Royal Protocol (2 page)

Harrison could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees in the time it took her to step into her salon and close the door with a dignified click.

“I’ll let myself out,” he muttered, and turned on his heel.

Gwen would have been more than happy to let him leave on his own. As shaken as Marissa had looked to her, she would much rather have gone after her friend, but duty demanded that she escort the queen’s guest from the room.

“Her Majesty wouldn’t hear of it,” she returned politely, and turned ahead of him. “I’ll see you to the door.”

She was fairly certain he’d expected her to stay put. He was, after all, the sort of man who ordered and expected people to obey.

She tended to bridle around any man, other than the king, who automatically expected such total deference. There were many like him in the circles in which she moved. Her own father being one of them. Yet, even her father wasn’t as hard or ruthless as the admiral was rumored to be.

To be fair, ruthless or not, she knew that if anyone could be counted on to find the prince it would be the man following her across the room and the men he commanded on the Royal Elite Team. The RET consisted of the best of the best, the cream the king himself had skimmed from his Royal Intelligence Institute with its top
scientists, doctors, military and economists. All were at the admiral’s disposal.

“May I ask something of you, Admiral?” Feeling as protective as a sister of the woman she had served for the past ten years, she reached for the gilded handle of the door. “For Her Majesty?”

“Put that way, I can hardly refuse.”

“Then, please,” she requested, overlooking the flatness, or maybe it was the fatigue, in his tone, “don’t burden Her Majesty with details of the trade alliance.”

His eyebrows knit into a single slash. “Excuse me?”

“The alliance,” she repeated, wishing he wouldn’t frown at her with such displeasure. “It’s the king’s project. All the queen needs right now is information about her son. You should speak with His Majesty about anything else.”

Her tone was faintly disapproving, her manner utterly calm and certain. At that moment, with her cool guard firmly in place and the soft vulnerability he’d glimpsed nowhere in sight, she looked very much like the very proper matron of a school for incorrigible young boys.

He was in no mood for a reprimand. Or to be told what he should or shouldn’t do, something that seldom happened to him, anyway. Taking her hand from the latch, surprised to find her slender fingers so warm, he replaced it with his own and turned to face her.

Despite the way she clasped her hands in a knot, the way she looked up at him made her seem every bit as regal and poised as their queen.

“Lady Corbin,” he began, his tone a shade shy of patient, “I realize it’s your job to protect Her Majesty from whatever she doesn’t wish to deal with around here. You screen her visitors and answer her mail and do whatever is required of you to insulate her from what takes
place beyond the scope of her duties and these walls. But there are forces at work here about which you haven’t a clue.”

Most people would have backed down. The faint-hearted would even have backed away. Remarkably, admirably, she did neither—though he did catch a telltale hint of color rising beneath her maddeningly calm facade.

“And those forces would be?”

“Nothing you’re cleared to know about.”

“The alliance with Majorco is hardly top secret, Admiral.” Years of training kept her tone even, her manner unfailingly polite. He wouldn’t have any idea that she was practically gritting her teeth. “The queen and I have been planning the state dinner to celebrate its signing for the past two months. Everyone from the royal printers to the kitchen staff knows about it.”

“I’m not talking about the alliance.”

“Then what are we talking about? The alliance is what I asked you not to bother Her Majesty with.”

He caught a hint of her perfume again. The scent was subtle, warm. Like the air on a tropical island when flowers scented the sensuous breeze.

Distracted, annoyed because he wasn’t a man who distracted easily, he took a step closer—for no reason other than to prove she had no real effect on him at all.

“We’re talking about matters to which even the king’s council isn’t privy,” he informed her, ignoring the unwanted tingle of heat low in his gut. “But just so you’ll have some idea of what is going on, a special team will be arriving any minute to tap in to Her Majesty’s telephone lines. It’s possible that Prince Owen’s captors have her personal phone number and will try to make contact that way. It’s no secret how close she is to her children.”

His voice dropped like a rock over Penwyck’s sheer
cliffs. “They will also be tapping the telephone in your apartment,” he informed her, failing to mention that telephone communications of all staff with access to the royal residence would be monitored. “Where are your rooms?”

A flicker of hesitation passed through her eyes. “Directly upstairs.”

“Then, I imagine they’ll do yours right after they’re finished here. One never truly knows who one can trust.”

He was baiting her. Deliberately. Gwen caught the odd glint in Harrison’s eyes as he waited for her reaction. Refusing to give him the satisfaction, she bit her tongue, swearing she almost perforated it in the moments before he released his visual hold and pulled open the door.

An instant later he was striding out down the long, wide hall, guards jerking to attention as he passed.

The guard near Gwen remained stiffly still, his eyes straight ahead, his rifle at his side. Not until she started to close the door did he reshoulder the weapon in three motions as quick as they were precise.

As he did, Gwen noticed the black holster resting against the red wool of his jacket. He was also wearing a side arm.

It had been ten years since she’d seen armed guards inside the private residence. Normally they kept posts only at exterior doors.

