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[Jim]

Just Another Kill

A Fan Fiction

By Jacques I. M. Stewart
This is a not for profit enterprise and is nothing more than a simple entertainment by way of fan fiction. All non-original characters and situations are copyright Ian Fleming Publications Limited and there is no intention asserted to the contrary. All original characters and situations are copyright the author.

6. Half the World Away

Inevitably it would be one of those mornings when the rising sun, fighting the smothering grey mist, would burn the white sky orange. Rarely seen in England save on those hottest of dense, soupy August days when the breeze forgets to blow and all creatures suffer for it, such daybreaks are the tedious norm in the valleys umbilical to Lake Victoria. No dawn choruses on the smoky hillsides until the cloying, syrupy fog lifts; too much effort for the birds.

Waiting for the sun without any great enthusiasm, along their valley floors these arteries of Africa rumble awake with little welcome for the inevitable heat of the day, the chill of the night and the torpor of the next dawn; ever onward the cycle. The colours of the flowers that gaily skirt the walls, the varied calls of the societies of wonderful creatures wandering from their shelter to drink at the riverbeds, the choppy flitting of the sapphired and rubied hummingbirds pollinating flower to flower like ageing women desperately mating before they can mate no more; these superficial wonders still cannot disguise the dank gloom that pervades the remorseless predictability of the light hours.

With the truck idling its engine, James Bond, his body exhausted by both pain and effort, sat with his aching back against the driver’s side wheel, his legs outstretched uselessly limp along the slab of smooth red rock. This solid tennis court sized platform, jutting out absurdly pompously from the crumbling mountainside’s Demerara consistency, was the first stable plateau he had reached. Doubtless, the truck would be visible from all directions. Hardly a haven, but hang that; take the risk. If they could see him, he could see them.

Bond studied the landscape for signs of life; signs of potentially dangerous life.

Human life.

None.

Oddly, the pale orange of the hills reminded him of the early morning view of the Jungfrau from the Monch, when the sun blasts the undefiled virgin morning snow a pale, fleshy pink, beckoning the sportsman to challenge it.

But…

Still a good two hundred yards above the riverbed, he scanned the view down the valley. The road to the north, the road away from DeveronTown, was behind him as he sat. Unwise to consider the journey ahead before knowing what was behind. To know better what was coming was, he reasoned, to know what – or who - was coming after him.

Before him, the hills softening out as they sank into the lake, or merged into DeveronTown, the river spread wider and shallower into its little delta fingers, each skirted with unappealing dark marsh and, raised onto precarious, uneven wooden platforms, what appeared to be the road. The only road.

Christ, thought Bond; that looks bloody dangerous. Would it have been any safer to have taken the truck along there than over this damned hill?

To answer him, the fog decorating the “road” shifted, as if wiped away, revealing to Bond one of the more macabre sights of his life. Around the base of the rotting pillars, along the half-mile or so of gimcrack pontoons and at least a ten foot drop from the platforms - rusting cars; perhaps thirty, although the mist was patently hiding more, unwilling to divest itself of its secrets too readily. A graveyard of family saloons and small trucks, the mist sweeping around them as a sinister shroud, rusting and rotting bodies upended and half sunk into the marsh, their exhausts screaming in panic in a futile attempt to get help. Dragged into the jaws of the mire as effectively as a crocodile takes a gazelle.

One, so near to the end of the platform and safety, rested its front wheels on solid ground yet its rear was well below the surface of the bog; stuck forever trying to climb out, its headlight eyes having blazed only so long and now dead, looking blindly, plaintively up the road to safety; so close, so close.

Bond chose not to think about the occupants of the cars save for wondering what killed them first; starvation, drowning or the night animals?

The mist descended and the cemetery folded back into it.

Gravequiet.

Beyond the marsh bridge, up the valley, the road became hard, cracked but, Bond was satisfied to note, at the very least stable. No sudden drops on either side, it ran alongside the river, on the opposite side to Bond’s position. He let his eyes wander up the river bed, but there was no bridge from his pebbled shore to the road. Parallel with where he sat, the river was rich indigo rather than dusty brown; deep.

Damn.

How to get across? He had no desire to use the platforms; patently suicide to go anywhere near the marsh. But the river would be shallower as it filtered out into its delta. He had to go there; at least near to it. It would be a question of positioning the truck correctly.

Cross that bridge when I come to it, thought Bond without humour.

Gazing back down towards the lake, beyond the marsh, Bond thought he could make out the spires of the Cathedral through the mist. How far? Ten miles? Fifteen? Hard to tell at this height. Little doubt that Fajeur would send men after him, maybe follow him himself. Bond had a vision of forcing Fajeur, at the point of the twelve-bore, to walk into the marsh. It was now that he allowed himself a grim smile.

But – surely – Fajeur had had enough time now to round up more men and try to head them off? Bond disliked and was suspicious of the absence of activity. That was far more threatening than seeing vehicles advancing up the road. With action, with sound and fury, one knows how the enemy is thinking and can use their frenzy against them. With silence, with nothing…the threat is more difficult to anticipate, and impossible to know how to deal with.

He listened, but above the noise of the river gurgling its way towards the marsh, he heard no engines.

As he listened, Bond wondered whether he should disable the pontoons in some way, to prevent pursuing vehicles coming further, driving themselves into the deadly brown swamp. Given the fires he had left behind him, he doubted that Fajeur would follow that way; additionally, the truck must have carved up what little enough track there had been, as it had slid its way down to this point. No; unlikely that anyone was directly behind him.

So, the road. Go down there, take out the supports and…

He started; had that been..? Yes, engine noise, down in the valley!

About to scramble to his feet to clamber back into the cab, from the corner of his left eye Bond spotted movement. Thank Christ, not a police Land Rover. He relaxed again, and watched the little truck, bags of what Bond assumed to be grain bobbing up and down in the back, jigger its way along the rough road, approaching the marsh from Bond’s side. The little van, way below Bond, seemed to take an age to bump along; Bond suspected large potholes. After all, who would risk driving heavy road building equipment from DeveronTown if one had to cross that godforsaken network of rotting bridges?

The sound of what Bond suspected was little more than a two-stroke engine grew as the little truck jumbled along to the start of the mist, the start of the marsh, then…

Swallowed up, gone.

It was if someone had turned a radio off; as soon as the truck had disappeared into the fog, silence. Better than hearing the squealing of brakes and tyres, thought Bond; but nothing at all?

Whatever was happening down in the mist had, however, answered his thoughts; in all conscience, he could not remove the supports. Others than Fajeur would use the road. And given what he’d seen the day before, if he damaged the pontoons, would those wanting to flee the city when Sycorax took control find themselves trapped and then slaughtered or forced into the marsh, because he, Bond, wanted half an hour’s start on the inevitable pursuer?

He killed the thought. Have to rely on Fajeur realising the risk of driving over the marsh, the makeshift bridges damaged or not.

And in any event; could it have been wasted effort? Fajeur could send anything after him, apart from men in police Land Rovers. Aeroplanes? Shifting to his left side and feeling the burning sensation he had hoped would have subsided, reminded him about the airport. So, no aeroplanes. A helicopter, though…he dismissed the thought of trying to shoot one down with the twelve-bore. Not a practical weapon for the job. Only one shot left, anyway.

And, he thought, eyes scanning the hills on the other side of the valley, there was no guarantee that there was no road beyond those.

Only one shot left…

He shut his eyes. Not for sleep, for the quietness was still shouting anxiety into his mind. Just an attempt to shut away the sheer hopelessness of sitting on this precipice, staring into the valley, armed with a practically useless weapon, waiting for a silent enemy to make its move. London half the world away and no other resource to fall back on.

Eyes still closed, he knew now that what he had always assumed as myth – that once blinded, one becomes more aware of one’s surroundings – was probably fact. One cannot shut one’s eyes tight and hope everything goes away. The dark deprived him of the benefit the fripperies of the valley had given him, their masking of the previous hour of hell. In the darkness, no comforting distractions to gaze upon, the memory of the journey down the mountain loomed unmolested.

It had been impossible to stop Bewick’s bleeding.

Even though Bond had begun to feel his own twinges of pain once more, he had given Bewick the pills from his pocket to try to ease the man’s suffering. Useless. Waste. Should have kept them for himself, the natural human reaction, but it was probably humane to have shared. What value humanity, though?, Bond had thought. The least prized virtue; why otherwise give it to those with nothing to give in return? Cheap, throwaway and futile. How easy it must be to be humane. How much harder to be human.

Bond, whilst trying to wrench control of the truck away from the mountain’s insistences, had fed the pills into Bewick’s lazying mouth. He assumed that Fajeur’s bullet had hit the Scotsman’s gut; no way back from that. Bond had ignored the irony that Bewick was indeed probably dying through liver damage.

There had been no great performance, no heroic final words, no spasms of finality. At a point when Bond was grabbing the handbrake up with both hands in a near-disastrous vertical slide, Bewick had died. There had been, ultimately, nothing to stop him from doing so.

