Grosvenor and I should have the lab almost to ourselves.” Jeremy nodded. Good. Perfect alibis, if ever needed.
Father and son finished their tea, and after hugging his mother, Jeremy went to the car and tossed his travel case into the back seat. As his father drove, the son wrote a note and handed it over: “You
Jeremy leaned back and studied his father, who held the steering wheel lightly with the gentle, sure hands of a talented surgeon, a man who had worked hard his whole life only to see his dreams crushed. He deserved better. The young medical student had fallen in love with England the moment he set foot in the country from his battered homeland of Lebanon. The golden history of the British Empire enthralled him, and he trekked all over the country, wanting to become part of it but knowing that he could never really be a true Englishman because of his deep skin color, his dark eyes and hair, and the accent; a foreigner forever. To close the distance between him and the society of which he so desperately wanted to be a part, he committed the greatest shame of his life, abandoning his country of birth to become a British citizen.
Aziz Osman gained a reputation as a brilliant young doctor who healed patients of high social status. That was until the old and cancer-riddled Lady Wallendar died beneath his knife. It mattered not that the obese woman was in her eighties, and an extraordinarly poor candidate for any sort of surgery. When Osman opened her up, he found the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart almost destroyed. Then she had a myocardial infarction while on the operating table, and it was all over in twenty minutes. Lord Wallendar had wanted a miracle and, by God, had paid handsomely to get one. He blamed Osman, and from that moment the surgeon was tainted as just another worthless wog saw-bones. The big door of class slammed shut, with Osman on the wrong side, and his practice and dreams evaporated.
The doctor determined that his children should not have to face that same barrier, and after taking the advice of friends, Aziz Osman went to court and formally anglicized his name. Aziz became Allen; Dr. Osman added a single letter and became Dr. Osmand. The next year, his son was born, and Jeremy Osmand grew up about as English as a boy could be.
The car pulled up at the new St. Pancras International train station in King’s Cross, and Jeremy removed his bag and went inside. Since he would be traveling to the Continent, he ran the magnetically encoded card through a reading device and passed smoothly through customs and an X-ray tunnel, for he had nothing to hide. Once in the sterilized zone for departures, he would not have to go through customs on the other end of his journey, the Bruxelles-Midi station in Belgium. The high-speed Eurostar departed at 6:10 A.M., with Jeremy resting comfortably in seat 55 on the aisle of the first-class, nonsmoking car number 9, reading an
The Eurostar sped into the mouth of the thirty-one-mile Channel Tunnel, dashed through the Chunnel, and popped up in Europe. Two and a half hours after leaving London, he was in Brussels. He took a cab to the Silken Berlaymont Hotel on the Boulevard Charlemagne, asked for and got early check-in, and went directly to his room. With the wink of a tiny green light above the handle, the electronic coded card opened the door.
Jeremy Osmand turned on the television and placed his cell phone on a small, polished table beside the soft chair facing the set, then hung up his jacket and brewed a pot of tea in the little kitchenette. He checked his watch again and transformed himself, the genial personality of the pleasant Englishman sliding away like the discarded skin of a snake. His feelings shut down. He became Juba.
SECURITY AGENCIES WERE IN overdrive, for nothing could be allowed to mar the wedding or threaten the royals. The streets around Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral were searched a dozen times, and officers were posted in every building along the route. Security cameras were everywhere, their little eyes probing and curious. Uniformed policemen from the boroughs were brought in for duty, and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch detectives threaded through the throng. British soldiers in combat gear were stationed in plain view.
Tuesday was a national holiday in Great Britain, and about seven hundred thousand people were jammed into the parks near the palace-Kensington, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s. Each person had been searched before being allowed through the security cordon. The Royal Wedding Command Center in the Palace Gardens had been going nonstop for seventy-two hours before the ceremony and was not to stand down until William and Barbara left for their honeymoon at a private place unknown to the general public.
Every cop in England was looking the wrong way.
The wedding went off without a problem, and the royal couple signed the register after the ceremony and walked back down the red carpet, with Barbara needing help from her bridesmaids to maneuver the twenty-five-foot train of her antique lace and ivory silk gown. The prince and his smiling, radiantly beautiful bride stepped into sunshine amid nonstop cheers and hurrahs and got into a special open landau drawn by a matched team for the trip back to the palace, escorted by the glittering Horse Guards.
Juba, in Belgium, watched the carriage depart and gave it a three-minute start through the adoring crowd. He held his cell phone in both hands. When he finally dialed a number, the call bounced off a satellite and into London. It caused a dart of electricity to pulse across the microscopic gap between two strips of copper, closing the circuit in the small bomb beneath the floorboard in the purple and white press van rented by the Italians. It was a crude device, but all he needed to generate an explosion from the C-4 to rupture the lead container.
The explosion detonated the gas tank and caused a secondary eruption. The Edinburgh van tore apart as the blast peeled away its sides and knocked over the antennas of several nearby trucks. Flying pieces of metal became deadly shrapnel, and all four members of the European technical crew and three passersby were killed. Although the unruffled BBC commentators, far from the scene, continued describing the parade, the explosion was clearly heard by thousands on the ground, and the plume of smoke in the rear of the media headquarters in Kensington Park was seen by millions of television viewers before the camera intentionally swung away.
The horses pulling the landau of the prince and his new princess broke into a fast trot, and the mounted guard closed around them, sheathing their ceremonial swords and pulling free the carbines attached to their saddles.
Kimberly Drake was stunned. The unexpected explosion had smashed her against another truck, and she toppled to the ground, out of breath and dazed. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs just as the strong hands of Tom Lester, her cameraman, scooped her up.
Tom Lester, a photojournalist for more than twenty years, had stepped over a lot of bodies in a couple of wars. Any explosion that did not kill him was someone else’s problem, but he had not seen one in London since the IRA had quieted down. He looked at his reporter and saw no blood. Just shock. He poured water into a cupped hand, wiped her face, and gave her a drink. That was enough tender loving care, and he shook her by the shoulder. Hard. “Wake the fuck up, Kim! Pull yourself together! A monster story just fell right on your lucky little head!” He turned to see the young engineer looking out of the doorway of their van. “Get back inside, Harold. Get us up live to Little Rock right now. Move, kid! We’re not here as sightseers.” He snatched his camera and looked it over, wiped the lens, then hoisted it to his shoulder and adjusted the eyepiece to frame the fire, the debris, and the dead.
Kim was pegged to the spot by indecision over whether to cover the story or help the bleeding victims around her. Lester shouted, “Get with it, Drake! This story is all ours for the time being, but others are going to be coming. It’s your moment, girl. Grab it with both hands.”
“But these people, Tom…”
“Fuck ’em,” he snarled. “We all take our chances in this game. They caught it, we didn’t. Shit happens. The medics will be here in a few minutes for them anyway, and our job is to cover the goddam story! You make up your mind right now whether you want to be a reporter or Florence Nightingale. You stop to help those poor bastards and you can kiss your career good-bye.” He had to keep her focused, keep her mind busy, or she would falter. Fucking newbie.
Harold ran up and rigged them with collar microphones and earpieces. “We’ve got the station. Go!”
“Kim? What’s happening over there?” The familiar voice of the news director back home in Arkansas comforted her.
