He borrowed a pair of field glasses from a spotter and trained them on the target window.
"Be over soon, chaps," he muttered.
It was. The window glass abruptly shattered under the force of an SAS soldier in full flight. He struck the concrete like a sack of potatoes. After a short time, he was joined by a second man and then a third. They made a neat pile on the pavement.
A man's face poked out of the broken window.
"Don't make that mistake again," an American voice shouted from the wrecked window.
"The ruddy bastard!" Colonel Upton-Downs shouted. "Take him out! Take the bounder out now!"
Rifle muzzles jumped to the ready. Fingers caressed triggers.
"Uh-uh," the American said. "Naughty, naughty." Colonel Upton-Downs abruptly changed his mind. "Hold fire! Drat it! Hold your damned fire!"
For the American was holding the Royal Sceptre in front of his face. He shook one finger at them as if at pranking children.
"Let's not make any messy mistakes," he said, withdrawing from the window.
Dejectedly the colonel trudged back to the hotel lobby. The prime minister was not going to take this in good humor.
The prime minister accepted the news with a flinty "Thank you, Colonel. Stand by." She laid the phone down without hanging up and faced her cabinet, who were arrayed around a conference table at Number Ten Downing Street.
"The assault has failed," she told them. "We must now consider other options."
"Such as?" the home secretary inquired.
"Such as, my dear man, that these terrorists are sincere in their belief. You all know the American situation. Our exchange has just closed after taking a tremendous beating. It can only get worse. The Far Eastern markets are bound to react badly to what is happening in Europe and America. And we will feel the brunt of the next wave of selling panic. It may never end."
"I fear if the American situation is as bad as they say," the minister of finance pointed out, "it will not matter. They are practically bankrupting their exchange in their frenzy to sell."
"Could someone be causing this?"
"Balderdash." The murmur of assent that followed the foreign minister's remark reminded the prime minister of Parliament during her heyday, when she used to ride roughshod over the simpering cowards.
"What manner of bloody fool would attempt such a thing, knowing it would ruin our own economy?" the finance minister remarked pointedly.
"Communist plant, possibly?" Sir Guy Phillistone blandly suggested between sucks on his broken pipe.
"It's a thought," the home secretary muttered. "Lord knows we've had enough of them."
No one joined in the home secretary's uncertain laughter.
The prime minister shook her head. "The Communist world looks to the West for economic salvation," she said. "This is not one of their operations. If we sink, they follow us to the bottom." She spanked the table with a palm. "Think, gentlemen. Think. If you have the knack for it."
Stung, the cabinet looked to one another in embarrassment. But the cutting remark cleared the air. They stopped talking and began thinking.
"You know," the chancellor of the exchequer began slowly, " I have been receiving these wildly incoherent letters of late. About one every fortnight, informing me that the signal has been received and something called the Grand Plan has commenced."
"And what do you do with these letters?" the prime minister inquired.
"Why, I dispose of them, of course. They are obviously the scrawling of a crackpot."
"And does this crackpot have a name?"
"Yes, a Sir Quincy, I believe."
"And have you none of these letters at all?"
"I fear the most recent of them has gone into the rubbish," the chancellor of the exchequer admitted.
The prime minister rose quickly. "Find that letter. Get down on your hands and knees in the rubbish, if you must. It is all we have. Gentlemen, let's get on this, shall we?"
As they filed from the room, the prime minister picked up the still-open telephone line and began issuing new instructions to a very surprised Colonel Upton-Downs.
The letter, smelling of old cigarette butts and loose tea, was on the prime minister's Downing Street desk within the hour.
She picked it up with sure fingers and an offended expression on her face. The letter was still in its crumpled envelope. The return address was smudged, but the bottom line was still legible, reading "Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 2LJ.
"This narrows it down," she murmured, extracting the letter. It did indeed read as if written by a crackpot. It rambled, dwelling on the fading glory of the British Empire, soon to flower again like a phoenix. A colorful if illiterate metaphor, the prime minister thought.
