‘What is his business? From what I understand, he’s given up narcotics.’
‘I have no idea. I didn’t ask and he didn’t say.’
‘Did you tell him why you were here?’
‘No. I make it a practice never to share information and certainly not in the way I have with you. I led him to believe that I was a gold-digger, trying to get my hooks into Irwin’s fortune. And he believed me. It fits with his view of women. I don’t think he likes us very much.’
She yawned and Bond glanced at his watch. It was only ten o’clock. He felt he had been in Antibes much longer. ‘I should leave,’ he said.
‘I was hoping you’d stay.’ She looked at him with laughter in her eyes. ‘I’m going to bed and you’re going to come with me. I want you to make love to me again but more slowly this time. You make love like a schoolboy. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of girls, James, but you’ve never had a woman and you’ve still got a lot to learn.’ He was about to protest but she stopped him. ‘Don’t say anything. We’ve talked enough. If there’s more to be said, we can do it in the morning.’
There was a staircase opposite the kitchen and she climbed up with Bond following. The bedroom was exactly as he had imagined it would be, small and pretty with ormolu wall lights and an antique bed and two windows leading out onto the terrace that he had seen at the front of the house. She turned as he came in. ‘No more talking,’ she said.
It was only the next morning, as the sun came up, that they spoke again. Bond was woken by Sixtine slipping out of bed and padding bare-footed out of the room. When she returned, she was wearing a long, striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up and carrying something in her hand. ‘I want you to have this,’ she said. ‘What I said to you last night, before we came upstairs, was unfair. I want you to have this as a souvenir of our time together. You can use it when you buy yourself some decent cigarettes.’
It was a flat square cigarette case made out of gunmetal. When Bond opened it, he saw that there were four words inscribed in the lid, but close to the edge where they were hard to see.
FOREVER AND A DAY.
‘I bought it for Danny,’ she explained. ‘On the day we got married, he said he wanted to be with me forever but I told him that wasn’t enough. I wanted forever and a day. I had this made for our anniversary but he was dead before I could give it to him. So I want to give it to you.’
‘I thought you hated Danny,’ Bond said, closing the lid.
‘Did I say that? No. How can I hate him? He’s part of my story and that story brought me to you.’
Bond reached out for her and as the first bright orange rays of the morning sun stretched across the wooden floor, she slipped into his arms, the two of them gently folding themselves into one another beneath the sheets.
15
Down to the Wire
The road from Menton is a gift to thrill-seekers. It climbs steeply through a series of hairpin bends with dazzling views of the deep blue Mediterranean Sea before plunging into the dense forests of the Alpes-Maritimes with olives, cypresses and pine trees taking over from the orange and lemon trees that have been cultivated on the slopes below. Apart from the tarmac and the occasional telegraph pole, it feels that nothing has changed here in a thousand years. Saracen fortresses, or the remains of them, still stand guard over rocky crags, and villages cling to hilltops with church bells sounding out from improbably large cathedrals. The houses are pink and yellow and white and green and many of them still lack electricity. It’s a world apart from the coast of the Riviera. A train line runs up to the town of Sospel, tunnelling through the rocks that it was unable to bypass. But it is in a fast car with the roof down that you will fully experience the heat, the smell of herbs and wild flowers and the sense of calm that you have momentarily broken, the modern world rushing through the ancient.
Bond and Sixtine had enjoyed a late breakfast in Menton. They’d eaten eggs that had been warm in the hand when they were carried into the kitchen, bread baked that morning and strong Italian coffee. The town might call itself ‘the pearl of France’ but it was less than a mile from the border and enjoyed the best of both worlds. The sun was hotter than ever and the mountains had thrown an overprotective arm around the little community, preventing any breeze from reaching its tightly packed streets and alleyways. By the time they had finished their meal and paid the bill they were glad to climb back into the MG and to set off with the wind streaming over their shoulders.
