Royal Protocol

by Christine Flynn

  Shoving the newspaper he carried under his left arm, Harrison returned his salute.

  “Sir,” the young man began, still at attention, “the men you asked your secretary to summon are waiting in the conference room. Except for Colonel Prescott. He’s on his way,” he explained, his words as clipped as the bristle of brown hair covering his head. “Your secretary also asked you be told that the minister of foreign relations has requested your presence at a meeting in his office as soon as possible. She said it was urgent.”

  It appeared that no one had slept much that night. That meeting would be about Majorco, Harrison thought. And there wasn’t anything that wasn’t urgent at the moment. “I need coffee. Black.”

  “It’s already waiting for you, sir.”

  He had his secretary to thank for that. He was sure of it. If the woman wasn’t already married, he’d consider marrying her himself. “What’s the holdup with Colonel Prescott?”

  “I wasn’t informed, sir.”

  Harrison gave the young man a nod. “As you were,” he muttered, and pressed a code into the pad by the unmarked conference room door.

  In one salute, Harrison returned those of the two highly trained men rising to their feet around a gleaming mahogany conference table. The walls here were richly paneled wood, the carpet beneath his feet a deep burgundy.

  “Sorry to call you out so early,” he said to men who had to be every bit as tired as he felt. “I know neither of you got to bed before midnight.”

  “I’m not sure the colonel got to bed at all,” said Carson Logan, referring to Colonel Pierceson Prescott, Duke of Aronleigh. Logan, the king’s loyal and powerful bodyguard, was a duke himself. “I think he’s on to something.”

  Harrison stopped halfway between the table and the coffee tray on the matching sideboard. Pierce Prescott was also head of Royal Intelligence.

  “On to what?”

  “He didn’t say. He called half an hour after you did and said he’d meet us here. You’d probably already left or he’d have called you, too.”

  Harrison headed for the caffeine.

  Sir Selwyn Estabon, the king’s personal secretary and secret member of Royal Intelligence, settled back into one of the burgundy leather chairs. “Before we get into why you called,” he said, over the sound of coffee being poured into a white ceramic mug, “I just spoke with the king’s nurse. He had an uneventful night.”

  Cup in hand, Harrison eyed the tall, rather elegant-looking man through the steam rising over the rim. “His condition is the same, then?”

  “Still critical but stable,” the king’s secretary confirmed. “And he’s still quite comatose.”

  Logan leaned his big frame forward in his chair. The king’s bodyguard was a man of action who’d proven his loyalty time and again protecting the king. He was clearly frustrated by his inability to protect him now. “I thought once they’d discovered that Princess Meredith had the same thing, they’d be able to come up with something to help him. I don’t understand why her case was so mild and his is so severe.”

  “It’s as Doctor Waltham told us before,” Selwyn reminded him. “He feels it a matter of exposure. Somehow Her Highness was less exposed than His Majesty.”

  “But how was either exposed in the first place?” Logan demanded of his compatriots. “Everything we hear is that the disease is contracted through a mosquito bite. Neither had a bite anywhere on their bodies. It makes no sense that he contracted a form of encephalitis found only in Africa when he hasn’t set foot on the continent in forty years. Her Highness has never been there at all.”

  He wasn’t voicing anything they hadn’t all puzzled over for weeks.

  Harrison, tired of having no answers himself, simply let his friend vent.

  Selwyn, ever the diplomat, sought to soothe.

  “Perhaps they’ll find an answer now that they’ve discovered the virus can be grown. A sucrose medium is what I believe the doctor said the lab found worked best.”

  “I sure as hell hope they come up with something soon,” Logan muttered over the click of the electronic lock on the door. “None of this is making any sense.”

  Even as everyone murmured their agreement, all eyes swung toward the handsome young officer in uniform. Colonel Pierce Prescott acknowledged them with a nod as the door clicked shut behind him.