Now, in the dark, Bond could feel his muscles’ memory of the tension in his knuckles and the soreness in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue in – he admitted to himself – fear, as like a child’s fairground rollercoaster he had not so much driven as ridden the truck downhill,, the two tonnes of vehicle finally sliding greasily across this flat stone to a halt, the front tyres no more than three feet from the edge and a two hundred foot leap into inevitable death on – or before – hitting the river below.

For what had seemed like twenty minutes but had probably been nearer two, Bond had been unable to prise his hands from the security of the steering wheel. A curious sensation and one he had experienced only once before, at the end of the war, at the unpleasant conclusion of that frantic moonlit dash in Sauvage’s battered little ink-blue Renault, across and then out of Lille and to Calais port with the Russian attaché’s suitcase on the back seat, the Russian attaché in the boot and three better horsepowered Peugeots of better armed pursuers hard on his tail.

Prising himself from the wheel of the truck, his fingers still crooked and stiff due to the sudden draining of their adrenaline, and after turning the headlights off, Bond had resolved to deal with Bewick. There was no conceivable way he could drive on with a dead man next to him. The wound in Bewick’s back had belched undulations of sticky, rancid blood as the truck had bounced its way to a halt, and Bond had watched with impending unease as three, then five, then many more than five mosquitoes had interested themselves in what Bewick was, and what he had once contained.

Nor had there been any possibility of putting Bewick in the back of the truck; it – he – would infect everything. Distaste rising, Bond knew he had to leave the man behind.

When Bond had walked back to the truck after dealing with the body, in the beam of the small flashlight he had found in the passenger’s side door pocket, he had observed the thick black slick that betrayed the route he had dragged Bewick from the vehicle back onto the track, roughly twenty yards behind. Undignified way of doing it, but he knew he could not risk carrying Bewick lest the man’s blood wash him over and he, Bond, became as much of a target for flies and God knew what else was up here, as Bewick had become. Bond knew he was wearing more than enough blood already to represent a figure of greedy curiosity to anything willing to feast off him. The tidemark graffito of blood had become swiftly busy with humming insects, winged and otherwise, gorging on their sudden, much appreciated, midnight feast. The sight of the filthy sea of little bodies, new lives thriving in death, had caused Bond to turn the light off in disgust.

There had been that unpleasant five minutes of debate about how to dispose of the corpse. Digging a shallow grave would be the humane option, but to dig was to sweat which itself was to attract whatever this godawful creatures were to him, Bond. Furthermore, he did not have the tools.

Leaving Bewick as he lay, bloodpuddle soaking him into the track and greedy, ravenous eyes waiting for their moment, had not seemed attractive. Furthermore, such a delicacy would attract more than the insects, nauseating Bond by reminding him in their frenzy of sale day women shoppers in dull high streets. There would soon be more substantial beasts to present themselves at table. Was it right to simply rest the man across the track?

It had to be. The probable attendance of more muscular diners around the body would be enough warning to any police pursuers to stay back or, indeed, turn back. At the very least delay them. Sorry friend, Bond had thought, but the human thing for me to do is preserve myself and the girl. The humane choice, to bury you off the road, would not guarantee that.

In walking back, observing the glistening and busy slick starting to gleam pink rubies in the glow of a rising sun, Bond did not turn to regard the body. Numb to it, death held no fascination for him. On reaching the back of the truck, he had allowed himself one glance; not so much out of pity nor curiosity, but because the girl was sitting on the edge of the flatbed, gazing down at him, her long legs swinging underneath her. A quick check over his shoulder; no, a slight dip in the track meant that she should not have been able to see the body. And, true – the girl had been staring at him, not behind him.

“I…what happened? I mean, look at you…” Her voice had trailed off into what Bond recognised as the slurring of one waking from a drugged sleep.

“It’s alright Tempest, we’re safe,” Bond replied, having thought it wiser to lie to her to prevent difficult questions. Extending his hand, he had offered to help her down. “You need some fresh air.”

“Thank you…oh!” The girl had extended her hand to meet his, and then shot it back to her breast as if bitten.

Bond looked at both palms, black with blood. “Some bad things have happened Tempest, some very bad things and I’ll tell you about them later, but I’m standing here asking you to trust me that we’re safe now; we’re on our way.” With that, Bond decided to stop placating her; any more of it and he thought he would end up convincing himself, let alone her, and caution would slip.

Despite the glowing gloom of the dawn, Bond thought he had seen a doubtful look in the girl’s eyes. Had he? Or was he imagining in her the manner in which he himself would have reacted to such superficial heroics?

Regardless, she had helped herself down, a slight gasp of breath as she touched the ground. As she had done so, albeit it could have been a trick of little enough light, her white shirt caught taut over her breasts. Bond noted the way in which his bloodied thumbprints circled her left nipple as if pouncing to attack it.

“Is anything wrong?” the girl had asked him, smoothing herself down; the phenomenon became pronounced.

“Nothing. Although I think we could both do with a good wash.” Bond had not smiled, unsure whether the girl would take – or appreciate - the bait.

In the still-slurred voice, matter-of-factly she had replied “I want a walk first. I…must have been asleep for…hours. Those pills of Mr Bewick’s…where is he?”

Before he had answered, Bond had deliberately walked around the truck. Now, sweetheart, if you want an answer to that, you’re going to have to follow me aren’t you? Last place I want you is any risk of finding the body.

Leaning against the bonnet of the truck, unsure how to continue and debating whether to lie or not, Bond had started, “I’m sorry Tempest”. The girl, who in following him had already seemed unsteady on her feet, seemed to Bond now to slump against the cab door in response.

“Don’t say any more. Please. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

Then: “He was killed, wasn’t he?”

Too late had Bond realised the implication of the accusatory “killed”.

Too late had Bond acted to prevent her cracking her open palm across his right cheek.

Strange…

It had happened before, too many times; he had expected to be numb to just another silly woman overreacting. But, to his confused and increasingly ashamed mind’s surprise, he had found himself sliding down the wheel until his backside had thudded dully onto the smooth stone. Of all the forces of the night’s entertainments, a woman’s displeasure had been the one that had lost him his feet.

As he had slipped down, his face had displayed nothing, too stunned into blandness to show any shock at this final straw’s snap. Then, she had crouched down beside him and, his head beginning to sing fresh perplexities, he had seen in her eyes what he imagined would only be the eyes of a desperate mother smothering an unwanted, crippled child to put it out of both their miseries; love and hate, pity and fear.

Call it what one would, her emotions had fought each other to stalemate; equally powerful and, accordingly, equally impotent. Her eyes, her face, had reminded him of a fairground trick he had once seen; light refracting off a mirror seeming to change a dummy’s features from rage to love at the spectator’s merest movement.

“You…I’m sorry…but you bastard…you bastard…” Then she had started crying. “You…are you hurt?”

Why lie any more?

“Yes.”

She had bitten her lip and turned away from him. In so doing, Bond thought he heard her mutter “Good.”

A sob-ravaged silence had descended. Bond had stared at the back of the girl’s head, unsure whether his pity was for himself or her or both of them. And then guilty because it had not been for Bewick. And then ashamed at his humanity, at his lack of professionalism for such guilt. And then wanting the girl to start talking, shouting, screaming, clawing at him – whatever; something with sufficient energy for him to react to, a placebo to wrest his mind from the cancer of hurting guilt.

Blessedly…

“Who are you? Really?” The girl, now a foetal ball, had not turned around.

“My name is James Bond.” He had found talking wearisome. “That is true.”

Then she had turned, turned on him. Shifting suddenly, her face stopped within a bare inch of his. The tears running down her face were glaciers cutting into a plateau of rarest beauty. Bond had felt the cold mist of spit on him when she had hissed “Is that the only thing that is true, Mr Bond?”

Interrogation. When the light shines in the face, let it only find darkness and obfuscation. The past, strapped to chairs in the damp and threatening rooms that are the game’s field of play, so many times. And yet, the training will only cover prospective revelation to an enemy, not a crying, angry girl to whom too many lies have been told and many more, through suggestion, she has believed. And back further, back to simple school lessons in the housemaster’s study; to spell “believe”, there has to be “lie”, dead centre.

But to tell her? What if Fajeur were to capture her? Would that bring the whole thing crashing down? But to lie further….?

To tell her, he would then have to protect her. He would have to ensure she was close by, prevent her walking away or being taken away to betray him. Protect himself by protecting her. Selfish reason perhaps, but then Bond knew that in his business no-one told the truth for the truth’s sake. Revealing the truth kept the truth hidden.

“I work for the British Government.” He had expected another strike and had braced himself for it. None came. She merely blinked at him, without revealing any surprise. “We were…I was asked to come out here by Eyelight; that is true, I promise you.”

“Can I trust your promises?”

“Your decision. I’m asking you to, not telling you.”

