"Grenade!" he yelled, turning to find Churchill emerging from the car without so much as a scratch on him yet.

Harry dived at the prime minister, slamming into him like the champion rugby player he'd once been, and driving the portly old man back into the relative safety of the armored car. A curse, a tangle of arms and legs, and then two explosions that shook the Bentley and peppered the interior with shrapnel through the still-open door. Harry felt some of it hit his body armor, and a hot shooting pain in his calf told him at least one piece had struck home.

Churchill heaved him off, and Harry backed out of the car, looking for Skorzeny.

A platoon or more of real British troops had arrived from within the Ministry building, and more were running up from the Horse Guards.

"He got away," said Draper, appearing from around the other side of the Bentley.

The familiar voice of the British prime minister rode in over the top of him. "You know, Your Highness, we once had a civil war in this country to put the royal family in its place, and that place was not on top of the prime minister… but thank you, anyway."

Harry took the PM's outstretched hand, still looking for Skorzeny.

But he was gone.

EPILOGUE

The Quiet Room had no physical presence. There was no room, as such. The Quiet Room was a set of protocols, a number of agents, and an expression of will.

Admiral Phillip Kolhammer's will.

He was not an autocrat. He consulted with those he trusted. Men like Captain Judge and Colonel Jones, or women such as Karen Halabi. But when it came time to make a call, the responsibility fell on him alone.

Kolhammer scanned the read-once-only report from one of his best agents. They sat in a nondescript conference room on campus in the Zone. The woman was dressed in civilian clothes. An expensive suit, cut in a twenty-first style by a local tailor who was becoming rich because of his ability to reproduce the designs of Zegna, Armani, and their contemporaries from magazine photographs that came through the Transition.

The woman was wealthy in her own right now. She worked for herself, but she answered to a higher purpose.

"You've done excellent work, Ms. O'Brien," said Kolhammer. And he was impressed. She effectively ran a dozen large and rapidly growing enterprises on behalf of her clients. They'd come to trust her advice without reservation, so successful had she been in advancing their interests. Some of the clients were complex entities, corporate concerns with claims over intellectual property not yet existent in this universe. Some were individuals, such as Slim Jim Davidson.

As long as their wealth continued to grow at a staggering pace, Maria O'Brien's clients asked her very few questions about the vast and ever-growing discretionary funds she invested on their behalf.

Kolhammer grinned at the thought of what an asshole like Davidson would think of his ill-gotten gains being channeled into something like the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference fifteen years before its time. Not much, he supposed, unless he could see a dollar in it-in which case, he probably couldn't care less.

"I see you've gifted Bryn Mawr's Library fund rather generously," he said, raising one eyebrow.

"Yes." O'Brien nodded.

"You're an alumna of Denbigh Hall, if I recall correctly."

"You do, sir. So I know how much they need the money."

Kolhammer handed her the flexipad, deleting the read-once file as he did so. "Be careful with the political donations, Ms. O'Brien. Hoover's men are all over Congress. They'll pick up any whiff of us playing favorites."

"They won't, Admiral. I know my job."

"I believe you do," said Kolhammer, handing her back the flexipad with a new read-once file, a list of trust funds, individuals, and organizations he wanted her to fund. O'Brien took a few minutes' pace around the bare room, committing the list to memory before she deleted it.

"So," he said when she had circled back to a spot in front of him. "How's civilian life treating you?"

O'Brien relaxed a little. She was no longer in the corps, but old habits died hard. "I don't have to get up early. That's pretty cool," she said. "And, you know, I'm actually loving the work. Not just for you, but for my clients. It's exciting…" She seemed to falter at something.

"But?"

"But," she said with the air of someone about to make a confession. "It's really hard here, sir. The rednecks and the assholes I can handle, if you'll pardon my French. A guy like Slim Jim, he's a pussycat. But I'll tell you what hurts. It's the way women resent me, and everything I stand for. The way they look at me when I enter a room, or walk down the street. Like I'm some sort of five-dollar whore turning tricks at their bake-off."

"Not all of them, surely."

"No. But enough." Tears began to well up in her eyes. "There isn't a day I don't wish I could just go home," she said as her voice cracked.

Kolhammer passed her a handkerchief. "You leave anyone special behind?"

O'Brien dabbed her eyes and pulled herself together. "No husband or kids, if that's what you mean. But I was very close to my sister."

"I'm sorry, Maria. Have you been in contact with your family here? Grandparents, or anything?"

She shook her head. "I… I don't know how they'd react to me. I don't-"

Kolhammer stood up and gripped her shoulder. "Why don't you find out?"

O'Brien sniffed. "Thank you, sir. I might. I have traced some people on my mother's side. I'm sorry, I don't normally blubber. Marines aren't allowed to."

"You're not a marine anymore. Blubber away. That's an order."

They began to walk toward the door. Kolhammer gave her a fatherly pat on the back of her exquisitely cut suit. "You go get 'em, tiger. I'm sure they'll be proud of you."

"They'll probably hit me up for a loan," she half laughed, half sobbed.

"You can afford it."

They shook hands, and she left. Kolhammer checked his watch. He had another meeting in his office in ten minutes. He turned out the lights and left, walking out of the building into a night so cold and clear, it seemed as if you could see to the end of time out there in the stars.

As he walked back, he tried to keep a whole world in his head. Everything from the planning of the assault to retake Hawaii, to the names of the FBI agents who tried to use Davidson as a pawn. A frost had formed on the turf laid out between the campus buildings. It crunched underfoot as he cut across a section that had been laid just that afternoon. The strips of grass shifted under his feet.

He wondered what he was going to find when Ivanov sent his scheduled data burst from Siberia tomorrow. Assuming he sent anything at all. He wondered if Wild Bill Donovan had made contact with Ho Chi Minh yet, with a promise to supply all the arms the Viet Minh would need to make the Japanese occupation of Indochina a grinding nightmare. He wondered if Roosevelt would accept his argument that rather than fighting the Communist north after the war, they should bury them in aid and consumer goods. As he climbed the steps of the building that housed his office, he thought about the latest reports of out of the Middle East, about the Baath Party uprising in Syria and the Wahabi Intifada in Egypt.

He wondered if his uncle has been sent to the death camps yet and whether another round of horror stories in the broadsheet press might shame Churchill and Roosevelt into assigning more assets to bombing the rail links into Poland. He made a note to ask Dan Black to speak to Julia Duffy about that. She'd been more than helpful that way in the past.

As he saluted the guards at the entry foyer and marched down the corridor to his office, thoughts of Duffy led naturally to the horrible footage of that Natoli girl being murdered. A slow burn began in his gut, and he felt his gorge rising with his anger. He returned the salutes of the three men waiting for him.