James Bond Anthology (78 page)

M. gave one of the rare smiles that lit up his face with quick brightness and warmth. Bond smiled back. They understood the things that had to be left unsaid.

Bond knew it was time to go. He got up. ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad about the girl.’

‘All right then,’ said M. on a note of dismissal. ‘Well, that’s the lot. See you in a month. Oh and by the way,’ he added casually. ‘Call in at your office. You’ll find something there from me. Little memento.’

James Bond went down in the lift and limped along the familiar corridor to his office. When he walked through the inner door he found his secretary arranging some papers on the next desk to his.

‘008 coming back?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she smiled happily. ‘He’s being flown out tonight.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ll have company,’ said Bond. ‘I’m going off again.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She looked quickly at his face and then away. ‘You look as if you needed a bit of a rest.’

‘I’m going to get one,’ said Bond. ‘A month’s exile.’ He thought of Gala. ‘It’s going to be pure holiday. Anything for me?’

‘Your new car’s downstairs. I’ve inspected it. The man said you’d ordered it on trial this morning. It looks lovely. Oh, and there’s a parcel from M.’s office. Shall I unpack it?’

‘Yes, do,’ said Bond.

He sat down at his desk and looked at his watch. Five o’clock. He was feeling tired. He knew he was going to feel tired for several days. He always got these reactions at the end of an ugly assignment, the aftermath of days of taut nerves, tension, fear.

His secretary came back into the room with two heavy-looking cardboard boxes. She put them on his desk and he opened the top one. When he saw the grease-paper he knew what to expect.

There was a card in the box. He took it out and read it. In M.’s green ink it said: ‘You may be needing these.’ There was no signature.

Bond unwrapped the grease-paper and cradled the shining new Beretta in his hand. A memento. No. A reminder. He shrugged his shoulders and slipped the gun under his coat into the empty holster. He got clumsily to his feet.

‘There’ll be a long-barrel Colt in the other box,’ he said to his secretary. ‘Keep it until I get back. Then I’ll take it down to the range and fire it in.’

He walked to the door. ‘So long, Lil,’ he said, ‘regards to 008 and tell him to be careful of you. I’ll be in France. Station F will have the address. But only in an emergency.’

She smiled at him. ‘How much of an emergency?’ she asked.

Bond gave a short laugh. ‘Any invitation to a quiet game of bridge,’ he said.

He limped out and shut the door behind him.

The 1953 Mark VI had an open touring body. It was battleship grey like the old 4½ litre that had gone to its grave in a Maidstone garage, and the dark blue leather upholstery gave a luxurious hiss as he climbed awkwardly in beside the test driver.

Half an hour later the driver helped him out at the corner of Birdcage Walk and Queen Anne’s Gate. ‘We could get more speed out of her if you want it, sir,’ he said. ‘If we could have her back for a fortnight we could tune her to do well over the hundred.’

‘Later,’ said Bond. ‘She’s sold. On one condition. That you get her over to the ferry terminal at Calais by tomorrow evening.’

The test driver grinned. ‘Roger,’ he said. ‘I’ll take her over myself. See you on the pier, sir.’

‘Fine,’ said Bond. ‘Go easy on A20. The Dover road’s a dangerous place these days.’

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said the driver, thinking that this man must be a bit of a cissy for all that he seemed to know plenty about motor-cars. ‘Piece of cake.’

‘Not every day,’ said Bond with a smile. ‘See you at Calais.’

Without waiting for a reply, he limped off with his stick through the dusty bars of evening sunlight that filtered down through the trees in the park.

Bond sat down on one of the seats opposite the island in the lake and took out his cigarette-case and lit a cigarette. He looked at his watch. Five minutes to six. He reminded himself that she was the sort of girl who would be punctual. He had reserved the corner table for dinner. And then? But first there would be the long luxurious planning. What would she like? Where would she like to go? Where had she ever been? Germany, of course. France? Miss out Paris. They could do that on their way back. Get as far as they could the first night, away from the Pas de Calais. There was that farmhouse with the wonderful food between Montreuil and Etaples. Then the fast sweep down to the Loire. The little places near the river for a few days. Not the chateau towns. Places like Beaugency, for instance. Then slowly south, always keeping to the western roads, avoiding the five-star life. Slowly exploring. Bond pulled himself up. Exploring what? Each other? Was he getting serious about this girl?

‘James.’

It was a clear, high, rather nervous voice. Not the voice he had expected.

He looked up. She was standing a few feet away from him. He noticed that she was wearing a black beret at a rakish angle and that she looked exciting and mysterious like someone you see driving by abroad, alone in an open car, someone unattainable and more desirable than anyone you have ever known. Someone who is on her way to make love to somebody else. Someone who is not for you.

He got up and they took each other’s hands.

It was she who released herself. She didn’t sit down.

‘I wish you were going to be there tomorrow, James.’ Her eyes were soft as she looked at him. Soft, but, he thought, somehow evasive.

He smiled. ‘Tomorrow morning or tomorrow night?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she laughed, blushing. ‘I meant at the Palace.’

‘What are you going to do afterwards?’ asked Bond.

She looked at him carefully. What did the look remind him of? The Morphy look? The look he had given Drax on that last hand at Blades? No. Not quite. There was something else there. Tenderness? Regret?

She looked over his shoulder.

