Colonel Sun

Colonel Sun

Robert Markem

Pseudonym for Kingsley Amis

After Ian Fleming's death in 1964, Glidrose decided to continue the Bond franchise with a series of well-known authors each writing a book under the pen-name Robert Markham. However, only Kingsley Amis took up the offer, and in 1968 his 007 novel, 'Colonel Sun' was published. Bond fans now consider it a classic, although sales proved disappointing. Amis had previously written a critical work on Bond, entitled 'The James Bond Dossier'. There is also a suggestion that Amis finished 'The Man With The Golden Gun' after Fleming's death, and that Colonel Sun was his incentive from Glidrose.

To the memory of

IAN FLEMING

Author's Note

Two methods of indicating dialogue are used in this book.

Dialogue _given in English translation__ from Russian or Greek, following Continental practice, is introduced by a dash; for example,

- Good morning, Comrade General.

Dialogue _in English__ is enclosed in the normal inverted commas; for example,

'He was hit in the back, I think.'

Chapter 1

A Man in Sunglasses

JAMES BOND stood at the middle tees of the eighteenth on the Sunningdale New Course, enjoying the tranquil normality of a sunny English afternoon in early September. The Old Course, he considered, with its clumps of majestic oak and pine, was charmingly landscaped, but something in his nature responded to the austerity of the New: more lightly wooded, open to the sky, patches of heather and thin scrub on the sandy soil - and, less subjectively, a more testing series of holes. Bond was feeling mildly pleased with himself for having taken no more than a four at the notoriously tricky dogleg sixth, where a touch of slice in the drive was likely to land you in a devilish morass of bushes and marshy hummocks. He had managed a clear two hundred and fifty yards straight down the middle, a shot that had demanded every ounce of effort without (blessed relief) the slightest complaint from the area where, last summer, Scaramanga's Derringer slug had torn through his abdomen.

Near by, waiting for the four ahead of them to move on to the green, was Bond's opponent and incidentally his best friend in the Secret Service: Bill Tanner, M's Chief of Staff. Noticing the deep lines of strain round Tanner's eyes, his almost alarming pallor, Bond had taken the opportunity of an unusually quiet morning at Headquarters to talk him into a trip down to this sleepy corner of Surrey. They had lunched first at Scott's in Coventry Street, beginning with a dozen each of the new season's Whitstable oysters and going on to cold silverside of beef and potato salad, accompanied by a well-chilled bottle of Anjou rosé. Not perhaps the ideal prelude to a round of golf, even a little self-indulgent. But Bond had recently heard that the whole north side of the street was doomed to demolition, and counted every meal taken in those severe but comfortable panelled rooms as a tiny victory over the new, hateful London of steel-and-glass-matchbox architecture, flyovers and underpasses, and the endless hysterical clamour of pneumatic drills.

The last of the four, caddie in attendance, was plodding up to the green. Tanner stepped to his trolley - having some minor Service shop to exchange, they were transporting their clubs themselves - and pulled out the new Ben Hogan driver he had been yearning for weeks to try out. Then, with characteristic deliberation, he squared up to his ball. Nothing beyond a nominal fiver hung on this game, but it was not Bill Tanner's way to pursue any objective with less than the maximum of his ability - a trait that had made him the best Number Two in the business.

The sun beat down. Insects were droning in the little belt of brambles, rowans and silver birch saplings to their left. Bond's gaze shifted from the lean, intent figure of the Chief of Staff to the putting green a quarter of a mile away, the famous, ancient oak by the eighteenth green of the Old Course, the motionless line of parked cars. Was this the right sort of life? - an unexacting game of golf with a friend, to be followed in due time by a leisurely drive back to London (avoiding the M4), a light dinner alone in the flat, a few hands of piquet with another friend - 016 of Station B, home from West Berlin on ten days' leave - and bed at eleven thirty. It was certainly a far more sensible and grown-up routine than the round of gin and tranquillizers he had been trapped in only a couple of years back, before his nightmare odyssey through Japan and the USSR. He should be patting himself on the back for having come through that sticky patch. And yet...

With the sound of a plunging sabre, Bill Tanner's driver flashed through the still, warm air and his ball, after seeming to pass out of existence for an instant, reappeared on its soaring arc, a beautiful tall shot sufficiently drawn to take him well to the left of the clump of Scotch pines that had brought many a promising score to grief at the last minute. As things stood he had only to halve the hole to win.

'It looks like your fiver, I'm sorry to say, Bill.'

'About time I took one off you.'

As James Bond stepped forward in his turn, the thought crossed his mind that there might be a worse sin than the cardinal one of boredom. Complacency. Satisfaction with the second-rate. Going soft without knowing it.

* * *

The man wearing the rather unusually large and opaque sunglasses had had no difficulty, as he sauntered past the open windows of the club lounge towards the putting-green, in identifying the tall figure now shaping up to drive off the eighteenth tee. He had had plenty of practice in identifying it over the past few weeks, at greater distances than this. And at the moment his vision was sharpened by urgency.

If any member had marked out the man in sunglasses as a stranger and approached him with inquiring offers of help, he would have been answered courteously in a faintly non-British accent - not foreign exactly, perhaps South African - to the effect that no help was needed. Any moment now, the stranger would have explained, he expected to be joined by Mr John Donald to discuss with him the possibilities of being put up for membership. (Mr John Donald was in fact in Paris, as a couple of carefully placed telephone calls had established earlier that day.) But, as it turned out, nobody went near the man in sunglasses. Nobody so much as noticed him. This was not so surprising, because a long course of training, costing a large sum of money, had seen to it that he was very good at not being noticed.

The man strolled across the putting-green and seemed to be examining, with exactly average interest, the magnificent display flower-bed and its thick ranks of red-hot pokers and early chrysanthemums. His demeanour was perfectly relaxed, his face quite expressionless, as the eyes behind the glasses looked in the direction of the flowers. His mind, however, was racing. Today's operation had been set up three times already, before being abandoned at the eleventh hour. There was a date schedule on it so tight that further postponement might mean the cancellation of the entire scheme. This would have greatly displeased him. He very much wanted the operation to go through, not for any fancy idealistic or political reason, but simply out of professional pride. What was being undertaken would, if all went well, end up as the most staggeringly audacious piece of lawlessness he had ever heard of. To be associated with the success of such a project would certainly bring him advancement from his employers. Whereas to be associated with its failure...

The man in sunglasses drew his arms in to his sides for a moment, as if the approach of evening had brought a stray gust of air that suddenly struck chill. The moment passed. He had no trouble making himself relax again. He considered dispassionately the undeniable fact that the time schedule he was working to was even tighter than the date schedule, and was showing signs of coming apart. Events were running half an hour late. The man Bond and his companion had lingered hoggishly over their lunch in the rich aristocrats' restaurant. It would be very awkward if they lingered over the drinks these people felt bound to consume around this hour.

A casual glance showed that the two Englishmen had finished their round of infantile play and were approaching the club house. The man in sunglasses, his eyes invisible behind the dark lenses, watched sidelong until, laughing inanely together, they had passed out of sight. No further delay had occurred. Although he had not looked at his watch for half an hour, and did not do so now, he knew the correct time to within a minute.

A pause. Silence but for a few distant voices, an engine being started in the car park, a jet aircraft in a distant corner of the sky. Somewhere a clock struck. The man went through a tiny underplayed pantomime of somebody deciding regretfully that he really cannot be kept waiting any longer. Then he walked off at an easy pace towards the entrance. As he neared the road he took off his sunglasses and slipped them carefully into the top jacket pocket of his anonymous light-grey suit. His eyes, of a washed-out blue that went oddly with his dead black hair, had the controlled interestedness of a sniper's as he reaches for his rifle.

* * *

'Do you think I'm going soft, Bill?' asked Bond twenty minutes later as they stood at the bar.

Bill Tanner grinned. 'Still sore about ending up two down?' (Bond had missed a four-foot putt on the last green.)

'It isn't that, it's... Look, to start with I'm under-employed. What have I done this year? One trip to the States, on what turns out to be a sort of discourtesy visit, and then that miserable flop out East back in June.'

Bond had been sent to Hong Kong to supervise the conveying to the Red mainland of a certain Chinese and a number of unusual stores. The man had gone missing about the time of Bond's arrival and had been found two days later in an alley off the waterfront with his head almost severed from his body. After another three days, memorable chiefly for a violent and prolonged typhoon, the plan had been cancelled and Bond recalled.

'It wasn't your fault that our rep. went sick before you turned up,' said Tanner, falling automatically into the standard Service jargon for use in public.

'No.' Bond stared into his gin and tonic. 'But what worries me is that I didn't seem to mind much. In fact I was quite relieved at being spared the exertion. There's something wrong somewhere.'

'Not physically, anyway. You're in better shape than I've seen you for years.'

Bond looked round the unpretentious room with its comfortable benches in dark-blue leather, its decorous little groups of business and professional men - quiet men, decent men, men who had never behaved violently or treacherously in their lives. Admirable men: but the thought of becoming indistinguishable from them was suddenly repugnant.

'It's ceasing to be an individual that's deadly,' said Bond thoughtfully. 'Becoming a creature of habit. Since I got back I've been coming down here about three Tuesdays out of four, arriving at the same sort of time, going round with one or other of the same three friends, leaving at six thirty or so, driving home each time for the same sort of evening. And seeing nothing wrong with it. A man in my line of business shouldn't work to a time-table. You understand that.'

It is true that a secret agent on an assignment must never fall into any kind of routine that will enable the opposition to predict his movements, but it was not until later that Bill Tanner was to appreciate the curious unintentional significance of what Bond was saying.

'I don't quite follow, James. It doesn't apply to your life in England, surely,' said Tanner, speaking with equally unintentional irony.

'I was thinking of the picture as a whole. My existence is falling into a pattern. I must find some way of breaking out of it.'

'In my experience that sort of shake-up comes along of its own accord when the time is ripe. No need to do anything about it yourself.'

'Fate or something?'

Tanner shrugged. 'Call it what you like.'

For a moment there was an odd silence between the two men. Then Tanner glanced at the clock, drained his glass and said briskly, 'Well, I suppose you'll want to be getting along.'

On the point of agreeing, Bond checked himself. 'To hell with it,' he said. 'If I'm going to get myself disorganized I might as well start now.' He turned to the barmaid. 'Let's have those again, Dot.'

'Won't you be late for M?' asked Tanner.

'He'll just have to possess his soul in patience. He doesn't dine till eight fifteen, and half an hour or so of his company is quite enough these days.'

'Don't I know it,' said Tanner feelingly. 'I still can't get near him at the office. We've taken to doing most of our confabulating over the intercom and that suits me fine. I've only to say it looks like rain for him to shout at me to stop fussing round him like a confounded old woman.'

It was a life-like imitation and Bond laughed, but he was serious enough when he said, 'It's only natural. Sailors hate being ill.'

The previous winter M had developed a distressing cough which he had testily refused to do anything about, saying that the damn thing would clear up when the warmer weather came. But the spring and early summer had brought rain and humidity as well as warmth, and the cough had not cleared up. One morning in July Miss Moneypenny had taken in a sheaf of signals to find M sprawled semiconscious over his desk, grey in the face and fighting for breath. She had summoned Bond from his fifth-floor office and, at the angry insistence of the headquarters MO, M had been bundled half by force into his old Silver Wraith Rolls and escorted home. After three weeks in bed under the devoted care of ex-Chief Petty Officer Hammond and his wife, M had largely recovered from his bronchial congestion, though his temper - as Bond had amply discovered on his periodic visits - looked like taking longer to heal.... Since then, Bond had taken to breaking his weekly return journey from Sunningdale by looking in at Quarterdeck, the beautiful little Regency manor-house on the edge of Windsor Park, ostensibly for an informal chat about the affairs of the Service but really to keep an eye on M's health, to have a sly word with the Hammonds and find out whether the old man was following the MO's orders, getting plenty of rest and, in particular, laying off his pipe and his daily couple of poisonous black cheroots. He had been prepared for a characteristic explosion from M when he suggested the first of these visits, but as it was, M had growled an immediate, if surly, assent. Bond suspected he felt rather cut off from the world by being, among other things, temporarily condemned to a three-day working week. (The MO had only won that concession by threatening to send him on a cruise unless he agreed.)

Bond now said, 'Why don't you come along too, Bill? Then I could give you a lift back to London.'

Tanner hesitated. 'I don't think I will, James, thanks all the same. There's a rather important call from Station L coming through to the office later on which I'd like to take personally.'

'What's the Duty Officer for? You're doing the best part of two men's work as it is.'

'Well... it isn't only that. I'll give M a miss anyway. There's something about that house of his that gives me the creeps.'

A quarter of an hour later, having dropped the Chief of Staff at the railway station, Bond swung the long bonnet of his Continental Bentley left off the A30. Ahead of him was the pleasant, leisurely drive of ten minutes or so that would bring him, via twisting minor roads, to Quarterdeck.

The man who had been watching Bond earlier sat in a stolen Ford Zephyr, unobtrusively parked fifty yards from the turning. He now spoke a single word into his Hitachi solid-state transceiver. Four and a half miles away, another man acknowledged with a monosyllable, switched off his own instrument, and emerged with his two companions from the dense woodland thicket where they had been lying for the past two hours.

The occupant of the Zephyr sat quite still for another minute. It was his nature to avoid unnecessary movement, even at moments like the present when he was as tense as he ever allowed himself to become. The time-table of the operation was now fifty minutes in arrears. One more major delay would entail, not merely cancellation, but disaster, for the step his radio signal had just initiated was as irreversible as it was violent. But there would not be another delay. None was inherently present in the situation. His training told him so.

At the end of the minute, calculated after careful research as the optimum interval for following in the wake of the Bentley, he put the Zephyr in gear and started for the turning.

Bond crossed the county boundary into Berkshire and made his unhurried way among the ugly rash of modern housing - half-heartedly mock-Tudor villas, bungalows and two-storey boxes with a senseless variegation of planking, brick and crazy paving on the front of each and the inevitable TV aerial sprouting from every roof. Once through Silwood village and across the A329 these signs of affluence were behind him and the Bentley thrummed down a gentle slope between pine-woods. Soon there were lush open farmlands on his left and the forest established in force on his right. Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been. As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a BEA Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bearing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal's lovely Algarve province, and now, as the range of development schemes grew ever wider, as far as Morocco. But it was churlish to resent all this and the rising wage-levels that made it possible. Forget it. Concentrate on cheering M up. And on tonight's piquet session. Raise the stakes and gamble in earnest. Or scrub it altogether. A couple of telephone calls and a night out for four. Break free of the pattern...

These thoughts ran in Bond's head as he carried out almost mechanically all the minute drills of good driving, including, of course, an occasional glance at his rear-view mirror. Not once did the Zephyr appear there. Bond would have paid no particular attention if it had. He had never seen it before and would not have recognized its driver even if brought face to face with him. Although he had been under close surveillance for over six weeks, Bond had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. When not on an assignment abroad, a secret agent does not expect to be watched. It is also much easier to watch a man who keeps regular hours and has a fixed domicile and place of business. Thus, for instance, it had not been necessary to set up any kind of checkpoint at Bond's flat off the King's Road, nor to follow him between there and Service headquarters in Regent's Park. More important, the operation involving him was regarded by its planners as of the highest priority. This meant a lavish budget, which meant in turn that an unusually large number of agents could be employed. And that meant that watchers and followers could be changed frequently, before the repeated presence of any one of them had had time to register on that almost subconscious alarm system which years of secret work had developed in Bond's mind.

