by Ian Fleming
Bond walked deliberately round the table and took the chair next to Krebs. Those pale eyes, he noticed, after the first shock, had been fixed firmly on his plate. As Bond came up behind him he was delighted to see a large mound of Elastoplast on the crown of Krebs’s head.
“Yes, go to bed, Miss Brand, I will talk to you in the morning,” said Drax testily. Gala obediently left the room and Drax went to his chair and sat heavily down.
“Most remarkable those cliffs,” said Bond blithely. “Quite awe-inspiring walking along wondering if they’re going to choose just that moment to collapse on one. Reminded me of Russian roulette. And yet one never reads of people being killed by cliffs falling on them. The odds against getting hurt must be terrific.” He paused. “By the way, what was that you were saying about a cliff-fall just now?”
There was a faint groan on Bond’s right, followed by a crash of glass and china as Krebs’s head fell forward on to the table.
Bond looked at him with polite curiosity.
“Walter,” said Drax sharply. “Can’t you see that Krebs is ill? Take the man out and put him to bed. And don’t be too soft with him. The man drinks too much. Hurry up.”
Walter, his face crumpled and angry, strode round the table and jerked Krebs’s head out of the debris. He took him by his coat collar and hauled him to his feet and away from his chair.
“Du Scheisskerl,” hissed Walter at the mottled, vacant face. “Marsch!” He turned him round and hustled him to the swing door into the pantry and rammed him through. There were muffled sounds of stumbling and cursing and then a door banged and there was silence.
“He must have had a heavy day,” said Bond looking at Drax.
The big man was sweating freely. He wiped his face with a circular sweep of his napkin. “Nonsense,” he said shortly. “He drinks.”
The butler, erect and unperturbed by the apparition of Krebs and Walter in his pantry, brought in the coffee. Bond took some and sipped it. He waited for the pantry door to close again. Another German, he thought. He’ll already have passed the news back to the barracks. Or perhaps all the team weren’t involved. Perhaps there was a team within a team. And if so, did Drax know about it? His behaviour when Bond and Gala had come through the door had been inconclusive. Had part of his astonishment been affronted dignity, the shock of a vain man whose programme had been upset by a chit of a secretary? He had certainly covered up well. And all the afternoon he had been down the shaft supervising the fuelling. Bond decided to probe a little.
“How did the fuelling go?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the other man.
Drax was lighting a long cigar. He glanced up at Bond through the smoke and the flame of his match.
“Excellently.” He puffed at the cigar to get it going. “Everything is ready now. The guards are out. An hour or two clearing up down there in the morning and then the site will be closed. By the way,” he added. “I shall be talking Miss Brand up to London in the car tomorrow afternoon. I shall need a secretary as well as Krebs. Have you got any plans?”
“I have to go to London too,” said Bond on an impulse. “I have my final report to make to the Ministry.”
“Oh, really?” said Drax casually. “What about? I thought you were satisfied with the arrangements.”
“Yes,” said Bond non-committally.
“That’s all right then,” said Drax breezily. “And now if you don’t mind,” he got up from the table, “I’ve got some papers waiting for me in my study. So I’ll say good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Bond to the already retreating back.
Bond finished his coffee and went out into the hall and up to his bedroom. It was obvious that it had been searched again. He shrugged his shoulders. There was only the leather case. Its contents would show nothing except that he had come equipped with the tools of his trade.
His Beretta in its shoulder-holster was still where he had hidden it, in the empty leather case that belonged to Tallon’s night-glasses. He took the gun out and slipped it under his pillow.
He took a hot bath and used half a bottle of iodine on the cuts and bruises he could reach. Then he got into bed and turned out the light. His body hurt and he was exhausted.
For a moment he thought of Gala. He had told her to take a sleeping pill and lock her door, but otherwise not to worry about anything until the morning.
Before he emptied his mind for sleep he wondered uneasily about her trip with Drax the next day to London.
