Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  She let the clippers fall and tore back through the tunnel, scraping her hands painfully as she went because she couldn’t see, had to do it all by feel.

  She almost went past the ladder. It brushed her left leg as she went by, and she realized what she’d been about to do, to swim endlessly down this tunnel, directly into the explosions. She reversed, felt around, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, there!

  Get these damn flippers off, get them off. She kicked them away, her shaking hands clutching at the ladder rungs, and she started to climb.

  Her head had just broken the surface, seeing the floor another eight feet above her, the ladder extending upward to that platform there, when all at once the water around her vibrated, and then lifted, and she was underwater again, clinging to the ladder, the water reaching for her with a million fingers, trying to pluck her off the ladder, drag her away. The water surged upward around her, powerful, lifting her, then drained back, bearing strongly downward, still trying to carry her with it, she still clutching hard to the rungs, stupid with fright.

  The first bomb has gone off. I really am going to die here.

  The water receded, foaming, her head was in air again, and a hand was there, reaching down for her. She looked up, gaping through the goggles, and it was George, holding onto the ladder just above her, reaching down for her.

  She put one shaking hand in his, and he pulled upward, and they both rose out of the water to collapse onto the floor, the water boiling eight feet below. She lay there gasping, on her side, the air tank still cumbersome on her back, the goggles still on, looking blearily out and down at the water heaving in the darkness below.

  Distant thunder boomed. The water heaved upward as though to recapture them. They clung to each other and watched it rise, and then it fell back, quiet again.

  Solemnly, “I don’t ever want to dive again,” Kim said.

  George laughed, and kissed her, and they didn’t care about the third and last explosion.

  15

  Curtis paced the narrow portside deck of Granjya, staring northward, watching the glittery lights of the island city far away, willing it to happen. Thirty-two minutes. Thirty-three.

  Could they possibly have stopped it, defeated the soliton? He knew the charges were located where they should be. How could they have stopped him? They’d have to send divers into the tunnels, the water in the tunnels would be filthy, they wouldn’t have the time or the people to do all that. And there’s no other way to stop the soliton.

  Thirty-four minutes.

  It’s George, somehow. George Manville has done this to me. He should be dead, the man should be dead, and in any case he’s nothing but an unimaginative engineer, how can he stop me?

  Curtis had always known this was a possibility, but he’d had to go forward anyway. His position was untenable and getting worse. He had to get out from under or go under, ruined, disgraced. So he’d had to make this gamble, and now he’d lost.

  Thirty-seven minutes.

  It wasn’t going to blow. George Manville, of all people, had beaten him. (He never even thought of Kim.)

  But was this any worse than to fail the other way? To be sued, hounded, taken through bankruptcy courts, reviled by everyone who used to shake his hand and drink his liquor. If things had worked out…

  If things had worked out, he would have had all the money he needed to solve his problems, and he would not have had one breath of scandal to touch upon him. He would have had his revenge on the city that had tried to destroy him, and he would have continued to be Richard Curtis, owner of Curtis Construction and RC Structural, respected, accepted everywhere in the world.

  Well, he had failed, and now that failure was behind him, and it was time to start again. He still had a very few trusted people—the Farrellys at Kennison, for instance—he could rely on. Richard Curtis would have to disappear forever, and gradually he would have to build up a new identity. He had lost a battle, that’s all, not the war.

  To disappear meant totally, and that meant he had to start now. Defeat had made him tougher, more decisive. He knew what had to be done, and he wouldn’t shrink from doing it.

  There was a pistol in his cabin, an Iver Johnson Trailsman .32. He went there and got it, and walked forward to where the Hsus stood together, he at the wheel, she seated in the bolted-down chair beside him, chatting. Curtis shot her first, in the head, and then her husband, quickly, before he could think about it. Then he rolled the bodies over the side.

  This was the first thing. No one must know how he left Hong Kong, where he went. Before, he’d been in a position where he could trust the Hsus to keep silent, because they would want more of his work in the future. But now, they would know he was a fugitive, and they would not want to be linked to him, and they would go to the police at the very first opportunity. So they wouldn’t get an opportunity.

  He could operate this ship alone. The thing to do now was choose a new destination, because the authorities would surely know by now he’d come to Hong Kong from Taiwan, so he could not go back to Taiwan.

  There are other places in this world, some not even as far away as Taiwan. There was Macao, for instance. Farther off, but possibly even more useful, there was Vietnam. Or the Philippines.

  He could decide all that later. The main thing now was to deal with the submarine, get farther away from the Chinese coast, and at last get some sleep, an hour or two of sleep before daylight.

  It would be very good if he could keep the submarine, but he didn’t dare. If he were stopped, he was Mark Hennessy, with a partly burned passport, due to an accident on board. (All of Mark’s travel goods were still aboard, and he would arrange a small fire in the main cabin to back up his story.) But he could not be Mark Hennessy, an innocent traveler, if he were leashed to a submarine carrying a full load of gold ingots, so unfortunately the submarine would have to go.

