The James Bond MEGAPACK®

by Ian Fleming

  Should he tell M how the picture had changed? Should he make a report to the Governor? Bond thought of the Governor and dismissed that idea. But what about M? Bond had his own cipher. He could easily send M a signal through the Colonial Office. What would he say to M? That Doctor No had sent him some poisoned fruit? But he didn’t even know that it was poisoned, or, for the matter of that, that it had come from Doctor No. Bond could see M’s face as he read the signal. He saw him press down the lever on the intercom: “Chief of Staff, 007’s gone round the bend. Says someone’s been trying to feed him a poisoned banana. Fellow’s lost his nerve. Been in hospital too long. Better call him home.”

  Bond smiled to himself. He got up and rang down for another drink. It wouldn’t be quite like that, of course. But still...No, he’d wait until he had something more to show. Of course if something went badly wrong, and he hadn’t sent a warning, he’d be in trouble. It was up to him to see that nothing did go wrong.

  Bond drank his second drink and thought over the details of his plan. Then he went down and had dinner in the half-deserted dining-room and read the Handbook of the West Indies. By nine o’clock he was half asleep. He went back to his room and packed his bag ready for the morning. He telephoned down and arranged to be called at five-thirty. Then he bolted the door on the inside, and also shut and bolted the slatted jalousies across the windows. It would mean a hot, stuffy night. That couldn’t be helped. Bond climbed naked under the single cotton sheet and turned over on his left side and slipped his right hand on to the butt of the Walther PPK under the pillow. In five minutes he was asleep.

  The next thing Bond knew was that it was three o’clock in the morning. He knew it was three o’clock because the luminous dial of his watch was close to his face. He lay absolutely still. There was not a sound in the room. He strained his ears. Outside, too, it was deathly quiet. Far in the distance a dog started to bark. Other dogs joined in and there was a brief hysterical chorus which stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Then it was quite quiet again. The moon coming through the slats in the jalousies threw black and white bars across the corner of the room next to his bed. It was as if he was lying in a cage. What had woken him up? Bond moved softly, preparing to slip out of bed.

  Bond stopped moving. He stopped as dead as a live man can.

  Something had stirred on his right ankle. Now it was moving up the inside of his shin. Bond could feel the hairs on his leg being parted. It was an insect of some sort. A very big one. It was long, five or six inches—as long as his hand. He could feel dozens of tiny feet lightly touching his skin. What was it?

  Then Bond heard something he had never heard before—the sound of the hair on his head rasping up on the pillow. Bond analysed the noise. It couldn’t be! It simply couldn’t! Yes, his hair was standing on end. Bond could even feel the cool air reaching his scalp between the hairs. How extraordinary! How very extraordinary! He had always thought it was a figure of speech. But why? Why was it happening to him?

  The thing on his leg moved. Suddenly Bond realized that he was afraid, terrified. His instincts, even before they had communicated with his brain, had told his body that he had a centipede on him.

  Bond lay frozen. He had once seen a tropical centipede in a bottle of spirit on the shelf in a museum. It had been pale brown and very flat and five or six inches long—about the length of this one. On either side of the blunt head there had been curved poison claws. The label on the bottle had said that its poison was mortal if it hit an artery. Bond had looked curiously at the corkscrew of dead cuticle and had moved on.

  The centipede had reached his knee. It was starting up his thigh. Whatever happened he mustn’t move, mustn’t even tremble. Bond’s whole consciousness had drained down to the two rows of softly creeping feet. Now they had reached his flank. God, it was turning down towards his groin! Bond set his teeth! Supposing it liked the warmth there! Supposing it tried to crawl into the crevices! Could he stand it? Supposing it chose that place to bite? Bond could feel it questing amongst the first hairs. It tickled. The skin on Bond’s belly fluttered. There was nothing he could do to control it. But now the thing was turning up and along his stomach. Its feet were gripping tighter to prevent it falling. Now it was at his heart. If it bit there, surely it would kill him. The centipede trampled steadily on through the thin hairs on Bond’s right breast up to his collar bone. It stopped. What was it doing? Bond could feel the blunt head questing blindly to and fro. What was it looking for? Was there room between his skin and the sheet for it to get through? Dare he lift the sheet an inch to help it. No. Never! The animal was at the base of his jugular. Perhaps it was intrigued by the heavy pulse there. Christ, if only he could control the pumping of his blood. Damn you! Bond tried to communicate with the centipede. It’s nothing. It’s not dangerous, that pulse. It means you no harm. Get on out into the fresh air!

