Destroyer - The Empire Dreams Part 7

A tight smile gripped his bloodless lips.

Maude Smith was so surprised by the sudden change in her husband that she wanted to burst out in tears of joy. But she knew Harold frowned on those sorts of emotional displays. When she cried, she generally cried alone. Ironically it was her aloneness that usually brought her to tears.

But she wasn't alone today.

She gripped her husband's gnarled ?ngers, snif?ing slightly.

"I'll get the camera," Maude croaked feebly.

THEY FOUND several more rusted metal fragments from shattered bomb casings. Helene had even stopped denying that they were fragments of the ordnance stolen from the deminage bases. Her frown deepened at each discovery.

"So it was an accident," Remo mused. "But the stuff still got all the way down to Paris for some reason. Why?"

"There is only one reason to have booms," Chiun replied. He was watching the American investigators sift through the debris.

They had found evidence of the deminage bombs, as well.

Remo nodded his agreement. "True. But we still don't know who has them. Any ideas, Helene?" he called over to the French agent.

She was talking into the cellular phone that she periodically removed from the pocket of her jacket. She pitched her voice low, little realizing that Remo could have heard her even if she were on the other side of the building and locked away in an isolation tank. Heard but not understood. Remo had never bothered to learn French.

It hadn't been easy, but he had convinced the Master of Sinanju to quietly translate some of what she was saying. It was during the ?rst of these calls that Remo learned she was an agent for the DGSE.

"I do not support your conjecture," she called back. She hunched farther into her phone.

"She's not very helpful, is she?" Remo said to Chiun.

"She is French." The Master of Sinanju shrugged, as if this explained everything.

Remo put his hands on his hips. Frowning unhappily, he surveyed the emba.s.sy wreckage.

"We've gone as far as we can here. I don't see anyone running up to tell us they did it."

"Perchance Smith might have new information," Chiun suggested.

"Chiun, I can't call Smith," Remo explained. "He's on the ?rst vacation he's ever taken since I've known him. Besides, his wife is with him."

"Call Smith, do not call Smith. It matters not to me," Chiun said with a shrug of his birdlike shoulders.

Remo thought for a few more minutes. His frown deepened with each pa.s.sing second.

"I think I'll call Smith," he said eventually.

He hopped over a pile of shattered wall debris and stepped up to Helene. When she noticed him coming toward her, she pulled more tightly into herself, whispering a torrent of French into the small phone in her hand.

Wordlessly Remo reached around her. Before she could issue a complaint, he plucked the phone from her clenched hand.

"She'll call you back," he announced into the receiver.

"Give me my phone!"

"Sorry, kitten. Of?cial State Department business."

As Helene protested, Remo pressed the b.u.t.ton that severed the connection. She continued complaining violently as Remo- humming all the while-punched in his personal access code for Folcroft. Smith had told him before he left that he could phone at any time in case of emergency. The call would be rerouted to wherever in the world the CURE director was staying.

"Give me that this instant," Helene insisted hotly, grabbing at the phone.

"When I'm through," Remo promised. He had ?nished dialing and, batting away Helene's grabbing hands, was waiting for the call to go through.

Eventually Helene gave up trying to get the phone back. Seething, she crossed her arms.

"You are a barbarian," she snarled.

"This from the people who brought you the guillotine," Remo said smilingly. He resumed humming a song from the musical Gigi. It was Maurice Chevalier's "Thank Heaven for Little Girls."

HAROLD SMITH HAD SEEN as much of London as he had ever wanted to see during World War II. And most of what he saw back then had been at night.

Large parts of his youth had been spent ducking shrapnel. As the air-raid whistles squawked their nightly preamble to horror, the streets emptied. Blackout shades were hastily drawn and Londoners huddled together in shelters awaiting the end of the Blitz.

That end had come decades ago. The sirens were silent now.

The sandbags and antiaircraft guns were gone. As he strolled with his wife from Kensington Gardens and across the street into Hyde Park, Smith didn't see a single British soldier or military vehicle.

