by John Gardner
They held each other close. Then she guided him to the bed where he stripped her of the flimsy garments. It was a time of great passion, with Nina’s legs wrapped around him, crying out for him to be harder as they rode towards their climax.
Bond felt she needed him for some purpose of her own. A release, perhaps, from dark fears, or a way to bolster her confidence. She had, after all, told him what she really wanted – ‘. . . to be with my parents.’
She cried out as she reached fulfilment, the cry of someone who might be looking towards the last uncharted land beyond the grave.
When it was over, they were silent for some time. Bond got up at last, glancing at his watch, to see that it was almost time for their guide, as the waiter had called him, to arrive. He washed again, and dressed, still worrying at the view from the window and, at the same time, trying to arrange his thoughts.
The priorities, as he saw them, were to find out the exact location of this so-called Hôtel de la Justice, to be certain members of the inner circle, the leaders of Chushi Pravosudia, were there, then to extract, by direct observation or clandestine methods, the reasons for their presence. Lastly, armed with all this information, to get away, warn, bring down the wrath of Stepakov’s Banda upon this strange and divergent terrorist group. Maybe that would also entail calling in the secret power of his own Service.
He still stood gazing down at the high wooden structures which formed four sides of the frozen garden when Nina came up behind him, dressed now, like himself, in heavy jeans, rubber-soled boots and a thick, enveloping cable-knit pullover which threatened to swamp her. He wore one of his favourite heavy-duty sea-island cotton rollnecks under a thick denim jacket, reinforced with leather at shoulders and elbows. It was a jacket he had chosen especially before leaving London, for it carried a few surprises he was certain would not have been detected in even the most rigorous search.
‘Thank you, Guy,’ she said, one hand on his arm. He wondered for a second if the lovely Nina had any devious reason for seducing him as she had done – last night, under the influence of drugs, or this morning when all defences were down. It was too late to worry about the possible consequences now, and as he looked into her eyes, he thought he could see some great sadness lurking like a tiny, dangerous, quiescent dragon behind her irises.
Then there was a firm knock at the door, a sound as commanding as that of a drill sergeant.
Bond opened up to find Pete Natkowitz, looking very fit and bright, standing next to a tall young woman with exceptionally long legs encased in tight jeans. She had short blonde hair which had been teased into a row of curls above her forehead and he knew that this was one of the giggling trio who had pressed them into the car near the Dom Knigi on the previous night.
‘Hi, Guy.’ Natkowitz’s face was filled with a kind of devilish glee, and his short stature, topped by the unruly red hair, made him look like an errant teenager out for roguery. He nodded at Nina. ‘Morning, Helen, this is Natasha. She’s in charge of us. Going to show us where all the goodies are.’
‘We’ve already met,’ Natasha also looked as though she shared some secret with the Israeli, ‘though neither of you probably remember. George certainly didn’t.’ She looked down at Natkowitz’s perky face and her hand drifted, like a feather, tracing fingers down his jawline. ‘I think we should go.’ The hand made a small gesture towards the corridor. ‘They’ll probably be waiting for us. Clive said ten forty-five and, as a director, Clive is a martinet where time’s concerned.’
As they walked down the passageway, Bond wondered at the normality of the place. It appeared to be like any other hotel. Doors were open while maids worked inside, and you could peep into suites and rooms like the one they had just vacated – all in the same condition, the woodwork smooth and unfinished.
At the end of the corridor they came to a bank of three elevators. Three other people waited – two elderly women and a man, talking in voluble Russian.
‘I have no doubt, as I said to Rebecca,’ one of the women said. ‘He was the man. I saw him every day for almost two years. You think I could forget that one? He killed my sister. Little Zarah he killed. Shot her there in the mud because she laughed.’ Tears welled in the old eyes which seemed to look back with loathing to another place and another hated time.
‘I wish to hear him speak,’ the man replied. He was stooped, a short person who seemed bowed now with a terrible weight. ‘I am not certain, not until I hear his voice. They will let us hear his voice, surely?’
