‘It is you who betrayed us, Kate Chapman, and you will pay the penalty!’
The water closed above the girl’s head and the shark turned and sped in for the kill.
In the room above the figures of the two children in the Romney painting shivered as if in sympathy with the fate of the girl and then moved obediently to one side. Enclosed within the ornate, gilded frame of the painting was now revealed a television screen.
Bechmann and Markovitz sat with the sweat of fear sticking to their bodies and watched the screen as if hypnotized. The shark had the girl by the thigh and was worrying her like a bone. A disgusting pink candy-floss of blood spurted in all directions. For an instant, the shark’s head filled the camera and it was possible to see the triangular saw teeth grinding their way through the white bone, the terrifying glint of incontestable purpose in the small, evil eye. Then the leg came away from the body and dropped slowly to the floor of the tank leaving a corkscrew spiral of blood. The shark chased it for a moment and then turned like a whiplash to snap its mouth about the girl’s waist. There was an impression of the girl's suppliant head jerking forward, the long, black hair smeared across the face, the arms pushing vainly against the brutal, gut-ripping maw. And then the stomach burst and the horrifying carnage on the screen was mercifully obliterated in a thick red cloud.
The silence in the room was broken by a soft purr as the Romney slid back into place and two sweet and wholesome eighteenth-century children beamed down upon the three men in the room. Bechmann fought a desire to be sick and Markovitz wiped the sweat from his forehead with a wide bandana handkerchief.
The red slowly oozed from Stromberg’s eyes and his mouth regained its normal shape. During the television transmission, the two men sitting on either side of him had been aware of an increased pattern of breathing from their employer, and on one occasion a long, sibilant hiss. Nevertheless, no sum of money on earth would have induced them to turn and look at him. The horror of the television screen was enough.
‘Gentlemen.’ Stromberg’s meticulous enunciation brought the heads swinging dutifully round. ‘Is there any other business?’
The words toppled one after the other like giant dominoes of ice. He rose, and neither of the men spoke.
‘Good. Then you are free to leave.’
When the two men had hurried from the room, Stromberg returned to his chair, made a note on his pad and pressed one of the switches on the small rectangular console in front of him. He inclined his head and spoke calmly.
‘Send in Jaws.’
On the Scent
The muted drone of the fanjets changed key and Bond felt himself projected forward as the nose of the British Airways VC10 tilted and began its long descent towards Cairo International Airport. The North African coast had been crossed west of the Ras el Kenayis and Bond calculated that with any luck he would be on the ground within thirty minutes. Just time to review the situation and consume another dry martini. He reached above his head and pulled the call button for a stewardess. Was it a sign of growing old or was it really true that stewardesses were not as beautiful as they used to be? The girl approached him, brushing a wisp of errant hair away from her forehead.
‘Yes sir?’
‘I’d like another dry martini, please.’
The girl pursed her lips and tried to remember the lesson he had taught her. ‘Er - that’s three measures of gin
‘Gordon’s.’
'- one measure of vodka -'
‘Polish or, preferably Russian.’
‘-shaken until it’s ice cold and then topped with a large, thin slice of lemon peel.’ The girl finished triumphantly.
Bond did not care for the word ‘topped’ but he nodded agreeably. ‘And I'd like it in the largest glass you’ve got, please.’ Bond hated to see a good drink suffocating in a tiny glass. The martini would already be less than perfection without the addition of half a measure of Kina Lillet - a taste that his friends were always trying to cure him of, without success. There was no point in asking for it because airlines did not carry such fundamental treasures.
Bond adjusted a stream of cool air on to his face and told
himself not to be grumpy and pompous. Perhaps it was that damn medical making him feel old. He knew that he smoked far too much and was at the upper level of what a man could decently drink without being considered to have an overreliance on alcohol. He did not need some apple-cheeked little whippersnapper fresh out of medical school leaning across a table and telling him that he was endangering his health.
Bond produced his gunmetal case and lit his fifteenth cigarette of the day.
