The Lost Kingdom

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

Tyler Webb smashed a closed fist against the top of his desk, exultant as he heard the news. The feeling he experienced bordered on sexual, so arousing it almost settled on a par with the feelings he got whilst stalking other people’s homes and rifling through their personal lives, but then he remembered who was on the end of the line.

“Dudley,” he breathed a little lower than he really wanted to. “Good job, my fine Irish friend. Good job. You’re actually holding all three Z-boxes now?”

“Yer men just delivered them to me. We’re all standing around in a nice little circle.”

Webb luxuriated in the feeling of accomplishment. From the plan’s earliest gestation he had been unconvinced — such a convoluted idea with so many possible places for it to go wrong. Finding the fossil, translating the tablets, locating Mu and so on. But it had worked! Maybe its pure diversity gave it the legs to succeed. An interesting lesson and one he would take to his heart and soul when forming his future plans. Well done Bay-Dale, the smarmy, arrogant old bastard.

Job done, Webb thought. What’s next?

Dudley waited patiently and Webb simply let him. His mind flicked over the various scenarios that had already been offered up — Le Brun’s galleons or “ghost ships” sounded positively delicious, real dead-of-night, roaring campfire kind of storytelling stuff, God rest her foul, malevolent soul, whilst his own Tesla suggestion, and in particular a project one of the new guys — Julian Marsh — had come up with were all vying for first place on the new agenda.

“Are yer still there?” Dudley’s voice broke in.

“Yes, yes.” Webb sighed and looked up, greeted by a window full of blackness. It was almost midnight in DC, not that the passing ant-life below seemed to notice. “Bring the boxes home, Dudley. Bring them here to DC.”

A pause and then: “Are yer feckin’ kiddin’ me?”

Webb started, snapped back to reality. What did this toady just say to me? “Is there a problem?”

“Of course there’s a feckin’ problem! This Drake twat and his team killed three of my boys. Three!” His thick brogue pronounced it as tree! “Did y’not hear me? We be the 27-Club for fifteen bloody years, man.”

“Okay.” Webb couldn’t care less about Dudley’s life — past, present or future. “We’ll deal with Drake later. I hear the Yakuza are now chasing him down as well as Ramses. That team — their future is dismal at best.”

And I have my own personal interest in seeing them live at least a little longer…

“Feck that.” Dudley assaulted his ears, shocking him still further. “We’re gonna kill that fecker and we’re doin’ it in Hong Kong.”

Webb took a deep breath, counting to ten and thinking that his other team — the team that had initially taken delivery of the Z-boxes from the Chinese — were standing alongside the Irishman and his three colleagues. Perhaps…

“Bring me the Z-boxes. They’re more important than you can ever imagine. Even your life pales beneath their importance. Bring them to me and we’ll talk about Drake et al.”

“Me life?” Dudley repeated. “Me life? All I know is how t’kill and maim and torture. Drake’s gonna learn that. Him and his mongrel crew. You, boy, you can have yer feckin’ boxes and feck ya.”

The line went dead. Webb sat holding the receiver in his hand for almost a minute, trying to remember the last time anyone had spoken to him in such a way. It was so unusual it felt almost refreshing. Standing up, he knew that he couldn’t trust the Irishman and placed another call, this one to the leader of the other team.

The Z-boxes were of vital importance now, more so than any other thing. If Webb owned those, he owned more of the US military than the recently deceased General Stone could ever have given him.

There was an eye-opening, quite improbable but true story about how America had sent most of its nuclear weapons to Georgia at some time during the cold war. At that time, if Georgia had seceded from the United States it would instantly have become the third largest nuclear power in the world.

Funny story, Webb thought. What then if I personally held the key to all of them? What would I become?