Free Fool's Gold by Warren Murphy Page A

other lord was found with all those bodies he had promised to bury free. Hadn't buried them at all, but kept them in a freezer locker in his basement. Two hundred of Her Majesty's subjects had to be thawed, washed, reclothed, and buried. Bit of a mess.
    "Problem, Neville?" harrumphed the old Lord Pimsy.
    "Business," said Neville.
    "Steel. Good British steel. Honest steel. Steel."
    "Thank you, Uncle," said Lord Neville.
    "British steel. You can count on it."
    "Yes, Uncle."
    "Steel to the gut."
    "Well, Uncle, it's a bit more complicated than that," said Lord Neville.
    "Nothing is so complicated that good British steel can't cut through," said Uncle Pimsy.
    "We've already used knife fighters and failed."
    "Knife fighters?"
    "Our trusty Nepalese Gurkhas."
    "Wogs. Can't use wogs. Good British steel with English lads behind them. Will take the measure of any man."
    "Yes, that is an option."
    "Option? It's your course, boy. Charge."
    "Yes, well, thank you, Uncle. How's Nancy?"
    "Bit off her feed but a fetching lass, isn't she?"
    Pimsy petted the poodle who wearily stood her ground as she was trained to do.
    "Uncle Pimsy, we are up against a new machine that we can't fathom. It is a new age. There are no more kings to service, no more crowns in the West to assure. This is a new world. With new machines and new clients."
    "Your wogs again, boy," said Uncle Pimsy.
    "The wogs have the need and the money, Uncle. The industrialized world has its own in-house staff. They don't need us. If we went to Number 10 Downing Street and offered our services, they would laugh us out. Yes, wogs."
    "Steel's good against wogs. But powder's better. The little yippie beasts run at the big bangs."
    "Not anymore, Uncle. We can't survive murdering girl-friends for Henry VIII forever."
    "That's a lie," said Pimsy heatedly. "We put away one embarrassment and our enemies have bruited it about for the past three centuries. And you believe them. You've always thought the worst of the Wissex. I don't mind telling you, I was against your taking over. Yes. There you have it. Out in the open. The truth."
    "You've been telling me that every month for the past seven years, Uncle."
    "Have I? Well, doesn't hurt to restate it."
    "Yes, but we have grown rather wealthy in that time. And look. My hands are clean," said Neville. "I have never skulked in an alley or had people blazing at my backside as I ran from an open window."
    "You demean the name of Wissex."
    "You're not limping, Uncle, because someone didn't get a round off at you."
    "Honorable wound," Uncle Pimsy sputtered. "On an honorable mission. Not like these things you have the house involved in now. Fleecing some towel-head with the brains of a porcupine. Frightful form, Neville. Mine was an honorable wound."
    "And you got an honorable seven thousand pounds for it, and already this week, I've made ten million dollars for our House from that towel-head Moombasa as you call him. And now I have a problem with a machine that fires no projectile, yet crushes bones, is so portable that no traces of it exist, and can be worked by one of those wogs you complain about and a white. That is what I have to wrestle with while you play with your doggy and talk of the old days."
    "A wog?"
    "Yes, wog," said Lord Wissex.
    "What kind of wog?"
    "Oriental."
    "What kind of Oriental?" asked Uncle Pimsy.
    "I don't know."
    "What was he wearing?"
    "Clothes, I imagine," said Wissex.
    "What kind of clothes?"
    "I think a kimono of some sort."
    "Neville, lad, find the design of that kimono," said Uncle Pimsy. His voice was suddenly low. The bluster was gone and the old man was deadly serious.
    "What does the pattern have to do with anything?" asked Lord Wissex.
    "If it is what I am thinking of, those killings were not done by any machine. And your wogs may or may not have even seen what killed them."
    "What are you talking about?"
    "Find out the pattern of that kimono because we might all be dead if you don't know it," said Uncle