Man From Barbarossa

8

STEPAKOV’S BANDA

Bond had followed Stepakov’s lead of the previous evening and was wearing, in plain sight, his ASP 9mm tucked into his waistband behind the right hip. Now, as he turned, his hand flashed to the weapon, but Stepakov’s fingers were faster, clamping round Bond’s wrist like a mantrap.

At the same moment, Pete Natkowitz bent his knees, his right hand going to an ankle holster, but Nicki, the street fighter, was on him like a dog, freezing him in a powerful hold so that he remained in an odd, half-squatting position.

‘Nina!’ Stepakov’s voice cracked, like a sheriff in a Western, firing his old Buntline Special to gain attention.

Bond saw the dark girl who had boiled his eggs, flick at her skirt. There was a flash of exquisitely long leg and lace as the pistol appeared in her hand, jackdawed from a thigh holster. She moved with extraordinary grace and speed as though levitating across the room, the gun never wavering, held close to her left hip. She was beside Stephanie and the GIGN major, covering them.

It was impressive, Bond thought. All four of them had been neutralised almost in the time it took to snap a finger. The exits were covered and Stepakov appeared calm while still continuing the pressure on Bond’s wrist.

‘I feared something like this. The British and French were not my ideal partners, but it had to be, so I’m going to ask you to relax. I also want you to make your peace.’

‘The major, over there, tried to fly-swat me in London the night before last. Damned nearly did as well.’ Bond’s voice was level, with no hint of anger.

Stepakov grunted. ‘I thought fly-swatting went out in Berlin. Late sixties. KGB used it a lot until the bills came in. It was too expensive on cars.’

‘This was a very old car.’ It was the first time Henri Rampart had spoken. The English was good, and though the muscles on his face remained set, nobody could miss the undertow of humour.

‘Mlle Adoré also had me on a piece of string.’ Bond shook himself free of Stepakov’s hand, which, in effect, meant that the Russian had released him. ‘She lied and had us waltzing around London looking like idiots.’

There was a strained pause in which the invisible daggers passing between the injured parties like missiles could almost be heard.

‘This is the London incident about which you told me?’ The Russian glared at Stephanie.

She nodded.

‘Nobody said anything about attempts to kill or maim.’

Natkowitz had been allowed to straighten up. ‘Bet they didn’t tell you about the shooting either. We had a drama they’ll be talking about over little lunches in smart Kensington for the rest of the year.’

Stepakov growled, then nodded towards Rampart. ‘You wish to explain to Mr Betteridge and Mr Newman.’

Stephanie gave her tinkling laugh. ‘Is that what they’re calling themselves? In London your Mr Betteridge passed himself off as Mr Boldman, and he is, in fact, Captain James Bond.’

‘You think I don’t know this?’ Stepakov raised his eyebrows. ‘Just explain. Our arrangement didn’t call for hostilities in London.’

Henri Rampart took a step forward, looking from Bond to Natkowitz. ‘My sincere apologies to both of you. Captain Bond, I had no desire to kill you. I just wanted to rough you up a little . . .’

‘In a brick and metal sandwich?’

‘Maybe I’d have broken a few of your ribs. Things got difficult when your friend started shooting. At that moment I thought you were a junior member of the British Security Service. If I’d known . . .’ his voice trailed away like smoke on the wind.

‘Tell us about it.’ Bond stood his ground. ‘You mean if you had known you had the Secret Intelligence Service or the SAS on your back you’d have been more gentle?’

‘I think,’ Stepakov’s voice had completely lost its boom, retaining the crack of a whip or pistol shot quality. ‘I think we should let all this drop for the present. It’s sensitive and we’ll have time to put this incident into perspective in an hour or so. Time is precious. So, let us eat breakfast, then go into details. You all know it is against my natural training to be doing this here, in a moderately secure dacha, so I am also on edge. Now, eat.’

‘At least you should tell us why the French are here,’ said Bond. ‘This is something quite unexpected, something never mentioned. The Secret Intelligence Service has sent us to assist. We have the right to know why the DGSE and GIGS are involved.’

Stepakov sighed. ‘Captain Bond, all in good time. You will be told everything at our special briefing. Enough.’

