“Hold on a second,” Remo said.
Mark Howard and Harold Smith heard Chiun and Remo conversing in Korean. It was difficult to read their emotions in the language, so unlike American English. Still, Mark thought Chiun sounded tense.
“Didn’t take him long to figure out we were on to him,” Remo complained. “What’s he trying to accomplish?”
“He’s to be crowned king of England during the same ceremony,” Mark said.
A burst of noise cut off further explanation. Mark Howard and Harold Smith looked at one another across the office. It sounded as if somebody was breaking up the furniture. Strangely enough, it sounded as if Chiun was doing the breaking.
Remo said, “He can’t do that. Can he?”
“He is doing it,” Harold Smith said. “He more or less came right out and admitted he was responsible for the genocide in Ayounde. Who’s going to argue with him?”
“Emperor Smith,” Chiun asked, “do you mean to say that Her Majesty will bow to his vile wishes?”
“She did not state her intent. When she received the call she was understandably, er, shaken,” Smith said. “Wylings informed her that he is en route to London and will proceed from the airport directly to Buckingham Palace. He intends to force the issue without delay.”
“She’ll go along with it,” Mark Howard added. “That’s just my gut feeling, but she’ll marry the son of a bitch and name him king of England if it means sparing her city.”
“Yes. She will do this.” Chiun sounded tense. “How could she not?”
“I agree with Mark,” Smith said. “No one, royal or governmental, is going to put up a resistance. They’ll let it happen and deal with the consequences later— whenever later is.” Smith and Howard were busy monitoring other communications lines, just in case Wylings used another method of reaching out to the world. Mark was trying to figure out how to get the Masters’ aircraft into England first—and finding few options.
“But it’s a sham,” Remo said on the phone line. “Can’t they have it annulled and voided once the nanobots are found?”
“Such is not the way with royalty.” It was Chiun who answered. “The queen will give her word and then break it? Even if she faces extortion, it mars her credibility to renege. A king is crowned and then the crowning is nullified? Many will say a coronation cannot be nullified. If these ceremonies are allowed to proceed, they cannot be undone without chaos.”
“This guy has been riding this wave of kinda-sorta legitimacy long enough,” Remo said. “A law isn’t a law just because he pretends it is, no matter how many people agree to pretend along with him. A king ain’t a king just because he makes somebody say he’s king. It doesn’t work like that.”
“It does work like that,” Smith responded. “No matter how blatant the lie, a segment of the population will call it truth if they are told it is truth.”
“It’s stupid.”
“This is beside the point,” Smith added. “Wylings has got England under his thumb, and the rest of the world as well. Until and unless the threat of the nanobots is removed, he calls the shots.”
“Not for long will he be calling shots,” Chiun squeaked. “I will pursue the pilot of this sky needle to accelerate his pace.”
Chiun was gone in a flash, leaving Remo sitting alone at the small sofa booth in the rear of the aircraft with the speakerphone. “He’s up front, telling the pilot to step on it.”
“I’ve already given your pilot air clearance for a more direct route and he’s at top speed,” Mark Howard said. “If he goes any faster, his gas mileage decreases and he’ll risk running out of fuel short of the British Isles.”
Remo heard shouting from the cockpit and a yelp. The Learjet’s speed picked up noticeably. “Maybe somebody had better do some smoothing over with the charter company,” Remo said.
“Remo,” Smith asked, “does Chiun have some sort of a personal involvement with this Wylings?”
“No. Absolutely not. Why would you even ask such a thing?”
Chiun was, naturally, within earshot and returning to the booth.
“Our estimated time of arrival has been revised,” Chiun announced. “We will land in three hours, eighteen minutes.”
“Oh,” Mark Howard said. “That would be advantageous and somewhat amazing.”
“Then you shall be amazed,” Chiun said. “The pilot has given his word that it shall be done.”
“Unfortunately,” Mark added, “that will still be an hour later than Wylings’s arrival. He’s got a lot less distance to travel.”
Chiun nodded and said, “I will see how much more motivation can be applied to the pilot.”
“No, that won’t be needed,” Smith insisted. “The pilot is performing admirably. We show your airspeed is at the maximum design limits of the aircraft now.”
“Design limits are simply numbers on paper,” Chiun said. “They can be ignored by a skilled joystick-toggler.”
“There’s a risk,” Remo pointed out before Chiun could scamper up front to apply his motivation. “The wings.”
“What of them?” Chiun demanded.
‘The engineers make them to go a certain miles per hour, you know,” Remo said. “Any faster—”
“They will come off?” Chiun gasped.
“Almost never.”
“What knowledge of engineering is there in your swollen white head?” Chiun demanded. “The wings will not come off if we exceed the design speed. Emperor?”
“Correct, Chiun. The wings are made to withstand stresses much greater than the design speeds of the aircraft. It’s unlikely that the wings would lose structural integrity.”
“Quite unlikely,” Mark Howard added.
Chiun squinted at Remo, at the small electronic box of the phone, back at Remo. “We are traveling quickly enough.”
“I think so, too. What do we do in the meantime?” Remo asked. “Can you guys stall Wylings? Can you divert his plane? Anything?”
“We’re not going to risk setting him off,” Smith said. “We don’t even know what kind of personality we’re dealing with here.”
Chapter 34
“Oh, heavens!” Wylings had never fainted in his life, but the spectacle of the royal parade almost made him swoon.
Built in 1798, the Wylings family coach was a jaw-dropper back in its day. Old Edward Wylings III spared no expense to hire Britain’s best carriage-smiths and to have gold plating applied to every filigree and detail. More than two centuries later, Sir James Wylings hired equally capable carriage-smiths to carry out the restoration, and he poured more than a million pounds into gold plating the complete exterior.
He hadn’t stopped there. Gold-and-silver baubles, gemstones and platinum rivets decorated the bridles of the horses and the coats of the twenty-four horsemen. The drive was lined on both sides with standard-bearers holding twenty-foot wooden poles displaying the Union Jack. Every article of textile, from the flags to the coats to the horse blankets, had dangling gold fringe. It was truly a royal procession that was staged in front of the Heathrow Airport terminal exit.
The orders had reached the street cops. There was no police resistance to the unscheduled jubilee, and they were organizing the crowds like any other royal event. The police were making room for the media, even providing priority access for Wylings’s staff.
Wylings had expected this. The queen and the other powers that be were not going to risk intimidating him—not when he had the power to burst his WMDs in the streets of London, symbolic heart of England. The more England’s people appeared to be a part of today’s events, the more legitimate would be the coronation. With police escort, this parade would look as it should look—like a royal procession. The ceremonial arrival of the king of England. This parade and the festivities that followed would convince the world that he was the king of England. Once the people of the world believed it, his opponents would have to change the people’s minds, and that was always the hard part.