by Tom Clancy
Jack could see his mind going over what he'd just been told. His Highness was sitting a little straighter now. The smile that began to form was an austere one, but at least it had some conviction behind it.
"I am not accustomed to being addressed so forcefully."
"So cut my head off." Ryan grinned. "You looked like you needed a little straightening out—but I had to get your attention first, didn't I? I'm not going to apologize, sir. Instead, why don't you look in that mirror over there. I bet the guy you see now looks better than the one who shaved this morning."
"You really believe what you said?"
"Of course. All you have to do is look at the situation from the outside, sir. The problem you had yesterday was tougher than any exercise I had to face at Quantico, but you gutted it out. Listen, I'll tell you a story.
"My first day at Quantico, first day of the officer's course. They line us up, and we meet our Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Willie King—humongous black guy, we called him Son of Kong. Anyway, he looks us up and down and says, 'Girls, I got some good news, and I got some bad news. The good news is, if you prove that you're good enough to get through this here course, you ain't got nothin' left to prove as long as you live. And he waits for a couple of seconds. 'The bad news is, you gotta prove it to me!»
"You were top in your class," the Prince said. He'd been briefed, too.
"I was third in that one. I tied for first in the Basic Officer's Course later on. Yeah, I did okay. That course was a gold-plated sonuvabitch. The only easy thing was sleeping—by the time your day was finished, falling asleep was easy enough. But, you know, Son of Kong was almost right.
"If you make it through Quantico, you know you've done something. After that there was only one more thing left for me to prove, and the Corps didn't have anything to do with that." Ryan paused for a moment. "Her name is Sally. Anyway, you and your family are alive, sir. Okay, I helped—but so did you. And if any reporter-expert says different, you still have the Tower of London, right? I remember that stuff in the press about your wife last year. Damn, if anybody'd talked that way about Cathy I'd have changed his voice for him."
"Changed his voice?" His Highness asked.
"The hard way!" Ryan laughed. "I guess that's a problem with being important—you can't shoot back. Too bad. People in that business could use some manners, and people in your business are entitled to some privacy, just like the rest of us."
"And what of your manners, Sir John?" A real smile now.
"Mea maxima culpa, my Lord Prince, you got me there."
"Still, we might not be here except for you."
"I couldn't just sit there and watch some people get murdered. If situations had been reversed, I'll bet you'd have done the same thing I did."
"You really think so?" His Highness was surprised.
"Sir, are you kidding? Anybody dumb enough to jump out of an airplane is dumb enough to try anything."
The Prince stood and walked over to the mirror on the wall. Clearly he liked what he saw there. "Well," he murmured to the mirror. He turned back to voice his last self-doubt.
"And if you had been in my place?"
"I'd probably just've wet my pants," Ryan replied. "But you have an advantage over me, sir. You've thought about this problem for a few years, right? Hell, you practically grew up with it, and you've been through basic training—Royal Marines, too, maybe?"
"Yes, I have."
Ryan nodded. "Okay, so you had your options figured out beforehand, didn't you? They caught you by surprise, sure, but the training shows. You did all right. Honest. Sit back down, and maybe Tony can pour us some coffee."
Wilson did so, though he was clearly uneasy to be close to the heir. The Prince of Wales sipped at his cup while Ryan lit up one of Wilson's cigarettes. His Highness looked on disapprovingly.
"That's not good for you, you know," he pointed out.
Ryan just laughed. "Your Highness, since I arrived in this country, I nearly got run over by one of those two-story buses, I almost got my head blown off by a damned Maoist, then I nearly get myself shish-kabobed by one of your redcoats." Ryan waved the cigarette in the air. "This is the safest damned thing I've done since I got here! What a vacation this's turned out to be."
"You do have a point," the Prince admitted. "And quite a sense of humor, Doctor Ryan."
"I guess the valium—or whatever they're giving me—helps. And the name's Jack." He held out his hand. The Prince took it.
"I was able to meet your wife and daughter yesterday—you were unconscious at the time. I gather that your wife is an excellent physician. Your little daughter is quite wonderful."
"Thanks. How do you like being a daddy?"
"The first time you hold your newborn child…"
"Yeah," Jack said. "Sir, that's what it's all about." He stopped talking abruptly.
Bingo, Ryan thought. A four-month-old baby. If they kidnap the Prince and Princess, well, no government can cave in to terrorism. The politicians and police have tohave a contingency plan already set up for this, don't they? They'd take this town apart one brick at a time, but they wouldn't—couldn't—negotiate anything, and that was just too bad for the grown-ups, but a little baby… damn, there's a bargaining chip! What kind of people would—
"Bastards," Ryan whispered to himself. Wilson blanched, but the Prince suspected what Jack was thinking about.
"Excuse me?"
"They weren't trying to kill you. Hell, I bet you weren't even the real objective… " Ryan nodded slowly. He searched his mind for the data he'd seen on the ULA. There hadn't been much—it hadn't been his area of focus in any case—a few tidbits of shadowy intelligence reports, mixed with a lot of pure conjecture. "They didn't want to kill you at all, I bet. And when you covered the wife and kid, you burned their plan… maybe, or maybe you just—yeah, maybe you just threw them a curve, and that blew their timing a little bit."
