“He cut me!” Sykes protested.
“What’d you expect? Little foolish boys who play with knives will cut themselves. That doesn’t mean you have to ruin my roses. Who’d you think you were, anyway—Don Quixote? Fools!”
“We’re trying to learn to be knights,” young James Wylings protested to the old man. That was a worthy undertaking, wasn’t it? he asked, demanding accreditation.
“What a waste of time. There’s no need for knights in the world anymore. Flowers we can always use.”
“We’re going to be men of bravery,” Wylings protested. “We’re British, right? The toughest men in the world.”
That seemed to take the wind out of the old man’s sails. He silently disarmed the young men of their old weapons and started to walk away, seriously subdued, then he turned back. “No matter what, you’ll never be the toughest men in the world. Remember this, lads, there will always be someone tougher than you are.”
“That can’t be true!” Wylings said, somehow stung by the implication. “Somebody in the world has to be the toughest!”
“But not you.”
“Who, then?”
“Who? You really want to know who?”
Wylings certainly did. The fury that had enraged Sykes was forgotten, and the old man waved them along. They followed him to his private library, and there he told them the stories of the ancient Masters of Sinanju.
“They were fairy tales meant for eight-year-old boys,” Sykes insisted, waving the already empty glass of Scotch from Wylings. “They weren’t real!”
“Most of the stories were untrue,” Dolan agreed. “In fact, I think all of them were exaggerated out of the realm of reality by the old man—but there was an element of truth to them, too. He heard the stories from his own father and swears that there are Dolans who actually had a meeting with a Master of Sinanju, in Buck Palace itself—with the king!”
“Come on,” Sykes responded. “I was there when he said all that, Dol. It’s the kind of thing you say to boys to fire up their imaginations.”
“Maybe, but I talked to him about it later, when I was older. Must’ve been ten years back and the old bloke was on death’s door. He tells me one day, out of the blue, he says remember the lesson he taught us that day. He wanted it to be the one great lesson he taught me before he checked out. ‘There’s always somebody tougher than you out there,’ he says to me. I tried to tell him that wasn’t so unless you count Orientals in fairy tales. That’s when he tells me there really were Masters of Sinanju. ‘There were and there are, to this day,’ he says. ‘And what I told you they could do, they could do. There’s people known to me, to this family, who had run-ins with the Masters—but they didn’t live to tell the tale.’”
“You’re puttin’ us on, Dol,” Sykes said accusingly.
‘I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. And the old man tells me one more thing. There’s two of them. The Master and his apprentice, and the apprentice was a bleeding Yank!”
Sykes was staring at Dolan, waiting for the punch line, but Dolan was as dead serious as they had ever seen him.
They left it at that—unresolved as to what to believe. Dolan had made his decision. He was convinced that this fairy-tale assassin actually existed, and that he and his American trainee had nearly crushed the Ayounde coup attempt—and had wiped out the veritable army of mercenaries that Wylings had placed in Jamaica.
Sykes scoffed sullenly at the idea. Even as a boy he resisted the idea that the most powerful person on Earth was an Oriental, of all things.
James Wylings was in the middle. He knew that not believing in the supremacy of the Masters of Sinanju because they were Korean and American was a poor reason not to believe. But there were many other reasons not to believe….
And there were many reasons to believe. Dolan’s family had treated the old patriarch, Gerold, as if he was senile. They’d treated him that way for decades, and he wasn’t crazy at all, just an eccentric individualist. Deciding that he was touched in the head made it easier to excuse his politically incorrect statements—and made it easier to remove him from the role of the decisionmaker for the family.
But Wylings always thought the old man was perfectly sane, as sharp as a tack. He lived in the past, but he wasn’t prone to fancy. Even when he told the fairy tales of the Masters of Sinanju he had seemed to be improvising about the plot, but not about the Masters themselves. The challenges were prone to change—what was a three-headed dragon one time would be a serpentine basilisk the next time the story was told. The Masters never changed. Gerold seemed to take them very seriously.
Were they true? Were they genuine, but something too dangerous to talk about? Did old Gerold work the Masters of Sinanju into his fairy-tale adventures just so he could talk about it in one way or another?
If only the old gent was still around to ask. What family did he refer to that had run-ins with the Sinanju Masters and had not survived to tell the tale? There was no way to even guess.
Chapter 20
When Sykes and Dolan arrived at Wylings Manor, they found their old friend sunk in a chair in his private study, no drink in his hand. He was sunk so low, his face a mask of concern, it was as if a large and invisible weight were pushing down on him and he could barely tolerate it.
“Sit down. We have important matters to discuss.”
They already understood that. They had been called in for a special meeting at Wylings’s personal residence, and that never happened. They always talked at the club. On the off chance anyone was keeping an eye on their activities, they didn’t want there to be any sort of pattern of activity that would hint that they were planning some sort of strategy, about anything.
Sykes and Dolan were supporters on the inside—power brokers in parliament. Wylings knew he could make his plan work only if he had governmental backing.
Right now, Sykes and Dolan were playing their games carefully. Parliament was trying to come up with a consensus on how to respond to the recolonization violence and the matter of the Proclamation of the Continuation of the British Empire. Sykes and Dolan were to keep a consensus from happening. Until parliament sent a clear message to the world that said the proclamation was illegal, then the actions in the colonies had to be considered legal under British law. Nobody wanted to offend the British—and notably the queen of England—until it became absolutely necessary.
“I have decided to ramp up the threat-level, so to speak,” Wylings announced without preamble. “I am going to assume that we are being hunted by the Masters of Sinanju.”
Sykes sniggered. Even Dolan was surprised by it.
“Before you say anything insulting, let me explain further,” Wylings said. “I did not say that I believe the Masters of Sinanju exist. They might. They might not. I am saying that I shall assume that they are hunting for us.”
“Even if they don’t exist,” Sykes said tauntingly.
“Don’t be an idiot!” Wylings snapped. It had been a long time since Wylings had said anything so harsh to his old chum. “Kindly let me finish speaking.”
“All right, Wylie.” Sykes sat and waited.
“Somebody is out there. They were in Ayounde and they were in Jamaica and they are against us. Maybe they are trying to find us or maybe just trying to stop our colonization efforts. Maybe it is not the Masters of Sinanju, but it is someone with extraordinary capabilities.”