Uneasily, but not desperately. In due course many questions would have to be answered and many mysteries probed, but the basic facts seemed solid and unanswerable. This extraordinary millionaire had built this great weapon. The Ministry of Supply were pleased with it and considered it sound. The Prime Minister and Parliament thought so too. The rocket was to be fired in less than thirty-six hours under full supervision and the security arrangements were as strict as they could possibly be. Somebody, and probably several people, wanted him and the girl out of the way. Nerves were stretched down here. There was a lot of tension about. Perhaps there was jealousy. Perhaps some people actually suspected them of being saboteurs. But what would that matter so long as he and Gala kept their eyes open? Not much more than a day to go. They were right out in the open here, in May, in England, in peacetime. It was crazy to worry about a few lunatics so long as the Moonraker was out of danger.
And as for tomorrow, reflected Bond as sleep reached out for him, he would arrange to meet Gala in London and bring her back with him. Or she could even stay up in London for the night. Either way he would look after her until the Moonraker was safely fired and then, before work began on the Mark II weapon, there would have to be a very thorough clean-up indeed.
But these were treacherously comforting thoughts. There was danger about and Bond knew it.
He finally drifted into sleep with one small scene firmly fixed in his mind.
There had been something very disquieting about the dinner-table downstairs. It had been laid for only three people.
PART THREE
Thursday, Friday
Chapter XVIII
Beneath The Flat Stone
The Mercedes was a beautiful thing. Bond pulled his battered grey Bentley up alongside it and inspected it.
It was a Type 300 S, the sports model with a disappearing hood — one of only half a dozen in England, he reflected. Left-hand drive. Probably bought in Germany. He had seen a few of them over there. One had hissed by him on the Munich Autobahn the year before when he was doing a solid ninety in the Bentley. The body, too short and heavy to be graceful, was painted white, with red leather upholstery. Garish for England, but Bond guessed that Drax had chosen white in honour of the famous Mercedes-Benz racing colours that had already swept the board again since the war at Le Mans and the Nurburgring.
Typical of Drax to buy a Mercedes. There was something ruthless and majestic about the cars, he decided, remembering the years from 1934 to 1939 when they had completely dominated the Grand Prix scene, children of the famous Blitzen Benz that had captured the world’s speed record at 142 m.p.h. back in 1911. Bond recalled some of their famous drivers, Caracciola, Lang, Seaman, Brauschitz, and the days when he had seen them drifting the fast sweeping bends of Tripoli at 190, or screaming along the tree-lined straight at Berne with the Auto Unions on their tails.
And yet, Bond looked across at his supercharged Bentley, nearly twenty-five years older than Drax’s car and still capable of beating 100, and yet when Bentleys were racing, before Rolls had tamed them into sedate town carriages, they had whipped the blown SS-K’s almost as they wished.
Bond had once dabbled on the fringe of the racing world and he was lost in his memories, hearing again the harsh scream of Caracciola’s great white beast of a car as it howled past the grandstands at Le Mans, when Drax came out of the house followed by Gala Brand and Krebs.
“Fast car,” said Drax, pleased with Bond’s look of admiration. He gestured towards the Bentley. “They used to be
good in the old days,” he added with a touch of patronage. “Now they’re only built for going to the theatre. Too well-mannered. Even the Continental. Now then you, get in the back.”
Krebs obediently climbed into the narrow back seat behind the driver. He sat sideways, his mackintosh up round his ears, his eyes fixed enigmatically on Bond.
Gala Brand, smart in a dark grey tailor-made and black beret and carrying a lightweight black raincoat and gloves, climbed into the right half of the divided front seat. The wide door closed with the rich double click of a Fabergé box.
No sign passed between Bond and Gala. They had made their plans at a whispered meeting in his room before lunch — dinner in London at half-past seven and then back to the house in Bond’s car. She sat demurely, her hands in her lap and her eyes to the front, as Drax climbed in, pressed the starter, and pulled the gleaming lever on the steering wheel back into third. The car surged away with hardly a purr from the exhaust and Bond watched it disappear into the trees before he climbed into the Bentley and moved off in leisurely pursuit.