‘Most certainly,’ the other woman said, more calmly than her companions. ‘You’re both well in character. You’ve worked hard and that is good. Stay in character. Remain there the whole time, for the camera will be on your faces. It will use your expressions, eyes, mouths, to gauge the truth.’
‘I could never forget Zarah,’ the first woman said.
They did not speak again as they rode down in the elevator cage, to find themselves emerging into a large room filled with people. Most of them elderly, some of them very old. The conversation rose and fell, a babble of languages swarming around the ears.
Natasha motioned them to follow her, and Bond soon realised they were walking along the inside of the wooden well, the part which looked like a cloister. He tried to make a ground plan in his head, so he could work out exactly which way they were heading. With concentration, he divined they had traversed one wall of the four when they reached another large room, like the foyer of a hôtel. This time, though, the wall furthest from them was not a wall, but two vast metal doors. There was a small entrance, set into the doors to the right of where the doors met, and next to it, a pair of lights, red and green. The green was on and Natasha went straight for the smallest door, ushering them through.
‘Ah, here, I sincerely hope, come our blessed camera crew, and about time too, ’Tasha darling. What’ve you been doing with them? Doesn’t anybody realise we’re on the tightest of schedules here. Tighter than your little backside, ’Tasha.’ He was a tall and willowy man in dark pants and a shirt. Long hair flowed to his shoulders, his hands danced, playing invisible arpeggios on the air, and he was accompanied by three smaller men who seemed to hang on every word. They looked, Bond thought, like trained whippets ready to streak away the moment their master commanded them.
‘Come along, then, let’s all get moving. You’re Guy, I suppose.’ His small eyes looked up over a pair of granny glasses straight at Bond. ‘See, I’m right. I’m always right. I can spot a cameraman at fifty paces in me high heels. So you,’ to Natkowitz, ‘must be the sound tech.’ His head whipped round to settle his eyes on Nina. ‘Oh, but Lord knows what we’re going to do with the pretty lady, and she won’t tell, will she?’
‘Clive,’ Natasha muttered by way of introduction.
But Bond was hardly listening to this stream of words which seemed unstoppable. Instead, he was taking in the sight which had greeted them on passing through the door. The area was vast and hot from the huge lighting gantries which ran above them. Cables snaked across the floors and at the far end there was a massive set which was immediately recognisable as an immaculate replica of a real courtroom.
‘Now, Guy,’ the tone was high, peevish and irritable. ‘I hope to goodness you’ve worked with Ikegami equipment before, because if you haven’t you’re going to be no use to me.’
They stood on a very real sound stage which was almost certainly an exact copy of one of the major Hollywood studio sound stages. The only thing missing was the mass of technicians and assistants usually associated with sound stages during the shooting of movies. Only Clive, his three stooges and a handful of assorted men and women – Bond counted six – who fiddled with cables and were doing things to the lighting gantries.
Clive saw the look and plunged straight in. ‘Yes, I know, Guy dear. I do know what you’re thinking. There aren’t nearly enough people here to shoot a major movie, but it’s make do and mend time as they used to say in the navy, and I had plenty of experience both makin
g do and mending. We just have to go with what we’ve got, and I only hope, in the name of Ossie Morris, that you’re at least competent with a camera.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Bond looked round, still taken aback by the scale of the sound stage. ‘Oh, I’m competent. Just tell me what you want and I’ll do it.’
‘Ah,’ Clive gave a little dance, two steps forward and two back. ‘Ah, so we have a pro. Thank heaven for small mercies as my old mother used to say. Now, perhaps we can get on with the bloody picture.’
‘What’s it called and have you got a shooting script?’ Bond asked.
