Bond - 27 - Never send flowers (11 page)

Austin Reed's store occupies almost an entire block on the west side of Regent Street, a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus. As the cab pulled up, so Bond slipped the driver a five pound note and was on to the pavement almost before the vehicle had come to a stop. He had no intention of going into the store. Instead, he walked quickly towards what Londoners usually refer to as `The Dilly', and disappeared down the steps to the London Transport Underground system.

He took a train to South Kensington where he intended to change on to the Circle Line, to take a train back to Sloane Square which would bring him within walking distance of his flat in the pleasant Regency house which stands on a quiet tree-lined street off the King's Road.

As he negotiated the pedestrian tunnels at South Kensington he realized that the young man he had seen in Baker Street was not only still with him but he had also manoeuvred himself into a position some twenty feet in front of him, anticipating Bond's destination. The young man was a professional and Bond knew where there is one experienced watcher then two or three others are usually near at hand.

The adrenalin began to pump, and his nerve ends tingled. The very fact of being followed created a tension of its own, and he felt his muscles involuntarily tighten. He had no idea where this team came from. For all he knew, they could be part of some foreign service, or more likely, he considered-part of the famed Watcher Service of MIS.

The platform was crowded even though the usual rush hour would not get under way for another hour or so. The man in jeans and black shirt lounged against the slick, tiled wall, near a poster proclaiming `Cats.

Now and For Ever.

Bond placed himself directly in front of the watcher, giving the young man a good view of his back, waiting for the next train to rumble from the tunnel. It pulled up with a hiss of automatic doors opening, and there was a surge forward as people tried to board the carriages while others eased their way out.

He stayed back, as if he had changed his mind about getting on the train. Then, he turned, took a pace forward and asked the young man if he had the time. The watcher lazily raised his left arm to look at his watch and Bond gave him a quick, hard jab to the chin with the heel of his right hand.

The watcher's head snapped back, his eyes taking on, a glazed look of surprise.

`There s a man in trouble here,' Bond shouted in the general direction of a uniformed official, before he lunged for the closing doors of the nearest carriage. As the train pulled out, he saw a small knot of people form around the crumpled watcher.

* * * The street off King's Road where Bond lived was a cul-de-sac, the preferred kind of location for anyone in his profession. `You either live out in the open, with a lot of flat ground between you and the rest of the world, or you choose a street with only one entrance or exit,' one of the instructors had told him years ago. `Preferably, a short street,' the old expert had added.

He knew all his neighbours, and their cars, by sight, and could spot a strange car or person in a second. Now, as he finally turned the corner and entered his street, Bond realized that, whoever they were, this surveillance team was serious. He saw not only a very strange vehicle a small closed van but also a uniformed road sweeper, with his high wheeled cart, who was making his rounds, working as Bond's old housekeeper would have said `as though dead lice were dropping off him'.

The road sweeper was a total stranger, and not the man Bond was used to seeing.

He showed no sign of having noticed anything out of the ordinary as he put his key in the latch and entered the house through the front door. A pile of mail lay on the mat.

His housekeeper, May, was up in Scotland with her nephew and his wife, so Bond had taken his usual extra precautions slivers of wood in the doorjamb, invisible thread across windows, just in case anyone had tried to bypass his sophisticated alarm system. Everything was in place, but that did not mean a thing. If he was truly the target of a tight surveillance operation, there could be a tap on his telephone without anyone gaining entrance to the house.

He dumped the mail on his sitting-room table, went to the ornate Empire desk and unlocked one of the larger drawers and removed what appeared to be a normal telephone. Unplugging his house phone from its modular jack, he replaced it with the equipment taken from the desk drawer. He did not trust pocket tap detectors, and certainly could not call in the delousing department from headquarters. The telephone now in use was a state-of-the-art piece of equipment, a very distant cousin of what used to be called the Neutralizer phone. With this instrument in place, even the best wire tap was defenceless. The micro circuits within the telephone automatically sent out signals which could not be captured on tape or headphones.

Instead, a would-be eavesdropper would be treated to a high-pitched signal known to cause severe deafness for a minimum of forty-eight hours one of the reasons the service instructions forbade the use of these devices on a permanent basis. The other consideration was cost, for each unit of the Electronic Countermeasures Telephone (ECMT) or `Squealerphone', as it was often called, ran to almost œ4,000.

Having dealt with communications, he took the briefcase into his small bedroom, felt along the gleaming white painted wainscot until he found a tiny knot of wood which he pulled back to reveal a large, secret fireproof steel safe. Quickly working the combination, he slid the briefcase inside then locked everything and slid the panel back into place.

Having dealt with the important matter, Bond now turned his attention to the day's mail: ironically enough there was a telephone bill, as well as a red electricity account, meaning that it was time to pay up or lose power, four pieces of junk mail, and a letter in a dark blue envelope, addressed correctly in a bold hand female, he thought which he did not recognize.

The envelope contained one sheet of notepaper, in the same shade of blue. The sheet contained neither address nor salutation. In the same, round, very feminine hand was a five-line message: `You should be warned that the Security Service has permanent, round-the-clock surveillance on you, it read. `We have met once, but I should not give you my name in writing. I shall take tea at Brown's Hotel each afternoon this week between four and six. Please throw the watchers and meet me. This is a matter of great urgency and importance, which concerns the late Laura March.

There was just enough in the short note to rouse his interest.

The trick would be throwing the surveillance team. In novels of espionage a hero might disguise himself suitably and hoodwink the Tharp-eyed team of watchers. He thought of Buchan s The Thirty-nine Steps, where Richard Hannay had left the police standing as he exited a building disguised as a milkman. It was almost five in the afternoon, Brown's Hotel lay a good twenty minutes away, by taxi, in Dover Street, close to Piccadilly and Bond Street. If he was going to slip the leash and make contact today, he would have to be very light on his feet.

