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“No!” Jennings lunged for the satellite phone.
Lunk’s paws slammed down on his shoulders. “Compose yourself.”
Jennings took a shuddering breath.
“Better.” Bolan nodded. “Put it on speakerphone.”
Jennings pressed a button on the link. A deep, British upper-class voice came across the speaker. “Clive, we need to talk.”
Bolan watched Clive’s face closely. He’d broken into a sweat.
“I agree,” Jennings replied.
“Listen,” the voice continued. “I’ve spoken with our counterparts in the East. We are in agreement. We need to step up the timetable.”
Jennings looked like he might throw up.
Lord William cocked his head. Clearly something about the voice was familiar. Jennings got that staring-into-the-middle-distance, everything-unraveling look on his face again. He opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“I say,” the voice said. “Clive, are you there?”
Bolan silently mouthed the words “keep talking” at Clive.
“I…”
Lord William suddenly beamed and leaned in toward the intercom. “Parky, you old sod! How the bloody hell are you?”
Jennings’s jaw dropped. Lunk shot Bolan a knowing grin. The voice on the other side of the secure link paused in shocked silence. “To whom am I speaking?”
“Why, Ian, it’s Bill! Bill Glen-Patrick! Haven’t seen you since I last voted in Lords! By God, when was that? Aught 2, then?”
The voice on the other end was clearly stunned. “Clive, what is going on?”
“I…” was all Jennings could manage.
Bolan subvocalized to Lunk. “Who?”
Lunk muttered under his breath, “His Lordship Ian Parkhurst, if I’m not mistaken.”
Bolan had never heard of Lord Ian, but then there were close to seven hundred members of the English peerage. “Is this bad?”
Lunk’s craggy brow furrowed. “Bad enough. Lord William is a baron. Parkhurst is an earl.”
“Listen, Parky,” Lord William continued. “Your lad Clive has cocked things up a bit. I’m doing a little spring-cleaning around the old office. I’m putting a stop to whatever he’s up to. I do hope you won’t be inconvenienced.”
“Glen-Patrick,” the voice said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave my office.”
“Your office?”
“Yes, William. Just who do you think it was who took your wretched little box of tin soldiers away from you? Surely not that pissant Clive?”
“Well, truth be told, yes,” Lord William admitted. “Not quite cricket, Ian. Peers turning on each other like this, is it, old bean?”
“You know, I never really considered you a peer,” the voice stated. “None of us ever did. You’re just a jumped-up country squire who never knew his station. You spent more time on your sordid little escapades and in the tabloids than you ever did voting in the house.”
Bolan listened to the exchange with interest. Whoever Parkhurst was, he was an amateur. He was gloating and monologing when he should have kept his mouth shut. Bolan silently mouthed the words “keep him talking” to Lord William. The baron nodded.
“Listen, Parky. We have dead CIA agents, the IRA, whispers of mass destruction, Aegis somehow involved. I was looking into this out of duty, you know. Queen and country and all that. But you know something, Parky? Now I think it’s personal.”
“Do you know what one does with toothless, barking old dogs?” The voice went utterly cold. “One puts them down. However, I’ve come to learn that you’re not an old dog. You, William, are a cockroach. A pest that refuses to be crushed. And I’ll tell you something, William. When Clive failed to kill you in Guernsey, I had a thought you might show up at the offices.”
“Oh? And what might that thought—”
“Goodbye, William.”
The line clicked dead.
Lunk was peering out the window toward the river. “Company, Lord William, coming to kill us quiet.”
Bolan gazed out the window. Men were spilling out of a pair of Volkswagen vans. They were dressed in civilian clothing, but each one was sporting a micro-Uzi machine pistol with the long black tube of a sound suppressor screwed over the stub barrels. The gunners’ torsos had the barrel shape of men wearing body armor beneath their clothing. Bolan counted ten of them and was pretty sure there would be more coming around the back. If Lord Parkhurst was telling the truth about owning the company, the killers would probably have their own keys.
He turned on Clive. “Where are the guns?”
“Your guns?” Jennings stared up at Bolan in confusion. “Grietje has them in the safe downstairs. You know that—”
“No, Clive. Where are your guns?”
“Mine? You have my—”
Bolan seized Jennings by his hand-painted Italian silk necktie. “You’re a boy who likes playing with the grown men’s toys, Clive. Where’s your toy box?”
“I—”
Bolan’s eyes flicked around the room and instinctively came to rest on the hoplite shield mounted on the wall.
Lord William’s mustache lifted in a curtain of amusement. “Oh, jolly good.”
Bolan nodded. “Lunk?”
Lunk happily wrapped his fingers around the edges of the shield. His knuckles went white as he pulled. Wood splintered, cracking and breaking around the hidden lock. Lunk let out a groan of effort, and the Aegis ripped away from the wall.
The shield formed the door of a recessed gun cabinet.
Lunk picked an inch-long splinter out of his palm. “Little boys with grown men’s toys.” The Welshman grinned. “Have to remember that one.”
Clive Jennings had some toys.
“My rifle!” Lord William exploded in outrage. “My bloody fucking Falklands rifle!”
Jennings cringed.
Lord William stalked to the ruptured gun cabinet and ripped a 1980s-era British L-1 A 1 SLR rifle off the rack. He racked the action on the big black .308 self-loading rifle and peered through the SUIT optical sight. “You son of a bitch! You told me it’d been lost!”
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