Only the comely radiologist had introduced a note of light relief. Settling him down in his ridiculous slippers and shift, she had escorted two overweight Arabs towards their chest X-ray and said gaily, and in all innocence, ‘I’ll be with you in a couple of shakes, Mr Bond.’
The stewardess saw Bond smile as she approached with his drink and thought how different his face suddenly looked. Something told her that he did not smile very often. It was a handsome face but something about it frightened her. When the smiled switched off, the features were cold and cruel, the eyes hard as flints. She thought that he would probably make love very well without saying anything.
Bond accepted his drink and stared down through the perspex at the scallop-shaped ridges of sand stretching into infinity. M was convinced that there was no chance of treachery in the U.K. Captain Talbot would have received his orders shortly before sailing, and these directly by word of mouth from Head of Operations at Holy Loch. Rear-Admiral Talbot, Talbot’s father, was a personal friend of M's and his son had received the Queen’s Sword at Dartmouth and done all the things expected of a young naval officer with a brilliant career in front of him. Still, although Bond respected M’s judgment and would willingly have died for it, he remembered that Burgess and Maclean had also had impeccable antecedents.
The possibility of a hoax also existed. If somebody knew of the disappearance of Ranger they might seek to capitalize on it by pretending that they could supply the answer to the riddle in exchange for a large sum of money. This kind of thing happened whenever there was a kidnapping case with a huge ransom demand. But who would know about the disappearance of Ranger apart from those responsible for it? No details had been given to the press. The whole business had been given a TS rating.
Bond sucked the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and luxuriated in its long expulsion over the empty first- class seat in front of him. Why was a blueprint of the tracking system being offered for sale, and not the system itself? One answer seemed more obvious than any other. Whoever was wishing to sell did not own the property he was selling. Somebody connected with an invention that could totally undermine western defence policy had stolen the blueprint and defected.
So, who was the owner of the tracking system? Again, Bond thought he knew the answer. The Russians and their nucleus of German atomic scientists, spirited away from beneath the noses of the Allies in 1945, had been working on something like this for years. Well, now it looked as if they had cracked it. And been cracked in turn. The ghost of a smile haunted Bonds lips. Whoever had defected must have known what he was biting off. SMERSH would be humming like killer wasps. The next world war would be in the bag if the Russians could keep tabs on every allied nuclear submarine and strike at the moment of their choice. Ninety-five per cent of the free world’s nuclear retaliatory strength was tied up in submarines.
Bond felt himself grow cold as he considered the picture he was painting. The Russians would walk barefoot through hell to get that tracking system back. Every airport would be under surveillance. Every spy and agent would be on twenty-four- hour alert. And what would they make of his arrival in Cairo? Especially after the Chamonix affair, which Bond was more and more certain was the work of SMERSH? One thing was certain. He would have to watch his step every inch of the way.
Bond took a taxi from the airport and checked in at the Nile Hi
lton on the island of Roda, stuck like a lozenge in the throat of the Nile. His suite was air-conditioned and functional, and a welcome escape from the hot sun that burned down outside. He took a cold shower, changed into a blue towelling dressing- gown and called room service for a long glass of tomato juice and a plate of scrambled eggs.
When this arrived, he was staring out of one of the double- glazed windows at the six-hundred-foot Cairo Tower - the tallest, and perhaps the ugliest, building in the East - and considering his first move. On the face of it, everything was very simple. A Mr Fekkesh was the ‘contact’ and Bond had his telephone number. Ring him up and talk business. It was like being given a list of contacts as a salesman. ‘Good morning, sir. My name is Bond. I represent the Great Britain Company. We're interested in old silver, antiques and nuclear submarine tracking-systems.' Bond shook his head at the idiocy of it all. One day, soon, there would be a computer doing his job.
Bond finished chasing the last mouthful of scrambled egg round the plate and dressed himself in a pair of dark blue buckskin shoes purchased from Honest in the Rue Marboeut, off-white cotton trousers and a navy-blue silk shirt with a long collar. His cotton jacket with the propinquitous blue stripes and the single vent, made for him by someone in Hong Kong who makes such things better than anyone else in the world, he threw on the double bed.
