Devil May Care

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘There were too many of them.’

  ‘Now what, James?’

  Bond thought for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t suppose Gorner has had us brought to the middle of the desert for no reason. If they wanted to kill me – or you – they would have done it by now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he must have a use for us. A purpose.’

  ‘Or just information.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Bond. ‘Until we find out, I think we should try to rest. And by the way, Scarlett, you never did tell me what on earth you’re doing in Persia.’

  ‘It sounds a bit silly now,’ said Scarlett, and Bond felt her wriggle slightly. ‘Do you promise you won’t laugh?’

  ‘I don’t feel that mirthful.’

  ‘I’m on holiday.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Even bankers take a rest sometimes. I have three weeks’ annual leave and I took ten days. I wanted to be on hand when Poppy came out of Gorner’s clutches. I couldn’t concentrate at work while you were here. And I wanted to see Persia.’

  Despite what he had said, Bond found himself laughing drily, then wished he hadn’t, as the cuts on his back rubbed against Scarlett.

  ‘Now you’ve seen Persia,’ he said, looking at the sand and rock. ‘Right up close.’

  Light from the corridor was filtering into the cell when the bolt was drawn. Bond groaned as he shifted his weight on the sand.

  Two armed guards came in. One bent down with a knife and cut the ropes that joined them, but kept their wrists bound. The second guard gave them water, which they drank with their shackled hands.

  ‘Go,’ he ordered.

  They were marched at gunpoint down the passageway and into a primitive washroom, where, under close supervision, they were allowed to clean up and use a lavatory in a cubicle.

  ‘Can I have a shirt?’ Scarlett looked down at her bare torso.

  The guard shook his head. He ordered them out, down another corridor to a stainless-steel door.

  ‘Wait.’

  The man entered a code and offered himself to a concealed camera to be recognized. The door slid open. Bond and Scarlett went forward into a spacious air-conditioned room that was painted crimson: floor, ceiling, walls – there was almost nothing in the room that wasn’t poppy-red. Behind a desk stood an old-fashioned swivel chair with a maroon leather seat, and in it sat a man with an outsize gloved left hand.

  ‘For God’s sake, give the woman a shirt,’ said Dr Julius Gorner. There was such disgust in his voice that Bond wondered for a second whether he found all women’s flesh repulsive.

  Gorner stood up and walked round the desk. He wore a cream linen suit, blue shirt and red tie. His corn-coloured hair, driven back from the high forehead, hung over his collar at the neck. He put his face close to Bond, who noted the high Slavic cheekbones and the look of intensely arrogant impatience he had first seen on the dock at Marseille.

  More chilling still was the aloofness – the way that Gorner wouldn’t quite engage with his eyes, as though he knew that being exposed to the demands of others might dilute the purity of his own driving purpose. This slight reserve made him almost invulnerable, Bond thought – with no Achilles heel of pride or lust or pity.

  ‘So, you are my guest again, Commander Bond,’ Gorner said. ‘Don’t make a habit of trespassing on my hospitality. Not cricket.’

  Bond said nothing. A man came in with a grey army shirt for Scarlett. Bond noticed that even after washing, her breasts were smeared with blood – his or hers, he didn’t know. The man handed a similar shirt and trousers to Bond, who quickly put them on.

  ‘Now. Sit down.’ Gorner gestured to a pair of wooden chairs. ‘Listen to me carefully and don’t speak. I am not a sporting person. We won’t be playing any more tennis. No more “Have it again, old chap.” You are here to work. I’m going to show you my factory and then I will give you your operating instructions, Bond. You are going to help me pull off one of the most audacious military interventions of the century. One that I am confident will change the course of history. Do you follow?’

  Bond nodded.

  ‘By the way, you don’t mind if I call you “Bond”, not “Mr Bond” or “Commander Bond”, do you? That’s what English gentlemen do, isn’t it? Just the surnames for their “chums”. We need to play by the rules, don’t we?’

  ‘What about Scarlett?’ said Bond.

  ‘The girl? I’ve no interest in her. Though I imagine my workforce might.’

