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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.

10. The Drugs Don’t Work

Bond rose slowly from his crouch, his exhausted muscles at a scream, preserving momentum in his thighs as he glanced to his side, ready to spring. Upon noting that the girl had stayed impossibly out of reach to tackle, he relaxed his legs, and dropped the gun at his feet. He wondered whether she would be stupid enough to ask him to kick it towards her, giving him opportunity to distract and disarm and disable. How many bad books had she read? How many worse films seen?

“I said turn around. And raise your hands. If you try anything, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your brain. Do you understand me?” A professional.

Damn.

Bond did as he was ordered and stared directly at her. Chill punctured him. The girl’s eyes were a ghastly scarlet, the dark pink irises surrounded by white, bloodstains in snow, an angry face angrier by these blazing wounds. Even then, compellingly horrific as they were, not her most unsettling feature, nor was the hairless scalp. In the suddenly unrelenting spotlight moon, momentarily cloud-free, her skin shone as the purest, palest marble; Bond suspected the same of her heart. Standing still, her long, smooth legs, tight, muscular waist and small, appropriate breasts evident under carelessly worn shirt and shorts, she was truly statuesque; save for the discernable tremble of anxious excitement, she could have been an exhibit, and one he would have queued to see. Regarding her more closely, he frowned at the glowing translucence: the moon not shining off her but shining through. A blink of memory punched Tempest and her waterfall rainbow into his mind, a cruel contrast to this leprous, fishbelly whiteness. In Sengee, this girl had appeared alive: strong, athletic, a challenge. The same muscles now promised hardness, pain.

Bond affected a sigh. “Your bedside manner needs work.”

The girl did not react, the face still a smooth bust. Quietly, calmly, she said, “We must get out of the moonlight, or we will be seen. That will be bad for us both, I think.” The voice was as bland as her body; she had shed both the accent and skin of Helen Cremmer. She tilted her head towards the house. “Inside; quickly. Don’t run. If you run I’ll lame you.”

“Noisy, that.”

“What’s another gunshot in this town?”

The muzzles of her eyes promising harm as certainly as her gun, Bond believed her. “Understood; but leaving my gun out here is a bad idea; agreed?”

“Move.” Another bait untaken.

Bond walked deliberately slowly back to the house, evaluating the position. Evidently she could have shot him straightaway; equally, she had taken him by surprise – damn her – and could have just as easily stabbed him as held him at gunpoint. It suggested that an interview, an interrogation of some description would be coming; death delayed once more. However, the more time he had, the more time to conceive a means of escape, and therefore the more he had the advantage over her, despite appearances. Her actions also suggested – as did her calm, unhurried manner - that she had time to spend in dealing with him, rather than a quick disposal and a run for Sycorax.

She was waiting for something.

Something or somebody.

Very probably the latter; to get even this far she must have had assistance, a contact. Was this house the rendezvous? Fortuitous, a pure chance to stumble across it himself, but only bad gamblers sneer at luck; decent ones embrace it, and never bid it goodbye, simply wave an optimistic au revoir.

If she was expecting to meet someone, obviously Bond would be outnumbered and outgunned. He had to seize that situation’s other possibilities; a third party invariably disrupted and complicated matters; there are few games designed for three players as a result. The trick was always to turn that additional mind, with its own ambitions and secrets, to his advantage without that third person or one’s immediate opponent realising it.

He pushed open the front door and walked into the dark, musty hallway once more. Behind him, he heard the soft padding of the girl’s feet, and then the slightest crunch as she stepped onto the thin patch of gravel five feet distant of the threshold. Then silence. Clever girl; keeping your distance. Someone’s taught you this, haven’t they?

Odds on we’re meeting that someone tonight, aren’t we?

He knew it was a choice; he could have twisted, turned, thrown himself at the girl and rid himself of her then, a straightforward enough manoeuvre: his training would have considered this the only option. The textbook response. Immobilise her, secure her for interrogation later, then get on with the task of deciding what to do with Sycorax, and get the hell out. However, his curiosity, a bad habit that M. had curtly – and regularly - dismissed as being at the very least troublesome and at worst fatal, stayed his leap, its inquisitive fingers dragging him into the house and away from action. He let them, feeling another opportunity drain away. He had to know more about the girl; experience dictated that rash actions in ignorance, if immediately effective, often led to worsened situations in the long term. He allowed himself a smile at the thought that his decade-younger self would probably at that moment be wrestling for the gun, hang the consequences. A sharp stinging in his ribs confirmed his decision; he would not have been able. But was this another avenue to explore?

“I need pills, painkillers. They’re in the truck.” He walked forwards, to the foot of the stairs. He heard nothing behind him. “Look,” he said over his shoulder, “stuff the fact that you’re not a real nurse, forget that game, I’m not interested; I need those pills. Whatever you intend to do, chop me on the neck, hit me with the gun or whatever it is, can you at least get me some? If we must have a talk, I’d rather do it in comfort. Not what I expected as my last meal, but worth all the champagne and oysters in Paris.”

He heard the girl sniff. A minute, maybe more, passed. “Perhaps,” she said. “First, lie face down on the stairs, your right foot on the floor, the left on the third stair up, legs crossed. Your hands must reach for the highest stair they can, palms upwards, arms crossed. Do it. Do it now.”

Bond felt, and heard, the stubble hair on the nape of his neck, oily with sweat and greasy lakewater, prising itself free from his skin. The classic New York Police Department immobilisation position, stretching the prisoner’s muscles for at least five minutes in such an ungainly and uncomfortable and overoccupied, cramp-inducing manner that he could establish no momentum, rendering it safe to search him at close quarter without the need for another person to provide cover. Now, who on Earth had taught her that?

After two minutes, the numbness started to eat at Bond’s thighs and forearms. A further two minutes and his hands had frozen, useless; to flex them was agony. He heard her moving behind him, edging closer. Cautious but pointless; she could have sat down next to him and he would not have been able to move to administer the damned good strangling she deserved. “Fine,” he grunted into the stair, relieved that his mouth had not gone similarly dead. “Now you have me. What comes next?”

“Is your neck numb?”

Bond breathed deeply, lungs burning. All she had done was to soften him up for the blow. Perhaps there was an inherent kindness in that, to be exploited. No, his neck was not yet numb, but he doubted that he could bear the stabbingly hot pins and needles in his forearms and wrists much longer; a swift, painful jab to the nape would at least be release from that and, he reasoned, hurry things along. “Yes,” he lied.