On their tour he noted that some of the buildings that had been damaged in the war had been repaired. Others had been torn down to make way for fresh architectural eyesores. It was as if World War II had never so much as brushed the sh.o.r.es of England.

To Maude Smith's eyes, this was London. She had never seen what Smith had seen, and so to her the images of the war had been restricted to the far-off unreality of newsreels and, in later years, the occasional advertis.e.m.e.nt for a PBS doc.u.mentary. She never watched the programs themselves. They were too depressing.

Happily oblivious to the horrors that had nightly occurred on these very streets, Maude Smith clicked picture after picture on her old Browning camera. Smith thought it likely that she hadn't even loaded the ?lm correctly. She had never been very good at it.

Whatever the case, it didn't seem to matter to Mrs. Smith.

"Isn't it beautiful, Harold?" Maude Smith trilled. As she spoke, she clicked away at the pond in Hyde Park. It could have been any small duck-?lled body of water in any city in the world."Yes, dear," Smith agreed.

"Aren't you having a wonderful time?" she asked. Her face was beaming. Brie?y-through the rounder face, the slackness and other marks of age-a hint of the girl he had married peeked through once more.

"I am, dear," Smith said.

And the truth was, he meant it. Smith hated to admit it, but he actually was beginning to enjoy himself. He found her good humor to be infectious.

They crossed the street and were beginning to make their way up Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square when Smith felt an odd electronic hum at his waist. "What was that?" Mrs. Smith asked.

Smith had already reached beneath his gray suit jacket to shut off the device. It was small and black-half the size of a deck of cards.

"I took the precaution of renting a pocket pager before we left home," he said, frowning.

"A pager?" she asked. "I didn't know one would work this far away."

"It is hooked in to a world satellite service," Smith explained. He glanced around for a phone.

"Harold," his wife said. It was an admonishing tone, but a mild one. Their day together had been too enjoyable so far to spoil it with nagging.

"It must be Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said. "I told her to contact me if there was a problem at Folcroft."

Mrs. Smith tsked. "Can't they run that place for a week without you?"

Smith spied a red phone box across the street. "It is probably nothing," he said, forcing the tenseness from his tone. "But I should return the call."

"Oh, very well," Maude said in a mock-impatient tone. "I need some more ?lm anyway. There was a small store near Hyde Park Corner, I think. Yes, there it is. Did you know they call their drugstores 'chemist' shops?" Maude Smith explained, proud of her erudition. Leaving Smith to dwell on this kernel of knowledge, she walked over to the door of the shop. Smith hurried across the street.

In the phone booth, Smith unclipped the pager from his belt and carefully entered the number on the small display strip. Remo answered immediately. "Sorry to interrupt your vacation, Smitty."

"What is the problem?"

"Chiun and I have hit a dead end here. No one's taking credit for the bombing, and the French government hasn't been able to get much of anything from the truck or street, at least according to the DGSE."

There was a shout of surprised protest from the background. It was a female voice.

"Hey, it's not my fault you can't keep a secret," Remo called to the voice in the background. To Smith he said, "One thing we have been able to determine is that the bomb that went off outside the emba.s.sy probably wasn't really a truck bomb at all."

"Explain."

Remo went on to tell him about the metal fragments and his theory that the explosion had been accidental.

"Does Chiun concur with your hypothesis?"

"It is true, Emperor Smith," Chiun's squeaky voice called. "The attack on your Gallic outpost does not appear deliberate. And the parts of the boom devices we found were ?fty or more years old."

"Did you get all that?" Remo asked."Yes."

"There's no doubt about it," Remo said. "The stuff that was stolen from the bases blew up the emba.s.sy."

"Only some of what was stolen," Smith clari?ed. "From what I learned, there was much, much more than a single truckload of explosives taken from the deminage facilities."

"That one truckload did a h.e.l.l of a lot of damage," Remo said somberly.