  His gray-green eyes looked bleary as he tossed his beret on the table. “The bad news is that the courier service was paid in cash to deliver the envelope,” he began, not bothering to waste breath on formalities. “It was dropped off at their largest downtown office location which takes in anywhere from three to four thousand business envelopes a day. But,” he stressed, sinking into the nearest chair, “one of the clerks remembers it because it was the first package she checked in that day. It was brought in by an old woman with curly gray hair, big hands and a bad case of laryngitis.”

  “Great,” Harrison muttered. “A guy in drag.”

  “You got it. We found a wig and a housedress in the trash bin behind the building. We’re going through the netting in the wig for human hair.

  “The good news,” he continued, pushing his fingers through his own, “is that we’ve identified the paper the ransom note was written on. It was run on a laser printer on the king’s personal stationery. The letterhead was cut off.”

  Sir Selwyn’s dark eyebrows formed a single heavy slash. “The king’s personal stationery? The beige paper with the royal crest and banner on the side? Not the white?”

  “What we have is beige,” Pierce informed him, “with remnants of a thin red line down the left side. Microscopic analysis discovered a micrometer of crimson ink that hadn’t been trimmed away.”

  “But that is kept only in the royal residence.”

  Harrison’s eyes narrowed at the trusted secretary’s certainty. “There is none in the royal office?”

  “It’s never kept there,” Selwyn insisted. The royal offices were inside the main gates of the palace grounds. That was where the daily affairs of running the kingdom were handled by the king, his ministers and dozens of assistants, secretaries and clerks. Correspondence flowed through his staff like rainwater, all manner of memoranda and letters issued on the standard white stationery bearing the small tasteful seal of Penwyck above its letterhead. “The king’s personal stationery is used only for his most personal correspondence,” he continued. “It is always addressed from his office in his private apartments.”

  Harrison took his coffee and offered it to Pierce. The younger man looked even more desperate for caffeine than he felt himself.

  “Have a seat,” he muttered, and poured himself another cup as the importance of something that ordinarily wouldn’t seem significant at all turned all four men silent.

  Whoever had kidnapped Prince Owen had also been in the king’s private apartments.

  The conclusion was so obvious that not one of them felt compelled to mention it.

  “Not to add insult to injury,” Harrison prefaced, “but was the printer used the one in the king’s residence office, too?”

  Pierce had taken a grateful sip of what his colleague had offered him. Preparing to take another, he muttered, “It appears so.”

  Harrison’s grip on his own mug tightened. “How do you want to handle General Vancor?” he asked, speaking of the head of the royal guard.

  “I think it’s best that whatever evidence we have remain among us,” Logan asserted.

  “I agree,” Harrison concluded, his voice going hard as he wondered how many other ways security might have been compromised that night. “Just tell him we have reason to believe Prince Owen’s kidnappers were also in the king’s apartments and find out how security was breached. If he doesn’t have answers from his men by this afternoon, I’ll pay him a visit myself.”

  Having delegated that task, he picked up the newspaper he’d dropped onto a side chair and slid it faceup to the center of the table. “We also have another security problem.” His tone was matter-of-
fact, his manner amazingly calm considering how furious he was at whoever had broken their confidence. The situation before had been delicate, to say the least. It now held the potential for disaster. “I received a call from a reporter of the Penwyck Herald about forty-five minutes ago. This is already hitting the streets.”

  The bold, black headline screamed up at them all: King Morgan in Coma; Prince Broderick in Power

  The other three men rose to their feet, each turning the paper so he could better see, the sounds muffled by their expletives.

  Having already uttered a few oaths himself, Harrison glanced from one to another. These were the men the king had chosen to trust with his kingdom. There wasn’t one Harrison didn’t trust himself.

  “We need to find whoever leaked this information.”

  “What did the reporter say?” Logan demanded darkly.

  “Only that he thought the palace should know before the public found out. He hung up before I could ask anything else.” To Harrison, Logan looked as if he could cheerfully choke someone. He could sympathize. Refusing to cave in to fatigue or frustration, he shoved his hand into his pocket instead. “My secretary is tracking him and his editor down now.”