Bond wanted to take a look at the plant where Wolfe Europe manufactured its new film stock and Sixtine had agreed to take him. It was still hard to believe that Irwin Wolfe was involved in any criminal activities but at the same time he certainly appeared to be at the centre of a web that stretched across the south of France. A British agent had been sent to look into the activities of the Corsican syndicates. He had been killed in Marseilles, close to a chemical company either owned or operated by Jean-Paul Scipio, a local gangster who had once controlled 80 per cent of the narcotics trade. When Bond had visited Ferrix Chimiques he had almost got himself killed, but he had learned that Wolfe was a customer there. It didn’t matter that the chemical he was buying – acetic anhydride – seemed to be completely innocent. The link had been made. Scipio and Wolfe. Visiting the plant when it might not be possible even to penetrate the perimeter fence might seem like a waste of time but it was a Sunday, the weather was glorious and right now there wasn’t anywhere that Bond would prefer to be.
The road took them through Castellar, one of the many villages perchés, where they were forced to slow down behind a donkey and a cart piled up with watermelons. The MG grumbled but the animal ignored it.
‘One day,’ Bond said, ‘I want to spend a week with you in a village like this. We’ll sit in the sun and drink red wine and pretend there aren’t any bad people in the world.’
‘A week?’ Sixtine looked at him scornfully. ‘You’d get bored in three days.’
The donkey shifted forward. Seeing an opportunity, she touched the accelerator and sent the little car in a wide curve around it.
It was amazing how quickly the landscape swallowed them up. Still climbing, the road seemed to go into contortions as if trying to shake them from its surface, bending and twisting for no obvious reason, dog-legging and turning back on itself. They passed a few abandoned-looking stone cottages lost on the edge of a forest that stretched all the way to the mountains, blocking out much of the sky and turning the light green. Even the car sounded subdued, nervous about going too much further.
They almost missed the turning. Perhaps it was designed that way. There was a low sign with the letters ‘W.E.’ and an arrow, but it was the lane itself that gave the game away. The bitumen was brand new and the grass had been cut back to reveal the edges. Sixtine drove past and then pulled into a clearing between two trees. The car, only a few feet from the main road, was completely invisible and Bond remembered what she had told him. She had been here before.
‘We’ll walk from here,’ she said. ‘It’s about half a mile but the lane only goes to Wolfe Europe so if they hear the engine, they’ll know we’re coming.’
Before they’d left Nice, Sixtine had driven Bond back to his hotel and he had changed into a short-sleeved cotton shirt, linen trousers and nubuck saddle shoes with crepe soles. He’d deliberately chosen shades of brown and grey so that he would blend in with his surroundings. He had also picked up his Beretta, now tucked reassuringly into his waistband.
He nodded. ‘After you.’
They set off together, keeping a line of trees between themselves and the edge of the new lane. The ground was soft and spongy with a bed of pine needles and they were careful to make no sound. It was cooler inside the forest than it had been in Menton. A few bees droned around them, found them uninteresting and buzzed off. Birds rustled the leaves but remained unseen. But for the lane, it would have been easy to get lost. Every step they took offered a choice of a dozen identical directions.
After about
ten minutes, Sixtine held up a hand and they stopped. ‘There it is,’ she whispered. ‘They’re still working, even though it’s a Sunday. I don’t think they ever stop.’
Bond looked through a gap in the foliage and saw a metal fence with the sun glinting on the wire. It was about ten feet high, disappearing through the trees on either side of the lane. There was a solid-looking barrier that rose and fell electronically and, next to it, a two-storey office and administration block made out of grey concrete with searchlights and radio antennae mounted on the roof. Two men were standing outside, both dressed in dark blue uniforms. Bond could make out the letters ‘W.E.’ on their jackets. It was more like the entrance to a high-security prison than a manufacturing plant, but the strange thing was that the men seemed to be guarding nothing at all. The lane simply continued further into the wood.
