage spent the night in an overpriced hotel in Lake Placid. He was a typical rich person, also a skinflint. He watched every penny that he and his company spent. His staff hated it and accused him of being a micromanager, but his father had been like that and had drummed those habits into the son who was running the business. Jak had been like Calum, often away with the fairies and thinking about the world rather than making as much green as possible.

His staff alerted him to a range of very unflattering posts on social media. As he read them, his anger towards his son only increased. It was only later that he began to understand what Jak was doing.

He only cared about money. The posts could hurt him financially, at least in the short term. For once in his life, he raised his bedtime glass of Kentucky Bourbon to Jak.

That praise was only temporary.

If Jak had walked into his room right then, Jak would soon be dead. He read the posts again and again. It hurt him all the more because not only had his son collected the data from right under his nose, but it was 100% accurate.

After raising his glass again, he called his team together.

“My son has been spreading a lot of dirt on me. We have been played as fools. The search for my son is not over. I have to fly home ASAP and deal with this bad PR. My lawyers will be sending out defamation lawsuits to everyone who even liked his lies.”
It was all bluster and bravado, but he had to appear to be strong and in control.

The ‘team’ didn’t look happy.

“I have paid you all for your time for another ten days. In that time, I want you to spread out and look for my son and especially that truck. By spreading out, I mean even to Vermont and New Hampshire. I know that he went there on stupidly expensive skiing trips while at MIT. If any of you find him or the truck, there is another five grand in it for you. Just don’t go overboard on the expenses, ok? At the end of the six days, send all the receipts to my office as before. You will get paid by the end of next Friday. Your flights back home from Albany are all paid, so return the SUVs there, and we will be good.”

“Boss,” said one of them.
“If we find him, what do we do?”

“Keep well away. I don’t want him running again. Call me, and I’ll fly back, and we can confront him. Please, no violence unless he uses it first. Agreed?”

One by one, they all agreed.

Jak’s father returned to Albany by taxi, which hurt his wallet and pride before flying home, angry with himself as well as his son. The posts that Jak had made about him and his business hurt him hard. He’d been foolish to let him in on how he worked now; he was using it against him. He’d been played for a fool, and that hurt. No one had done that to him before and lived to tell the tale.

Jak had no idea that all that dirt would be used when it was. It was just his get-out-of-jail-free card. The jail would be working for his father in a business that was, in his opinion, going down the tubes. He would not have used it if his father had not come to Scotland after him. The words he’d said to Sarah hurt him, and he was trying to do the same to his father. She was not the ‘hired help’ nor a ‘blackie’. Her colour and race didn’t matter to him. She was… He was lost for words. If that was love, then… then he knew that she was the only thing that mattered in his life.

He kept a very low profile for two days; meanwhile, his father’s team spread out far and wide as instructed. Two men to a vehicle. One was driving, and one was looking for their target. Jak never knew if they had travelled along the road or not. He didn’t care that much as long as there was no threatening knock on the door.

Jak used the time to look at a lot of sites for transgender people. He’d resisted doing it before but with Calum’s challenge looming, he felt that it was time. To his dismay, many of the stories were depressing, especially where the trans person ended up taking their own life. They made him even more determined not to let that happen to him. What soon became apparent was the sheer number of laws being passed in the USA aimed at literally exterminating all Trans people. Why politicians were spending so much time legislating against a group that made up such a small part of the population was very sad. In his opinion, they looked like they had nothing better to do with their time on the public dime.

After a period of reflection and re-evaluation, he began to realise that it was probably the precursor to banning Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people from the society that they wanted to create should the GOP get re-elected. Jak wanted nothing to do with that sort of world. Scotland looked like it could be the sort of place where he could be himself, or rather herself, and if Sarah was alongside her, then all the better.

He spoke with Sarah almost every day. Her trip was going well, and she was about to wrap it up and leave a local NGO running the programme to help refugees from the DRC. Then she dropped a bombshell.

“Jak… I have a new project to get up and running.”

“Eh?” he said.
“I thought that you were about to fly home?”

“I was, but I was talking with a family of refugees from Uganda. They fled the country because their fifteen-year-old son is gay. They are making it a crime to be LGBT there. You know what that means?”

Jak thought for a few seconds. He knew exactly what she meant.

“I know very well what that means. Some of the more loony-tunes Republicans here are talking about doing the very same thing. It really irks them that Biden appointed a gay man as Transportation Secretary. He was accused of taking time off from work to chest feed his child by one of Trump’s cheerleaders.”

“Ouch,” said Sarah.
“It sounds like we should think about organising something in the US. If you are right, the number who left for Canada to avoid the draft for Vietnam will be tiny if they go after all who define themselves as LGBT.”

“Darling, Uganda first, ok? You can only do so much at a time.”

Sarah laughed.
“Yes, Boss!”

“Any news on your Visa?” she asked, changing the subject.

“I’m hoping to hear tomorrow.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s been grovelling on several cable channels. He is telling the world that an agent of a competitor infiltrated his organisation and that the stories are full of lies and half-truths. He’s not saying what bit of dirt he thinks is a lie, fake news, and spread by the ‘deep state’. That is typical of his messiah, Donald Trump. Anything to deflect the media from the real news.”

