Prehistoric Clock Read Free Page A

talking.
    After blinking sweat from her eyes, Verity dragged the boxes to a safe distance and defused the hexagonal clockwork explosives in the bell’s light. She had to leave one, however, as her cutter ran out of acetylene. Instead she buried it in the sand at a safe distance from the pipeline, and then made her way back to the diving bell. One hard tug on her lifeline was all the signal Djimon needed to haul her slowly up. As she rose, several more crimson flashes lit the distant gloom.
    She blew damp strands out of her eyes, then heaved a sigh. What had other crews gone through in the name of Britannia tonight?

Chapter 2
Son of a Marquess
    “Get out of my way, blue bottle.” Lord Garrett Embrey brushed the irritating old butler aside and marched along the strip of tan carpet flanked by varnished oak panels. Too many nautical oil paintings adorned the corridor walls. Grosvenor House was as self-righteously appointed as its committee members, and he’d long grown tired of this superciliousness.
    “May I take your hat and coat, My Lord?” The pesky servant wearing a shiny blue waistcoat scurried after him.
    Embrey stopped outside the new conference room door, inhaled the strong smell of lacquer and then shrugged his damp top coat off while the man held it for him. He handed his top hat behind him and waited until the blue bottle’s shoes squeaked away out of earshot. This moment to gather himself before the interrogation was the most crucial time of the evening, he knew. He plucked his father’s bronze pocketwatch inscribed with the Embrey coat-of-arms from his waistcoat—the timepiece was pretty much the only item belonging to the old man he still used—and raised an eyebrow.
    Seven-twenty-five. He was deliciously late.
    Oh, let them slither a while longer.
    The 1801 Thomas Luny painting, Battle of the Nile , caught his eye. Thrilling and majestic, it echoed the nautical reminiscences his father had shared with him by the fireside after many a dinner. As far back as he could recall, Garrett had loved imagining them perched together in the crow’s nest of a grand ship of the line, sharing a spyglass in the run-up to a fierce engagement. How often he’d pictured his older self as the spitting image of Marquess Embrey, a much-admired figure in London society. Alas, how little he resembled his father these days! In his teens, everyone had remarked on the likeness. Now at twenty-five, Garrett was a little over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, strikingly blond, and he had his mother’s sharply defined, heart-shaped face that many had called handsome. But it was in his father’s name that he must contend with the Special Committee on War Crimes this evening.
    Eighteen months after they had wrongfully convicted and executed Marquess Embrey for treachery against the Crown, the vipers still wanted more blood. Now they were after him, the last surviving member of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England. He tempered his urge to punch a hole through the glass by loosening his shoulders as he would on the playing fields of Oxford. He straightened his white bow tie and winged collar. During this meeting, his rage would have to remain subcutaneous, for his enemies were circling, and he must not be baited.
    Very well—have at it, vipers.
    He flung the door open and a score of gazes tried to strip him bare. Two long mahogany tables formed a V in the middle of a vast maroon carpet. The low ceiling, the centric lighting and the broad dimensions of the room had been designed to intimidate, to set visitors immediately ill-at-ease.
    The game was afoot.
    As he had during his Oxford days, Embrey fed off the challenge. He’d sparred with Sir Horace Holly himself on the debating floor, and the old adventurer had personally lauded his composure. It would take more than legal double-talk to ruffle him. He breezed to his chair held out for him by a gaunt, monocled clerk, bowed to the vipers slithering to their places, and