  As if the beast had heard, it moved on up the column of the neck and into the stubble on Bond’s chin. Now it was at the corner of his mouth, tickling madly. On it went, up along the nose. Now he could feel its whole weight and length. Softly Bond closed his eyes. Two by two the pairs of feet, moving alternately, trampled across his right eyelid. When it got off his eye, should he take a chance and shake it off—rely on its feet slipping in his sweat? No, for God’s sake! The grip of the feet was endless. He might shake one lot off, but not the rest.

  With incredible deliberation the huge insect ambled across Bond’s forehead. It stopped below the hair. What the hell was it doing now? Bond could feel it nuzzling at his skin. It was drinking! Drinking the beads of salt sweat. Bond was sure of it. For minutes it hardly moved. Bond felt weak with the tension. He could feel the sweat pouring off the rest of his body on to the sheet. In a second his limbs would start to tremble. He could feel it coming on. He would start to shake with an ague of fear. Could he control it, could he? Bond lay and waited, the breath coming softly through his open, snarling mouth.

  The centipede started to move again. It walked into the forest of hair. Bond could feel the roots being pushed aside as it forced its way along. Would it like it there? Would it settle down? How did centipedes sleep? Curled up, or at full length? The tiny centipedes he had known as a child, the ones that always seemed to find their way up the plughole into the empty bath, curled up when you touched them. Now it had come to where his head lay against the sheet. Would it walk out on to the pillow or would it stay on in the warm forest? The centipede stopped. Out! OUT! Bond’s nerves screamed at it.

  The centipede stirred. Slowly it walked out of his hair on to the pillow.

  Bond waited a second. Now he could hear the rows of feet picking softly at the cotton. It was a tiny scraping noise, like soft fingernails.

  With a crash that shook the room Bond’s body jackknifed out of bed and on to the floor.

  At once Bond was on his feet and at the door. He turned on the light. He found he was shaking uncontrollably. He staggered to the bed. There it was crawling out of sight over the edge of the pillow. Bond’s first instinct was to twitch the pillow on to the floor. He controlled himself, waiting for his nerves to quieten. Then softly, deliberately, he picked up the pillow by one corner and walked into the middle of the room and dropped it. The centipede came out from under the pillow. It started to snake swiftly away across the matting. Now Bond was uninterested. He looked round for something to kill it with. Slowly he went and picked up a shoe and came back. The danger was past. His mind was now wondering how the centipede had got into his bed. He lifted the shoe and slowly, almost carelessly, smashed it down. He heard the crack of the hard carapace.

  Bond lifted the shoe.

  The centipede was whipping from side to side in its agony—five inches of grey-brown, shiny death. Bond hit it again. It burst open, yellowly.

  Bond dropped the shoe and ran for the bathroom and was violently sick.

  Chapter 7

  Night Passage

  “By the way, Quarrel—” Bond dared a bus with ‘Brown Bomber’
painted above its windshield. The bus pulled over and roared on down the hill towards Kingston sounding a furious chord on its triple windhorn to restore the driver’s ego, “—what do you know about centipedes?”

  “Centipedes, cap’n?” Quarrel squinted sideways for a clue to the question. Bond’s expression was casual. “Well, we got some bad ones here in Jamaica. Tree, fo, five inches long. Dey kills folks. Dey mos’ly lives in de old houses in Kingston. Dey loves de rotten wood an’ de mouldy places. Dey hoperates mos’ly at night. Why, cap’n? Yo seen one?”

  Bond dodged the question. He had also not told Quarrel about the fruit. Quarrel was a tough man, but there was no reason to sow the seeds of fear. “Would you expect to find one in a modern house, for instance? In your shoe, or in a drawer, or in your bed?”

  “Nossir.” Quarrel’s voice was definite. “Not hunless dem put dere a purpose. Dese hinsecks love de holes and de crannies. Dey not love de clean places. Dey dirty-livin’ hinsecks. Mebbe yo find dem in de bush, under logs an’ stones. But never in de bright places.”

  “I see.” Bond changed the subject. “By the way, did those two men get off all right in the Sunbeam?”