“Go on.”

“My people thought that what happened up at the clinic sounded a bad business. They sent me out here to get you up there, see you get there safely. That’s what I intend to still do.”

The girl had been quiet.

Then, the sharpest softness: “Safely?”

Bond had known where this would lead but was too tired not to have responded. “Yes.”

“I don’t feel very safe. Mr Bewick is…How did you get this back?” She had tilted her head towards the truck.

“I went into town and took it back.”

The girl had looked down at his still bare chest. The sunrise was painting him inopportunely blood-bronze. “You killed someone, didn’t you? And when you told me earlier, yesterday, that you had been in a fight, you killed that man too, didn’t you?”

Bond had thought he could feel the scars of Italy stinging. He stared out across the valley, away from her. “Yes,” he replied. “I killed those people.”

“Is that what you do, Mr Bond? Kill people?”

He had looked back at her. Of the battling emotions in her eyes, anger had clearly emerged victorious. Angry hot lava tears raged down from her blazing eyes.

“I kill people.”

Her hand spat out another slap. “You bastard! You absolute bastard!” She had then scrambled to her feet and, standing over him, her hands jutting before her, she had grabbed his head into her palms. “Why? Why?”

Bond, pitifully painfully, had wriggled his face free. “Look, Tempest. Don’t be so bloody melodramatic. It isn’t helping.” The girl had snorted at that. On reflection now, Bond considered her justified to have done so. “Listen to me. I do it because I have to. I don’t like doing it, but it has to be done.”

“That’s not true”

Bond could feel surging through him the urge to hit the girl, hard. To tell her to be quiet, to…

But…

“Please believe me, Tempest.”

“Because that will be easier, won’t it? Stop asking difficult questions, Tempest, is that what you want? Just accept the position? That I’m standing here – wherever here is - with a man who kills people. Understand me, Mr Bond, it may be convenient to you not to ask too many questions, perhaps you don’t like having them asked because you know what the answers are and you don’t want to hear them any more…”

“Shut up.” Bond had roared this so violently that he felt empty, his frame the casing of a shell blasted as a futile, petty final tactic against her barrage. He had sneered inwardly at how pathetically effective it was.

The girl had stifled a sob. “Just drive me to the clinic. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me and don’t even think of touching me. Then, when we get there, leave. I won’t want you there. I’ll find my own way back.”

“You need my protection.”

“Everyone else…on that ‘plane…had your protection, if what you say is true. So did Mr Bewick. I neither want nor need your protection. Neither will the people at the clinic. You attract death, Mr Bond and I do not need to die yet. Neither do they. They need to live. That’s why I’m here.”

She looked away from him, down the valley.

Still staring out, “And I’m not interested in why you’re here.” Said in a whisper, but to Bond it was harsher than a scream. Far more effective than his petulance.

Then Tempest had muttered that she needed to walk off her headache. Bond had advised her to make her way down to the river rather than wander back up the track, on the basis that he could pick her up on following her down. He had deliberately avoided mentioning Bewick. The girl had not questioned his idea, and Bond had watched her pick perform that curious half-tumblerun of those descending crumbling mountainsides at speed, until she had disappeared from his sight, as if under the flat bed of the rock.

And now, eyes closed and back still slumped against the tyre, the decision to tell her nagged his light-headedness. What had that accomplished? And how much more could he blame poor judgment on the drugs?

Damn it all to Hell; live with it.

Knowing further dark thoughts in this dark would cripple him with a sense of the hopelessness of the situation, he opened his eyes. No, the world had not disappeared. It still needed to be lived against.

Bond clambered into the drenched and fetid driver’s seat. Through the thin material of the trousers, it felt as if by osmosis blood were attracting blood. As he fired the engine, he stared at his stinging arms. His blood? Bewick’s? The guard’s? He wondered how much had sunk into the skin, how much blood of dead men he carried, running through him, energising his brain and heart. After all these years…

As he rolled the truck back in reverse, he did not look over his shoulder. That way lay Bewick. Ahead was the future.

The girl was almost at the water’s edge before he caught up with her. The track down the hill had thinned the further the truck crashed down it. With the dust belching through, no windshield to protect him, and a series of slides into near vertical drops, to see where he was going was much more threatening to Bond than driving blind. On more than one occasion, there had been opportunities to let go, to let go and…

When he pulled up beyond the girl, Bond reached across the smell of Bewick and flung the passenger door open. She walked to the door, past the door, kept on to the water and crouched down. As she washed her face, the shivering of her shoulders suggested to Bond more than crying; rage. Whatever words she had practised on her walk were about to hit him. Bond had no desire to meet the strike and sat back in his seat. Looking to his left, no more than a hundred yards off, the towers of the stilt road rose from the marsh and then twisted backwards into the gloom of the fog. He had not appreciated from his earlier vantage point on the rock quite how high the pontoons were, nor how twisted the planks had become. Man had shaped the wood into planks, and yet here, on the floor of the valley, nature had reclaimed its trees, the road surface, barely fit to be so named, bending like knotted roots.

Whatever the hardships of the mountain, that had been the better way.

He stared ahead of him, beyond and over the girl’s back. The river was just at its spreading point as it too was sucked into the thick treacle of the mire. Twenty five yards to the other side? Thirty? Harder to tell now that the sun was beginning to bounce off the broken surface. But better a broken surface than smooth; suggested shallows. Would the river bed hold the weight of the truck? Was it stone under there, or just rutted sand unable to support it?

To the right, calmer but deeper. A flooded engine.

To the left, the marsh. Unappealing. A flooded cabin.

Bond felt as if he was staring down the Road Hole, that fiendish seventeenth so often the ruin of great rounds and the resurrection of mediocre ones. The direct route, to fire the drive at the hotel, was risky but it was the only possible option to win the game. He smiled at the memory of the game against Tanner the previous September; the fifty pound bet on the tee despite being an absurd number of shots down, the grim satisfaction as Tanner fired his cautious opener into the gorse down the left hand side of the fairway, the silent prayer when lining up the shot, the sweetest soft honey pillow of a contact and…

The only way to go.

He did not look at the girl but felt her settling in the seat next to him. Her sharp intake of breath at the smell, he ignored.

He studied the water further, waiting for her onslaught.

It did not come.

Instead, she said quietly: “It looks quite shallow, just up ahead. I think we can get across here. If you look at the ground carefully, there are tyre tracks leading in.”

No guarantee they came out of there, thought Bond, but still…

“Thanks.”

The synchro squealed sickly as he rammed the gear lever into first. Revving the engine until it howled, Bond jabbed his left foot back up and, as if blasted from behind by a good half-pound of dynamite, the truck sprang forwards into the water.

There was no impact on entry; it was indeed shallow. At least, thought Bond, the girl is being practical. It was when, halfway across, Tempest suddenly shrieked and quickly drew her knees up to her chin, that Bond knew something was horribly wrong.

To that point, the water dividing either side of the cabin doors, all had been as expected. The river bed seemed sound and the truck found good contact. Now, Bond looked at the cabin floor. The stale, hardened blood had found new vigour, new life and it foamed at their feet as the river water rose through the chassis. He could feel it on his heels, then at his ankle, then a lukewarm tide rising up his shin.

Stopping would be impossible. No; stopping voluntarily would be impossible. Stopping when the diluted blood flooded the engine was eminently probable. Pumping the accelerator only served to splash its pedal into the rich burgundy lake. Checking the water level outside the door, Bond noted that the red tide was seeping under the door, flowing out behind them in the truck’s wake.

Now, well up his shin.

Now, at the back of his knees.

Bloodlogged, the lower parts of his trousers were heavy as he shifted through the gears, his legs moving as wooden spoons stir thick soup. The smell appalled him. He dared not to look at the girl, who was breathing frenziedly, in the rushed manner of one too terrified to die.

Fifteen yards? Come on, damn you. Come on. A grinding Bond thought had been the gears he realised was his teeth. Then, the tide was up, over his knees and into his lap. The girl was crouching on her seat, shrieking. At his side, a rusty tide smearing into the sapphire river; a new Ruby Run.

The stench was too familiar.

And then, just as the greasy mess of blood and river water and engine oil had caused Bond to slide in his seat, miss a gear and crunch the gearbox hellishly, the wash began to wane and Bond felt a unpleasantly warm sensation, as if he had wet himself, as the tide descended down his body and back into and beyond the floor.

Not so much driving as dragging the truck from the river, Bond threw the gear stick forwards. The truck groaned, and then…

Under his feet, Bond felt the tyres hit the stony, flat riverbank…

And up…

***

“Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.”

Blinking through the blur of sterilised water and stinging carbolic, Bond rubbed his face and stared at the girl. “What?”

She feigned deafness, and carried on scrubbing down her clothes. The bloody fingerprints on her blouse, now two thin lines of washed out pink, were merging into the other stains where the river had bled onto her. Only when she motioned for him to pass the water bottle did she answer. Still not looking at Bond, still staring at the water just crossed, she said, as if apologising to the river, “Something I remember from when I first went to London. It was February, two…no, three years ago. I had been in London for three days. Three days. It was in Hyde Park. Do you know Speaker’s Corner?”

