Shakira was unaccountably overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness, not so much 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.