Текст книги "The James Bond Anthology"

Автор книги: Ian Fleming

Bond shot a quick glance towards the bank of cameramen. Yes, the M.I.5 photographer was on his toes. He had also seen the movement. He lifted his camera deliberately and there was the quick glare of a flash. Bond got back to his seat and whispered to Snowman, ‘Got him. Be in touch with you tomorrow. Thanks a lot.’ Mr Snowman only nodded. His eyes remained glued on the auctioneer.

Bond slipped out of his place and walked swiftly down the aisle as the auctioneer said for the third time, ‘One hundred and fifty-five thousand pounds I am bid,’ and then softly brought down his hammer. ‘Yours, sir.’

Bond got to the back of the room before the audience had risen, applauding, to its feet. His quarry was hemmed in amongst the gilt chairs. He had now put on his dark glasses again and Bond put on a pair of his own. He contrived to slip into the crowd and get behind the man as the chattering crowd streamed down the stairs. The hair grew low down on the back of the man’s rather squat neck and the lobes of his ears were pinched in close to his head. He had a slight hump, perhaps only a bone deformation, high up on his back. Bond suddenly remembered. This was Piotr Malinowski, with the official title on the Embassy staff of ‘Agricultural Attaché’. So!

Outside, the man began walking swiftly towards Conduit Street. James Bond got unhurriedly into a taxi with its engine running and its flag down. He said to the driver, ‘That’s him. Take it easy.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the M.I.5 driver, pulling away from the kerb.

The man picked up a taxi in Bond Street. The tail in the mixed evening traffic was easy. Bond’s satisfaction mounted as the Russian’s taxi turned up north of the Park and along Bayswater. It was just a question whether he would turn down the private entrance into Kensington Palace Gardens, where the first mansion on the left is the massive building of the Soviet Embassy. If he did, that would clinch matters. The two patrolling policemen, the usual Embassy guards, had been specially picked that night. It was their job just to confirm that the occupant of the leading taxi actually entered the Soviet Embassy.

Then, with the Secret Service evidence and the evidence of Bond and of the M.I.5 cameraman, there would be enough for the Foreign Office to declare Comrade Piotr Malinowski persona non grata on the grounds of espionage activity and send him packing. In the grim chess game that is Secret Service work, the Russians would have lost a queen. It would have been a very satisfactory visit to the auction rooms.

The leading taxi did turn in through the big iron gates.

Bond smiled with grim satisfaction. He leant forward.

‘Thanks, driver. Headquarters please.’

3 | THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

James Bond lay at the five-hundred-yard firing point of the famous Century Range at Bisley. The white peg in the grass beside him said 44 and the same number was repeated high up on the distant butt above the single six-foot-square target that, to the human eye and in the late summer dusk, looked no larger than a postage stamp. But Bond’s lens, an infra-red Sniperscope fixed above his rifle, covered the whole canvas. He could even clearly distinguish the pale-blue and beige colours into which the target was divided, and the six-inch semi-circular bull looked as big as the half moon that was already beginning to show low down in the darkening sky above the distant crest of Chobham Ridges.

James Bond’s last shot had been an inner left – not good enough. He took another glance at the yellow-and-blue wind flags. They were streaming across range from the east rather more stiffly than when he had begun his shoot half an hour before, and he set two clicks more to the right on the wind gauge and traversed the cross-wires on the Sniperscope back to the point of aim. Then he settled himself, put his trigger finger gently inside the guard and on to the curve of the trigger, shallowed his breathing and very, very softly squeezed.

The vicious crack of the shot boomed across the empty range. The target disappeared below ground and at once the ‘dummy’ came up in its place. Yes, the black panel was in the bottom right-hand corner this time, not in the bottom left: a bull.

‘Good,’ said the voice of the Chief Range Officer from behind and above him. ‘Stay with it.’