The final paragraph said, "Vide Royal Reclamation Charter." It was signed: "Faithfully yours, Sir Quincy Chiswick."
The prime minister looked up Sir Quincy Chiswick in her office copy of Burke's Peerage. She learned that he was Regius Professor of History at Nuffing College. A call to the college brought the news that the staff had all left for the day. There was no one competent to retrieve his address or telephone number.
The prime minister called for directory information and asked if there was a telephone subscriber known as Sir Quincy Chiswick in Oxford or Oxfordshire. The prime minister was assured, after a ten-minute delay, that there was none.
She thanked the operator and hung up. Ringing her secretary, she told him, "Have them go through Public Records for a document called the Royal Reclamation Charter. "
"That could take a bit of doing."
"Then I would begin now," the prime minister said sharply, giving her secretary the benefit of her piranha smile.
The man went away. The prime minister personally put her own call through to the Morton Court Hotel.
"Hello, desk? Could you kindly put me through to the terrorists in Room Twenty-eight? Thank you."
Remo Williams picked up the phone. The woman's voice sounded familiar, so when she identified herself as the prime minister of England, he didn't give her an argument.
"Pssst! Chiun, I got the prime minister on the line."
I only speak with royalty," Chiun curtly replied.
"Sorry," Remo told the prime minister. "He's indisposed. Your sexless soap operas have him enthralled." Remo listened for five minutes without getting in a word edgewise. Then he turned to the Master of Sinanju.
"She says they have the guy's name," he said. "They can't find him, but they think he lives in Oxford. Isn't that a shoe?"
"Inform the prime minister that I will allow you to search for this person in the town of Oxford."
"You? Allow me?"
"Tell her," Chiun commanded.
Remo returned to the phone. "Here's the deal," he said. " I get safe conduct to Oxford, free rein to search for this guy, and the Sceptre and my friend stay here, unmolested. Got that?"
The prime minister did. Remo hung up.
"Okay, it's a done deal," he told Chiun. "Are you sure this is the best way to go about this?"
"No," Chiun said flatly. "But if I go, I will miss the end of this story." He did not look away from the screen when he said it.
"Good thinking," Remo said airily. "I'll be in touch."
Remo strolled through the lobby, passing the sullen-faced SAS soldiers.
"Keep a stiff upper lip," he called as he went down the steps.
At the curb, a car waited for him, along with an unarmed SAS colonel holding a set of keys up for Remo's inspection.
"Here you go, Yank," the colonel said in a civil if testy voice. "We've got you a Vauxhall Cavalier. Nice machine. British-made, you know."
"Thanks," Remo said, taking the keys. He opened the left-hand door.
"The wheel is on the other side," the colonel said, smirking.
"I knew that," Remo lied, sliding all the way in. He put the key in the ignition and started the engine.
The colonel leaned into the window. "Take the roundabout at Regen
t's Park. There you can pick up the A-Forty north to Oxfordshire. That will get you to Oxford in jig time."
"How many kilometers?"
"Haven't the foggiest. But it's about fifty miles as the crow flies, if that means anything to you."
"It does," Remo growled.
"There's a map in the glove- box. There's extra petrol in the boot, and the motor's under the bonnet, just as in the States."
" I sure wish we both spoke the same language," Remo remarked dryly.
"As I do, chap. Toodles."
Remo pulled away. He found the road. But as he drove along, the green-and-white signs that he assumed marked the A40 became the A35 and then the A40 again. None of them actually had an A before the numbers. Remo began wondering if maybe he was mistaking the speed-limit signs for highway markers. Occasionally he passed blue signs that also said 40.
After he got out of the city, Remo found a blue sign that said 404. He knew he had it figured out then. It must be the A404. Nobody, not even the British, drove 404 miles an hour.
Remo settled down for the long ride.