Now, thought Bond to himself, we go to work. With a sigh, he drew a table to the window and placed on it the Olivetti Lettcra 32 portable typewriter that he now carried with him every time he travelled by air. He unzipped the cover and with the aid of a small screwdriver swiftly removed the base plate of the machine. Skilfully tucked away beneath the ribbon spools and aligned with the direction-changing arms were the dismembered skeleton grip and breech mechanism of Bond’s Walther PPK 7.65 - Airline Model, as Q Branch called it. Bond unclipped the parts and put them to one side on a dean white handkerchief. Next to be removed was the cylinder. This was hollow and yielded up the barrel of the Walther, assorted pins and nuts and forty rounds of ammunition packed in cylindrical patterns of eight When these had been removed and placed on the handkerchief, Bond replaced the cylinder and unscrewed the nuts that held the ribbon spools in position. These were revealed as being round metal boxes camouflaged with typewriter ribbon. Each of them contained a further fifteen rounds of ammunition.
With his doctored Olivetti, Bond could bypass any airport check in the world. The machine worked when the keys were depressed and the arrangement of the Walther’s constituents had been done in such a way that only the most skilful and unblasé eye would be able to detect an unfamiliar outline when the machine’s working parts were exposed by an X-ray machine.
Bond deftly reassembled the Olivetti and typed ‘The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy doge’ to make sure that it was in perfect working order. Next, he picked up the screwdriver, looked at his watch, and went to work on the gun. Precisely four minutes, forty-eight seconds later he slapped the chamber of the assembled weapon and sat back to look at his Rolex Oyster Perpetual and expel a sigh of pleasure. It was the first time that he had beaten five minutes for the job. Bond cleaned the oil from the gun with the now soiled handkerchief and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands. He wrapped the handkerchief in two Kleenex tissues and dropped it into the waste bin.
This was the moment he loved. The moment when the adrenalin started to pump. The beginning of an assignment. To Bond it was more exciting than the beginning of a love affair. He sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the telephone, feeling that the palms of his hands were already beginning to sweat. A girl’s voice answered in Arabic and then switched to near-faultless English. Bond gave the number that he had memorized and sat back drumming his fingers on the bedside table. There was a silence and. then he could hear the number ringing. And ringing.
Tm sorry-’ It was the operator’s voice telling him that there was no answer. Bond was about to say he would ring again later when there was the click of a receiver being picked up. This was followed by another click which experience told Bond meant that the call was being recorded.
‘ ’Alo?’ It was a woman’s voice.
Bond took a deep breath and started to speak. ‘Good afternoon. My name is James Bond. I believe you were expecting me to ring about a business matter?’ There was silence at the other end of the Line. ‘Hello?’ Perhaps she did not understand English.
‘You will come at six o’clock. Apartment fourteen, Scmi- ramis Palace.’ The voice sounded worried. Like a child repeating a message over the telephone when its parents have gone out for the evening. ‘Do you know Cairo well? It is near the Citadel.’
‘Not terribly well, but I’ll find it. Do you - ?’
The continuous whine told him that the telephone had been put down.
‘Were you cut off, sir?’
Bond wondered if the girl had been listening to the call. Probably. The Egyptian Intelligence Service would have an agent on the switchboard of every hotel in Cairo. ‘No, it’s all right, thank you.’
He replaced the receiver slowly and picked up his jacket. The slight padding in the shoulder was in fact a substitute for a holster, which he now considered it unwise to carry when exposed to the attentions of hijack-happy security guards. The ‘padding* could be easily removed and re-zipped under the arm pit, or inside the waist band of the trousers, to form a serviceable holster for the Walther. Some speed of draw was inevitably lost. Bond had been capable of hitting a man at twenty feet in three-fifths of a second with a conventional holster draw. With the reinforced nylon, he had never broken the magic second. Still, it was better than being held up at an airport for hours while his credentials were checked out and he was eventually released with grudging apologies - or at some airports, where he might be driven away to a small room with no windows and padded walls to suffocate the screams. Bond unzipped the padding, turned it inside out and zipped it against the armpit. He put on the jacket, inserted the Walther and checked his appearance in the looking-glass above the writing desk. Only a professional would notice the faint bulge. Still, he was up against professionals.
