by John Gardner
Once he had gone, Pam Bouvier sat down and thought. She had, in fact, been feeling a shade guilty, having filched the cheque Bond had taken, for quarter of a million dollars, at the casino. After all, it was made out to her. Only after cashing the thing had she felt guilt.
By ten that morning, she was seated in a small, uncomfortable mongrel motorcar, in the main parking lot of Isthmus City International airport. She held a small two-way handset and was waiting for Q’s instructions.
Q, in the disguise of a peasant gardener, loitered near the gates to the estate, his car, a little deux chevaux, was hidden a mile down the road, and he hacked at the verge near the gates with a hoe he had ‘borrowed’ on the walk up from the car.
They left at ten o’clock, on the dot. First, a pick-up truck driven by the man called Braun, with three armed guards making a show of weapons. Truman-Lodge was at the wheel of the first stretch limo, driving four of the Chinese, while the rest were in Sanchez’s private limo, driven by his chauffeur. An open jeep brought up the rear. Perez drove, and Q saw that Bond was sitting next to him, but two more guards, openly displaying weapons, were in the rear. Sanchez himself was conspicuous by his absence, which, Q reflected, did not make the heart grow any fonder of him.
As the convoy disappeared, Q took out his little handset and quietly spoke into it. ‘They’ve just left. Pick-up, two limos and a jeep. Turning north on to the main highway. Sanchez not with them. Repeat, Sanchez not present. Wait . . .’ He heard a familiar stuttering noise. A moment later, he saw a helicopter rise from the middle of the estate. ‘Get airbone. Sanchez probably in helicopter.’
Pam’s voice came over very clearly. ‘I copy that, Q. Base out.’ In the car park she picked up her briefcase from the seat next to her – she was not going to leave the quarter of a million out of her sight – locked the vehicle and walked between the airport buildings towards the executive parking area where she had left the Beechcraft.
Neither of them were to know the small drama that had gone on, an hour before, at the helipad. Sanchez had told everybody that he would be travelling separately, by chopper, and the helicopter landed around nine, while Q was still making his way towards the estate.
Sanchez and Heller both waited for the machine as it put down gently. Next to the pilot sat another of Sanchez’s henchmen, Dario, who climbed out, carrying a canister around five feet in length.
‘Good,’ Sanchez smiled, reaching out for the canister and unlocking the plastic covering around the electronics pack, which fitted in a stubby T-shape about two feet from one end. Nobody could disguise the fact that it was some kind of handheld portable missile. ‘Good,’ he repeated. ‘You have brought my insurance policy.’
‘I brought all four, as you instructed, patron.’ Dario gave a well-oiled smile.
‘We can put them in the vault,’ Heller suggested.
Slowly Sanchez shook his head, ‘Oh, no, Colonel. They come with us. In the helicopter. From now on until all this is completed, I want them nearby.’
The Beechcraft was there, exactly where Pam had left it. But now, as Pam approached, she saw that several mechanics surrounded it. The engines were laid out neatly, in pieces.
‘What in hell’s name’re you doing to my airplane?’ She caught one of the mechanics by the shoulder. He shrugged off her hand and reached out for a clipboard. ‘Overhaul.’ He pointed to the signature at the bottom of the list. ‘Ordered yesterday by Senor Sanchez.’
‘But I’ve got to have a plane . . .’ she stopped, looking towards the gas pumps. A little Cessna, with its high-domed single seat cockpit and crop-spraying canisters under the wing roots, tight in to the fuselage. Very manoeuvrable, she thought. Low stalling speed, plenty of visibility. Just the thing for crop-dusting – or Sanchez-dusting come to that. There was nobody nearby, the keys were in the right place when she climbed on to the wing and peeped into the cockpit. If she was to do it, then it had to be done very quickly indeed. As she switched on, Pam’s eyes swung across the instrument panel. She had a full tank of gas, and could see the spraying canisters were also full.
By this time she was taxiing and doing up the seat belts. Nobody appeared to notice; nobody leapt up and down, though she reckoned the tower would already be shouting blue blazes at her. Deliberately she dumped the earphones out of the cockpit and pulled the high plexiglass dome down, snapping it into the closed position which cut out a lot of external noise.