The target was already up again and Bond put his cheek back to its warm patch on the chunky wooden stock and his eye to the rubber eyepiece of the ’scope. He wiped his gun hand down the side of his trousers and took the pistol grip that jutted sharply down below the trigger guard. He splayed his legs an inch more. Now there were to be five rounds rapid. It would be interesting to see if that would produce ‘fade’. He guessed not. This extraordinary weapon the Armourer had somehow got his hands on gave one the feeling that a standing man at a mile would be easy meat. It was mostly a .308 calibre International Experimental Target rifle built by Winchester to help American marksmen at World Championships, and it had the usual gadgets of super-accurate target weapons – a curled aluminium ‘hand’ at the back of the butt that extended under the armpit and held the stock firmly into the shoulder, and an adjustable pinion below the rifle’s centre of gravity to allow the stock to be ‘nailed’ into its grooved wooden rest. The Armourer had had the usual single-shot bolt action replaced by a five-shot magazine, and he had assured Bond that if he would allow only two seconds between shots to steady the weapon there would be no fade even at five hundred yards. For the job that Bond had to do, he guessed that two seconds might be a dangerous loss of time if he missed with his first shot. Anyway, M. had said that the range would be not more than three hundred yards. Bond would cut it down to one second – almost continuous fire.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll give you a count-down from five. Now! Five, four, three, two, one. Fire!’

The ground shuddered slightly and the air sang as the five whirling scraps of cupro-nickel spat off into the dusk. The target went down and quickly rose again decorated with four small white discs closely grouped on the bull. There was no fifth disc – not even a black one to show an inner or an outer.

‘The last round was low,’ said the Range Officer lowering his night-glasses. ‘Thanks for the contribution. We sift the sand on those butts at the end of every year. Never get less than fifteen tons of good lead and copper scrap out of them. Good money.’

Bond had got to his feet. Corporal Menzies from the Armourers’ section appeared from the pavilion of the Gun Club and knelt down to dismantle the Winchester and its rest. He looked up at Bond. He said with a hint of criticism, ‘You were taking it a bit fast, sir. Last round was bound to jump wide.’

‘I know, Corporal. I wanted to see how fast I could take it. I’m not blaming the weapon. It’s the hell of a fine job. Please tell the Armourer so from me. Now I’d better get moving. You’re finding your own way back to London, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Good night, sir.’

The Chief Range Officer handed Bond a record of his shoot – two sighting shots and then ten rounds at each hundred yards up to five hundred. ‘Damned good firing with this visibility. You ought to come back next year and have a bash at the Queen’s Prize. It’s open to all comers nowadays – British Commonwealth, that is.’

‘Thanks. Trouble is, I’m not all that much in England. And thanks for spotting for me.’ Bond glanced at the distant Clock Tower. On either side, the red danger flag and the red signal drum were coming down to show that firing had ceased. The hands stood at nine fifteen. ‘I’d like to have bought you a drink, but I’ve got an appointment in London. Can we hold it over until that Queen’s Prize you were talking about?’

The Range Officer nodded non-committally. He had been looking forward to finding out more about this man who had appeared out of the blue after a flurry of signals from the Ministry of Defence and had then proceeded to score well over ninety per cent at all distances, and that after the range was closed for the night and visibility was poor to bad. And why had he, who only officiated at the annual July meeting, been ordered to be present? And why had he been told to see that Bond had a six-inch bull at 500 instead of the regulation fifteen-inch? And why this flummery with the danger flag and signal drum that were only used on ceremonial occasions? To put pressure on the man? To give an edge of urgency to the shoot? Bond. Commander James Bond. The N.R.A. would surely have a record of anyone who could shoot like that. He’d remember to give them a call. Funny time to have an appointment in London. Probably a girl. The Range Officer’s undistinguished face assumed a disgruntled expression. Sort of fellow who got all the girls he wanted.

The two men walked through the handsome façade of Club Row behind the range to Bond’s car that stood opposite the bullet-pitted iron reproduction of Landseer’s famous ‘Running Deer’. ‘Nice-looking job,’ commented the Range Officer. ‘Never seen a body like that on a Continental. Have it made specially?’

‘Yes. The Sports Saloons are really only two-seaters. And damned little luggage space. So I got Mulliner’s to make it into a real two-seater with plenty of boot. Selfish car, I’m afraid. Well, good night. And thanks again.’ The exhaust boomed healthily and the back wheels briefly spat gravel.

The Chief Range Officer watched the ruby lights vanish up King’s Avenue towards the London road. He turned on his heel and went to find Corporal Menzies on a search for information that was to prove fruitless. The corporal remained as wooden as the big mahogany box he was in the process of loading into a khaki Land Rover without military symbols. The Range Officer was a major. He tried pulling his rank without success. The Land Rover hammered away in Bond’s wake. The major walked moodily off to the offices of the National Rifle Association to try and find out what he wanted in the library under ‘Bond, J.’

