Elektra walked to him and pushed his gun away from him with her toe.
Seconds away from death, Zukovsky dredged up every last ounce of energy to raise his cane a millimetre off the ground. He rested the handle against his chest and pointed the tip directly at Bond. Elektra watched curiously as Zukovsky grasped the centre of the stick and stared at the man in the torture chair.
Bond gazed back. Zukovsky’s eye narrowed, then he pulled back on the stick as if it were a pump action shotgun. A single shot splintered the wood on the back of Bond’s chair. What Elektra didn’t notice was that the bullet had cleanly cut through the clasp on Bond’s binding. A brilliant shot!
A silent acknowledgement passed between the two men. Comrades in arms. The merest of smiles. Then the light faded from Zukovsky’s eyes and his head rolled forward.
Elektra stared at the Russian with confusion. She didn’t see where the bullet had gone, only that it had missed Bond.
She sighed, turned back to Bond and said, ‘Excuse me a moment.’ She picked up a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. ‘Everything’s under control up here. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ came Renard’s voice. ‘I was afraid that you -’‘I'm all right. You had better get on with it.’
‘Very well. Au revoir . . .’
‘Goodbye,’ she said Lost for a moment, she breathed heavily. She dropped the walkie-talkie, glanced at Zukovsky’s corpse, then back at Bond.
‘Zukovsky really hated you, didn’t he?’ she said, slightly puzzled. She then moved back to the chair and straddled his lap again. ‘Time to say your prayers.’
She kissed him, long and hard, then reached behind to deliver the killing twist . . .
In a lightning-fast move, Bond’s hand broke free and grabbed her throat tightly. He held her, their faces close together, disdain in his eyes. He then hurled her backwards, her nails scratching his face as she went.
She was momentarily stunned. Bond quickly reached over and freed his other hand, then tugged at the garrotte, loosening it until he was able to slip it off. He got to his feet, but by then Elektra had recovered, run out of the room and up the stairs. He went to Zukovsky, felt his pulse, then picked up the bloody gun.
He took the walkie-talkie and had a moment’s hesitation — should he race below to the submarine, or follow Elektra?
He decided to go after the girl. The bitch had gone too far . . .
Outside, at the quay, the submarine’s engines roared into life.
15 - Unholy Alliance
As he felt the powerful engines rumble throughout the submarine, Victor Zokas, aka Renard the Fox, felt the bullet in his skull vibrate. Of course, he knew it was not really an actual ‘feeling’, for his nerves were completely dead there. It was what that Syrian doctor had warned him about — the kind of sensation one felt at a dentist’s surgery after being given novocaine. The dentist would always say, ‘What you’ll feel is a bit of pressure . . ’ That was precisely what Renard felt. Pressure.
He had noticed some physical changes over the last twenty- four hours that he hadn’t mentioned to Elektra. While his strength and tolerance to pain were increasing by the minute, his capacity to smell, taste and touch was diminishing rapidly. The foolish doctor had told him that his sensory abilities would almost certainly degenerate rapidly just before ‘the end’. Renard hadn’t liked what he’d been told by the idiotic doctor who couldn’t remove the bullet, so he had strangled him.
Renard looked around the sub’s control room and noted that his skeleton crew were at their positions. Two men here. One in the tank room. A man in the torpedo room. They believed they were going to get rich and return home. Little did they know that they were on a collision course with destiny. The sub was moving and there was no stopping it. All was going according to plan. Everything was fine.
So why did he feel so lousy? Was that what was happening to him? Was he dying? Had the end come already?
He tested his reflexes by performing some simple exercises with his fingers and hands. They seemed to be working fine. He could see perfectly well. His hearing had not been affected. He just felt . . . out of body, somehow. It was as if he had separated from his physical self and was looking down upon the world. Nothing seemed real.
Well, he thought, if this was the end, then he was going to see the mission completed before it happened. If that meant speeding up the schedule, so be it.
