Royal Protocol. Christine Flynn

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      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, СКАЧАТЬ