“Good.”

Bond shut his eyes, and braced such parts of his body as still felt attached to him. When it came, the blow was swift, it was hard and it was blissful. A final sensation of sliding uselessly down the stairs, safely cushioned by his numbness, and he floated into night, into sleep, into safety.

***

A sleep unshared thousands of miles distant.

In sleep we ignore the lives of others and the way they harm us; it is our comfortable selfishness, our retreat into ourselves, our protection, our rejection of the world.

In the same instant that Bond had such welcome isolation forced upon him, Yuri lay naked in his cold bed and willed sleep away. On any other day, he would have begged it not to leave. Today had to be different. Today he would play the world at its own hideous game, and he would win.

The hateful grey dawn infected the little apartment, its disease spreading through the thin curtain and across the floor, the cracked walls, the mottled ceiling. Yuri watched it slither up the bedsheets and edge closer to his left arm, eating away at his solitude. As it spread across his chest, cold and unrelenting, it ran him through with its vicious, unsympathetic poison: the world is waiting for you.

The mocking world, the world that had only caused him pain, wanted to duel once more. Would he never learn? Could he not accept that the world would win; and yet he would always come back for more? Why? It was not a chivalrous opponent; he had not known it to respect him for his persistence or the way that he had fought. No quarter given.

Outside, it waited, baiting him.

Painfully, Yuri pulled the sheets away and let the day’s toxic herald inspect his body, its weak grey light mocking his feebleness. Pushing himself up, he swung his thinning legs to the floor and stumbled across the thin carpet to his sink, the dank patches on the wall above it the ghosts of the mirror long-smashed. Using one hand at a time, the other clutching the edge of the bowl to steady himself, he drew the tepid, brackish water over his face and chest. He allowed himself to smile; no different to normal then. The world was not suspecting what he would do and seeking to make amends in advance. As far as it was concerned, today would be like any other, kicking him down, then kicking him further.

It would deserve its fate. He would return its mercy. He would take the late train to Baikonur and he would burn the world.

He dressed and ate slowly and painfully, inevitably slowly and painfully, performing his usual decaying ritual to lull his enemy into complacency. It was well past ten before he opened the curtain, stared down at the schoolyard below and, horrified, saw in the joyful squealing of the infants as they chased each other, that he had been discovered; the world knew what he was planning. In each smile, in each piercing laugh, in each uncorrupted and happy face, the world knew.

And now it was daring him to act. Daring him to destroy.

The single pane of glass an inadequate barrier to the happiness, Yuri stood and stared, accepting the challenge until the whistle went and the children retreated into the grey block of their school. Then he turned, sank exhausted into the single worn armchair and reviewed the damage. The tactic was perversely admirable: no more physical pain being possible, it now attacked his resolve. Using the children was ruthless.

Reaching to his right, he picked up the small photograph frame and for an hour stared at her, drawing strength. When the time came to leave, he decided to place the frame face down. He did not want her to see what was about to occur. He could save her that, at least.

***

Bond woke into warmth; a not unpleasant sensation. The dawn was hot upon his face. Eyes closed, he breathed in softly, taking such benefit as he could, enjoying the sunrise, appreciating living. He knew that as soon as he opened his eyes he would be back into the problem of Sycorax, the problem of his orders and the problem of the girl. He decided to linger in his privacy a while longer, damn them all.

He let his body run a spot check. Developing sensation taught him that he was seated and bound at his ankles and wrists by rope; probably some of the same rope that had saved his life at the waterfall. Gentle – he hoped unnoticeable - manipulation told him that his ankle binds were themselves connected to those at his wrists. The same slight movement revealed that the rope extended around his neck, and then looped back to his feet, tied in such a manner that he could sit up straight and lean forwards, but he suspected trouble if he pushed back or looked to either side. Shaking his leg softly, he established that he was also tied to the chair. Trussed up like a bloody pheasant. More encouragingly, he was still clothed. The intermittent stinging under his ribs had become a dull, persistent ache. He did not know whether that was a good sign. Otherwise he felt unharmed. He contemplated testing the knots but given the girl’s competence to that point he suspected that it would prove futile.

When he did open his eyes, blinking into the pinkness of the dawn, he recognised the bedroom in which he had waited for the truck the previous evening. His chair, now his prison, was the one in which he had sat then, half-slumbering. The bed, still barely more than a frame and mattress, was occupied by the girl, who stared at him as dispassionately as the gunshot-wound eyes would let her. Bond raised his eyebrows in recognition, but said nothing. The girl nodded, without any emotion. Again, she seemed exceptionally relaxed, which disconcerted him. Agitated people are more likely to make mistakes, beneficial mistakes. She exuded a coolness Bond had rarely experienced in anyone, let alone a young woman. He wondered, if it had to come to her hitting him, killing him, whether she would even blink. It was as if all her blood had rushed to her eyes, leaving nothing – or ice – behind.

He recognised the symptom, relaxation before a kill; how he himself would sleep much of a day to preserve his body for the rigours of a night. Exhaustion, even through nothing more than the drudgery of routine work, could be deadly.

Breathing in the morning air, he watched the roselight crawl along her strong legs, turning them pink, turning them human. It was nothing more than another disguise, another skin. It was as the light bathed the bed that he noted his gun lying next to her, alongside her own. No, not her own. His other gun.

He swallowed; his mouth was hellishly dry. Although he had not intended it as a signal, the girl rose and, a mug in her right hand, approached him. In and out of the healthy glow she moved, grey to pink to grey to pink, a corpse switched on, off, on again.

She brought the mug under his chin, letting him see the contents. “It’s only water,” she said, flatly. “If I had wanted to poison you I would have done so while you slept. I don’t like to watch suffering unless I have to. Do you want these?” She unclasped her left hand, revealing three grey pills, barely noticeable against her skin. So similar to her pallor were they Bond had initially thought they were blisters, or polyps.

“Yes.” Bond accepted his immediate powerlessness. He debated biting at her fingers when she fed him the medicine but what good would that have done? He would still have been bound and even with a wounded hand, she had two guns, both of which, at such short range, powerful enough to spread him liberally around the room. It would only have been worthwhile to find out if she bled.

The water tasted good, the pills better. He nodded in thanks and the girl retreated, back to the bed, sitting upright, the sun having given up the struggle and letting her rebathe in shadow. Her pose, ankles crossed, hands clasped before her and head supported, reminded Bond of a monarch’s tomb, the white-grey rock was hard, smooth, cold, dead.

