Timeline 102762 Main 09 All Along the Watchtower by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

06:05 Hours (EST)

The White House, Philadelphia

It was growing light outside but the heavy drapes on the first-floor windows of the old Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Bank excluded the new day.

Captain Sir Peter Christopher and his wife had been shepherded into another reception room when the President and his stern-faced companion, Senator Richard Russell were called away by a harassed aide. Since then he and Marija had been cooling their heels in a state of angst-ridden turmoil.

The bodies of the Ambassador, Lord Franks, his wife and the Chargé D'affaires and the youthful Blues and Royals officer who had commanded the small Embassy protection detail, had been thrown – practically naked – onto the steps of the Wister Park Embassy.

Peter and Marija had only been at the Embassy a little over a month or so, during which time Peter had spent several days away at Cape Cod during the period of the Hyannis Port Summit between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Kennedy. Nevertheless, they had made many new friends – the processes of forming friendships greatly accelerated by the siege atmosphere at the Wister Park compound – and been taken under the paternal wings of the Ambassador and his wife.

Lord Franks had treated Peter much like a long, fondly remembered lost nephew; and Lady Barbara had mothered Marija and Rosa Hannay as if they were her own daughters. Although Peter Christopher did not think he could, or ever would be, at ease in the company of Rachel Piotrowska, the mysterious Polish-born ‘spook’, the two ‘Maltese wives’ and the unlikely Head of Station of British Intelligence in Philadelphia had been like sisters. Despite everything, Peter and Alan Hannay – his putative ‘deputy consul’ in the mission to the West Coast but actually, ever since the Battle of Malta, his de facto aide-de-camp – and their wives had ‘mucked in’ with the Embassy staff and been welcomed into that community with open arms. Many of their new friends would have gone to Canada or to the legation in New York after the bombing of the compound last month; but it was likely that everybody else was dead, murdered by a gang of religious fanatics and misfits, and a mob...

“The President will be with us shortly,” explained the solid-looking, stern-faced man who was ushered into the small room without prior warning or introduction.

Peter Christopher shot his cuffs, straightened his jacket and shook Secretary of State William Fulbright’s hand. He and the man who, albeit approximately, was Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson’s counterpart in the US Administration, had met previously but never really spoken to each other.

He remembered his manners.

“Good morning, Mister Secretary of State. I don’t think you’ve met my wife...”

Marija had risen unsteadily from the chaise longue upon which she had been sitting and trying, with only middling success, not to succumb to the urge to nap. It was customarily at about this time of day that she started being sick; obviously her body clock, confused by travelling between time zones was determined to inflict her daily morning sickness later, rather than earlier today.

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