‘No, dear. No script. We have to make it up as we go along. As for the title, weeeellll, I suppose we could call it Death of a Salesman but I suppose Arthur Miller’d be a bit miffed. Let’s make up a name – after all we are making up a movie. Let’s call it Death With Everything, because that just about sums up the plot. Grisly, dears, just too grisly.’ He gave an almost sly pout in Nina’s direction. ‘Hope you’ve got a strong tummy, dear. The people in this epic aren’t exactly your normal cosy down-memory-lane folks.’ He paused, sadly only for a quick breath. ‘These good people do go down memory lane, only all the mementos are mori, as it were. It’s as amusing as an evening with grim-visaged death, as the Bard would have said.’ He sighed, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘Lord how I miss Stratford,’ then in an aside to Bond, ‘I was there with Peter, you know. And how that boy’s got on, bless him. Get him now? Oh, well, we can’t all be visited by a good fairy in our cradles, can we? I think they let Karabos into my nursery.’
At the far end of the sound stage, people had begun to drift in, and even at a distance, a cold chill descended blotting out the heat from the lights.
12
DEATH WITH EVERYTHING
Nigsy Meadows was right – and wrong. As he had expected, M sent him a flash which came in at three in the morning. They woke him and he tottered down to the bubble to deal with it. After that, he found it difficult to sleep. The signal did not contain the instructions he had expected, ordering him back to London. Instead, he was told to meet M personally at the Grand Hotel, Stockholm. The wording indicated that the Old Man wanted Nigsy there yesterday. For breakfast and, preferably, on toast.
He arrived in the middle of the afternoon. The people at Aeroflot were their usual uncommunicative selves. Even under the twin turbos of glasnost and perestroika, very little has changed in the manner in which the Russians run their hotels, restaurants or state airline. In his short time back at the embassy, Nigsy heard stories of couples trying to get meals in Moscow hotels. They were usually turned away from half-empty restaurants because they were not ‘a party’. When it came to booking a flight on Aeroflot, they wanted to know, as Nigsy’s old father would have crudely put it, ‘the far end of a fart’.
Finally he had got out with the help of the third secretary (Trade) who was the embassy’s travel agent. He was left with the distinct impression that Aeroflot would have been happier if he had travelled British Airways, even though BA did not run flights direct from Moscow to Stockholm.
The Grand Hotel, Stockholm, is more large than grand, though none can deny that the views from the rooms at the front, looking across the canal towards the royal palace, are spectacular. People were known not to book wake-up calls, relying on the military band playing during the Changing of the Guard. The music floated loudly across the short spit of water and on a good day you had to raise your voice to be heard above the military marches.
Meadows thought he spotted the first signs of M’s presence at the hotel some two hundred metres from the elaborate entrance. One of the British Embassy’s pool cars, aptly a Saab 9000 CD, was tucked into a parking slot with its nose protruding so that the driver and observer had good sightlines along the approach. In Stockholm, the SIS preferred to be in plain sight unless a particular situation demanded otherwise. Hence the CD plates and British registration, shouting that the embassy had interests nearby.
In the foyer, replete with high-priced glass-cased baubles and a grand curving staircase, two Special Branch men tried to look like tourists, an exercise which made them only appear more like policemen. Nigsy even knew one of them by name, but they all behaved with perfect decorum. Nobody nodded, smiled, or even passed a raised eyebrow. He wondered what these kind of people did when they went off to the Canaries or Madeira, or wherever policemen went on vacation nowadays.
As a pillbox-hatted pageboy led him to the elevators, Nigsy saw someone slightly more perturbing who also hid in plain sight – a short, muscular young man, dark and self-confident with the restless eyes and air of a street fighter. He stood close to the elevator doors, scrutinising anyone who approached. This man was definitely neither Branch, SIS nor the local Swedish versions. He had KGB written right through him, like the wording inlaid in a stick of English seaside rock. No psychiatrist wheeled on by the Service could have told how Meadows knew, but he did. Part intuition, part long-term Moscow experience. His nostrils twitched, the mental antennae beeped, and the answer came up, KGB thug. To Nigsy it was unnerving because he knew that, had Bond been there, his answer would have been the same. On the flight he had started to realise he was feeling guilty about 007’s disappearance.
The message light was winking on the telephone when they got to his room, but the pageboy insisted on showing him the luxurious amenities of the accommodation, even though the word luxury is practically an insult in the Swedish lifestyle.