She remained alert. The little Cessna was a dream to taxi: very responsive. Twisting her head this way and that, watching for other aircraft on the ground or in the circuit, she saw the taxiway turned on to the main runway, almost directly ahead. She turned, braked lightly to make sure, for the last time, that no other airplane was either inbound or outbound, then swerved the aircraft on to the runway and opened the throttle. As the speed rose so she had to bang on the rubber bar to keep the nose straight. Ahead there was a yellow airfield truck, heading down the runway towards her. A man in uniform stood in the back waving for her to stop. The airspeed indicator read sixty and she had no idea of the speed at which the crop duster would unstick. But unstick it must, for the yellow truck was growing larger by the second. Fingers mentally crossed, Pam eased back on the stick, rotating the airplane which lifted into its natural element with ease.
At seven hundred feet, she took the power off and turned north. She thought to herself that the man in the back of the truck was probably changing his pants at this moment, and smiled as she climbed out of the turn, going up to a thousand feet.
Fifteen minutes later she spotted the convoy, just as they turned off the one decent four-lane highway within spitting distance of Isthmus City. On the horizon she saw trees, an unusual feature on the flat red earth of the local countryside. The convoy still moved at a steady pace along a wide dust road.
Pam felt like the fighter pilots she had read so much about, her head swivelling all the time, eyes going from instruments to mirror, then sweeping in a 180-degree arc. The trees were growing clearer and she could see that they were specially planted conifers, quite close together to form a protective circle. There was no doubt the convoy was heading directly towards them, and, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a helicopter, below her and also aiming for the trees.
Time for cover, she thought. Away to the right there was a cluster of farm buildings. Fields of some kind of crop spread out in an irregular circle. Well, she thought, no farmer would object to a little free crop-dusting.
Pam gave the airplane a little flap and nosed down, levelling out almost parallel with the helicopter but now below it at around a hundred feet. She let the Cessna drop a shade lower, her right hand going out to the button array below the main instruments. There were four buttons: two for the port dusting compound, and two for the starboard. At around twenty feet she punched one of the starboard buttons, knowing that a cloud of powder was being released behind the airplane. Whoever was in the helicopter would, she hoped fervently, take little notice of a pilot at work dusting the crops.
Finger off the button, she climbed, turning back as she did so to get a perfect picture of the convoy, trees and helicopter. What she saw made her almost stall the plane. In the middle of the trees stood a huge circular construction.
It seemed to have been built of great red blocks, inlaid with pieces of mosaic, the whole edifice rising almost to the height of the trees. The effect of the building had an almost hypnotic effect: one of serene calm so that she could not take her eyes from it.
Though the construction was of large blocks, it contrived to form a complete circle, the interior floor of which was one great mosaic, while at the top of the structure, at regular intervals, other shapes prodded upwards: cones of the same red stone, but glittering as though showered with gold dust.
She levelled out, turning again, not wanting anyone in the convoy or helicopter to think she was taking a peek at this incredible piece of architecture, and, as the airplane banked, so Pam realised she had seen this place before, but cou
ld not think where. Then, as she got a new view, she realised. This place was a temple, and you could see it on television each week. Yes, now she had it. This was the Olimpatec Meditation Institute, a full-sized replica of the Olimpatec indian temples. The Temple of Meditation. This was where the professor – Professor Joe – did his programmes from. And not only the programmes, she remembered. No wonder Sanchez was heading in this direction, for this was where, unknown to the outside world, the buying, price-fixing, ordering and selling of drugs went on each week. Live on TV.
The convoy had stopped at some kind of barrier which security guards had begun to raise, while the helicopter was slowly dropping for a landing right on the vast mosaic floor in the centre of the circle. As the chopper came level with the top of the temple, so, to Pam’s amazement, the floor appeared to slide away, breaking into two halves, turning the temple into a deep and dark crater.
