Solo (27 page)

Bond pulled off his tie and began to undo the buttons on his shirt.

Bond and Blessing made love, then ordered food and drink – two omelettes and fries and a bottle of champagne – and, after they’d eaten and drunk, they made love again. She was eager and insisting, giving him precise instructions, at one stage rolling him on to his back and sitting astride him, her hands pressing hard on his chest as she rocked to and fro. Bond did as he was told, revelling in her slim brown body, her lissom youthfulness.

Later, when they lay in each other’s arms, she told him that she’d been with no one else since that night they’d been captured by Kobus Breed.

‘I thought about you a lot,’ she said. ‘And when I saw you in the restaurant I felt my heart jump, you know . . .’ She laughed quietly. ‘My first reaction was pleasure – not alarm. What does that tell you?’

‘That you’ve still got a lot to learn,’ Bond said.

She punched him gently on his shoulder and kissed him.

‘So teach me,’ she said.

Bond slipped out of her room in the small hours, having been given all the details about the AfricaKIN flight and the house in Orange County. He had dressed and kissed her goodbye and gave her naked body a final caress as she lay sleepily on the bed amidst the rumpled sheets.

‘I suppose we’d better not meet again,’ Bond said. ‘Until this is all over.’

‘I know what,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask to be posted to London.’ She sat up and put her arms round his neck. ‘That would be fun, wouldn’t it, James? You and me in London. Where do you live?’

‘You know where I live.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Chelsea.’

‘You and me in Chelsea . . .’ She lay back on the pillows, touching herself. ‘Think about it, James . . .’

Bond was tempted to tear his clothes off and climb back in the bed.

‘There’s no harm in thinking,’ he said. He kissed her quickly on the lips and left before his resolve collapsed.

As he crossed from the annexe to the main block of the motel Bond paused, some sixth sense making him draw into the shadows of a doorway. He waited, looking about him. The parking lot was almost full, its corralled cars shining dewily in the glow of the arc lights, like some sort of sleeping mechanical herd in its vast paddock. Nobody moving, nobody to be seen. He waited a couple of minutes but there was nothing to worry him. He strode into the rear of the motel, with a wave to the night porter, and rode the elevator up to his room. He requested the motel operator to give him a wake-up call at 5 a.m., slept for a couple of hours then showered and shaved and, as dawn approached, he went down to the lobby and asked the sleepy doorman to hail him a taxi. Thirty minutes later he was breakfasting in the dining room of the Fairview.

After breakfast Bond took a taxi to the BOAC offices on Pennsylvania Avenue and confirmed his return flight to London for the evening of the following day. Now he was glad that he’d booked first class – he could rebook without any problem at the very last minute, and even not showing up was unlikely to be penalised as long as notice was given. He left the offices, hailed a cab and paid the driver $10 to take him round the corner and wait. From the shelter of a doorway he saw agent Massinette stroll into the BOAC offices, no doubt to confirm the flight that Bond was leaving on. The CIA would be reassured and Bond assumed that the surveillance of him would be less thorough. Wait and see. Massinette would acquire the necessary information with a flash of his badge and pass it on to Felix Leiter.

Bond climbed back into his taxi and asked to be returned to the Fairview. There was something about Massinette and his demeanour that troubled Bond – some shortfall in the routine CIA professionalism that Brig Leiter embodied. Bond hadn’t liked the sullen, aggressive way that Massinette had stared at him that first time they’d encountered each other. Brig Leiter had zeal, an ethic – that was obvious the minute you met him. Massinette was harder to gauge. Bond told himself to forget it. Maybe Massinette had personal troubles of his own that were souring his view of the world – even agents are human beings, after all.

When he arrived at the Fairview Bond went to the parking lot and sat in his Mustang for five minutes. As soon as he was confident no one was watching him he took a leisurely, roundabout route west to Seminole Field airport.