“Is it only on Cable TV?”

Jak shook his head.
“A few progressive YouTube channels have been giving him a lot of stick. One site has racked up well over a million hits on one article about his disregard for safety in his coal mine, in just two days. There is talk of a class action lawsuit being filed in the next few days. It could wipe him out.”

“Ouch.”

“I miss you,” said Jak.
“You are good to me.”

Sarah laughed.
“I miss you too. I should be home this time next week.”

“I’ll be waiting for you, visa permitting.”

Jak was starting to go a bit stir-crazy, staying in the cabin all day and night. He only ventured to the local gas station early in the morning to buy some overpriced bread, milk and other essentials. He was able to walk through the woods, in which the cabin was located, right next to the gas station. It was that fact that made him remember it as a place to hide.

On the day of his third visit, he arrived so early that it hadn’t opened yet. Jak thought about going back to the cabin but decided against it. Instead, he crossed the road and walked into the bit of the wood that was on that side of the road. The trees were not naturally planted. These particular trees were all in neat rows. It was a plantation. He watched a squirrel feeding on a pine kernel for almost ten minutes. After a quick look at his phone, Jak wandered back towards the road.

As he neared it, he heard the sound of a large engine coming up the road. Jak stopped, and more out of fear of the unknown than anything else, he ducked down behind a tree.

A black Suburban pulled up at the gas station. Two men who could only be described as ‘Heavies’ got out. One pumped some gas while the other man went inside. Jak could see him talking to the cashier. The man was showing the cashier a photo.

Jak’s heart almost stopped when the cashier pointed in the direction of the cabin where Jak had been staying. He breathed deeply until his racing heart calmed down. He’d been found.

The man who had gone inside the gas station paid for the gas and hurried outside. After a brief discussion with the other man, and a lot of pointing in the general direction of the cabin.

Jak tapped his left pants pocket. His passport and wallet were there. He sighed. Luck. He needed a lot more than that if he was going to get away from here in one piece. His laptop was there and a few clothes. After a little dithering, he decided to let his father have whatever was there.

Then, the sound of the engine of the suburban being started brought his mind back to reality. The vehicle drove off back the way it had come. It didn’t go far. Less than half a mile down the road, it pulled off the road and backed into the entrance to a field. Jak could see the black roof of the Suburban from his vantage point.

Jak could visualise the phone conversation that was going on between the men in the Suburban and his father. No doubt his father would be firing up his G5 jet and heading north very soon. Jak had to get away from there. Luck, for once, was on his side. The men would expect that 1) he was still at the cabin and 2) they didn’t know that he knew that he’d been found. They would be relying on the element of surprise when they entered the cabin.
Jak would not be there, but his advantage was only temporary.

At the moment, he had an advantage. That might not last very long, depending on his father. It was up to Jak to put as much distance between the cabin/gas station and him as possible while he could. The trees of the plantation would provide some cover, but nowhere near as much as a natural forest. It was his only choice.

Slowly, Jak backed away from the road and walked deeper into the plantation. He had no idea how large or small it was and what, if anything, lay on the other side. He blamed himself for not having an exit plan. That was something that his father had droned on about ad nauseam when he took Jak hunting for deer every October. There were lots of black bears in the area, but Jak had never seen one in the eight years that he’d been dragged along, covered from head to foot in dayglow orange. His father had never let him shoot anything but pigeons. Yeah, Jak, the big game hunter… not!

After some twenty minutes of walking a bit and then looking behind him for a tail, he reached the edge of the plantation. Large fields of grass and recently harvested maize greeted him. In the distance, well over a mile away, there was a house, and given that there was smoke rising from the chimney, he guessed that there was someone home.

Jak looked at the scene for several minutes. Nothing was moving. After deciding to keep to the edge of the plantation and not visit the small farm, he walked away.

He’d only gone a few steps when something he’d seen but had not registered came into his mind.

He turned and looked back at the group of buildings. Just beyond them, there was a cell tower. That changed his mind. He’d risk getting shot for trespassing just so that he could make a phone call. The worries subsided when he saw a muddy brown UPS delivery truck disappear behind the buildings. There must be a road on that side of the property.

He’d reached about halfway across the open space when another thought panicked him. As there was a road, wouldn’t the people in the black Suburban be patrolling the road looking for him?

He decided that he needed to find cover close to the farm and the cell tower. He could wait there until nightfall before moving on under the cover of darkness.

No other vehicles had travelled along the hidden road by the time Jak reached the cover of an old and very dilapidated outbuilding. There was just space for him to crawl inside and become invisible to anyone but someone standing less than 5 feet from him.

He made a call to Edinburgh and ‘young’ Mr Mackay.

“I’ve been made,” he said after the normal greetings had been exchanged.
“Two of his goons turned up at the gas station where I’d been buying bread and milk. The cashier identified me and pointed towards where my cabin was. I only escaped them because I was early and walked away from the gas station until it was open.”

“I’m about two to three miles south of the cabin and near a small farm.”

Jak listened to Mr Mackay call his associate in New York City and patch him into the call.