The helicopter dropped out of sight, and the floor slid back into place again. Pam stood the Cessna on one wing and headed at full throttle low towards the nearby farm buildings. Somehow she had to get into the amazing Olimpatec Meditation Institute.
She landed on a piece of rough land near to the adobe buildings, using full flap and a lot of brake after the flare. The flaps would be dragging on the ground to get the plane out again, she thought, opening the cockpit dome and springing down to meet a puzzled farmer who greeted her in Spanish, saying she had sprayed the wrong fields. ‘I have no money for this kind of treatment!’ He was almost wailing until she told him it was on the house. All she wanted was a lift in the decrepit old pick-up standing near the building.
‘I want to go to the temple,’ she said. ‘The Indian place. Olimpatec . . . know what I’m saying?’
The farmer knew what she was saying, but did not like it. Many spirits of the Indians lived in these parts. It was ill luck to go near the place.
She convinced him by saying he just had to drop her off. She would make her own way back. If not, then there would be a big charge for the crop spraying, and her bosses knew how to get money out of people who said they were poor. ‘Just like those who collect the taxes,’ she said.
Instantly, the farmer walked to his pick-up and started it with a toothy grin.
At the Olimpatec Meditation Institute, the convoy had gone through the checkpoint, driven on well-metalled road, and suddenly broken through the circle of trees. Even Bond, used to shocks of one kind or another, was impressed by the towering red walls, the mosaics and glittering cone-shaped towers. The building loomed over them.
The convoy proceeded around the perimeter of the building, stopping in front of a great studded door. Bond realised that Professor Joe’s TV programme never showed this side of the temple, or Institute as he preferred to call it.
They were signalled to leave the cars, joining together like a group about to be shown around Westminster Abbey or the Senate House. Bond almost expected Truman-Lodge to be carrying an umbrella to act as a sign for the party to follow. Also, for the first time he really had a look at the members of the party. There were at least one Korean and possibly a Burmese. The rest came from Hong Kong. All the orientals carried briefcases.
The guards appeared to be very alert, but stayed in the background as Truman-Lodge gathered the visitors around him.
‘We started this place strictly as a cover,’ he began. ‘But Professor Joe, who you all know from his TV shows, has managed to do some really beneficial work here, and has turned a tidy profit. Now, these doors lead to our main laboratory area, and before we go in, I’m going to have to ask you to wear face-masks. There’s a lot of dust from our product, and it floats around. I wouldn’t want any of you good people developing a bad habit. Now, just step this way.’
A white-coated and masked laboratory assistant appeared from a small door set in the big studded gates and began to pass out gauze masks which covered their mouths and noses. Bond, wary of unknown objects coming anywhere near his mouth or nose, carefully sniffed the gauze before deciding it was safe to strap it on and file, with the others, into the laboratory.
Once inside the door they found themselves in a tunnel, illuminated only by blue lamps set behind small grilles in the wall. As they walked, Bond could feel they were going down at a slight angle. Then the floor flattened out again and ahead a brilliant light began to flood into the tunnel. Quite suddenly, with more than a touch of drama, they had passed into the main laboratory area, finding themselves standing on a gantry which stretched around a massive hall, divided into sections by solid walls. From this walkway you could see the top of each wall, and what lay in each division. This, Bond decided, was more of a factory than a laboratory.
The hall was, as Truman-Lodge had suggested, full of white dust, the motes floating and filling the great shafts of light which came from high up in the roof above them.
Directly below, white-coated assistants, wearing dust filter masks, loaded blocks of solid cocaine on to a conveyor belt which, in turn, carried them through a wall. From the gantry you could see that the greyish-white blocks were falling from the conveyor belt into a huge pulverising plant.
Truman-Lodge eased them along so that they stood directly over this giant pulveriser. An automatic filter made certain that none of the cocaine left the pulveriser until it had turned completely into a white powder. The powder was being drawn off the pulveriser, through a large vacuum tube that, Bond realised, probably contained other filters which, through the air-pressure ground the powder to an even finer consistency.
