ONE Balmoral Estate, Scotland It was the considered opinion of Chief Superintendent Tommy Fairbairn-Sykes that His Majesty the King was just a touch barmy. How else to describe someone making an intentional, voluntary decision to venture out into the cold gray drizzle to tramp around in a bog for hours, literally beating the bushes in hopes of maybe having the satisfaction of shooting what was little more than a glorified wild chicken? What sane person would do that? wondered the chief superintendent. Coming up in the commandos, Fairbairn-Sykes had spent more than his share of days and nights tramping around in cold, damp, miserable places, but doing that had at least served a purpose. That had been military training, the anvil upon which he and his mates had been forged into the hardest, deadliest elite warriors on earth-the Royal Navy Special Boat Service. What it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, was his idea of a holiday. It wasn''t as if the King''s options were limited. The man could spend his leisure time almost anywhere-Corfu, Malta, Switzerland, the Caribbean, Transylvania . yes, even bloody Transylvania-and those were just the places with Royal estates.
No, if this was the King''s idea of a good time, then he had to be just a little bit touched in the head. Chief Superintendent Tommy Fairbairn-Sykes, of course, wasn''t going to say any of this aloud. Not if he wanted to keep his job. Because after all he wasn''t the King''s bloody travel agent. He was the King''s personal bodyguard and senior commander of the Royalty and Specialist Protection branch of the Metropolitan Police. Farther up the hill, he saw the King and the head gamekeeper, one Roderick McClanahan, stop in their tracks, and so he did too, maintaining a respectful distance of about 150 yards from his charge. Close enough that he could sprint to the King''s defense or aid if needed, but not so close as to disrupt the hunt. "We''re holding," he said into the lip mic of his radio unit, letting the other five members of the protective detail, who were fanned out in a broad crescent trailing out behind the two-man hunting party, know to halt their advance as well.
In the hilly, fog-shrouded terrain, most of them didn''t have a direct line of sight on the principal, and in fact, they were not required to. While they needed to know where he was, their real purpose was to mind the flanks, creating a barrier between the King and any would-be attacker. Fairbairn-Sykes''s preference would have been to have the detail completely surrounding the King, but doing so would have risked spooking the game the King was so intent on killing, and thus ruined his sport. It also would have put them in the direct path of his shotgun. Not a great concern given the limited range and effect of bird shot, but not something to be taken lightly either. Ultimately, it didn''t really matter, because Fairbairn-Sykes and his RaSP team-all veterans of the SBS and the SAS-had already taken steps to ensure that the entire estate, all fifty thousand acres of it, was locked down so tight that not even a weasel could slip inside the secure perimeter without their knowledge. The King and the gamekeeper lingered on the spot for a good two minutes, presumably hoping to flush a hapless grouse out of hiding, but when nothing happened, they resumed their trek up the hill. "We''re moving," Fairbairn-Sykes said into his radio mic and then recommended his own ascent.
He supposed that there was a certain . not quite beauty, exactly . appeal? Yes, that was the word. A certain appeal to the Highlands. It was possible, at least theoretically, to have too much sunshine and golden sandy beaches or to get bored lounging by the pool with tall rum drinks. It was like music. Sometimes, you wanted something with a beat that you could dance to, and sometimes you wanted a sad song. Maybe it was the hunting that put him off, he admitted to himself.
He was not opposed to hunting game per se. He just couldn''t see the appeal of it as a recreational activity. During survival training as a commando, he''d spent weeks in the Brecon Beacons living off whatever he could catch in snares, so he was intimately familiar with the primal satisfaction that came with killing your own food, but at the same time . why? In a civilized world where you could just nip out to the pub for bangers and mash or pick up a steak, and-kidney pie at Tesco, why would anyone want to spend their holiday trying to procure wild game? Shooting was fun, sure, but there was more to hunting grouse than just blasting them out of the sky. After you pulled the trigger, you had to stomp around the moor to find where the bloody thing had fallen. Then you had to cut it open and- "Tommy, I''ve lost visual. Do you see them?" The radio call snapped Fairbairn-Sykes out of his reverie, and he was dismayed to see that he also had lost sight of his charge. The King and the gamekeeper had crested the hill, and now the foggy summit was blocking his view.