In the hastening Mercedes, Gala busied herself with her thoughts. The night had been uneventful and the morning had been devoted to clearing the launching site of everything that might possibly burn when the Moonraker was fired. Drax had not referred to the events of the previous day and there had been no change in his usual manner. She had prepared her last firing plan (Drax himself was to do it on the morrow) and as usual Walter had been sent for and through her spy-hole she had seen the figures being entered in Drax’s black book.
It was a hot, sunny day and Drax was driving in his shirt-sleeves. She glanced down and to the left at the top of the little book protruding from his hip-pocket. This drive might be her last chance. Since the evening before she had felt a different person. Perhaps Bond had aroused her competitive spirit, perhaps it was revulsion from playing the secretary too long, perhaps it was the shock of the cliff-fall and the zest of realizing after so many quiet months that she was playing a dangerous game. But now she felt the time had come to take risks. Discovery of the Moonraker’s flight-plan was a routine affair and it would give her personal satisfaction to find out the secret of the black notebook. It would be easy.
Casually she laid her folded coat over the space between herself and Drax. At the same time she made a show of arranging herself comfortably, during the course of which she drew an inch or two nearer Drax and her hand came to rest in the folds of the coat between them. Then she settled herself to wait.
Her chance came, as she had thought it might, in the congested traffic of Maidstone. Drax, intent, was trying to beat the traffic lights at the corner of King Street and Gabriel’s Hill, but the line of traffic was too slow and he was checked behind a battered family saloon. Gala could see that when the lights changed he was determined to cut in front of the car in front and teach it a lesson. He was a brilliant driver, but a vindictive and impatient one who was always anxious for any car that held him up to be given something to remember.
As the lights went green he gave a blast on his triple horns, pulled out to the right at the intersection, accelerated brutally and got by, shaking his head angrily at the driver of the saloon as he passed it.
In the middle of this harsh manoeuvre it was natural for Gala to allow herself to be thrown towards him. At the same time her left hand dived under the coat and her fingers touched, felt, and extracted the book in one flow of motion. Then the hand was back in the folds of the coat again and Drax, all his feeling in his feet and hands, was seeing nothing but the traffic ahead and the chances of getting across the zebra outside the Royal Star without hitting two women and a boy who were nearly halfway across it.
Now it was a question of facing Drax’s growl of rage as with a maidenly but urgent voice she asked if she could possibly stop for a moment to powder her nose.
A garage would be dangerous. He might decide to fill up with petrol. And perhaps he also carried his money in his hip-pocket. But was there an hotel? Yes, she remembered, the Thomas Wyatt just outside Maidstone. And it had no petrol pumps. She started to fidget slightly. She pulled the coat back on to her lap. She cleared her throat.
“Oh, excuse me, Sir Hugo,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Yes. What is it?”
“I’m terribly sorry, Sir Hugo. But could you possibly stop for just a moment. I want, I mean, I’m terribly sorry but I’d like to powder my nose. It’s terribly stupid of me. I’m so sorry.”
“Christ,” said Drax. “Why the hell didn’t you... Oh, yes. Well, all right. Find a place.” He grumbled on into his moustache, but brought the big car down into the fifties.
“There’s a hotel just around this bend,” said Gala nervously. “Thank you so much, Sir Hugo. It was stupid of me. I won’t be a moment. Yes, here it is.”
The car swerved up to the front of the inn and stopped with a jerk. “Hurry up. Hurry up,” said Drax as Gala, leaving the door of the car open, sped obediently across the gravel, her coat with its precious secret held tightly in front of her body.
She locked the door of the lavatory and snatched open the notebook.
