JEREMY MARK OSMAND-JUBA- awoke from a disturbed sleep into an unsettling moment during which he did not know where he was. The former British paratrooper was drenched in sweat. Why does it still bother me? Familiar and terrible memories flooded up during long nights and sat on his chest so heavily that he could hardly breathe. Palestinian kids blown apart by Jew rockets and Russians doing the same thing to Muslim children in Chechnya. A baby dead on its dead mother’s breasts in Afghanistan, flies on their open eyes. Pakistan, the Balkans, Colombia, Ecuador, and, for too many months, Iraq.
Then he realized that he was not in some war zone but safe at his family’s home in England, awakening to the smell of cooking eggs and sausage. His mother had gotten up before dawn because she knew he had to leave again. He showered and dressed in a blue Armani suit and a D &G Bengal stripe shirt with a solid blue tie, with soft black Cole Haan shoes, and a Fortis watch on his wrist. The upscale clothes were just another uniform, one that said “successful business executive.” He looked around his old room. Soccer trophies, club flags, ribbons, and photographs of the young striker scoring goals. His old prep school jacket with the golden crest on the pocket still hung in the closet. Yesterday’s hero.
He went downstairs. The house was small and immaculate, everything in exactly the same place it always was. A photograph taken ten years earlier would show the same furniture in the same spots, the time difference marked only by the changes in the faces of the people in the pictures. They were all younger then. He lifted his mother from the floor and twirled her in a circle in the tiny kitchen.
“Stop that this minute, Jeremy,” she commanded with a giggle. “I am cooking! The toast will burn.” As if that were important. He loved her without reservation.
Martha Goodling Osmand thought her son traveled too much, although she had put in more than a few miles herself as a young firebrand human rights attorney when she went out to the hellholes and recorded what the devils were doing. An Israeli bullet shattered her knee during a raid on a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank and clipped her traveling wings but not her spirit. Now she worked from home, hosting a Web site to help Muslim refugees.
His father, Dr. Allen Osmand, came into the kitchen and gave his wife an affectionate good-morning peck on the cheek. A thin man with a neat beard, he, too, was impeccably dressed for work, The doctor sat across from his son at the table.
“How long do you intend to keep up this schedule, Jeremy?” his mother scolded as she poured hot tea. “When are you going to get your company to assign you to the home office here in England? I want to be able to play with the toes of my grandchild before I am too old.”
“Look who’s talking.” He laughed. “You two hauled me all over the world as a kid, taught me languages, how to travel and to get along with people. Now you complain because I’m taking advantage of that training to make a living.” He sipped the tea and cut his toast into triangles, dipping them into the egg yolk. “I am just a poor salesman, forced to hustle for my next meal at some five-star restaurant in Berlin or Paris, and it’s your fault.” He looked at the clock. Almost time to go. “Are you going to watch the wedding today, Mum? Not going down there, are you?”
“Oh, wouldn’t dream of getting mixed up in that crowd. Barbara is quite lovely, and a fine match for Prince William, but my leg tells me to stay here and watch it on the telly. A volunteer from Amnesty International is dropping by to help me catch up on some work on the site.”
His father spoke. “We expect things to be quiet around the hospital today because of the wedding, so Professor Grosvenor and I should have the lab almost to ourselves.” Jeremy nodded. Good. Perfect alibis, if ever needed.
Father and son finished their tea, and after hugging his mother, Jeremy went to the car and tossed his travel case into the back seat. As his father drove, the son wrote a note and handed it over: “You must stay out of London today.” The father read it and gave it back, with a slight nod of understanding. The son tore it into little pieces and fed it out the window, bit by bit, along the morning highway.