The Bentley slid across the Windsor-Bagshot road. The familiar landmarks came up on the left: the _Squirrel__ public house, the stables of the Arabian stud, the Lurex thread factory (often a focal point of M's indignation). Now, on the right, the modest stone gateway of Quarterdeck, the short, beautifully kept gravel drive, and the house itself, a plain rectangle of Bath stone weathered to a faintly greenish grey, luminous under the evening sun, shadowed in parts by the dense plantation of pine, beech, silver birch and young oak that grew on three sides of it. An ancient wistaria straggled up to and beyond the tiny first-floor balcony on to which the windows of M's bedroom opened. As he slammed the car door and moved towards the shallow portico, Bond fancied he caught a flicker of movement behind those windows: Mrs Hammond, no doubt, turning down the bed.

Under Bond's hand, the hanging brass bell of a long-defunct ship of the line pealed out sharply in the stillness. Silence followed, unbroken by the least rustle of air through the tree-tops. Bond pictured Mrs Hammond still busy upstairs, Hammond himself in the act of fetching a bottle of M's favourite Algerian wine - the aptly named 'Infuriator' - from the cellar. The front door of Quarterdeck was never latched between sunrise and sunset. It yielded at once to Bond's touch.

Every house has its own normally imperceptible background noise, compounded it may be of distant voices, footfalls, kitchen sounds, all the muted bustle of human beings about their business. James Bond was hardly across the threshold when his trained senses warned him of the total absence of any such noise. Suddenly taut, he pushed open the solid Spanish mahogany door of the study, where M habitually received company.

The empty room gazed bleakly at Bond. As always, everything was meticulously in its place, the lines of naval prints exactly horizontal on the walls, water-colour materials laid out as if for inspection on the painting-table up against the window. It all had a weirdly artificial, detached air, like part of a museum where the furniture and effects of some historical figure are preserved just as they were in his lifetime.

Before Bond could do more than look, listen and wonder, the door of the dining-room across the hall, which had been standing ajar, was thrown briskly open and a man emerged. Pointing a long-barrelled automatic in the direction of Bond's knees, he said in a clear voice: 'Stay right there, Bond. And don't make any sudden movements. If you do I shall maim you very painfully.'

Chapter 2

Into the Wood

In the course of his career, James Bond had been held up and threatened in this sort of way literally dozens of times - often, as now, by a total stranger. The first step towards effective counter-measures was to play for a little time and analyse what information was immediately available.

Bond set aside as profitless all speculation about the enemy's objective and what might have happened to M and the Hammonds. He concentrated instead on the enemy's gun. This was recognizable straight away as a silenced 9-mm. Luger. The impact of a bullet of such a calibre, weighing nearly half an ounce and travelling at the speed of sound, is tremendous. Bond knew that to be struck by one at the present range, even in a limb, would hurl him to the floor and probably shock him unconscious. If it hit anywhere near the knee, where the weapon was now aimed, he would almost certainly never walk again. All in all a professional's armament.

The man himself had a thin, bony face and a narrow mouth. He was wearing a lightweight dark-blue suit and well-polished brogues. You might have taken him for a promising junior executive in advertising or television, with a taste for women. What Bond chiefly noticed about his looks was that he was as tall as himself, but slighter in build. Perhaps vulnerable in a physical tussle, then, if one could be engineered. What made him disquieting was the economy and force of the words he had just used and the businesslike tone in which they had been uttered, devoid of vulgar menace or triumph, above all without the faintest hint of that affected nonchalance which would have marked him down as an amateur and therefore a potential bungler. This was the surest possible guarantee that he knew how to use his gun and would do so at once if he felt it to be advisable.

All this passed through Bond's mind in three seconds or so. Before they were quite up, he heard a car turn into the drive and felt a flicker of hope. But the man with the Luger did not even turn his head. The new arrival was clearly going to lengthen the odds, not shorten them. Rapid footsteps now sounded on gravel and another man entered by the front door. He hardly bothered to glance at Bond, who had a fleeting impression of washed-out blue eyes. Smoothing his crop of black hair, the man drew what looked like an identical Luger from just behind his right hip; then, moving as if to some carefully worked-out and practised drill, he passed outside and well clear of his companion to the foot of the stairs.

'Out here and up, slowly,' said the first man in the same tone as before.

However difficult it may be to escape from a ground-floor room in the presence of armed enemies, the problem becomes virtually hopeless when the scene is shifted upstairs and there is a guard on the landing or in the hall. Bond appreciated this at once, but simply did as he was told and moved forward. When he was three yards off, the thin-faced man backed away, preserving the distance between them. The second man, the one with black hair, was on the half-landing, his Luger grasped firmly in front of his belly and pointed at Bond's legs. These two were professionals all right.

Bond glanced round the incongruous normality of Quarterdeck's hall - the gleaming pine panels, the 1/144 scale model of M's last ship, the battle-cruiser _Repulse__, M's own antiquated ulster thrown carelessly on to the old-fashioned hall-stand. This thing was bad and big. Bad on all counts, not least his lack of any weapon: British agents do not go armed off duty in their own country. Big in that to be prepared to maim, probably even to kill, in such circumstances was unknown in peacetime - except for frighteningly high stakes. Not to know what these stakes might be was like an intolerable physical thirst.

James Bond's feet mounted mechanically on the worn old olive-green Axminster stair-carpet. The two gunmen preceded and followed him at the same safe distance. Despite their total competence they were obvious employees, non-commissioned material. The officer in charge of whatever operation this might be would no doubt be revealed in a moment.

'In.'

This time the black-haired man spoke. The other waited on the stairs. Bond crossed the threshold of M's bedroom, that tall, airy room with the brocade curtains drawn back from the shut balcony windows, and came face to face with M himself.

A gasp of horror tore at Bond's throat.

M sat in a high-backed Chippendale chair by his own bedside. His shoulders were hunched as if he had aged ten years, and his hands hung loosely between his knees. After a moment he looked up slowly and his eyes fastened on Bond. There was no recognition in them, no expression at all; their habitual frosty clarity was gone. From his open mouth came a curious wordless sound, perhaps of wonder, or of inquiry, or of warning, perhaps of all three.

Adrenalin is produced by the adrenal glands, two small bodies situated on the upper surface of the kidneys. Because of the circumstances which cause its release into the circulation, and its effects on the body, it is sometimes known as the drug of fright, fight and flight. Now, at the sight of M, Bond's adrenals fell to their primeval work, pumping their secretion into his bloodstream and thus quickening respiration to fill his blood with oxygen, speeding up the heart's action to improve the blood-supply to the muscles, closing the smaller blood-vessels near the skin to minimize loss in case of wounding, even causing the hair on his scalp to lift minutely, in memory of the age when man's primitive ancestors had been made to look more terrible to their adversaries by the raising and spreading of their furry crests. And while Bond still stared appalled at M, there came to him from somewhere or other, perhaps from the adrenalin itself, a strange exultation. He knew instantly that he had _not__ gone soft, that at need he was the same efficient fighting machine as ever.

A voice spoke. It was a neutral sort of voice with a neutral accent, and it used the same practical, colourless tone as the earlier voices had done. It said sharply, but without hurry, 'You need not be distressed, Bond. Your chief has not been damaged in any way. He has merely been drugged in order to render him amenable. When the drug wears off he will be fully himself again. You are now about to receive an injection of the same drug. If you resist, my associate here has orders to shoot you through the kneecap. This, as you know, would render you utterly helpless at once. The injection is painless. Keep your feet quite still and lower your trousers.'

The speaker was a burly man in his forties, pale, hook-nosed, nearly bald, at first glance as unremarkable as his subordinates. A second glance would have shown there to be something wrong about the eyes, or rather the eyelids, which seemed a size too large. Their owner was certainly conscious of them, for he continually raised and lowered them as he spoke. Instead of looking affected, the mannerism was oddly disturbing. If Bond's mind had been open to such reflections, he might have been reminded of the Black Stone in Buchan's _Thirty-Nine Steps__, the man who could hood his eyes like a hawk and who had haunted Bond's daydreams as a boy. But Bond's thoughts were racing all out in a more practical direction.

He had registered purely subconsciously the positions of his adversaries: one gunman facing him, the other somewhere on landing or stairs covering the door, the man who was doing the talking stationed with his back to the windows that gave on to the balcony, a fourth man, a doctor of some sort, physically negligible, standing at the foot of the bed with a hypodermic in his hand. So much for that. What clamoured for solution were two problems, which Bond knew to be vital without understanding why. Where was the fallacy in what the man by the windows had just finished saying? And what was the tiny unimportant fact about those windows that none of these four would know and Bond did and could use - if only he could remember it?

'Move.'

The lids closed imperiously over the eyes and lifted again. The voice had not been raised in volume or pitch.

Bond waited.

'You will gain nothing by this. You have five seconds in which to begin carrying out my instructions. Should you not have done so, you will be disabled and then given the injection at our leisure.'

Bond did not waste any of his attention on the countdown. Before it was over he had the solution to the first of his two problems. He had found something contradictory in what was proposed. There is no point in giving an already helpless man an injection designed to render him helpless. Why not maim him immediately, which as things stood would be quick, certain and without risk, and forget about the injection, which was already turning out to be troublesome? So they wanted him not merely helpless, but helpless _and undamaged__. The chances were high that the gun threat was just bluff. If it were not, if there were some extra factor Bond had failed to spot, the penalty would be dreadful. But there was no alternative.

The voice had finished counting and Bond had not moved. In the silence M made another small inarticulate sound. Then- 'Take.'

Bond's arms were seized from behind and jerked backwards - he had not heard the approach of the thin-faced gunman from outside the room. Before the nelson grip was complete Bond had lashed backwards with his heel and made contact. One arm came free. It was instantly seized by the black-haired gunman.

The struggle that followed, though two-to-one, was almost on equal terms, for Bond was full of the exultation of having his guess proved right and thus winning the first point, not to speak of his joyful recovery of confidence in his fighting abilities. And he could hurt them in ways they must not hurt him. But he was up against one man who was his equal in build and another who, though slighter, had a genius for throwing on the most painful available nerve-hold as soon as the one before it had been broken.

An elbow-jab that just missed the groin brought the top of Bond's body forward. Before he could recover, ten fingers that felt like steel bolts had sunk into the ganglia at the base of his neck. The muscles of his upper arms seemed to turn into thin streams of cold mud. Again he tried to bring his heel back and up, but this time his legs were grabbed from the front and held. A wrench, a heave, and Bond hit the floor. He lay face down, one body across his shoulders, the other immobilizing his lower half, relaxed, not struggling uselessly, thinking, thinking about the windows, if he ever reached them, the windows...

'Jab.'

Bond felt the arrival of the third man, the doctor, above him, and gathered himself for a supreme effort. In the next minute he proved how difficult it is even for two strong, skilful and determined men to render a third equally powerful man completely helpless if they are not allowed to inflict anything really violent and ruthless upon him. Bond used that minute. As he strove and sweated, with no objective beyond not allowing any favourable area of his body to become available to the hypodermic, dimly aware that some sort of argument was going on between the man with the hooded eyes and the doctor, he remembered what he had to remember. The windows, though closed, could not be fastened. The catch was broken. Hammond had mentioned it the previous week and M, tetchy as ever, had said he would be damned if he was going to let some carpenter johnny turn the room into a shambles - it could wait a couple of weeks, until the time of M's annual salmon-fishing holiday on the Test. So a sharp shove where the windows met would...

Perhaps the triumph of remembering this snatch of talk - to which Bond had not been consciously listening at all - made him relax for an instant. Perhaps one gunman or the other found an extra ounce of strength. Anyway, Bond's wrist was caught and held and the next instant he felt the prick of the needle in his left forearm. He drove off a wave of despair and loathing, asked himself how long the stuff was supposed to take before it worked, experimentally let himself go limp, found the pressure on him relaxing slightly but significantly, and moved.

In that one possible split second he was able to twist himself partly free. He arched his back and drove out with both feet. The thin-faced man screamed. Blood spurted from his nose. He fell heavily. The other man chopped at the back of Bond's neck, but too late. Bond's elbow took him almost exactly on the windpipe. The man with the hooded eyes swung a foot as Bond came up off the floor, but he was not in time either. All he did was lay open Bond's path to the windows. The two halves flew apart with beautiful readiness as his shoulder struck them. One hand on the low stone balustrade, over, down to a perfectly balanced four-point landing, up and away into the nearest trees.

Those first scattered pines seemed to move past him only slowly, run as hard as he might. Now there were more of them. And brambles and wild rhododendrons. Making the going difficult. Very important not to fall. Not to slow down either. Keep up speed. Why? Get away from them. Who? Men. Man with eyes like a hawk's. Man who has done terrible things to M. Must save M. Go back and save M? No. Go on. Save M by running away from him? Yes. Go on. Where? Far. Go on far. How far? Far...

Bond really was hardly more than a machine now. Soon he had forgotten everything but the necessity to take the next stride, and the next, and the next. When there was nothing left of his mind at all his body ran on, as fast as before but without sense of direction, for perhaps another minute. After that it slowed and stopped. It stood where it was for a further minute, panting with slack mouth, the arms hanging loosely by the sides. The eyes were open, but they saw nothing. Then, impelled by some last flicker of intelligence or will, the body of James Bond took a dozen more steps, dropped, and lay full length in a patch of long coarse grass between two dwarf poplars, virtually invisible to anybody passing more than five yards away.

In fact, nobody came as close as that. The pursuit was hopeless from the start. The thin-faced man, bleeding thickly from a smashed nose, was over the balcony and round the corner of the house nearly - though not quite - in time to see Bond disappearing among the pines, but it was ten or twelve more seconds before he was joined by his fellow and by the man with the hooded eyes, who was not accustomed to jumping from balconies and had had to descend by the stairs. If the thin-faced man had been working for an organization that encouraged initiative, he would have made without delay for the edge of the woods, listened, and been able to give effective chase. As it was, Bond was just out of earshot by the time the trio reached the first trees. They moved in the obvious, and indeed in the right, direction for a time, but time was the very thing they were short of. It was not very long before the leader looked at his watch and called a halt.

'Back.'

Before they turned away, the speaker unhooded his eyes and looked with a peculiar intentness at the thin-faced man. That face lost some of its colour. Then the three moved off. By the final irony in a day of ironies, another sixty or seventy yards advance would have brought them straight to where Bond lay.

More time passed. The shadows in the wood lengthened, began to fade into the blur of dusk. The hum of insects fell to a murmur. Once a blackbird called. No other sound. If Bond had been able to strain his ears to their limit, he might just have heard a distant scream, abruptly cut off, and then, a little later, a car being started and driven away. But he heard nothing. He was nothing.

* * *

The room was small, but it was still not possible to decide what was in it or where it was, and there seemed no point in trying. Those men, two of them probably, or three, were talking again, first one, then another. Their voices were muffled by long tangled strips of grey stuff, vague and smoky at the edges, that hung in the air in front of them. The same grey strips made their faces hard to see. Or did they just make it hard to want to see their faces? What was really there? Did it matter? There was something, something like a book or a man or a secret or a telephone, that said it did matter, something a long time ago, round hundreds of corners, thousands of slow difficult paces back, that said there was no giving up, ever. Try. Want to try. Try to want to try. Want to try to...