There they were, just as she had thought. On each page, under the date, the neat columns of figures, the atmospheric pressure, the wind velocity, the temperature, just as she had recorded them from the Air Ministry figures. And at the foot of each page the estimated settings for the gyro compasses.
Gala frowned. At a glance she could see that they were entirely different from hers. Drax’s figures simply bore no relation to hers whatsoever.
She turned to the last completed page containing the figures for that day. Why, she was wrong by nearly ninety degrees on the estimated course. If the rocket were fired on her flight plan it would land somewhere in France. She looked wildly at her face in the mirror over the washbasin. How could she have gone so monstrously wrong? And why hadn’t Drax ever told her? Why, she ran quickly through the book again, every day she had been ninety degrees out, firing the Moonraker at right angles to its true course. And yet she simply couldn’t have made such a mistake. Did the Ministry know these secret figures? And why should they be secret?
Suddenly her bewilderment turned to fright. She must somehow get safely, quietly to London and tell somebody. Even though she might be called a fool and a meddler.
Coldly she turned back several pages in the book, took her nail file out of the bag and, as neatly as she could, cut out a specimen page, rolled it up into a tight ball and stuffed it into the tip of a finger of one of her gloves.
She glanced at her face in the mirror. It was pale and she quickly rubbed her cheeks to bring back the colour. Then she put back the look of an apologetic secretary and hurried out and ran across the gravel to the car, clutching the notebook among the folds of her coat.
The engine of the Mercedes was turning over. Drax glowered at her impatiently as she scrambled back into her seat.
“Come on. Come on,” he said, putting the car into third and taking his foot off the clutch so that she nearly caught her ankle in the heavy door. The tyres churned up the gravel as he accelerated out of the parking place and dry-skidded into the London road.
Gala was jerked back, but she remembered to let the coat with her guilty hand in its folds fall on the seat between her and the driver.
And now the book back into the hip-pocket.
She watched the speedometer hovering in the seventies as Drax flung the heavy car along the crown of the road.
She tried to remember her lessons. Distracting pressure on some other part of the body. Distracting the attention. Distraction. The victim must not be at ease. His senses must be focused away. He must be unaware of the touch on his body. Anaesthetized by a stronger stimulus.
Like now, for instance. Drax, bent forward over the wheel, was fighting for a chance to get past a sixty-foot RAF trailer, but the oncoming traffic was leaving no room on the crown of the road. There was a gap and Drax rammed the lever into second and took it, his horns braying imperiou
sly.
Gala’s hand reached to the left under the coat.
But another hand struck like a snake.
“Got you.”
Krebs was leaning half over the back of the driving seat. His hand was crushing hers into the slippery cover of the notebook under the folds of the coat.
Gala sat frozen into black ice. With all her strength she wrenched at her hand. It was no good. Krebs had all his weight on it now.
Drax had got past the trailer and the road was empty. Krebs said urgently in German, “Please stop the car, mein Kapitän. Miss Brand is a spy.”
Drax gave a startled glance to his right. What he saw was enough. He put his hand quickly down to his hip-pocket, and then, slowly, deliberately, put it back on the wheel. The sharp turning to Mereworth was just coming up on his left. “Hold her,” said Drax. He braked so that the tyres screamed, changed down and wrenched the car into the side-road. A few hundred yards down it he pulled the car into the side and stopped.
Drax looked up and down the road. It was empty. He reached over one gloved hand and wrenched Gala’s face towards him.
“What is this?”
“I can explain it, Sir Hugo.” Gala tried to bluff against the horror and desperation she knew was in her face. “It’s a mistake. I didn’t mean...”
Under cover of an angry shrug of the shoulders, her right hand moved softly behind her and the guilty pair of gloves were thrust behind the leather cushion.
“Sehen sie her, mein Kapitän. I saw her edging up close to you. It seemed to me strange.”
With his other hand Krebs had whipped the coat away and there were the bent white fingers of her left hand crushed into the cover of the notebook still a foot away from Drax’s hip-pocket.