Jeremy leaned back and studied his father, who held the steering wheel lightly with the gentle, sure hands of a talented surgeon, a man who had worked hard his whole life only to see his dreams crushed. He deserved better. The young medical student had fallen in love with England the moment he set foot in the country from his battered homeland of Lebanon. The golden history of the British Empire enthralled him, and he trekked all over the country, wanting to become part of it but knowing that he could never really be a true Englishman because of his deep skin color, his dark eyes and hair, and the accent; a foreigner forever. To close the distance between him and the society of which he so desperately wanted to be a part, he committed the greatest shame of his life, abandoning his country of birth to become a British citizen.
Aziz Osman gained a reputation as a brilliant young doctor who healed patients of high social status. That was until the old and cancer-riddled Lady Wallendar died beneath his knife. It mattered not that the obese woman was in her eighties, and an extraordinarly poor candidate for any sort of surgery. When Osman opened her up, he found the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart almost destroyed. Then she had a myocardial infarction while on the operating table, and it was all over in twenty minutes. Lord Wallendar had wanted a miracle and, by God, had paid handsomely to get one. He blamed Osman, and from that moment the surgeon was tainted as just another worthless wog saw-bones. The big door of class slammed shut, with Osman on the wrong side, and his practice and dreams evaporated. Wog! The acronym for “worthy Oriental gentleman” was the ultimate sneer.
The doctor determined that his children should not have to face that same barrier, and after taking the advice of friends, Aziz Osman went to court and formally anglicized his name. Aziz became Allen; Dr. Osman added a single letter and became Dr. Osmand. The next year, his son was born, and Jeremy Osmand grew up about as English as a boy could be.
The car pulled up at the new St. Pancras International train station in King’s Cross, and Jeremy removed his bag and went inside. Since he would be traveling to the Continent, he ran the magnetically encoded card through a reading device and passed smoothly through customs and an X-ray tunnel, for he had nothing to hide. Once in the sterilized zone for departures, he would not have to go through customs on the other end of his journey, the Bruxelles-Midi station in Belgium. The high-speed Eurostar departed at 6:10 A.M., with Jeremy resting comfortably in seat 55 on the aisle of the first-class, nonsmoking car number 9, reading an International Herald Tribune.
The Eurostar sped into the mouth of the thirty-one-mile Channel Tunnel, dashed through the Chunnel, and popped up in Europe. Two and a half hours after leaving London, he was in Brussels. He took a cab to the Silken Berlaymont Hotel on the Boulevard Charlemagne, asked for and got early check-in, and went directly to his room. With the wink of a tiny green light above the handle, the electronic coded card opened the door.
Jeremy Osmand turned on the television and placed his cell phone on a small, polished table beside the soft chair facing the set, then hung up his jacket and brewed a pot of tea in the little kitchenette. He checked his watch again and transformed himself, the genial personality of the pleasant Englishman sliding away like the discarded skin of a snake. His feelings shut down. He became Juba.
SECURITY AGENCIES WERE IN overdrive, for nothing could be allowed to mar the wedding or threaten the royals. The streets around Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral were searched a dozen times, and officers were posted in every building along the route. Security cameras were everywhere, their little eyes probing and curious. Uniformed policemen from the boroughs were brought in for duty, and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch detectives threaded through the throng. British soldiers in combat gear were stationed in plain view.
Tuesday was a national holiday in Great Britain, and about seven hundred thousand people were jammed into the parks near the palace-Kensington, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s. Each person had been searched before being allowed through the security cordon. The Royal Wedding Command Center in the Palace Gardens had been going nonstop for seventy-two hours before the ceremony and was not to stand down until William and Barbara left for their honeymoon at a private place unknown to the general public.
Every cop in England was looking the wrong way.
The wedding went off without a problem, and the royal couple signed the register after the ceremony and walked back down the red carpet, with Barbara needing help from her bridesmaids to maneuver the twenty-five-foot train of her antique lace and ivory silk gown. The prince and his smiling, radiantly beautiful bride stepped into sunshine amid nonstop cheers and hurrahs and got into a special open landau drawn by a matched team for the trip back to the palace, escorted by the glittering Horse Guards.