End of story for now. Bond realised that, while his first view of the Russian in the semi-darkness of the car at the military airport had been of a powerful man, his guard had dropped during the journey to the dacha. Now he saw clearly that Stepakov was indeed a very tough, uncompromising man, his physical attributes complementing a very high IQ – a person used to giving orders and one who was normally obeyed.

‘A man of awesome knowledge,’ Bill Tanner had said. Bond believed it as the Russian gave him a wide smile as though embracing him.

He went back to his eggs which were all but spoiled, and the look on his face must have betrayed him, for the dark girl Stepakov had called Nina came over and asked if she could do him two more. ‘You are fussy about the way your eggs are cooked, I think.’ She smiled at him, looking him in the eyes as though testing him.

He nodded and thanked her. She gave him another hard look, as though trying to see which one of them would blink first, then turned away. She wore a crisp blue dress not unlike a nurse’s uniform and he realised that his eyes hardly left her as she walked back to the big table. He could sense the way in which her body moved inside the material which crackled as she walked, and his mind filled with that tiny glimpse of the long, stockinged leg and the hint of lace as she had drawn her pistol.

He picked up his coffee cup and saw Stepakov’s eyes on him, smiling as though they shared a secret.

‘Nina Bibikova,’ he said, low and almost confidentially. ‘A handful, I tell you, but one of my best. She worked in the Washington Embassy for two years and the Americans never made her. Secretarial cover, and I know for certain they didn’t even keep a dossier on her. Both your Service and the Americans have the idea that our only employment for a woman is as lastochka, for honey traps.’ He used the Russian word for ‘swallow’, KGB slang for the prostitutes or skilled seductresses they used for entrapment, an old speciality of their service.

‘But, you see, they’re wrong. Nina is very special.’

‘Yes.’ In the back of his head Bond saw the girl’s large black eyes, the small crescent scar to the left of her mouth, the high cheekbones and now, her long slim fingers as she placed a plate with two freshly boiled eggs in front of him.

Again their eyes met, and he felt a distinct frisson of challenge. Unsummoned, his mind screened a clear picture of Nina’s face above his, her lips descending on to his mouth. For a moment, he was filled with an almost tangible sense of yielding flesh.

‘Thank you, Nina.’ He wondered if his look betrayed the lust that had stirred at the winking centre of his manhood.

Her lips parted in an expression of acknowledgement and, though she did not speak, the quick sliding of her tongue over her lips and the signal in her eye came directly from that all too human lexicon Bond already knew by heart.

There was very little conversation over the rest of breakfast. Stephanie Adoré tried to make it clear to everyone that she had enjoyed an evening at the Café Royal with Bond, hinting that this had been more than just a simple meal. Natkowitz made two remarks about the Scales of Justice, framing them as questions directed towards Stepakov who simply parried them and again made it clear that he would not be drawn. Henri Rampart ate three rolls, dry, with not even butter or a film of jam. When the Russian expressed surprise, he simply said that the doctor at his unit outside Paris maintained people should eat more dry bread. ‘It is better for you than all the high-fibre diets the Americans hurl at you.’ He lit a Gauloise, drawing hard on it, and continued to talk. ‘The Americans are obsessed with diets, health, cholesterol and smoking. This is so crazy. At one time you had the simple choice, you smoked or you did not smoke. Now you cannot smoke for fear of people getting secondary inhalation. If this were so serious they should look to newsprint and books. Printers’ ink is dangerously full of the same carbons they fear from cigarettes. So what do you do? Burn the books? Ban newspapers? Wear respirators in the streets to ward off all those fumes from the internal combustion engine? I guarantee that two hours reading a book will do as much harm as walking through a cloud of secondary smoke.’ He spoke like a fanatic, and with some anger. Nobody commented. This was a well-worn monologue, the diatribe of one who wanted to defend the indefensible.

Alex and Nicki stood by the door and the lovely Nina walked between the round table and the coffee, filling cups and bringing extra toast. She did all this with dignity and no sense of servility. The fact that she was obviously on the team did not make her role as table-server demeaning.

