Colonel Sun

by Kingsley Amis

  A police constable in shirt-sleeves knocked and entered. ‘Phone’s in order, sir,’ he said. ‘And London Airport Security informed as you requested.’

  ‘Thank you.’ When the man had gone, Bill Tanner put his glass of Scotch down with a slam. ‘It’s all hopeless anyway,’ he said with a sudden violence. ‘Let’s get moving, James. Every sort of important person has got to be collected and told about this, and fast. What are we hanging about here for?’

  ‘If we move we’re off the telephone. And we’ve got to be sure there’s nothing more this end. The police will find it if there is. That Inspector Crawford’s a competent chap. What do you mean anyway, hopeless? With a call gone out to the seaports and –’

  ‘Look, James.’ Tanner got up and began pacing the faded Axminster rug. He studied his watch again. ‘They’ve had something like four hours’ start now …’

  Bond drew in his breath and bit his lip hard. ‘Christ, you don’t know how I wish …’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, man. Nobody could have done more than you did. Pull yourself together and listen to me.’

  ‘Sorry, Bill.’

  ‘That’s better. Now. Four hours. They wouldn’t have counted on much more whatever had happened. They’ll have cut it as fine as they dared in the first phase. If they took him out by aeroplane, then with the airport not much more than down the road from here they’d have been in the air in well under an hour. Another hour at the most to Orly or Amsterdam, or these days as far as Marseilles – and they must have gone somewhere comparatively near, they wouldn’t have dared spend six or eight hours in transit and risk being met by the wrong people at the far end … Well then. That’s two hours. Another half hour at the outside for Customs and Immigration. By now they could be, what, seventy, eighty miles from their touchdown? Or out at sea?’

  ‘What makes you think they aren’t in East Berlin?’ asked Bond flatly. ‘Or most of the way to Moscow?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ With shaking fingers, Tanner chain-lit another cigarette and thrust his hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘It doesn’t sound like that lot. Too grown-up these days. That’s what I think, anyway. Perhaps it’s only what I hope.’

  Bond had nothing to say.

  ‘Perhaps they haven’t taken him out at all. That might be their best bet. Hole up with him in Westmorland or somewhere and operate their plot from a derelict cottage. Whatever the hell their plot may be. No doubt we shall find out in their own good time. We’ve had it, James. We’ve lost him.’

  The telephone rang noisily from its alcove in the hall (M would not have the hated instrument where he could see it). Tanner jumped up. ‘I’ll take it. You relax.’

  Bond lay back in his chair, half-listening to the intermittent drone of Tanner’s voice in the alcove. The muffled noises of the police at work, their deliberate footsteps, sounded false, out of key. The study where Bond sat – he noticed for the first time M’s old briar pipe lying in a copper ashtray – looked even more museum-like than earlier. It was as if M had left not hours before, but weeks or months. A derelict stage-set rather than a museum. Bond had the uneasy fancy that if he got up and pushed his hand at the wall, what was supposed to be stone would belly inwards, like canvas.

  Tanner’s abrupt return brought Bond out of his daze – evidently traces of the drug still lingered in his system. His friend’s face was tightly drawn at the forehead and cheekbones. He looked ghastly.

  ‘Well, James, I was nearly right. A great consolation.’ Tanner went back to pacing the rug. ‘Shannon. They went off on Aer Lingus flight 147A at twenty to nine. The fellows on duty remember them all right. The whole thing was stage-managed down to the last detail – pattern of previous trips by supposedly the same four people, a diversion timed to the second, the lot. I wonder what they had lined up for you and our pal in the hall. Anyhow …

  ‘They landed at Shannon at half-past nine or so. That’s … nearly two and half hours ago, while you were still wandering about in that wood. So they’re away. Met by car at Shannon and driven off to God knows what remote inlet, any one of hundreds, I know that coast a bit. It must be the most deserted in the whole of Western Europe. After that … you can bloody well take your choice. Boat out to ship, or to submarine for all I know – this thing looks as if it’s on that kind of scale. Rendezvous with flying-boat a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Then anywhere in the wide world.