An old sense of loss, of anger, rose inside her. Uneasily, she pushed it right back down. She didn’t want to think about the events that had last required such tight security. Even though there never had been a sense of closure about them for her—or for her daughter—they were over and done with. They also had no part at all in what was going on now.

Reminding herself of that, she let the latch click quietly
into place and pressed her hand to her stomach. She would think only of the present. Of this moment. And at that moment, she could still feel an odd, lingering heat where Harrison’s fingers had gripped hers when he’d so abruptly moved her hand. Preferring to ignore the sensation, she drew a breath of air that still smelled faintly of citrus and something distinctly, boldly male.

His aftershave.

Even when he was no longer physically present, the man had the power to unnerve.

Not wanting to think about him, either, Gwen headed for the desk, thinking about him, anyway.

She’d had little occasion over the years to directly encounter the admiral, but she could swear that, on the rare occasions they did meet, he made a point of provoking her. She had no idea why that was. Nor was she going to waste energy trying to figure out his warped power-hungry psyche. She knew only that he was reputed to be frighteningly intelligent, obsessed with his job and position and impossible for any woman to land.

Not that one would want him, she thought, heading for Mrs. Ferth’s painfully neat desk. The man possessed the sensitivity of stone.

There had been no blood. At least none that was immediately visible, he’d said, oblivious to the mental pictures such doubt would put in a mother’s mind.

She couldn’t believe the blunt way he’d responded to the queen’s request for information about her son. She couldn’t believe, either, that he would burden the queen about the alliance. Not that the queen wouldn’t be able to handle matters of state. The woman was enormously bright, well-read and far more politically astute than His Majesty tended to realize, or admit. It was just that King Morgan, though an eminently kind and wise monarch,
wasn’t the most liberated ruler in the western hemisphere. To his royal mind, politics was man’s work. His queen was to tend their children and the plethora of women’s duties that kept Penwyckian arts, charities and hospitality the envy of the civilized world.

She had the feeling the admiral was just as narrow.

Frowning at how he invaded her thoughts, she automatically picked up a stack of lists near the queen’s personal calendar.

She had planned to check the silver services for the state dinner with the chef’s captain that morning, and to meet with the royal sommelier about the wine, provided that she had been able to get a decision out of the queen. The chef had made his recommendations, but he needed Her Majesty’s approval to serve the Margaux with the fois gras, rather than hold it for the main course of filet with truffles. Aside from the queen’s uncharacteristic indecision, there was the matter of champagne. It was nonexistent.

The cellar had been depleted of champagne last month due to Princess Meredith’s hastily planned and executed nuptials, and the order of Dom Perignon had yet to be received. Monsieur Pomier, the sommelier, lost sleep each night those dark-green bottles were being agitated by drivers and deliverymen and not resting properly in his cellar.

Returning the lists to the desk, Gwen stepped back. Because many of the elements for the dinner had been borrowed for the wedding, she had scrambled to redesign seating arrangements, floral displays, the menu, the music. But she felt none of the energy, or the urgency, that had sustained her for the past weeks.

What she felt was concern. Even before the horrible, unbelievable news of the prince’s kidnapping, the
queen’s manner had seemed oddly withdrawn. Over the past week she had also become totally apathetic about the preparations for the dinner. It wasn’t like her to not care about such an important function. Her fingerprints were usually all over everything, from the choice of silver to be used to the color of ink on the place cards. But lately Marissa couldn’t have cared less about such details.

The queen had dismissed her own lack of enthusiasm as postwedding letdown following the frantic preparations for the royal wedding. Gwen wanted to believe that was all that was wrong, but she’d known the queen too many years not to feel that something more was going on.

When she’d asked, Marissa had insisted there wasn’t—and spent most of the past several days avoiding her by going for long walks. Alone.

Knowing that the woman didn’t need to be alone just then, she headed for the door of the salon. It didn’t matter at the moment why the queen had been acting so strangely. The dinner didn’t matter, either. With the prince missing, it would undoubtedly be postponed, anyway. All she really cared about was Prince Owen.

For his sake and the sake of his mother, she hoped desperately that he hadn’t been harmed.

She also hoped that Admiral Arrogant and his men could find him.

The same thought was on Harrison’s mind when he was awakened by the telephone before the sun rose the next morning. But with that call, concern about the prince was replaced with a more pressing problem.

T
he kidnapping of Prince Owen was not the Royal Elite Team’s first priority. Under most other circumstances, it certainly would have been. But the RET was presently perpetrating a royal hoax they were duty-bound to continue. That was why the complexities of locating the missing heir simply blended into the mix of duties and dilemmas Harrison took to bed with him a little before midnight.

Ordinarily he slept like the dead. Some would have claimed that was because he had no conscience. But his conscience was just as keen as the rest of his mind, and if he slept well, it was because an exhausted body had no choice. Sleep tonight was fitful, though. He still felt a niggling dread every time his subconscious stirred with thoughts of who was actually wearing the king’s robes.