  ‘What have you done to my sister?’ said Scarlett. ‘Where’s Poppy?’

  Gorner walked across his office and put his face against Scarlett’s. With his gloved monkey’s hand he cupped her chin and twisted her face one way, then the other. Bond saw the hair-covered wrist between the glove and cuff.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’ve perhaps been listening to rumours. We have a way of dealing with people who listen to rumours.’

  ‘Where is my sister? What have you –’

  The back of the monkey’s hand whipped across her mouth with a crack.

  Gorner raised the forefinger of his human hand to his lips. ‘Ssh,’ he said, as a trickle of blood ran out of Scarlett’s mouth. ‘No more talk.’

  Turning to a guard, Gorner said, ‘Lock the girl in the cell till tonight when she can entertain the early shift.’

  The man took Scarlett away, blood still running from her lip, and Gorner turned to Bond. ‘You come with me.’

  He touched a spot on the crimson-draped walls, and a panel slid aside. Bond followed him on to a walkway whose sides and floor were made of glass. Below them was what looked like a chemical factory.

  ‘Analgesia,’ said Gorner, walking forwards. ‘I learned about it on the Eastern Front. How to take away pain. People talk a lot of nonsense about the horrors of chemical warfare. No one who fought at Stalingrad can be in any doubt that “conventional” warfare is far worse.’

  The size of the works was astonishing. Bond calculated that there were almost five hundred men on the assembly lines or transporting raw materials to the stills and centrifuges.

  ‘When you have seen men with their faces missing,’ said Gorner, ‘literally sliced off by bullets that have spun and turned on the bones of the skull … When you’ve seen men trying to hold their liver and intestines in their hands … Then you understand the need for the rapid relief of pain.’

  They came to a junction in the walkway.

  ‘On that side, those large steel vats are processing poppy extracts into what will become painkillers and anaesthetics. Codeine, dihydrocodeine, pethidine, morphine and so on. Some products are transported through the Persian Gulf to Bombay for the Far East and Australasia. Some go overland to my plant in Paris, then to America and the West. And some, believe it or not, go through the Soviet Union and on to Estonia. In Paris and Bombay, some of the chemicals are further refined, turned into powders, liquids, tablets, whatever local markets want. The brand names and the packaging in which they are sold are different in Paris and Bombay. The client health services and the private clinics pay into offshore accounts and no one is able to connect all the operations. Otherwise I would be accused of running a cartel. In fact, the man in the emergency field hospital in Nigeria is receiving the same drug as the woman in the private clinic in Los Angeles. Only the box and trade name are different. Both come from here.’

  ‘What about the competition?’ said Bond.

  ‘I’m able to compete with the older companies because I have very low labour costs. In fact, they work for nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No money. They’re all addicts. We find them in Tehran, Isfahan and Kabul. Some in Baghdad and further afield. Turkey. They work twelve hours a day in return for water, rice and heroin. They sleep on the sand. They never run away.’

  ‘You give them heroin?’ said Bond.

  ‘It’s cheaper and stronger than opium. They may come as opium addicts but we quickly change them ove
r. Then we can just shoot them up once a day. They queue up like children for their injection. You should see their little faces.’

  Gorner turned and walked a few paces. ‘On this side of the plant, we make heroin. Doesn’t look much different, does it? That’s because I am the only manufacturer in the world who has brought a truly industrial technique to the manufacture of this drug. Putting it alongside my conventional works has allowed me to make huge economies of scale. The powder that comes out of here is produced with the same efficiency as the tablets and liquids that emerge from the other part of the factory. One lot ends up in the emergency rooms of Chicago and Madrid, the other in the back alleys of the Paris banlieue or the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles. And increasingly, Bond – it makes me very happy to say this – in the jolly old British streets of Soho and Manchester. Once I’ve sold it, I dare say it may get cut with amphetamine or rat poison or weedkiller. But that’s not my responsibility, is it? Once Chagrin has signed it off, I lose interest in the product – though not in what effects it has.’

  The workers were only a few feet below them. They wore grey shirts and loose trousers of the kind issued to Bond. Each man bent to his task with terrified intensity, particularly when he sensed the approach of one of the supervisors with his bullwhip and his Alsatian dog straining at its flimsy chain.

