Feeling much less frustrated, Ravi pulled on his driving gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, because he would not be taking the coffee flask with him. He ate his chicken sandwiches thoughtfully and sipped the coffee from the wide lid of the flask. He saved enough for one more cup, and also saved a couple of sandwiches.
And the hours slipped away. In the still of the night, Ravi heard Big Ben chime every fifteen minutes, with the massive main bell resonating on the hour. Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock — and then at a quarter to five there was a minor commotion.
Ravi was half asleep, but he heard the sudden, short, sharp wail of a police siren, two police sirens. He peered out through his closed Venetian blinds and could see the spinning blue lights reflecting in the street-level shop windows. So far as he could see, there was a police cruiser parked on either side of Dover Street, Piccadilly end, right outside the front door to his building.
He had never heard, or even sensed it, before, but he somehow knew people were entering the building. He packed into his duffel bag the remains of his dinner, the two small sandwiches, and the flask. He slipped his briefcase into the wide central drawer of his desk and moved to a position behind his office door, which was locked.
The police were obviously in the building, and he heard, or certainly felt, the dull thud down below as the main front door, between the glass swing doors and the street, was slammed shut. He must have heard it before, but this morning it sounded amazingly loud. He could hear a succession of loud thumps from the lower floors, voices, shouting, growing nearer all the time.
Then he heard Reggie’s voice from almost outside his office. “There’s no one here, boys, you can trust me on that.” Then he added, “Don would have checked the building before he left.” This was of course palpably untrue. Neither doorman had ever checked the building before leaving.
The banging continued, and Ravi guessed the police were knocking hard on every office door. There were intermittent shouts of POLICE! ANYONE THERE? Occasionally Reggie could be heard calling someone’s name—“Mr. Marks — it’s Reggie here, just checking the building — no worries.”
The footsteps grew closer, and finally, shortly after five o’clock, there were three sharp, loud bangs on Ravi’s door. The terrorist chief froze against the wall.
ANYONE THERE? POLICE!
Ravi knew he could have made a different choice, left the door open, lights on, and been sitting at his desk working. But that would have meant he’d been there all night. Bad idea. Ravi had decided to throw the dice and gamble on the police checking, but not opening, every door in the building.
He heard them banging on the office next door. He heard them go into the bathroom where four hours earlier he had shaved. Then he heard them climbing the stairs to the next floor, and he checked his watch. It was 0516, and he thought about the admiral for the millionth time this night. Seventy minutes from landing. That would put him somewhere over Ireland right now.
He could still hear the footsteps above him, and finally he heard them coming back down the stairs. He heard Reggie say, “Well, I did tell you the place would be empty. Anyway, it’s good you’ve got your blokes in position.”
As the footsteps continued below him, he caught one of the policemen saying “Thanks for coming in, Reggie.”
And he heard the Cockney doorman’s reply: “You can pick me up in a squad car any morning you like, old mate. ’Cept the bloody neighbors’ll think I’ve been nicked!”
The footsteps died away. And there was but one thought in the ex-SAS major’s mind: there were fewer people going downstairs than there had been going up. Somewhere, up above him, the police had left two or three men behind. Ravi stayed absolutely still, waiting for more footsteps descending the stairs. Nothing.
He tried to dismiss it from his mind. But he could not. In Ravi’s opinion, there were at least two, maybe three, London policemen, probably marksmen, stationed on the roof of this building, watching the main entrance of the Ritz Hotel, watching for the sudden appearance of an assassin, a man who might burst out of the crowd and fire a shot at Admiral Morgan, just as that crazed kid John Hinckley had done to President Reagan outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington in 1981.
Ravi’s assessment was accurate. Scotland Yard had marksmen on the roof of every building that overlooked the main entrance to the Ritz. They were not exactly SWAT teams, with heavy machine guns and missile launchers, ready to repel attack from the air. But they were top-class police snipers who would be unlikely to miss, firing directly down at a would-be assassin.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe had put just enough of a scare into the security authorities for them to install a very serious steel ring of protection around the admiral. But, in Jimmy’s opinion, it was not nearly enough to take care of a top international assassin, the kind of high-level, trained terrorist who he believed would imminently strike at the best friend of the President of the United States of America.