Juba, in Belgium, watched the carriage depart and gave it a three-minute start through the adoring crowd. He held his cell phone in both hands. When he finally dialed a number, the call bounced off a satellite and into London. It caused a dart of electricity to pulse across the microscopic gap between two strips of copper, closing the circuit in the small bomb beneath the floorboard in the purple and white press van rented by the Italians. It was a crude device, but all he needed to generate an explosion from the C-4 to rupture the lead container.
The explosion detonated the gas tank and caused a secondary eruption. The Edinburgh van tore apart as the blast peeled away its sides and knocked over the antennas of several nearby trucks. Flying pieces of metal became deadly shrapnel, and all four members of the European technical crew and three passersby were killed. Although the unruffled BBC commentators, far from the scene, continued describing the parade, the explosion was clearly heard by thousands on the ground, and the plume of smoke in the rear of the media headquarters in Kensington Park was seen by millions of television viewers before the camera intentionally swung away.
The horses pulling the landau of the prince and his new princess broke into a fast trot, and the mounted guard closed around them, sheathing their ceremonial swords and pulling free the carbines attached to their saddles.
Kimberly Drake was stunned. The unexpected explosion had smashed her against another truck, and she toppled to the ground, out of breath and dazed. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs just as the strong hands of Tom Lester, her cameraman, scooped her up.
Tom Lester, a photojournalist for more than twenty years, had stepped over a lot of bodies in a couple of wars. Any explosion that did not kill him was someone else’s problem, but he had not seen one in London since the IRA had quieted down. He looked at his reporter and saw no blood. Just shock. He poured water into a cupped hand, wiped her face, and gave her a drink. That was enough tender loving care, and he shook her by the shoulder. Hard. “Wake the fuck up, Kim! Pull yourself together! A monster story just fell right on your lucky little head!” He turned to see the young engineer looking out of the doorway of their van. “Get back inside, Harold. Get us up live to Little Rock right now. Move, kid! We’re not here as sightseers.” He snatched his camera and looked it over, wiped the lens, then hoisted it to his shoulder and adjusted the eyepiece to frame the fire, the debris, and the dead.
Kim was pegged to the spot by indecision over whether to cover the story or help the bleeding victims around her. Lester shouted, “Get with it, Drake! This story is all ours for the time being, but others are going to be coming. It’s your moment, girl. Grab it with both hands.”
“But these people, Tom…”
“Fuck ’em,” he snarled. “We all take our chances in this game. They caught it, we didn’t. Shit happens. The medics will be here in a few minutes for them anyway, and our job is to cover the goddam story! You make up your mind right now whether you want to be a reporter or Florence Nightingale. You stop to help those poor bastards and you can kiss your career good-bye.” He had to keep her focused, keep her mind busy, or she would falter. Fucking newbie.
Harold ran up and rigged them with collar microphones and earpieces. “We’ve got the station. Go!”
“Kim? What’s happening over there?” The familiar voice of the news director back home in Arkansas comforted her.
“There was some kind of explosion in one of the TV vans,” she said. “It was not close to the parade route and probably has nothing to do with the wedding. Maybe an overheated generator or something.”
Lester broke into the conversation through his own microphone. “Fuck that! The goddam thing blew up almost right next to us! I’ve got some great fucking shots here, dude. Bodies and fires and all kinds of good shit. Kim and I are alone with it right now, but it won’t last long. Get us on air!”
The voice in her ear told her to stand by and be ready to go live. The news director took a few moments to confer with the station management. Fire and destruction always made good television, even better when media people were involved, but this was frontline action and a royal wedding at the same time, and their reporter had it! “Get your thoughts together, Kim. We’re going live in about one minute, as soon as we offer you to the network and cables.” The additional revenue from such an exclusive report could cover the budget for Kim’s entire trip.