“What’s the time?”

She looked at her watch, a brand Bond did not recognise, or one so cheap he had chosen to ignore it. “Twenty past seven.”

Looking sideways at the window, Bond said, feigning cheeriness “Looks like a nice day.”

“Yes. The best day.”

“Not if they see that truck in the road it won’t be.”

“I have not been idle whilst you slept, Mr Bond. The truck is well hidden.”

“So,” he said, working hard on a smile, “here we are. Now what?”

The girl tilted her head, and to Bond she appeared both annoyed and surprised that he had chosen to lead the conversation. “Why did you come back? Back here?”

“I don’t like people stealing things from me. If you had stayed around, I could have told you in Sengee what happened to the last person who took that truck.”

She wrinkled her nose in mild disgust, the lines on her face just cracks in the stone. “You’re lying. I left you with nothing, no weapon and no means of return. Then,” she opened her left hand, palm upwards, and waved it to where the Lee-Enfield lay, “this. There was no such gun at the clinic. No gun at all. Where did you get it and why are you here?”

“Why do you need to know?”

Her reaction to his question surprised Bond. She smiled, an evident patience in her face, as if explaining a simple theory to a simpler child. “I need to know whether I must kill you or not, and if I must kill you, whether I do it now or later.” It was not said with anger, nor contempt; a more horrifying certainty of mind, of purpose. “I hope my answer does not surprise you.”

It did not. Bond breathed in, and let her wait. His waking muscles flexed against the rope and he winced at the tightness of his binds. He suspected that as much as anything she had given him the pills not out of concern for his general health but so that he would be sufficiently comfortable to be interrogated.

With the best shrug of his shoulders his condition would allow, Bond said, “Fine. I could ask the same of you but I know enough about you already that I don’t have to, and I choose not to. You had to ask me. That puts me in the stronger position, agreed?”

“Perhaps, Mr Bond. But you are the one tied to the chair.”

He ignored her. “You are Camille Dejouis. It’s not a question, it’s a statement.”

The red eyes spat flames, but her voice remained flat. “How do you know this?”

“You meet the description. Somehow – and this I don’t yet know – you managed to get into the country by either being or pretending to be a Helen Cremmer.” He considered that mentioning the brother and his connection to the Service would be unwise. “Which was it?”

“Pretending. There was a Helen Cremmer.” She paused. “I would regret that if it had not been necessary. As I had to do it, I cannot.” Bond recognised like-mindedness in the words, but ignored the possibility that this was why they sickened him. “So, what else do you know? And who told you?”

“A good man, one who died. You don’t deserve to know the name and it’s not important, there’s nothing you can do to him. The only history that’s worth exploring is yours.”

“Hm.” She sounded disconcertingly unconcerned.

“You came to the DIA to kill Jabez Sycorax. You had no way down from Sengee and had to wait for me and Sister Golightly to bring the truck. I’m still working out who back in London betrayed who, but I’ll keep that to myself. You already have some hold over Sycorax; he has his disgusting Consul Fajeur and his men terrorise white women, sometimes not just white women, checking their eyes. Checking their eyes for yours.” He exhaled, wishing to show his patience at an end. “Listen to me, sweetheart. When they find you, they’ll tear you apart like the dogs they are, probably right in front of Sycorax and his son. I think they would enjoy it. My advice is to get out now before they catch your scent and we can forget this,” he shook his arms against the rope for effect, “ever happened.”

The girl sighed, and stared beyond Bond, over his left shoulder. Dreamily, softly, she murmured “….get out?”

Bond nodded, and regretted it as the rope dug savagely into his neck. “Yes. Take the truck, drive back the way you came, get to the border, then keep driving. Don’t stop until there are at least two countries between you and here.”

She looked back at him, that patient, condescending kindness returning to her face. “And what will you do, Mr Bond? What will you do with that?” She nodded at his gun. “Is that for shooting… mad dogs? Well?” Slowly, she pushed herself forwards, upwards on the mattress so that she now kneeled upon it in front of him. As she did so, Bond noted that there did not appear to be an ounce of fat upon her. This was not a woman, he thought. This was, in its unrelenting physical hardness, a shark, its blank calmness, its unwasted energy, its absolute promise of pain and, because of that promise, its unshakeable confidence as it circled him. The only notable difference in manner, the eyes: whilst the shark’s are deepest black, hers pulsed blood at him. The only evident emotion. She left him doubtless that she was a killer.

“We are hunting the same prize, Mr Bond. You were not dissuaded by my attempt to put you out of the game. Nor am I by yours. But you still have not answered my question. Where did you get the gun?” She leant forward, and reached her right hand to his face, resting her fingertips under his chin. Softly, terribly softly, she began to push upwards, no more pressure than a lover’s touch but Bond knew it would imminently throttle him. “Who is helping you?” Bond swallowed and the saliva squeezed its painful way down, burning him like bad alcohol. “All I have to do,” still the disappointed voice of the nursery, no angrier than if he had eaten biscuits before dinner, “is to push upwards two inches and you will not be able to breathe. One inch further and your spinal cord snaps. Whichever kills you is not important to me. What is important is that you do not do either of two things, Mr Bond.” She stopped her hand, but did not lower it. In the heat in his throat, Bond felt himself dying. Christ, was this how it would be? Soothed to death?

She sighed, and looked him over, apparently bored to be killing a man. “These two things I will tell you, Mr Bond, but they are not so very different. The first is that you do not try to stop me. The second, that you do not claim Sycorax for yourself. In truth, to do the one is to do the other, is that not so?”

Bond opened his mouth to speak, and in so doing pushed the girl’s hand down. She did not resist. Some relief, at least, but by God it hurt. “If I wanted Sycorax dead, he would be dead already.”

Maternally, she closed his mouth – Bond half expected to be patted on the head - and the pain resumed. “Then perhaps you do not want him dead. This does not change that you may have been told to kill him.” She smiled, and Bond believed that he saw some kindness, although this may have been the searing hurt deluding him into hope. “For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Bond, I want him dead.”

Hoarsely, Bond dryspat “Why?”

She pushed a little higher and Bond feared that he would black out before he heard her answer. He tried to swallow but the greasy saliva stayed, swilling around his mouth, drowning him. A coolness at the corner of lips told him that it was beginning to leak, to trickle down his chin. “If you know my name, you know my story, perhaps? Hm?”

Through the liquid, through lips barely capable of opening, Bond whispered “Not all of it.”