The Dover Street office block again went quiet. Big Ben chimed six times. Ravi went to his leather briefcase and took out the telescopic sight to his rifle, training it on the deserted front steps of the Ritz, staring through the crosshairs, imagining the dimension of his task later this day.
The transatlantic passenger jets were beginning to come in now; staring south through the window, Ravi could easily discern the flight pattern as they came in, banking steeply over East London and the city and then tracking the River Thames along the south bank, out past Hammersmith, Chiswick, and into Heathrow, directly into the prevailing southwest wind.
The sun, just rising now, glinted on the fuselages as one by one they dropped down toward the world’s busiest airport. Northwest Airlines, Air Canada, British Airways, Delta, Virgin, American, line astern at the end of their Atlantic crossing. Ravi tried to spot incoming AA163, and at 0615 he thought he saw the sunrise lighting up the entire length of a Boeing 747. He guessed that was the reflection on the familiar bright silver surface of American Airlines.
He may or may not have been correct, but his phone signaled an incoming call that relayed to him only two words: “American landed.”
Just thirty minutes later, at 0645, the phone rang again and a voice said: “Seadog plus bruisers. Two U.S. embassy cars plus two police cars left Terminal 3.”
What the man from the Syrian embassy did not know was that four police outriders, on motorcycles, had joined the four-car motorcade along the slip road to the M-4.
The order of the convoy was now two motorcycles, side by side, riding shotgun in the lead; then one police car, containing four armed Metropolitan police officers; then the first U.S. embassy car, containing the admiral and Kathy, plus two armed CIA men in the front seats; then the second embassy car, containing Arnold’s regular three armed Secret Service agents and the new man, George Kallan; then the second police car, with four more armed policemen; then the final two outriders bringing up the rear. No sirens sounded, and the only flashing lights were on the leading motorcycles.
The convoy ran swiftly into West London. They were in moderate traffic, which was not yet into the eight o’clock gridlock. And there were no holdups whatsoever until they reached the big junction where Cromwell Road meets the Earls Court Road. Then everything slowed down.
But as soon as they crossed that junction, the outriders opened up their sirens, just short sharp whoops that caused the very savvy British drivers to ease over to the left, giving the convoy an almost free run into Knightsbridge.
They swung right down Beauchamp Place and ran straight through to Belgrave Square. Shakira, looking through her bedroom window, saw the motorcycles and cars come streaming past and guessed immediately who was in the black one with the darkened windows. But she thought not of the archterrorist-buster Arnold Morgan, but of his wife, her friend Emily’s daughter, the very beautiful Washington socialite, who only the previous day must have delivered Kipper to Brockhurst.
Shakira was unaccountably overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness, not so mu
ch for the mayhem and murder her husband was about to inflict on that family, but for her own lost life, the absence of normality, of calm and happiness. Perhaps Ravi would gun down Arnold Morgan later today. But Shakira was assailed by the fear that wherever the admiral fell, Ravi too must lie someday.
As she turned away from the disappearing convoy, tears trickled down the exquisite face of Shakira Rashood.
…Light upon Light,
God guides whom he will to His Light…
The convoy ran south out of Belgrave Square and then turned east, toward the endless high wall of Buckingham Palace. They sped past the Royal Mews and the Queen’s Picture Gallery, and then swerved around onto the Mall, still at a fast speed.
They passed Clarence House, where Prince Charles lives, and at the next traffic light made a left, past St. James’s Palace, and then straight up St. James’s Street heading north.
Just before the Piccadilly traffic light, the outriders opened up their sirens again and made a sudden left turn along Bennett Street. With the convoy past, two London policemen, each with a submachine gun slung across his shoulder, stepped off the sidewalk and dragged three traffic cones across the entrance to the street.