Her heart flopped, but Tom flashed a thumbs-up and gave a smile of encouragement. The network was going to carry her report! No other reporters were at the smoldering site yet because they had been out of position, trying to get close to the parade route. Kim pulled out her hairbrush and a small mirror, but Tom Lester slapped them from her hands, saying the unkempt look of the blond hair dangling over her forehead and the dirt on her face and jacket added authenticity. He did not want her to see the trickle of blood working a crimson path down her dirty cheek. A button had torn from her blouse, enough to give a glimpse of a lacy black bra. Sexy as hell. The voice in her earphone started a nineteen-second countdown. Then she heard the godlike tones of the network anchorman saying, “…and here is reporter Kimberly Drake at the site of the explosion. Kimberly?”
In his hotel room in Belgium, Juba smiled as he recognized Kim Drake. She had her opportunity, just as he had predicted. He dialed another number, and this time a soft pop no louder than a firecracker went off unheard beneath the van rented by the Arkansas station. The contents of the canisters bled invisibly into the air, crawled out from beneath the van, rose, and spread.
Kim’s mike was live. Her dream was coming true. She was on live network TV! Once she started to talk, her nerves calmed and the training kicked in. Nothing fancy. Let the pictures speak while you give the who, what, when, where, why, and how. The network news directors were impressed with the kid.
Crew Manager William Warner of the London Fire Brigade was chewing a chocolate and peanut energy bar when the first explosion detonated less than a hundred meters from his truck. He had kept his team on full alert during the wedding, so they were already in their bulky coats, overtrousers, and fire boots. The truck was rolling in seconds, its lights flashing, the horn honking and the siren shrilling to push a path through the crowd as the crew slapped on helmets and pulled on gloves.
There were some casualties but only a small area of actual damage, and his firefighters were on it immediately with suppressant chemicals, then waded into the charred debris with their tools. Some cleared a circle for emergency medical personnel. Walker found himself bumping against a small American news reporter with a microphone in her hand.
Kim had finished her first report, but the appearance of the fire truck and its flashing lights gave her more material. Tom had them in his eyepiece as they dove into work. Let the pictures talk! Her throat was very dry; her eyes started to mist, and her skin itched. Probably the smoke, she thought, and plunged ahead with her work.
She had expected to be shoved aside by the big firefighter because that is what would have happened in the States, but this was England, where people valued courtesy. William Warner let her stand her ground because nothing important was happening anyway and his people had the work in hand. He coughed.
Warner had listened to the reporter and agreed with her quick conclusion that this had the look of an accident, maybe an undetected electrical fire inside the truck that set off a gas tank leak. Only an off-the-cuff hypothesis by an untrained observer, but a pretty good guess. Arson investigators would sort it out soon enough. He had already given basically the same report to the Command Center; the situation was under control. He felt a tug on his sleeve. The disheveled young reporter thrust the microphone at him, and Warner leaned down to answer the question. The telly camera was pointed at him.
Kim cleared her throat, then had to do it again before speaking. Exposed portions of her skin were stinging as if she had been attacked by a swarm of bees, and she felt woozy. She wouldn’t let that sideline her. “I am standing with an official of the London Fire Brigade,” she said. “Sir, what can you tell us about this explosion?”
Warner was about to answer that all was quite well, that it was an accident, when he actually looked at her. The girl’s face was flushing bright red, and she was rubbing her forearm, where a gelatin-like substance was clinging. Then a sharp chirp squealed from a rectangular device attached to the thick collar of his coat. He jerked his head up. More chirps were coming from the crew’s uniforms, and his firefighters turned to him with alarm and shock on their faces. They were in the midst of thousands of people, and their hazardous materials detectors were singing like mad canaries.
“Get your rebreathers on and button up!” he yelled. The reporter was collapsing at his feet, clawing at her skin as she sucked in air, having trouble breathing. Her eyes rolled back. The cameraman was falling to his knees.
“Oh, dear God,” Warner said, slapping down his own face shield as he grabbed the radio that was on the frequency of the Royal Command Center. “Red Alert! Crew Chief Warner in Sector Kensington Three. Red Alert! Dirty bomb! I repeat: Dirty bomb!”