Another man, much nearer. Face very close. Doing something with eye. Holding wrist. Doing more with eye. Grunting. Talking. Going away. Coming back. Doing more - what? Pulling, helping up from chair. Something with jacket. Something with shirt-sleeve. Little pain. Gone. Back in chair again.

'Well, doctor?'

'He's been given a massive dose of some drug or other, I couldn't say which at this stage. Could be hyoscine. I've given him something that should help him come round.'

'Drug addict, is he, then?'

'Possibly. I doubt it. We'll have to wait and see. How did you get hold of him?'

'A motorist brought him in getting on for half an hour ago. Said he found him wandering about in the road near one of the entrances to the Great Park. Of course, we thought he was tight at first.'

'There's a similarity. The quiet kind of drunk. I can't think of any better way of making a man docile. You know, sergeant, there's something nasty about this, whatever it is. Who is our friend?'

'Name of Bond, James Bond. Business address in London, Regent's Park somewhere. I gave 'em a ring on the off-chance and they said to hold him and not let anyone but a doctor see him and they'd send a man down right away. The Inspector should be here soon, too. Went off just about two minutes before this chap arrived. Pile-up on the M4. It's getting to be quite a night.'

'Indeed... Ah, I think we may get something now... Mr Bond? Mr Bond, you're quite safe and in a very few minutes you'll be completely yourself again. I'm Doctor Allison and these officers are Sergeant Hassett and Constable Wragg. They are only here for your protection. You're in a police station but you've done nothing wrong. All you need do is rest a little.'

James Bond looked up slowly. There was nothing left of the grey tangle that had obscured his vision and hearing. He saw a very English face with an inquisitive pointed nose and dependable dark eyes, eyes that at the moment were puzzled and concerned. In the background were two solid-looking men in dark-blue uniform, a battered desk with a telephone, filing cabinets, wall maps and charts, a poster announcing a Police Ball: recognizable, everyday, real.

Bond swallowed and cleared his throat. It was very important that he should get exactly right what he knew he had to say, the more so since he was not as yet quite sure what all of it meant or why he had to say it.

'Put your feet up for a bit, Mr Bond. Bring that chair over, Wragg, will you? Could you organize a cup of tea?'

Now take it slowly, word by word. 'I want,' said Bond in a thick voice, 'I want a car. And four men. Armed. To come with me. As quickly as possible.'

'Mind wandering, poor chap,' said the sergeant.

The doctor frowned. 'I doubt it. You'd get confusion all right, but not actual fantasy.' He leant down and put his hands firmly on Bond's shoulders. 'You must tell us more, Mr Bond. We're all listening. We're trying to understand.'

'Admiral Sir Miles Messervy,' said Bond distinctly, and saw the sergeant react. Bond's mind was clearing fast now. 'There's been some trouble along at his place. I'm afraid he's been kidnapped.'

'Go on, please, sir,' said the sergeant, who had picked up the telephone before Bond had finished speaking.

'There were four men. They'd given him a shot of the same stuff as me. I don't quite know how I got away.'

'You wouldn't,' said Dr Allison, offering Bond a cigarette and a light.

Bond drew the life-giving smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled luxuriously. He began quickly and coolly to consider, analyse, predict. The immediate conclusion he arrived at appalled him. He jumped to his feet. At the same moment the sergeant put down the telephone.

'Number unobtainable,' he said grimly.

'Naturally,' said Bond. 'Give me that thing.' When the police operator answered he said, unconsciously clenching his fist, 'London Airport. Priority. I'll hang on.'

The sergeant looked at him once and left the room at a run.

While Bond was rattling off descriptions of M and the four enemy agents to his friend Spence, the Security Officer at the airport, the Inspector arrived, followed a minute later by Bill Tanner. Bond finished talking, hung up, drew in his breath to start explaining the position to Tanner, but just then the sergeant returned. His round, good-natured face was pale. He addressed himself to Bond.

'I got a patrol car up to the house, sir,' he said, swallowing. 'They've just come through. I'm afraid it's too late for your armed men now. But we shall need you, Doctor. Not that you'll be able to do very much, either.'

Chapter 3

Aftermath

THE BODY of the thin-faced man lay on its back in the hall at Quarterdeck. There was not much left of the face. Parts of it and what had been situated behind it could be seen here and there on walls and floor. The Luger bullet was half an inch deep in one of the panels.

Ex-Chief Petty Officer Hammond had been shot twice, once in the chest and again, to take no chances, in the back of the neck. It was assumed that he had been disposed of immediately on answering the front door, and that the use of a small-calibre weapon in his case had been dictated by the necessity of not leaving any traces in the hall that would have alerted Bond on his arrival. The corpse had been dumped in a heap in the kitchen, where the third body was also found.

Mrs Hammond at least could have known nothing of what happened to her. The killer, using the same light gun, had got her with a single well-aimed shot through the back of the head as she stood at the stove or the sink. She was lying close to where her husband had been dropped, so close that the back of his outflung hand rested against her shoulder. It was as if he had tried to reassure her that he had not left her, that he was near by, as he had been for twenty years. Since Hammond had been demobilized just after the war and had come with his wife to serve M, the two of them had not spent a night apart.

Bond thought of this as he stood beside Tanner and the Inspector and looked down on what was left of the Hammonds. He found himself beset by the irrelevant wish that he had listened more appreciatively to Hammond's anecdotes about pre-war naval life at the Pacific Station, that he had had the time and the kindness to thank and encourage Mrs Hammond for her self-dedication to M during his illness. Bond made a muffled sound between a sob and a snarl. This act, this casual sweeping aside of two lives just to save trouble - there were half a dozen ways in which the Hammonds could have been neutralized with the minimum of violence and without risk to the enemy - was not to be endured. The men who had done it were going to die.

'It's a good job you didn't fall in with my suggestion about coming along here tonight, Bill,' said Bond.

Tanner nodded without speaking. Then the two turned away and left the bodies to the doctor and the police experts. Not that any of them was expected to add to what was already known or self-evident. The Hammonds' fate was an open book. There remained, of course, the question of the shooting of the thin-faced man.

In M's study a minute later, Bond and Tanner decided to start with that. Each tacitly avoiding the straight-backed Hepplewhite armchair where M habitually sat, they had settled themselves on either side of the low stone fireplace that was bare and swept clean at this time of the year.

'Perhaps his boss had him knocked off in a fit of rage,' suggested Tanner. 'By what you told me on the way here our dead friend didn't handle himself too cleverly in the scrap upstairs. Could be considered to have helped to let you escape, anyway. But then these people don't sound as if they're given to fits of rage. Of course, a man with a bloody nose is to a certain extent conspicuous. Would that have been enough to earn him a bullet? Rather frightening if it was.'

Before replying, Bond picked up his Scotch and soda from the silver tray that sat on a low table between the two men. He had had to harden his heart to bring in the tray from the kitchen, where Hammond, as on previous Tuesdays, had had it ready for his arrival.

'That would fit the airport theory.' Bond drank deeply and gratefully. 'It would be a big risk already to walk M through Immigration, passing him off if necessary as under the weather or whatever they had lined up. Presumably it would have been a still bigger risk if they'd managed to persuade me to join the party. Or would it? Anyway, we can leave that for now. The point is that, whatever the risk, it was one they'd been able to prepare for to the _n__th degree. But here was something they couldn't have taken into account. A man who'd clearly just been in some sort of serious fight would be just the thing to arouse that fatal flicker of official curiosity. Yes, it fits. And yet...'

Tanner glanced at him mutely and fumbled for a cigarette.

'I can't help feeling there's something else to it. Some added point. After all, why leave him here? That's making us a present of God knows how much information. You'd have expected them at least to try to hide the body.'

'They hadn't time,' said Tanner, looking at his watch. 'This must all have been planned to the minute. And talking of time, when are they going to get that damned telephone repaired? We'd better start looking for - '

'No rush there. I wish there were. With the shifts changed an hour or more ago Spence's job won't be easy. He's having to rout out the people who were on duty earlier on. And that Security staff is tiny. They'll be up to their eyebrows pushing the descriptions out to all the other airports. And in any case...'

A police constable in shirt-sleeves knocked and entered. 'Phone's in order, sir,' he said. 'And London Airport Security informed as you requested.'

'Thank you.' When the man had gone, Bill Tanner put his glass of Scotch down with a slam. 'It's all hopeless anyway,' he said with sudden violence. 'Let's get moving, James. Every sort of important person has got to be collected and told about this, and fast. What are we hanging about here for?'

'If we move we're off the telephone. And we've got to be sure there's nothing more this end. The police will find it if there is. That Inspector Crawford's a competent chap. What do you mean anyway, hopeless? With a call gone out to the seaports and - '

'Look, James.' Tanner got up and began pacing the faded Axminster rug. He studied his watch again. 'They've had something like four hours start now... '

Bond drew in his breath and bit his lip hard. 'Christ, you don't know how I wish...'

'Don't be a fool, man. Nobody could have done more than you did. Pull yourself together and listen to me.'

'Sorry, Bill.'

'That's better. Now. Four hours. They wouldn't have counted on much more whatever had happened. They'll have cut it as fine as they dared in the first phase. If they took him out by aeroplane, then with the airport not much more than down the road from here they'd have been in the air in well under an hour. Another hour at the most to Orly or Amsterdam, or these days as far as Marseilles - and they _must__ have gone somewhere comparatively near, they wouldn't have dared spend six or eight hours in transit and risk being met by the wrong people at the far end.... Well then. That's two hours. Another half hour at the outside for Customs and Immigration. By now they could be, what, seventy, eighty miles from their touchdown? Or out at sea?'

'What makes you think they aren't in East Berlin?' asked Bond flatly. 'Or most of the way to Moscow?'

'I don't know.' With shaking fingers, Tanner chain-lit another cigarette and thrust his hand through his thinning grey hair. 'It doesn't sound like that lot. Too grown-up these days. That's what I think, anyway. Perhaps it's only what I hope.'

Bond had nothing to say.

'Perhaps they haven't taken him out at all. That might be their best bet. Hole up with him in Westmorland or somewhere and operate their plot from a derelict cottage. Whatever the hell their plot may be. No doubt we shall find out in their own good time. We've had it, James. We've lost him.'

The telephone rang noisily from its alcove in the hall (M would not have the hated instrument where he could see it). Tanner jumped up.

'I'll take it. You relax.'

Bond lay back in his chair, half-listening to the intermittent drone of Tanner's voice in the alcove. The muffled noises of the police at work, their deliberate footsteps, sounded false, out of key. The study where Bond sat - he noticed for the first time M's old briar pipe lying in a copper ashtray - looked even more museum-like than earlier. It was as if M had left not hours before, but weeks or months. A derelict stage-set rather than a museum. Bond had the uneasy fancy that if he got up and pushed his hand at the wall, what was supposed to be stone would belly inwards, like canvas.

Tanner's abrupt return brought Bond out of his daze - evidently traces of the drug still lingered in his system. His friend's face was tightly drawn at the forehead and cheekbones. He looked ghastly.

'Well, James, I was nearly right. A great consolation.' Tanner went back to pacing the rug. 'Shannon. They went off on Aer Lingus flight 147A at twenty to nine. The fellows on duty remember them all right. The whole thing was stage-managed down to the last detail - pattern of previous trips by supposedly the same four people, a diversion timed to the second, the lot. I wonder what they had lined up for you and our pal in the hall. Anyhow...

'They landed at Shannon at half-past nine or so. That's. . . nearly two and a half hours ago, while you were still wandering about in that wood. So they're away. Met by car at Shannon and driven off to God knows what remote inlet, any one of hundreds. I know that coast a bit. It must be the most deserted in the whole of Western Europe. After that... you can bloody well take your choice. Boat out to ship, or to submarine for all I know - this thing looks as if it's on that kind of scale. Rendezvous with flying-boat a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Then anywhere in the wide world.

'So that's that,' Tanner finished. 'We'll pass the word to the Irish coastguards and navy. Tell 'em to keep a special lookout. Very useful that'll be. And we'll get a man over there tonight. He'll be a great help, too. Then there are various parties in London we can at least tell to foregather. Come on, James, let's go and do a bit of telephoning. There's nothing more for us round this place. It always did give me the creeps.'

Inspector Crawford, a tall saturnine man in his forties whom Bond had immediately taken to, came up as they finished the last of three calls. He carried a large unsealed manilla envelope.

'We're about through here, gentlemen. If you want to get away I think you'll find all you'll really want in this.' He handed Tanner the envelope, then gestured without looking at the body on the floor. 'Contents of the man's pockets. Rather a surprise that there were any, I suppose. You'd have expected them to try to cover up his identity. Clothing labels, all standard, I'm afraid. No laundry tags. Three pretty good photographs of what there is of him, and a set of fingerprints. Height and approximate weight. Distinguishing marks, none. If he's on your files at all, though, I reckon you should be able to turn him up in no time without any of this clobber, Mr Bond having had a good look at him. Oh, and doctor's preliminary report, just for completeness. That's the lot. I'll have to ask you to sign for the dead man's effects, sir. And we'll be wanting them back when you've finished with them.'

Tanner scrawled on the proffered slip. 'Thank you, Inspector. I'm afraid we must ask you to accompany us to London right away, to attend a meeting that may go on for the rest of the night. Most of it won't be your concern but somebody's certain to complain if you don't turn up to give the complete police picture. I expect you understand.'

Crawford nodded impassively. 'I expect so, sir. Now if you'll just give me two minutes I'll be at your disposal.'

'You realize of course that there's a complete black-out on this business? Tell the GPO to put the telephone out of order again as soon as everybody's out of here. Thank you for all you and your men have done. We'll see you outside when you're ready to go.'

As they moved off, Bond glanced down at the corpse of the man whose death he had unwittingly brought about. It lay there waiting to be removed and disposed of according to routine, a piece of debris, totally insignificant. Bond hated and feared the half-unrevealed purpose that had brought the man to this house, but he could not repress a twinge of pity at the thought of the casual chance that had led to this summary removal. Was this how James Bond would end, shot in the head and flung aside like a heap of unwanted clothing to smooth out a kink in somebody's plan?

The immense blaze of starlight in the velvety late-summer sky outside drove away these thoughts. Good flying weather. Where were they taking M? Never mind that for now: no point in guessing in a vacuum. There was a faint chill in the night air and Bond realized he was hungry. Never mind that either. There would be nothing to eat before London, if then.

At Tanner's side, Bond passed the dark bulks of the two police cars and made for his Bentley, still where he had parked it an age ago. Tanner put a hand on his shoulder.

'No, James. You're riding with me. I'll see about your car tomorrow.'

'Nonsense, I'm perfectly all right.'

'And we can't be sure the thing isn't booby-trapped.'

'That's nonsense too, Bill. They wanted me alive and uninjured.'

'Then they did. Nobody knows what they might want now.'

Chapter 4

Love from Paris

SIR RANALD Rideout, the Minister concerned, was not best pleased at being abruptly summoned from the late stages of a dinner-party given by an Austrian princess whose circle he had been trying to infiltrate for years. The telephone message stressed the magnitude of the matter requiring his attention without revealing anything about what it was. The underling who spoke to him had rung off before Sir Ranald had had the chance to protest at the impropriety of his being allowed no say in the arrangements for this meeting or conference or whatever. So he was to present himself at the offices of the Transworld Consortium, i. e. the headquarters of the Secret Service, was he? That confounded old admiral, notorious for his obstinate resistance to political guidance, was in trouble, then. The fellow should have been given the push long ago. It was a more than mildly irritated Sir Ranald who, at the horrid hour of one twenty in the morning, trotted up the steps of the big grey building that overlooks Regent's Park, an agile little figure of sixty in perfect condition, this as a result not of any self-discipline but of that indifference to food and drink which so often accompanies interest in power. The facts were baldly laid before him. He looked about with angry incredulity at the faces ranged round the battered oak table: the Permanent Under-Secretary to his Ministry, Assistant Commissioner Valiance from Scotland Yard, the man whose office this was and whose insignificance was shown clearly enough by the condition of its furnishings, the spy called Bond who seemed responsible for the mess, and some policeman or other from Windsor.