‘The whole thing is shaped like a doughnut,’ Sixtine whispered next to him. ‘This is the outer ring. There’s another quarter-mile of woodland and then a second fence. That’s the electrified one. The actual plant is in the middle.’
‘When did you come here?’
‘Two weeks ago. Follow me. And take care where you tread.’
They turned left, heading away from the lane and moving clockwise round the fence. Every few yards, they passed ‘Do Not Trespass’ signs, printed bright red in both English and French and attached to the wire. Sixtine ignored them. She was looking for something and after about ten minutes she found it: a white cross scratched on a fir tree. The fence was right next to them and she went over to it.
‘This is where it gets interesting,’ she said.
Bond saw that the wire had been carefully cut at ground level. The join was invisible but one section could be lifted up like a cat flap. The gap was just big enough for the two of them to squeeze through. Now they found themselves inside the inner ring with the second fence somewhere ahead of them. The trees seemed even thicker here and the vegetation was wilder, the ground covered in nettles and moss with freakishly coloured mushrooms that looked like pustules, breaking out in clumps.
Sixtine held a finger to her lips and they continued forward in silence, taking care not to step on loose branches or anything that made a sound. After a few steps, Bond understood why. Sixtine pointed to the trunk of a tree and he saw a thick cable running up to a fan-shaped microphone. The entire wood had been wired for sound! She was right about what she had said. Irwin Wolfe had taken security to extremes. They were lucky that there didn’t appear to be any cameras.
They continued more slowly after that. Bond was sweating. The air seemed very close, hemmed in by so many trees. Nothing else moved. Even the birds and the butterflies had been warned to stay away. Sixtine pointed at a thick clump of leaves, heart-shaped and a dark, bilious green. It was some sort of nettle and he knew at once that it was alien, that it had no place in a European wood. Sixtine put her lips very close to his ear and whispered: ‘Gympie-gympie.’ Bond knew immediately what she meant. It wasn’t an easy name to forget, although he had heard it only once before at a briefing on jungle warfare in relation to Australia and Indonesia. Gympie-gympie. Also known as the mulberry-leaved stinger and the moonlighter. The most painful stinging nettle in the world. If the tiny silica hairs came in contact with your skin, within minutes you experienced pain that you would not believe possible, the sort of pain that would stab at every inch of your body with a series of electric jolts that could easily drive you into anaphylactic shock. The instructor had told the story of a serviceman who had unknowingly used one of the leaves as toilet paper during a training exercise. Thirty minutes later, unable to bear any more, he had shot himself dead.
And here it was, growing just a few miles away from the quietest and most genteel resort in the Riviera. Bond had no doubt that it had been brought to France and planted quite deliberately to punish unwary trespassers, and he had to ask himself – were such extreme measures really justified, simply to protect a replacement for Technicolor film? Plenty of industrialists kept secrets. Very few were prepared to maim or even to kill to protect them.
With a sense of dread and a growing knot in his stomach, he pressed forward. There was still no sign of the second fence but the forest had one last trick to play. Sixtine held up a hand, this time pointing down with the other. There was a tripwire, about six inches above the ground, stretching out in front of them before disappearing into the undergrowth. Intrigued, Bond followed it, carefully separating the leaves with a stick, not wanting to touch them with his hands. The wire was connected to a grey metal box that was fastened to a tree a short distance away. A miniature crossbow was attached to the side with a vicious, needle-sharp bolt pointing back. Anyone activating the device would have been crippled, shot in the ankle. Bond could imagine their pain and confusion as they stumbled back through the undergrowth, perhaps into the bed of killing nettles.
He’d had enough. He wanted to get out of there. Instead, they pressed on.