"What do you mean?" the Prince asked.
"Goddamned medications slow your brain down," Ryan said mainly to himself. "Have the police told you what the terrorists were up to?"
His Highness sat upright in the chair. "I can't—"
"You don't have to," Ryan cut him off. "Did they tell you that what you did definitely—definitely—saved all of you?"
"No, but—"
"Tony?"
"They told me you were a very clever chap, Jack," Wilson said. "I'm afraid I can't comment further, Your Royal Highness, Doctor Ryan may be correct in his assessment."
"What assessment?" The Prince was puzzled.
Ryan explained. It only took a few minutes.
"How did you arrive at this conclusion, Jack?"
Ryan's mind was still churning through the hypothesis. "Sir, I'm an historian. My business is figuring things out. Before that I was a stockbroker—doing essentially the same thing. It's not all that hard when you think about it. You look for apparent inconsistencies and then you try to figure out why they're not really inconsistent." He concluded, "It's all speculation on my part, but I'm willing to bet that Tony's colleagues are pursuing it." Wilson didn't say anything. He cleared his throat—which was answer enough.
The Prince looked deep into his coffee cup. His face was that of a man who had recovered from fear and shame. Now he contemplated cold anger at what might have been.
"Well, they've had their chance, haven't they?"
"Yes, sir. I imagine if they ever try again, it'll be a lot harder. Right, Tony?"
"I seriously doubt that they will ever try again," Wilson replied. "We should develop some rather good intelligence from this incident. The ULA have stepped over an invisible line. Politically, success might have enhanced their position, but they didn't succeed, did they? This will harm them, harm their 'popular' support. Some people who know them will now consider talking—not to us, you understand, but some of what they say will get to us in due course. They were outcasts before, they will be outcasts even more now."
Will they learn from
this? Ryan wondered. If so, what will they have learned? There's a question. Jack knew that it had only two possible answers, and that those answers were diametrically opposed. He made a mental note. He'd follow up on this when he got home. It wasn't a merely academic exercise now. He had a bullet hole in his shoulder to prove that.
The Prince rose to his feet. "You must excuse me, Jack. I'm afraid I have rather a full day ahead."
"Going back out, eh?"
"If I hide, they've won. I understand that fact better now than when I came in here. And I have something else to thank you for."
"You would have figured it out sooner or later. Better it should be sooner, don't you think?"
"We must see more of each other."
"I'd like that, sir. Afraid I'm stuck here for a while, though."
"We are traveling out of the country soon—the day after tomorrow. It's a state visit to New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. You may be gone before we get back."
"Is your wife up to it, Your Highness?"
"I think so. A change of scenery, the doctor said, is just the ticket. She had a very bad experience yesterday, but" — he smiled—"I think it was harder on me than on her."
I'll buy that, Ryan thought. She's young, she'll bounce back, and at least she has something good to remember. Putting your body between your family and the bullets ought to firm up any relationship. "Hey, she sure as hell knows you love her, sir."
"I do, you know," the Prince said seriously.
"It's the customary reason to get married, sir," Jack replied, "even for us common folk."
"You're a most irreverent chap, Jack."
"Sorry about that." Ryan grinned. So did the Prince.
"No, you're not." His Highness extended his hand. "Thank you, Sir John, for many things."
Ryan watched him leave with a brisk step and a straight back.
"Tony, you know the difference between him and me? I can say that I used to be a Marine, and that's enough. But that poor guy's got to prove it every damned day, to everybody he meets. I guess that's what you have to do when you're in the public eye all the time." Jack shook his head. "There's no way in hell they could pay me enough to take his job."
"He's born to it," Wilson said.
Ryan thought about that. "That's one difference between your country and mine. You think people are born to something. We know that they have to grow into it. It's not the same thing, Tony."
"Well, you're part of it now, Jack."
"I think I should go." David Ashley looked at the telex in his hand. The disturbing thing was that he'd been requested by name. The PIRA knew who he was, and they knew that he was the Security Service executive on the case. How the hell did they know that!
"I agree," James Owens said. "If they're this anxious to talk with us, they might be anxious enough to tell us something useful. Of course, there is an element of risk. You could take someone with you."
Ashley thought about that one. There was always the chance that he'd be kidnapped, but… The strange thing about the PIRA was that they did have a code of conduct. Within their own definitions, they were honorable. They assassinated their targets without remorse, but they wouldn't deal in drugs. Their bombs would kill children, but they'd never kidnapped one. Ashley shook his head.
"No, people from the Service have met with them before and there's never been a problem. I'll go alone." He turned for the door.
"Daddy!" Sally ran into the room and stopped cold at the side of the bed as she tried to figure a way to climb high enough to kiss her father. She grabbed the side rails and set one foot on the bedframe as if it were the monkey bars at her nursery school and sprang upward. Her diminutive frame bent over the edge of the mattress as she scrambled for a new foothold, and Ryan pulled her up.
"Hi, Daddy." Sally kissed him on the cheek.
"And how are you today?"
"Fine. What's that, Daddy?" She pointed.