James Bond’s appointment was not with a girl. It was with a B.E.A. flight to Hanover and Berlin. As he bit off the miles to London Airport, pushing the big car hard so as to have plenty of time for a drink, three drinks, before the take-off, only part of his mind was on the road. The rest was re-examining, for the umpteenth time, the sequence that was now leading him to an appointment with an aeroplane. But only an interim appointment. His final rendezvous on one of the next three nights in Berlin was with a man. He had to see this man and infallibly shoot him dead.

When, at around two thirty that afternoon, James Bond had gone in through the double-padded doors and had sat down opposite the turned-away profile on the other side of the big desk, he had sensed trouble. There was no greeting. M.’s head was sunk into his stiff turned-down collar in a Churchillian pose of gloomy reflection, and there was a droop of bitterness at the corners of his lips. He swivelled his chair round to face Bond, gave him an appraising glance as if, Bond thought, to see that his tie was straight and his hair properly brushed, and then began speaking, fast, clipping off his sentences as if he wanted to be rid of what he was saying, and of Bond, as quickly as possible.

‘Number 272. He’s a good man. You won’t have come across him. Simple reason that he’s been holed up in Novaya Zemlya since the war. Now he’s trying to get out – loaded with stuff. Atomic and rockets. And their plan for a whole new series of tests. For 1961. To put the heat on the West. Something to do with Berlin. Don’t quite get the picture but the F.O. say if it’s true it’s terrific. Makes nonsense of the Geneva Conference and all this blether about nuclear disarmament the Communist bloc are putting out. He’s got as far as East Berlin. But he’s got practically the whole of the K.G.B. on his tail – and the East German security forces of course. He’s holed up somewhere in the city and he got one message over to us – that he’d be coming across between six and seven p.m. on one of the next three nights – tomorrow, next day, or the day after. He gave the crossing point. Trouble is,’ the downward curve of M.’s lips became even more bitter, ‘the courier he used was a double. Station W.B. bowled him out yesterday. Quite by chance. Had a lucky break with one of the K.G.B. codes. The courier’ll be flown out for trial, of course. But that won’t help. The K.G.B. know that 272 will be making a run for it. They know when. They know where. They know just as much as we do and no more. Now, the code we cracked was a one-day-only setting on their machines. But we got the whole of that day’s traffic and that was good enough. They plan to shoot him on the run. At this street crossing between East and West Berlin he gave us in his message. They’re mounting quite an operation – operation “Extase” they call it. Put their best sniper on the job. All we know about him is that his code name is the Russian for “Trigger”. Station W.B. guess he’s the same man they’ve used before for sniper work. Long-range stuff across the frontier. He’s going to be guarding this crossing every night and his job is to get 272. Of course they’d obviously prefer to do a smoother job with machine-guns and what have you. But it’s quiet in Berlin at the moment and apparently the word is it’s got to stay so. Anyway,’ M. shrugged, ‘they’ve got confidence in this “Trigger” operator and that’s the way it’s going to be!’

‘Where do I come in, sir?’ James Bond had guessed the answer, guessed why M. was showing his dislike of the whole business. This was going to be dirty work and Bond, because he belonged to the Double-O Section, had been chosen for it. Perversely, Bond wanted to force M. to put it in black and white. This was going to be bad news, dirty news, and he didn’t want to hear it from one of the Section officers, or even from the Chief of Staff. This was to be murder. All right. Let M. bloody well say so.

‘Where do you come in, 007?’ M. looked coldly across the desk. ‘You know where you come in. You’ve got to kill this sniper. And you’ve got to kill him before he gets 272. That’s all. Is that understood?’ The clear blue eyes remained cold as ice. But Bond knew that they remained so only with an effort of will. M. didn’t like sending any man to a killing. But, when it had to be done, he always put on this fierce, cold act of command. Bond knew why. It was to take some of the pressure, some of the guilt, off the killer’s shoulders.

So now Bond, who knew these things, decided to make it easy and quick for M. He got to his feet. ‘That’s all right, sir. I suppose the Chief of Staff has got all the gen. I’d better go and put in some practice. It wouldn’t do to miss.’ He walked to the door.

M. said quietly, ‘Sorry to have to hand this to you. Nasty job. But it’s got to be done well.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir.’ James Bond walked out and closed the door behind him. He didn’t like the job, but on the whole he’d rather have it himself than have the responsibility of ordering someone else to go and do it.