Jak told the associate the same story before Mr Mackay said,

“Can you check your location on the ‘Map’ App?” asked the associate.

Jak sent the lat/long of his location to Mr Mackay.

After a slight delay, Mr Mackay said,
“I’ve sent you the location of where I’m hiding. Jak needs the cavalry to come ASAP. Those men are probably armed. Who knows what Jak’s father might order after the dirt that Jak had been exposed to the world?”

“The latest on that is that the IRS is looking into the taxes paid by Jak’s father and the company,” said the Associate.

Jak swallowed hard and said,
“If there is one thing that is guaranteed to get him angry, that is an audit by the IRS. A few years back, he was escorted out of the local IRS office when he tried to pay his taxes in pennies. They refused and called the cops.”

The associate said,
“Jak, I’ll get a few of the agents we use for evicting squatters on the road in a couple of hours,” he said,
“Sit tight. It may be a long afternoon and evening. Put your phone on silent, but keep it close. I’ll get my people to SMS you with a passphrase when they get close. What do you suggest?”

Jak thought for a moment. He remembered his trip to the west of Scotland with Sarah and the name of a port where one of the ferries they’d used had docked.
“Tarbert. Tango Alpha Romeo Bravo Echo Romeo Tango.”

“Good,” said the associate.
“When you get the message, call him back.”

“Thanks. I’ll lie low, but I’ve not got any water or food with me.”

Jak ended the call and tried to make himself comfortable. All sorts of theories, mostly bad, rattled through his brain. Most were about how those agents of his father happened to call at that very gas station. The only thing he could think of was that because the truck was made by GM and was less than ten years old, it might have been fitted with the ‘’OnStar” service. With his father, money talked, and the PD back home might have been in his pocket. It would have been simple for them to flag the truck as stolen or a vehicle of interest in a crime and add some $$$ into the mix; the people who run OnStar would reveal the location of the truck. That was his reasoning before he drifted off to sleep.

A sound woke him. A glance at his phone told him that it was after three in the afternoon. He tried to move and found that his left leg had gone to sleep. After some gentle massaging, he was able to stand up.

Through a crack in the wooden door, he saw the very sight that he’d been dreading. A black Suburban was in the yard of the farm. The occupants were questioning a grey-haired woman. She was shaking her head as if to say, ‘No, I have not seen this person.’

These men were different from the two who visited the gas station earlier. He guessed that his father was probably not that far away.

The two men took the woman’s word for it and got into their vehicle and, after making a six-point turn, left the farm. From another crack, Jak saw it turn onto the nearby road and accelerate away. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down again.

He was dozing off again when a voice startled him.
“It is ok, they have gone. I checked, and they are at the Anderson place, almost two miles away.”

Jak looked up to see the same woman as before.

“Sorry. I’ll get going,” said Jak.

“No, you won’t. Those men will be back after dark; I’m sure of that. I know their type.”

“I can’t put you in danger,” said Jak.

“I think that it is a little too late now. I saw you crossing the field and guessed that you’d find your way in here. Come into the house, and I’ll get you something to eat and drink. Then perhaps you might feel like explaining to me why those armed men who are not part of any known form of law enforcement want to skin your hide?”

Reluctantly, Jak nodded. Her directness impressed him. That marked her out as a woman not to be messed with.

Jak followed her inside the house. It took a moment to get used to the relative darkness of the place. Then, he got the shock of his life. All along one wall, there were pictures of the lady posing with all the Presidents, dating from Clinton up to and including Trump.

“I was in the Secret Service for more than twenty years. Before that, I was in the FBI, ending up as a close combat instructor at Quantico.”

Jak turned to see the woman grinning. She was proud of her service.
“I… I’m Jak McGee. Jack without the ‘c’.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jack, without the ‘c’ McGee. I’m Stella Hawkins.”

“There is a bathroom through there,” she said, pointing at a door.
“Why don’t you wash up and then join me in the kitchen, which is at the end of the corridor?”

“Thanks.”

A few minutes later, Jak went into the kitchen. He got another surprise. There on the table were two pump-action shotguns. He stopped dead for a second. Then he saw that they were not loaded.

“Have you ever used one of these?”

He nodded.
“A long time ago, I used a 12-gauge shotgun to murder a few pigeons.”

“Good. One of them is for you. If they come back and set foot through that door or any window, they are dead meat. Armed intruders can be shot. That’s the law, and I intend to do it if they step over the threshold. You point, pull the trigger, and they hit the floor. Are you with me on this?”

Stella saw Jak’s hesitancy.
She smiled and said,
“The shells are birdshot and rock salt. Unless you hit them in the face, that won’t be fatal. Are you in?”

Jak gulped.
“I think so.”

She smiled.
“Right. Now on to other matters. I’m guessing here, but the grumbling coming from your stomach tells me that you haven’t eaten much today. Would a plate of Ham and Eggs with some home-baked sourdough bread go down nicely?”

Jak nodded.
“With some tea, if possible. Make that lots of tea. I’m parched.”

Stella laughed.
“I can see that we are going to get along just nicely.”

[to be continued]