  “Sho ting, cap’n. Dey plenty happy wid de job. An’ dey look plenty like yo an’ me, cap’n.” Quarrel chuckled. He glanced at Bond and said hesitantly, “I fears dey weren’t very good citizens, cap’n. Had to find de two men wheres I could. Me, I’m a beggarman, cap’n. An’ fo you, cap’n, I get a misrable no-good whiteman from Betsy’s.”

  “Who’s Betsy?”

  “She done run de lousiest brothel in town, cap’n,” Quarrel spat emphatically out of the window. “Dis whiteman, he does de book-keepin.’”

  Bond laughed. “So long as he can drive a car. I only hope they get to Montego all right.”

  “Don’ yo worry,” Quarrel misunderstood Bond’s concern. “I say I tell de police dey stole de car if dey don.’”

  They were at the saddleback at Stony Hill where the Junction Road dives down through fifty S-bends towards the North Coast. Bond put the little Austin A.30 into second gear and let it coast. The sun was coming up over the Blue Mountain peak and dusty shafts of gold lanced into the plunging valley. There were few people on the road—an occasional man going off to his precipitous smallholding on the flank of a hill, his three-foot steel cutlass dangling from his right hand, chewing at his breakfast, a foot of raw sugar cane held in his left, or a woman sauntering up the road with a covered basket of fruit or vegetables for Stony Hill market, her shoes on her head, to be donned when she got near the village. It was a savage, peaceful scene that had hardly changed, except for the surface of the road, for two hundred years or more. Bond almost smelled the dung of the mule train in which he would have been riding over from Port Royal to visit the garrison at Morgan’s Harbour in 1750.

  Quarrel interrupted his thoughts. “Cap’n,” he said apologetically, “beggin’ yo pardon, but kin yo tell me what yo have in mind for we? I’se bin puzzlin’ an’ Ah caint seem to figger hout yo game.”

  “I’ve hardly figured it out myself, Quarrel.” Bond changed up into top and dawdled through the cool, beautiful glades of Castleton Gardens. “I told you I’m here because Commander Strangways and his secretary have disappeared. Most people think they’ve gone off together. I think they’ve been murdered.”

  “Dat so?” said Quarrel unemotionally. “Who yo tink done hit?”

  “I’ve come to agree with you. I think Doctor No, that Chinaman on Crab Key, had it done. Strangways was poking his nose into this man’s affairs—something to do with the bird sanctuary. Doctor No has this mania for privacy. You were telling me so yourself. Seems he’ll do anything to stop people climbing over his wall. Mark you, it’s not more than a guess about Doctor No. But some funny things happened in the last twenty-four hours. That’s why I sent the Sunbeam over to Montego, to lay a false scent. And that’s why we’re going to hide out at the Beau Desert for a few days.”

  “Den what, cap’n?”

  “First of all I want you to get me absolutely fit—the way you trained me the last time I was here. Remember?”

  “Sho, cap’n. Ah kin do dat ting.”

  “And then I was thinking you and me might go and take a look at Crab Key.”

  Quarrel whistled. The whistle ended on a downward note.

  “Just sniff around. We needn’t get too close to Doctor No’s end. I want to take a look at this bird sanctuary. See for myself what happened to the wardens’ camp. If we find anything wrong, we’ll get away again and come back by the front door—with some soldiers to help. Have a full-dress inquiry. Can’t do that until we’ve got something to go on. What do you think?”

  Quarrel dug into his hip pocket for a cigarette. He made a fuss about lighting it. He blew a cloud of smoke through his nostrils and watched it whip out of the window. He said, “Cap’n, Ah tink yo’se plumb crazy to trespass hon dat island.” Quarrel had wound himself up. He paused. There was no comment. He looked sideways at the quiet profile. He said more quietly, in an embarrassed voice, “Jess one ting, cap’n. Ah have some folks back in da Caymans. Would yo consider takin’ hout a life hinsurance hon me afore we sail?”

  Bond glanced affectionately at the strong brown face. It had a deep cleft of worry between the eyes. “Of course, Quarrel. I’ll fix it at Port Maria tomorrow. We’ll make it big, say five thousand pounds. Now then, how shall we go? Canoe?”

  “Dat’s right, cap’n.” Quarrel’s voice was reluctant. “We need a calm sea an’ a light wind. Come hin on de Nor-easterly Trades. Mus’ be a dark night. Dey startin’ right now. By end of da week we git da secon’ moon quarter. Where yo reckon to land, cap’n?”