“Do you wish to know?”

In any other circumstances, Bond knew that he would have refused. Just another damaged girl, and if he lived, he knew that he would forget her story as easily as he had forgotten the others. Time, however, kept him alive, kept the back of his mind thinking about escape. “Yes.”

She released her hand and Bond, knowing that too sharp a drop of his head would probably break his neck, crushed his eyes to the stabbing daggers as he forced his numb muscles to lower his chin as gently as it had been raised. Swallowing was like vitriol, breathing like death.

When he looked up, she had swung her slender legs around so that she now sat on the edge of the bed, her bare feet pressed to the floor and no more than six inches from his. She regarded him with an indifference he could not reciprocate; so casual in her observation was she that she would again, now more frequently, look beyond his left shoulder, as if fixing her gaze on something more interesting in what he remembered of the bare, cracked wall three feet behind him. It was an uncomfortable technique: he was either ignored or, when she did pay him attention, the eyes burned beyond his, into his still pounding brain, and then through the back of his skull.

This curious analysis of him and the surroundings lasted for five minutes. Only when she looked at her feet did Bond sense that he was about to receive the truth. Still staring down, she spoke softly. “I was seventeen years old. My mother and I lived in Cairo; we had done so since the occupation of Paris ten years before. My father died in that.” She sniffed. “No; he was killed in that. My mother, she was English, she had been disgusted at the way in which the French had succumbed, and so… left. We were lucky in that we got out, thousands did not. My mother persuaded several friends that we had to leave Paris and head to the South, to the sun for… for my health.” At this, she raised her head, and the eyes probed Bond. “This is not something cured by a suntan, or an outdoor life and plenty of good exercise.” For the first time, Bond noted contempt in her voice. “People understand little enough now, less then, so we were able to raise some money. I suspect I know how my mother did that but she would never admit it. Within a week we were in Marseilles, another week Alexandria. People did not ask too many questions; a diseased child is not a pleasant thought, and too much of a distraction given the fall of the country.” She lowered her head again. “It was difficult. My father had been a deputy director of The Louvre, my mother a restorer of fine sculpture for l’academie. They had lived well; an apartment on the Rue de Varenne, a smallholding on the Gironde for summers. Now, in the dirt and barbarism of Cairo, life for this young widow and her… strange child, it would be very difficult.”

The girl sighed, humanly. “In truth, Mr Bond, she did not make it easy. The consulate at Cairo tried to offer us some sanctuary, and two rooms, but my mother rejected it. She turned her back on France. As a young woman, she had travelled. She had been fortunate to do so; her father had been with your Foreign Office. Egypt had been her home for six months just after the first War and she had often longed for it during many a cold Parisian autumn. She still had some contacts within the Embassy and used them as best she could. She was determined to raise me English. When the British school dismissed our application, apparently because of my status as a French national but no doubt also due to my mother disclosing my…nature, she paid for a private tutor to teach the French out of me. Her income was only obvious by the number of men at our little house in Aguza. She did what was necessary, and did it well. Within reduced expectations, we lived reasonably. That is something to admire.

“I had been a solitary child in France, for obvious reasons. My mother wished me free. Often, I had never stepped into Paris for months on end, only living my childhood in the holidays at the little farm many miles from cruel eyes. In Cairo, it would have been even more noticeable. So my mother restored me, just as she used to restore old statues; the application of make-up no different to repairing something badly damaged. It repaired me. It amused us, that I could change my appearance simply, swiftly, day to day. I still knew very few people and it was an entertainment to walk one day through the markets as a blonde, the next as a brunette, some days even as a boy, and watch their reactions; it taught me much about men and women. I was her little Camille, her little chameleon; our joke. As I got older, it became less amusing. I learned, as we all learn, that outward appearance is only the disguise to someone’s true nature, gaudy packaging tempting others closer, but really little else. In my case, even more so.

“In time, my mother fell into more reputable work with the Coptic Museum. May 1950, it received a commission from the British Museum to supervise and advise an expedition party to the Valley of the Kings, Lord Duxbury’s party. As I say, I was seventeen, my mother did not wish to leave me in Cairo – we had become constant companions and I still relied on her for her skills, although mine were becoming more able. So, we sailed downriver with the five elderly English lords and barons, a number of younger male servants and two guides: one an old man, Ahmed I think his name was. The other was Sycorax.

“One did not talk to the guides. Also, we realised that our little game of my dressing differently each day would have to stop unless suspicion was raised. So, I was Camille, the demure and pretty, bronzed, green-eyed and black-haired daughter of Mme Dejouis. On the journey down, my mother would lecture, and I would change her photographic slides. It was a happy journey.

“Of the lords whose intentions did not lie towards their boy servants, my mother was of great interest, and not for her academic expertise. On the first night at Deir el Bahri, she gave herself to Lord Duxbury’s nephew. This shamed me. Previously, she had to give herself to men to survive. But we had enough money by 1950; there was no need for her to do it. No need. All my life to that point, I had seen our needing: hers to survive and raise her child; mine to hide. All I had understood of life was that we only do what we need to do, the only reason for living. This, though, this had been a choice, a luxury. It angered me, the first time I had felt such a thing for my mother.

“So, I was seventeen. I had not realised it but I know now that it is the need of seventeen year-old women to defy their parents.” A brief smile, a resigned smile, but swiftly gone. “Two days into the camp, my mother fell ill, a fever. Some of the more cowardly men became superstitious, in Egypt it is easy, but it was nothing more than something bad in the water. I still required daily disguise and she was too weak to help me. So I went out without. I could have applied the make-up myself; I was well capable of it. But I made a choice. I went out as myself. I remember leaning over her as she lay in the tent, sweating out the infection, as myself. These eyes, this skin. I told her that I too was going to do something I wanted, not just a thing I needed. I too was indulging in a luxury.”

The girl sighed, and stared at the ceiling. “I remember her look; absolute horror, a look that I have seen since. It is always something that gives me power. Usually it is because of what I am… this. This I did not choose. My mother, though, she feared not me but my decision. What she said I do not remember but I know she tried to stop me walking from our tent; too weak, I left her on the floor. I did not look back.

“I remember disappointment as I crossed the camp at the Tombs of the Nobles and walked to the Temple of Hatshepsut, to the caves; although mid-morning, all were busy elsewhere. I had wanted to put on a show, but there was no audience. This is what I thought. The sun on this skin was fierce, Mr Bond, and had it been a longer walk to the coolness of the caves I would have turned back, but I made it, skin beginning to blister, my heart singing. I had been me; I had been able to choose to be me.