  ‘Do you know what heroin is?’ said Gorner. ‘A short chemistry lesson for you, Bond. We start with a pretty flower: the poppy or Papaver somniferum. A beautiful name for a beautiful plant – “the sleep-bringing poppy”. The juice from its seedpods gives you opium – the prince of drugs, extolled by poets from Homer to the present day. You’ve encountered it, I daresay.’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘Opium is expensive,’ said Gorner, ‘but highly desirable. The greatest drug cartel the world has ever seen – before my own modest enterprise – was run, of course, by your British Empire. They fought two opium wars with China to retain their trafficking monopoly – and twice they defeated them. By the treaty of Nanjing in 1842, they stole Hong Kong and opened five new ports to the opium trade, turning millions of Chinese into gibbering addicts. It’s not unreasonable that someone should attempt to repay them in their own coin, is it? I’m doing nothing that the British haven’t done themselves.’

  Bond said nothing.

  ‘It takes time, though,’ said Gorner, remorsefully. ‘God, it takes time.’

  As he spoke, Bond was looking down at the row upon row of slave workers in their sweat-drenched uniforms. One seemed to have fainted or died and was being dragged away by the guards. The others alongside him were too scared to stop working.

  ‘Between opium and heroin came morphine,’ said Gorner. ‘It was first isolated by a German in 1805 – the year of your famous Trafalgar. Then, in 1874, an Englishman called Wright produced diacetylmorphine, a white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder, made by the acetylation of morphine. Heroin.’

  Gorner coughed. ‘That’s what they’re doing there. Acetylation. That’s the smell. I think you must know my reputation, Bond. I have a number of degrees from universities around the world. Perhaps these long words are confusing to you, but they are like love poetry to me. “My love is like a red, red rose,” your Scotsman wrote, did he not? But my love is a red, red poppy. So various, so glorious. It gives me great pleasure that the poppy is the sentimental emblem of your pointless imperial sacrifice against the Germans in the Great War. I make sure that everyone in my narcotics supply chain repeats the words of your vacuous little poem: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow …” It’s their code. The code for death.’

  Gorner coughed again and brought himself back as though from a reverie. ‘Anyway, your English chemist, this Wright – most unusually for an Englishman – failed to exploit his discovery for personal gain. It was a German, Heinrich Dreser, the head of Bayer’s pharmacological laboratory, who was the first to see the commercial uses of heroin. He tested it on his workers and they chose the name “heroin” because it made them feel heroic! Pharmacologically, heroin had the same effect as morphine, but you needed only about a quarter as much. It was also cheaper, quicker and easier to use. It was a wonder drug. Soon every American chemist was lacing his own preparations with imported heroin. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” as another of your poets put it …’

  Bond found it hard to look at this man with his yellow hair and demonic sense of purpose. He seemed to be beyond reach, locked in a world where ordinary human concerns couldn’t touch or weaken him.

  ‘We have two shifts of twelve hours each,’ said Gorner, ‘so we’re never idle. That’s a further economy that none of my competitors can make.’

  ‘Don’t they have a break?’ said Bond.

  ‘They have a two-minute water break every three hours. There is a degree of … natural wastage. They die at their post. They are carried out. You probably saw one go just now. We have no shortage of replacements. Even the Shah’s government admits there are two million addicts in Iran, and each day more young people become addicted. Chagrin has a recruitment team that brings in roughly twenty men a day through Yazd and Kerman. It’s a revolving door.’

  ‘That’s despicable,’ said Bond.

  ‘It’s good business,’ said Gorner. ‘Everything I know about slavery I learned from the British Empire and its colonies. Africa, India, the West Indies. I was a most willing student of British techniques, Bond. And these men … They’re trash. They’d die anyway. We prolong their lives. And at the end of each shift I even give them an entertainment. You’ll see. We’ll go back to my office now.’