What the public didn’t know was that their beloved King Morgan was at that very moment locked away in
the bowels of the palace, deep in a coma. He was being cared for in secret by an elite medical team with access to the most brilliant minds in modern medicine, but that didn’t change the fact that the monarchy was not precisely what the RET was honor bound to make it appear on the surface.

The situation, as Harrison had come to think of it, began over six weeks ago when King Morgan had unexpectedly fallen ill and slipped into unconsciousness. Viral encephalitis had been the diagnosis. A rare form from Africa that the king’s body might be able to fight off—if it didn’t kill him first.

No one had any idea how he had contracted it. But once the diagnosis had been made, there had been no real question about what needed to be done. Because Penwyck had been—and still was—involved in its history’s most critical treaties and alliances, the RET had been forced to implement a plan the king himself had devised years ago in the event of his incapacitation.

His Majesty wanted his estranged identical twin, Prince Broderick, to impersonate him. Plan B, he had called it.
B
for Broderick.

The RET had collectively cringed at the idea. All any of them really knew of the prince was that his relationship with his brother had been as volatile as it was strained while they’d grown up, and that Broderick had been estranged from his family ever since the boating accident that killed both their parents when the elder royal twins were in their early twenties.

It had been known for some time prior to that, that the reigning king and queen had favored Morgan over his ineffective, unproductive sibling. When it was discovered upon their parents’ deaths that Morgan had been named heir-apparent and was crowned king, Broderick had
bought himself a surprisingly modest estate on Majorco and quietly gone into seclusion.

No one knew if he’d been grieving for his parents or merely licking his wounds. It was as if the man had dropped off the planet. For years Broderick ignored all of King Morgan’s attempts to draw him back into the fold. When Broderick finally did respond to the overtures, he’d returned long enough to cause grief by impersonating his brother to embezzle funds, and King Morgan had sent him packing. After that, the king had heard from him only once—the evening Broderick called to warn him of an assassination attempt that was about to be made on his life and that of Queen Marissa and their children.

That call had saved their lives, but Broderick had promptly withdrawn once more to the reclusive life he’d chosen to lead. By then he’d already been little more than an afterthought to the public. Because so few knew of the assassination attempt that had taken place those ten long years ago, he had now all but disappeared from the public’s memory. His heroic act, however, had made the men of the RET look at him with less skepticism, but not one of them was totally comfortable with the man presently playing king.

Broderick could run as hot as lava or as cold as the earth’s poles. He could be cooperative or demanding. But so far he had proven worthy of the confidence his brother had placed in him and been a model king in public.

King Morgan himself had told Harrison that Broderick would be convincing in the position. He had said that, if worst came to worse, his brother could take over quite ably in the role because, even though Broderick hated him, Broderick had always loved power and would work to foster the image of a great monarch.

Harrison would never disobey the king’s command.
Yet, as much as Harrison respected His Majesty’s opinions, he couldn’t shake the thought that nothing about Broderick was what it appeared to be.

That was the thought preying through his fitful sleep when the telephone beside his bed jerked him awake at four o’clock the next morning.

Within seconds of groping for the receiver and grumbling, “Monteque,” he learned that Plan B had been blown wide open.

Even as his feet hit the floor, the muffle-voiced reporter on the other end of the line was saying that he couldn’t reveal his source, but that the headline would explain everything. Before Harrison could try to demand that source, anyway, his caller told him that he’d just left a copy of the morning paper outside the admiralty’s office. The rest of the copies would be hitting the streets in a little over an hour.

The RET didn’t have a headquarters with a plaque or signage to identify it as such. Since it consisted only of four men whose daily duties kept them in the palace or elsewhere in the capital city of Marlestone, and who met solely when an emergency situation threatened the royal family or its government, the RET met wherever it was expeditious and secure.

Security was a definite priority with Harrison.

Half an hour after the call, showered, shaved and still bleeding from the nick on his chin where he’d been a little too aggressive with his razor, he opened a steel door deep beneath the palace’s grounds and stepped into a brightly lit and austere gray hallway. There were few places on earth more secure than the rooms he was about enter.

Few people knew of the tunnel beneath the palace that
the royal family used to avoid walking through the palace’s public areas. Even fewer knew of the tunnel intersecting it through a boiler room that connected to the Royal Intelligence Institute a mile away.

It was the second tunnel Harrison had just entered.

The doors here were unmarked and the same pale gray as the walls. The floor was industrial tile. Overhead lights were long, fluorescent tubes. Cameras followed the movements of whoever stepped inside. Many of the unseen rooms were soundproofed and lined with lead so no communication inside could be overheard or intercepted by equipment from the outside world.

A Star Wars array of the most sophisticated surveillance equipment known to man occupied a cavernous space behind the unobtrusive door a couple hundred yards down. A door beyond that led to a suite, complete with kitchens and a year’s worth of supplies for the royal family and necessary staff in the event of an attack. Another on the other side led to a medical clinic with a surgical suite and hospital beds.

One of those beds was occupied now—by King Morgan.

A soldier in the khaki uniform and black cap of the Royal Army appeared from behind the only glass door.

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 dis
covered 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.”