  ‘So that’s that,’ Tanner finished. ‘We’ll pass the word to the Irish coastguards and navy. Tell ’em to keep a special look-out. Very useful that’ll be. And we’ll get a man over there tonight. He’ll be a great help, too. Then there are various parties in London we can at least tell to foregather. Come on, James, let’s go and do a bit of telephoning. There’s nothing more for us round this place. It always did give me the creeps.’

  Inspector Crawford, a tall saturnine man in his forties whom Bond had immediately taken to, came up as they finished the last of three calls. He carried a large unsealed manila envelope.

  ‘We’re about through here, gentlemen. If you want to get away I think you’ll find all you’ll really want in this.’ He handed Tanner the envelope, then gestured without looking at the body on the floor. ‘Contents of the man’s pockets. Rather a surprise that there were any, I suppose. You’d have expected them to try to cover up his identity. Clothing labels, all standard, I’m afraid. No laundry tags. Three pretty good photographs of what there is of him, and a set of fingerprints. Height and approximate weight. Distinguishing marks, none. If he’s on your files at all, though, I reckon you should be able to turn him up in no time without any of this clobber, Mr Bond having had a good look at him. Oh, and doctor’s preliminary report, just for completeness. That’s the lot. I’ll have to ask you to sign for the dead man’s effects, sir. And we’ll be wanting them back when you’ve finished with them.’

  Tanner scrawled on the proffered slip. ‘Thank you, Inspector. I’m afraid we must ask you to accompany us to London right away, to attend a meeting that may go on for the rest of the night. Most of it won’t be your concern but somebody’s certain to complain if you don’t turn up to give the complete police picture. I expect you understand.’

  Crawford nodded impassively. ‘I expect so, sir. Now if you’ll just give me two minutes I’ll be at your disposal.’

  ‘You realize of course that there’s a complete black-out on this business? Tell the G.P.O. to put the telephone out of order again as soon as everybody’s out of here. Thank you for all you and your men have done. We’ll see you outside when you’re ready to go.’

  As they moved off, Bond glanced down at the corpse of the man whose death he had unwittingly brought about. It lay there waiting to be removed and disposed of according to routine, a piece of debris, totally insignificant. Bond hated and feared the half-unrevealed purpose that had brought the man to this house, but he could not repress a twinge of pity at the thought of the casual chance that had led to this summary removal. Was this how James Bond would end, shot in the head and flung aside like a heap of unwanted clothing to smooth out a kink in somebody’s plan?

  The immense blaze of starlight in the velvety late-summer sky outside drove away these thoughts. Good flying weather. Where were they taking M? Never mind that for now; no point in guessing in a vacuum. There was a faint chill in the air and Bond realized he was hungry. Never mind that either. There would be nothing to eat before London, if then.

  At Tanner’s side, Bond passed the dark bulks of the two police cars and made for his Bentley, still where he had parked it an age ago. Tanner put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘No, James. You’re riding with me. I’ll see about your car tomorrow.’

  ‘Nonsense, I’m perfectly all right.’

  ‘And we can’t be sure the thing isn’t booby-trapped.’

  ‘That’s nonsense too, Bill. They wanted me alive and uninjured.’

  ‘Then they did. Nobody knows what they might want now.’

  4

  LOVE FROM P
ARIS

  Sir Ranald Rideout, the Minister concerned, was not best pleased at being abruptly summoned from the late stages of a dinner-party given by an Austrian princess whose circle he had been trying to infiltrate for years. The telephone message stressed the magnitude of the matter requiring his attention without revealing anything about what it was. The underling who spoke to him had rung off before Sir Ranald had had the chance to protest at the impropriety of his being allowed no say in the arrangements for this meeting or conference or whatever. So he was to present himself at the offices of the Transworld Consortium, i.e. the headquarters of the Secret Service, was he? That confounded old admiral, notorious for his obstinate resistance to political guidance, was in trouble, then. The fellow should have been given the push long ago. It was a more than mildly irritated Sir Ranald who, at the horrid hour of one twenty in the morning trotted up the steps of the big grey building that overlooks Regent’s Park, an agile little figure of sixty in perfect condition, this as a result not of any self discipline but of that indifference to food and drink which so often accompanies interest in power.