  “Aside from us,” Logan growled, “the only people who knew were the doctor and the three nurses tending His Majesty. They all have top security clearance and wouldn’t have anything to gain by leaking this.”

  “The queen knows,” Pierce reminded him.

  “Well, we know she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the Crown,” the bodyguard conceded. “What about someone in a lab somewhere? The king’s bloodwork is still being handled under an alias, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll check with the doctor,” Pierce replied, fully sharing his peer’s frustration. “But questions raise questions and we need to tread lightly there. I think our best source right now is the reporter and the editor.”

  “I’ll stay on it,” Harrison promised. “But who leaked this isn’t our biggest problem at the moment.” He was unable himself to imagine where the leak had occurred, though he did agree with Pierce about Her Majesty. If the queen were to confide in anyone, it would be Lady Gwendolyn, and he had already eliminated her as a suspect. Had she known, she would have immediately understood why he had to consult with the queen about the alliance. But she hadn’t betrayed so much as a hint of such knowledge. All he remembered seeing in her intriguing blue eyes was the unexpected and beguiling plea with which she’d greeted him, and the quick, damnably annoying way that sapphire blue had frosted over before she’d come to her queen’s defense.

  With a swift frown, he shook off the thoughts. He didn’t need to be thinking about the ice maiden—especially while three of the most intelligent, wealthiest and most powerful men in the country were waiting for him to continue.

  “The entire kingdom is waking up to these headlines,” he pointed out, determined to stave off disaster. “Press from all over the world is going to descend like locusts in less than an hour…if the pressroom phone isn’t ringing already.” The thought had him starting to pace. “The good news is that the reporter apparently hadn’t been told how long the king has been ill. As far as anyone will know from that article, King Morgan took ill last evening rather than weeks ago.

  “However,” he continued, pacing behind the men, “now that the public does know the king’s condition, it is imperative that Prince Broderick cease the masquerade as the real king and make a statement to the people that he will be taking his brother’s place in a ceremonial capacity. With those headlines,” he muttered, dismissing the offending wording with the wave of his hand, “we also need to make it very clear to the public and the world that Prince Broderick is a figurehead only. In the absence of an appointed heir, Penwyckian tradition passes power to the queen.”

  Selwyn was inevitably the voice of reason. “I for one am relieved to have this out in the open. Prince Broderick has proven far more amenable than I would have expected, but I don’t know how much longer we could have kept up the charade.”

  Pierce nodded. “I never liked this. I’ve always felt he was too much of a wild card.”

  “We all share that feeling,” Harrison assured them both, “but we had no choice but to play the card we were handed. Our concern now is the effect this news will have on pending negotiations. Nothing must happen to jeopardize either the alliance with Majorco or the alliance with the U.S.”

  “No question,” muttered Logan.

  Sir Selwyn smoothed his tie. “Absolutely.”

  “Pierce.” Harrison paced the length of the table again, his mind totally focused on a new battle plan. “I think it would be most expeditious if you met with Broderick to advise him of his change in status while Selwyn heads off the press. Are you all right with that?”

  A sharp nod confirmed that he was.

  “Selwyn,” he said to the Royal Secretary, “we need to arrange for the king’s press secretary and staff to meet with Prince Broderick.”

  “Consider it done. Do we want cameras? All the trappings?”

  The king’s twin would love that.

  “Whatever it takes to make it look as if everything is totally under control. As to official statements,” Harrison continued, pacing back the other way, “Prince Broderick needs to assure the kingdom that official business will be conducted as usual. That message needs to be strong enough to assure the citizens of Penwyck that their government is and will remain stable but nonspecific enough to allow us time to track down Prince Owen before his abductors realize the alliance will be signed as planned.” He stopped at the head of the table and turned to face them. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” they replied in unison.