What was going on in the tower? Elektra had sounded breathless on the radio, even though she said everything was under control. Had Bond escaped? Surely not. Elektra had been looking forward to making the MI6 agent die slowly and painfully. Perhaps she was simply feeling the excitement of nearing her goal.
Renard thought back over the past year and how he had changed as a human being. Before meeting Elektra King, he had been a bitter, loveless man who had cared about nothing but anarchy. He had never been successful with women. A prison psychiatrist once told him that his penchant for evil was due to some sort of lack of affection when he was a child.
Renard thought about his mother, a bar tart in Moscow. She had never been at home to look after him and his three older sisters. Each of the siblings could have claimed a different father. Renard never knew his own.
His mother often came home late at night, drunk and irritable. He could vividly recall the smell of alcohol and smoke that wafted into the small, dank flat where they all lived. There was always something that she found to shout about: one of his sisters had forgotten to do the laundry, another sister hadn’t cleaned the toilet, he hadn’t scrubbed the floors.
Sometimes his sisters would blame him for the minor transgressions. His mother would beat him, and his siblings would watch and laugh. God, how he hated them all.
He was no psychiatrist, but even Renard could understand why he might have a problem with women.
Another memory suddenly flooded into his brain. He was fourteen, and he had decided to leave his family and fend for himself on the streets. He had crept into his mother's bedroom, thinking she was asleep in a drunken stupor. She awoke and caught him stealing money from her handbag. She chased after him, but he ran outside, without a coat or any belongings, and never went back. It was the last time he had seen his mother.
He saw his eldest sister once, two years later. She had been looking for him all over Moscow. It was pure chance that they ran into each other at a shelter that was handing out food for the needy. She told him that a drunken sailor in a tavern had murdered their mother. The three girls had split up and each was on her own. Two of them were working as prostitutes. She had managed to get a job as a seamstress. They were penniless. His sister begged him to come to their aid.
Renard, who hadn’t forgotten the cruelty his sisters had shown him when he was growing up, refused to help. He walked away from his family and never looked back.
When he was eighteen the Soviet Army caught up with him. Surprisingly, he took to the vigorous routine and applied himself in all aspects of military life. He became adept with firearms, learned how to make explosives and mastered hand- to-hand combat. He enjoyed training exercises and was reprimanded twice for taking ‘simulations’ dangerously close to reality. One time he killed two fellow recruits and made it look like an accident. It had been a pleasurable experience knowing that he could control life and death in that way. In many ways, he was a problem for the Soviet Army. He had aggressive tendencies that were often disturbing and disruptive. He was mean-spirited and made no friends. But once the officials realised that they had a cold-blooded killer on their hands, they moved Renard from the regular army and into a special branch of Army Intelligence.
The position was much more to Renard’s liking and temperament. He worked as an assassin and explosives expert until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among his many accomplishments was the murder of at least three MI6 agents, four CIA men, and seven from the Mossad. He had kept a chart on the wall of his room in the barracks in Moscow, marking off kills as he made them.
After the
USSR broke up, he went AWOL, left Russia, and found that his reputation had preceded him nearly everywhere he went. Obtaining freelance mercenary jobs was incredibly easy. He especially enjoyed working for anti-Capitalist groups who wanted to see the return of Communism. At least it was something to believe in. He became more publicly outspoken, issuing grand statements and warnings when he committed an atrocity.
Renard had gained the unwanted nickname ‘the Fox’ after a particularly successful espionage operation that he had carried out in Iran. He was recognised as having a knack for stealth and secrecy. He had the ability to infiltrate the most impenetrable places, perform all manner of covert activities or violence and leave without a trace. It wasn’t long before he was on the American FBI’s most wanted list of worldwide terrorists and anarchists. He was arrested only once, in Korea, and was extradited to Russia. That was where he had met the psychiatrist who had told him he had a problem with women.
Renard’s first sexual experience didn’t occur until he was eighteen years old, which was late by most standards. It was not a pleasant experience. The prostitute taunted him, made fun of his thinning hair, and enjoyed humiliating him when he was unable to perform.