The sterile room was in a basement carved out and cemented like a bombproof shelter. The walls, Bond noted, were lined with the thick anti-electronic material they used in embassy bubbles, the bubble that had been more or less stolen from the American practice, as it took up little space, and was one hundred per cent secure, though it caused much discomfort to those who had to use the igloo-like facilities in embassy bowels. Here, at the dacha, there was a whole large room and it was clear that no expense had been spared. Though the walls and ceiling were well-lined, there were also small electronic bafflers, grey boxes with winking red lights, fitted into the roof and at each corner of the room. The door had an extra sliding section which sealed it off from the crude wooden stairs and there was no telephone – an extra precaution lest security was somehow breached and the instrument made live.

They sat in comfortable leather chairs, arranged in a half-circle, and nobody was given a chance to take notes. No pens, pencils or paper were allowed in the room.

‘This must be absolutely secure,’ Stepakov began. ‘We have taken great pains to make it so, for I suspect we know far more about Chushi Pravosudia – what you call the Scales of Justice – than any of our visitors from France and the United Kingdom. Let me first explain my position in all this. My name, as you know, is Boris Ivanovich Stepakov and I hold the rank of General, KGB. More than that, because of our fears of internal terrorism, I do not report through normal channels. I don’t present myself to the Central Committee or the Praesidium. I don’t have to make a physical report to dva 2 Ploshchad’ Dzerzhinskogo, the postal address of KGB Moscow headquarters as I’m sure you know. I answer directly only to the Chairman, KGB, and the General Secretary, who is now also our President. You will realise why in a moment.

‘You have met my immediate staff – Alex, Nicki and Nina. They are my most trusted people, and we have others, both here and at another dacha a couple of miles away in the forest. They act in a number of ways – they are bodyguards, go-betweens, analysts and keepers of my closest data bases. We are a kind of task force, and apart from these, others work unseen – in the Kremlin itself and secretly both in and outside our borders. We make up what is commonly known over here as Stepakov’s Banda. In English, I suppose it might be translated as Stepakov’s Mafia. Many within KGB and the army do not like us at all, and I have to be exceptionally careful both with information and my personal movements, particularly in Moscow.

‘You must understand that we in the Soviet Union have not been in this business of international counterterrorism for very long. We have not yet started to share completely as you in the West share. This is, I suppose, the reason we have not altogether been forthcoming about the organisation you call the Scales of Justice.’

He coughed, clearing his throat before continuing. ‘The Scales of Justice, or Chushi Pravosudia as we call them, first came to your attention in the October of last year. I fear we have had knowledge of them for much longer than that, and our knowledge will undoubtedly alarm you.’

It was as though he had begun to soften them up for something sinister – facts which possibly had escaped the West entirely. Whatever it was, James Bond felt an old familiar stirring – the desperate need to know everything about his enemy. He also sensed something else. It was as though all his experience had brought him to this one point. He had squared off against evil many times in his long career. Larger-than-life evil. Criminal, political and military wickedness. At the time, much of it had seemed unreal. Now it felt as if he were about to come up against a kind of reality he had never faced in the past.

The Scales of Justice, Stepakov told them, had come into being within the Soviet Union and her satellites of the old Eastern Bloc as early as 1987. Primarily, they had been Russian in concept, and at first KGB had believed they were another manifestation of unrest. Early on there had been informers. They knew, by the autumn of 1987, that Chushi Pravosudia was organised much as a network of agents was organised. ‘Initially there were three rings, or cells, here within the Soviet Union. They have now amalgamated these into one.’ Stepakov’s manner was grave. His natural happy and boisterous personality seemed to have retreated as though the people of which he spoke were too dangerous to laugh at or joke about.

‘We know there was another ring in what used to be East Germany, one in Poland, one in Czechoslovakia. We were also aware of American, British and French connections. We detected this through informants. People we trusted. And this is significant – even those who informed did not know the full reality. From the autumn of 1987 until the autumn of 1988 we followed up on forty-two of these informants. They took us only to the people who made the first approach, the primary contacts. Let me tell you how it worked.

‘It started with a whispering campaign. First, simply the name, Chushi Pravosudia, repeated over and over, passing from ear to ear. It spread through Moscow in a strange, confused manner. Through the more luxurious apartments along the Nevsky Prospect, among students at the university, like wildfire in the eggbox apartments of the workers, in the factories, in the illegal markets and bargaining places, in Gum and the other department stores, inside military barracks, and so into the Kremlin itself. Within days the name was known to everyone except foreign journalists from whom people instinctively kept this strange name. So Chushi Pravosudia became a household word. It also became something tangible. Through the repetition of the name, the organisation took on a life of its own.

