The South Lawn Plot

by Ray O'Hanlon

  The bottom line, based on information coming in from Britain through media, official and intelligence channels, was that the prince's defection, for want of a better word, was somehow tied to a series of murders of Catholic priests and that there was a connection, unclear and unproven, to the office of the prime minister, to Number 10 Downing Street.

  Conway was staring at the door. The president and Spencer were due to appear at any second after their private conversation in the West Wing. And as she considered whether not to tell her superiors about the storm breaking about the guest of honor's head, the two men came into view, Packer leading Spencer by the arm and pointing at portraits of presidents and patriots, one or two of whom had distinguished themselves battling the prime minister's predecessors.

  “And as you know, Mr. Prime Minister, we might be rolling out the cannon again in the next couple of days.”

  To Conway's ear, Packer's already booming voice seemed to have risen a few decibels. Clearly, she thought, the president's adrenaline was up. It would mean that he would be extra lively with the crowd and would no doubt bust through the rope.

  She tapped her earphone, nodded to the other agents who would be taking the lead with her and stepped in front of the president and Spencer. Dalton, she knew, would be bringing up the rear along with Rafter, the president's belt buddy.

  Conway had decided not to wear sunglasses on her debut and, as it turned out, they were unnecessary. It had turned cloudy, although the heat of the afternoon was a slap to the senses as soon as they were clear of the building and its circulated, cool air.

  The crowd was milling about the lawn with many taking refuge under the canopy where drinks were being served. There were no chairs. The ceremony was to be a truncated one given the situation on the far side of the globe. Sometimes, Conway thought, geopolitics had its virtues. A couple of short speeches, the presentation of a ceremonial check, photos and some flesh-pressing and her debut would be over.

  She walked slowly towards the steps leading up to the stage, ignoring the band's hailing to the chief and taking in the people lining the velvet rope. They were applauding and cheering, some were overly excited; none appeared to be threatening.

  Walking in front of the stage, Conway kept her eyes looking left. Dalton and Rafter would be mounting the stage with the president. She was to stand with her back to the presidential podium. And as she did so she noticed some in the crowd were staring at her. This, of course, was potentially distracting so she gave into the inevitable, reached into her suit pocket and extracted her Ray Bans.

  Now I look the part, she thought, and as she did so, Packer began to speak.

  Pender had his lens focused on Lau. The news from Britain had made its way from the reporters to the photographers with the inevitable result. Most of the cameras were pointed towards Spencer, a few at the president. But Pender had Lau in his sights. He was sitting behind the president staring out over the crowd and into the distance. He didn't look too well. But, of course, he wasn't. Pender checked his watch. It was almost four, the appointed hour for the presentation and ceremonial handshakes. He shook his head and rolled his eyes as a rumble of thunder to his rear grew louder.

  “But, of course,” he said as he reached for a camera cover though, as yet, it had not started to rain.

  The changing weather seemed to energize the various White House aides and the security teams hovering around both leaders. Packer, his long arms extended, began to herd his guests off the podium towards a spot on the lawn where a green mat had been placed.

  Lau moved with surprising agility despite the walking cane, Pender observed. The group descended from the podium and took its position for what the program had described as the ceremonial presentation of a check, or a presentation of a ceremonial check, Pender could not quite remember which.

  The president was all smiles. Spencer looked grim because this was the point that reporters would get to ask questions. Lau seemed to be smiling, or trying to. The three lined up at their designated spot, fifteen feet from the camera positions.

  “This is a great day. Despite the cloud hanging over our world, this is proof positive that the work of peace goes on. I hope it will inspire others to embrace that path of peace,” Packer said to a smattering of applause.

  It was a clear reference to the Chinese, and Pender noticed Lau nodding. The man was no longer smiling.

  Pender lifted his head momentarily to get his bearings. Spencer was on his left, Lau was in the middle, and Packer was on his right. On either side, but just outside what would be the frame of the coming photographs were two women, one a buffed looking Secret Service agent standing to Packer's left. A smaller woman with short blonde hair was standing a little behind and to Spencer's right. Another man was a standing right behind Packer but would not figure once Pender had zoomed in on his big three.

  “Here we go,” he said as his eye returned to his camera.

  He would later tell a friend that the next few seconds seemed to last minutes with the added effect that they would rewind in his mind's eye, over and over. Packer was talking and gesticulating with his hands, Spencer was nodding. Lau was leaning over on his stick and seemingly putting something in his mouth.

  Now he was standing straight, a look of amazement on his face, or so it seemed. He began to convulse even as the thunder exploded overhead and the South Lawn was struck with a rain shower and blast of wind that was tropical in its suddenness and intensity.

  The other photographers around him were pushing equipment into bags but Pender kept shooting, even as Lau hit the ground and Packer fell into the arms of the agent, the woman, who caught him before he hit the ground. Spencer was on his knees, the other woman, presumably part of his police protection unit, had her hands around his torso but she wasn't pulling him up; rather she was crumpled over the prime minister.

