And that was what America would be, some day. It would have to be skillfully done, but Wylings could foresee it happening. He would start retaking the colonies around the world—those that would benefit England the most, and those that would give England a new foothold in the lands that she had to someday conquer anew. The tide of support would help Wylings take back more and stronger territories, and with British rule would come a new and splendid peace.
The world was weary of war and violence. Once the people saw that the new British Empire could quell the violence, there would be whole nations clamoring to subjugate themselves.
One important point: the British Parliament was not equipped, or legally entitled, to rule a vast global empire. That required a single authority, as the proclamation spelled out in no uncertain terms. The rebirth of the empire was also the reemergence of the power base of British royalty.
Which begged the need for a powerful, benevolent and wise king of England.
Sir James Wylings came up with his crazy scheme years ago. Back then it was a pipe dream. These days it still bordered on the insane, and Wylings would be the first to admit it. But he was going to succeed. He had the strategy, he had the tools, he had the leverage to make it happen.
That’s all his knights really were, after all—his tools. They’d help him get this project off the ground, with their petty ambitions and their celebrity status. Later on he could discard them like the disposable knights they were. When he was running things, England would once again return to the days when knighthood meant something more than pop music fame. For now, they had succeeded better than he had hoped—until Jamaica. In Jamaica, Sir Muffa Muh Mutha’s coup attempt had gone down the drain with unexpected swiftness. Wylings still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong there. Somebody had been on the ground on Hope Road ready to react the instant Jamaica House came under attack. Who was it? Some sort of special-forces unit? Whoever it was, they were few in number and skilled at keeping a low profile. Probably some American unit called in to assist the Jamaicans.
Sir Muffa Muh Mutha’s death was no great loss. The man was an imbecile. He’d only been chosen for the coup because he had a bit of a score to settle with the Jamaicans. His chief strategist’s loss was more painful. Sissy Muh was a mocha-skinned goddess. It took all Wylings’s self-control to not succumb to her temptations—and he’d never even met her in person.
None of his recruits met him in person. None of them knew him for who he was. He would emerge into the public eye soon enough, when the time was right to wrest control…
“What’s bothering you, Wylie?” It was Andrew Dolan. He and Wylings had been friends since boyhood. He was a member of parliament, and his sympathies lay on the same plane as Wylings. A good chap. It was just the two of them, in the bar of the club. The three-hundred-year-old club was a private establishment that was the second home to some forty-seven men of special character and breeding and status. Here, in the bar, Wylie laid out his plans to his best mates, Dolan and Sykes. Both sat in parliament. Both longed for the days of old when their forefathers were more than just bickering fools in a congress of bickering fools.
“Jamaica bothers me, Andy. Something strange about all that.”
“Old man, you’re too hard on yourself. You can’t expect to succeed every single time.”
The private, intimate bar was tended some of the time, but most hours it was to the members to fix their own drinks. It was a matter of privacy—this was where they discussed their business and their politics. The decisions made here impacted the UK and the world. It was more comfortable not to have a man standing there listening in, even if he was just a lackey drink mixer.
“It’s not that we didn’t succeed in Jamaica. It is the way in which we didn’t succeed. Somehow our forces were trampled. They were wiped out. Sir Mutha and Sissy killed. Almost everybody killed.”
Sykes was clenching his teeth around an ivory-inlaid pipe, but he removed it to laugh and knock the pipe on the ashtray. “Don’t grieve for that trash, Wylie!”
Wylings wasn’t feeling as jovial as his companions.
“It’s not grief. It’s concern, to be perfectly up front about it. What kind of a tiger do we have by the tail? That’s what I’m wondering.”
Sykes laughed it off, but Dolan said, “What do you mean, Wylie? This is something we expected. What’s worrying you now?”
Wylings went to the bar, a solid-oak affair hand- hewn in the late eighteenth century, and poured himself more Scotch, hand bottled in the 1970s. “The hell of it is, I don’t know. Doesn’t it strike you that Sir Mutha and his mercenaries were flattened a little too completely?”