  “South shore near the mouth of the river. Then we’ll go up the river to the lake. I’m sure that’s where the wardens’ camp was. So as to have fresh water and be able to get down to the sea to fish.”

  Quarrel grunted without enthusiasm. “How long we stayin,’ cap’n? Caint take a whole lot of food wit us. Bread, cheese, salt pork. No tobacco—caint risk da smoke an’ light. Dat’s mighty rough country, cap’n. Marsh an’ mangrove.”

  Bond said: “Better plan for three days. Weather may break and stop us getting off for a night or two. Couple of good hunting knives. I’ll take a gun. You never can tell.”

  “No, sir,” said Quarrel emphatically. He relapsed into a brooding silence which lasted until they got to Port Maria.

  They went through the little town and on round the headland to Morgan’s Harbour. It was just as Bond remembered—the sugar-loaf of the Isle of Surprise rising out of the calm bay, the canoes drawn up beside the mounds of empty conch shells, the distant boom of the surf on the reef which had so nearly been his grave. Bond, his mind full of memories, took the car down the little side road and through the cane fields in the middle of which the gaunt ruin of the old Great House of Beau Desert Plantation stood up like a stranded galleon.

  They came to the gate leading to the bungalow. Quarrel got out and opened the gate, and Bond drove through and pulled up in the yard behind the white single-storeyed house. It was very quiet. Bond walked round the house and across the lawn to the edge of the sea. Yes, there it was, the stretch of deep, silent water—the submarine path he had taken to the Isle of Surprise. It sometimes came back to him in nightmares. Bond stood looking at it and thinking of Solitaire, the girl he had brought back, torn and bleeding, from that sea. He had carried her across the lawn to the house. What had happened to her? Where was she? Brusquely Bond turned and walked back into the house, driving the phantoms away from him.

  It was eight-thirty. Bond unpacked his few things and changed into sandals and shorts. Soon there was the delicious smell of coffee and frying bacon. They ate their breakfast while Bond fixed his training routine—up at seven, swim a quarter of a mile, breakfast, an hour’s sunbathing, run a mile, swim again, lunch, sleep, sunbathe, swim a mile, hot bath and massage, dinner and asleep by nine.

  After breakfast the routine began.

 
; Nothing interrupted the grinding week except a brief story in the Daily Gleaner and a telegram from Pleydell-Smith. The Gleaner said that a Sunbeam Talbot, H. 2473, had been involved in a fatal accident on the Devil’s Racecourse, a stretch of winding road between Spanish Town and Ochos Rio—on the Kingston-Montego route. A runaway lorry, whose driver was being traced, had crashed into the Sunbeam as it came round a bend. Both vehicles had left the road and hurtled into the ravine below. The two occupants of the Sunbeam, Ben Gibbons of Harbour Street, and Josiah Smith, no address, had been killed. A Mr Bond, an English visitor, who had been lent the car, was asked to contact the nearest police station.

  Bond burned that copy of the Gleaner. He didn’t want to upset Quarrel.

  With only one day to go, the telegram came from Pleydell-Smith. It said:

  EACH OBJECT CONTAINED ENOUGH CYANIDE TO KILL A HORSE

  STOP SUGGEST YOU CHANGE YOUR GROCER STOP GOOD LUCK

  SMITH

  Bond also burned the telegram.

  Quarrel hired a canoe and they spent three days sailing it. It was a clumsy shell cut out of a single giant cotton tree. It had two thin thwarts, two heavy paddles and a small sail of dirty canvas. It was a blunt instrument. Quarrel was pleased with it.

  “Seven, eight hours, cap’n,” he said. “Den we bring down de sail an’ use de paddles. Less target for de radar to see.”

  The weather held. The forecast from Kingston radio was good. The nights were as black as sin. The two men got in their stores. Bond fitted himself out with cheap black canvas jeans and a dark blue shirt and rope-soled shoes.

  The last evening came. Bond was glad he was on his way. He had only once been out of the training camp—to get the stores and arrange Quarrel’s insurance—and he was chafing to get out of the stable and on to the track. He admitted to himself that this adventure excited him. It had the right ingredients—physical exertion, mystery, and a ruthless enemy. He had a good companion. His cause was just. There might also be the satisfaction of throwing the ‘holiday in the sun’ back in M’s teeth. That had rankled. Bond didn’t like being coddled.