As I said, I’m a little bit psychic. The London trip had my power ringing 24/7.  A lot was going on.  Lord Caligula had started making flights on his Dassault Falcon 8X.  He liked it because it could land at London City airport.  He had made recent trips, or so I was told, to Tel Aviv, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris.  Because of my status as a world-famous journalist, I got invited to accompany his Lordship on a trip to Moscow to discuss certain matters with Putin.  Of course, the certain matters were bots, Ice-10, and steal bombs.  

To keep himself from getting bored, his Lordship also had Constance aboard as a guest.  I’m okay with Constance, but I dislike how she carries on like a wounded animal when Lord Caligula is having the in and out with her.  They have no shame.  It’s as if they think cats don’t notice or care what they’re doing.

Placating Putin required that he not think Munitions Galore had swindled him.  So, Lord Caligula went to a few meetings with Putin to work out prices.  Putin got a tall story about why Munitions Galore could not sell directly to him.  Instead, a secret subsidiary Menacing Arms, Inc. would sell the Russians whatever in the way of Ice-10, stealth bombs, and bots Putin wanted.  The price was enormous, but Putin only wished he could buy more.  The ancient Greeks had a word for Putin’s vice: Pleonexia.  The German translation haben und mehrhabenwollen, that is, to have and always want to have more.  That about sums up Vlad’s sense of life. 

Vlad also had a mean streak.  When setting the meeting with Putin, his Lordship suggested a piece of country owned by Munitions Galore that had a rich supply of pigeons and squirrels.  His Lordship brought along a supply of poisoned bread.  As they walked about the grounds, Putin delighted in kicking pigeons as he negotiated prices.  Whenever his legs tired of pigeon kicking, Putin tossed poisonous balls of bread to squirrels.  He roared with laughter as he watched squirrels flip onto their backs with stiff dead limbs pointing to the blue Russian sky.  “They’re so gullible they remind me of Ukrainians.”

Somehow the key element in this story did not escape Emperor Xi’s sharp sources. When I got back to Lucky in London, she was beaming.  Xi had given her a mission.   A rat at Munitions Galore by the name of Max Rosen was being run by Dmitri Razumikin.  They often met in a small Chinese restaurant near Piccadilly Circus.  Xi asked that Lucky not shoot, stab or garrote them.  His desire was for an explosion that would blow them to smithereens.  As Lucky’s messenger told her, he wants the restaurant to become a collage of gore.  Lucky told me she also had permission to ignore innocent lives.  Xi wanted splashy stories in the Tabloids.

I didn’t like the sound of any of this.  How much easier it would be for me if I slipped away to Potomac to spend time with Melania’s family.  And Potomac was free of the husky, blow-hard Prez.  Prez Trump’s inveterate bullshit got on my nerves.  But I stayed.

The day after the order, I noticed Lucky had stayed in the previous night to build a PE-4 bomb.  PE-4 is easier to come by in the UK than C4.  That afternoon, Lucky stuffed me in a large tote bag and headed to Piccadilly.  Once there, she went to some betting cents to put bets on dog races. From there she walked to the restaurant.  She went in and ordered tea and a spring roll.  She excused herself, went to the lounge and WC for women, and returned in disguise.  I noticed she placed her bomb under a table.  She walked out.  She then somehow returned from the WC dressed as when she left.  She ordered some fish that she sneaked to me since I was still in the tote.  We then left. 

Back at the Connaught, she sat on a mobile phone.  Two hours passed.  I saw her hit a button on the phone.  Within 5 minutes the messenger had knocked on the door, received the phone, and left with practised nonchalance.  Not long after that, I saw TV rushes covering an “Explosion in Piccadilly.”   The story said 4 people had died.  One was a Russian national, and another was Max Rosen, who was identified as a “brilliant engineer and graduate of Imperial College.” The two other victims were an unfortunate customer and a cute waitress.  Or so she was described.  The decapitated, shredded version of her on the screen did not seem too cute to me.  The walls of the restaurant were indeed festooned with body parts of the four.  An eyeball splattered dead-centre on a wall disgusted me.  I believe in clean kills.

Lucky was grinning from ear to ear.  “The game’s on.  Let Putin and the capitalist swine at Munitions Galore must learn the truth. We do not mess with the Chinese: On ne badine pas avec les chinois. 

By the next day, the Tabloids were having a grand time with the story.  The preferred line was to speculate that a lady in a Burqa was the culprit.  Even though the Russian embassy expressed public dismay that Scotland Yard had declined to consider a wider range of fiends.  As one Russia volunteered, “Not all monsters wear Burqas. Some even wear Chanel and Liberty scarves.”   Fleet street preferred Burqas.  It was easier to revv up intemperate comments if reporters asked about Mohammedan women in Burqas.  Editors hated words like Islamic,  “It makes it sound like our paper is in league with the terrorists.”   

Putin was not fooled.  Putin gathered in high dudgeon with his intelligence experts.  They all agreed that Emperor Xi was sending his message on Ice-10.  It was too bad that their sources also suspected that, like the Russians, the Chinese had a supply of bots, stealth bombs, and Ice-10.  A new arms race had arrived. The new toys may confer no military advantages when everybody of consequence had them, but it seemed foolish not to have them.