“How far I walked – joyfully – into the rocks I did not know; possibly a mile and it felt like seconds. Do you know the caves? So very often there are fissures in the rock letting in daylight, and then one comes to clearings as if in forests, clearings of light. So absorbed had I been with my liberty that I had not been conscious of anyone else; my mistake. As I settled on a rock in one of those clearings to take account of my new life, I heard the footsteps, gentle footsteps.

“Into the light he came. He was bare-chested, a good young chest, strong. Dirty, dusty trousers, I remember that, and around his waist his belt with a pocket torch and a knife. In his eyes I could see his shock and it amused me. I felt powerful. He approached; I did not withdraw. I let those wide eyes see me, the first eyes other than my parents, the first man to see me, Camille, not the little chameleon. Camille.

“His deep breaths echoed around me and it was thrilling to see, to feel the effect I had. Closer he came until he took my right arm and held it, amazement running evident in his face. He did not speak, neither did I. I knew then that this would be the real manner of my defiance of my mother. If she could indulge herself in sex for pleasure, then so could I.

“I had barely given him much notice before then. I would not have known if he had been watching me on the boat, or at the camp. Now, now he was beautiful. Older, by fifteen years perhaps, but beautiful in what he represented. I put my hand on his cheek and there could have been no greater contrast, deepest black against most bone-china whiteness. But united in desire, in lust. Black, white, Mr Bond, we’re all the same, with the same weaknesses.

“He pulled my shirt away and proceeded to work at my body with his tongue, with his hands, still with curiosity and uncertainty in his eyes as he did so. I enjoyed it, Mr Bond, and I enjoyed enough to think of forgiving my mother her actions for now I understood the pleasure.”

She fixed Bond with the hellish red stare. “But let me ask you this; three words, three in passion, what would you expect? Perhaps you would wish for “I love you”, yes?”

Bond sniffed. “Better than ‘My husband’s downstairs’.”

She stood up, reached towards him and cracked him piledriver-hard across the right cheek with the back of her left hand. Bond’s neck jerked and, the rope cutting into his throat, he gasped at both pains. “Shut up, you bastard.” Gulping air, Bond willed instant healing from the satisfaction of getting some passion out of her. Evidently, torturing him had been incapable of it, but this story she needed – wanted? – taking seriously. The sting of drawn blood at his collar-line warned him not to push it too far and to be satisfied with what he had seen.

She remained standing, the muscles at her waist hardened. Bond understood Sycorax’s fascination.

“I had expected ‘I love you’, ‘I want you’, something like that.” She sat down. “This is how my books had always said it would be. But he did not say this. Instead,” and at this Bond could hear in her voice a pulling on the reins, an attempt to control anger, “he said ‘I clean you’. I did not understand and I know now how he got dominion over me, for I let my body relax in my confusion. I became weak. I knew he felt it, for he clamped one hand over my mouth and with the other, reached for his belt.

“I still did not expect what happened; I had thought that this would be the moment that he would… enter me. What I did not foresee was that it was with his knife.”

Bond swallowed, sufficiently numbed with disgust that he did not notice any pain.

The girl breathed hard, long, deep. “Do you know the story of Queen Hatshepsut, Mr Bond? It is, after all, her temple at Deir el Bahri. It fits; perhaps he knew that. She ruled with her stepson, Thutmose III, for ten, fifteen years or so, having previously been his regent. A woman wielding such power, Mr Bond. After her death, he destroyed her depictions, the image of her. He wiped it out. He could not eradicate that someone else had ruled; but he could remove all trace of it having been a woman. He denied her that.

“So it was with Sycorax. I have heard people scream in my life, I have made people scream. None come close to mine. He cut me, Mr Bond, he cut me inside and whilst cutting told me that it made me clean, that it would purify me, would make me more of a woman.” At this, and to Bond’s horror, she stood again and pulled at her shorts, until they dropped to her knees. Breathing hard, she clamped his unwilling head between her hands and, with her thumbs, forced his eyelids up. “So,” and at this her words came in short stabs, “am I more of a woman to you? Look.”

Bond’s stomach rose, and he fought to press it down, gulping air in. It was a monstrous sight. Against the pale, hairless skin of her lower body shot raw, scarlet flames, unhealed knifescars, in her excitement living, crawling, pulsing with blood like worms gorging, reaching up from between her legs as straggled, demonic fingers clawing towards her stomach. “Put it away,” he hissed. “Put it away. I’ve seen enough.”

She released his head, and drew her shorts back up. She sat back on the edge of the bed and her voice regained its dispassionate composure. “That is why I want to kill him.”

Bond swallowed, hard, settling his urge to vomit. He hoped that his eyes showed more compassion than fear when he finally spoke. “So, what happened then?”

“I clawed at his face; you have seen him? You have seen the scars? I am told I fainted and when they found me, my mother too having drawn herself from her sickbed, I had lost considerable blood. The others took my paleness as the result of that. Sycorax had fled. We had to take at least one of the party into our trust to get us to Luxor, it was the man my mother had slept with, and from there back up the river to our home. I inherited my mother’s fever just as she was coming out of it, amongst other infections inevitable given the wound, and I was sick for a month. Even then, once recovered, I retreated to how I had been in Paris: solitary, enclosed, and for three years I did not set foot outside nor were visitors welcomed.

“We heard nothing of Sycorax for several years, we did not know whether he was still in Egypt or here or Somalia with his father, and just at the point when Lord Duxbury’s nephew, with whom we had remained in contact, thought that he had made some progress, Nasser nationalised the canal, and we had to leave. Being English was not a wise move in Cairo. There were few options available to us; my mother still refused to return to France and her family in England were dead, only the most distant of cousins lived. Through an acquaintance at the Metropolitan Museum, we found ourselves in New York. At first I resented it, being so far from where I wanted to be, my hands around his throat, but in time I realised that I could walk freely as myself amongst the people there.

“That time, in the caves, it was the only time that I defied my mother. It had taught me not to. Of course, I became aware, as we all did, of Sycorax’s rise in this country. Whilst it sickened me, I knew where to find him, but he did not know where to find me. From time to time I still stepped out in disguise and I knew that this was no longer for my own amusement or to save myself from cringing in fear. It was my weapon.

