Prologue
The
President’s Palace, Seoul, South Korea
The North Korean and Chinese delegates,
outside the main palace’s formal photographic room, were dutifully waiting for
the ceremonial single ‘knock’ to be delivered by the official usher.
The crowd of one hundred and twenty five
photographers and journalists were separated from the guards and officials by a
pristine red velvet rope.
The Usher was a gaunt, white haired, and
obviously venerated old Korean gentleman wearing a formal suit, and white silk
gloves. He must have been eighty and must have seen the decades of trouble and
of wonder in Korea, a nation separated by the foreign and the insane. That hard
time was over now. The healing had begun.
He knocked once on the great reinforced
oak doors with a ceremonial carved golden staff. He paused, respectfully, as
per custom; and then opened the thick sound-proofed doors inwards.
The carnage that awaited them all became
the last thing, apart from the shattering jags of glass and the singularly
bright red-orange flash, any of them ever saw.
In addition to the bodies of the Usher,
the US President, the translator, the Secret Service Agents, the Chinese and
North Korean delegates, one hundred and thirty six other people were
incinerated by the explosion of the sidewinder missile that came straight through
the heavily armoured ‘impenetrable’ glass of the South Korean Presidential
Palace’s formal photographic room, straight through the massive open doors,
fully detonating within the packed lobby.
The Red Package had been delivered.
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