  “Good. In the meantime, I will ask the appropriate ministers to meet with the ambassadors of the United States and Majorco, and assure them that nothing will stand in the way of their alliances.”

  “Is that where you’re headed now?” Logan asked.

  “No.” A muscle in Harrison’s jaw jerked. “Right now I’m going to see the queen.”

  It was barely six in the morning when the guard at the entrance to the royal residence rang Gwen’s apartment on the second floor overlooking Castle Cove. Her three rooms, once a nanny’s quarters, were appointed modestly and were quite small, considering the size of the rooms below her. Still, decorated with the comfortable provincial furniture and personal treasures Gwen had brought with her ten years ago, they had proved more than adequate for a young widow with a small child to raise.

  That child was now a twenty-year-old woman, who was presently on holiday with a friend and her family in the Scottish highlands—which was why the telephone rang five times before Gwen snatched it up.

  Amira would have jumped on it by the second ring. With the blow dryer running, Gwen had barely heard it at all.

  “He’s on his way up now?” she asked, tucking the receiver under her chin to snatch up her beige suit skirt. “Where exactly is he?”

  The formal male voice on the other end of the line informed her that Admiral Monteque had just passed through the vestibule and turned into the queen’s hallway. He would be at the doors of the queen’s apartments in less than a minute.

  Gwen’s heart felt as if it were beating out of her chest as she hurried to her wardrobe and stuffed her feet into a pair of taupe leather pumps. The only reason she could imagine him needing to see the queen—and at such an hour—was because something had happened with Prince Owen.

  In her years of service to the queen, Gwen had always preferred two-piece suits because they were neat, comfortable and layers could be added or dispensed with beneath the jacket, depending on the season. There would be no layers today. Grabbing the beige silk jacket that matched her skirt, she shoved her arms into the sleeves, pushed back her freshly dried hair and rushed through the doorway beside her small Italian marble fireplace, zipping her skirt as she hurried down the narrow staircase that led directly to the queen’s drawing room.

  Stepping through the narrow
door by Mrs. Ferth’s desk, she closed it behind her and hurried soundlessly across the pale butters and creams of the carpet.

  She was buttoning her jacket over her bra when she reached for the long gold handle and opened the carved door.

  The red-jacketed guard beside it was already at attention. But it was the tall, powerfully built man in the navy uniform who commanded her attention as she stepped back.

  Feeling totally thrown together, she watched the admiral close the door, her anxious eyes seeking his.

  “Is it news of the prince?”

  Harrison opened his mouth and felt his breath snag halfway to his lungs. Her usually restrained hair tumbled around her face and shoulders in a shimmering fall of platinum and honey. The thick, dark lashes of her sapphire eyes were as unadorned as her flawless skin. She smelled of soap, shampoo and fresh powder.

  The combination sent something sharp and hot straight to his groin.

  “I’m afraid not,” he murmured, the tightness gripping his body slipping into his voice.

  An odd sense of regret licked through him as he watched the light of hope slip from her eyes.

  Before he could question it, before he could stand there staring at her any longer, he pulled the newspaper he carried from beneath his arm. “It’s about the morning paper. Has Her Majesty seen it?”

  Aware of the edge in his voice, Gwen took a step back and blinked at the shaving nick in his chin. “The paper?” she repeated, thinking that little wound terribly human for someone who seemed to have a rock for a heart. “She was up most of the night. Worried about Prince Owen,” she explained, in case that might not have occurred to him. The queen had called her at midnight to come sit with her. Gwen hadn’t gone to bed herself until after two. “I wasn’t even going to order up her tea for at least another hour.”

  He took her response as a no and tried to ignore how soft her mouth looked without the pale-peach lipstick she’d worn yesterday. He’d obviously caught her dressing. Something she hadn’t quite managed to fully accomplish. She was without makeup, which made her look temptingly touchable. She hadn’t had time to restrain her hair, which made her look even more so. She wore no necklace, no earrings—and she’d missed the top button of her jacket.