“My mother, she died three years ago; the dust of old tombs had infected her lungs and, whilst painful, it was brief. Only I and a priest we knew attended the funeral and her grave is not marked. Even as I laid the flowers on her casket, I knew that I needed a means of getting back to Africa, getting into the DIA and taking Sycorax at his proudest moment, just as he had taken me at mine. So, here I am, here is today, only a handful of hours away from me is my absolute revenge.

“And you brought me my truck. You and that girl.” She smiled, not unkindly. “I saw how you looked at her.”

“So?”

“It was tender. You cared.”

“Perhaps. But you’re not the only one who can put on a show.”

“No, no.” The smile remained. “The eyes always betray. You meant it. You should have been true to those eyes of yours, Mr Bond. You should have stayed. Ah, I see it in how you look now; you wanted to, didn’t you? You feel guilty, hm? And yet, here you are, here you are with… the gun.

“That brings us back to where we started, Mr Bond. We’re both hunters. There are rules for hunters, and you are cheating. You lost, back in Sengee. I won.” She stood up, and again rested her hand under his chin. Bond wondered how quickly death would come. “Now,” she continued, slowly pushing her blunt, short fingernails into his flesh “is it right, is it fair, that you should have help?”

Bond exhaled sharply, angrily. Then…

…the voice, behind him, ran him through. A short, barked, unpleasant laugh and “Oh come on, Camille; not as if you haven’t.”

Bond’s heart felt as if it would burst apart. God Almighty! So fixated on her had he been that he had ignored any notion of there being another person in the room with them. Only at her tilting her head to one side, in enquiry, and a gentle creak of a floorboard did Bond’s sense rush back to him. How could he have been so dull witted, so absorbed by this macabre creature?

“Good morning, Mr Bond.” The voice was male, clear, firm, undoubtedly American. East Coast educated, New York in all probability, but with the nasal harshness tempered, softer, grown out. Bond tried to turn his head to his left, but felt the rope cutting into him: a glimpse of a large, muscular, suntanned hand, its back thick with wiry black hair and clean, well maintained nails almost disguising the nicotine stains; a white shirt cuff, grey trousers. The same the other side. The man was standing directly behind him and Bond knew that there was no way in which he could look around and up at the face; alternatively, it would be the last thing he would see before the rope crushed his windpipe.

“I’ve no need to hurt you, nor does Mlle Dejouis.”

Bond cleared his raw throat, and stared at the girl who pushed herself back onto the bed. She looked away in contempt, dissatisfied with the interruption. “I don’t believe you.”

“Mm. I saw that, what she did. Perhaps she didn’t need to, but wanted to. Seems to be the theme of the conversation, yeah? But we’ll find the need if we have to, both of us in turn, if you give us no other choice. Don’t nod if y’understand, it’ll kill you.” There was no tremor in the voice: it was cold, hard, direct and businesslike. Possibly Bond’s own age, he guessed. Perhaps a little more.

“I understand,” Bond said, dully.

“Sure. Important that you do.” An increased confidence was dripping through the man’s voice. “I guess you wanna know who I am?”

“Good guess. And I usually like to see who I’m talking to.”

“That’s not gonna happen, Bond; good reasons, don’t lose sleep.”

“Alright. What’s your name?”

“Call me Torpenhow.”

“Does that answer the question?”

Bond heard the snort of amusement, and the smile in the voice. “Mebbe not. But,” and at this the man’s index finger appeared alongside Bond’s right eye, pointing at the bed “it’s the name she knows so I guess I should be consistent, yeah?”

“Admirable.”

“Yeah.” Bond considered that his comment could not have been more effectively ignored. “You, though, Bond, you I don’t need to ask about. James Bond, British government agent.” The man emphasised it as a-Gent, mockingly. “You’re here for Sycorax. Here to kill him.” The voice dropped. “You people just don’t know when you’re beat, do you?”

“I’m a charity officer with Eyelight and…”

“Crap.” The word whipcracked around the room, and Bond braced himself for the strike, but none came. “You know how I know that, Bond? You know how I know your real identity, what you’re really doing here?”

“No. But I guess you’re about to tell me.” As he said this, Bond watched the girl; had there been a flicker of something, mild amusement; had those eyes become less furious for a moment? Trick of the light? But her general good humour in Sengee had to mean that she was capable of warmth, of some emotion…

An act.

“As you said, Bond, good guess. Truth is, you’ve been working for me. For me and…some shared interests.” The man laid his hands upon Bond’s shoulders, softly, as if in welcome, or thanks, a thanks unexpressed in the voice’s sneer.

Bond kept his eyes fixed on the girl. “Including you?”

The girl nodded her head, slowly.

“Don’t worry,” Torpenhow continued, “your superiors don’t know it.”

Bond cleared his throat. “You’re wrong. I’m not here for him; I’m here for you.”

“Oh yeah? That gun, for me?” The man paused. “Then tell me. About me. Shoot.”

“I don’t know everything, but I know enough. Get me out of these damned shackles and I’ll tell you, face to face.” The man released his hands from Bond.

“Not a chance. You know nothin’. Except what she just told you.”

“I know that if she kills him, there’ll be a war.”

There was a pause, during which Bond heard the lighting of a cigarette. “That confident, huh?” Bond felt the smoke being slowly exhaled over the raw skin at the back of his neck. “Hm. Good, that’s good. Let’s say I value your professional judgment.” The man sounded thoughtful. “That’s very good. Still, what that also tells me is that you’ve had the talk too. That tale about Archangel, the Russian space shot? Guess we both believe it. Better be true now, yeah?”

Bond swallowed, his raw throat objecting futilely. “You really want a nuclear war?”

“Yeah.” A sniff. “Simple as that.”

“You can’t mean it.”

More smoke. Bond sensed it whispering between his collar and neck, down his shirt. “I do. Never been more serious.”

Bond raised his eyebrows and shot a look at the girl. “What about you?”

She stuck out her bottom lip, as if in thought, then shrugged. “There has always been war, Mr Bond. It is always around us. Sometimes it is more noticeable than at other times; that is all. Sometimes the world has no choice but to face it.”

A low chuckle behind his right ear sickened Bond. “Nice try; but she believes it as much as I do. Different reasons, sure, but we got the same conclusion.”

Bond sighed. How the hell was he going to deal with this? “Fine. If we’re all going to burn to death very soon, at least may I have a cigarette?”

“Hm. Don’t see why not.” Past his left cheek – Bond suspected deliberately closely – shot a half packet of Chesterfields; the girl caught it. The same happened with a box of matches. “Camille, you do the honours.”

