[2. James Bond.]God resides within the details; those small instances of perfection that cause the senses to disregard all but the moment and the corners of the mouth to curl upwards in appreciation. As James Bond applied pressure, minute but meaningful, to the pedal beneath his foot he simultaneously thrust the gearstick into fifth and embraced the feeling of acceleration. It was a moment of perfection; the synergistic meshing of separate mechanisms, of machine and man, that pushed his head rearwards into the soft leather of the bucket seat and saw the trees and road signs flash by with a renewed sense of urgency.
The speedometer, properly calibrated after the DBS’s annual service, read ninety-eight; a figure confirmed by the screaming of the six-cylinder engine nestled beneath the bonnet. Though the vehicle was rated to one hundred and forty miles per hour, she rarely reached such speeds as a part of Bond’s ordinary commute. This was a ritual of Bond’s designed to ensure the DBS hadn’t been ‘neutered’ during its week with Hathaway’s of Chelsea; once a year he would drive the jet-black vehicle into the Cornish countryside, not too far from where the Drax affair had transpired and take a room at a quaint bed and breakfast. The surrounding roads were a proving ground with which Bond was intimately familiar and upon which the DBS would be thrashed, pushed within an inch of its limits and examined in minute detail. Should there be any problems, Bond had resolved to return the car to Hathaway’s and demand they repeat the service free of charge. Bond eased off of the accelerator, applying the clutch and downshifting to fourth; the car processed his inputs with a pleasingly mechanical precision and drifted accordingly through the chicane-like series of turns. On the apex, he re-applied the accelerator and took a brief moment to appreciate the baritone roar of the engine. It was perfection; there hadn’t been a single hint of wear in the ZF manual gearbox and the steering remained light and accurate. In comparison to the battleship-grey DB5 with which Bond had three years earlier parted, the DBS was a monster of a car; both wider and longer. In all other respects, though, it compared favourably; the interior was more spacious and more comfortable, the chassis more sophisticated and the brakes more responsive. It was a pleasant place to be; the sort of place in which a man’s mind could wander and indulge itself.
It was Saturday; the beginning of summer and a warm day. From London, Bond had only brought with him a small weekend bag containing two changes of clothes and a set of toiletries. He had intended working on the hand-to-hand combat manual (provisionally entitled
“Stay Alive!”) that he had begun writing years prior but not touched for months and briefly considered driving to nearby Dover to revisit the white cliffs under which he and Gala Brand had nearly been buried. Bond was not prone to sentimentality but understood on good authority that Brand’s marriage had ended in a spectacular row; he relished the idea of a reunion with the steely undercover policewoman. Perhaps a proper ‘cooling off’ period was appropriate? Regardless, Bond knew of a Met. officer from whom he could easily acquire her phone number. It was a prospect of which he’d recently found himself daydreaming.
It was at that moment, as the DBS reached one hundred miles per hour and Bond’s mind’s eye painted a portrait of Gala Brand, that his mobile phone began emanating its shrill alert. Bond slowed the car, cycling from fifth to neutral as the vehicle came to a rest at the roadside, and reached into a cubbyhole at his side. The LCD screen read simply
‘UNIVEX;
’ SIS’s corporate cover.
***
Michael Donovan sat – hands clenched and supporting his chin – at the cheap metal table. The cup of coffee, more akin to motor oil than anything else, sat cooling before him; it was the sixth that he had ordered in thirty minutes. Next to that cup, arranged with fastidious precision, Donovan had lain his wallet, cigarettes and lighter. He consulted his watch; a relatively inexpensive though not cheap looking Citizen chronograph and grimaced so slightly that the minute tension of muscles was all but invisible. Such was the man himself; no energy was needlessly expended nor conversation made without necessity. Smoking was the only frivolity that he afforded himself; though not to the extent that it impeached upon his physical fitness. No alcohol had passed his lips in the past six years; his life was one of eagerly embraced hardship – suffering in the name of long-term benefit.
He had been a CIA officer once, though that chapter of his life was closed and almost forgotten; sealed and compartmentalised with everything else that Donovan wished to disregard. Plucked from the ranks of the ordinary by men to whom he was merely a bad photo in a thin file, Michael Donovan had been trained as a sniper to be assigned CIA ‘wet ops’; Cold War exercises unofficially sanctioned by select committee and denied to all. Those days had passed slowly in the Russian wilderness and Germany by night. Communist leaders had been brutally and fatally subjugated and KGB officers picked off one by one. With each bullet propelled between human eyes, Donovan had grown enamoured to the violence but distant from the cause. The stars and stripes lost their glamour; the American ideal became stale and outmoded and Michael Donovan, CIA assassin extraordinaire, had sought a new ideology.
The written instructions whose ashes had been scattered into the Thames, had been quite clear; once the slaughter of innocent Londoners had been completed, he was to meet with his employer’s representative outside a tacky tourist caf
Edited by Mr_Incognito, 11 April 2005 - 09:15 PM.