Bond scraped matted blood from his chest with a sharp edge of the bar of soap. “Yes.” He decided not to tell her he had most recently seen it through a sniperscope, watching the fedora of the Cuban assassin Cheodoro bobbing through the crowd, waiting for a clear shot. He closed the memory on the fallen hat’s final spin.

“There was a man, he was talking about…it was the Treaty of Rome.”

Bond said nothing.

“He was talking about the peoples of Europe coming together. He feared it. He feared pollution of…” She stopped.

“Of?”

“The British. I found that odd. The British are a race born out of pollution, I would say. I can see what it is they…you…are. So many different peoples combined as one. Invaders and invaded…conquerors and conquered...polluters and polluted. And he feared pollution. Absurd. It was then I knew that if one is wilfully blind to oneself, one is wilfully blind to others. There was nothing to fear for it had already happened.”

Bond thought it better not to disagree. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, but he knew that he needed to keep her amenable. If not friendly. He watched the soapy stream of old blood trickling from him, through the pebbles and into the river. Marking his territory. Washed clean of history, he dirtied the world. “What did you do?”

“What I said a moment ago, that quote, it just sprang to my mind. It may have been because the man kept shouting about Rome.” She swilled the half-empty plastic gallon bottle around, holding the spout between both palms. “Can you remember your Virgil, Mr Bond?”

Something vaguely, something childhood, something…“No.”

She poured the contents of the bottle over her head and Bond watched the pure water wash from her the dirty stains of the night. “I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. It seemed appropriate to the situation.”

She paused and looked out again over the river, concentrating on the bloodbrown mass gently flowing towards the marsh. “Appropriate here, too.”

The heat of the morning drying the bare skin of his chest, Bond rubbed his palms against his trouser legs and, without speaking to the girl, walked back to where he had placed Bewick’s sodden suitcase. The rest of the cargo, sealed in metal or plastic or both, had emerged unscathed, but this poor, cheap case had turned to pulp; Bond suspected cardboard, rather than whalebone, supports. When he had opened it to dry its contents, such as had been worth rescuing, amongst the barely recognisable clothes and half-bottles of all-too-recognisable spirits, three packets of Chesterfields and two boxes of matches. Providentially, still dry. But then, five minutes earlier, getting clean had been the priority. Now, the cigarettes had become their own priority. Although he thought the brand a limp one, they were better than nothing.

Concentrating on them avoided listening to the girl.

He sucked the tar and let the nicotine rush through him as he leaned against the truck and watched the girl standing at the water’s edge, the sun drying her shirt from the naked translucence of greasy paper to the finest, densest folio. The simplest, most natural of things…

Ten minutes later, the remains of Bewick’s suitcase hurled into the river and underway once more, the girl, still crouching rather than sitting in the passenger’s seat, with her knees tucked up to her chin and her arms cradling her legs, turned to Bond as he drank his third cigarette. Above the clunking of the engine, disconcertingly interspersed with unhealthy grinding shrieks, he heard her say, slowly: “That river is polluted now.”

Without turning to her, and with his cigarette jammed between his teeth, Bond said, more calmly than he had anticipated the words would come, “Look, Tempest, don’t be a silly bitch. Just think of it this way; where would you rather be, here or on the other side of the river? Or worse than that, back at Bewick’s?”

“I was asleep at Mr Bewick’s house,” she answered, firmly. “I don’t know what happened. I go to sleep in the house, and Mr Bewick is alive. I wake up, we’re in the valley and Mr Bewick has been killed.”

Acidly, Bond spat, “I can turn around. I can turn around and I can take you to DeveronTown. Then you can find out what happened for yourself.”

“I don’t want that. But I don’t want this either.”

Bond withdrew the stub of the cigarette and flicked it forward through the empty windshield. “You can’t always get what you want, Tempest. Sometimes, you just have to cope with it.”

“No matter the consequence? No matter that Mr Bewick is dead? No matter that you’ve flooded my country with blood? No matter that….”

“It wasn’t your blood. It wasn’t my blood. Appreciate that. You’re still alive. If that gives you a problem, deal with the problem. Don’t look back.”

“Just run? Just drive away and ignore what happened?”

“No, I’m not telling you to ignore what’s been happening. But it’s good practice to always stay ahead of the past. Don’t stand around to let it catch you up.”

The girl fell silent. Then: “What are we running from, Mr Bond? What happened with Mr Bewick?”

Sitting back in the driver’s seat, eyes scanning the flat road for potholes and careful not to look at her, Bond began to deliver a version of such truth as he considered she needed to know. He had not liked her reference to Virgil, whatever it had been; it spoke of an education. Suspicious, educated woman are one thing; dangerous enough, but predictably dangerous. However, her clumsy analogy with the blood in this river suggested the education had only gone so far. This made her more unpredictable. He knew the type. She would wield her knowledge like a badge of honour beyond question, a club, using it to justify her cynicism, a cynicism that only covered a refusal to recognise her inability to properly understand.

As far as the truth went, he was a government policeman. She ventured the suggestion “Scotland Yard?” and he did nothing to disabuse her of the notion. That explanation would do. It was true that he had come out here to find out what had happened at the clinic, because DIA was still British territory. He had added the political point to see where her sympathies lay. If she had expressed a pro-Sycorax view, he would have been considerably more wary. If anti-Sycorax…?

Is my enemy’s enemy my friend?

But she gave no reaction.

After half an hour, the road began to drift away from the river bank and soon there was an acre of dusty plain between them and the water. And now, so suddenly as if it had been a theatrical scene change, flanking them on either side, each twenty feet high and ten feet wide, huge billboards blocking the view of the river on one side, the hills on the other. A forest of forty, fifty on each flank, each sporting the same sunblistered poster. The dominant image, a face Bond had last seen on a blurred photograph in London a lifetime ago.

Sycorax.

The poster was of the sparsest design; confident and arrogant enough in its message not to deem it necessary to identify the face but just to show the shoulders and head, and give the election date. It was like walking through a monarch’s finest chamber, the walls tapestried and hung with his colours. In the benevolent shade of the placards, all was calm and cooler. Very probably deliberate, thought Bond.

Only when the engine nearly stalled did Bond realise he had slowed the truck to a near standstill, to gaze at the sight.

With the engine quiet, Bond noticed all was silent. In this hallway, there was no birdsong, no sound of rushing water from the river; nothing.

And then the forest ended, as suddenly as it had begun.

The girl had said nothing, as intrigued as Bond at the peacockery of the future King. Now, she murmured, still flatly but with less anger in her voice, “You were telling me about the guard.”

Bond squinted through the empty windscreen, the sun still low enough to trouble his eyes. Ahead, what appeared to be a road sign, yet without any track or road leading from it. Only as they approached did Bond identify it as a single, small placard extolling in dense script the virtues of Joseph Gwembe.

It provided no scale.

It provided no shade.

Several more, faded and illegible, littered the roadside as they passed. At present, thought Bond, they may present resistance, mark out the start of Gwembe’s territory. Come the day, and there would be little doubt they would all be swept away.

The future was coming.

Bond now knew his earlier comment to Tempest had been wrong. They were not driving to stay ahead of the past. They were driving to stay ahead of the future, a future that meant Sycorax, Fajeur and whatever threat they brought with them.

Leaving Sycorax land gave him no feeling of security. The way ahead would be unknown.

“Well?”

Bond told her about the struggle in the garage. He decided to emphasise the fairness of the fight rather than the manner in which he had secured the keys. The girl stared ahead of her, not appearing to react, but at each of his pauses, reminding him matter-of-factly to carry on.

When he paused at the moment he had picked her and Bewick up from the drive of the house, the girl said, without excitement, “I have never heard such a tale.”

“You don’t believe me?” Bond was concerned. All he had said had had truth in it.

“It’s not that,” and at this she looked at him with what he thought was a compassionate curiosity. “I just have never heard a story such as that. I’m sorry, Mr Bond, but I have never conceived that there could be people living their lives in this manner. Perhaps you’d call me naïve.”

“No,” said Bond quietly. “I’d call you lucky.”

More silence.

Just before the road started to rise into foothills of the purple mountains ahead of them, Bond stopped the truck and filled the petrol tank. One more canister down. Two down already. How would he explain that to the girl? She appeared to be on the turn from anger to…to tolerance. Would telling her about how he had burned men to death turn her back again?

Her voice came through the side of the tarpaulin. “There should be something to eat in the large red tin; biscuits I think. If you’re hungry, help yourself.” He took that as a signal that she wanted to eat. He had forgotten to be hungry, but as he picked out a paper-wrapped packet of dry biscuits, he felt the hunger rising. How long had it been since he had eaten a proper meal? Probably on the aeroplane, and even then…a proper meal would have been an absurdly generous description of it. Still, better there than eating bland biscuits on the side of a dusty road dead centre of the middle of nowhere.