Chapter 27
The New York Stock Exchange bottomed out at high noon, after only two and a half hours of stop-and-start trading.
The Dow stood at 1188.7 like a rock poised at the edge of a precipice, buoyed by Crown Acquisition's insatiable appetite for undervalued stocks-which was virtually everything that traded over the New York and American stock exchanges, as well as NASDAQ.
Then others jumped in. Still monitoring the DOT system, Smith saw that the first wave consisted of frantic buying by Looncraft, Dymstar d. The Lippincott Mercantile Bank also leapt in with slavering jowls, buying up airline and electronic stocks. DeGoone Slickens went for the oil companies. And others came in-all prestigious centuried firms with good sound Anglo-Saxon names.
And Smith began to see it for what it truly was. An old-fashioned investor pool-the kind stock speculators used to employ to corner the market before SEC regulations put a stop to it. It was the original hostile-takeover scheme. The so-called Loyalists were working in concert, and no one could stop them.
For they represented the nation's oldest business concerns, its most affluent families. A hundred years ago, they would have controlled ninety-five percent of American commerce, education, and politics. But this was the late twentieth century, when even the Boston Brahmins no longer lorded it over Boston.
But soon all that could change. They were buying up the country, literally cornering the market in American business. Ten years ago this scheme could never have worked. But a decade of mergers and leveraged buy-outs had consolidated the national economy into a tight circle most of whom were either Loyalists or so-called Conscripts. Smith had seen the bulletin announcing that the New York Stock Exchange board had voted to keep trading no matter what. Their voting was a matter of public record. No wonder the chairman's warning had been overridden. They were the New York Stock Exchange too. They were also the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although what was transpiring before his eyes was flagrantly illegal, there might be no way to enforce those laws without crushing the nation's economic center of power. They were the economy.
More chillingly, they were America.
Smith sank back in his leather chair, his face haggard. The stock market was coming back, slowly, haltingly. But there was momentum. The bulls were running again. The market might even come roaring back. The Global News Network was already predicting it through its spokesman and owner, P. M. Looncraft.
But when it was all over, the economy of the strongest democracy on earth would have changed hands like a rumpled dollar bill.
Smith leaned into his computer like a fighter pilot about to trip his machine guns. It was time to play his trump card. He brought up the Mayflower Descendants bulletin board and engaged a program labeled "TRACEWORM."
When it was up and running, he pressed the "Send" key. He grabbed the red telephone next.
"Mr. President," he rapped out. "Do not ask questions. Just listen to me. This is merely a precaution. I want you to purge your Secret Service protective detail of all agents bearing Anglo-Saxon surnames. Just do it. Please . . . Yes, Italians are fine. It doesn't matter, just avoid persons of British ancestry." Smith paused. "Yes, it would be a good idea to cancel your meeting with the Vice-President. One final matter: were you successful in arranging Looncraft's summons to London? Excellent. I will explain everything later. Good-bye, Mr. President."
After he hung up, Smith wiped away the steam a sudden flash of nervous perspiration had caused to condense on his eyeglasses.
His intercom buzzed.
"Mr. Smith. Mr. Winthrop is here to see you."
Smith started. "Here?"
"He's very insistent."
"Tell him to go away," Smith snapped.
"I've tried to, but- Wait! You can't go in there."
Smith hit the concealed stud that sent the CURE terminal dropping into his desk interior. The desktop panel clicked into place just in time. The office door flew open.
Smith rose from his seat angrily.
"What do you mean by barging in like this?" he demanded.
The man who paused at the open door was well over six feet tall and built along the lines of Ichabod Crane. His face was red with indignation.
"I am Nigel Winthrop, Dr. Smith," he said testily. "And I will be put off no longer. This matter is urgent."
Smith hesitated. "Urgent?"
"If you will give me but a moment of your time . . ."
"Make it quick," Smith snapped. "I'm extremely busy. It's all right, Mrs. Mikulka," he added, nodding to his secretary, who hovered behind Winthrop like a nervous hen.