'Well, gentlemen, really.' Sir Ranald inflated his cheeks and blew out long and noisily. 'A pretty kettle of fish, I must say. This will have to go to the Prime Minister. I hope you realize that.'

'I'm glad to find you agree with us, sir,' said Tanner in level tones. 'But, as you know, the Prime Minister flew to Washington today - yesterday. He can't do anything about this from there, and I doubt if he'll be able to cut short his stay. So it looks as if we must push ahead ourselves.'

'Of course we must.' This time Sir Ranald sniffed emphatically. 'Of course we must. The question is where. Push ahead where? You people seem to have nothing at all that can be called information. Extraordinary. Take this man you found shot. Not the servant, the gangster or whatever he was. All you appear to know about him is that he met his death by a bullet shattering his skull. Most helpful. Is that really as much as anybody can say? Surely something must have been found on him?'

Inspector Crawford spoke up at once and Sir Ranald frowned slightly. One might have expected the least important man present to satisfy himself that none of the comparatively senior people wanted to answer, before pushing himself forward. At least, one might once have expected that.

'Oddly enough there were some belongings, sir,' the Inspector was saying. He nodded towards the small heap of miscellaneous objects that Valiance was turning over. 'But they don't tell us much. Except - '

'Do they tell us anything about who the man was?'

'Not in my view, sir.'

Valiance, dapper as ever in the small hours, glanced over at Crawford and shook his head in agreement.

'Then may I take leave to ask my question again? Who was he? Assistant Commissioner?'

'Our fingerprint files are being gone over now, Sir Ranald,' said Valiance, his direct gaze on the Minister's face. 'And of course it's conceivable that this chap will be on them. We're also checking abroad, with Interpol and so on, but it'll be a couple of days at least before all the returns are in. And I feel strongly that we shan't learn anything useful from anywhere. To my way of thinking, the mere fact that he was left behind like that, just as he was, proves that knowing his identity wouldn't help us.'

'I agree with Valiance,' said Tanner. 'We're in the same position here exactly and I'm sure we shall get the same results, or lack of them. No, sir - this chap'll turn out to be one of a comparatively new type of international criminal who's been turning up in rather frighteningly large numbers in the sabotage game, terrorism and so on. They're people without a traceable history of any sort, probably white Africans with a grudge, various fringe Americans - but that's all supposition because they turn up out of thin air. The lads in Records here call them men from nowhere. Damn silly twopenny-blood sort of name but it does describe them. What I'm saying, sir, is that it's a waste of time trying to find who this fellow was, because in a sense he wasn't anybody.'

'You're guessing, aren't you, Tanner?' said Sir Ranald, crinkling up his eyes as he spoke to show he wasn't being personally offensive yet. 'Just guessing. Educated guess-work no doubt you'd call it but that's a matter of taste. I'm afraid I was trained to observe carefully, impartially and thoroughly before venturing on any theorizing. Now... Bond,' the Minister went on with a momentary expression of distaste, as if he found the name unaesthetic in some way, 'you at any rate saw this man when he was alive. What could you say about him that might help?'

'Almost nothing, sir, I'm afraid. He seemed completely ordinary apart from his skill in unarmed combat, and he could have learnt that anywhere in the world. So...'

'What about his voice? Anything there?'

Bond was tired out. His head throbbed and there was a metallic taste in his mouth. The parts of his body on which the dead man had worked were aching. The ham sandwich and coffee he had grabbed in the canteen were hardly a memory. Even so, he would not have answered as he did if he had not been repelled by the politician's air of superiority in the presence of men worth twenty of him.

'Well, he addressed me in English, sir,' said Bond judicially. 'By my standards correct English. I listened carefully, of course, for any traces of a Russian or Albanian or Chinese accent but could detect none. However, he spoke no more than about twenty words in my hearing, which may have been too small a sample upon which to base any certain conclusions.'

At the other end of the table, Valiance went into a mild attack of coughing.

Sir Ranald appeared not in the least put out. He flicked his eyes once at Valiance and spoke to Bond in a gentle tone. 'Yes, you weren't about the place very long, were you? You were anxious to be off. I congratulate you on your escape. No doubt you would have considered it ridiculously old-fashioned to have stayed and fought to save your superior from whatever fate was in store for him.'

The Under-Secretary turned away suddenly and stared into an empty corner of the room. Inspector Crawford, sitting opposite Bond, went red and shuffled his feet.

'Mr Bond showed great courage and resource, sir,' he said loudly. 'I've never heard of anybody who could hope to subdue four able-bodied men single-handed and unarmed let alone being full of a drug that incapacitated him a few minutes later. If Mr Bond hadn't escaped, the enemy's plans would be going ahead _in toto__. As it is, they'll have to be modified, they may even be fatally damaged.'

'Possibly.' Sir Ranald beat the air with his hand. With another grimace of displeasure, he said to his Under-Secretary, 'Bushnell, get a window open, will you? The air in here isn't fit to breathe with three people chain-smoking.'

While the Under-Secretary hastened to obey, Bond was hiding a grin at the memory of having read somewhere that hatred of tobacco was a common psychopathic symptom, from which Hitler among others had been a notable sufferer.

Rubbing his hands briskly, as if he had won an important point, Sir Ranald hurried on. 'Now just one matter that's been bothering me. There doesn't seem to have been any guard or watch on Sir Miles's residence. Was that normal, or had somebody slipped up?'

'It was normal, sir,' said Tanner, who had started to redden in his turn. 'This is peacetime. What happened is unprecedented.'

'Indeed. You agree perhaps that it's the unprecedented that particularly needs to be guarded against?'

'Yes, sir.' Tanner's voice was quite colourless.

'Good. Now have we any idea of who's behind this business and what its purpose is? Let's have some educated guesses on that.'

'An enemy Secret Service is at any rate the obvious one. As regards purpose, I think we can rule out a straight ransom job, if only because they could have operated that from inside the country and so avoided the immense risk of getting out with Sir Miles, and presumably Mr Bond too if they'd managed to hold on to him. And why hold two people to ransom? The same sort of reasoning counts against the idea of interrogation or brainwashing or anything of that sort. No, it's something more... original than that, I'm certain.'

Sir Ranald sniffed again. 'Well? What sort of thing?'

'No bid, sir. There's nothing to go on.'

'Mm. And presumably we're in a similar state of non-information about where this scheme, whatever it is, whoever's running it, is going to be mounted. Any reports of unusual activity from any of your stations abroad?'

'No, sir. Of course, I've asked for a special watch to be kept.'

'Yes, yes. So we know nothing. It looks as if we have merely to wait until the other side makes a move. Thank you, all of you, for your help. I'm sure none of you could have done more than you have. I'm sorry if I may have seemed to suggest that you, Mr Bond, could have acted in any other way. I spoke without thinking. Your escape is the one redeeming feature of this whole affair.'

The Minister spoke with what sounded very much like simple sincerity. The thought had occurred to him - belatedly, but then he had always been prone to let his impatience with lower-echelon muddle run away with him - that although he was not in fairness accountable for the abduction of the head of the Secret Service, his Cabinet colleagues as a whole held the view of fairness common to politicians. In other words, this business could be turned into a most useful weapon in the hands of anybody who might want to get him pushed out. Envy, spite, ambition were everywhere around him. These people here might not be the most satisfactory or effective allies, but they were the only ones immediately available. He turned to Valiance, whom he had several times in the past dismissed as an over-dressed popinjay, and said in a humble tone, unconsciously smoothing the front of his own frilled azure evening shirt as he spoke, 'In the meantime, Assistant Commissioner, what about the Press? A "D" notice, do you suppose? I'm more than content to be guided by you.'

Valiance did not dare glance at Bond or Tanner. 'I think not a black-out, sir. The Admiral has plenty of connections and we don't want them turning inquisitive. I suggest a short tucked-away paragraph saying his indisposition continues and he's been advised to take a thorough rest.'

'Excellent. I'll leave that in your hands, then. Now - any more suggestions? However tentative. Anybody...?'

Crawford stirred. 'Well, sir, if I may just...'

'Go on, Inspector. Please go on.' Sir Ranald crinkled his eyelids. 'Most welcome.'

'It's this piece of paper with the names and numbers which we all had a look at earlier. We found it crumpled up in a corner of the man's wallet. I understand the cipher people are working on a copy of it still but are just about sure it's a waste of time, there being so little of it. I wondered whether we might perhaps take another look at it ourselves. Have we considered the possibility that these are telephone numbers?'

'I'm afraid there's nothing in that, Inspector,' said Tanner, rubbing his eyes wearily. ' "Christiana" looks like Christiania in Norway, of course, and "Vasso" might be Vassy in northeastern France, and we all know where Paris is, but it didn't take us ten minutes to establish that these numbers aren't possible for the exchanges at those three places, any more than, say, Whitehall 123 would be for London. If they are telephone numbers they're probably coded on some substitution system we've no means of cracking, so we're back where we were. Sorry to disappoint you.'

'Might they be map references?' put in the UnderSecretary.

Tanner shook his head. 'Wrong number of figures.'

'Actually, sir,' the Inspector went on with quiet persistence, 'I wasn't really meaning it quite like that. Take the one we haven't mentioned - Antigone. What does that suggest to people?'

'Greek play,' said Tanner. 'Sophocles, isn't it? Code word for God knows what.'

'That is possible, sir. But Antigone isn't only a Greek play, is it? It's also a Greek name. A woman's name. I don't know whether it's still in use there, but I do know a lot of these classical names are. Now Christiana. Doesn't that sound like a woman's name too, on the lines of Christine and Christina and so on? Christiana might be the Greek form. And Paris, of course, is another Greek name.'

Abruptly, Bill Tanner got to his feet and hurried to a telephone that stood on an ink-stained and cigarette-burned trestle table by the wall.

'As regards Vasso, I'm afraid I don't - '

'What are you leading up to, Inspector?' broke in Sir Ranald, with a return to his earlier manner.

'That our man was going to Greece and had got some telephone numbers off somebody so that he could fix himself up with some female company if he felt inclined. That these are telephone numbers on the same unstated exchange. A large one, presumably. Athens, as it might be. Or at least that that's what we were supposed to think, sir.'

Sir Ranald frowned. 'But Paris is a man's name. I hardly - '

'Quite so, sir, the abductor of Helen of Troy, the man who started the Trojan War. But if you'll just take another look...'

Crawford passed over the small creased sheet of cheap lined paper. The Minister, still frowning, hitched over his ears a pair of spectacles with heavy black frames and peered at the ballpoint scrawl. He sniffed. 'Well?'

'Immediately above "Paris" there, sir... It's not at all clear, but it looks to me like "If supplies fail" or "fall". If Antigone and the other two were away or he didn't like them or something then Paris was going to be able to fix him up.'

'Mm.' Sir Ranald took the spectacles off again and chewed at the earpiece. His eyes darted briefly to Tanner, who was still telephoning. 'What did you say about our being supposed to think this?'

'To me this looks planted, sir. If it's genuine it got into our hands as a result of at least three oversights. Not removing the body. Not emptying the pockets. Not at any rate searching the pockets. Well, now...'

'You mean it's a red herring?'

'No, sir, quite the contrary. It's a straightforward pointer to Greece, clear enough but not too clear.'

Tanner rang off and returned to his chair. He glanced over at Crawford with heightened respect.

'All four are perfectly possible modern Greek first names, according to Mary Kyris at the Embassy. And the figure groups could be telephone numbers in Athens, Salonika and a couple of other cities.'

'We're on to something, gentlemen,' said Sir Ranald, his eyes almost disappearing in crinkles. 'We're on to something.'

'And we know exactly what we're on to.'

James Bond's head had been sunk in his hands since he had last spoken a quarter of an hour earlier. He had seemed half asleep. In fact he had been striving to keep his exhausted brain ceaselessly analysing and evaluating the course of the discussion. Now, as his voice sounded through the low-ceilinged, smoke-laden room, he sat up in his chair and gazed at Tanner.

'Inspector Crawford is right. This is a plant. Or let's call it a lure. They were very anxious to include me in their plans. Clearly they still are. The names and numbers on that paper are a brilliant piece of improvisation designed to get me following in their track at full speed. Which of course I'll have to do. As far as that goes they could have written GREECE on that bit of paper and left it at that.'

Tanner nodded slowly. 'Where would you start?'

'Anywhere,' said Bond. 'Let's say Athens. It doesn't really matter, because I shan't need to look for them. They'll find me.'

Chapter 5

Sun at Night

THE ISLAND of Vrakonisi lies midway between the coasts of southern Greece and southern Turkey; more precisely, near the middle of the triangle formed by the three larger islands of Naxos, Ios and Paros. Like its more distant neighbour, Santorini, thirty miles to the south-west, Vrakonisi is volcanic in origin. It is what remains of the crater walls of an immense volcano extinct since prehistoric times. Ancient upheavals and subsidences have given it a ragged profile, with a misshapen semicircular backbone of hills rising in places to twelve hundred feet. From the air, Vrakonisi looks like the blade of a sickle drawn by a very drunk man. The tip of the blade has broken off, so that a hundred shallow yards of the Aegean lie between the main body of the island and a tiny unnamed islet off its northern end. The islet is inhabited, but apart from a couple of fishermen's cottages there is only a single house, a long low structure in brilliantly white-washed stone situated among palm and cactus at the farthest corner. The owner, a Piraeus yacht-builder, lets it to foreign visitors in the summer months.

This particular summer month the house had been occupied by two men whose passports said they were French; morose, taciturn men, their complexions suggesting little acquaintance with life in the sun. Their behaviour suggested the same thing. Pallid and uncomfortable-looking in gaudy bathing-shorts, they could sometimes be seen sprawled in canvas chairs above the little private anchorage (empty throughout their stay so far) or splashing grimly and very briefly across it. For long periods they were not to be seen at all. They had the air of men filling in the time until they could start to do whatever they had come all this way to do.

Their identity and purpose, and very much more, were well known to Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People's Liberation Army. The two men on the islet were out of sight of the colonel as he sat at the window of a smaller and even less accessible house than theirs, situated on the main body of the island. For even the chance of a look at them he would have had to go outside, make his way up an overgrown hillside to a point perhaps two hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and look down across the farther slopes, the stretch of water and the eighty-yard length of the islet, about a kilometre in all. But, ever since arriving here by water the previous night, Colonel Sun had not gone outside for a moment. The immediately recognizable Oriental facial type has in itself seriously hindered the expansion of Chinese infiltration and espionage in the Western countries, except for those, like the United States and Great Britain, where Orientals are not uncommonly seen. They are excessively rare in the Greek islands. Nobody on Vrakonisi, nobody outside China, come to that, must even have cause to wonder whether a Chinese might not be present here and now.

