Which made the timing of everything to come a bit more interesting. He and his new friend Dr. Halter were literally babysitting a live bomb.
Someone would be first to push the button. And someone else would be first to die.
Hawke, his mind racing, knew he’d have to find some way to take the Tsar out when he was alone, or at least get him out in the open. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, accept any collateral damage. He could not conscience the death of innocents.
Such as the woman he loved.
Or, and here his heart paused a beat, their unborn child.
65
The Nobel Prize banquet ceremony is held each year at the Stadshuset in Stockholm. Even a monarch’s coronation cannot rival the Nobel celebration in terms of pure grandeur and epic scale. The massive Stadshuset complex, with its three-hundred-fifty-foot tower at one corner, is built in the Swedish Romantic style. It stands on the banks of the Riddarfjarden, a freshwater lake in the heart of Stockholm. Tonight, Sweden’s beautiful State House was ablaze with light.
Alex Hawke, shivering as he climbed out of the Saab’s passenger seat, thought it looked like a great medieval fortress, but Professor Halter had informed him that it was built in 1923.
“Are you sure you’re not going to freeze to death out here?” he asked the professor. Halter would remain in the car while Hawke went inside. Halter was dressed for Russian winter, wearing an ushanka, the Russian trapper’s fur cap with ear flaps, and a full-length bearskin coat. Sitting behind the wheel, his brow furrowed in concentration, he resembled some great bear, fiddling with the silvery Beta detonator on his lap, making sure he’d know how to use it when the time came.
“I’ll be fine. But try to hurry this up, will you?” he said. “It is frightfully cold, and we’re rapidly running out of time. He intends to destroy the first city on his agenda in a little less than two hours.”
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” Hawke said, glancing at his watch. “Thirty max. Keep your eye on that entry door, and please keep the engine running. When he comes out, he will likely be in a hurry. You see his car and driver over there, the liveried chap standing beside the heavily armored Maybach? He’ll head for that, straightaway.”
“How the hell do you know that’s his car?”
“I’m a British spy, professor. Besides, it’s got Russian plates. Moscow. Now, try to stay awake. Maybe turn the heat down.”
“What heat?”
Hawke smiled, shut the passenger door, and raced across the snowy car park to join the party inside. He felt his mobile vibrating in his trouser pocket. Anastasia? He’d rung her cell phone from his room while he was shaving; perhaps she was returning the call. No time to find out now. He’d just have to call her later. He’d not spoken to her since they’d kissed good-bye when he boarded the Navy fighter at Ramstein. But since then, he’d been maintaining a fairly active schedule. With any luck, he’d see her tonight. But whether or not they’d have time alone, he had no idea.
He knew he had roughly two hours to get the Tsar out into the open, in the countryside, preferably, somewhere where he could take him out without endangering anyone else. Two hours was enough time, perhaps, but there was a slight complication. He had no idea how he was going to accomplish this objective. Ah, well, he’d think of something.
First things first, he thought, showing his beautifully engraved invitation to the security chaps at the entrance. He’d need to smoke Korsakov out of the massive crowd inside the banquet hall. Find a way to force him outside in the open. And do it rather quickly. That would be the trick.
The Nobel guest list included some 1,300 dignitaries from around the world. This closely guarded A List included the Nobel laureates and their families, their majesties the king and queen of Sweden, and the entire royal family, plus various European heads of state and a smattering of celebrities and bigwigs. The dinner was always held in a magnificent space called the Blue Hall, and Hawke hurried there now, the inkling of a workable idea just forming in his mind.
He was late. He and Halter had pushed the ancient Saab to the limit on the icy roads returning north to Stockholm, and he’d barely arrived with time enough to race up to his room at the Grand Hotel, shower and shave, and don his white tie and tails. With some help from Sir David Trulove, Hawke had managed to get his last-minute invitation courtesy of the British ambassador to Sweden.
When he arrived inside the venue, he was first surprised to find that the famous Blue Hall was not blue at all. The architect had originally planned to paint the great hall blue but changed his mind when he saw the beauty of the handmade red bricks. The name, however, stuck.
The gala dinner was just beginning as Hawke straightened the white piqué tie at his neck and made his way along a great gallery overlooking the guests still being seated in the vast hall below. Thirteen hundred people, with all that chatter and tinkling china and silverware, made for quite a din. And then there were the trumpets.
Vast numbers of trumpeters in period costume lined the gallery balustrade and both sides of the grand staircase leading to the floor below. Their gleaming brass horns were as long as Amazonian blowguns. They sounded an impressive fanfare before each of the few remaining laureates and dignitaries was announced, everyone pausing regally at the top of the staircase, waiting to hear their names called before descending.
There was a stern chap in court regalia with a great ornamental staff, and just after the fanfare and before someone’s name was announced, he’d bang the staff down on the marble step, making a fine noise that got everyone’s attention.
Hawke joined this august line of Nobel geniuses, wondering if he’d get a whack of the staff and a fanfare. He certainly hoped so. He’d never had a fanfare before.
At the foot of the staircase, a temporary stage had been built. At the center of this flower-bedecked podium was a gleaming mahogany lectern, where an elderly white-haired gentleman, the presumed head of the Nobel Prize Committee, was introducing the winners and assorted Swedish big shots as they made their way down the broad marble stairs.
There were television cameras everywhere, and Hawke knew the annual ceremony was being beamed around the world to an audience of millions.
A vast worldwide audience only made his germ of an idea all the more appealing.
Perpendicular to the podium was a massively long dining table that stretched the entire length of the huge hall. This brilliantly laid table was reserved for the laureates and their immediate families and, of course, the king and queen, their daughter, and the royal family. Here at this table, one would naturally suppose, he would spy his favorite Tsar. The man’s car was outside. Was he inside? He had to be.
Hawke stepped out of line a moment and, ducking between two trumpeters, leaned out over the balustrade to peer at the crowd below. Spread beneath him was an undulating sea of women in beautiful gowns and sparkling jewelry with gentlemen resplendent in white-tie evening attire, all lit in the warm glow of countless candles. He pulled a cigarette-thin but powerful Zeiss monocular from inside his black cutaway and scanned the guests seated at the royal table from one end to the other, then back up the opposite side.
Halfway down, on the far side of the table, he saw Anastasia, exquisite in a diamond tiara. She was seated beside her father, who wore a great red sash across his chest and many jeweled decorations. Tsar Ivan was speaking expansively to someone across the table, and his daughter was listening, a smile on her lips. He zoomed in on her lovely face. He wasn’t so sure about that smile. It looked brave, pasted on. His poor darling.