Royal Protocol Read Online Free Page A

call, showered, shaved and still bleeding from the nick on his chin where he’d been a little too aggressive with his razor, he opened a steel door deep beneath the palace’s grounds and stepped into a brightly lit and austere gray hallway. There were few places on earth more secure than the rooms he was about enter.
    Few people knew of the tunnel beneath the palace thatthe royal family used to avoid walking through the palace’s public areas. Even fewer knew of the tunnel intersecting it through a boiler room that connected to the Royal Intelligence Institute a mile away.
    It was the second tunnel Harrison had just entered.
    The doors here were unmarked and the same pale gray as the walls. The floor was industrial tile. Overhead lights were long, fluorescent tubes. Cameras followed the movements of whoever stepped inside. Many of the unseen rooms were soundproofed and lined with lead so no communication inside could be overheard or intercepted by equipment from the outside world.
    A Star Wars array of the most sophisticated surveillance equipment known to man occupied a cavernous space behind the unobtrusive door a couple hundred yards down. A door beyond that led to a suite, complete with kitchens and a year’s worth of supplies for the royal family and necessary staff in the event of an attack. Another on the other side led to a medical clinic with a surgical suite and hospital beds.
    One of those beds was occupied now—by King Morgan.
    A soldier in the khaki uniform and black cap of the Royal Army appeared from behind the only glass door.
    Shoving the newspaper he carried under his left arm, Harrison returned his salute.
    “Sir,” the young man began, still at attention, “the men you asked your secretary to summon are waiting in the conference room. Except for Colonel Prescott. He’s on his way,” he explained, his words as clipped as the bristle of brown hair covering his head. “Your secretary also asked you be told that the minister of foreign relations has requested your presence at a meeting in his office as soon as possible. She said it was urgent.”
    It appeared that no one had slept much that night. That meeting would be about Majorco, Harrison thought. And there wasn’t anything that wasn’t urgent at the moment. “I need coffee. Black.”
    “It’s already waiting for you, sir.”
    He had his secretary to thank for that. He was sure of it. If the woman wasn’t already married, he’d consider marrying her himself. “What’s the holdup with Colonel Prescott?”
    “I wasn’t informed, sir.”
    Harrison gave the young man a nod. “As you were,” he muttered, and pressed a code into the pad by the unmarked conference room door.
    In one salute, Harrison returned those of the two highly trained men rising to their feet around a gleaming mahogany conference table. The walls here were richly paneled wood, the carpet beneath his feet a deep burgundy.
    “Sorry to call you out so early,” he said to men who had to be every bit as tired as he felt. “I know neither of you got to bed before midnight.”
    “I’m not sure the colonel got to bed at all,” said Carson Logan, referring to Colonel Pierceson Prescott, Duke of Aronleigh. Logan, the king’s loyal and powerful bodyguard, was a duke himself. “I think he’s on to something.”
    Harrison stopped halfway between the table and the coffee tray on the matching sideboard. Pierce Prescott was also head of Royal Intelligence.
    “On to what?”
    “He didn’t say. He called half an hour after you did and said he’d meet us here. You’d probably already left or he’d have called you, too.”
    Harrison headed for the caffeine.
    Sir Selwyn Estabon, the king’s personal secretary andsecret member of Royal Intelligence, settled back into one of the burgundy leather chairs. “Before we get into why you called,” he said, over the sound of coffee being poured into a white ceramic mug, “I just spoke with the king’s nurse. He had an uneventful