And nobody catching a glimpse of the colonel would have had to wonder about his origin. He was tall for a Chinese, nearly six foot, one of the northern types akin to the Khamba Tibetan, big-boned and long-headed. But the skin-colour was the familiar flat light yellow, the hair blue-black and dead straight, the epicanthic eye-fold notably conspicuous. It was only when you looked Sun straight in the eyes that he seemed less than totally Chinese. The irises were of an unusual and very beautiful pewter-grey like the eyes of the newborn, the legacy perhaps of some medieval invader from Kirgiz or Naiman. But then not many people did look Sun straight in the eyes. Not twice, anyway.

The colonel continued to sit on his hard wooden chair while darkness fell outside. Normally he was a voracious reader, but tonight he was attuning his mind and feelings for what lay ahead. Twice he smoked a cigarette, not inhaling, allowing it to burn away between his lips. They were British cigarettes, Benson & Hedges. Sun did not share his colleagues' often-expressed contempt - in some cases, he suspected, routine rather than sincere - for everything British. He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.

The men themselves (he had met none of their women) had often aroused his admiration. He had first encountered the British in September 1951, at a prisoner-of-war centre near Pyongyang in North Korea. There, as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern attached, in the capacity of Assistant Consultant on Interrogations, to Major Pak of the North Korean Army, he had had the opportunity of getting to know the British soldier intimately. After September 1953, when the last of them had been repatriated, his experience of Westerners had been confined almost entirely to Frenchmen, Australians, Americans: interesting types in many cases, but not up to the British - 'his' British, as he mentally referred to them. He had had to content himself with the odd spy captured inside China and the occasional US Army prisoner taken in South Vietnam who turned out to be a recent immigrant from the 'Old Country'. Fortunately, his reputation as an expert on, and interrogator of, the British was well known to his Service superiors and had even reached the ears of the Central Committee, so it was rare indeed that any British captive was not passed over to him. But the last of these occasions had been nearly six months ago. The colonel could not repress a gentle thrill of anticipation at the thought of tonight's reunion with his British and of the seventy-two hours of uninterrupted contact which were to follow. In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed.

There was a tentative knock at the door. Sun called amiably in English, 'Yes, please come in.'

The opening door let in a shaft of light which illuminated the outline of a girl. Also tentatively, also in English, a naturally harsh but not loud voice said, 'May I put on the light, Comrade Colonel?'

'Just let me close the shutters.... Good.'

The instant blaze of the unshaded bulb fell on a stone floor without covering, four whitewashed walls, a cheap nondescript table and an equally cheap and nondescript unoccupied chair. The interrogation-room atmosphere soothed the colonel, and at a time like this put him on his mettle too.

Now his eyes blinked neither at the sudden glare nor at the sight of the girl, which, although he had seen her a dozen times since arriving, they might well have done.

The Albanians, as a race, are not noted for their beauty. They are, of course, much less a race than the end-product of successive admixtures with the native stock - Latin, Slavonic, Greek, Turco-Tatar. Now and then this cocktail of heredities produces an individual physically remarkable even by the high standards of the eastern Mediterranean. Doni Madan, aged 23, citizen of Korçe in south-eastern Albania, strictly temporary holder of a Greek passport (forged in Tiranë with unusual competence, thanks to Chinese supervision), was physically remarkable.

She wore a pair of serpent-green Thai-silk trousers, close-fitting and low-cut, with a plain turquoise jacket of the same material and Ferragamo slippers in embroidered leather. Nothing else: even within twenty yards of the open sea, fine September nights in these latitudes can be hot and humid. Although this outfit had been selected purely to do its part in proclaiming Doni to be one of a standard house-party of welloff cosmopolitan holidaymakers, it did more for her than that.

She was above middle height, within a couple of inches of Sun, but slender and light of frame, narrow in the waist, richly rounded above and below. Her wide hips and ever-soslightly protuberant belly strained at the stuff of the pants; the swell of her breasts made the casually-buttoned jacket fall straight, well clear of her midriff. Asia was in her cheekbones and the strong planes of her jaw, Asia Minor in the all-but-black brown of her eyes, Venice in the straight but fully-moulded mouth. The light brown of her hair, cut in a simple bell, made an odd and exciting contrast with the delicate swarthiness of her skin. She stood there in the doorway of the bare room in an attitude of meek unconscious provocation that took no account of Sun as a man.

Anything more overt would certainly have been wasted. Sun Liang-tan was unmoved by women, though if challenged on the point he would have replied, rather mechanically, that he respected them as wives, mothers, and the bringers of comfort to men. He glanced somewhere in Doni's direction and said simply, 'Yes?'

'I am wondering if you wish any food,' said the quiet harsh voice.

Doni's Italian, Serbo-Croat and Greek were idiomatic and relatively accentless. Her English was neither, but she had no other means of communication with her temporary master. Being forced to use the enemy's language in order to work with European agents is a habitual source of irritation to Chinese subversives, but the mild irritation Sun now showed sprang from an opposite feeling.

He laced his fingers behind his long head and leant back as far as his chair allowed, making a curious semi-Westernized figure in his white tee-shirt and uncoloured cotton trousers. 'I was wondering,' he said slowly, 'if you wanted any food. If you would like, if you would care for something to eat. If you'd like me to rustle up - no, that's American - if you fancy a snack. Do try not to be a peasant in everything you say and do, my dear. And in any case, no. No thank you. Not just now. Let's hang on for a bit until our chums join us, shall we? They shouldn't be long.'

The colonel's English was correct enough - he had studied the language for two years at Hong Kong University - but his pronunciation would have been a joy to any phonetician. His quick ear and passionate desire to learn, allied to a total ignorance of the British dialectal pattern, had issued in a kind of verbal salad of regional peculiarities. The tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London worked in successive syllables against those of the governing class. The result might have sounded merely bizarre, even ridiculous, from another mouth than Sun's, accompanied by a different kind of gaze.

Doni looked to one side of him. 'I'm sorry, Comrade Colonel,' she said humbly. 'I know my English not good.'

'Better than the other one's, anyway,' said Sun with a tolerant smile. His lips were dark, the colour of dried blood, his teeth pointing slightly inwards from the gums. He went on: 'But enough of the Comrade Colonel. You sound like somebody in a progressive youth play. Call me Colonel Sun. It's more friendly. And enough of solitude - let's be sociable, eh? Where are the others?'

Followed by Doni, he walked out of the room, across a stone-flagged corridor, and into the main sitting-room of the house, a high-ceilinged, airy place with a cobbled floor that sloped gently and splendid shapely furniture of olive-wood, made in the island. The brightly-patterned modern rugs and cushions, the pair of run-of-the-mill abstracts on the roughcast wall, were incongruous. Open double doors gave on to a narrow terrace with folding chairs and a low table, and beyond there was nothing but the sea, flat calm and so brilliantly lit by a fast-rising full moon that it seemed both infinitely liquid and impossibly shallow, a sheet of water one molecule thick stretching out to the edge of the sky. Invisible wavelets made tiny hushing sounds on the stretch of pebbles between the two stubby moles of the anchorage.

Sun stood for a moment by the doors, keeping well into the shadow, and gazed out. He had not seen the sea for fifteen years, and the sight still fascinated him. It was the British element, on which the men of those cold islands had ventured out, long ago, to bring a quarter of the world under their sway. A perfect setting, thought Sun with a full heart, then turned back to the room.

The girl stretched out on the square-cut day-bed looked up quickly. She was Doni's height, had the same near-black eyes, wore the same kind of outfit (black pants, white jacket in her case), but her slimness made the other girl appear almost lumpish. Long-legged and high-breasted, with an exquisitely-shaped small dark head cut short in a boyish style, Luisa Tartini was Italian in more than her name. Like Doni, however, she was Albanian by nationality, carrying a similar passport. But she had none of her companion's docility of manner, and her glance at Sun now was edged with resentment and fear.

It seemed that Sun did not notice. He said pleasantly, 'What a lovely evening. And how very decorative you look, my dear.'

'Is boring,' said Luisa sulkily, shifting her slender legs so that Doni could sit beside her. 'What we doing here?'

'Your main function, as I told you, is to give our little party the appearance of a group of friends on holiday. Not very exacting. But tonight your duties will be, er, enlarged. You and Doni will put yourselves at the disposal of some men who will be arriving soon. That may prove rather more exacting.'

'Which men?' Luisa sat up so that her shoulder touched Doni's. 'How many?'

'Six in all. Two are reactionaries and needn't concern you. The other four are fighters for peace who have been on a dangerous mission. You must give them all the comfort in your power, both of you.'

The two girls looked at each other. Luisa shrugged. Doni gave a sleepy smile and put a brown arm round Luisa's waist.

'And now... Ah, right on time, Evgeny. What a very good servant you are. You should take it up professionally!'

The fourth member of the household, a stocky, bulletheaded Russian, was edging his way into the room with a tray of drinks. Evgeny Ryumin had considered himself underpaid and without prospects at the Soviet Embassy in Peking and had defected without fuss ten years earlier. His new masters had found him unimaginative but capable, also quite ruthless. These qualities, and his being European, suited him admirably to act as the man-of-all-work in Sun's group. He put the tray down on a sturdy round table and cocked his close-cropped head at the girls.

The colonel watched with a tolerant smile as Luisa was handed a vodka on the rocks and Doni a Fix beer, refused a drink himself, gestured genially for the Russian to take whatever he wanted.

Hands in pockets, Sun turned away and strolled towards the open doors. Then he halted, stood quite still for a moment, and glanced at his watch, a steel-cased Longines WD pattern which he had had for nearly fifteen years. Its former owner, a captain in the Gloucestershire Regiment, had died under interrogation as bravely as anyone Sun had ever met. The watch was a precious possession, a memento, not a trophy.

Sun called sharply over his shoulder, 'Evgeny. The lights. All of them.'

Ryumin put down the Fix he had just tasted. 'All?'

'All. What can't be concealed should be flaunted. This is the remainder of our little house-party arriving.'

Just below the crest of the hillside above the house, the two men from the islet lay under a stunted fig-tree and saw the terrace and anchorage spring into bright illumination. They watched the slow approach of the motor-boat, and waited without moving or speaking while lines were thrown and secured, laughter and cries of greeting were borne faintly to their ears, and three men came ashore, one of them needing some assistance, the other two springing forward to be embraced by the two women from the house. The servant dealt with some suitcases. The party retired indoors. The boat, its engine popping gently, slid out from the shore and turned west, no doubt preparing to circumnavigate the islet and make for the public anchorage in the middle of the inner curve of Vrakonisi.

On the hillside, one man looked at the other and spread his palms. The two got up and resumed their arduous and ineffective patrol. They had eleven more houses to check on tonight.

In the house, Sun Liang-tan sat and surveyed the three new arrivals. He said nothing.

The black-haired gunman, he who had followed James Bond from Sunningdale to Quarterdeck thirty hours earlier, spoke. 'Bond,' he started to say, but his throat was dry and he had to clear it. 'Bond got away from us in England.'

Sun nodded, perfectly expressionless.

'But steps have been taken to retrieve the error and there is every reason to hope that he will be in our hands within twenty-four hours,' the man said woodenly, as if repeating what he had learnt by heart.

Sun nodded again.

'HNC-16 only takes effect at once when administered intravenously,' put in the second man. 'He was struggling so much that I could only manage an intramuscular injection, which meant he could - '

He stopped with the last word half bitten off at a tiny gesture from Sun, a mere raising of one yellow hand from the wrist.

'He escaped after damaging Doyle's face severely enough to attract attention,' the first man went on as before. 'So Doyle was eliminated on the spot. After that everything proceeded according to plan. The double diversionary tactics at the airport, were successful in - '

Again the hand came up.

'Quantz brilliantly improvised a clue which he left on Doyle's body,' the recital continued, 'and which he estimates cannot fail to lure Bond to Athens in search of his chief. The details are in here,' said the gunman in a hurry, as if to forestall another flick of the hand, and passed Sun a sealed envelope. 'By now Quantz is in Athens himself. We put the flying-boat down off Cape Sounion and he set out for the shore in the rubber dinghy. He will contact our friends in Athens. Should Bond fail to appear after all, Quantz will arrange for the abduction of one of the regular British agents there and will transport him to this island. Quantz estimates that even in that event the operation will succeed in its main object.'

Sun sat on in silence for half a minute, tapping the envelope gently against his knee. Sweat showing on their faces, the two men stood before him in awkward attitudes. Luisa sat on the day-bed and furtively watched Sun; Doni, at her side, looked from one man to the other.

At last the colonel looked up, and the purple lips parted in a smile. Tension relaxed; somebody exhaled sharply.

Turning to the gunman, Sun said, 'Well, De Graaf, you certainly seem to have had the most damnable bad luck. But I must say it looks as if you've done everything in your power to put things right.' Sun was a fair-minded man. Further, that obsession of the Chinese secret services, the splitting-up of every team project into independent units directed from the top, had seen to it that his responsibility started and finished with the Vrakonisi end of the plan. And, although bitterly disappointed at the non-arrival of Bond, he could not consider betraying any such emotion in the presence of Westerners. 'But now you'll want to relax,' he went on. 'Full discussion in the morning. Help yourselves to a drink. Evgeny will prepare a meal to your requests. These girls are called Doni and Luisa. They've been instructed to please you in every way and at any time. Oh, and finally...'

Rising unhurriedly to his feet, Sun went over to the third of the newcomers, who had remained slumped in a chair since entering the room.

'Good evening, Admiral. I am Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army. How are you feeling, sir?'

M raised his head. Some of the old sharpness had returned to his grey eyes. He spoke firmly.

'I shan't be answering any of your other questions, you yellow-faced bandit, so I might as well make a start by not answering that one. Save your breath.'

'The main reason for your presence here, Western filth, is not the answering of questions. But answer them you will when the time comes. Rest assured of that.'

Sun's tone was as equable as ever. He continued, 'Now, Lohmann, take your patient away and put him to bed with a shot of something that'll give him a good night's sleep. Evgeny will show you where.'

The doctor, a bald, under-sized man in his forties, did as he was told.

Holding a tumbler half-full of vodka, De Graaf sauntered over to the day-bed. He looked each girl up and down in the manner of a farmer at a cattle-market. Finally he pointed at Luisa.

'The colonel said any time,' he murmured. 'So now.'

Luisa glanced at Doni, who talked emphatic Albanian for almost half a minute. At the end of it, Luisa shrugged, then nodded. Doni fixed her eyes on De Graaf.

'I like you to take me also. The other man disgusting. No hairs on his head and too little and hands like a bird. You take me also. We did this before. We do many things for you. You enjoy it.'

'Suits me,' said De Graaf, draining his glass and grinning. 'Lead on, my dears.'

Left alone, Sun Liang-tan strode to the terrace and spat as hard as he could towards the Aegean.

Chapter 6

The Shrine of Athene

JAMES BOND sat in the bar of the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens and waited for something to happen.

There was no alternative, no active policy in the least pursuable. Hours of four-cornered discussion between Bond, Bill Tanner, Head of Section G in London and, from time to time, Head of Station G in Athens over the radio link had finally produced something that, for want of a better word, had to be called a plan. Bond ran over the points in his mind as Tanner had scrawled them down on the back of a message-form in the office.

1. Ideally, 007 should identify the enemy agents entrusted with his abduction, evade capture and tail them to the next higher echelon with a view to locating M.

2. This can be ruled out as a practical proposition .007 will be unable to identify these agents in advance, and the degree of practical efficiency displayed in the Quarterdeck operation strongly suggests that they will render evasion of capture impossible.

