That’s right, Wylings thought. They had scrounged up some old practice swords from the attic storerooms and had a grand old romp in the garden that got out of hand. Dolan cut Sykes across the shoulder and actually drew blood, and Sykes flew into a rage, attacking Dolan with the old sword as if he meant to kill him. Dolan was backed into his great-grandfather’s rose garden, where he sought cover behind a trellis of Dolan’s Perfect Blush, a variety that Gerold had developed himself when he was a younger old man. Now he came charging into the garden after them with a vigor he hadn’t shown in almost as long, and he disarmed Sykes with an angry flick of the wrist. He turned the sword on the boy and pressed it against his chest. Sykes went from mad rage to abject terror. He knew the old man was out of his mind. What was to stop him from killing him, right then and there?
“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.