  Back in the red-walled room, Gorner sat at his desk. He pressed a button beneath the top, and a panel slid back behind him, giving him a window on to the factory floor. ‘Sometimes I like to look at them,’ he said, ‘and sometimes I grow tired of their struggles. Anomie, Bond. I feel it sometimes. It is the weariness that eats the soul – the enemy of great achievement.’

  He caused the panel to close and swung round in his chair. ‘One day, Bond, I will make as many heroin addicts in Britain as Britain made in China. One day soon. Then you’ll lose your precious status at the United Nations. You’ll lose the Cold War, too. You’ll become the third-world country you deserve to be.’

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ said Bond. ‘How did you manage to fight for both the Red Army and the Nazis with your disability? Your hand.’

  It was a risk he had calculated.

  For a moment, the hard blue eyes were hidden as the cheekbones rose and the teeth met in an audible grinding. Then Gorner breathed out with a snort.

  ‘You can know nothing of the Eastern Front, you idiot. These were not jolly Tommies with a cup of tea at five and stab you in the back at six. These were animals, freezing to death, killing with their bare hands, raping, torturing and murdering. They welcomed any recruit – the maimed, the mad, the deaf, the syphilitic. If you could pull a trigger – if you could find a rifle – you were in. It was what you would call “all hands to the pump”.’

  Gorner had regained control. He almost smiled. ‘There. I think I have made a joke. All hands … Even this one.’

  Then he lifted the white glove and stared hard at Bond, challenging him to meet his eye.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on, Bond. I know you’re curious. You don’t become a secret agent without curiosity. Let me show you.’

  Gorner peeled off the glove and held his hand close to Bond’s face. The palm was long and flat, whitish-pink on the underside, black and wrinkled on the back. The first joint of the fingers was exceptionally long, and the blackened nails were triangular. All the skin was dry, and deep with simian lines. The thumb was short and set so far down towards the wrist as to be of no use working with the other digits. From the knuckle upward, the thing was covered in thick, blackish-brown hair, like a chimpanzee’s. Midway between the wrist and the elbow, the forearm became a man’s.

  Gorner replaced the glove. Bond showed no r
eaction.

  The two men stood about a foot apart, staring into one another’s eyes. Neither blinked.

  ‘Why did you change sides in the war?’ said Bond.

  ‘Because the Nazis could no longer win. Their war was over. By 1944 the Cold War had already begun in Eastern Europe. I wanted to be on the side that would eventually beat the British. So I switched to the Soviet Army.’

  Bond said nothing. Most of what Gorner had said confirmed what M had told him. What Bond had learned was that the question of his hand could still unbalance him, even if only for a moment.

  ‘Now to business,’ said Gorner. ‘My opium – my raw material – has to come from somewhere. I can’t get enough from Turkey. I am using Chagrin’s connections to open up the Far East. Laos is a good source, and the Americans have been most surprisingly helpful there. Did you know that the CIA has its own airline, Air America, that actually flies out cargoes of opium?’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Bond.

  ‘That’s politics,’ said Gorner. ‘Air America takes weapons to the anti-Communist warlords and returns with consignments of opium poppies. What do you expect from an airline whose motto is “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere”? Thousands of GIs are addicts now. The CIA headquarters in northern Laos has a plant where they refine heroin. That part of Asia is the source of seventy per cent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier for America’s insatiable market.’

  ‘And are you getting your hands on that too?’

  ‘Yes. Chagrin is working on it. I’m paying over the odds there at the moment. It’s an investment. I don’t really like it because my money goes directly to funding the American war effort. But there’s one major advantage. It means the CIA is unofficially inclined to look on my global activities with a rather forgiving eye. I’m sure you understand why that might be helpful.’

  ‘Russia, America … You’ve covered all the angles, haven’t you?’ said Bond.

  ‘That’s certainly my intention,’ said Gorner. ‘It makes sound business sense. One day I’ll buy at better prices in the Far East. For the moment, the bulk of my supply is coming from Afghanistan, in Helmand province. And this is where you come in, Bond. The border is causing us some problems at the moment. There are bandits everywhere, some with rocket launchers and grenades as well as handguns. There’s a run my men have to make near Zabol, when they’re loaded up with opium. They call it Hellfire Pass. Do you know why?’