3. Therefore, 007 must invite capture and depend on the following safeguards: (a) Operatives of Station G will keep 007 under surveillance at all times and trace the movements of the abduction party with a view to intervention in force.

(b) A midget homing-transmitter will await 007 on arrival in Athens for installation in his clothing.

(c) Escape devices in clothing.

(a) and (b): Head of Station G for action.

(b) and (c): Head of Q Branch for action.

Bond smiled thinly to himself. Station G was famous throughout the Service; its Head, a mild-looking Welshman called Stuart Thomas, had served long and valiantly as 005 before an eye defect had begun to impair his ability with firearms, since when he had run the Athens unit with unsurpassed skill and imagination. But even Thomas could not be expected to produce the kind of supermen demanded by Bill Tanner's 3(a), which the enemy must have taken into account and would surely guard against. While as for 3(b) and 3(c)...

A packet containing the midget transmitter had been awaiting Bond when he checked in at the hotel, and he had duly installed it in the compartment Q Branch had made for it in the heel of his left shoe. A miniature pick-lock was fitted into the right heel, and two wafer-thin tungsten steel hacksaw blades, hardly less pliable than the cloth itself, in the lapels of his charcoal-green mohair suit. Such devices grew more sophisticated every year; their possible hiding-places remained constant. Men like the ones who had planned and carried out the Quarterdeck operation would be unlikely to overlook any of them. Bond realized grimly that, on this assignment as on all his previous ones, the tools he basically had to depend on were invisible, intangible, within himself. They would be tested to the utmost by what lay ahead. Everything else was uncertain.

He had a look around the crowded, decorously noisy bar. Perhaps, merely for curiosity's sake, he would be able to pick out the local agents whose job it was to keep him under their eye. (Standard Service procedure, aimed at minimizing the possibility of betrayal under torture, dictates that no agent shall have any knowledge of his co-agents that is not absolutely necessary.) The place seemed full of conventional business and professional types and their women, Athenian bankers, ship-owners from the islands, politicians from Salonika, less readily classifiable visitors from Istanbul, Sofia, Bucharest - not forgetting the tourists - all with the appearance of solid respectability.

Bond had chosen to stay at the Grande Bretagne because it was public in the way he wanted and because he had always responded to its slightly seedy grandeur, inter-war in period with a thin veneer of modernism. He enjoyed the lofty foyer with its stained glass, green marble pillars and handsome Gobelin tapestry, a good copy of the original in the Louvre, depicting Alexander the Great entering Babylon on a fat, crafty-looking horse, a dignified figure at the head of his retinue but gone a bit blowzy, more like Cleopatra than a Macedonian prince. Bond accepted too the rather Frenchified style of the bar, all broken pediments, terracotta friezes and heavy, expensive silk curtains, plus the very un-French sedate courtesy of the waiters.

It was ten o'clock, the hour when fashionable Athens considers where it will dine. Bond was hungry. Arrival at the hot, crowded little airport under Mount Hymettus early that afternoon had found him too tired to eat. He had dropped his bags at the Grande Bretagne and gone straight to a pavement café in the square. A quick carafe of cheap wine in the sun had been an ideal prelude to seven hours of wallowing sleep in the comfortable bed of the room he always asked for, 706 on the top floor, far from quiet, but with a fine view of the Acropolis and a glimpse of the sea.

By now the enemy would have confirmed Bond's arrival, finalized his own plans and moved his units into position. Time to go. Bond signalled to the waiter. Almost simultaneously, a man sitting not far away, his back half-turned to Bond, made the same bill-summoning gesture. He looked the most comfortably bourgeois of all the bar's customers, and had been sitting chatting quietly with his companions, a replica of himself and two handsome but unglamorized women. Thomas's sort of people. No pairs of silent toughs in dark suits for him. It would be interesting to see whether...

Bond's bill came. He was reaching for his money when his eye was caught by a sudden movement at the little table on his other side. A tubby, swarthy man with a thick moustache, a Turk by the look of him, had seized the bare upper arm of the girl next to him, pulled her close and was talking into her ear in something between a whisper and a snarl. She was young and strikingly pretty, with the delicate features, full breasts and tobacco-blonde hair of the most attractive physical type in this region. Now she was straining away from the Turk's heavy head and writhing red mouth, trying to undo his hand, her tan-coloured eyes wide with what looked like shock and fright. Their glance fell on Bond, who was only a few yards off and the nearest unattached male.

'Please,' she called in English, not loudly but urgently. 'Please do something.'

Bond weighed it up briefly. He could perfectly well pay and leave. The waiters could deal quite adequately with the man if he persisted. On the other hand, Bond's instinct told him, as just now, that here was something relevant, something that stuck out from the innocently busy social scene round him. And the girl certainly was a beauty.... And there was nothing to be lost. He made his decision.

'Bring it to me in a moment, please,' he told the waiter, walked across and sat down next to the Turk on the corner of the green plush bench. 'Now what is all this?'

'He's annoying me,' said the girl with much resentment. 'He says awful, obscene things to me. I beg you to get rid of him.'

Bond's Greek was small but well-chosen. He leant close to the man, who was staring at him contemptuously, and said in his deadliest tone, '_Fíye apo tho, málaka__.'

This, though probably as obscene as anything the man had been saying to the girl, is a standard Greek insult. What made it effective was Bond's air of determination and his sudden grip on the man's nearer arm. There was a pause while the two men stared at each other and Bond tightened his grip, noticing half-consciously that the arm was distinctly harder than its owner's general corpulence would have suggested. Then the Turk quickly and quite calmly let go the girl, waited for his own arm to be released, rose to his feet, adjusted his jacket, and walked out of the bar. His departure did not go unnoticed by the two couples Bond had picked out earlier. 'Thank you,' said the girl in excellent American English. 'I'm sorry about that. I could see no other way without a public disturbance. You dealt with him very competently.' She chuckled suddenly, a warm-hearted, gay sound that showed remarkably quick recovery from the fear she had been displaying. 'You must have had practice.'

'Shall we have a drink?' asked Bond, raising his hand. 'Yes, I rescue girls from obscenity-spouting Turks all the time.'

'Thank you. Tzimas isn't a Turk. He just behaves like one. But he is obscene. My family have been pushing me at him - he has a good carpet-manufacturing business here. After this tonight my mother will talk to my father and there'll be no more pushing in that direction. Are you married?'

Bond smiled. 'No. I sometimes think I never will be. What will you have?'

'Ouzo and ice,' said the girl, glancing up at the waiter. 'Not that Sans Rival stuff you serve all the time. Have you Boutari?'

'Certainly, madam. And for you, sir?'

'The same. Plenty of ice.'

'You know ouzo?' The girl looked at Bond consideringly. 'You know Greece well?'

'Greece I know a little and love what I know. Ouzo I know much better: a Greek version of Pernod with a much more sinister smell but similar effects. Love would be too starry-eyed a word to use there.'

'That's a slander. And not accurate. The French took it from us and flavoured it with aniseed and dyed it green. Horrible! My name is Ariadne Alexandrou.'

'Mine is Bond, James Bond. How did you know just now that I spoke English?'

The girl laughed again. 'Most people do. And you look English, Mr Bond. Nobody could mistake you, not even for an American.'

'As a matter of fact I'm not strictly English at all. Half Scottish, half Swiss.'

'The English have swallowed you, then. What are you doing in Athens? Business or pleasure?'

'Business, but I hope to get some pleasure in while I'm here.'

Ariadne Alexandrou returned Bond's gaze for a moment without reacting to it, then turned away to observe critically as the two small tumblers of cloudy drink - the cloudiness curling whitely outwards from the ice-cubes like liquid smoke - were set in front of them and as much again of water added. Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, 'classical' look one associates with old coins, a carefully-finished sculpture overlaid with the softest tints of tan and white and olive and rose. The effect was set off by earrings in an ancient style, small thick hoops of beaten gold.

No doubt it was for her splendid appearance and obvious quickness of mind that she had been picked by the enemy - of whose presence behind the events of the past five minutes Bond was no longer in the smallest doubt. All the girl's apparent confidence and warmth had not been able to disguise the patness and predictability of the way she had established acquaintance with him. He guessed that, left to herself, she would have stage-managed things with more imagination. Some plodding middle-echelon spymaster had come up with that amorous-Turk routine. Encouraging: the other side were getting lazy. Bond brushed aside the thought that they could afford to.

The girl Ariadne had raised her glass and was looking at him with a kind of down-turning smile that might have been ugly on anyone else, but in her case only emphasized the marvellously delicate yet firm lines of her lips.

'I know the sort of thing you expect me to say now.' The smile turned upward. ' "In Greece, when we drink to someone, we say _ees iyían__, your health, or colloquially _yássou__." Well, sometimes we do, but half the time it's "cheers" and "here's looking at you" these days.' The smile faded. 'Greece isn't very Greek any more. Every year less. I'm being a little conservative and sentimental just by asking for ouzo. The newest people want vodkatini, or Scotch and soda. Are you free for dinner, Mr Bond? Shall we go out somewhere together?'

Despite himself, Bond smiled in his turn. He was beginning to enjoy the girl's tactic of wandering away from the point and then jumping back to it with a direct question. But the other half of his mind was cursing. Why hadn't he taken the simple, obvious precaution of getting something under his belt before allowing the enemy to make contact? He could visualize, as clearly as if it had already happened, the deserted street where she would lead him, the men closing in, the car, the long drive to and across the Bulgarian frontier, and then.... Bad enough on a full stomach, he thought wryly. Was there another way?

Bond sipped the deceptively mild drink, its flavour reminding him as always of the paregoric cough-sweets he had sucked as a child, before he answered. 'Splendid, I'd love to do that. But why don't we eat in the hotel? I've done a lot of travelling today and- '

'Oh, but nobody dines at the Grande Bretagne unless they have to. It's not exciting. I'll take you somewhere where they have real Greek food. You like that?'

'Yes.' Perhaps he should come part-way into the open. 'It's just that I should hate to be prevented from getting to grips with it. I've never liked being sent to bed without any supper.'

A flicker of alarm showed in the light-brown eyes, to be instantly followed by blankness. 'I don't know what you mean. All the good restaurants stay open late. What they have they will give you. The Greeks have the oldest tradition of hospitality in Europe. And that's not tourist-bureau talk. You'll see.'

The hell with it, thought Bond savagely - what could he do but play along? It was far too early to start trying to capture the initiative. He decided to give in gracefully.

'Forgive me,' he said. 'I'm too used to England, where you have to choose between dining early and reasonably well, and late and badly - if at all. I'm in your hands,' he added. And meant it.

Three minutes later they stood on the steps of the hotel between the Ionic columns. Constitution Square was ablaze with light: the BEA offices, Olympic Airlines, TWA on the far side beyond the rows of trees, American Express to the right, the gentler illumination of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the left. What Ariadne Alexandrou had said about the decreasing Greekness of Greece came to Bond's mind. In thirty years, he reflected, perhaps sooner, there would be one vast undifferentiated culture, one complex of superhighways, hot-dog stands and neon, interrupted only by the Atlantic, stretching from Los Angeles to Jerusalem; possibly, by then, as far as Calcutta, three-quarters of the way round the world. Where there had been Americans and British and French and Italians and Greeks and the rest, there would be only citizens of the West, uniformly affluent, uniformly ridden by guilt and neurosis, uniformly alcoholic and suicidal, uniformly everything. But was that prospect so hopelessly bad? Bond asked himself. Even at the worst, not as bad as all that was offered by the East, where conformity did not simply arise as if by accident, but was consciously imposed to the hilt by the unopposed power of the State. There were still two sides: a doubtfully, conditionally right and an unconditionally, unchangeably wrong.

The grey-uniformed commissionaire blew his whistle and a taxi, to all appearance innocently cruising, swung in to the kerb. Bond laid his fingers on Ariadne's upper arm as he walked her over. The flesh was firm and the skin deliciously cool. She spoke briefly to the driver, an elderly, paunchy type who, again, looked the soul of innocence, and they were away.

Ariadne studied Bond's profile. As always, her employers' instructions had been confined to essentials. She had been told only to induce the Englishman to go with her to a designated area where fellow-workers would take over the operation from her. What would happen to him afterwards was no concern of hers - officially. But, more and more, the question bothered her as a woman, a woman who had learnt to recognize on sight the kind of man who knew how to love. Bond was such a man. She was certain, too, that he found her desirable. She had always been a loyal servant of her cause, and not for a moment did she seriously contemplate disobeying orders, allowing Bond to take her home after dinner and do with her whatever he wanted. Ariadne only wished, passionately, that it had been possible. That mouth was made to give her brutal kisses, not to become distorted in a grimace of agony; those hands existed to caress her body, not to be stamped on by the torturer's boot. These images were so painfully vivid that she could find almost nothing to say as the taxi approached the slopes of the Acropolis.

At her side, Bond mistook her silence for that of tension. The next stage of the plan must surely be imminent. At each intersection he was ready for the sudden lurching acceleration to left or right that would bring them to the dark alley and the pick-up team he had imagined earlier. Automatically he began ticking off possible counter-measures in his mind before he remembered, sickly, that this time there must be no countermeasures, that capture was not the danger but the aim. And then, quite suddenly it seemed, the street widened, the shadows receded, the taxi, slowing, began to pull in towards a low incline at the top of which glittered the lights of an open-air restaurant. The driver stopped, switched off his engine and simply sat there.

Paying the man off, Bond resolved quite coolly to behave as if this were what it appeared to be, an encounter between an English visitor and a beautiful Greek girl anxious to entertain him in any way he wished. As they walked towards a narrow flight of steps that led up the incline, their shoulders touched for a moment. Bond laid his arm round Ariadne's waist and murmured, 'We're going to enjoy our dinner tonight. Nobody can stop that.'

She half-turned towards him, her back arching in what might have been either nervousness or desire, so that the swell of one firm breast brushed his arm. There was light enough for him to see an expression of defiant determination animate her lips and eyes. Her hand grasped his in an oddly warm, confiding gesture.

'Nobody shall,' she said. 'Nobody shall spoil it - James. It's all right for me to call you James? You must call me Ariadne, if you can manage it.'

'Ariadne. Easy. Four pretty syllables.'

'The original Ariadne was supposed to have been the girl friend of King Theseus of Athens. She helped him to kill the Minotaur - you know, that guy with the bull's head who lived in the maze. But then Theseus went and dumped her on the island of Naxos so that he could go and...'

She stopped speaking so abruptly that Bond gave her a quick glance. 'Go and do what?'

'Oh, I forget what came next. I suppose he went off and hunted the Calydonian boar or something. Anyway, Ariadne wasn't on her own for long. The wine-god Dionysus happened to be passing at the time and she latched on to him. Which is a funny coincidence because this restaurant's named after him. Well, what do you think? It's lovely, isn't it?'

From the top of the steps they looked over at the platform of the Acropolis, an enormous flat-topped chunk of rock adorned with temples of Athens's golden age, the lights of the theatre of Herodes Atticus showing near its base. Dominating everything was the moonlit length of the Parthenon, the temple which Bond had heard called the most beautiful building in the world. He could see it was beautiful, but was half distracted by the tiny teasing incident of a minute before. Ariadne Alexandrou had chopped off what she was saying exactly in the manner of somebody just not quite blurting out an important secret. But what could be either important or secret about which mythical exploit a legendary hero undertook after a former mythical exploit?

Bond gave up the problem. He felt a pang of tenderness at Ariadne's obvious anxiety that he should be impressed. 'I've never seen a view like it,' he said rather lamely.