To gee himself up, he swallowed two more painkillers.

She smiled thinly when he handed her the biscuits. Without any warmth, but still…

“We should be thinking about where we can stop for something more substantial.”

The girl stared at him. “This is Africa, Mr Bond. There are no pretty English tea rooms.”

Stupid bitch, thought Bond. But, still…keep her happy…

“I was thinking…maybe a town or village somewhere…? I saw a little truck on the road earlier, coming from this direction. Suggests there must be something up here.”

“Oh, sometimes people drive for days; all night, all day. Dangerous.”

Helpful, thought Bond.

“Another day’s drive to the clinic, would you say?” asked Bond, making a show of looking at the mountains as if he knew the way.

The girl chewed a biscuit thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps a little more. Sometime tomorrow afternoon if we have a few hours’ sleep somewhere. We have to get around those mountains, the Sengee range. Sengee province is on the other side, in the valley stretching to the Kenyan border.”

“Doesn’t look so far away,” Bond said.

“Well,” said the girl curtly, “you don’t know the road like I do. See that ridge of trees below the lowest peak, the one with a real point?”

“Mm-hm.”

“And it doesn’t look far, does it? Well, just below that is Korfela, a town. We won’t get there in under eight hours. That would be the place to stop for the night. There’s nothing between there and Sengee.”

Bond walked around the front of the truck, jumped back into the driver’s seat with an enthusiasm only the pills could have brought on and fired the engine. “Korfela it is, then.”

When the route began to twist away from the river, and the ridge above Korfela drifted to the left, then behind them as the road wound around what appeared to be each individual hillock, Bond realised that the girl had not exaggerated their likely journey. She sat, eating her biscuits, sometimes dropping crumbs and excusing herself for it in an endearingly childlike manner, and Bond thought he recognised in her stilted humming the tune she had been considerably freer with when he had been the respectable, helpful and charitable Mr James Bond of Universal Exports.

Who did not kill people.

As more foliage crowded the roadside, Bond thought it curious that this should happen away from the river. Still steaming with the mist of the morning, the thick rubbery leaves of who-knew-what plants dripped thick splashes onto the road and, when they came to a densely overgrown stretch, the dark and cool of which reminded Bond of the placards on the valley floor, onto the tarpaulin. He remarked on the phenomenon to the girl, who informed him blandly that at this part of the valley, rising into the foothills of the Sengee, the mist always stayed the longest, clinging on until the very hottest part of the afternoon; more moisture in the air meant more chance of something growing.

He drove for three hours, fifteen cigarettes, in silence whilst the girl captured some natural sleep. Under the shade of the trees, the road was dark but at each clearing Bond felt near blinded, reminded of the burning sun. On three occasions, tired and blinded by the revelation of the truth of the day beyond the darkness, he nearly lost control of the steering wheel. Concentrate!

To try to keep himself awake, he considered the position with the girl. He was sure that had been some sympathy in her eyes when he had last broken off the story. He would not have gone so far as to suggest that the trust they had invested in each other in the bathroom at Bewick’s had been reborn, nor in the current climate did he imagine it would be, but her anger had subsided and, after all, she was still there.

But could he trust her? He doubted whether she would deliberately betray him, but could it be inadvertent? Or, worse; that she thought so little of him that she had no reason to think of the consequences of revealing who he was?

As they progressed, Bond could feel the clamminess on his body, and did not know whether it was sweat or simply undispersed mist. Whatever; the carbolic was failing and in his throat he could taste the rising scent of blood once more.

As if the smell had reinvigorated the girl, she broke the silence. “You were going to tell me about the garage at the Ruby Hotel. You mentioned some drawings, or symbol…I can’t remember. Then you went on to something else.”

“Yes,” said Bond. “I’d forgotten I’d told you about that.”

Both looked ahead in silence as a group of what Bond thought were baboons, albeit thinner than the ones he had viewed through rain at the Regent’s Park zoo, which had been busying themselves on the road ahead of them, scattered at the approach of the truck. In so doing, they revealed to Bond and the girl what they had been doing. A twisted mass of scarlet and brown, a fallen comrade, and tell tale ruby lips upon his brothers. Bond winced; the girl did not react. After they had passed, and Bond had driven around the corpse, shrill screeching behind them. Bond knew little enough about apes, but had read somewhere – where? - that this was a warning of future peril. To whom, though?

Then: “Tell me what you saw.”

Bond had previously avoided describing the guard’s features. However, now, given that she had asked…he lit the final cigarette from Bewick’s first packet, and delivered an unexpurgated version.

It was when he mentioned in passing the symbols on the garage wall that he heard the girl take a sharp, sudden breath. He slowed the truck. “What is it?”

The girl stared ahead of her, but Bond could see the corners of her eyes moistening. She whispered dully, hoarsely, “It’s…please, describe the symbol. Please try to remember.”

With the truck idling forwards, Bond described the circle within a circle, the peculiar markings within the outer ring and the three ostensibly parallel lines inside, each marked with crosses and circles. He was about to describe the rushing cloud symbols beneath when the girl, with her hands over her ears, shouted, shrieked “Stop it!”

Bond jammed on the brakes, and the truck slid to a halt. Twisting in his seat, he leant over to Tempest. He thought better of going so far as to touch her, given her earlier warning. Instead, he patted the back of her seat softly. The girl remained with her palms clamped in a child-like fashion over her skull, and the burgeoning tears of a moment beforehand now ran freely down her face.

“Tempest…what’s wrong?” He wondered what he had done to upset her now, and whether he could tolerate this girl for another day’s driving.

Slowly, she removed her hands, and turned to him. The look on her face horrified him. Her cream coffee complexion had drained, and in her eyes he saw not anger, but fear. “It’s…too horrible…”

“What?”

But she did not answer him. Instead, she wrenched the door lever and scrambled down from the cab. The slam behind her was like a gunshot, and at its report, Bond watched flocks of small black birds, hundreds, erupt from the darkening, overhanging trees and into the sky, rendering the world darker. The sunlight now became as starlight, mere pinpricks through the overwhelming darkness.

As he stepped from his seat onto the road, he was thrilled with horror when, on hearing their screech, he realised that these were not birdflocks.

Bats…

The girl had not gone far behind the back of the truck. She was on her hands and knees in the dusty road, hurriedly drawing her right index finger across the surface. She seemed oblivious to the screaming sky, and to Bond as he approached her. Over her shoulder, even in the spasmodic, fluttering light, he could see her work.

Across the span of the road, she had drawn a series of crucifixes.

Without looking at him, she stood and, calmly, walked back to the cab, climbed in and shut the door. Bond did not immediately follow. As the vermin flew away, as the light improved, he gazed on her symbols and tried to figure out what the hell use the girl thought they would be.

Before he climbed back into the cab, he took two more pills.

He said nothing for ten miles.

Then the forest ended and the bright light and dry heat of the early afternoon flooded the cabin. As she shifted in her seat to adjust herself to the sun’s glare, Bond took that as his cue. “What happened back there?”

The girl looked out of her window, away from him. “I was wondering when you would ask.”

Bond slowed the vehicle to let a scrawny ox stumble across the road, from one patch of bare vegetation to the next. “You don’t have to tell me.”

As he increased speed, the girl turned to him. He could feel her eyes on him, searching him. He chose not to look.

“Do you know, Mr Bond, what FGM is?” Bond wondered whether he should be flippant and ask if these were the initials of yet another new African republic. He considered it better not to. He said that he did not know.

“It is a horrible thing. Do you know what the letters mean? No? They stand for Female Genital Mutilation.”

Something in a dossier long ago read and long ago abandoned in an archive a hemisphere away, triggered Bond’s memory. “I remember now. It’s an Islamic practice, isn’t it?”

He was shocked by the girl’s response. “No! No, I won’t allow that!”

Now he looked at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” Bond was sure that the SIS docket had said that. Perhaps that said more about SIS…

She smiled weakly, without humour. “No…I think that is how it is often seen. But it predates Islam. There are some teachings which can be interpreted in its favour, but then there are some which can be interpreted against it. But it is widespread in Christian countries too. Anyway,” she continued, “it is really an African cultural practice, not a religious one. For the most part, anyway…” Her voice trailed away and for ten minutes she was silent.

Bond reached into his memory and tried to recall what he had read. He could see before him the bold red signature of the head of the Research Division, a taciturn, pompous Welshman called Knighton; the close-typed script…now, what had it said?

“Those opposed to FGM see it as a means to reduce the woman’s sexual appetite and reaction, to render her less prone to be active before wedlock, or to embark on adultery once wed. There are also side-effects, the most prevalent being gross internal bleeding. It frequently leads to death and at the very least, chronic pelvic and obstetric infection, due to the lack of proper surgical procedure and instrumentation.