At the Blue Posts pub, desolate at this time in the morning, the convoy swung right onto narrow Arlington Street and came to a halt right outside the Ritz. The two lead motorbike cops drove several yards beyond the main door, as did the first police car, which left Arnold Morgan’s armed embassy chauffeur to pull up directly at the flight of six white stone steps.
The American security guards were out and on the sidewalk in a split second. The outriders deployed strategically, still on their bikes, engines running. Right now, it was impossible to gain entrance to the street from either end. Arnold’s four guards went immediately to the left rear door and clustered around as the great man disembarked.
Two of them mustered to his right, the other two to the left. Four Metropolitan policemen made the same formation around Kathy as she exited the right rear door and made her way around the front of the car to join the admiral. Thus, eight guards formed a kind of armed rugby scrum around the couple as they walked up the steps into the hotel.
High in his office, General Rashood held his finely tuned telescopic sight to his left eye. He could see everything with immense clarity. A head shot on the admiral would have been as near to impossible as making no difference. There were just so many people. Aside from the eight-man scrum that surrounded the American visitors, there were also two doormen. At one point, Ravi counted twelve people on the steps. The two guards who walked closely on the admiral’s right side almost obscured him. Which was, of course, the general idea.
Ravi estimated that there had been two “windows,” of perhaps two seconds each, when he might have risked a shot. But this was very, very tight. The greatest marksman in the world might have missed and hit someone else.
Ravi Rashood might very well have been the greatest marksman in the world, but from the scene playing out below him, he would not have dared to pull the trigger. It was too difficult a target, there were too many police and security officers, and the odds against success were just too great. There would be better times.
He did have some kind of a view of the admiral, who was not a tall man but was powerfully built, immaculately tailored in a suit from nearby Savile Row and an Annapolis tie. Ravi could see his steel-gray hair, and for the briefest moment had the side of his head in the telescopic sight. He had no wish to kill Kathy, and merely noted her alongside her husband. She was wearing a dark blue suit, and her red hair was loose on her shoulders.
Even from his fourth-floor redoubt, Ravi could see that she was a very beautiful woman, and he wished her no harm. He did not give one single thought to the fact that he was about to break her heart and wreck her life, all with one of Mr. Kumar’s exploding 7.62mm bullets.
Within moments, the entire crowd had dispersed through the revolving doors. The police hung around for a while, and then the outriders pulled off into Piccadilly and turned left toward Hyde Park Corner. Both police cars pulled away and headed east to Piccadilly. The embassy cars remained in place outside the hotel, engines running, drivers at the wheel.
Inside the hotel, two security guards accompanied the admiral and Kathy to their suite. Both men remained on duty outside in the corridor. There were two doors from the corridor, one of which led into the small drawing room, with the bedroom off to the left. The other led directly into the bedroom and had not been opened for about forty years. This was a suite much in demand, and it had never been necessary to turn the bedroom into a single room.
Admiral Morgan outlined his plan of battle to his wife. “Right now I’m going to sleep for two and a half hours. Then we will have a lavish breakfast delivered right here to the room — English bacon, eggs, and toast. My favorite, reminds me of the old days in the submarines, Holy Loch.
“Then we will venture out and take a stroll along Piccadilly to my favorite bookstore in all the world, Hatchards. We will browse in there, buy some books that we would not see in the USA, and have Hatchards send them all directly to Chevy Chase.
“I will then accompany you to Jermyn Street, where we will shop for a while at Fortnum and Mason’s and request that our food selections also be forwarded on to Chevy Chase, by courier, to arrive the day we get home.
“And then we will wander among the greatest shirtmakers in the world and place some orders for both of us, and likewise have them sent directly to the USA. Thereafter, we will cross to the north side of Piccadilly and I will permit you the freedom of the Burlington Arcade while I wander up to my longtime tailor, Gieves and Hawkes at the corner of Savile Row, to be measured for a couple of new suits. How’s that?”