The Chief of Staff had been only a shade more sympathetic. ‘Sorry you’ve bought this one, James,’ he had said. ‘But Tanqueray was definite that he hadn’t got anyone good enough on his Station, and this isn’t the sort of job you can ask a regular soldier to do. Plenty of top marksmen in the B.A.O.R., but a live target needs another kind of nerve. Anyway, I’ve been on to Bisley and fixed a shoot for you tonight at eight fifteen when the ranges will be closed. Visibility should be about the same as you’ll be getting in Berlin around an hour earlier. The Armourer’s got the gun – a real target job, and he’s sending it down with one of his men. You’ll find your own way. Then you’re booked on a midnight B.E.A. charter flight to Berlin. Take a taxi to this address.’ He handed Bond a piece of paper. ‘Go up to the fourth floor and you’ll find Tanqueray’s Number 2 waiting for you. Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to sit it out for the next three days.’

‘How about the gun? Am I supposed to take it through the German customs in a golf bag or something?’

The Chief of Staff hadn’t been amused. ‘It’ll go over in the F.O. bag. You’ll have it by tomorrow midday.’ He had reached for a signal pad. ‘Well, you’d better get cracking. I’ll just let Tanqueray know everything’s fixed.’

James Bond glanced down at the dim blue face of the dashboard clock. Ten fifteen. With any luck by this time tomorrow it would all be finished. After all, it was the life of this man ‘Trigger’ against the life of 272. It wasn’t exactly murder. Pretty near it, though. He gave a vicious blast on his triple windhorns at an inoffensive family saloon, took the roundabout in a quite unnecessary dry skid, wrenched the wheel harshly to correct it and pointed the nose of the Bentley towards the distant glow that was London Airport.

The ugly six-storey building at the corner of Kochstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse was the only one standing in a waste of empty bombed space. Bond paid off his taxi and got a brief impression of waist-high weeds and half-tidied rubble walls stretching away to a big deserted crossroads lit by a central cluster of yellowish arc lamps, before he pushed the bell for the fourth floor and at once heard the click of the door-opener. The door closed itself behind him and he walked over the uncarpeted cement floor to the old-fashioned lift. The smell of cabbage, cheap cigar smoke and stale sweat reminded him of other apartment houses in Germany and Central Europe. Even the sigh and faint squeal of the slow lift were part of a hundred assignments when he had been fired off by M., like a projectile, at some distant target where a problem waited for his coming, waited to be solved by him. At least this time the reception committee was on his side. This time there was nothing to fear at the top of the stairs.

Number 2 of Secret Service Station W.B. was a lean, tense man in his early forties. He wore the uniform of his profession – well-cut, well-used, lightweight tweeds in a dark-green herringbone, a soft white silk shirt and an old school tie – in his case Wykehamist. At the sight of the tie, and while they exchanged conventional greetings in the small musty lobby of the apartment, Bond’s spirits, already low, sank another degree. He knew the type: backbone of the Civil Service; over-crammed and under-loved at Winchester; a good second in P.P.E. at Oxford; the war, staff jobs he would have done meticulously; perhaps an Q.B.E.; Allied Control Commission in Germany where he had been recruited into the I Branch and thence – because he was the ideal staff man and A.1 with Security and because he thought he would find life, drama, romance, the things he had never had – into the Secret Service. A sober, careful man had been needed to chaperon Bond on this ugly business. Captain Paul Sender, late of the Welsh Guards, had been the obvious choice. He had bought it. Now, like a good Wykehamist, he concealed his distaste for the job beneath careful, trite conversation as he showed Bond the layout of the apartment and the arrangements that had been made for the executioner’s preparedness and, to a modest extent, his comfort.

The flat consisted of a large double bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen containing tinned food, milk, butter, eggs, tea, bacon, bread and one bottle of Dimple Haig. The only odd feature in the bedroom was that one of the double beds was angled up against the curtains covering the single broad window and was piled high with three mattresses below the bedclothes.

Captain Sender said, ‘Care to have a look at the field of fire? Then I can explain what the other side have in mind.’

Bond was tired. He didn’t particularly want to go to sleep with the picture of the battlefield on his mind. He said, ‘That’d be fine.’