"No, the bloody hill is in the way," he replied, quickening his pace, not quite running but definitely moving with a purpose to reach the summit. "Jamie, do you have them?" A different voice sounded in his earbud. "No, I don''t. Wait. Okay, I''ve got them. They''ve turned northeast, heading my way." Even though there was no real crisis, Fairbairn-Sykes felt palpable relief that someone in the detail had eyes on the King. All the same, he hurried to the top of the rise, slowing only after he spotted the King, who stood only five feet ten inches with sloping shoulders in his favorite raggedy-looking Barbour jacket and his Lock & Co.
wool flatcap. The King was moving along a narrow game trail off to Fairbairn-Sykes''s right, perfectly oblivious to the fact that, for a period lasting about five seconds, he had been, at least technically speaking, missing. "All right," Fairbairn-Sykes said into his mic. "I have them again." And then, realizing that the King was taking another pause, he added, "Holding." Downslope from his position, the gamekeeper was pointing into a particularly rugged-looking section of sedge as if something there had caught his eye. The King nodded enthusiastically, and then the two of them began moving in that direction. "Moving again," said Fairbairn-Sykes.
The King and the gamekeeper strolled over to the patch of wild grass and then began carefully moving into it, gently pushing the long blades aside. Then both men knelt down, almost disappearing completely into the waist-high sedge. A loud, mournful wail-the baying of a hound-filled the air. Fairbairn-Sykes turned, looking for the source of the sound. As loud as the howl had been, it had to have come from somewhere nearby, but that didn''t make any sense. The King hadn''t brought along any of the Royal hunting dogs, and his favorite Jack Russell terriers certainly didn''t have the pipes for a howl like the one he''d just heard. "Do we have any dogs on the grounds?" he asked over the radio, hoping that one of the other protection agents would be able to fill this apparent knowledge gap. "Just Beth and Bluebell" came the reply.
Fairbairn-Sykes felt a vague uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. He felt like he was staring at one of those visual puzzles in a magazine. What''s wrong with this bloody picture? Then it hit him. There aren''t supposed to be any damned hounds on the estate right now. He supposed that it might have been a feral dog that had wandered onto the property days or even weeks before the King''s visit and that it had somehow managed to escape the notice of both the household staff and the RaSP team''s security sweep. It was a plausible enough explanation, but it was still an anomaly, and anomalies are what happen when you don''t do your job. "I want to know where that dog came fr-" He stopped short as he realized that the King was no longer kneeling in the sedge. "Oh, bollocks, I''ve lost him again.
Does anyone have an eye on?" He didn''t wait for the answers but jogged ahead to the sedge, turning this way and that, certain that the two men would, at any moment, materialize from out of the fog, but they did not. Voices sounded in his ear like a Greek chorus. "I don''t have him." "Nothing here." "Where the hell did he go?" Fairbairn-Sykes ignored them. He wasn''t quite frantic, not yet, but his heart was definitely beating faster. "Majesty!" he called out. He waited for the King to answer, knowing that when the King finally did, he would feel like a ninny for having panicked.
But the answer didn''t come. He turned ninety degrees and shouted, louder this time, "Majesty! Where are you?" No reply. "Bugger," he growled, then took out his Scotland Yard-issued mobile phone and opened a tracking app that was linked via Bluetooth to the King''s Parmigiani Fleurier Toric Chronograph, which had been specially modified with a panic button and a location tag. The phone display showed a topographic rendering of the surrounding area, along with two little dots closely spaced-one blue and one red. The blue dot, which also had a little arrow to show the direction of travel, marked the location and orientation of the phone. The red dot was the King. Had the monarch pressed the panic button, the red dot would have begun flashing,.