“Goddamned Ramshawe still causing trouble,” said Arnold ruefully. “He’s been waiting for this moment for a month, trying to curtail my simplest pleasures.”
“Darling, don’t talk about him like that,” scolded Kathy. “He cares about you more than anyone in the world, except for me. He is genuinely worried, as you well know.”
“I know all that, but he’s still a goddamned nuisance,” replied her husband. And he turned to Big George, his new bodyguard, and demanded, “And where the hell do you think you’re going to park that thing while I’m in the bookstore? In the biography section?”
“Don’t worry about that, sir. The car will be right there when you come out. I’m only following orders. The president insists you play everything by the book while we have this terror threat.”
Admiral Morgan scowled. But did as he was told. George checked outside. “Car’s here, Admiral,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Kathy took Arnold ’s right arm, and the five of them walked across the carpeted lobby. George went through the revolving doors first, followed by the other two guards, then Kathy, last of all the admiral.
From high above, Ravi leveled the Austrian precision rifle at the Ritz entrance. One by one he watched them emerge, gravitating to the right-hand brass rail. The doorman, however, was standing on the left, and when the admiral himself came out, he stood next to the doorman as Kathy took his right arm. They started down the steps, and the moment Arnold moved forward, Ravi had his clear head shot, for less than one second.
But Big George, sensing the admiral’s unprotected left flank, suddenly swung around on the fourth step down and took a giant stride back up to Arnold ’s left.
Ravi tensed, kept the rifle steady, the crosshairs on the admiral’s head, and pressed the trigger. The sound was a soft phutt. The 7.62-millimeter shell ripped out of the barrel just as George reached for Arnold ’s arm, stepped across, and completely blocked him from the left.
The bullet caught the big bodyguard full in the temple, splitting the skull right in front of the hairline, penetrating the brain, exploding on impact inside his head. George died while he was still holding on to the left-hand brass rail.
He pitched forward, pushing Arnold and Kathy to the right and falling into the top step, his neck twisted. The small wound to his left temple was obscured. And for at least five seconds, no one had the slightest idea what had happened. Then the blood began to trickle down the steps.
All three remaining agents formed a cordon around the admiral, one of them shouting, “Police! Right here we have a shooting! One of our guys is dying!”
The doorman blew his whistle and the agents hustled Arnold down the steps and almost hurled him into the embassy car. The police outriders swung around and drove the motorbikes into tight formation around the vehicle. With Arnold now onboard, the American agents raced up the steps to collect Kathy, who was standing next to the doorman.
George’s immediate boss, the black Secret Service man Al Thompson from the White House, was on the phone while he was helping to half-carry Kathy down the steps and into the vehicle with Arnold. A police cruiser came howling around the corner from Bennett Street. Everyone knew the drill as far as an attempt on the admiral’s life was concerned-and that was to get him as far away from the datum as possible, immediately.
Right now, Ravi had shut the window and was dismantling his rifle. He’d missed. He knew that. Missed because of a million-to-one fluke, when the late Big George suddenly swung onto the admiral’s left side and blocked the path of the bullet. The seconds ticked away, and Ravi clipped the case shut. He then applied the finishing touch to his disguise-a thick but neatly trimmed black wig.
He now wore no blond moustache or goatee. He was clean-shaven, of dark complexion, and in his gray suit and tie he looked like an elegant businessman, a persona he had never assumed before. Neither doorman had ever seen him in anything but jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, or a tracksuit. Twenty-four seconds had elapsed since he pulled the trigger. And now he picked up the duffel bag and briefcase, peered out of the office door, and stepped out, locking the empty room behind him.
There was no one on the landing, nor on the one above. He crossed the floor and softly rammed the duffel bag down the incinerator. Then he moved swiftly down the stairs, and, without even a sideways look at Reggie, walked across the foyer and pushed open the swing doors.
He was a totally different person from the fair-haired Finn Haakon Fretheim. No one would have guessed the transformation. Reggie glanced up and saw the departing figure. Not the face, just the dark hair, suit, and leather briefcase. The man could have been visiting anywhere in the building, and Reggie did not remotely recognize him. He turned back to the sports pages of The Sun.
Ravi turned right and headed straight up Dover Street, walking steadily but in no great rush. Behind him, across Piccadilly, pandemonium had broken out. At least three police cruisers were howling toward the scene of the shooting, one of them swerving right in front of the colonnaded north portico of the Ritz, blocking the westbound route along to Hyde Park Corner. They also blocked Bennett Street and directed traffic north up Albemarle Street into Mayfair.
A detective superintendent was already on the scene, talking to the admiral’s bodyguards, trying to get an idea of the direction from which the bullet had been fired. All three of the Americans had seen Big George go down, and all three confirmed that the shot he took to the left temple must have been fired from a building across the street.
Arlington Street itself was under strict scrutiny by the security forces and the police. No one had fired from ground level, or someone would have seen them. The shot most definitely had come from one of the two buildings on the south corners of Dover Street, most probably the one on the southeast.
The superintendent looked up and could see the police marksmen on top of the building. He turned to the sergeant who was supervising the deployment of his men as they arrived, and asked, “Did we search that building this morning?”
“Certainly did, sir. Just before 0500 this morning. I was in there myself. We checked every office, top to bottom. The place was deserted. It never opens ’til 7 A.M.”
“Did you go inside the offices?”
“No, sir. They were all locked up for the night. But we tried every door, checked there were no lights on.”
“Who’s the doorman?”
“Reggie Milton, sir. We picked him up at home in Putney just after four this morning, sir. He took us through, swore to God no one was left in the building last night, swore to God no one was there when we entered this morning.”
By this time, the car bearing Arnold and Kathy had swooped through the Hyde Park underpass and then swung into Belgravia. Two police outriders led the way and came to a stop in Lowndes Square. One of them dismounted and walked back to talk to the chauffeur from the U.S. embassy.
“We’re evacuating Admiral and Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “Out of London immediately. By helicopter. Somewhere to the west, avoiding flying over the city. Ask the admiral if there’s anywhere he’d especially like to go. Otherwise we were thinking of somewhere like Henley-on-Thames, actually anywhere that’s quiet and secret. I imagine you know that that bullet was meant for him, not Big George.”
“I think we all know that,” replied the chauffeur. “I’ll just follow you to the takeoff point.”
“No problem,” said the outrider. He remounted and headed south, back down to Eaton Square, and then turned left toward Buckingham Palace. And from there he turned into Birdcage Walk and accelerated down to Horse Guards, the giant military parade ground that stands in the shadow of Great Britain ’s Admiralty at the end of St. James’s Park.