“Those who favour it see it as beneficial to the female health, rendering the woman more physically beautiful and desirable. It permits a pubescent female to protect her virginity, her honour, with greater ease. Additionally, the woman is more likely to find a husband and, accordingly, financial security for her and the family that offers her up for marriage; due to the curtailing of her sexual desires, the man is reassured that the woman will not stray. Further support for the practice is found in the beliefs that FGM prevents lesbianism; that it prevents jaundice; that it makes the female face more beautiful; that if unperformed, older husbands will be unable to meet their wife’s needs and will humiliatingly resort to stimulating substances, artificial or otherwise.

“007 will note that these perceptions of the medical and/or societal benefits of FGM are not universally shared.”

Something like that, anyway, thought Bond.

“Do you know what those symbols were?” The girl broke the silence.

“I recognised yours, in the road…”

“I’m not talking about those. Do you know what the symbol on the garage wall meant?”

“No.”

“Do you know the history of this country, Mr Bond?”

Bond changed down a gear; the road was becoming steeper. “More or less. I know about Deveron’s dream, if that’s what you mean.”

Suddenly, the girl’s hand clamped onto his as he tried to remove it from the gear stick. Surprised, he turned to her. She was trembling, her face still deathly pale. “Please, Mr Bond. That was no dream. Please believe that?” A question rather than a statement.

Her grip, though not strong, was sure. “I believe you,” he replied, blandly.

The girl looked at him as if weighing up his convenient lie.

Releasing his hand, she continued. “Then Astaroth is returned. It had to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“Believe in the demon or not, Mr Bond, but at the very least believe that there is a very powerful movement that has deified Astaroth.”

“You’re talking about the old Astaroth cult?”

“Not so old, Mr Bond.”

“I understand that was driven out of here decades ago.”

The girl looked out of her window. “No. Once a demon is in, it is difficult to remove. Your people, the British…you thought you had defeated it…you had only suppressed…”

“What does that have to do with this…FGM?” Bond asked. “Is it practised here?”

The girl looked at him. “You have not asked me why I was in England.”

“Not my business. Is it relevant?”

“Do you remember, yesterday…in the bathroom…I told you about my village, about my mother…”

Was that only yesterday? thought Bond, distracted. “Yes.”

“It was practice in my village to leave…the operation…until the wedding night. Other villages, one hears of girls as young as five being prepared by their mothers…but in mine, the belief was that it should be performed at the last moment, so the bride is at her most beautiful the following day.”

“You were going to be married?”

“Yes. I had not met him, never met him. I do not know his name, nor his face. I ran away. I could not face the ceremonies. Either of them…Anyway, my village’s practice had no name. I only found out the proper name when I came to London. It is called…” she hesitated over the word, as if to make sure Bond heard it absolutely correctly, “infibulation.”

Bond decided not to speak.

“It is one of three common methods, and the worst. I would be…cut - razor, knife, scissors, whatever would be available - and then sewn up. Then, on my wedding night, my husband would sever the stitching with…a double-edged dagger. There is a special type. It is called a barga. I would be sewn up again were my husband to leave on a long trip…and every trip away from my village would be a long trip. And when he came back, I would be unstitched again”

Bond suddenly felt a long way from the comforts of London. “Christ.”

“Will not help,” countered the girl. “My village was a Christian village. This is a Christian country. Your people introduced it.”

“But not this practice.”

“No,” agreed the girl, “but then as it did not happen to their daughters, the daughters of the rulers of the land, they ignored it. They decided not to look, and to refuse to look is to refuse to know.”

It was Bond’s turn to be silent. Then; “You said a moment ago it wasn’t a religious practice.”

“Isn’t, Mr Bond. Isn’t. And generally, no. But now, it will be.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the story of Deveron’s wife, the house on the hill, how she was discovered?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Those who support Astaroth…think, Mr Bond, think about what happened to her...they base their belief in Astaroth’s power on that terrible night…Do you understand now, Mr Bond? Do you see? Your people introduce your God, and in so doing must introduce your demon. You emphasise the strength of your God, so to justify the fight, the demon must be as strong. Otherwise, how would you persuade anyone to join you? And now the demon rises. Those who introduced the God are fleeing the land, and the demon’s men will use their Astaroth to justify their practice. To cleanse, Mr Bond, to cleanse the country of the British. Just as Deveron’s wife was…cleansed.”

Bond breathed deep. What on Earth…? He looked at Tempest. “Sycorax won’t be allowed to do it. Things are different now; it’s not the middle of the last century. The United Nations…”

Amazingly to Bond, Tempest gave a short bark of contemptuous laughter. “The United Nations? Look around you, Mr Bond, think how far away it is, how far away it wants to be…Do you know, Mr Bond, what the World Health Organisation said, only recently?” She did not wait for an answer. “Not in their…jurisdiction. Obviously,” she snorted, “we are not the world and this is not about health. Huh!”

“How do you know about this?”

“I am a nurse, Mr Bond. I thank your country for training me to deal with problems your country could not itself solve. I am a nurse trying to bring relief to the people of my country. I have to come back to my country to do so. It doesn’t make me feel safe, and…you killing people doesn’t make me feel safe. I fear…you have set the demon after us…”

“Hence the crosses in the road.”

“Pray that they work, Mr Bond. We are lucky that those who wish to practice FGM anew in DeveronTown are religious, even though it is a hateful religion. We can fight them with our faith. We cannot fight them if they abandon Astaroth. For us, their belief in their demon is also our salvation.”

Bond stared at her. “Do you really believe that, Tempest?” He thought of the one round left in the twelve-bore. He thought of the guard’s savage teeth, and the tale of Deveron’s mutilated wife. Not even the decency of a razor or scissors, next time…

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Bond replied. A sickening feeling in his gut told him that he was preparing to find out.

The girl said nothing further.

Two hours later, on rounding a bend in the road, Bond saw the green ridge the girl had pointed out earlier in the day. Disappointingly, it seemed just as far away, but – no….those were buildings he could make out. Seeing the road stretch in front of them across a raised plateau, he guessed at another twenty miles’ drive.

“Korfela,” said Tempest, unnecessarily.

At the revelation of the day’s destination, Bond suddenly felt a rush of tiredness. He had not slept since…since when? Waking up in Bewick’s house…

Suddenly the girl was jabbing him in the left rib. Still violently painful, he let out a howl of shooting agony. “F___! What do you think you’re doing, you…”

The girl was apologetic. “I’m sorry; but you nearly had us off the road then. I won’t do it again…”

Bond blinked hard. The buildings, which had seemed distant, were now no more than five minutes away. Had he gone into autopilot…? Must have.

“No, my apologies Tempest. You were…right to do that. I was falling asleep. Time to find somewhere to stop. Keep your eyes peeled for a likely looking rest place.”

There was none.

To have called Korfela a town would have exaggerated to an absurd extent. One street of faded clapboard frontages and rusting tin roofs, and no people. Not one. They drove through as if driving though a cemetery. But no signs of violence, no burning buildings or burning bodies. The street had merely been picked up, turned on its head to shake the people out, and then hurled back down again.

Only a single poster nailed to one door suggested an explanation. The dense, reader-unfriendly poster of the Gwembe campaign.

“Looks like they got out whilst they could,” Bond muttered. That he could hear the tyres crunching along the dirt of the street, the sound bouncing off the buildings, disturbed him.

And then they were beyond the town. The girl seemed to stifle a sob. “Why didn’t we stop?”

“Suit yourself Tempest, but I fancy some proper food and a bed, not those damned biscuits and the back of this thing. I might be expecting too much, but…now, who’s this?”

Bond considered for a moment whether the effect of the painkillers combined with the sun had turned his brain. In front of Bond and to the right, walking down a track which disappeared over a hill behind him, was an elderly man, once white but now bronzed nutmeg by the sun. He wore nothing on his balding head, but the rest of his appearance…for all the world, that was a Prince of Wales check suit, surely? From the way the jacket rested on the hips, Bond was sure it was Anderson & Sheppard. A little too international for Bond’s taste, but just acceptable, at a pinch, for the mid-afternoon.

The apparition did not vanish as Bond approached, but instead, where the track met the road stopped at a post, atop which there was a large, obviously empty, tin bucket. As Bond pulled up, the man started to speak in the manner of carrying on a conversation already underway.

“Don’t know why the wife sends me down here for the post any more…still, exercise, isn’t it?” The accent, unmistakeable; purest officer class. The tie, thankfully knotted four-in-hand rather than Windsor, Bond recognised as the dark green, red and pale gold of the Staffordshires.

The old man smiled up as Bond leant out of driver’s window. “Good afternoon, there,” he said through a top lip of neatly trimmed snow-white moustache.

Bond looked at the man, an absurd figure in the dry, dusty heat of the ghost town. But then, thought Bond, what must I be to him? A shaven-headed, bare chested scarred stranger with a pretty girl in tow. Bond made his voice sound as respectable as possible. “Good afternoon.”