The girl put a cigarette to her lips, lit it and inhaled deeply and, to Bond’s mind, suggestively. She may not have intended it and it may have been his brain scrabbling for meagre pleasure, but he enjoyed the charge it allowed him. She pushed herself forwards to the edge of the bed once more, and gently pushed the filter tip between his lips. The familiar flavour was lost in the taste of her. Bond shut his eyes and swallowed her down.

“Enjoy Camille’s story, Bond?” The mockery was plain.

Bond grunted. “I wouldn’t say ‘enjoy’.”

“Yeah, well, as we’re being frank with one another, you wan’ another one?”

“I’m amazed you have the time.” Bond opened his eyes and flicked the cigarette up to discharge the ash which then fell onto his shirt and he was gratified to note the girl brushing it off him, in mild annoyance. “If I was starting a war, I’m sure I’d be busier, not wasting a morning talking to me.”

“It’s no waste. There’s time.” The man was calm, confident. “I want you to know. I want you to know how you were beaten and despite all your efforts, beaten is the only result.”

Bond took another deep draught from the cigarette. “Go on then. I’m sitting comfortably. Begin.” He surveyed the girl. She stayed motionless under his gaze, a statue once more. Making made her mother proud, thought Bond.

“Just so you know where you stand. Hell, where you sit. You and I, Bond, you could call us… you could a few years back have called us cousins. Geddit?”

Bond frowned. “FBI?”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“CIA?” There was no response. Bond felt opportunity rushing through him. “Look, if that’s true, I know a man called Leiter.”

“I know six; what of it?”

“Felix Leiter. He was badly injured a few years back.”

“Yeah? Yeah, I heard about that. Guess that’s where I heard about you, Bond. Anyhow, that’s in the past. I left.”

“Your own decision?”

A snort of contempt. “Yeah. As it goes, they still think I haven’t. As far as Washington knows – or cares – I just sought… redeployment.”

Bond motioned to the girl to remove the cigarette. She did, and this time tapped the ash well away from him. He wondered whether she had seen his smile of earlier, and was now denying him even that pleasure. She put the cigarette to her mouth and, a grin spreading, pushed back on the bed. Bond curled his lip. “Careful now, Camille. Don’t get smoke in your eyes. They’ll go red.”

A sudden sting on his raw neck that turned to a burn and the sick porkfat smell of singed flesh filled his head. Anger, from the invisible enemy. “Be polite.”

Bond winced. “Alright, Torpenhow. So you’re a double. Not surprising you want to stay hidden. Who is it? The Russians, presumably.”

The anger remained. “Wanna get burned again, Bond? No? Sensible. No, it’s not Russia, not China, not anybody. Just me, me and Mlle Dejouis and Uncle Sam.”

“Go on.”

The man cleared his throat. “Ten past, Camille.”

The girl, who had been idly cradling Bond’s gun, pushed herself lazily from the bed. Kicking her discarded cigarette deftly, strongly, across the floor, she approached Bond and raised his head in the manner she had done before, although this time sharply, angrily and, to Bond, savagely, the pain going through him like an express train. “If you kill him, if you kill him and I do not, then I’ll kill you. You won’t see me coming.” She let him go, and looked over him at Torpenhow. “You’re right. It is time for me to change.”

Torpenhow said nothing but must have nodded assent, for the girl left the room. Bond heard the door shut and footsteps along the corridor. “Off to her box of magic tricks,” said the man. “Believe me, she’s got something unforgettable this time. Pity Sycorax won’t get time to remember it.”

Bond sniffed. “Get on with it.”

“Sure. As I said, we coulda been related, but not any more. I got out, three years ago. I’d seen enough.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a political disrupter; you’d call it an agitator. A mole. Fourteen years I gave, Bond, fourteen years as a good union man in Jersey City, New York, Baltimore, reacting properly, sympathetically to the little setbacks that befell ‘em, covering my involvement in making such things…happen.”

“Come on, Torpenhow; you know as well as I do that that sort of work’s federal jurisdiction. Her story was bad enough; yours just got worse.”

The room, warming in the morning sun, fell silent. The rasping of the man’s breath as he exhausted his cigarette betrayed a fury.

“Yeah, we both know that’s the rule, Bond.” Torpenhow spat “rule” as a four-letter oath. “It got broken. No, not broken. More kinda bent. Agency was worried about funding from the Soviets, wanted to establish who the contacts were. The unions were too powerful to dissolve, so they had to be infiltrated. Turns out the suspicion was right. Turns out they shoulda been worried about something else, though. I learned a lot in my time. Sure, there was funding coming in and funnily enough, the men receiving it met with bad accidents or had blame for blameless incidents pointed right at them. But, y’know, the more you see of your enemy, the more time you spend with them, the more you begin to understand, the more to see where they’re coming from. Deep cover, they call it.”

Bond muttered assent. “Sometimes you go too deep that you drown.”

“Yeah, right. I guess I never really got that far but it helped not to keep it all at a distance. It helped me see what my country was becoming. In all that time, in fourteen years, the monies passing through from Moscow, probably no more than half a million bucks, if more then not much. Grand scheme of things, Bond, that’s chicken feed. Some tables in Atlantic City, you win more than that in a week. And what that money was spent on? Low-level stuff, Bond. Sure, I was the spanner in the works and things didn’t go according to plan for them, but I ended up realising that if they had, so what? Some minor industrial disruption, a strike for a day or two; it would hardly bring the country to its knees. And that’s the point; the industrial concerns were so huge that this disruption woulda been nothing. Still, it was my job to stop it, I stopped it, but year on year, I saw the influence of the corporations growing until I didn’t know whether I was protecting them or protecting the people. Eventually, I realised I was in some private service; we’d been bought. I was complicit in it. We weren’t servants of the people no more. We were servants of some people.”

Bond smiled to himself, then sighed, hopefully expressing disappointment. “Welcome to capitalism, Comrade.”

“Hell, Bond, this wasn’t just capitalism, it was voracious, pernicious abuse of the system. When my folks and me came over on the boat into New York harbour in ’33, we were expecting a democratic ideal. Maybe we were naïve, and what we got was still better than what we’d left behind, sure, but it still seemed back then to be government for and by the people, that old routine. Struck me, the more I saw of the way it worked, it was all about government for about a half-dozen. And it’s getting worse.