The second experience was a rape. It was a crime that, fortunately for him, went unsolved. It was in Warsaw, and Renard had followed a young girl home from a bakery, forced her into an alley, and viciously had his way with her.
It had left him completely unsatisfied.
The third experience convinced him that he just couldn’t hit it off with women, and he had to accept it. She was a fellow mercenary, ten years older than he was, a tough, idealistic Communist who had an ugly, shrapnel scar across her face. Otherwise not unattractive, the woman seemed to take a shine to him. She managed to seduce him, but the lovemaking was awkward and self-conscious. It ended with a quarrel and he killed her.
From then on, Renard tried to ignore women as sexual beings, but he found that he desired them more than ever. He would stare at photos of supermodels and become attached to glamorous movie stars. He fantasised about some day having a beautiful woman in his control.
When he discovered that Sir Robert King, the wealthy oil tycoon, had a daughter ... he knew he could fulfill that fantasy.
He first saw her in a British financial magazine. It was an article about King Industries and how Elektra was following in her father’s footsteps. In the photo, she was wearing a business suit, but with a short skirt, and was standing in the middle of a group of workmen. Her confidence and authority was easily perceptible. He fell in love with her at first sight.
Further investigation into Sir Robert King revealed that he might be a worthwhile target for ransom. Renard hired four stooges to help him, and they moved into an abandoned cottage in Dorset to carry out their plan to extort five million dollars from the tycoon.
But Renard had an ulterior motive. He wanted to meet Elektra King and see her in the flesh, so to speak. He wanted to touch her skin, smell her hair . . . taste her mouth.
He watched her as she came and went from the King
Industries office in London. She was then living in a small flat in the Mayfair area and it didn’t take long to memorise her daily routine, which rarely changed. Renard and his men abducted her in broad daylight one morning as she left her flat.
They drove to Dorset with her kicking and struggling in the back of a van. He had to hit her a few times, but she finally settled down. By the time they had locked her in the cold, damp room in the cottage, she was frightened and vulnerable. And oh, so beautiful . . .
He attempted to talk to her during the first couple of days. She refused to speak. Once she spat at him. He slapped her and left the room
The first ransom demand went out on the second day of her captivity. Sir Robert’s response was that he needed more time. When Elektra heard that, she was shocked
‘More time?’ she asked. 'For what? He has the money!’ From then on, her attitude had changed. When food was brought to her, she would request that Renard himself bring it. Sometimes she asked that he sit and talk with her while she ate. She no longer seemed afraid of him.
Renard enjoyed watching her and listening to her, so he didn’t mind. He knew that he was failing for his captive, but he was careful not to let it show. He now understood that Elektra could see right through him and knew which buttons to push.
She was the most intelligent woman he had ever met. After seven days of captivity, word was received that Sir Robert ‘still needed more time’ to pay the ransom. It was obvious that he was stalling. A source on the street had told Renard that Sir Robert had contacted MI6 for help in the matter. When Elektra heard this, she became furious.
‘Am I not worth a measly five million dollars? That amount of money is nothing to him!’
That night, something extraordinary happened, and he would never forget it as long as he lived.
Elektra asked for him and specifically requested that he bring a bucket of ice and a bottle of champagne. When he entered her room, she was beneath the sheets of the bed and was wearing absolutely nothing.
Slowly and sensuously, Elektra King seduced Renard. At first he was apprehensive and nervous, terribly afraid that he would have yet another bad experience. Elektra alleviated his fears. She was no innocent. She was extremely skilled in the pleasures of the flesh.
The one thing she did that got him to relax was using the ice. She had made him watch her as she took a frozen sliver and rubbed it all over her body, letting the water dribble over her smooth, soft skin. She used it to arouse herself, make her nipples hard, and stimulate her senses. Renard was hypnotised by her act, and he found himself so tantalised that for the first time in his life he was able to have normal sexual relations with a woman.