"It's called a cast," Cathy Ryan answered. "I thought you had to go to the bathroom."
"Okay." Sally jumped back off the bed.
"I think it's in there," Jack said. "But I'm not sure."
"I thought so," Cathy said after surveying Jack's attachment to the bed. "Okay, come on, Sally."
A man had entered behind his family, Ryan saw. Late twenties, very athletic, and nicely dressed, of course. He was also rather good-looking, Jack reflected.
"Good afternoon, Doctor Ryan," he said. "I'm William Greville."
Jack made a guess. "What regiment?"
"Twenty-second, sir."
"Special Air Service?" Greville nodded, a proud but restrained smile on his lips.
"When you care enough to send the very best," Jack muttered. "Just you?"
"And a driver, Sergeant Michaelson, a policeman from the Diplomatic Protection Group."
"Why you and not another cop?"
"I understand your wife wishes to see a bit of the countryside. My father is something of an authority on various castles, and Her Majesty thought that your wife might wish to have an, ah, escort familiar with the sights. Father has dragged me through nearly every old house in England, you see."
"Escort" is the right word, Ryan thought, remembering what the "Special Air Service" really was. The only association they had with airplanes was jumping out of them—or blowing them up.
Greville went on. "I am also directed by my colonel to extend an invitation to our regimental mess."
Ryan gestured at his suspended arm. "Thanks, but that might have to wait a while."
"We understand. No matter, sir. Whenever you have the chance, we'll be delighted to have you in for dinner. We wanted to extend the invitation before the bootnecks, you see." Greville grinned. "What you did was more our sort of op, after all. Well, I had to extend the invitation. You want to see your family, not me."
"Take good care of them… Lieutenant?"
"Captain," Greville corrected. "We will do that, sir." Ryan watched the young officer leave as Cathy and Sally emerged from the bathroom.
"What do you think of him?" Cathy asked.
"His daddy's a count, Daddy!" Sally announced. "He's nice."
"What?"
"His father's Viscount-something-or-other," his wife explained as she walked over. "You look a lot better."
"So do you, babe." Jack craned his neck up to meet his wife's kiss.
"Jack, you've been smoking." Even before they'd gotten married, Cathy had bullied him into stopping.
Her damned sense of smell, Jack thought. "Be nice, I've had a hard day."
"Wimp!" she observed disgustedly.
Ryan looked up at the ceiling. To the whole world I'm a hero, but I smoke a couple of cigarettes and to Cathy that makes me a wimp. He concluded that the world was not exactly overrun with justice.
"Gimme a break, babe."
"Where'd you get them?"
"I have a cop baby-sitting me in here—he had to go someplace a few minutes ago."
Cathy looked around for the offending cigarette pack so that she could squash it. Jack had it stashed under his pillow. Cathy Ryan sat down. Sally climbed into her lap.
"How do you feel?"
"I know it's there, but I can live with it. How'd you make out last night?"
"You know where we are now, right?"
"I heard."
"It's like being Cinderella." Caroline Muller Ryan, MD, grinned.
John Patrick Ryan, PhD, wiggled the fingers of his left hand. "I guess I'm the one who turned into the pumpkin. I guess you're going to make the trips we planned. Good."
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Half the reason for the vacation was to get you away from hospitals, Cathy, remember? No sense taking all the film home unused, is it?"
"It'd be a lot more fun with you."
Jack nodded. He'd looked forward to seeing the castles on the list, too. Like many Americans, Ryan could not have abided the English class system, but that didn't stop him from being fascinated with its trappings. Or something like th
at, he thought. His knighthood, he knew, might change that perspective if he allowed himself to dwell on it.
"Look on the bright side, babe. You've got a guide who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Lord Jones's castle on the coast of whatever. You'll have plenty of time for it, too."
"Yeah," she said, "the police said we'd be staying over a while longer than we planned. I'll have to talk to Professor Lewindowski about that." She shrugged. "They'll understand."
"How do you like the new place? Better than the hotel?"
"You're going to have to see—no, you'll have to experience it." She laughed. "I think hospitality is the national sport over here. They must teach it in the schools, and have quarterly exams. And guess who we're having dinner with tonight?"
"I don't have to guess."
"Jack, they're so nice."
"I noticed. Looks like you're really getting the VIP treatment."
"What's the Special Air Service—he's some kind of pilot?"
"Something like that," Jack said diffidently. Cathy might feel uncomfortable sitting next to a man who had to be carrying a gun. And was trained to use it with as little compunction as a wolf might use his teeth. "You're not asking how I feel."
"I got hold of your chart on the way in," Cathy explained.
"And?"
"You're doing okay, Jack. I see you can move your fingers. I was worried about that."
"How come?"
"The brachial plexus—it's a nerve junction inside your shoulder. The bullet missed it by about an inch and a half. That's why you can move your fingers. The way you were bleeding, I thought the brachial artery was cut, and that runs right next to the nerves. It would have put your arm out of business for good. But" — she smiled—"you lucked out. Just broken bones. They hurt but they heal."
Doctors are so wonderfully objective, Ryan told himself, even the ones you marry. Next thing, she'll say the pain is good for me.