Captain Sender switched off the lights. Chinks from the street light at the intersection showed round the curtains. ‘Don’t want to draw the curtains,’ said Captain Sender. ‘Unlikely, but they may be on the look-out for a covering party for 272. If you’d just lie on the bed and get your head under the curtains, I’ll brief you about what you’ll be looking at. Look to the left.’

It was a sash window and the bottom half was open. The mattress, by design, gave only a little and James Bond found himself more or less in the firing position he had been in on the Century Range, but now staring across broken, thickly weeded bombed ground towards the bright river of the Zimmerstrasse – the border with East Berlin. It looked about a hundred and fifty yards away. Captain Sender’s voice from above him and behind the curtain began reciting. It reminded Bond of a spiritualist séance.

‘That’s bombed ground in front of you. Plenty of cover. A hundred and thirty yards of it up to the frontier. Then the frontier – the street – and then a big stretch of more bombed ground on the enemy side. That’s why 272 chose this route. It’s one of the few places in the town which is broken land – thick weeds, ruined walls, cellars – on both sides of the frontier. He will sneak through that mess on the other side and make a dash across the Zimmerstrasse for the mess on our side. Trouble is, he’ll have thirty yards of brightly lit frontier to sprint across. That’ll be the killing ground. Right?’

Bond said, ‘Yes.’ He said it softly. The scent of the enemy, the need to take care, already had him by the nerves.

‘To your left, that big new ten-storey block is the Haus der Ministerien, the chief brain-centre of East Berlin. You can see the lights are still on in most of the windows. Most of those’ll stay on all night. These chaps work hard – shifts all round the clock. You probably won’t need to worry about the lighted ones. This “Trigger” chap’ll almost certainly fire from one of the dark windows. You’ll see there’s a block of four together on the corner above the intersection. They’ve stayed dark last night and tonight. They’ve got the best field of fire. From here, their range varies from three hundred to three hundred and ten yards. I’ve got all the figures and so on when you want them. You needn’t worry about much else. That street stays empty during the night – only the motorized patrols about every half an hour – light armoured car with a couple of motor cycles as escort. Last night, which I suppose is typical, between six and seven when this thing’s going to be done, there were a few people that came and went out of that side door. Civil servant types. Before that nothing out of the ordinary – usual flow of people in and out of a busy government building – except, of all things, a whole damned women’s orchestra. Made the hell of a racket in some concert hall they’ve got in there. Part of the block is the Ministry of Culture. Otherwise nothing – certainly none of the K.G.B. people we know, nor any signs of preparation for a job like this. But there wouldn’t be. They’re careful chaps, the opposition. Anyway, have a good look. Don’t forget it’s darker than it will be tomorrow around six. But you can get the general picture.’

Bond got the general picture and it stayed with him long after the other man was asleep and snoring softly with a gentle regular clicking sound – a Wykehamist snore, Bond reflected irritably.

Yes, he had got the picture – the picture of a flicker of movement among the shadowy ruins on the other side of the gleaming river of light, a pause, then the wild zigzagging sprint of a man in the full glare of the arcs, the crash of gunfire and either a crumpled, sprawling heap in the middle of the wide street or the noise of his onward dash through the weeds and rubble of the Western Sector – sudden death or a home run. The true gauntlet! How much time would Bond have to spot the Russian sniper in one of those dark windows? And kill him? Five seconds? Ten? When dawn edged the curtains with gun-metal, Bond capitulated to his fretting mind. It had won. He went softly into the bathroom and surveyed the ranks of medicine bottles that a thoughtful Secret Service had provided to keep its executioner in good shape. He selected the Tuinal, chased down two of the ruby-and-blue depth-charges with a glass of water and went back to bed. Then, pole-axed, he slept.

He awoke at midday. The flat was empty. Bond drew the curtains to let in the grey Prussian day and, standing well back from the window, gazed out at the drabness of Berlin and listened to the tram noises and to the distant screeching of the U-Bahn as it took the big curve into the Zoo station. He gave a quick, reluctant glance at what he had examined the night before, noted that the weeds among the bomb rubble were much the same as the London ones – rose-bay willow-herb, dock and bracken – and then went into the kitchen. There was a note propped against a loaf of bread: ‘My friend [a Secret Service euphemism which in this context meant Sender’s chief] says it’s all right for you to go out. But to be back by 1700 hours. Your gear [double-talk for Bond’s rifle] has arrived and the batman will lay it out this p.m. P. Sender.’

