Lucky looked forward to a donnybrook in London.  I didn’t look forward to a donnybrook anywhere.  As you know, the informed call me The Love Machine.  The Love Machine avoids conflict. Let us make love, not war.

Lucky had no use for peace.  If you ask me, her lifestyle, as much as I adore her, depends on killing.  She was spoiling to know what rampage she could inflict on Munitions Galore.  

Despite the splashy coverage from the Tabloids, Putin did not unleash his bears.  What can I say?  Russians like bears. They also disliked the idea of more trouble in England.  

Now that Putin had his lethal gadgets, he simmered down.  Although we didn’t know it at the tme, he and his advisors decided against retaliating for the murder of their intelligence officer and asset.  The bomb had put the coppers and MI-5 on high alert, an unpropitious ambience for vegeance.  Also, Putin worried that Emperor Xi was yearning to fight.  That could be expensive.  

Russia’s quieticism did not mean that there were no juicy targets in Russia.  Xi had got the bots, stealth bombs, and Ice-10 he wanted, but he was irate that even the Israelis had scored.  He also sensed that despite all these oddly named shell companies that the lion’s share of the money made it back to Munitions Galore.  And if there were plenty of fine targets in Russia, there was also time enough to wait.

Further, and just as important,  Chinese intelligence pointed the finger at Binky Dalrymple as the probable organiser of the money grubbers’ commercial structure.  Over the years, Binky’s name surfaced whenever vast fortunes were being made off chicanery.  Binky, Xi was told, had a genius for mega thefts.  His mysteries would have to be studied slowly.

Wolverine had the good sense to use his NGA connections and clearance, as well as DoD clearances held by a plethora of fictitious officers, to glean the state of America’s understanding.  Visits to the main NGA office in Franconia, the CIA office in Langley, as well as a trip or two to Fort Meade and NSA put Wolverine in the know.  He also prowled the Pentagon in various disguises and uniforms of various ranks.  He obtained necessary TDY orders to explain his presence on the premises of the Pentagon.  Besides, he liked shopping at the Pentagon.  The bigwigs wanted the Pentagon to be nice enough that some reliable percentage of officers were willing to work endless hours to prove to their bosses that they were willing to work themselves to death.  It’s one of the best strategies for promotions ever invented.  Work until you drop.

After a hard day of spying at the Pentagon, Wolverine would head over to the bar at the Ritz in the Pentagon City Mall to drink cocktails.  From time to time, he would make the bar at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse his afterwork destination, as he liked to drink martinis there whilst trolling for rich divorcees or lonely, randy married women.  

Wolverine didn’t need rich women, but he preferred their company.  Too many poor women have squalid petty bourgeoisie tastes.  Worse, many turned out to be boringly conventional in the sack. Eton had made Wolverine a connoisseur of kink.  This kind of sexual hunting aggravated the perverted Lord Caligula because he found the submissions on the Munitions Galore expense account outrageous.  Once I heard his Lordship complaining, “Why has Wolverine such a fetish for consensual sex.  He should learn to behave as as a Lord with le droit de seigneur.  My god, these women are all Americans.  Wolverine had a good English education.  He must learn to show this colonials who’s in charge.”

Wolverine insisted, in his own defence, that his preference for consensual perversion saved Munitions Galore incalculable legal fees and payoffs.  “Unlike his Lordship, I’ve never had to bribe a copper over my doings.”  Of course, his Lordship kept his costs down by running with Constance, but he did like to steal, and that included sex.  The rich are like that.  They don’t care because they don’t have to.  There’s always a cleanup crew at hand.

Wolverine and Peregrine were both smooth operators.  Together they assembled the intelligence to know who know what about Ice-10 and its delivery.  Nobody, not even the Americans, had figure out how to use the blast frequency of steal bomb as a detonator.  In a way it made sense to me.  Don’t the big brains use an A-bomb to detonate a H-bomb?  

Peregrine did have the MI-5 crowd cowed.  He and Lord Caligula had assembled a killers’ row of solicitors and barristers to protect them and Munitions Galore property.  Their sacred status  of Munitions Galore didn’t sit well with Lucky.  Her rage got excessive after an incident at the Connaught.  

I suspect Constance was the instigator.  Lucky and I were on the sofa watching a trashy Brit costume drama. It had to be as old as dirt because both Mirren and  Jane Seymour had roles as young women.  Unlike the infamous Caligula movie, Mirren somehow kept her clothes on in this feature.  At least I think those were the two ancient starlets in the movie.

The noise of what smashed against our door proved why Lucky is a poor choice as a victim.  Faster than the fly heads to fresh shit, Lucky was in her closet.  She emerged super ricky-tick with devices.  One turned out to be a concoction that blinds a bot.  She tossed it around the corner of a wall forward from the front door.  It made a loud thump.  Voila.  The bot had a face full of muck, but so did I.  

Luck laughed when she saw me as she sped by me to the bot.  I heard her yell, “Check it out.”  

The head of the bot began to melt as the thermo device she had placed on its crown melted through to the incineration chamber where it stopped.  Lucky tossed another chemical on the bot to stop the reaction.  She enveloped it in an envelope that captured fumes  and than a hose to the window.  She cut hole in the window, placed the hose, and the fumes pumped out into London’s air.  

“Cool, eh, Crockey?”  In her uncontained glee, she explained Chinese scientists in Chongqing had studied how to destroy bots.  “The people put their brain to the problem. Behold the result: bot blinders and a super-mini thermobaric bomb.”

By then the adrenaline wore off enough for her to notice my pathetic condition.  The blinder had done almost as good a job on me it had on the bot.  Blind and whimpering, I heard Lucky coo, “Darling, I’ll restore you.”   Up I went, before I knew it, I had the terrifying experience of being plunged into a stream of water in a way that might have drowned a seal.  I do have to admit that when she finished, she had a result worthy of Jesus.  This blind guy could see again.  

She dried my face and petted me.  Whilst doing that, she also telephoned to a team of cleaners.  She told them what had to be removed from her suite.  Ever kind to me, she also told them to bring me a tartar of Chilean sea bass from Scott’s.  It’s hard to stay mad at a woman like that.  

She spoke to the cleaners in Mandarin. About an hour later, a tall Chinese chap who spoke English with a French accent arrived.  He  was wearing a Brioni suit.  He was also smoking cigarettes that smelled like Sartre’s Gauloises.   The guy drew them from a silver cigarette case and lit them with a Dupont lighter.  When Lucky wrinkled her face at the scent of the smoke, Charles, that’s what he called himself, told her they were custom-made to replicate the original Gauloises corporals, though some were made to the Maryland specs.  As he explained to Lucky, “The Nancy boys in Europe won’t let men smoke real cigarettes.  Everybody is supposed to watch their health, as if men in my trade ever make it past 50.”  Lucky concurred that European regulators were decadent poufs.  The whole of Europe was becoming a model of the Roman Empire in decline.   She was enough of a pouf herself to pass on the offer of fag, as did I.

After a few comments about the need to fix a problem, they broke into Mandarin, though I kept hearing the words “Munitions Galore,” and the names of the big bosses there.  

When Charles left, I looked puzzled.  “Oh, don’t worry about Charles not taking notes.  He has an eidetic memory.  If he sees it or hears it, he recalls it.”  He’ll have all we need when we go in.

I gulped.  I didn’t like what I knew was Lucky’s idea of “going in.”