“Not bad,” said Kathy. “What about lunch?”
“Forget that,” said the admiral. “I intend to eat such a gargantuan breakfast, it will not be necessary.”
“What about me?” asked Kathy. “How would it be if I didn’t want to feast like Henry VIII at ten o’clock in the morning? Imagine that I wanted only some fruit and coffee, and then a light lunch, perhaps a small fillet of Dover sole and some salad?”
“Then it would be my very great pleasure to provide it for you at Green’s restaurant, corner of Duke of York Street.”
“And what will you do while I eat my lunch?”
“Me? Oh, I’ll probably have the same.”
Kathy could not help laughing. She had never been able to resist laughing at this irascible titan of American foreign policy — his ups, his downs, his fury, his brilliance, and his wit; the way he answered to no man, the way he loved food and wine, his natural assumption that nothing short of the absolute best could possibly be good enough for him. And indeed for his wife.
Kathy smiled at him and asked if he intended to get right into bed, pajamas and all, or whether he was just going to lie on top of the spread.
“Christ, women!” he exclaimed. “These sheets are costing us about fifty bucks a square inch, and I’m taking total advantage.”
“You mean straight in?” said Kathy.
“Straight in,” he replied. “Coming?”
“Probably,” she laughed, somewhat sassily.
Across the street, Ravi was trying to commit to memory the images still clear in his mind of the four bodyguards who had surrounded the admiral as he entered the hotel. They were all six-footers, taller than Morgan, and the one certainty of the morning was that at least one of them would step outside before Arnold and Kathy.
Like the admiral himself, all four agents had their hair cut closely. One of them was virtually bald, one of them was black, and the other two were fair-skinned with light-colored hair. From this distance, Ravi could not tell if either of them was gray. From the shape of their jackets, the Hamas chief was sure they all wore shoulder holsters, and likely knew how to shoot straight.
He could no longer see the U.S. embassy cars, but there was a police car down Arlington Street beyond the Blue Posts. At
the bottom of the steps, on the sidewalk, the doorman was speaking to a uniformed London cop.
The traffic was still light, but it was now flowing along Bennett Street, through Arlington to the Piccadilly throughway. Ravi permitted himself three guesses — a luxury in which he rarely indulged. The first was that the police snipers were still on duty on the roof of the building; the second was that Reggie was at his desk in the foyer. The third was that Admiral Morgan’s car would be summoned by phone when he left the Ritz, and that the security detail would make certain that he and his wife were quickly into the vehicle. His fourth thought was an assumption, not a guess: that his “window” of opportunity would again be very short-lived, but less crowded.
It was only just 8 A.M., but people were beginning to arrive. Ravi could hear the elevator creaking as it went up, but it made no noise as it descended. If the two cops, the ones he assumed were still on the roof, left via the elevator, he would not know they had gone.
Equally, Reggie did not know Ravi was in the building. No one did, and the last image Reggie had in his mind, concerning Mr. Fretheim, was from yesterday, of a man in a loose-fitting dark blue tracksuit, wearing sneakers and carrying a sports bag. Images were critical in operations like this, because they affected the memory, shaded the truth, and distorted the reality.
Ravi poured himself the last of his coffee and ate the remaining two chicken sandwiches. He did so in front of the window, from an area to which he had shifted his chair. When he stood up, he slipped the window catch and pushed upward. The old-fashioned lower section rose, and Ravi kept pushing until it was open all the way.
If the security men were scanning the front of this building, they would not notice the lower open window, because it was fully open. He adjusted the Venetian blind so the light breeze from the southwest would not cause the laths to rattle.
While Arnold and Kathy slept, Ravi made his final preparations. He realized the Americans might not leave the hotel until after lunch, maybe not until tomorrow, and during this time he would be a virtual prisoner in this office. He resolved to change clothes at 10:30 A.M. and take up his position at the window immediately afterward. He would not move again.
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