From then on, he was the slave and she was the master. He made no bones about it. He pledged his devotion and servitude to her, and promised to do anything her heart desired.
That was when she made him a business proposition.
‘How would you like to kill my father?’ she had asked.
She explained that she wanted King Industries for herself so that she could reclaim her mother’s oil. She had grand ideas to create a worldwide oil monopoly.
Renard had thought about it for a couple of days. In the interim, Elektra would skillfully outline her plans for him, how he would fit in to her life, and how they would be lovers.
She discussed with him the possibility of a ‘new world order’ in which they were the masters. To accomplish that. Istanbul and the Bosphorus would have to be destroyed. This would close off the existing oil pipelines to the West, leaving the King Industries source as the only one. She would be the most powerful woman on earth.
Elektra offered Renard the chance to be her right-hand man if he helped her devise a way to do it.
The first step was to stage her escape. After three weeks of captivity, Elektra thought the most believable scenario would be that she had got lucky and overcome the guards. She was not afraid to say that she used her body to seduce a guard, kick him in the groin, and then take his gun. Renard would conveniently be away at the time, thereby allowing him to live to see another day. In fact, it was Renard who killed his own men - he was that much under her spell. He would have done anything she asked.
They had been fairly useless henchmen anyway.
Elektra had shown great courage when it came time to make it look as if she had been beaten. She forced him to hit her three times in the face, bloodying her nose and giving her a black eye.
‘There have to be signs of torture, Renard,’ she had told him. ‘Otherwise no one will believe me. It would have been too easy.'
She held out a pair of wire cutters and ordered him to cut her ear. Renard refused to hurt her again.
‘Come on, you do this kind of thing to other people all the time,' she taunted, but still he shunned the notion.
‘I cannot harm one hair on your head,’ he told her. The woman enraptured him, and he didn’t mind admittin
g it. There were times when he wanted to run in the streets of London and shout out that he was in love. He wanted to show his old schoolmates that he, too, could have a lover. If only his stupid mother and sisters could see him now . . .
‘If you won’t do it, then I’ll have to,’ she said.
‘It will hurt you,’ he said.
‘There’s no point in living if you can’t feel alive,’ she replied.
Without so much as a flinch, Elektra stood in front of a mirror, held the cutters to her ear lobe, then snapped once. The blood spurted everywhere. She didn’t cry out in pain. Renard couldn’t remember for certain, but she may have even laughed when she saw all the blood.
They bandaged her up, made certain that she looked the part and said goodbye. He left for Russia — she walked out of the cottage, leaving three dead bodies, and flagged down a lorry on the main road nearby.
The next step was to get rid of her father. Renard, with his connections in Russia, was able to set up the phony sale of the Russian Atomic Energy report to Sir Robert and arrange for a ‘refund’. He had rigged the money with explosives. They had agreed to wait a year before committing the crime. It was safer that way. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the M.I6 agent in Syria had wounded Renard in the head. Nevertheless, the murder of Sir Robert went off without a hitch.
The second step was to obtain a weapon so that they could steal some plutonium. He was able to hijack a Russian Army transport plane and steal an atomic bomb from under the noses of the military and the IDA. His reputation as ‘the Fox’ had come in handy in that regard. Elektra used her own influence to get hold of a Russian submarine. Everything had worked beautifully.
If only the damned MI6 agent hadn’t shot him in the head. If only he was still able to feel. If only he wasn’t on a one-way road to hell. Otherwise, he might be able to sit with Elektra on her throne of power once all of this was over. He might have been able to keep her love. He wouldn’t have had to let the bastard Bond have his way with her. Nevertheless, Renard looked at that episode as a token of his compassion for her. An offering. Since he was unable to give Elektra pleasure any more, why should he deny her needs? She was a very physical person. He knew that she was attracted to the British agent. That night after the casino ... he could have killed Bond then and there. But his love for Elektra prevented him from doing it. He wanted to give her a night of pleasure, even if it was with the enemy.
Bond Movies 06 - The World Is Not Enough Page 16