  But not the gold, or at least not all of it. He would bring, say, a dozen ingots aboard Granjya, hide them, and have that as the base for his next fortune. So, once the Hsus were out of the way, he throttled back the Granjya engines to their slowest forward speed, just making enough headway into the chop so the ship wouldn’t begin dangerously to roll. Delicately, with the radio controls, he brought the submarine to the surface and then forward, to hover beside Granjya, maintaining the same speed, while he got a rope around the rudder, just forward of the propeller.

  There was nothing else on the sleek machine to tie onto, but he had both vessels moving at the same speed, in the same direction, so everything would be fine so long as they were tethered together in at least one spot. And this transfer wouldn’t take long.

  The top of the submarine, when it rode on the surface, was below the side deck of Granjya. Curtis had to lie on his stomach on the deck and reach down to the central hatch cover of the submarine, a round metal wafer three feet across, with crescent indentations for handholds. Tugging on two of these indentations, he was resisted at first, and then the cover turned easily. So easily that all at once it was free, and sliding off the metal hull to fall away into the water. Not a problem; the whole submarine would be scuttled soon.

  The interior was not full. The top two feet of stowage space was empty, so Curtis couldn’t reach the nearest ingots from the deck of Granjya. He had to slide under the rail out over the submarine and lower himself through the hatch.

  Now it was easy. He bent down, grabbed an ingot, was surprised by how heavy it was, but lifted it up and turned to push it onto the deck of Granjya, under the lower bar of the rail. Then he transferred a second ingot, and then he paused; they were really very heavy.

  When he lifted the third ingot and turned, the deck of Granjya was too far away. Some wave had slightly altered the two vessels’ courses.

  No matter. They were still tied together. What Curtis had to do now was get to the rear of the submarine, grab the rope, bring the two boats back in line.

  It seemed to him too dangerous to try to crawl o
ver the top of the submarine. It was probably too slippery, and he didn’t want to wind up in the water, even with Granjya right there next to him. So he slid down into the submarine, lay on his back on the lumpy ingots of gold, and opened the aft hatch cover from inside. All of this was taking longer than he’d expected.

  This cover also slid away into the sea. Curtis slithered along the gold, raised himself through the aft hatch, and by the running lights of Granjya he could see that the two vessels had now yawed widely from one another, like an alligator’s mouth opening very wide. Both ships tried to move steadily forward, but each was hampered by the other, and they were turning almost disdainfully away from one another, the submarine attached by the rope around its rudder at the rear now facing almost directly away from the prow of Granjya.

  The rope! Curtis saw it was going to happen, and lunged, but too late. The ships made one more incremental turn away from one another, and the rope tying them together met the spinning propeller of the submarine, and the propeller neatly sliced through.

  Immediately the ships lunged away from one another. Curtis saw the lights of Granjya rapidly recede. There were no lights on the submarine.

  Dive into the sea? He couldn’t possibly hope to swim fast enough to catch up with Granjya. But if he stayed in the submarine, what then?

  Granjya’s lights were fainter, they disappeared. Curtis was getting wet. As the waves ran over the submarine, water ran inside through the two open hatches.

  He was in pitch blackness, in this small heaving boat on the surface of the sea. It was riding lower, taking on water faster.

  There was no light anywhere in the world, except far away to the north, far away, the cold white sheen of Hong Kong against the night sky. Curtis, standing in the hatchway on his gold ingots, his body moving with the roll of the submarine, kept his eyes on that far-off pale glow.

  After a while, the lights were still there, but he was not.

  Afterword

  by Jeff Kleeman

  I discovered the joys of James Bond in 1973, when I was nine years old and my stepfather took me to see Live and Let Die. Two years later I discovered Donald Westlake. While wandering in a bookstore I came upon a novel by Tony Kenrick. One reviewer compared Kenrick to Westlake. Who is this Westlake guy who’s supposed to be so great, I wondered.

  So I went hunting, like a heist artist in a Westlake plot. But trying to find a Westlake book in a sleepy California suburb, long before the days of Internet searches, wasn’t so easy. Eventually, I unearthed a trove of them in the public library and once I overcame the final obstacle (a librarian concerned the books were inappropriate for a child), I was hooked for life.

  Twenty years later, a veteran fan of all things Westlake and Bond, I joined United Artists, where I found a way to unite them for the first time. Or so I thought. While I was unaware at the time, it turns out that watching Live and Let Die in 1973 was actually the first moment I laid eyes on both Bond and Don. Here’s Don divulging it to me in 1995:

  Dear Jeff,

  In LIVE AND LET DIE, I am the passenger in the red car in the stunt driving sequence on the FDR Drive in New York. When I saw the movie, back then, I was astonished at how much that black silhouette (moi) inside that car was being thrown around. At the time, it had just seemed like a little sideswipe, not such a much at all.