Bond turned round. A hundred yards away there was the tall figure of a young man with fair hair trimmed short. His back was towards them and he was idling along, killing time.

Bond turned back and Gala’s eyes met his squarely.

‘I’m going to marry that man,’ she said quietly. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’ And then, as if no other explanation was needed, ‘His name’s Detective-Inspector Vivian.’

‘Oh,’ said Bond. He smiled stiffly. ‘I see.’

There was a moment of silence during which their eyes slid away from each other.

And yet why should he have expected anything else? A kiss. The contact of two frightened bodies clinging together in the midst of danger. There had been nothing more. And there had been the engagement ring to tell him. Why had he automatically assumed that it had only been worn to keep Drax at bay? Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?

And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure – the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. An exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.

She was looking at him rather nervously, waiting to be relieved of the stranger who had tried to get his foot in the door of her heart.

Bond smiled warmly at her. ‘I’m jealous,’ he said. ‘I had other plans for you tomorrow night.’

She smiled back at him, grateful that the silence had been broken. ‘What were they?’ she asked.

‘I was going to take you off to a farmhouse in France,’ he said. ‘And after a wonderful dinner I was going to see if it’s true what they say about the scream of a rose.’

She laughed. ‘I’m sorry I can’t oblige. But there are plenty of others waiting to be picked.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Bond. ‘Well, goodbye, Gala.’ He held out his hand.

‘Goodbye, James.’

He touched her for the last time and then they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.

THE END

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

Book 4

1 | THE PIPELINE OPENS

With its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler’s arms the big
pandinus
scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole under the rock.

There was a small patch of hard flat earth outside the hole and the scorpion stood in the centre of this on the tips of its four pairs of legs, its nerves and muscles braced for a quick retreat and its senses questing for the minute vibrations which would decide its next move.

The moonlight, glittering down through the great thorn bush, threw sapphire highlights off the hard, black polish of the six-inch body and glinted palely on the moist white sting which protruded from the last segment of the tail, now curved over parallel with the scorpion’s flat back.

Slowly the sting slid home into its sheath and the nerves in the poison sac at its base relaxed. The scorpion had decided. Greed had won over fear.

Twelve inches away, at the bottom of a sharp slope of sand, the small beetle was concerned only with trudging on towards better pastures than he had found under the thorn bush, and the swift rush of the scorpion down the slope gave him no time to open his wings.

The beetle’s legs waved in protest as the sharp claw snapped round his body, and then the sting lanced into him from over the scorpion’s head and immediately he was dead.

After it had killed the beetle the scorpion stood motionless for nearly five minutes. During this time it identified the nature of its prey and again tested the ground and the air for hostile vibrations. Reassured, its fighting claw withdrew from the half-severed beetle and its two small feeding pincers reached out and into the beetle’s flesh. Then for an hour, and with extreme fastidiousness, the scorpion ate its victim.

The great thorn bush under which the scorpion killed the beetle was quite a landmark in the wide expanse of rolling veld some forty miles south of Kissidougou in the south-western corner of French Guinea. On all horizons there were hills and jungle, but here, over twenty square miles, there was flat rocky ground which was almost desert and amongst the tropical scrub only this one thorn bush, perhaps because there was water deep beneath its roots, had grown to the height of a house and could be picked out from many miles away.

The bush grew more or less at the junction of three African states. It was in French Guinea but only about ten miles north of the northernmost tip of Liberia and five miles east of the frontier of Sierra Leone. Across this frontier are the great diamond mines around Sefadu. These are the property of Sierra International, which is part of the powerful mining empire of Afric International, which in turn is a rich capital asset of the British Commonwealth.

An hour earlier in its hole among the roots of the great thorn bush the scorpion had been alerted by two sets of vibrations. First there had been the tiny scraping of the beetle’s movements, and these belonged to the vibrations which the scorpion immediately recognized and diagnosed. Then there had been a series of incomprehensible thuds round the bush followed by a final heavy quake which had caved in part of the scorpion’s hole. These were followed by a soft rhythmic trembling of the ground which was so regular that it soon became a background vibration of no urgency. After a pause the tiny scraping of the beetle had continued, and it was greed for the beetle that, after a day of sheltering from its deadliest enemy, the sun, finally got the upper hand against the scorpion’s memory of the other noises and impelled it out of its lair into the filtering moonlight.

And now, as it slowly sucked the morsels of beetle-flesh off its feeding pincers, the signal for the scorpion’s own death sounded from far away on the eastern horizon, audible to a human, but made up of vibrations which were far outside the range of the scorpion’s sensory system.

And, a few feet away, a heavy, blunt hand, with bitten finger nails, softly raised a jagged piece of rock.

There was no noise, but the scorpion felt a tiny movement in the air above it. At once its fighting claws were up and groping and its sting was erect in the rigid tail, its near-sighted eyes staring up for a sight of the enemy.

The heavy stone came down.

‘Black bastard.’

The man watched as the broken insect whipped in its death agony.

The man yawned. He got to his knees in the sandy depression against the trunk of the bush where he had been sitting for nearly two hours and, his arms bent protectingly over his head, scrambled out into the open.

The noise of the engine which the man had been waiting for, and which had signed the scorpion’s death warrant, was louder.

As the man stood and stared up the path of the moon, he could just see a clumsy black shape coming fast towards him out of the East and for a moment the moonlight glinted on whirling rotor blades.