‘Then the informers began to pass information which was routed into my relatively new counterterrorist department. They used the MVD and special units of the police, following up on each reported case. But it led to nothing. Dead ends littered the filing cabinets and in-trays of my Banda.

‘It was an exceptionally clever and ingenious ploy, when they ran traces back to those who had contacted the informants they came up against a frustrating wall. For the recruiters had been chosen by the Scales of Justice because of their own innocence. These recruiters fell into several distinct types: they were often people who lived alone, sometimes simpletons with only enough intelligence to carry out easy tasks, sometimes old women whose lives had become barren and useless, people who yearned for some task to keep themselves occupied. The call came to these innocent folk from strangers in a meat line or a bar, even in a group waiting at a bus stop. Those with telephones were contacted quietly, often early in the day, and always there was a promise. This is good work, they were told. Easy work. Work for the State. Nothing criminal. Each was given a name – usually it was someone they knew, even slightly. They had to ask this one person a number of questions: do you wish to serve your country so that life will become better? Are you willing to undertake some special job, for which we believe you are well-suited? Always there were the mystic words, Chushi Pravosudia. Always there was a special promise – a few roubles, a new television set, a food parcel.

‘These simple, mainly good folk were lured into recruiting like men and women in Britain or the United States are offered lucrative work from home – addressing envelopes, canvassing over the telephone. We all know how that works,’ Stepakov said. ‘And the hell of it was that these people received their rewards, the few roubles, the television set, in one case a week’s vacation. These were truly unwitting agents. They had no idea that they were canvassing for an illegal terrorist group. When they had the answers to their set of questions, they would pass them on. They would be told to await a messenger or a telephone call. The messengers were often children they had never seen before or even someone in the very place they had first been approached. All insubstantial. Traces which led nowhere.’

The main worry, during this period – autumn ’87 to autumn ’88 – was that the informers, reporting back to Stepakov’s Banda were obviously only a fraction of those who had been approached.

‘We knew,’ he told them, ‘that the Chushi Pravosudia was now a reality, and we were also aware they had started to spread out of the Soviet Union into the satellite countries of the old Eastern Bloc, even into other Western countries. Our agents caught traces of similar recruiting techniques, and from these we made calculated guesses about the locations and the number of cells. The Scales of Justice was exactly what Winston Churchill once said of the Soviet Union – a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But Churchill also predicted that there might be a key, and there was a key, but one which, initially, took us only a short way. It led us into the ante-room of the Chushi Pravosudia, and what we heard there made our blood run cold.’

It had happened almost by accident. The interrogation section of an MVD unit had hauled in a language professor who taught at Moscow University. He was suspected of what the authorities loosely termed ‘Black Market Activities’, which meant anything from dealing in illegal currency, to luxury items, right on up to straight and unadulterated espionage.

In the case of Vladimir Lyko, a senior professor of English, it was several illegal currency transactions amounting to some $100,000. There were no doubts, the evidence was there, the money had been traced, and one of the professor’s pupils had informed.

‘It was January 1989.’ Stepakov placed his large rear end against the back of a chair, as if settling to tell a good tale. ‘They got me out of bed at one in the morning, and I went straight to Lefortovo. The MVD had a direct instruction to contact me if they ever came across any evidence leading us to Chushi Pravosudia. The officer in charge of the interrogation told me that Lyko had things he would talk about. He wanted to do a deal, and, as you must know, this is strictly against our operational practice.’ He gave a big smile. ‘We never do deals. Except when we will gain much. From tiny acorns . . . Well, Lyko was a very small acorn and he has grown into a very large tree.’

At the airport Bond had considered that the Russian would be a good story-teller. Now, with his mobile clown’s face and a knack of graphic description, Stepakov told them about his first meeting with the professor. Bond had been right. He did all the voices.