Bond heard the fence before he saw it – or rather, the 2,000 volts of electricity that were pulsing through it. There were no warning signs here. They weren’t needed. Anyone desperate enough to come this far would certainly have hostile intentions and wasn’t going to be put off by polite notices. They had emerged suddenly from the woodland. The ground had been cleared and trees cut down for about ten yards all the way round the compound, making it impossible to go any closer. Quite apart from the likelihood of further booby traps – and Bond wouldn’t have been surprised if the area ahead of him was actually mined – they would be unprotected out in the open and all too easily seen. It didn’t matter anyway. From here they had a reasonably good glimpse of the hidden world of Irwin Wolfe.
The main entrance, with a barrier and a security block identical to the one they had already seen, was over to their right. The lane emerged from the forest and finally led to a wide concrete area with two jeeps parked next to each other and a water tower to one side. The jeeps were Willys MBs, used by the French army, with Bren guns and ammo boxes mounted in the back. A short distance away from them, on the other side of the wire, they could make out the first in a series of long rectangular buildings made of dark wood on a brick base with slanting roofs formed from sheets of corrugated iron and windows deliberately designed to provide no view in or out. These were set in straight lines, each marked with a single letter painted white, like a POW camp. A single watchtower rose up in the far corner with two men silhouetted against the sky, one of them scanning the treetops through binoculars. The compound covered the same area as the mountain village they had passed.
‘Seen enough?’ Sixtine whispered.
‘Wait!’
Everything was wrong. Armed jeeps. Guards. Electrified fences. The position – in the middle of a forest, miles from the nearest town. And there was something else. Studying the compound more carefully, Bond saw that it was split into two halves. A whole area was taken up with buildings that had been added more recently, constructed in a quite different style. They had no windows at all and they were air-conditioned, with large steel boxes clinging to the woodwork and bright, silver chimneys jutting out of their roofs.
Was this where the new film stock was manufactured? The lack of windows made sense. Undeveloped film would demand complete darkness. Bond detected a sharp, chemical smell in the air. A door had opened and a man came out wearing a white laboratory coat. He slipped off the protective mask that had been covering his nose and mouth and lit a cigarette. Bond had brought a Minox subminiature camera with him and fired off half a dozen shots. He nodded at Sixtine. There was no point staying.
The two of them turned to leave.
They were no longer alone.
Three men stood facing them, dressed in khaki and carrying light machine guns. They had emerged silently from the forest, creeping up on Bond and Sixtine while they were watching the compound. They had the same dark, whippet-like features of the Corsicans who had surrounded Bond at Ferrix Chimiques and he saw, with a sinking heart, that they we
re equally professional, keeping exactly the right distance between each other, ensuring they had a clear line of fire. What had given them away? Had their footsteps been picked up by the concealed microphones? Or perhaps there were other security devices that they’d both missed. Bond’s mind was already racing. The Beretta was still in the waistband of his trousers but he would be dead before he could reach it. He would have to try another way.
He lifted his hands in the air and smiled. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, speaking in fluent French. ‘I wonder if you can help me. My wife and I went for a walk in the woods and we seem to have got lost.’
The men weren’t buying it. One of them, the leader, spat into the grass, then said: ‘Keep your hands in the air. You will come with us.’
‘I really don’t think you need to be quite so aggressive.’ Bond was still playing the innocent tourist. Next to him, Sixtine looked terrified, as if she had never seen a gun before. ‘We were following the lane and we took a wrong turn. You shouldn’t be pointing those guns at us. I can assure you I’ll be taking this up with the British consul.’
One of the men had a radio transmitter and brought it up to his mouth. There was a hiss of static as he made the connection. Bond realised that he had to act now if they were going to have any chance of getting out of this. If they allowed themselves to be escorted into the compound, it would be over. These men didn’t work for Irwin Wolfe. He was sure of it. They must work for Jean-Paul Scipio. And Bond had been warned. A second confrontation with the gangster would be his last. His hand edged round behind his back, reaching for the Beretta. He had to take them out before they called for back-up. There were three machine guns pointing at him. The odds were hopelessly against him. But if he dived to the ground and took out the two men on the right, leaving the man with the radio until last …
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