"Yes," Smith replied, thinking. He was looking thoughtfully out one of the side gla.s.s windows of the phone booth. Across the street, he spotted his wife exiting the chemist's shop. "Remo, I will have to call you back. I do not have access to my laptop at present."

"You without a computer?" Remo said, surprised. "Isn't that part of your wardrobe? Like that itchy Brooks Brothers suit or that Dartmouth noose you wear around your neck? Better be careful, Smitty. If you keep going out like that in public, you're going to get nabbed for indecent exposure."

"At what number can I reach you?" Smith pressed wearily.

"This one'll do ?ne for now," Remo said. "Very well. When I return to my hotel, I will uplink with the CURE mainframes and see what I can ?nd." Smith hung up the phone before Remo could say anything more.

On the other side of the street, he found Maude Smith searching the sea of pale faces on the sidewalk. Her eyes lit up when she saw him.

"I thought you'd left me."

"I must return to the hotel," Smith said quickly.

Mrs. Smith seemed crestfallen. "What's wrong?"

"An emergency has come up concerning one of the sanitarium's patients," he lied.

She could see from the determined set of his jaw that there would be no arguing with him.

"I'll go with you," she said, unable to mask the disappointment in her voice.

"No," Smith said. "It should not take long." He checked his Timex. "I will meet you in front of the National Gallery at ?ve o'clock."

When he looked back at his wife he could see that she was no longer paying attention to him. She was staring up in the sky. Along the sidewalk many other pedestrians were looking up, as well.

"What are those, Harold?" Maude aimed a curious ?nger in the air. Smith followed her line of sight. The day was unusually sunny and mild for England. On a backdrop of thin, virtually transparent white clouds, he spotted several dark shapes ?ying ominously in from the western sky.

Smith's heart tripped.

As the small planes ?ew toward them, tiny objects began dropping from their bellies. A rumble-like distant thunder-rolled toward them in waves from the approaching aircraft.

They could feel the sound beneath their feet. Moments after the ?rst rumble began, a different noise ?lled the air above London. It was a pained electronic screech. The crowd around them became more agitated as the persistent scream continued to a.s.sault their eardrums.

"What is that?" Maude Smith asked, crinkling her nose. She looked around for the source of the unG.o.dly sound.

Smith was staring up at the sky, his haggard face clouded in disbelief and dread. When he spoke, his words were low."An air-raid siren," Harold Smith breathed.

And at that the ?rst German bombs began dropping on London's Hyde Park.

Chapter 9.

Colonel E. C. T. Bexton of Her Majesty's Royal Air Force was single-handedly responsible for permitting the ?rst planes of the modern London blitzkrieg to cross over England and drop their payloads unmolested. He allowed this horror to be perpetrated against one of history's most famous cities because he refused to believe the word of a simple potato farmer.

His precise words were: "I will not scramble one of Her Majesty's elite RAF squadrons because some obviously p.i.s.sed-to-the-gills toothless old git sees cabbage crates ?ying in across the briny. Tell him to take an aspirin and have a lie down."

Hanging up the phone, Colonel Bexton attempted to resume his work on next week's ?ight schedules. He had barely brought pen back to paper before the phone resumed its persistent squawking. Placing the pen on his desk with exaggerated patience, he reached for the receiver.

"Colonel Bexton's of?ce. Bexton here," he announced to the party on the other end.

"Listen to me, you fool! There are German bombers ?ying in an attack formation toward London." Slender ?ngers tensed on the receiver.

"Who is this?" the colonel demanded. Though it was the same voice as before, he hadn't bothered to ask the clearly agitated man's name.

"I am Edmund Carter," the man explained with as much patience as time allowed. "I am a research scientist at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station in Cheshire-"

"Jodrell Bank?" Bexton interrupted. "Aren't you supposed to be looking for little green men? I would have thought German warplanes would be a bit too terrestrial for your lot."