Lefortovo is a grim, haunted place at the best of times. In winter it is truly bleak. They had Vladimir Lyko in a small interrogation room. Bare and unfriendly, with a table and two chairs bolted to a hard stone floor. The prisoner sat with his back to a wall, and directly behind him, high in the stone, was a small circular opening. In the old days victims had been shot from that tiny aperture, usually just as the interrogating officer took their signed statement from the table and moved to one side.

Stepakov wore his heavy greatcoat for there was ice on the walls. Lyko looked, rightly, terrified. He was a typical academic from the university. A fussy little man, about forty years of age, with dusty short hair and the thin face of a zealot, in which the once fervent eyes now reflected his terror. His hands shook as Stepakov offered him a cigarette and the KGB man had to hold his wrist to steady him as he lit the smoke for him.

‘Well, Vladi, you’re in a fine pickle now. They tell me over one hundred thousand dollars cash. This is a great deal of money. Enough money to give you one year for every ten dollars. One year for ten in the Gulag. You think this is cold? Wait till you get to one of the camps. This’ll feel like a summer vacation.’ He paused, looking at the dismal, cringing figure who saw himself, at best, as one of the living dead.

‘The boys here will be back. They’ll take your statement, your confession, and you’ll sign it. Then you’ll be up in front of a tribunal, and away you’ll go. Someone who’s had it soft, like yourself, feels bad about that, and the shame will stretch into the very heart of your family.’

For the first time, Lyko spoke, ‘I can provide information.’

‘Good. Provide it. If the information is fact, then you could get fifty years knocked off your sentence.’

‘I am one of the . . .’ he stopped, as though making a huge effort. ‘One of the Chushi Pravosudia.’

‘Really?’ Stepakov evinced surprise. ‘Who are these Chushi Pravosudia? Can’t say I know them.’

‘You know very well what I’m talking about. I can give you a lot of help. Details.’ For a second, Lyko seemed to have tapped a source of inner strength. That was good. This pitiful apology for a human being had found some self-respect.

‘You can give me names?’

‘Names are difficult. But I can give operational procedures; organisation; methods and, best of all, what Chushi Pravosudia is really doing.’

‘Go on then. Talk.’

Little dusty-haired Lyko shook his head. The moment of courage seemed to have put new life into him. ‘I’ll talk to you, even work with you, only if charges are dropped.’

Stepakov slowly got up and began to walk towards the door. Then he turned back. ‘If you have good information about Chushi Pravosudia, you’ll give it to the interrogators here and they will pass it on to me. They’re very good at that kind of thing.’

Lyko lifted his head. He actually smiled. ‘I know,’ he said quietly, his voice shaking, fear just below the surface. ‘The problem is that the kind of information I have is useless without me. Information by itself cannot help you. For instance, do you know what Chushi Pravosudia really is?’

Stepakov stood, just looking at him for a moment. Then, quietly, he said, ‘Tell me.’

Vladimir Lyko smiled and motioned for another cigarette. ‘Now tell me,’ Stepakov repeated after he had sat down again and lighted cigarettes for both of them.

The professor gave a little mirthless laugh. ‘Chushi Pravosudia is an organisation up for hire. They are terrorist mercenaries, with no political aims, no morals, no set ideology. If the Islamic Jihad require assistance, then they will provide it, for money; if the German Red Army Faction ask for help with a particular target, Chushi Pravosudia will use its people in Germany, strictly for cash; any terrorist organisation in the entire world can look for logistic support, sometimes active field support, from Chushi Pravosudia. The Scales of Justice is their joke. There is no justice from them. They’re in the game for the money, and what better place to use as a base than the USSR? The cradle of Communism. They have made it into a cradle of capitalist horror.’

Back in the present, in the hygienic room below the dacha, Boris Ivanovich Stepakov looked at Bond, Natkowitz, Stephanie Adoré, Henri Rampart and the three assistants. He arched his eyebrows, shrugged, and said – ‘The terrible thing is, he was telling the truth. That is exactly what Chushi Pravosudia were doing, are doing, and will go on doing if we don’t stop them.’