  Pandemonium followed with people screaming and agents running in from the sides. Paramedics appeared within seconds and the entire scene became enveloped in a strange sepia light as the storm cloud began to give way to the sun. Somebody shouted that the president had been struck by lightning.

  Pender finally lifted his head. He had the shot. He had completed his assignment. He jammed his camera into his bag and moved to the back of the stands. He knew that he would not leave the White House for many hours and that his photos would be considered evidence. No matter, they would be all over the world before then anyway, and Lau would have his immortality.

  Pender glanced up. The sun was breaking through and the great house, witness to so much history, though never an assassination, seemed to almost shimmer in the new light. There were flower boxes on the circular balcony overlooking the South Lawn, the one named after Truman. Pender stared at the balcony, the red blooms. He knew he would remember the moment for ever.

  63

  A LIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING by the time Falsham reached the house. Now that he was responsible for considerable lands and a small army of tenant farmers he knew he had to take note of such things. Spring rains would be a gift from God, assuming they did not exceed his need to the point that the land in use ended up like the marshes just a few miles distant.

  Dismounting from his horse, Falsham went down on a knee and placed his gloved hand flat on the bare soil that had been churned up by the hooves of horses, his and others. Then he removed the glove and placed his bare hand on the same spot.

  Mine, he thought. It was an idea that Falsham still found difficult to fully comprehend. He had spent most of his life as a wandering soldier. He had wandered through Europe's monarchies and wars as if in a dream. He had listened to old men's tales in Flanders and Spain where the shadow of the Moor still stretched back to North Africa and beyond to the Holy Land, a place of mystery, sanctity and the abode of long dead crusaders and warrior bands such as the Assassins.

  He had, he now knew, taken his comparative freedom very much as God given. Now he would have to stay in one place though his imagination would, in turn, have to range far
and wide in response to the instructions of the old man whose dying wish had been for Falsham and his heirs see England's throne once again in union with mother church.

  Falsham sighed. If only, he thought, life would be but one course, and a simple one.

  Standing now, he noticed the young boy who had emerged from the stable yard to fetch the horse. The boy was clutching something, a folded piece of paper. Falsham nodded and the boy reached for the horse even as he held out the paper with a muttered “My lord.”

  Falsham smiled at the salute but his lightness of mood quickly receded as he read the contents of the message. His presence was required in London, and urgently.For an instant, Falsham thought of taking a fresh horse and setting out at once but just as quickly decided against it. He would take a night at Ayvebury and be “my lord” for its duration. He would set out in the morning.

  Falsham was convinced, or had convinced himself, that the path to the old faith, or at least what the heretics considered the old faith, was open and clear. What caused him uncertainty was its length. His mission might take a year or years, perhaps many years. But he had no doubt of its ultimate success. God would not fail those in the right.

  The rain was heavier now, and Falsham turned towards the great house, his house. He would need heirs. What was bequeathed to him, the house and its great lands, would always attract avaricious eyes; this he knew for certain.

  “Oh, for simplicity in life,” Falsham said as he entered the stable yard. But he knew that such a life was not to be. God had other demands of him.

  64

  BAILEY'S JAW STILL HURT. The Secret Service agent had caught him full with a straight arm blow as he had dashed free of the reporters roped in area once it was evident that Samantha was in trouble.

  Funny, but he had felt no pain at the moment of impact. Nor indeed for some time afterwards. It had started to throb on the flight back to London, and it sure was throbbing now.

  He had been given a few days off to recover. Well earned, Henderson had said, which was about as generous as the man would ever get with his words.

  But even Henderson knew this to be an understatement. The story, the stories, had been nothing less than sensations, the biggest in years, a perfect storm of news that had demanded extra print runs. And who said newspapers were history?

  “Ouch,” said Bailey as he stifled a yawn. He was still jet lagged, still trying to put it all together, the changes in his life and the changed world.

  At least, he thought, there still was a world. As soon as it became apparent that President Packer would be incapacitated for some days, the Chinese had taken fright and had agreed to United Nations-sponsored talks to resolve the crisis. They regarded the vice president, Jorgensen, as a dangerous lunatic.

  And the man had looked dangerous in front of the cameras, accusing the Chinese of trying to assassinate the president. It didn't seem to matter that Lau, dead at least ten times over by virtue of the chemical concoction he had absorbed, was Taiwanese and a bitter foe of the mainland government.

  It seemed, though it had not been confirmed, that Lau was of the view, or somehow aware, that Packer was about to sell out Taiwan by turning around the American fleet just as it came within striking range of Chinese warships in the strait. The Sunday papers had been full of this stuff, but so many stories were floating around that the truth, whatever it was, was drowning in words and verbiage.

  Packer was reportedly on the mend, though with the prospects of some facial nerve damage. He was lucky. He had come within a breath of a toxic blockbuster. Ten times more powerful than Sarin, more deadly by far than Ricin, the reports had claimed, but with a life in free air of just seconds and a density that made it ineffective outside a range of just a few feet, at least when unleashed in the quantity that someone had managed to coat a piece of paper with.