  One car didn’t make it into the shot; a flashy pimpmobile with a black stunt driver in outrageous togs. After a rehearsal, he told the director he was almost out of gas and drove away and didn’t come back. Hours later, we learned what had happened. Being, like all the stunt drivers on that job, from Pennsylvania, he hadn’t known he couldn’t make a right turn on a red light in New York City. Wall Street area, Sunday, zero traffic. He turns, a police car appears out of nowhere, he’s stopped, he’s asked for license and registration. There’s no registration in the glove compartment of this rented specialty car. His wallet is in his regular clothes, not his costume. He has nothing. He said, “You see, I’m a stunt driver in a James Bond movie.” “And I,” said the cop, “am Minnie Mouse. Outta the car.” It was five hours before he got his phone call.

  Show biz.

  * * *

  The tale of reviving the James Bond franchise is too lengthy to be unspooled here, but this you need to know: when we made GoldenEye, the film industry didn’t believe it would succeed. They had good reason. Marketing surveys revealed that the majority of teenage boys in 1995 had no idea who James Bond was. The few who were aware described him as “that guy my father likes.” There was a good reason for this: a Bond film hadn’t done substantial business since Octopussy in 1983. The Dalton Bonds never found a large audience. Fifteen-year-olds in 1995 had been only two years old the last time James Bond had been culturally significant.

  The massive doubts about GoldenEye were accentuated by several factors: Pierce Brosnan was an ex-TV actor whose biggest recent role was a supporting turn in the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. Martin Campbell had done some wonderful television but had never directed a successful feature film. Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson had grown up working on the Bond films, but they had never before been lead producers.

  The first hint that GoldenEye would explode conventional Hollywood wisdom came during production, when Martin Campbell did something I’d never seen another director do: even though we were in the middle of a complex shoot, Martin managed to cut together the opening sequence and then showed it to the cast, crew and all of us at the studio. This was his way of keeping morale high. Boy, did he succeed.

  The next indicator came when we released a teaser trailer that displayed everything we believed a Bond film should be. In theaters across the country the response was ecstatic.

  By the time we saw a first cut in early 1995, the feeling at MGM/UA had shifted from doubt to hope that Bond might be the savior the studio needed.

  * * *

  In 1993, when I joined United Artists, I rewatched every Bond film, reread every book, dove into the archives and learned everything I could about the history of the franchise. I was struck by the unusual connections between the movies and novelists. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice and the finished film has a unique, rebellious wit I suspect comes directly from Dahl. Anthony Burgess wrote the first draft of the Spy Who Loved Me screenplay.

  I began to fantasize about what a Donald Westlake version of Bond would be. Don struck me as having it all—intricate plotting, Dahl and Burgess’s anarchic wit, plus an ability neither of them had: writing ingenious, tough, gritty action.

  It’s normal for a studio to hire a writer for a potential sequel even before a film is released. If the film works then the next installment in the franchise is already on a fast track; if the film flops the money spent on a first draft is inconsequential to the studio’s bottom line.

  In March of 1995, with GoldenEye’s release still eight months away, I proposed reaching out to Donald Westlake to see if he would be interested in writing the next Bond film—assuming there was going to be a next Bond film.

  The studio was game for anything. And Barbara and Michael were intrigued by the idea. They’ve always supported bringing fresh voices to Bond as long as we protect the particular qualities that make Bond singular in the action genre. So they gave me their blessing to reach out to Don.

  Now, while Don had written the occasional screenplay (and had even been nominated for an Academy Award for The Grifters in 1990), he’d never courted Hollywood. He had a rule that he would never adapt of one of his own novels, so the frequent options on his books never led to direct involvement with the filmmaking community. But I had to try—I couldn’t pass up the chance to get him involved with this.

  How many people get the opportunity to do something that would thrill their childhood self beyond all imagining? Working on a James Bond movie was just such an opportunity for me, and working with Donald Westlake on a Bond film would be even more so. When I reached out to Don through his agent, I had the incredible feelin
g that I was fulfilling a promise to that eleven-year-old boy who is still very much a part of me. Of course, I had no idea what Don’s response would be.

  3/29/95

  Dear Jeff,

  I have looked at the 3 Bonds, and am now more interested than ever. Here are some thoughts.

  A continuing motif, I see, is birth through water; I have no problem with that. And another theme, which I take it got lost later on, was always somehow to top the previous work; he dies and he’s buried at sea, so do something even more over the top next time.

  May I ask for one more of the earlier Bonds? I’d like to see LIVE AND LET DIE again, because I’m in it.

  Don was interested! We exchanged faxes—email had not yet become the norm. Don immediately had an idea involving a computer hacker who’d been stealing information from British Intelligence and the CIA. Because he’s in their systems, the U.K. and U.S. can’t use any of their wired tech, they have to go old school and thus, they turn to Bond to take on this very modern villain. The villain’s in league with some Third World financiers and their big scheme is to create chaos in the stock exchanges, destroying the entire economic system of the premier nations. As Don summed his thinking up:

  This could be too cerebral a threat, but I believe it could be made the equivalent of a bomb going off.

  I have not seen all 16 of the previous Bonds, nor all sixteen thousand of the imitation Bonds (I did see TRUE LIES, though), so for all I know the computer genius who will bring society to its economic knees has already been met. If not, I think he could be fun. Every day now, the newspapers have another story about how vulnerable that vast interconnected web of computer technology is, so if it’s that vulnerable, why don’t we go get it?