The Russian continued to talk, filling in the gaps, putting things into perspective. Names and locations were difficult because the Scales of Justice were, by this time, expert in the art of concealment. Their work was always done through numerous cut-outs. The main cells merely planned. The plans were put into operation by paid couriers, or men who worked like agent handlers. One subject possibly led to another, but, as you went down the line, so the chain of command split into fragments, tributaries, dead ends. Just as they had done their initial recruiting, so they ran operations, terrorist strikes, disruption, assassination and every conceivable kind of attack by covering tracks.

‘Even the funds generated by their work come back to them in ways so complex that I have asked for, but not yet received, an entire department of accountants who are familiar with the global movement of money. Often the payments are made in cash, which is broken up into relatively small allotments, and passed hither and thither, until it seems to disappear. My friend Lyko’s original $100,000 was payment for help in the murder of an Italian politician.’ He said the name aloud. Then, ‘Chushi Pravosudia actually did the whole of that job.’

Bond could not be silent any longer. ‘Bory, if what you’re telling us is true, then these people must have access, must have a way into all kinds and conditions of organisations. Can you name any worldwide terrorist operations in which you know they have had a hand?’

Slowly, Stepakov nodded. Then he began to reel off a list of horrors and atrocities, from car bombs and fire bombs to shootings and kidnappings which crossed every continent and infiltrated every border.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Bond said finally. ‘The terrorist organisations we know about, scattered through Europe and the rest of the world, are well documented. We know names, places, operations. None of them leaves room for outside help, particularly help from some crackpot secret plotters within the borders of the Soviet Union.’

‘There you’re so wrong, James.’ Stepakov had not moved. He remained leaning against the chair back, unsmiling. His voice was steady, almost hypnotic. ‘What should concern us is that Chushi Pravosudia has been able to provide arms, explosives and support to hundreds of incidents. Your normal counterterrorist experts take for granted that should the Hezbollah or the Red Army Faction or any one of the established terrorist groups claim a particular “event”, as we so callously call them nowadays, we tend to believe them. There are clues, the well-known code words to the media, the kind of explosives, the handwriting. You think these cannot be copied, cannot be forged? Of course they can. They are forged by this group within the Soviet Union. It is a new kind of private enterprise, Captain Bond. You had better believe me.’

‘So, what has all this really got to do with our being here?’ Bond snapped back. In the depths of his mind a cloud of concern rose, black and threatening.

‘Two reasons.’ The room was very still, as though those listening were about to be given some terrible sentence. ‘First, the long march of this our Motherland to a new, more open and free kind of society is under threat. There are those who would see us back in the dark ages of something akin to Stalin’s Great Terror. Second, the United Nations deadline to the Iraqis is getting very close. We have a hint that the Chushi Pravosudia have their fingers in both of those pies and, strangely, the entire business of this war criminal, Joel Penderek, is tied to each of these items.’

‘How?’

‘How?’ the Russian echoed. ‘I’ll leave that for you to discover first hand, Captain Bond. You and your colleague will have the opportunity of actually going out and, in all probability, meeting members of the inner circle of Chushi Pravosudia here in Moscow.’ He nodded to Alex who stood by the door. ‘Make sure he’s been brought over.’ Alex slid back the screen and hurried away.

‘We are very much on top of present events, and the man we have been running as a ferret within the Scales of Justice, Professor Vladimir Lyko, should be the one to brief you. He will be here in a moment.’

‘Then, if we have time,’ Bond was still not completely convinced, ‘are you yet prepared to tell us what our French friends are doing here?’

‘The question is really what have they done?’ The Russian treated them to one of his big smiles again. ‘We could have asked your Service, but I doubt if you would have done it; the Americans would certainly have said no; the Israelis have a vested interest. In the end, we asked the French, and they performed very well indeed. Stephanie, my dear, would you tell Captain Bond exactly why you’re here?’

Stephanie Adoré nodded elegantly, turning towards Bond. ‘Oh, yes, James, I’ll tell you. Our DGSE, in co-operation with the force to which Major Rampart belongs, ran an operation in the United States. We brought out the real Josif Vorontsov from right under the noses of the Americans and, I believe, an Israeli snatch team. It was a great success. We have Vorontsov safe, should the world require real evidence of his existence.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Bond nodded, glancing towards Pete Natkowitz who seemed to be amused by the whole business. As Stephanie Adoré hit them with the news that the French had abducted Josif Vorontsov from Florida, Natkowitz had simply thrown back his head, mouth open in a silent laugh.