With this thought in mind, he tapped a small amount of talcum powder into the palm of his hand and applied it circumspectly to the locks of his travel-weary Vuitton suitcase and attaché case. He then wedged one of his hairs into the door of the cupboard which contained his clothes and, returning the talcum powder to the bathroom, lifted the cover of the lavatory cistern and made a small scratch at water level on the copper ball-cock, which he was pleased to see had been manufactured by Allcock and Hardisty, Bilston, Staffordshire, England. Bond knew that the tension of breaking into a man’s room could reveal itself in the simplest way.
Satisfied that if anyone searched his suite he would know about it, Bond descended to the foyer and walked into the heat that even at five o’clock was striking down like a hammer. He ignored the three taxis waiting outside the hotel and turned right and then left over the El Gama’a Bridge. A hundred suffocating yards down the Shariel Corniche he found a taxi, a battered Buick that looked as if it was being driven to the scrapyard. He told the driver that he wanted to go to the Citadel and settled back uncomfortably against the imitation leather, scuffed down to its sun-bleached cross-weave. As far as he knew, he had not been followed.
The driver spoke fractured English, like a central European in an American situation comedy, and on the way Bond inquired about the imaginary address of a number of nonexistent friends in Cairo. Into this list he slipped the Semi- ramis Palace. The driver’s face lit up in recognition. Yes, it was very near. That tall block of flats silhouetted against the dome of the Sultan Hassan Mosque. Bond pinpointed the building in his mind and looked ahead admiringly to the vast complex of mosques, palaces and fortifications built just below the crest of the Mokkatam Hills. This was the Citadel of Saladin, so the guidebooks told you, built over a period of seven hundred years and half a dozen conquests.
Bond paid off the driver at the outer wall and resolutely refused
the blandishments of a crowd of beggars, trinket salesmen and potential guides. It was now half past five and, at a guess, it would take a ten-minute saunter to reach the Semi- ramis Palace. Just time to take advantage of the panorama from the ramparts of the Citadel. Bond climbed three flights of steps and leaned against a warm, sandstone balustrade. Below him sprawled the largest city on the continent of Africa, an untidy jumble of buildings stretching away into the heat haze like second hand furniture at an auction, the sky line pricked by the towers of minarets and the domes of mosques.
The sky was now tinged with red, which would quickly become purple, violet and then night. Bond watched the shadows creeping across the face of the Mohammed Ali mosque and filled his nostrils with the alien smells that wafted up to him. To Bond, who travelled widely, smells could pinpoint a place and a mood better than sights or sounds. What was in this bitter-sweet odour tonight? Spices, jasmine, detritus, corruption, history? Mostly tonight, thought Bond, it was danger - and perhaps death. He felt the reassuring pressure of the Walther PPK beneath his left shoulder-blade and began to retrace his steps down to the wide, worn staircase.
The Sound of Music
The lift was like a beautiful bird-cage; an exquisite prison of thin horizontal bars interlaced with a petit point of ironmongery by a craftsman who was obviously a frustrated flower-arranger. It probably dated from the time of the French occupation.
The lift carried Bond graciously and smoothly past exotic cooking smells and the plaintive wails of small children. It stopped with a decorous lurch, like an old lady steadying herself before she crossed the road, on the fourth floor. Bond slid back the two sets of metal doors and stepped out of the lift. He Listened for a moment and wondered if anyone else had been listening to the telltale noise of the lift coming up. There was no sound beyond that of a wireless in one of the apartments playing some monotonous Arab dirge.
The Spy Who Loved Me Page 5
