Patriot Games

Jack nodded. 'Doesn't sound real smart, does it?'

'You bloody fool.' Wilson said this just as Kittiwake came through the door with a tea tray. The nurse flashed the cop an emphatically disapproving look as she set the tray on the bedstand and wheeled it over. Kittiwake arranged things just so, and poured Ryan a cup with delicacy. Wilson had to do his own.

'So who was in the car, anyway?' Ryan asked. He noted strong reactions.

'You didn't know?' Kittiwake was dumbfounded.

'There wasn't much time to find out.' Ryan dropped two packets of brown sugar into his cup. His stirring stopped abruptly when Wilson answered his question.

'The Prince and Princess of Wales. And their new baby.'

Ryan's head snapped around. 'What?'

'You really didn't know?' the nurse asked.

'You're serious,' Ryan said quietly. They wouldn't kid about this, would they?

'Too bloody right. I'm serious,' Wilson went on, his voice very even. Only his choice of words betrayed how deeply the affair disturbed him. 'Except for you, they would all three be quite dead, and that makes you a bloody hero, Doctor Ryan.' Wilson sipped his tea neatly and fished out a cigarette.

Ryan set his cup down. 'You mean you let them drive around here without a police or secret service— whatever you call it—without an escort?'

'Supposedly it was an unscheduled trip. Security arrangements for the Royals are not my department in any case. I would speculate, however, that those whose department it is will be rethinking a few things,' Wilson commented.

'They weren't hurt?'

'No, but their driver was killed. So was their security escort from DPG—Diplomatic Protection Group—Charlie Winston. I knew Charlie. He had a wife, you know, and four children, all grown.'

Ryan observed that the Rolls should have had bulletproof glass.

Wilson grunted. 'It did have bulletproof glass. Actually plastic, a complex polycarbonate material. Unfortunately, no one seems to have read what it said on the box. The guarantee is only for a year. Turns out that sunlight breaks the material down somehow or other. The windshield was no more use than ordinary safety glass. Our friend McCrory put thirty rounds into it, and it quite simply shattered, killing the driver first. The interior partition, thank God, had not been exposed to sunlight, and remained intact. The last thing Charlie did was push the button to put it up. That probably saved them, too—didn't do Charlie much good, though. He had enough time to draw his automatic, but we don't think he was able to get a shot off.'

Ryan thought back. There had been blood in the back of the Rolls—not just blood. The driver's head had been blown apart, and his brains had scattered into the passenger compartment. Jack winced thinking about it. The escort had probably leaned over to push the button before defending himself… Well, Jack thought, that's what they pay them for. What a hell of a way to earn a living.

'It was fortunate that you intervened when you did. They both had hand grenades, you know.'

'Yeah, I saw one.' Ryan sipped away the last of his tea. 'What the hell was I thinking about?' You weren't thinking at all, Jack. That's what you were thinking about.

Kittiwake saw Ryan go pale. 'You feel quite all right?' she asked.

'I guess.' Ryan grunted in wonderment. 'Dumb as I was, I must feel pretty good—I ought to be dead.'

'Well, that most emphatically will not happen here.' She patted his hand. 'Please ring me if you need anything.' Another beaming smile and she left.

Ryan was still shaking his head. 'The other one got away?'

Wilson nodded. 'We found the car near a tube station a few blocks away. It was stolen, of course. No real problem for him to get clean away. Disappear into the underground. Go to Heathrow, perhaps, and catch a plane to the continent—Brussels, say—then a plane to Ulster or the Republic, and a car the rest of the way home. That's one route; there are others, and it's impossible to cover them all. He was drinking beer last night, watching the news coverage on television in his favorite pub, most likely. Did you get a look at him?'

'No, just a shape. I didn't even think to get the tag number—dumb. Right after that the redcoat came running up to me.' Ryan winced again. 'Christ, I thought he'd put that pigsticker right through me. For a second there I could see it all—I do something right, then get wasted by a good guy.'

Wilson laughed. 'You don't know how lucky you were. The current guard force is from the Welsh Guards.'

'So?'

'His Royal Highness's own regiment, as it were. He's their colonel-in-chief. There you were with a pistol—how would you expect him to react?' Wilson stubbed out his cigarette. 'Another piece of good luck, your wife and daughter came running up to you, and the soldier decides to wait a bit, just long enough for things to sort themselves out. Then our chap catches up with him and tells him to stand easy. And a hundred more of my chaps come swooping in.

'I hope you can appreciate this, Doctor. Here we were with three men dead, two others wounded, a Prince and Princess looking as though they'd been shot—your wife examined them on the scene, by the way, and pronounced them fit just before the ambulance arrived—a baby, a hundred witnesses each with his own version of what had just taken place. A bloody Yank—an Irish-American to boot! — whose wife claims he's the chap in the white hat.' Wilson laughed again. 'Total chaos!

'First order of business, of course, was to get the Royals to safety. The police and guardsmen handled that, probably praying by this time that someone would make trouble. They're still in an evil mood, they tell me, angrier even than from the bandstand bombing incident. Not hard to understand. Anyway, your wife flatly refused to leave your side until you were under doctor's care here. Quite a forceful woman, they tell me.'

'Cathy's a surgeon,' Ryan explained. 'When she plays doc, she's used to having her own way. Surgeons are like that.'

'After she was quite satisfied we drove her down to the Yard. Meanwhile we had a merry time identifying you. They called your Legal Attache at the American Embassy and he ran a check through your FBI, plus a backup check through the Marine Corps.' Ryan stole a cigarette from Wilson's pack. The policeman lit it with a butane lighter. Jack gagged on the smoke, but he needed it. Cathy would give him hell for it, he knew, but one thing at a time. 'Mind you, we never really thought you were one of them. Have to be a maniac to bring the wife and child along on this sort of job. But one must be careful.'

Ryan nodded agreement, briefly dizzy from the smoke. How'd they know to check through the Corps… oh, my Marine Corps Association card…

'In any event we have things pretty well sorted out. Your government are sending us everything we need— probably here by now, actually.' Wilson checked his watch.

'My family's all right?'

Wilson smiled in rather an odd way. 'They are being very well looked after, Doctor Ryan. You have my word on that.'

'The name's Jack.'

'Fine. I'm known to my friends as Tony.' They finally got around to shaking hands. 'And as I said, you're a bloody hero. Care to see what the press have to say?' He handed Ryan a Daily Mirror and a Times.

'Dear God!'

The tabloid Mirror's front page was almost entirely a color photograph of himself, sitting unconscious against the Rolls. His chest was a scarlet mass.

ATTEMPT ON HRH—MARINE TO THE RESCUE

A bold attempt to assassinate Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales within sight of Buckingham Palace was thwarted today by the courage of an American tourist.

John Patrick Ryan, an historian and formerly a lieutenant in the United States Marines, dashed barehanded into a pitched battle on The Mall as over a hundred Londoners watched in shocked disbelief. Ryan, 31, of Annapolis, Maryland, successfully disabled one gunman and, taking his weapon, shot another dead. Ryan himself was seriously wounded in the exchange. He was taken by ambulance to St. Thomas's Hospital, where emergency surgery was