At least he now knew who he was up against, and that was not the happiest of thoughts, for the Watcher Branch of the Security Service is one of the best-trained surveillance outfits in the world.

Softly he quoted Shakespeare to himself: "`Oh, for a muse of fire He stopped, wrinkling his brow, and then smiled to himself. That had done it, the Muse of Fire.

Smoke and mirrors, he thought, as he went rapidly into the kitchen.

May, his housekeeper, was old-fashioned and regarded any utensil made from plastic with the same disdain as a conscientious watchmaker might regard the electronic workings of digital timepieces. Instead of the ubiquitous plastic, foot-operated rubbish containers, she insisted on using an old and heavy Victorian all-metal rubbish bin. The plastic variety, she always claimed, were fire hazards and that was exactly what he needed now a safe, well-contained fire hazard.

On the previous Saturday, when he had been unexpectedly called into the office, Bond was left with little time to complete any of the household chores usually undertaken by the absent May, so the rubbish bin was still almost a quarter full. It contained damp paper towels, the somewhat pungent remains of the curry he had cooked for himself on the Friday night, together with coffee grounds, egg shells and some discarded toast from his breakfast on the Saturday morning. To this now unpleasant stew he added a pile of bundled-up paper towels, tamping them around the garbage and crumpling more which he threw on top of the moist mess until the bin was around three-quarters full.

Dragging the bin into the small lobby, he placed it in the open doorway between there and the sitting-room. Then he went quickly through to his bedroom.

When the old house had been renovated, a skilful architect had made certain that each of its three storeys was entirely self-contained. The only entrance to Bond's apartment was through the front door, and to all intents his rooms occupied the entire ground floor. In reality his apartment, like each of the flats above him, lost some eight feet along the right-hand gable end of the house, where a false wall had been put in to accommodate private entrances, each with its own self-contained flight of stairs, for the two higher apartments.

These alterations had in no way affected the original view from Bond's bedroom, where the gold Cole wallpaper contrasted elegantly with deep-red velvet curtains. The bedroom windows looked out on to a tiny garden, with a red brick wall surrounding the lawn and flowerbeds behind the house. The three sections of the wall formed simple divisions between the gardens of the houses on either side, and, at the end, the garden of the property at the rear. It was this far wall that interested him. The view from his windows included the back of the slightly larger Regency house which stood in another cul-de-sac running roughly parallel to the one in which Bond lived.

There was a drop of some eight feet from the bedroom windows, and the wall that separated the neighbouring garden was around twelve feet high, with no barbs, broken glass or other deterrents to a would-be climber. This house was owned by a merchant banker and his family who, to his certain knowledge, had left for their annual summer holiday in Cyprus on the previous Saturday. Bond liked to keep track of all his neighbours. It was something he did automatically when in London, and, over the years, his personal watch was one of second nature. He also knew that the house had a side entrance giving access from the garden along the gable end to a gravelled turning circle and the street.

He opened one of the long sash windows in the bedroom, then went back to the rubbish bin. Even a careftil team of watchers were unlikely to have any spare people loitering in the parallel street, anywhere near the merchant banker's home, and he considered that, should the ruse in mind work, he could get from his bedroom window, across the wall and out into the street through the garden door in a maximum of one and a half minutes. It would be a race, for the watchers would certainly react very quickly, but he considered the odds were just in his favour.

Squeezing past the rubbish bin, he opened a drawer in the ornate clothes stand, which stood against one wall of the entrance lobby, and took out a pair of black leather driving gloves. Thirty seconds later, Bond set light to the paper towels in the bin.

Initially, the metal container blazed alarmingly with flame. Then the fire tried to claw its way into the damp garbage, the flames died and dense white smoke began to billow from the container. Within thirty seconds the smoke began to fill the lobby, and Bond hesitated, wondering how much the smoke damage would cost him in refurbishing, then he stepped back heading for the kitchen to activate the alarm system which would shriek into action almost immediately because of the open window in his bedroom. A second before the bells went off, the smoke detectors triggered their separate shrill siren, and he made his way to the bedroom with ears humming from the din.

There would not be much time, for the watchers in the van, plus the phony road sweeper would almost certainly make for the front of the house, intent on breaking down the door. This would be flushing-out with a vengeance, for the team s instinctive reaction would be to assist in what should appear to be a true emergency, and to blazes with their cover. Once they broke down the door, the source of the predicament would be all too apparent, and by then Bond would have to be long gone.

He dropped from the window and hit the ground running, taking a flying leap at the brick wall, his gloved hand rocketing up as he reached the apogee of his jump, scrabbling to get a firm grip on the topmost bricks of the wall. His hands took hold, his body hitting the wall, chest first, knocking the wind out of him so that, for a second, he almost lost his grasp. Then, with one muscle-wrenching haul, he lifted himself over the wall and dropped into a carefully tended flowerbed on the far side.

Not looking back to see what damage he might have caused to the banker's hardy annuals, he plunged across the manicured lawn, running for the large wooden gate that would take him along the side of the house and into the street.

The gate was firmly bolted and locked, and he lost precious seconds in slipping the bolts and smashing the lock with three mighty kicks. Finally, some two minutes after dropping from the bedroom window, he emerged into the street, brushing himself off with one hand, and struggling to get control of his breathing.

In the distance he could hear the fire engines, and he thought he could detect the frantic shouts of the watchers. Smiling to himself, Bond reached the King's Road and hailed the first available taxi.