They walked on, through a door set in the gantry, for the next stage showed the powder being sucked through its pipe and dumped into a blending vat, full of a yellowish liquid, and this area of the walkway was enclosed in glass. The last section of this great factory was what appeared to be a kind of garage. Large gasoline tankers stood in line, and, in turn, they were being filled with the resulting mixture of cocaine and liquid.
‘Our product,’ Truman-Lodge said, his mask producing an odd muffling effect, ‘dissolves completely in quite ordinary gasoline. This process makes the cocaine completely undetectable. You see, gentlemen, we ship our product to the United States in the reserve fuel tanks of this Institute’s aircraft. We have six altogether. The tankers being filled now will be on their way to the International Airport this very afternoon, to refuel the aircraft which are, even as we speak, arriving from various destinations.’
Bond leaned forward. It was almost too simple, and he wanted to hear a great deal more. As he shifted his position something caught his eye across the gantry. Standing opposite them on the far side were Sanchez, Heller and Dario, the man he had last seen on the night he met Pam at the Barrellhead café on the West Island of Bimini.
At that moment, Sanchez was saying they should walk over and meet the group. He turned ready to move, when Dario plucked at his arm.
‘Who’s the guy leaning forward, patron?’ he asked. ‘The one with the grey windcheater.’
‘Oh, him. He’s someone who can, I believe, be very useful to us.’
‘I do hope so.’ Dario’s eyes darted back across the wide gap, towards Bond, then back to Sanchez. ‘I do sincerely hope so.’
‘Why?’ Like a whip-crack as Sanchez detected something was wrong.
‘Because the last time I saw that bastard was in Bimini. That night we went after the Bouvier woman.’
‘He was with Bouvier?’
‘Sure. You remember patron, you told us to check on her contact and get rid of them. Well, he was the contact.’
‘And you didn’t get rid of them, Dario. Perhaps you’d better be a stalking horse. Cut him off from the others, then we can finish him off in a very spectacular manner, eh?’
The three men began to move along the gantry, turning left to cross the width of the plant. Dario casually put one hand into his pocket and curled his hand around the butt of an HK4 automatic.
The farmer dropped Pam at the main gates of the Institute and she walked the few paces to the little guardhouse, h
anging on to the briefcase, almost holding it in front of her.
The guard was a middle-aged man in a blue uniform who smiled politely and called her ma’am.
‘I have a special surprise here for Professor Joe,’ she said, trying to sound winsome.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s no visitors this week. The Professor and his people are on a private meditation retreat.’
‘Oh, my Lord,’ she gasped, a regular country girl. ‘And I’ve hitched and hiked and all the rest of it all the way from Idaho. Y’see, sir, the folks back home are real fans of Professor Joe. They took a collection . . . see.’ She slowly opened the briefcase to show her walking-about money won by Bond in the casino, all $250,000 of it. ‘. . . They’re going to be that disappointed. Chose me, in particular to bring it, with instructions to put it into nobody else’s hands except the dear Professor. They’re sure going to be mor’n a mite peeved . . .’ She broke off for the guard was already on the telephone whispering.
Within three minutes, another pair of guards had arrived with ‘Strict instructions to take you straight to Professor Joe himself, ma’am.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ Pam smoothed her skirt and tagged along with the guards, right up to the towering temple and in through a small door which led to an unexpectedly large reception area. There was a long smooth reflecting pool, into which a waterfall appeared to cascade from mid-air. Even in her ‘golly-gosh’ persona, Pam had to admit it looked pretty spectacular. She would like Q to figure out the trick of having a waterfall coming out of mid-air.
‘Truly magnificent sight isn’t it? Rebuilt, stone for stone, from thousand-year-old plans. Now restored to all its original glory.’
She knew the unctuous voice of Professor Joe. When she turned, almost into his outstretched arms, there he was restored, but, unlike the temple, by a little skin-toning and a moisturiser, not to mention the very well made rug that rested, looking almost life-like on his head.
Professor Joe wore what seemed to be a designer robe: gold and white and gorgeous, tied at the waist with a rope belt. Pam thought she would look quite attractive in the robe. It would be a great talking point at dinner parties: if she ever got to any more dinner parties!