  The facts were baldly laid before him. He looked about with angry incredulity at the faces ranged round the battered oak table: the Permanent Under-Secretary to his Ministry, Assistant Commissioner Vallance from Scotland Yard, the man Tanner whose office this was and whose insignificance was shown clearly enough by the condition of its furnishings, the spy called Bond who seemed responsible for the mess, and some policeman or other from Windsor.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, really.’ Sir Ranald inflated his cheeks and blew out long and noisily. ‘A pretty kettle of fish, I must say. This will have to go to the Prime Minister. I hope you realize that.’

  ‘I’m glad to find you agree with us, sir,’ said Tanner in level tones. ‘But, as you know, the Prime Minister flew to Washington today – yesterday. He can’t do anything about this from there, and I doubt if he’ll be able to cut short his stay. So it looks as if we must push ahead ourselves.’

  ‘Of course we must.’ This time Sir Ranald sniffed emphatically. ‘Of course we must. The question is where. Push ahead where? You people seem to have nothing at all that can be called information. Extraordinary. Take this man you found shot. Not the servant, the gangster or whatever he was. All you appear to know about him is that he met his death by a bullet shattering his skull. Most helpful. Is that really as much as anybody can say? Surely something must have been found on him?’

  Inspector Crawford spoke up at once and Sir Ranald frowned slightly. One might have expected the least important man present to satisfy himself that none of the comparatively senior people wanted to answer, before pushing himself forward. At least, one might once have expected that.

  ‘Oddly enough there were some belongings, sir,’ the Inspector was saying. He nodded towards the small heap of miscellaneous objects that Vallance was turning over. ‘But they don’t tell us much. Except –’

  ‘Do they tell us anything about who the man was?’

  ‘Not in my view, sir.’

  Vallance, dapper as ever in the small hours, glanced over at Crawford and shook his head in agreement.

  ‘Then may I take leave to ask my question again? Who was he? Assistant Commissioner?’

  ‘Our fingerprint files are being gone over now, Sir Ranald,’ said Vallance, his direct gaze on the Minister’s face. ‘And of course it’s conceivable that this chap will be on them. We’re also checking abroad, with Interpol and so on, but it’ll be a couple of days at least before all the returns are in. And I feel strongly that we shan’t learn anything useful from anywhere. To my way of thinking, the mere fact that he was left behind like that, just as he was, proves that knowing his identity wouldn’t help us.’

  ‘I agree with Vallance,’ said Tanner. ‘We’re in the same position here exactly and I’m sure we shall get the same results, or lack of them. No, sir – this chap’ll turn out to be one of a comparatively new type of international criminal who’s been turning up in rather frighteningly large numbers in the sabotage game, terrorism and so on. They’re people without a traceable history of any sort, probably white Africans with a grudge, various fringe Americans – but that’s all supposition because they turn up out of thin air. The lads in Records here call them men from nowhere. Damn silly twopenny-blood sort of name, but it does describe them. What I’m saying, sir, is that it’s a waste of time trying to find who this fellow was, because in a sense he wasn’t anybody.’

  ‘You’re guessing, aren’t you, Tanner?’ said Sir Ranald, crinkling up his eyes as he spoke to show he wasn’t being personally offensive yet. ‘Just guessing. Educated guess work no doubt you’d call it but that’s a matter of taste. I’m afraid I was trained to observe carefully, impartially and thoroughly before venturing on any theorizing. Now … Bond,’ the Minister went on with a momentary expression of distaste, as if he found the name unaesthetic in some way, ‘you at any rate saw this man when he was alive. What could you say about him that might help?’

  ‘Almost nothing, sir, I’m afraid. He seemed completely ordinary apart from his skill in unarmed combat, and he could have learnt that anywhere in the world. So …’

  ‘What about his voice? Anything there?’

  Bond was tired out. His head throbbed and there was a metallic taste in his mouth. The parts of his body on which the dead man had worked were aching. The ham sandwich and coffee he had grabbed in the canteen were hardly a memory. Even so, he would not have answered as he did if he had not been repelled by the politician’s air of superiority in the presence of men worth twenty of him.