Bond lit the gas cooker, burned the message with a sneer at his profession, and then brewed himself a vast dish of scrambled eggs and bacon which he heaped on buttered toast and washed down with black coffee into which he had poured a liberal tot of whisky. Then he bathed and shaved, dressed in the drab, anonymous, middle-European clothes he had brought over for the purpose, looked at his disordered bed, decided to hell with it, and went down in the lift and out of the building.

James Bond had always found Berlin a glum, inimical city varnished on the Western side with a brittle veneer of gimcrack polish, rather like the chromium trim on American motorcars. He walked to the Kurfürstendamm, sat in the Café Marquardt, drank an espresso and moodily watched the obedient queues of pedestrians waiting for the ‘Go’ sign on the traffic lights while the shiny stream of cars went through their dangerous quadrille at the busy intersection. It was cold outside and the sharp wind from the Russian steppes whipped at the girls’ skirts and at the waterproofs of the impatient hurrying men each with the inevitable briefcase tucked under his arm. The infra-red wall heaters in the café glared redly down and gave a spurious glow to the faces of the café-squatters consuming their traditional ‘one cup of coffee and ten glasses of water’, reading the free newspapers and periodicals in their wooden racks or earnestly bent over business documents. Bond, closing his mind to the evening, debated with himself about ways to spend the afternoon. It finally came down to a choice between a visit to that respectable-looking brownstone house in the Clausewitzstrasse, known to all concierges and taxi-drivers, or a trip to the Wannsee and a strenuous walk in the Grunewald. Virtue triumphed. Bond paid for his coffee, went out into the cold and took a taxi to the Zoo station.

The pretty young trees round the long lake had already been touched by the breath of autumn and there was occasional gold amongst the green. Bond walked hard for two hours along the leafy paths, then chose a restaurant with a glassed-in veranda above the lake and greatly enjoyed a high tea consisting of a double portion of matjes herrings smothered in cream and onion rings, and two ‘Molle mit Korn’, the Berlin equivalent of a ‘boiler-maker and his assistant’ – schnapps, doubles, washed down with draught Löwenbräu. Then, feeling more encouraged, he took the S-Bahn back into the city.

Outside the apartment house, a nondescript young man was tinkering with the engine of a black Opel Kapitan. He didn’t take his head out from under the bonnet when Bond passed close by him and went up to the door and pressed the bell.

Captain Sender was reassuring. It was a ‘friend’ – a corporal from the transport section of Station W.B. He had fixed up some bad engine trouble on the Opel. Each night, from six to seven, he would be ready to produce a series of multiple back-fires when a signal on a walkie-talkie operated by Sender told him to do so. This would give some kind of cover for the noise of Bond’s shooting. Otherwise the neighbourhood might alert the police and there would be a lot of untidy explaining to be done. Their hideout was in the American sector and, while their American ‘friends’ had given Station W.B. clearance for this operation, the ‘friends’ were naturally anxious that it should be a clean job and without repercussions.

Bond was suitably impressed by the car gimmick, as he was by the very workmanlike preparations that had been made for him in the living-room. Here, behind the head of his high bed, giving a perfect firing position, a wood and metal stand had been erected against the broad window-sill and along it lay the Winchester, the tip of its barrel just denting the curtains. The wood and all the metal parts of the rifle and Sniperscope had been painted a dull black and, laid out on the bed like sinister evening clothes, was a black velvet hood stitched to a waist-length shirt of the same material. The hood had wide slits for the eyes and mouth. It reminded Bond of old prints of the Spanish Inquisition, or of the anonymous operators on the guillotine platform during the French Revolution. There was a similar hood on Captain Sender’s bed, and on his section of the window-sill there lay a pair of night-glasses and the microphone for the walkie-talkie.

Captain Sender, his face worried and tense with nerves, said there was no news at the Station, no change in the situation as they knew it. Did Bond want anything to eat? Or a cup of tea? Perhaps a tranquillizer – there were several kinds in the bathroom?

Bond stitched a cheerful, relaxed expression on his face and said no thanks, and gave a light-hearted account of his day while an artery near his solar plexus began thumping gently as tension built up inside him like a watch-spring tightening. Finally his small talk petered out and he lay down on his bed with a German thriller he had bought on his wanderings, while Captain Sender moved fretfully about the flat, looking too often at his watch and chain-smoking Kent filter-tips through (he was a careful man) a Dunhill filter holder.