The man smiled. “Lost?”

Bond thought about the question. There was only one road. How could anyone get lost? He recognised the upper-middle class affectation of understatement. In other circumstances, London say, Bond would have avoided the type. Here, however, it was as much a welcome sign of home as would have been finding a jar of Little Scarlet amongst the bandages and pill canisters.

“On our way through to Sengee,” replied Bond.

The old man gave a low whistle. “Don’t fancy that drive in the dark, and if you don’t mind me saying so, your truck’s seen better days.” The man seemed to stop and think. “What’re you going over there for?”

Tempest leant across Bond, and Bond was amused to see the old man’s eyes fire. “Medical supplies to the Sessi fever clinic; do you know it?”

“Oh, hello there. No, don’t know it, but it sounds like jolly important work. Can’t have you getting lost on the way there, can we?” The man, before staring up at the mountains, stole a further glance at Tempest. “Tell you what, as you’re doing good work, come up to the house. We’ll see what we can fix up for you, overnight say. Can’t have you young people out on this road…and if you don’t mind me saying so, it looks like you could do with a good bath and a drink; perhaps a bite to eat?”

“Much appreciated, Mr…” Bond looked at the name whitewashed onto the post bucket “…Featherstonehaugh.” He made sure he pronounced it correctly. The old man beamed.

“Just over the rise now,” shouted Featherstonehaugh through the back of the cab. Bond smiled at the thought of the old boy enjoying his ride, sitting on the flatbed of the truck, and how the old soldier had admitted to Bond that the invitation was as much to save himself the walk back as to welcome them in. When the track peaked, Bond and Tempest both stared at the sight before them. A wide plateau, stretching out for what must have been several dozen acres in front of a brilliantly white, three storey house, surrounded by a veranda; the rise of the mountains behind. Beyond the plateau, a view back down the valley up which they had driven, the sun just about to hit the peak of the ridge and disappear for another day. Lazing on the scorched grass, amidst numerous large orange boulders, twenty or so deer, three black Labradors and half a dozen or so geese.

Bond helped Featherstonehaugh down from the truck. “Idyllic, isn’t it?” said the old man, ruffling the heads of the excited dogs.

“Exquisite,” replied Bond, and he meant it.

After the necessary introduction to Mrs Featherstonehaugh, a pleasant, smart, slender woman with ivory hair and a similar bronzed complexion to her husband – Bond put them both in their mid-seventies – and after a suitable explanation of how they happened to be on that road at that time, Bond and Tempest were shown rooms. The house was well furnished on the lower levels, artefacts from much travelling, Bond assumed, but at the highest level, very sparse. Regardless, it suited him. There was it appeared, no question in any of their collective minds that Bond and Tempest would share a bedroom.

When bathing, Bond found a moment to wonder whether Tempest would wander into the bathroom again, but the moment passed soon enough. The nauseous feeling following their conversation in the truck had not entirely dissipated, however relaxed he now felt.

When he re-entered his room, he found laid out on the bed a pressed, plain worsted dark blue original Caraceni – Bond recognised the work of the Roman branch – a startlingly white shirt, black socks and, at the foot of the bed, parade-black Oxfords. Lying on the suit, a note: “Trust this fits; dinner at seven. JF.” Bond wondered which of the Featherstonehaughs was “J”.

The suit was a splendid, generous cut and fitted perfectly; the shoes just a size too small but there had been worse pain. There was no tie, but in this heat that would have been overdoing it; regardless, Bond felt he had recaptured something of himself.

When he stepped onto the Featherstonehaughs’ veranda, Tempest was already there. The sun, still bright but just beginning to set, gleamed off her simple white dress; no jewellery, no make-up and, Bond noted, no shoes. A girl, standing on this platform, a view down a lush African valley beyond her, the sun shining through the thin cotton to show…he reminded himself of her words when she had first woken up. The bitter stings of what she had said and the crack across the face both prevented him from venturing anything other than “Good evening.”

Damn.

She smiled thinly, but not without some trace of kindness. “Hello.”

They could have been meeting for the first time.

Behind him, he heard the squealing of poorly oiled wheels. Featherstonehaugh appeared, pushing before him with some effort a large, hinged mahogany box, the castors of which seemed barely able to take its weight.

The old man smiled at them. “Now, before dinner, I think a cocktail would do? Not too early, Miss Golightly?” He seemed amused at the name.

“No,” said Tempest, and smiled. Bond was relieved to see that. At least he would not have to make all the running with the hosts. There was little worse than an uncommunicative woman at a dinner table.

Bond considered Featherstonehaugh. One can tell a great deal about a man in what he wears; not just in who he is, but who he has been. The impression of travel – Bond was beginning to suspect the diplomatic corps – confirmed by several defiantly non-English choices. A continental double pleat to the beige cotton trousers, could well have been one of the less mundane Viennese tailors, doubtless lined down to the knee in the effeminate European fashion. A navy hopsack blazer, thankfully single-breasted, the number of buttons suggesting Rome rather than London. Caramel brown Shannons as bright as a new penny. A mercifully simple and simply strapped Patek Philippe. Not yet dandified, but perhaps too many years away from home to be truly the Englishman abroad.

Without ceremony, the old man pulled open the lid of the cabinet. It was hinged as a treasure chest, and inside, the sun’s rays bouncing off the glass, as sparkling as the most precious diamonds. Bottle upon bottle, each apparently different.

Both Bond and Tempest approached, intrigued. Mrs Featherstonehaugh, wearing a navy blue court dress which would have been too formal save for the ethnic brooch at her left breast, appeared at the doorway of the veranda, an overweight Labrador lolloping behind her. “Dinner in ten minutes. I do hope you like venison.” Bond kept his back turned to the deer lazing on the plain.

“Call it an old man’s folly,” Featherstonehaugh started, busying himself with the drinks cabinet, “but I can’t help picking things up whenever I go on a trip. I’d like to say anything you can think of is here, but I can’t. No whisky, I’m afraid. Can’t stand the stuff and, after all,” he beamed, “we didn’t know you were coming.”

Bond noted with approval the Smirnoff Blue Label, the strongest the brand offered. Tempest absentmindedly picked up a brown bottle with an intricate white label.

“Kummel,” explained Bond, “That brand, Wolfschmidt, is certainly the best known, even though many would say the drink originated in Holland, not Germany. Basically, it’s grain spirit with…”

“What does it taste like?” The girl’s quiet question stopped him dead. Bond noted the Fetherstonehaughs’ amusement.

“Caraway seed,” Bond replied curtly, although not sharply.

“I like that taste. Yes,” Tempest looked Featherstonehaugh, “I’ll have one of those.”

Mr Featherstonehaugh beamed. “I think…a Tovarich for the lady, my dear.”

Featherstonehaugh took the bottle and moved insider, his wife and the dog following him. Tempest leant towards Bond. “A what?” she whispered. He could smell gentle scents on her; Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Limes at her neck, and along her shoulders something which reminded him of Roudnitska’s Eau d’Hermes, the only unisex fragrance of which Bond approved. Although he would not have believed it, they combined well to disguise the bitter aroma of blood.

Bond smiled. “Measure and a half of vodka – I think you can expect a generous interpretation of that – measure of kummel and lime juice. Cubed ice so as not to cloud the alcohol too much.” Bond did not tell her it was only justifiable as a cold climate drink. Standing on the Featherstonehaughs’ veranda, the far valley sinking back into shadow and the distant hellish peak of Mount Selina silhouetted as the sun began its descent, to bore its way back into the soil; such things did not matter.

“Sounds…good.”

The Featherstonehaughs returned, together, as if in ceremony. Bond wondered how often they received visitors, and guessed at rarely. Here, behind their small rise, who would know they existed? How often would they venture beyond their land?

“I’m sorry my dear,” Featherstonehaugh extended the cocktail glass, brimful of translucent soft green liquid into which some thick, clumsily cut lime peel had been stuffed, “but I realise I could have offered you goldwasser. There’s some in the kitchen if you would prefer.”

When the girl did not answer, which Bond assumed was confusion on her part, the old man continued half-heartedly. “Tastes the same as this….are you sure?”

“Yes, thank you.” Tempest took the offered glass and sipped it. “That is lovely. I must remember it.”

Featherstonehaugh smiled and turned to Bond. “Super. Forgotten about that goldwasser. The wife does a splendid Soufflé Rothschild…now, Mr Bond, what about you? Pimm’s?” The old man seemed to be stifling a private laugh.

Before Bond could reply, Mrs Featherstonehaugh chipped in. “I’m very sorry, Mr Bond. My husband does enjoy his joke drinks. Fruit pop, isn’t it? Can’t stand the stuff myself. Cough medicine.”

Bond suppressed a smile as Featherstonehaugh gave his wife what Bond assumed was a well-practised look. He then could not help but grin as Mrs Featherstonehaugh volleyed it straight back. A performance. It spoke middle-age, when lust has succumbed to love and companionship, although many would equally call it the dread of solitude.