Seminole Field doubled as a commuting hub for small prop planes flying short journeys to Maryland, Virginia and Philadelphia and was also home to three Air National Guard squadrons of F-100 Super Sabres. Consequently the runway was long enough to service the largest transport planes and commercial jets. Bond parked his car and, taking his binoculars with him, joined the small crowd of plane-spotters on an elevated knoll outside the perimeter fence that gave a good view of the main runway, the apron and the small control tower and arrival and departure buildings. The Air National Guard hangars were on the far side of the airport. He checked his watch: according to Blessing the AfricaKIN flight was due in from Khartoum in an hour. Scanning the piste with his binoculars he could see that an area had been cordoned off with portable railings and there was a small row of bleachers to one side where a few journalists and photographers lounged, chatting and smoking.

After about thirty minutes a small motorcade of town cars arrived and assorted dignitaries emerged and were shown into the airport buildings. Bond spotted Colonel Denga and Blessing. There were men in suits and a few women in dresses and hats – AfricaKIN sponsors and officials from the Department of the Interior, Bond supposed. The welcome committee had arrived but clearly Gabriel Adeka wasn’t attending. Then three ambulances with ‘AfricaKIN’ logos drove on to the apron and parked in a row, waiting for the plane.

On time, a Boeing 707 swooped into the airport and touched down, causing a murmur of excitement among the plane-spotters. As it taxied in Bond saw that the words ‘Transglobal Charter’ were written on the side but there, stencilled on the nose, was the now-familiar AfricaKIN logo. The plane came to a halt, the dignitaries applauded and stairs were taken to the main doors. Gurneys were rolled in readiness from the ambulances and paramedics stood by.

Then the doors opened and the children appeared. First, those who could walk, some with their heads and limbs bandaged, some with little arm-crutches, then some very young and frail ones carried by male nurses, and finally those who were laid on the gurneys for the photo opportunity.

Bond focused his binoculars as the dignitaries briefly flanked the children and the flashbulbs popped. Denga was standing at one end of the group – immaculate in a beige seersucker suit – with a junior senator; an undersecretary of state at the other with Blessing. Hands were shaken, a short speech was made and there was a polite spatter of applause. Bond noticed that all the children who could walk were in a kind of uniform: peaked baseball caps, pale blue boiler suits and neat little rucksacks on their backs, all displaying the AfricaKIN Inc. logo. Charitable work and decent altruism marching hand in hand with very effective PR, Bond thought.

Within minutes the children were installed in the ambulances, which wheeled away to a gate in the perimeter fence, lights flashing. Bond loped to his car and drove round to the side entrance, where he was in time to see the last in the small convoy of ambulances turning on to the highway heading west into Orange County. Two police outriders led the way. Bond slowed, allowing some cars to overtake him – it was going to be an easy follow.

After twenty minutes the ambulances turned off the highway and the road and the countryside around it became noticeably more rural. They were barely an hour out of DC, Bond calculated, but already it felt very remote. They passed fewer and fewer houses. There were meadows with horses grazing, dense copses of wood – elm, walnut, ash – and a pleasing, gentle undulation to the landscape – valleys and streams, groups of small grassy hills. It was the country – but very civilised.

Eventually, after passing through a small village called Jackson Point, the ambulances swept through a gate between twin lodges that marked the driveway to Rowanoak Hall, the new headquarters of AfricaKIN Inc – a far cry from a grubby shop in Bayswater, Bond thought. Here in Rowanoak Hall, Blessing had told him, the children were fed, medicated, assessed and then despatched to the various hospitals in DC and surrounding areas that would best treat the children’s wounds, diseases or other ailments. Orphaned children, malnourished, suffering children, children wounded by landmines or ethnic violence, removed from harm’s way and brought to safety and succour in the United States of America, no expense spared. African kin indeed, Bond considered: nothing appeared better or more slickly organised or more sanctioned by authority. But what was really going on?

He drove slowly along the country lane that followed the ten-foot-high brick walls of the Rowanoak estate. The house was set in a thickly wooded park, carefully planted in the last century with red mulberry, spruce, cottonwood and hickory trees. There was no extra wiring or alarms fitted to the wall that Bond could see. He pulled into a muddy parking space and shinned up a yellow beech tree that would allow him a better view of the house itself.