'I'm glad it pleases you, because it's the main attraction here.' She began to move on. 'The food is rather pretentious and expensive, though you can have a reasonable meal if you know what to order. Will you leave this to me?'

'Gladly.'

Their table, set among cactus-beds, gave them a clear view of the Acropolis and also of the restaurant entrance, through which, a minute later, came the two couples Bond had decided were Thomas's people, talking as animatedly as before. He ignored them, not simply as an obvious precaution but because they brought with them an unpleasant reminder of reality. Fantasy was so much more attractive - the fantasy that he and Ariadne were destined to become lovers that night. He imagined what it would be like to slip the low-cut white piqué dress off those graceful shoulders and inhale the odour of the warm bared skin. Their eyes caught and held at that moment and Bond was certain she knew his mind, knew it and responded. But she too must be aware that what they both desired must remain a fantasy.

They began their meal with tender young crayfish, moist in the mouth and well set off by freshly-made mayonnaise. Bond savoured the scents of exotic foods, the pure warm East Mediterranean air, the surrounding atmosphere of relaxed, respectable enjoyment, the calm permanence of the ancient buildings in the middle distance, above all the girl opposite him, eating unfussily and with enjoyment.

She looked up and smiled. 'But you really like this food.'

'Of course. It's made of genuine materials and it tastes of them. What more could one ask?'

'Many of your countrymen ask for something different. Steaks, eggs and bacon, French fries.'

'The English call them chips.'

'Not here, not any more. It's French fries for years now. But you don't seem very English. Not English at all. I'm told it was the same with your Lord Byron.'

'I'm sure you mean to be kind,' said Bond, grinning at her, 'but I don't really enjoy being compared with Byron. As a poet he was affected and pretentious, he ran to fat early and had to go on the most savage diets, his taste in women was appalling, and as a fighter for liberty he never got started.'

Ariadne's mouth had set in a stern line. She spoke now in an even, measured tone, reasonable and yet forceful, the kind of tone which (Bond guessed) had been considered proper for ideological discussion in whatever political indoctrination centre had trained her. But her femininity triumphed over the propounders of Marx and Lenin, turning what might have been a schoolmarmy earnestness into a young and touching solemnity. Bond did not often find himself wishing so hard that the game was only a game.

'It's not proper for you to talk so lightly of one of your greatest compatriots,' said the severe voice. 'Lord Byron was a founder of the romantic movement in your literature. His exile from England was a victory of bourgeois morality. It was a tragedy that he died before he could lead his troops into battle against the oppressor.'

(Lesson 1, thought Bond sardonically. Emergence of the Greek nation. The War of Independence. Defeat of the Turks.)

'But his support of the Greek cause with money and influence was....' Ariadne faltered, as if she had momentarily lost her place in the script, and went on with something much nearer her normal warm eagerness, 'Well, no Greek can ever forget it, that's all. Whether he deserved it or not, he's a national hero, and you ought to be proud of him.'

'I'll try to be. I suppose I had him rammed down my throat too much at school. Childe Harold. Not a very lively chap, I thought.'

Ariadne was silent for a moment. Then she said quietly, 'It wasn't only him, of course. The English have helped us in many ways. Some time ago, not recently. But we haven't forgotten. In spite of Cyprus, in spite of... so much, we still- '

Bond could not resist it. 'In spite of our having helped your government to put down the Communists after the war?'

'If you like.' The light-brown gaze was candid and troubled. 'That was a terrible thing, all that fighting. For everybody. History can be very cruel. If only one could re-make the past.'

A faint flicker of hope, the first in this whole affair, arose in Bond's mind. However determined the enemy in general might be, this particular enemy was not whole-hearted. He had found someone who, given a massive dose of luck, could conceivably be turned into an ally.

This thought stayed with him while they talked lightly and with an enjoyable shared malice about the Greek rich set and the cavortings of shipping millionaires. Ariadne showed some inside knowledge, confirming Bond's impression that she must have come to Communism as a way of revolting against some sort of moneyed upbringing, rather than by local and family conviction, as an embittered child of the middle classes, not a militant ex-villager. Another point in his favour. Bond felt almost relaxed, finding the charcoal-grilled lamb cutlets with bitter local spinach very acceptable, enjoying the tang of retsina, the white wine infused with resin which some palates find musty or metallic, but which had always seemed to him the essence of Greece in liquor: sunshine-coloured, scented with warm pine-groves, faintly touched by the salt of the Aegean.

Then reality returned in short order. As they sipped the delicious, smoky-tasting Turkish coffee, Ariadne said quickly, 'James. I want to ask you something. It's eleven thirty. Tonight it's full moon and the Acropolis stays open late. If we leave now we can go and have a look at it. You must see it like this. It's indescribable. And I've a wish to see it again myself. With you. Will you take me? Afterwards... we can do anything you want.'

God! Bond's gorge rose at the vulgarity of it, the confident obviousness, the touch of footling melodrama in the choice of pick-up point. But he fought down his disgust and said with as good a grace as he could muster, 'Of course. I don't seem to have any alternative.'

Chapter 7

Not-So-Safe-House

THERE IS something to be said for the view that the Parthenon is best seen from a distance. Certainly the place was badly knocked about in an otherwise forgotten war of the seventeenth century. The restoration work, such as it is, is mainly incompetent, far less competent than could be expected from Germans, say, or Americans, who would have produced a reconstruction faultlessly in accord with the theories of the most respectable historians - and faultlessly dead. But by moonlight, with the bad joinery hidden and the outside world at a proper distance, those tall columns can seem much more than rows of battered antique marble. A dead world lives in them.

Even James Bond was not untouched by such feelings as he paced the southern aisle at Ariadne's side and waited for what must happen. The rocky, windy hilltop was thinly scattered with figures in ones and twos, late visitors, tourists or lovers, catching the final few minutes before the gates of the site were closed. Among them, of course, must be a party who were neither tourists nor lovers. Bond wasted no energy in trying to pick them out. They would come when it was time.

Quite soon it was time. Bond was watching Ariadne's face and saw its expression change. She turned to him and his heart filled with longing and despair.

'James,' she said. _'Khrisí mou__. Darling. Kiss me.'

He took her in his arms and her body strained against him and her firm dry lips opened under his. When they drew apart she looked into his eyes.

'Forgive me,' she whispered.

Her glance moved over his shoulder and she frowned. In a few more seconds they were there. Two of them. Both tallish, one plump, the other average build. Each had a hand in his jacket pocket. They took up positions either side of Bond. The plump one spoke to him in Greek, ordering him to come with them and adding something else he couldn't follow. The girl asked the other man a rapid question. An instant's hesitation, an equally rapid reply. Ariadne Alexandrou gave a satisfied nod, stepped close to Bond and spat in his face.

He barely had time to recoil before she followed up with her hands, no little-girl slaps but stinging blows that rocked his head. A stream of Greek insults, of which 'English pig' was the most ladylike, burst from her snarling mouth. Apart from the physical pain he felt only sadness. He caught a glimpse of the plump man's face split in an embarrassed grin.

Then, still hitting him, she switched to English. She used just the same abusive tone as before, so that she seemed to be cursing him in his own language. But what she said was: 'Listen to me. These men... are enemies.' Slap! 'We must get away. I'll take the fat one. You take' - slap! - 'the other. Then... follow me.'

She stopped, moved laughing towards the plump man, cracked her knee into his crotch and drove her stiffened fingers at his eyes. He squealed thinly. Without conscious thought Bond went for the other man, who had involuntarily half-turned, and chopped him cruelly at the side of the neck. The plump man was doubled up with his hands over his face. Bond brought his joined fists down on the base of the squat skull, grabbed Ariadne and ran.

Straight along the empty, shadowed colonnade to the western end, off the marble pavement on to the ground, uneven and awkward with its tussocks of slippery grass, past a pair of willowy youths with Germany written all over them, towards the entrance.... But Ariadne pulled him away to the left. Yes - danger of more men at the main gate. But was there another way out? He couldn't remember. Where were they going? No questions: he had instinctively chosen to stick to the girl and must continue to. Covering distance without falling took enough attention. He ran on.

Now a shout from behind them; another couple of astonished faces; the edge of a cliff too high to jump from, too sheer to clamber down in a hurry. But a stretch of wall joins the cliff at an angle, and in the angle a bunch of thick electric cables runs down. Down, then, down a face of irregular, almost vertical rock hanging on to the cables, the girl following. A gentler slope close to the wall, a final slither down more wall, helped by a single cable running horizontally. Run together across bumpy rock and earth - a yard away a jet of earth springing into the air. No report: silencer. Above them the sounds of scrambling and cursing. Now another drop, off the roof of some hut built into the hillside, a curving, descending path, a metal fence, and people ahead and below, hundreds of people. Easy to get over the fence, help the girl over, and join them.

At Bond's side, Ariadne laughed shakily. 'Theatre of Herodes Atticus. Performance ending. In all senses, I hope.'

Bond's glance was full of admiration. Whatever her motives might be, the girl had shown herself to be speedy, resourceful and determined: a valuable ally indeed. He said easily, 'It was clever of you to know about that alternative exit.'

'Oh, we plan carefully. I could draw a map of the Acropolis blindfold.'

'Who are "we"?'

'Maybe I'll tell you later. Right now it's your job to push us through this crowd, get us out to the street and grab the first taxi, by force if necessary. Show me how rough and rude and un-English you can be.'

The next few minutes were a hell of struggling and shoving. Bond felt the sweat running down his chest and back. The departing audience were cheerful, talkative, in no hurry, not in a mood to resent being jostled, not heeding it much either. Twice the two of them were separated, but at last reached the street together. There was a brief scuffle by a taxi, Ariadne keeping up a stream of indignant Greek about the airport and her husband's sick father, and they were in and driving off.

Ariadne lolled against Bond's shoulder, trembling violently, and her lips shook as she kissed his cheek. He put his arm round her shoulders and drew her close. She had fully earned her moment of reaction, of temporary collapse after the extreme and varied time of stress she had just gone through.. He murmured softly to her.

'I'm sorry I spat at you,' she whispered jerkily, brushing her cheek with her hand. 'But I thought I had to do it. And then all those mean things I said. I kept hoping you weren't understanding. And you can't think I meant- '

'You were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I don't know anybody who could have made a plan as fast as that and then carried it out so skilfully. You made fools of the pair of them. But now... I've got to ask you some questions. Haven't I?'

Her face was against his shoulder and he felt her nod.

'You were to decoy me to the Acropolis where I was to be picked up by two of your men. Correct?'

She began in a muffled voice: 'But I didn't want to- '

'We'll save that for now. Well, when the men appeared you realized they were the wrong men. How?'

Ariadne swallowed and pulled herself upright. 'We... there was to be a recognition signal just before they moved in. A thing with a handkerchief. They didn't give it. So I told them I was informed Legakis and Papadogonas were going to do the job. Then the guy said they'd been called away to another assignment. But as far as I know there's nobody named Legakis or Papadogonas who's working for us. So then I just gambled that they won't know enough English. And here we are. Can I have a cigarette?'

'Of course.'

Bond gave her a Xanthi, the pungent Macedonian blend he always smoked in Greece, lit one himself and inhaled deeply. He felt charged-up, almost exhilarated. Whatever lay immediately ahead the expected gloomy pattern of abduction and captivity had been broken. He was still free and the initiative was not all on the other side - or sides.

'Ariadne, who are you working for? You said you'd tell me.'

When she spoke she was herself again, quick and assured. 'I said maybe. It's still maybe. For the moment I can't tell you anything. And there's so much I don't know myself. Who were those men? It's frightening. The whole situation must have changed in the last few hours. It could be it isn't you we want after all. I don't see how it can be, now that this...'

She was thinking aloud, but her voice died away before she had done much more than express confusion. By now Bond had arrived at his own views about the scene on the Acropolis. For the moment he must follow through and put what faith he could in the midget transmitter in his shoe and the efficiency of Thomas's men. He said dryly, 'Where are you taking me?'

'To see my chief. He must talk with you. Obviously I can't force you to come with me. You can stop the driver now and get out and walk away. But please don't. We have to talk. Can you trust me?'

'Trust doesn't enter into it. I've got to come with you.'

'I don't understand that. Like most things about this.' Ariadne turned and gripped his hands. 'But I do have one reason for feeling happy. Oh, not happy, but less miserable than a quarter of an hour ago, when I thought I'd never see you again. We're still together. Sure, you've no reason to trust me on anything else, but you do believe me about this, don't you, James? That I want us to go on being together?'

'Yes.' Bond spoke as he felt. 'I believe you, Ariadne.'

They kissed, and for a moment left the world of enmity, violence and treachery in which they worked. Just then the taxi slowed and stopped. They moved apart. In the most everyday manner possible they got out and Bond paid off the driver.

It was a narrow street on the outskirts of the city towards the port of Piraeus, with a small bar in which a solitary old man dozed, a grocer's shop, a long building that might have been a school, a few houses of variegated shapes but all uniformly whitewashed. One was set a few yards back from the street behind rusty railings. Ariadne opened the gate, which squeaked painfully, and they crossed a tiny paved courtyard overgrown with vine and laurel. An underfed tabby cat rushed past them, squeezed through the railings and vanished. At the front door, Ariadne gave a complicated knock, reached out and gripped Bond's hand.

Bolts were thrown and the door opened. The man Ariadne had called Tzimas stood there. At the sight of them he gave a grunt of consternation, but a gun was in his hand within the time of a heartbeat. He motioned them in and shut the door, bolting it by feel while his eyes and gun remained on Bond. Ariadne led the way across a square tiled hall to an inner door. Bond followed her over the threshold.

There were two men sitting at the cheap barley-sugar-legged table. Both at once jumped up and began shouting questions at Ariadne. During the gesticulating three-cornered word-play that followed, Bond studied the men. One was in his thirties, dark, good-looking, a little overweight for his age: Greek. The other might have been anything between forty and sixty, grey, dried-up, close-cropped, speaking Greek with a heavy accent: Russian. No question about it. Well, that was one point checked off. Bond allowed himself to wonder whether M was in this house. Since the Quarterdeck affair he had, as far as possible, rigorously excluded M from his conscious thoughts, knowing that to speculate in that direction put him at the mercy of useless, senseless rage and hatred. So it did now for a moment: Bond gritted his teeth and concentrated on the present scene.

The Greek, biting his lip, hurried to an open roll-top desk littered with papers and began telephoning furiously. The Russian continued his dialogue with Ariadne for a time. He glanced at Bond more and more often, finally dismissed the girl with a flick of his hand and came over. He looked tired and frightened.

'Precaution, Mr Bond,' he said, his accent no less thick in English than in Greek. 'Take out your gun slowly and give it to me.'

Bond, with Tzimas at his side, did as he was told. The Russian gave the weapon a quick professional glance before reaching across and placing it on the desk.

'Now take a seat, Mr Bond. You like a drink?'

Bond, sitting beside Ariadne on a moth-eaten horsehair sofa, looked up in surprise. 'Very much. Thank you.'

The Russian signed to Tzimas. 'We have only ouzo, I'm sorry. It is known that you prefer whisky, but our budget wouldn't allow this. You call that cheese-paring?'

