Royal Protocol. Christine Flynn
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heard from him only once—the evening Broderick called to warn him of an assassination attempt that was about to be made on his life and that of Queen Marissa and their children.
That call had saved their lives, but Broderick had promptly withdrawn once more to the reclusive life he’d chosen to lead. By then he’d already been little more than an afterthought to the public. Because so few knew of the assassination attempt that had taken place those ten long years ago, he had now all but disappeared from the public’s memory. His heroic act, however, had made the men of the RET look at him with less skepticism, but not one of them was totally comfortable with the man presently playing king.
Broderick could run as hot as lava or as cold as the earth’s poles. He could be cooperative or demanding. But so far he had proven worthy of the confidence his brother had placed in him and been a model king in public.
King Morgan himself had told Harrison that Broderick would be convincing in the position. He had said that, if worst came to worse, his brother could take over quite ably in the role because, even though Broderick hated him, Broderick had always loved power and would work to foster the image of a great monarch.
Harrison would never disobey the king’s command. Yet, as much as Harrison respected His Majesty’s opinions, he couldn’t shake the thought that nothing about Broderick was what it appeared to be.
That was the thought preying through his fitful sleep when the telephone beside his bed jerked him awake at four o’clock the next morning.
Within seconds of groping for the receiver and grumbling, “Monteque,” he learned that Plan B had been blown wide open.
Even as his feet hit the floor, the muffle-voiced reporter on the other end of the line was saying that he couldn’t reveal his source, but that the headline would explain everything. Before Harrison could try to demand that source, anyway, his caller told him that he’d just left a copy of the morning paper outside the admiralty’s office. The rest of the copies would be hitting the streets in a little over an hour.
The RET didn’t have a headquarters with a plaque or signage to identify it as such. Since it consisted only of four men whose daily duties kept them in the palace or elsewhere in the capital city of Marlestone, and who met solely when an emergency situation threatened the royal family or its government, the RET met wherever it was expeditious and secure.
Security was a definite priority with Harrison.
Half an hour after the call, showered, shaved and still bleeding from the nick on his chin where he’d been a little too aggressive with his razor, he opened a steel door deep beneath the palace’s grounds and stepped into a brightly lit and austere gray hallway. There were few places on earth more secure than the rooms he was about enter.
Few people knew of the tunnel beneath the palace that the royal family used to avoid walking through the palace’s public areas. Even fewer knew of the tunnel intersecting it through a boiler room that connected to the Royal Intelligence Institute a mile away.
It was the second tunnel Harrison had just entered.
The doors here were unmarked and the same pale gray as the walls. The floor was industrial tile. Overhead lights were long, fluorescent tubes. Cameras followed the movements of whoever stepped inside. Many of the unseen rooms were soundproofed and lined with lead so no communication inside could be overheard or intercepted by equipment from the outside world.
A Star Wars array of the most sophisticated surveillance equipment known to man occupied a cavernous space behind the unobtrusive door a couple hundred yards down. A door beyond that led to a suite, complete with kitchens and a year’s worth of supplies for the royal family and necessary staff in the event of an attack. Another on the other side led to a medical clinic with a surgical suite and hospital beds.
One of those beds was occupied now—by King Morgan.
A soldier in the khaki uniform and black cap of the Royal Army appeared from behind the only glass door.
Shoving the newspaper he carried under his left arm, Harrison returned his salute.
“Sir,” the young man began, still at attention, “the men you asked your secretary to summon are waiting in the conference room. Except for Colonel Prescott. He’s on his way,” he explained, his words as clipped as the bristle of brown hair covering his head. “Your secretary also asked you be told that the minister of foreign relations has requested your presence at a meeting in his office as soon as possible. She said it was urgent.”
It appeared that no one had slept much that night. That meeting would be about Majorco, Harrison thought. And there wasn’t anything that wasn’t urgent at the moment. “I need coffee. Black.”
“It’s already waiting for you, sir.”
He had his secretary to thank for that. He was sure of it. If the woman wasn’t already married, he’d consider marrying her himself. “What’s the holdup with Colonel Prescott?”
“I wasn’t informed, sir.”
Harrison gave the young man a nod. “As you were,” he muttered, and pressed a code into the pad by the unmarked conference room door.
In one salute, Harrison returned those of the two highly trained men rising to their feet around a gleaming mahogany conference table. The walls here were richly paneled wood, the carpet beneath his feet a deep burgundy.
“Sorry to call you out so early,” he said to men who had to be every bit as tired as he felt. “I know neither of you got to bed before midnight.”
“I’m not sure the colonel got to bed at all,” said Carson Logan, referring to Colonel Pierceson Prescott, Duke of Aronleigh. Logan, the king’s loyal and powerful bodyguard, was a duke himself. “I think he’s on to something.”
Harrison stopped halfway between the table and the coffee tray on the matching sideboard. Pierce Prescott was also head of Royal Intelligence.
“On to what?”
“He didn’t say. He called half an hour after you did and said he’d meet us here. You’d probably already left or he’d have called you, too.”
Harrison headed for the caffeine.
Sir Selwyn Estabon, the king’s personal secretary and secret member of Royal Intelligence, settled back into one of the burgundy leather chairs. “Before we get into why you called,” he said, over the sound of coffee being poured into a white ceramic mug, “I just spoke with the king’s nurse. He had an uneventful night.”
Cup in hand, Harrison eyed the tall, rather elegant-looking man through the steam rising over the rim. “His condition is the same, then?”
“Still critical but stable,” the king’s secretary confirmed. “And he’s still quite comatose.”
Logan leaned his big frame forward in his chair. The king’s bodyguard was a man of action who’d proven his loyalty time and again protecting the king. He was clearly frustrated by his inability to protect him now. “I thought once they’d discovered that Princess Meredith had the same thing, they’d be able to come up with something to help him. I don’t understand why her case was so mild and his is so severe.”
“It’s as Doctor Waltham told us before,” Selwyn reminded him. “He feels it a matter of exposure. Somehow Her Highness was less exposed than His Majesty.”
“But how was either exposed in the first place?” Logan demanded of his compatriots. “Everything we hear is that the disease is contracted through a mosquito bite. Neither had a bite anywhere on their bodies. It makes no sense that he contracted a form of encephalitis found only in Africa when he hasn’t set foot on the continent in forty years. Her Highness has never been there at all.”
He wasn’t voicing anything they hadn’t all puzzled over for weeks.
Harrison, tired of having no answers himself, simply let his friend vent.
Selwyn, ever the diplomat, sought