Nigsy tried to intimidate the lad by advancing on him, edging him from the room, thrusting money into his hand, tipping to excess multiplied by three. The pageboy would have none of it. He went through the long spiel, praising room service, the minibar and the wonders of the television system, which, besides the usual programmes, would give him excellent adult films as well as three normal choices plus Sky and CNN. All for a fair price.
He was still talking, showing off his English and obeying hotel policy as Meadows closed the door on him, turned, threw himself across the bed and grabbed the phone to ask for the message.
Would he please call the Bernadotte suite? Should they put him through? Please.
‘Franklin Mint’s suite.’ Bill Tanner’s voice was balm to his ears.
‘It’s Bert. Home is the hunter.’ There was none of the ‘grey goose is flying tonight’ rubbish. Just plain Bert would do it, followed, of course, by the key phrase.
‘Come on up. Quick as you can, old boy.’ Some three-decimal-nine minutes later, Nigsy Meadows stood in the famous rooms which had been home to people like Gigli, Henry Ford II, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
M sat in a comfortable chair nursing a cup of tea. ‘Have some, Nigs?’ His smile was that of a wily old alligator. Meadows declined, asking if the place was secure.
‘Safe as a tomb,’ Bill Tanner supplied. So Nigsy told them they had KGB in the lobby.
‘Yes,’ M looked unruffled, ‘we’re hosting a small, and very private, meeting.’
‘Ah,’ Meadows said. Then, ‘They all laughed when I sat down to play.’
‘Always the wag, Meadows,’ M gave a tired sigh. ‘You lost one of our favourite sons, I gather.’
He nodded, inwardly furious. ‘Snow. Ice. Moscow nights. The whole show. Thought we were right on top of him. Then they flew him out, straight over my head in a damned great chopper.’
‘Yes.’ M took another sip of his tea. ‘This is really rather good. Sure you won’t have any?’
‘No, sir.’ Meadows spent a lot of his life telling his wife, Sybil, that when he refused food or a cup of tea, he meant it. She always pressed him when he said no.
‘We’ve put people straight into the field.’ M seemed to be talking at the teapot. ‘You did get a good signal from him?’
‘You could hear it chime from ten miles, sir. Then there was only the usual intermittent loss. It wasn’t the equipment.’
‘So, you came a pearler, Meadows.’
That triggered another memory. His father laughing over a line in one of Grah
am Greene’s books – he could not remember which – where the head of a private detective agency greeted one of his errant sleuths with almost the same words. ‘Another of your pearlers . . .’
‘If you mean they got away so fast that I couldn’t follow, yes, sir. You can’t very well take to the skies in a Volga, especially when it’s snowing and you’ve only got limited liability.’
‘They did.’ M smiled to show he was playing with his agent. ‘Not your fault, Nigs.’
‘No, not my fault, sir. But that doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘Course not. Sit down and go through it with us. I want the minutiae.’
So he talked, giving them the whole story from the moment Wilson Sharp fielded Bond’s squirt-transmission until it was over. They put a spiral-bound map of Moscow and environs on the table for him to trace every move, and M constantly interrupted. He had said he wanted the trivia and he pressed for it – other cars in the vicinity, the exact holding patterns Meadows had driven while trying to lock on.
‘The MVD surveillance vans,’ M growled. ‘You get their numbers?’
Meadows surprised himself by rattling off the licence plates without even thinking. That kind of thing was second nature to a good field man. In training, at the SIS prep school, they spent hours playing a complicated version of Kim’s Game – the one where a tray of objects was uncovered for a minute, then the subject was asked to write a list of everything on the tray. In their field games they learned mnemonics to aid memory and stored away licence and telephone numbers like jackdaws.
M circled his finger around the streets Nigsy had driven with the minder, Dave Fletcher. ‘You went quite close to the Moscow State University. That annexe they have downtown, not the main buildings out in Leninsky Gory.’
‘Within a block, yes.’
‘Nothing untoward? No oddities? Cars driving in a strange manner?’
‘Everyone was moving slowly. At times it snowed quite hard.’