The thin mouth twitched upwards. You've got guts, thought Bond. You're scared half out of your mind and you're too proud to be seen yielding to it. He nodded and smiled back. Tzimas handed him a tooth-glass half-full of milky fluid. '_Fíye apo tho, málaka?__' said the man threateningly, glaring into Bond's face. Then he guffawed and slammed him on the back. '_Bravo! Ees iyían!__'

'Now, Mr Bond.' The Russian waved Tzimas away with a frown and leant back against the edge of the table. 'My name is Gordienko and my associate here is named Markos. We may have very little time, so I must request you to be intelligent and answer my questions. As you have gathered, it was arranged for you to be captured tonight and brought here. You are not captured but you come here just the same. Why?'

'What alternative had I? You must see that.'

'I do not. I don't. Now, please. What is the purpose of your visit to Greece?'

Bond stared. 'Good God, you brought me here!'

Gordienko stared back, then shrugged, 'Perhaps it was not intelligent of me to ask this now. Tonight all very confusing. But answer this. In your opinion, who has employed the men who have tried to capture you?'

'I don't know. Some powerful free-lance. Anyhow, it failed. Now let me ask you something. Where's your other prisoner? Is he here?'

'This is...' Gordienko looked defeated. 'I have no idea what you mean.'

'Now who's being unintelligent? Another one, then. What do you want with me? You've got me here at your mercy. Surely you can let me know that much.'

'I can,' said Gordienko briskly. 'Now, yes, I can. You're considered to be very important, Mr Bond. So important that the task to plan your capture is taken out of my hands and entrusted to - another official.'

(Ah! thought Bond; I might have guessed that Acropolis caper wasn't your style.)

'On capture you would be kept in custody here in this safe-house for approximately three days and then released. You would also be questioned as to your intentions in coming to Athens. These were my orders. Privately, I had much doubt as to the wisdom of the second item. It is known that you're very resistant to questioning.'

Bond suppressed a surge of excitement. He was nearly certain he saw the truth. Gordienko's obvious air of competence made it most unlikely that he would lie so pointlessly at such a moment. On this reasoning, he, Bond, had somehow strayed out of one conspiracy into another, and the men on the Acropolis had been the agents of the original one, the first, grand, terrifying conspiracy. And that meant that some agreement with this Russian was possible. But caution must be maintained; he was only nearly certain. In this kind of work there are no certainties until the job is over - if then.

He said in a level tone, 'I think I believe you. It rather looks as if we've been at cross-purposes, you and I. We're so used to there being two sides that we never remember there may be a third, hostile to both of us. I propose that, for the moment, we join forces.'

'Agreed.' Some of the tension left Gordienko's lined face. He signed again to Tzimas. 'Let us pool information. Some information, at least. My side is conducting an important, um, event in this region. I must assure you that it's not aimed against your side. It's designed to give strength to my side, naturally, but not so much at the expense of yours. _Efkharistó__.' Gordienko took the glass of ouzo from Tzimas and looked sidelong at it. 'I too would rather have something else, but at least the use of neutral drink will make sure that our respective national egos aren't offended.' He twitched his mouth as before, with a sort of distant warmth. 'Good luck.'

'We'll need it.' Bond lifted his glass and drank.

'So. My task has been to counter possible outside interference with this event. When your arrival became reported by our observers, I passed on the news and was instructed to move against you. Your presence here at such a time could not possibly be the result of chance. And it is known that you've had success in the past at interfering with events.... _Nai__?'

Markos had finished his telephoning. He came and faced Gordienko, shaking slightly and sweating a great deal. Now he burst into a torrent of Greek. Bond made out only scraps, but they sounded to him disconcerting scraps. To judge by their faces, Gordienko and Ariadne agreed with him.

When the recital was over and Markos had gone back to the telephone with fresh instructions, Gordienko turned to Bond. His face had gone a shade greyer. He carefully adjusted his wire-framed spectacles before he spoke.

'Our common enemy is proceeding with extreme ruthlessness. The men entrusted with your capture have been murdered.'

Ariadne caught her breath.

'As you know, Mr Bond, assassination of agents is exceedingly rare in peacetime. Not unknown, of course' - the mouth twitched briefly - 'but rare. I am afraid that nothing less can be intended than total obliteration of the event I spoke about. The consequences of this would be serious. Serious as far as possible war. And the forces at my disposal have suddenly become almost useless.'

With a convulsive movement, Gordienko drained his glass. He looked hard at Bond.

'There is a traitor in our organization. Nothing less will explain what happens. It shames me to admit this to you, but we are allies. And to say so reminds me. I should like us to shake hands.'

Bond stood up and complied without much reservation. The Russian's clasp was firm and dry.

'The official who planned your capture is clearly suspect.' Gordienko resumed his awkward leaning posture at the table. 'But two persons I can at once eliminate from suspicion. Both are with us now. Markos is in my company continuously since your arrival has been reported. Miss Alexandrou was not informed of the details of your capture. Tzimas I can't logically eliminate. But I trust him.

'My procedure therefore is plain. I must move with these three to another safe-house, at a location known only to myself, and operate as best I can from there. Moscow will send me replacements and Markos will recruit fresh local helpers, but these things must take time. And we have almost no time. Will you accompany us, Mr Bond, or do you wish to consult with your own people? If this, I should welcome from you now what information you think you may give.'

Before Bond could reply, the creak of the gate's hinges (purposely left un-oiled, he guessed) sounded clearly from the front of the house. Gordienko's mouth tightened. He nodded to Tzimas, who moved to the doorway. Silence. Then came the code knock on the front door Ariadne had used earlier. Markos relaxed. None of the other three did. Gordienko gave a sharp command. Tzimas moved steadily and silently across the dimly-lit hall, put the chain on the door, and opened it a couple of inches. After a pause of about a second he shut it again. Then he turned and walked back to the inner room, but less steadily than before, and not silently.

When Tzimas reached the waiting group he stared at Gordienko with his left eye. Where his right eye had been there was a red hole edged with black and purple. Finally his body seemed to lose all character, all substance, as if his flesh had turned to sand, and he fell at Gordienko's feet.

Chapter 8

Council of War

THERE WAS no time for doubts now. Bond snatched his Walther automatic when Gordienko threw it. Markos dived for the light-switch and the room went as dark as the bed of the sea. Somebody - Gordienko - began blundering towards the window. 'No,' said Bond urgently - 'they'll be expecting that. It must be the front.'

'Correct. Thank you.'

They moved into the gloom of the hall and Gordienko carefully took the chain out of the door.

'We will allow one minute so that their first vigilance will become dulled. Then we will leave in the following order: Markos, Mr Bond, Miss Alexandrou, and myself. Thirty yards down the street to the left there is an alley with high walls both sides. We will rendezvous there.'

Gordienko switched to Greek and Markos replied briefly. Then more silence. Ariadne caught Bond's hand and held it against her breast. He felt her heart beating, fast but not wildly. He kissed her hand.

'Good luck, my friends,' Gordienko stood with his fingers twisting the door-knob. Bond thought he saw him touch Markos lightly on the shoulder for a moment. Then the door swung wide and they were all running.

The enemy had left the gate ajar - a lucky, a near-vital oversight. All four had gained the shadowy, half-moonlit street by the time the first shots came. Flashes showed from the dark of a shop doorway on the opposite side. Immediately Markos gave a loud grunt of surprise, threw his head back, tottered a couple of paces and dropped. Bond fired three on automatic at the doorway as an aimspoiler, the shots banging out almost as one and filling the little cobbled street with a crackle of echoes. A flying glance to his left showed Ariadne running like an Olympic sprinter, equally spaced from him and Gordienko so as not to offer a double target by bunching. Good girl.

Something fizzed through the air between Bond and Ariadne, knee height, direction ahead. Flashes from what could have been the alley Gordienko had described earlier. Bond veered to the right, halted in a single stride, went down on one knee, saw the next flash, got in a quick but aimed shot that must have passed no more than four feet in front of Gordienko, heard a muffled cry. He bounded up and made diagonally across the street, resisting the natural but slowing and dangerous impulse to crouch. Into the alley and out of danger for the moment. Gordienko and Ariadne there, a body at their feet.

Uncomfortably conscious that he was not in shadow, Bond leaned out and peered to his right, towards the shop-front. A flash came at once; a bullet hit the wall a couple of yards away and buzzed across his front. Instinctively he drew back - but it had been a parting shot. When he looked out again his man was fifty yards away and running hard. Bond did not waste a shot at such a target.

The whole operation had taken less than half a minute, but the street was already coming alive: lights in windows, excited voices, barking dogs. And the party that would have been covering the back of the house must already be starting on its way in their direction. There could be no hanging about, then. But before they moved...

Bond ran across to where Markos had fallen. The Greek lay on his face, his arms stretched forward as if he were diving. There was a large thick patch of blood on his cheap cotton jacket below the left shoulder-blade. When Bond turned him over, the limbs moved with the dummy-like lack of all resistance that no living body ever shows. Markos's eyes were open. His face was frozen in a look of mild astonishment, the exact equivalent of the cry he had given when hit. Bond closed the eyes. With a quick look at the house he ran back to the alley. There, methodically, he went straight to the other fallen figure, the gunman he had shot.

This body was perhaps not a dead body yet. The man had collapsed in an awkward half-sitting position, his back against the wall of the alley. Bond spared no attention for the wound the Walther slug had torn in the chest. It was the face that interested him, a pale, hook-nosed face with unusually heavy eyelids, now half-closed so that the eyes were hooded, a face he had seen at Quarterdeck some thirty hours previously: that of the group leader. Here was clinching evidence, if any were needed.

Enough. Bond got up and turned to his two companions. What he saw dismayed him. Gordienko was leaning against the other alley wall, breathing slowly and shallowly. He looked up at Bond and the thin mouth laboured with the effort to speak.

'He was hit in the back, I think,' murmured Ariadne. 'The man in the doorway.'

The Russian went on trying to speak a moment longer. Abandoning the attempt, he brought his right hand up slowly and pointed successively at Bond and Ariadne, Bond and Ariadne in a gesture as plain as any words could have been. Then blood suddenly welled over the lower lip, lots of blood, life-blood, something went out behind the eyes and Major Piotr Gregorievitch Gordienko of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate, Committee of State Security, fell over sideways and lay in the gutter.

Ariadne was crying. 'We must do as Mr Gordienko told us to do.'

'Yes,' said Bond shortly. He had enjoyed his fifteen-minute alliance with the grey man. 'Now we've got more running ahead of us, I'm afraid. Can you find us somewhere safe? Anywhere!'

'That's easy. I've a friend who'll look after us.'

Ariadne's friend, whose name Bond never learnt, turned out to be a plump brunette in a grubby expensive nightdress who showed no surprise whatever at being got out of bed at past 3 a.m. to open the door to two highly suspect-looking people - Ariadne with a ripped seam and earth-stains down one side of her dress, Bond, after his second successive night on very active duty, obviously in the later stages of exhaustion. There was an exchange of Greek between the two girls. The friend smiled and nodded at Bond, said something gracious and incomprehensible, acknowledged his bow, and waddled back to her bedroom. A man's voice sleepily asked a question; there was a shrill reply and a duet of ribald laughter.

'We're lucky,' said Ariadne, smiling at the sound. 'The spare room's vacant. There are drinks in the kitchen cupboard. You go fix yourself one while I put some sheets on the bed.'

Bond kissed her on the forehead and went to do as ordered. The kitchen was small, almost airless and smelt, not unpleasantly, of goat's-milk cheese and overripe figs. In the cupboard, among tins of Italian soup and packets of biscuits showing signs of age, was a huddle of bottles: ouzo, cheap red wine, local brandy, and - blessedly - Bell's Scotch. He poured himself about a gill, cut it with a similar quantity of the excellent Nigrita mineral water, and swallowed the drink in two draughts. Already, as he prepared a weaker follow-up, he felt the familiar spreading, smouldering glow enfold his stomach and seem to blow away the mists of fatigue that had overhung his brain. An illusion, surely that last part: the body must warm alcohol to blood heat before absorption can even begin. Yet, as always, illusion or not, it worked.

It was a pleasant little bedroom with gay hand-painted furniture and brocade curtains, but Bond had eyes only for the girl who sprang up off the bed when he appeared.

'I only put an undersheet,' said Ariadne. 'I thought we wouldn't need something over us.'

'No. It's very hot.'

She hesitated. 'We've many things to do and not much time. But I thought we couldn't do any of them before we'd slept.'

'No. And before we sleep...'

The unfinished sentence hung in the warm air. Ariadne smiled, a calm, self-possessed, sensual smile. Then, her sherry-coloured eyes never leaving Bond's face, she stripped naked, unhurriedly but without coquetry or exhibitionism, her movements and expression showing an absolute certainty that he would find her beautiful. She had a truly magnificent body, slender but rounded, longer in the leg than is common with Greek girls, the breasts deep and yet youthfully taut, the belly slightly protuberant with a soft honey-blonde triangle at its base. She narrowed her gaze now and her lips parted. There was nothing leisurely about Bond's undressing. Within seconds they stood flesh to flesh. She shuddered briefly and moaned; her arms tightened round his neck, her loins thrust against his and he felt the strength of her as well as the softness. As if they had become one creature with a single will, the two bodies sank to the bed. No preliminaries were needed. The man and the woman were joined immediately, with almost savage exultation. She leapt and strained in his grip, her movements as violent as his. The pace was too hot for their strivings to be prolonged. Their voices blended in the cry of joy that sounds so oddly akin to the inarticulate language of despair.

The creature separated, became two bodies once more. Bond tried to think of tomorrow, but his mind, like an overridden horse, refused to budge. He fell asleep with his head against Ariadne's bosom.

They left the flat early and made their necessary preliminary moves: coffee and rolls and splendid thin Hymettus honey at the busy little _kafenion__ round the corner, a lurching but speedy journey to Constitution Square in one of the big yellow sixwheeled trolley-buses, a whirlwind shopping expedition along Stadíou to equip Ariadne (her apartment in Loukianou would certainly be watched), and straight into the Grande Bretagne, keeping with the crowds all the way. The hotel too was no doubt being watched, but here they would be safe until nightfall at any rate, and long before then they would be gone.

At the same brisk tempo they changed and showered. By the time Bond had finished shaving in the grey-marble bathroom, all traces of fatigue had dropped from him. He even felt guardedly optimistic - no longer the tethered goat at the tiger-shoot, but a hunter on equal terms with the opposition and accompanied by an associate of proven value.

Finally, with Bond sitting on the bed and Ariadne on the blue-covered couch, the council of war went into session. 'Let's take the most obvious point first,' said Bond, lighting Xanthis for the two of them. 'Your position is horribly dangerous. You're the only survivor of the three people Gordienko felt he could trust. You daren't contact your organization - more than that, after what happened last night this traitor character will be actively interested in having you killed. You can disappear, of course, slide off to Salonika or somewhere and wait for the storm to blow itself out. But you're not going to do that, are you?'

Ariadne smiled. 'No. On at least two counts.'

'Right. Then all you can do is to throw in your lot with my people. I needn't explain you - you'll just be my assistant. Agreed?'

'Agreed.' Very much the earnest young discussion-group member again, she nodded sharply. 'But I must do my utmost to let Moscow know what's happened. You understand that?'

'Yes, quite reasonable. I've been working out how you can set about it. I don't suppose you'll have had any dealings with anybody at the Russian embassy here? That means you'll have to take your chance. Telephone them - on a public line - and just mention Gordienko. That'll get you somewhere near the right quarter. You'll know what to say. Of course, for all you know, you might get hold of the chap who sold out to the common enemy. But there's no way of guarding against that. Agreed?'

'Agreed.'

'Good. Now I must get hold of my man here and arrange a rendezvous.'