  ‘Well, he addressed me in English, sir,’ said Bond judicially. ‘By my standards correct English. I listened carefully, of course, for any traces of a Russian or Albanian or Chinese accent but could detect none. However, he spoke no more than about twenty words in my hearing, which may have been too small a sample upon which to base any certain conclusions.’

  At the other end of the table, Vallance went into a mild attack of coughing.

  Sir Ranald appeared not in the least put out. He flicked his eyes once at Vallance and spoke to Bond in a gentle tone. ‘Yes, you weren’t about the place very long, were you? You were anxious to be off. I congratulate you on your escape. No doubt you would have considered it ridiculously old-fashioned to have stayed and fought to save your superior from whatever fate was in store for him.’

  The Under-Secretary turned away suddenly and stared into an empty corner of the room. Inspector Crawford, sitting opposite Bond, went red and shuffled his feet.

  ‘Mr Bond showed great courage and resource, sir,’ he said loudly. ‘I’ve never heard of anybody who could hope to subdue four able-bodied men single-handed and unarmed, let alone being full of a drug that incapacitated him a few minutes later. If Mr Bond hadn’t escaped, the enemy’s plans would be going ahead in toto. As it is, they’ll have to be modified, they may even be fatally damaged.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Sir Ranald beat the air with his hand. With another grimace of displeasure, he said to his Under-Secretary, ‘Bushnell, get a window open, will you? The air in here isn’t fit to breathe with three people chain-smoking.’

  While the Under-Secretary hastened to obey, Bond was hiding a grin at the memory of having read somewhere that hatred of tobacco was a common psychopathic symptom, from which Hitler among others had been a notable sufferer.

  Rubbing his hands briskly, as if he had won an important point, Sir Ranald hurried on. ‘Now just one matter that’s been bothering me. There doesn’t seem to have been any guard or watch on Sir Miles’s residence. Was that normal, or had somebody slipped up?’

  ‘It was normal, sir,’ said Tanner, who had started to redden in his turn. ‘This is peacetime. What happened is unprecedented.’

  ‘Indeed. You agree perhaps that it’s the unprecedented that particularly needs to be guarded against?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Tanner’s voice was quite colourless.

  ‘Good. Now have we any idea of w
ho’s behind this business and what its purpose is? Let’s have some educated guesses on that.’

  ‘An enemy Secret Service is at any rate the obvious one. As regards purpose, I think we can rule out a straight ransom job, if only because they could have operated that from inside the country and so avoided the immense risk of getting out with Sir Miles, and presumably Mr Bond too if they’d managed to hold on to him. And why hold two people to ransom? The same sort of reasoning counts against the idea of interrogation or brainwashing or anything of that sort. No, it’s something more … original than that, I’m certain.’

  Sir Ranald sniffed again. ‘Well? What sort of thing?’

  ‘No bid, sir. There’s nothing to go on.’

  ‘Mm. And presumably we’re in a similar state of non-information about where this scheme, whatever it is, whoever’s running it, is going to be mounted. Any reports of unusual activity from any of your stations abroad?’

  ‘No, sir. Of course, I’ve asked for a special watch to be kept.’

  ‘Yes, yes. So we know nothing. It looks as if we have merely to wait until the other side makes a move. Thank you, all of you, for your help. I’m sure none of you could have done more than you have. I’m sorry if I may have seemed to suggest that you, Mr Bond, could have acted in any other way. I spoke without thinking. Your escape is the one redeeming feature of this whole affair.’

  The Minister spoke with what sounded very much like simple sincerity. The thoughts had occurred to him – belatedly, but then he had always been prone to let his impatience with lower-echelon muddle run away with him – that although he was not in fairness accountable for the abduction of the head of the Secret Service, his Cabinet colleagues as a whole held the view of fairness common to politicians. In other words, this business could be turned into a most useful weapon in the hands of anybody who might want to get him pushed out. Envy, spite, ambition were everywhere around him. These people here might not be the most satisfactory or effective allies, but they were the only ones immediately available. He turned to Vallance, whom he had several times in the past dismissed as an overdressed popinjay, and said in a humble tone, unconsciously smoothing the front of his own frilled azure evening shirt as he spoke, ‘In the meantime, Assistant Commissioner, what about the Press? A “D” notice, do you suppose? I’m more than content to be guided by you.’