The French girl had the knack of delivering tidings which were neither comforting nor joyous, like someone cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer. Her sweet, tinkling manner was the velvet glove surrounding a steel fist. Stephanie Adoré, the name went through Bond’s head. Stevedore, he thought automatically.

‘Where the hell’re you holding him . . . ?’ Bond began, edgy and annoyed. But Natkowitz’s amused restraint was a calming influence. Instead he smiled. ‘You obviously did very well. Forgive me, but, if you have Vorontsov safe, what’re you doing here? And why the visit to London?’

‘Because we had a problem here. With Vorontsov.’ Stepakov spread his hands as if to indicate that this answer was enough.

‘What kind of a problem?’

‘Okay.’ Stepakov inclined his head towards Stephanie.

‘You’re familiar with hostage-taking techniques?’ She was telling Bond, not asking him. ‘In the situation we had with Vorontsov it was essential to get his confidence. To begin with we had him doped up to the eyeballs. You see, we had no clandestine way to get him out of the country. He had to walk, come of his own volition. No restraints. Just like Adolf Eichmann with the Israeli snatch team in 1960.’

Bond recalled that when the Israelis had lifted Adolf Eichmann, one of the main instigators of the monstrous Nazi Holocaust, from Argentina to stand trial in Israel, they had persuaded him to walk out to an El Al scheduled flight disguised as a flight attendant.

‘Yes.’ He indicated that Stephanie should continue.

‘I don’t need to give you all the technicalities, but we drugged him initially. After that it was my job to be his friend, to reassure him and make certain he was not overanxious.’ She gave a very Gallic shrug. ‘This, of course, meant lying a great deal. Telling him that no harm would come to him. Making him totally pliable.’

Bond again made a little gesture to show he understood. Indeed he did. He knew the ways of hostage-takers and political kidnappers. You either scared the victim out of his wits or you made him feel at home. As a rule one person did exactly what Stephanie had been instructed to do, and should the victim have to be killed, it was usually the trusted one who did the killing. ‘So you did all that, obviously. You got him to do as you wanted.’

‘But of course. He even followed Eichmann’s footsteps. We all walked on to an Aeroflot jet dressed as flight attendants. It was very easy.’

‘So, why are you here now?’

‘There was a small problem. Bory . . . ?’ She appealed to Stepakov.

The exaggerated clown’s smile. ‘For obvious reasons we did not want to have Vorontsov sedated. Who knew when we might need him? Stephanie handed over her duties to Nina. Things didn’t work out.’

‘You see, it’s like a psychiatrist and a patient,’ Stephanie chimed in. ‘What do they call it . . . ?’

‘Transference,’ Bond supplied. ‘When a patient has so much trust in a psychiatrist that he becomes completely dependent. If it’s a difference of sexes, the patient often persuades himself, or herself, that he’s in love with the shrink.’

‘Right. Happened just like you say,’ Boris Stepakov sounded excited.

‘I was removed,’ Stephanie looked pleased with herself. ‘He pined for me, poor monster. Wouldn’t accept Nina. Even tried to attack her.’

‘Was very difficult,’ Stepakov made gestures with his hands as though miming a great physical problem. ‘Nina came to me. She couldn’t deal with it, so she suggested we bring Stephanie back.’

‘And Henri came for the ride?’

‘I came as muscle, Stephanie’s minder, as you’d say.’ Rampart did not even look in Bond’s direction.

‘Mmmm.’ Bond still did not sound completely happy.

‘James,’ Mlle Adoré’s voice dipped seductively. ‘It was a kind of contract operation. We were hired. Money in the bank.’

‘Mice,’ Bond muttered, and they all knew what he meant. Mice was the English acronym used by all intelligence communities to indicate the four principle motivations of espionage agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise or Ego. The French had been attracted to the operation by money. It was often the strongest motive these days.

‘Why London? Why did you . . . ?’ Bond began. But at that moment the door opened, the screen slid back and Alex returned with a short, thin-faced man who had dusty-looking hair and wore spectacles.

‘Come in, Vladi. Welcome.’ Stepakov pushed back the chair and opened his arms to embrace the newcomer.