“Yes dear…now, what can I possibly offer you…? As it seems appropriate…Sundowner?”

Bond smiled. “No, but thank you. I find Van der Hum too sweet, too aromatic.” Bond looked into the cabinet, the glass and gaily coloured liquids reflecting jewel-like in the direct sun. “Would that be strega, though?”

Featherstonehaugh withdrew the thin, unopened bottle of yellow liquid. “D’you know, I’d almost forgotten about this. Picked it up a couple of years ago in Florence. Ever been to Florence?”

Bond replied without smiling, “Yes.”

Featherstonehaugh stared at the label in reverie. “Yes; there’s a little shop, not too far from the Duomo, sells all sorts of labels, all sorts of drinks…Andretti…I think…sure it’s Andretti…hm…anyway,” his attention back on Bond, “the old witch’s brew, eh?” Bond noticed the man steal a glance at Tempest, who had moved away to look over the fields and watch the sun which was somehow bigger in the emptiness of the view. “You know what they say…”

Bond grinned. He had indeed heard the myth, that the drink had aphrodisiac qualities, that it would unite for evermore lovers who shared it. In such circumstances, that this bottle was unopened told him another story.

“John!” But his wife’s chiding of Featherstonehaugh was not angry, more the feigned shock of amusement of a parent feeling she has to rebuke a mischievous child for doing something she, the parent, would have wanted to have done but her station prevented it.

Bond decided to change the subject. “It’s been a long day, and I need a long drink. So may I have a double, in a tall glass please, with a measure of orange juice, one of crème de banane, a triple of the Blue Label and a slice of orange peel.” He remembered the pathetic dry biscuits of earlier. To be here, now! What a day, indeed!

Bond was impressed by Featherstonehaugh’s unshocked response to his precise request. “Ice?”

“Please. If possible, crushed to take some sweetness off.”

Two hours later, Bond felt fit to burst, both at the food consumed and the company kept. Featherstonehaugh had proved a garrulous host, revealing far more to Bond than Bond had reciprocated. So generous with the cigarettes, the dark, rich and complex tobacco of the Roth-Handle a specie away from the anaemic Chesterfield, and the wine, that Bond had decided in kindness not to tell him that another day and the Petrus would have been damn near undrinkable.

Yes, it had been diplomatic service before and then after the War. Bond had avoided talking about his war service. He relied on Featherstonehaugh’s insistence on referring to him as a “young chap” as his host’s unwillingness to ask whether Bond had been old enough to have been involved at all. As for Featherstonehaugh, yes, it had been the Staffordshires, to the rank of Colonel, more “scooting around” until the last post to DeveronTown under Rowley Scott. A friend had put them on to this farmstead and they had been here for nine years, since retirement. No, they had no plans to return to England. After all, reasoned Featherstonehaugh, he had spent most of his life away from England so “returning” was the wrong word.

Mrs Featherstonehaugh, who at no point revealed her first name to them, was more guarded. She only led one conversation, which was to reveal that she had been born and brought up near Cromer; did Bond know it? Yes, he had been there once as a child. She wondered how it must look now, for she too had not been to England for thirty years. This had triggered an anecdote from her husband about how they had met in Madrid, just before the Franco rising. Beyond this insight into her past life, the woman had said little.

Neither mentioned children; Bond guessed inability to reproduce by one, or the other, or both. Featherstonehaugh had talked at some length about dogs he had known, so Bond assumed that the animals had been sufficient replacement.

The cloud on the evening had come when Bond had asked, to satisfy his curiosity, how they lived, given the distance from DeveronTown. Featherstonehaugh had instantly sobered, as if splashed in the face with cold water. “We don’t go to the town, Mr Bond. Not any more. Of course, one hears things…but it’s a bad lot down there now.”

“What are you going to do after this week…after the election, I mean?” Bond had asked.

The Featherstonehaughs had then exchanged a look of what Bond later chose to interpret as the most tragic denial. Then the old man said, “Whatever comes, Mr Bond, we’re here for the duration. This is our home. Now, we don’t approve of Mr Sycorax and his ways, awful man, but then we don’t think much more of Mr Gwembe either. We’re not voting. I’m not even sure if we can vote. But we’ve had very little trouble and cause even less and, as you can see, who knows that we are here? But to answer your question, we get deliveries in from Delera, it’s at the far side of Sengee, on the Kenyan border. There’s a little airstrip there, and a chap flies in from Nairobi and comes once a week to see us. Does for most of the town too.”

Not unkindly, Bond had said softly “You do know the town has gone, don’t you?”

Featherstonehaugh had replied, equally quietly “Yes. Shame about that; it could be very pretty in the springtime.” Bond thought this wilfully evasive. “We stay on, though. Whatever happens,” the old man had suddenly brightened, “we’re too old to go anywhere else. Can’t see us in Cromer, can you dear?”

Mrs Featherstonehaugh had said nothing, but with her eyes full of weary resignation and not moving their gaze from Bond, shook her head slowly.

Now lying on the bed, head spinning slightly from the tobacco and considerable wine – foolish to show off like that with the cocktail! – Bond was glad he had ended the conversation about DeveronTown with that. There had, at the time, been something of a childish determination in not wanting the older man to dominate the conversation with his trivial chatter, to want to tell them what he had seen, what he, Bond, had experienced…but then, why scare them? If they wanted to sit on their veranda each evening and watch the sun set over the country they had once helped to govern, getting blind drunk, then let them.

Blind drunk.

Yes, that was exactly the expression.

There was a tap at the door. Bond raised himself, painfully. He pulled the two pills from his pocket and swallowed them. Then: “Yes?”

Tempest stood in the doorway. She looked tired, the temporary rejuvenation of the meal having worn off. “I came to say…goodnight.”

“Then, goodnight,” and as soon as he had said it, Bond knew it had been too sharp. The girl appeared to crumble into the doorframe. Bond sprang from the bed as quickly as his own weary body would let him, and took her shoulders in his palms.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll get to the clinic and then we can review our position. If what these kind people say is right, if there’s trouble we can get out over the border to the north, get everyone else out too.” He did not know whether this was right or not. “We never have to go along this road again.”

She looked up at him. “Do you think it will be that easy?”

“I don’t know, Tempest. But there’s no point imagining it will be very difficult either. We won’t know until we’re there.”

The girl nodded. “It’s just…that I know this country. Can you feel the air cooling? I think there’s a storm coming.” Bond did not reply to this, wondering whether she was talking in metaphors again.

“You need sleep,” he said. “Go; I’ll see you in the morning.”

***

It is when one is dreaming that one is dreaming that it is well past time to wake. Bond opened his heavy eyelids and stared into the white of the ceiling, and failed to remember anything of what he had been seeing, just a few seconds before. He turned over and looked at his watch. Substantially past nine…well, so be it. The house still seemed quiet.

He noted that the trousers he had borrowed from Bewick were lying across his bed, washed and pressed. The suit of the night before had disappeared. So, at the very least, the lady of the house was up. Over the small wooden chair by the door to his bathroom, a clean pale blue cotton shirt. The shoes, most of the blood removed, were by the door.

He dressed quickly, and when fastening down the shirt buttons, glanced out of his window, which overlooked the side of the house, up the driveway. Directly underneath him, a startlingly incongruous sight. A dusty, black Rolls Royce Phantom. The radiator grille, even at this height, was unmistakeable. Surely not Featherstonehaugh’s? How much was the civil service pension, anyway?

The house, so quiet, and yet the clothes a sign of activity…

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise. No, worse than that, he heard them separate from his scalp. Something very wrong…

Yet when he walked onto the veranda, the mackerel sky suggesting Tempest’s storm approaching, there was the breakfast table loaded with unfamiliar fruit and four large coffee cups. There were the Featherstonehaughs and the girl, but something unnatural in the way in which all were seated, all facing out to the field rather than around the table. And quiet…

What had…?

He stepped onto the wooden platform. “Good morning.” Perhaps too cheery.

Nobody moved, although he could see Tempest’s shoulders trembling.

And there was also something odd out in the field. The dogs were running around, seemingly gleefully, their tails performing circular looping wags. The object of their instant, disloyal affection was a small African boy in a blue and white hooped t-shirt and denim shorts, laughing happily.

Now where had he come from?

A cough from behind him, and he turned to the figure sat in the wicker chair. Even in real dimension and not twenty feet high, the face was unmistakeable. Behind him stood a traditionally absurdly liveried policeman, a revolver pointing at Bond’s heart.

“You.” The sharp end of the polished bone-arm jutted aggressively at Bond. “You, I would talk to. Walk with me, Mr Bond.” The man rose from the chair and swept past him, down the steps and onto the field.

It was an order, not an invitation. As he passed them, Bond gave all the pale faces the most reassuring look he could summon up, although none looked back at him, and he followed Sycorax off the veranda.