The door closed and Nigel Winthrop pulled a chair up to Smith's desk.
"I don't know if you remember me, Dr. Smith . . ." Winthrop began.
"Your name is familiar," Smith admitted.
"I managed your father's estate."
Smith blinked. Yes, it came back to him now. Winthrop and Weymouth. His father's law firm. He could remember seeing the letterhead on his father's desk many times as a boy.
"My father's estate was settled years ago," Smith said, stiff-voiced.
"And you were cut off."
"Ancient history," Smith snapped. He didn't like to be reminded that his own father had disinherited him.
Winthrop opened a leather briefcase and took out a sealed letter. He handed it to Smith.
"This letter was entrusted to me by your father, Dr. Smith. It was to be given to you, or to your eldest son in the event of your decease."
"I have no sons, only a daughter," Smith said.
"Open it, please."
Smith opened the letter with a red plastic letter opener and extracted a thick sheaf of folded papers. He read the salutation. It was addressed to him.
Smith read along, his eyes widening.
To my son, Harold:
I write this to you in life, but I will be dead when and if you read it. We have had our differences, Harold. You have failed me as a son. I know you bear me ill will because I could not accept your refusal to take over the family firm. I could not tell you otherwise while I lived, but this letter will help you understand that my hopes and dreams for you had nothing to do with publishing those cheap, shoddy magazines, but with something immensely greater.
If there is any family loyalty left in you, Harold, if any particle of red Anglo-Saxon blood flows through your veins, heed it now. Put aside your differences with me, for queen and empire are calling to you with clarion voice to rewrite a terrible wrong that a band of ragtag lawless rabble perpetrated on this proud colony many years ago. I refer to the shameful severing of this country from Mother England.
"Good God," Smith choked. He looked up at Winthrop. "Do you have any idea what this says?"
"I do. Please finish the letter, Dr. Smith."
Smith read on. It was all there, in his own father's handwriting. How after the signing of the Treaty of Yorktown, ending the American Revoluti
on, a cell of Tory sleeper agents had been created on order of King George III. They were to await the proper time, and a signal from the crown, to activate. And by whatever means possible, to bring America to financial ruin.
"My own father . . ." Smith said under his breath. The papers in his hands shook. He shook. His weak gray eyes seemed to recede into his gaunt patrician face.
"Your father is offering you a second chance," Nigel Winthrop was saying quietly. "Here is an opportunity to redeem yourself in his eyes, Smith. You loved your father. Like these colonies, you were strong-willed, stiff-necked, and stubborn. All that is past. I must have your decision now, for my inability to contact you has kept you from entering the fray like the true Englishman that you are by birthright. "
Smith looked up from the letter. There were tears in his eyes.
"But . . . I love my country," he said in a quavering voice.
"Surely you must love your father more," Winthrop said firmly. "And do not fear for America." Winthrop smiled, exposing tea-stained teeth. "It is our country too. We are merely returning it to its proper place in the grand scheme of things. Now, I must have your answer."
Chapter 28
Remo Williams got lost on the A40 and ended up in a pastoral hamlet called Aylesbury.
He had to ask directions of three different people-not because the natives weren't forthcoming with directions, but because he had to hear the same directions three times before the thick local accent was comprehensible to him.
As he got back on the A40, he understood what was meant by whoever had said that Americans and British were a people separated by a common language.
Oxford resembled a crumbling fairyland from a distance, but when he found his way onto its narrow ancient streets, he was surprised to see a Kwik Kopy photocopy outlet and the usual fast-food restaurants. There was even a store that dealt exclusively in comic books, called Comic Showcase.
Remo looked around for a place to park. He caught sight of a space in a long row of undersize European cars on High Street, and he pulled into it--only then noticing the bright red cast-iron device set in the sidewalk. It looked like an overgrown fireplug, and Remo wondered if he'd be towed for parking there.
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