Bond focused his binoculars and saw a large and rather ugly red-brick nineteenth-century house constructed in somewhat over-the-top Gothic-revival style. There were battlements, towers, buttresses and clustered crockets, pinnacles and finials and gingerbread trim wherever possible. On the wide gravelled sweep of the driveway in front of the carriage porch of the house the three ambulances were parked and, as Bond watched, they were joined by others sent by the affiliated AfricaKIN hospitals. An hour later, they were all gone, the children despatched. Bond wondered how many other staff remained in the house. From time to time burly men in black windcheaters with walkie-talkies wandered around the lawns and disappeared again. They seemed to be the only evidence of extra security. Bond supposed that they had to be discreet – AfricaKIN was a charity, after all. Was Gabriel Adeka inside? he wondered. And Kobus Breed? He imagined Breed would stay close to Adeka. As far as he could tell neither Blessing nor Denga had accompanied the convoy of ambulances.

Bond climbed stiffly down from his vantage point. Evening was coming on and the sky was darkening as he drove round to the main entrance and found a leafy lane where he could park out of sight but with a view of the gates themselves. As the working day ended, he watched as a small procession of private cars came down the drive from the house, some containing uniformed nurses. There was a man living in one of the lodges who emerged to open the gates and close them, chatting amiably to some of the staff as they departed.

When no more cars appeared Bond assumed that Rowanoak Hall was now empty, down to its core staff – just Adeka, perhaps, and Breed and their aides and bodyguards. He couldn’t know for sure without climbing in and doing a headcount himself. But not tonight, he thought. Once he entered those walled acres he had to be prepared for anything and anyone. Perhaps Blessing could tell him more about the personnel left behind once the gates closed for the night. He started his car and headed back to DC. He was hungry – he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

Bond asked at the Fairview’s reception where the best steak restaurant in Washington was to be found and was told that the Grill on H Street was the place to go. So Bond took a taxi there and asked for a table for one. He knew exactly what he wanted and, while his vodka martini was being mixed at the bar, he consulted the maître d’ – slipping him the obligatory $20 – telling him the white lie that it was his birthday, and that he was a fussy eater – all to make sure things were arranged precisely as he desired them.

Ten minutes later Bond was led into the dining room to his corner table. The napery was thick white linen, the silverware heavy and traditional and the glasses gleamed, speck-free. The Grill on H Street replicated the clubby values of a Victorian steakhouse reimagined for America, a hundred years on: dark panelled walls, low-wattage sconces, gilt-framed oil paintings of sporting scenes and frontier battles, the odd stuffed animal trophy on the wall, a chequerboard marble floor and venerable, grey-haired men in long white aprons serving at table.

Bond’s preordered bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages 1953 had already been decanted and, as he sat down, a small lacquered tray was brought to his table that contained all the ingredients necessary to make a vinaigrette to his own secret formula: a little carafe of olive oil and one of red-wine vinegar, a jar of Dijon mustard, a halved clove of garlic, a black-pepper grinder, a ramekin of granulated sugar, a bowl, a teaspoon and a small balloon whisk to mix the ingredients together.
¹

Bond swiftly made his dressing then his filet mignon –
à point
– arrived with a bowl of salad. He had ordered filet mignon because he didn’t want a steak that overlapped his plate. It was nicely chargrilled on the outside, pink but not blue on the inside. Bond dressed the salad, seasoned his steak and took his first mouthful of claret. As he ate and drank he allowed himself to enjoy the fantasy that life was good and the world was on its proper course – this being the purpose of eating and drinking well, surely? He ended his meal with half of an avocado into which he poured what remained of his dressing. He drank a calvados, smoked a cigarette and called for the check. His culinary hunger assuaged, a new one replaced it. He was hungry for Blessing, for her slim active body. Hungry for her to give him more precise instructions about what she wanted him to do to her.

Bond sauntered into the lobby of the Blackstone Park, said hello to Delmont, who was working that night, and went up to his room. He waited until ten o’clock and strolled back down to the lobby, exiting through the rear doors into the parking lot. The lights in Blessing’s suite were on. He felt a hot pulse of anticipation at seeing her.