"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 film 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 embassy 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 fifty 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 embassy."
"Only some of what was stolen," Smith clarified. "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 hell of a lot of damage," Remo said somberly.
"Yes," Smith replied, thinking. He was looking thoughtfully out one of the side glass 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 fine for now," Remo said. "Very well. When I return to my hotel, I will uplink with the CURE mainframes and see what I can find." 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 five 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 finger 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 flying ominously in from the western sky.
Smith's heart tripped.
As the small planes flew 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 first rumble began, a different noise filled the air above London. It was a pained electronic screech. The crowd around them became more agitated as the persistent scream continued to assault their eardrums.
"What is that?" Maude Smith asked, crinkling her nose. She looked around for the source of the ungodly 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 first 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 first 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 pissed-to-the-gills toothless old git sees cabbage crates flying 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 flight 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 office. Bexton here," he announced to the party on the other end.
"Listen to me, you fool! There are German bombers flying in an attack formation toward London." Slender fingers 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."
"We were alerted to this by a local farmer," the voice explained.
"Ah, yes," Bexton sympathized, "the poor old sot who still thinks he's seeing monkeys on the ceiling. You sound like a sensible chap, Carter. Surprised a man of science would be taken in by a boozer with one foot in the past and the other in the Boar's Head Tavern."