  The Americans were fit to be tied about that one and obviously going full bore after anyone and everyone who might have been in the plot to assassinate the president. It didn't help their mood that one of their Secret Service agents, a man standing directly behind Packer and whose name Bailey could not remember at such an early hour, had taken the full brunt of the nerve gas cloud and had succumbed on the spot. He was being given a hero's funeral.

  Too bad about the agent, Bailey thought. He had absorbed a witch's brew apparently mixed in a lab in one of the former Soviet Central Asian republics. At least the end was quick. Rafter, that was his name.

  Everything else was a bit clearer. A woman in Packer's detail had survived with little more than a headache. The gust of wind and sudden downpour had lessened the toxic effect of the poison vapor, thus deciding the final outcome of the attack, now being called “The South Lawn Plot” on one of the television news channels.

  Spencer had taken a gulp of the poison but tried to joke afterwards that three or four gin and tonics would have had a more painful effect. The attempt at humor had, rightly, fallen flat and he had been brutally treated in the tabloids, including the Post, which had managed to embrace sensitivity for about a day.

  Samantha had taken in a little more, but had more or less retained consciousness throughout. She was being proclaimed an all-British hero for the speed that she had moved, once it became apparent that something was badly amiss.

  She was the “plucky policewoman” who had risen above and beyond on her very first assignment with the prime minister.

  Bailey had sent flowers to her hospital bed. That had been easy enough but it was his marriage proposal that was causing his jaw to ache that little bit more. This was not the way he had planned things. A proposal would only come after a long period of consideration. His mother had been a little unfair when she had once suggested that long in his case would be a lifetime.

  But he had thought about it and seemed like the right thing to do. He had not realized how much in love he was until he had seen Samantha slumped over Spencer. And it was that feeling for her that had propelled him from the pack of journalists into the outstretched arm of a Secret Service agent with the tree trunk arm. They had told him afterwards that he was lucky it had been an arm and not a bullet.

  That blow, of course, had been just the first of a series of shocks. With all hell breaking loose on both sides of the Atlantic and the prime minister in the middle of it in all respects, it had been open season on Spencer. It turned out that he was not at all far removed from the circumstances surrounding the prince's theological leap.

  More stories had surfaced linking Spencer to the order of priests that had been instructing his royal highness in his new Catholicism. Spencer, as a young man, had been Catholic, at one point in early training for the priesthood when he left the seminary, a country house in Essex, after some kind of row or incident.

  Reports of sexual abuse had been given short shrift, but there were indications of some kind of doctrinal clash. In what was to become a political trademark of the man, Spencer apparently took exception to some key spiritual aspects of his training and would consider no compromise on these issues. Rather, he had instigated something approaching a latter day reformation within the walls of the seminary.

  Such heresy, combined with the man's known volcanic temper, had reportedly caused uproar. He had departed soon afterwards with his former hosts apparently all too eager to brush the episode under the pews. The story had never surfaced throughout decades of the man's political career, but it was doing so now.

  “Jesus,” Bailey said, forcing himself to sit up. As he did so the phone on the bedside table erupted. It always seemed to erupt rather than just ring when Henderson called, and, sure enough, the office number was showing.

  “You said to take a few days off,” Bailey said after he plucked the receiver off its charger.

  “Yes,” he added. “What?”

  In response to Henderson's instruction, delivered in a lower, slower voice than usual, the kind that could not be ignored under any circumstance, Bailey's hand moved to the radio. He had it turned to a London news radio sta
tion and the familiar newsreader's voice, only this time there was an even more fevered pitch about it than usual.

  He pressed a button. His physical state required the mellower BBC.

  “Initial reports have described a chaotic scene in which the prime minister was apparently stabbed fatally in the chest by a homeless man that he had taken time to speak with during a visit to Clapham Common, where a new section of replanted parkland was being opened to the public.

  “Downing Street has cautioned against rash speculation, but a caller to the BBC said that, in what appeared to have been an extraordinary lapse in security, the prime minister, who survived the recent White House attack, approached the homeless man to speak with him, despite the fact that the man had apparently not been vetted by police officers in the PM's detail.

  “Officers shot the man when he lunged at the prime minister's private secretary seconds after Mr. Spencer was struck down. The assailant's condition is unconfirmed, but the caller to the BBC said he believed the man was dead at the scene.

  “There is an additional unconfirmed report, from an unrelated source, that the attacker may have been a member of the military at some point and had the necessary training to inflict a fatal wound with a single blow. This was deduced because the assailant, and again this has to be fully confirmed, was in possession of a Victoria Cross, the nation's highest award for military gallantry.

  “The cabinet, meanwhile, led by the home secretary, is in emergency session and an official statement is expected at any time.

  “Leonard Spencer served a little over three years as head of the government and was no stranger to controversy. Even as he was attending the White House event, his name was linked in sensational reports to a series of deaths of Roman Catholic priests. Those priests in turn have been named possible participants in the religious instruction of the heir to the throne that resulted in his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, His Highness’ unequivocal condemnation of the 1701 Act of Settlement, and what many are describing as the most serious constitutional crisis to affect the realm since the abdication of Edward the Eighth.”