“They bought government, and it doesn’t matter which party. The Constitution, it got sold. It has shareholders now. That isn’t what we were promised. All I saw as I worked was the influence growing, into policy, into it mattering so damn little who the hell was President because all they were was some advertising guy, a mouthpiece, father of the nation and puppet of the few. Basically, Bond, there was a coup. It took years and it was silent and it happened so gradually no-one saw it. There were no tanks on the White House lawn, no bodies foaming in the Potomac, but it happened and it continues to happen.

“You may say it had to happen. After the Crash, government and business had to work together to build the country again; these corporations had to be invited in. The house guest, so polite for so long, ended up kicking out its host.

“It has to stop. The people, the moms and the pops, the kids, off to church Sundays, reading the funnies, little league, paying off the car, they trust the government and it’s trust it doesn’t now deserve. Their faith is being exploited to make a handful so much richer. And yet, we prosper. Life is good. The crumbs from the table are plentiful and tasty and candy-dipped, it seems, and that blinds us to the reality that crumbs is all they are.”

“So,” said Bond, trying to sound relaxed, “you want to destroy your country. Same old song, Torpenhow. Just another frustrated traitor.” The words were barely out when the strong hands clamped down onto his shoulders and started to squeeze the life out of him. Death was an instant away.

The voice was whispering, hurried, deadly. “Tell me when it hurts too much, and I’ll make it hurt some more, you lousy bastard.” Bond said nothing, concentrating on keeping his teeth from popping from his gums as the pain skewered him, his restricted movement tripling it. Finally, Torpenhow released his grip, and with the blood rushing back into his shoulders and neck, Bond fought not to faint.

“You really shouldn’t have said that, Bond.” Torpenhow was struggling to keep calm. “I warned you to stay polite.”

“Alright,” Bond spat. “Go on, damn you.”

“I’m no traitor, Bond. Not at all. I love my country. I love what it is intended to represent. The theory is the greatest one; the practice is tainted. I don’t seek to diminish its power. I just want to put it right. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t care. I want to see it the greatest nation on Earth, legitimately. Destroying it is the last thing I want.”

“Start a war and see what happens.”

“Yeah, we all will. I’ll tell you what happens, Bond. We win. My country reclaims its place.”

Bond snorted. “Lunatic, fascist delusions. Hitler had the same idea.”

A low chuckle, humoured. “Never thought I’d be likened to him… Ah, you leap to conclusions, Bond. You’re wrong. My politics, such as they are, I would call liberal. Strikes me you like to divide the world, divide people into defined camps. People easier to kill if you don’t have to think too much about them, that so? Liberals, now they march against war, against the bomb. The more conservative, well they take pride in America’s military strength, they want a show of force. The world, Bond, it just ain’t like that. I’m the good son of East Coast intellectuals in their Chelsea coffee houses and their summers on Long Island. My father has a seat in politics at a university I’m not naming. My mother, she writes columns, quite academic ones. I am your very picture of liberal stock, and I’m a liberal who wants a war. Don’t get confused. There are a number of us, but,” a snort of a laugh, “most of them are still drinking their coffee and arguing about it.

“The right wing, the conservative economic power, they sure as hell don’t want war. Like any bully, they’ll flex their muscles, but will run from the fight. But it’s a calculated cowardice. The more time before a conflict, the more time they have to prepare themselves, the more time to make themselves rich; and the more time they have to scare others.

“That’s what my country has become. The people are oppressed, they just don’t see it. The arms corporations feeding the government have created the myth that we are, currently, in danger. And as they stockpile the weapons, they churn them out of the factories, they are creating the most powerful armament of all, far more damaging than the bomb. Think about it for a minute, it’ll only take that. Fear. It’s why you flinch, because you can’t see me. But Camille, look at her, she knows the truth. See how calm she was, sitting opposite me?

“Yeah, fear. It’s the great weapon and it’s used not against our enemies but against our own people. That’s what’s happening, Bond, and you’re an agent of it too. Momma back in Iowa, Indiana, wherever, she believes, because she is told, that the Red Menace threatens those little children she sees playing in the yard whilst she washes the dishes each night. It’s fear of the dark, and there’s no bogeyman. It’s a fiction. But it helps so much those who are making millions to shout so loud that the bogeyman exists so people are convinced that so much of their tax dollar has to go into defence spending. It’s the standard political lie; to get elected, you point out how different you are from the other guy. To stay elected, you make people scared of that other. Hell, it’s not even political, yeah? If you believe that God created everything then God created evil too; why do that, other than scare people into trusting you, believing in you, accepting that no matter how violent you are in killing their first born or their cattle that you’re still better than that bad thing you told them about?

“It’s robbery, Mr Bond, theft with force, or the threat of it. People are scared. If – if – there actually was, God forbid, a war, now, the whole house comes tumbling down and it’s exposed as one big fraud. The American people are being taken for suckers.

“My country is corrupted; I’ve seen it. It needs to be taught its proper place in the world. Number one.”

“For a man saying so little,” said Bond, “you talk too much.”

“Years of not talking teaches me the value of a captive audience. ‘Scuse the expression. Anyhow, at present, you know as well as I do that, truth is, the Soviet Union can’t cope with a war. The truth, the absolute truth, is that it doesn’t have the weapons, it doesn’t have the air power, it doesn’t have the resources to sustain attack. Yet. And that’s the key. The longer this is drawn out, the more time they will have to mobilise, the more developed they will become, the greater the risk of my country being destroyed. A war now, and people will see the truth – our rapid mobilisation was totally unnecessary; all we’ll need is one strike and this war will be over, the world will see that the USA is the greatest power on the planet, that the enemy was nothing more than a ghost, a lie, a justification for corrupting our democracy. War, now, the optimum moment, will purify my country, cure it of its cancer.

“They have created the villain, just as God created the serpent or Satan or whatever. To justify its policy, it has birthed this image of the ravenous Russian bear, this evil power running rampant through Europe and Asia and – hell – Cuba, which they’re welcome to.”

“The Russians have power. You saw what happened in Hungary.”

“Sure, they have the manpower. The army is huge, yeah, every man, woman and dog. But it has to cross borders. This war, it isn’t a land war. It comes out of the sky. You don’t have to invade your neighbour any more; that’s the tactic of the Dark Ages. We don’t need their land, we got enough, this ain’t some border dispute, Bond. As for Hungary, hell, you know as well as I do that we – and I include the British in this – we let it happen. It adds to the myth. When there are more uprisings, we’ll let it happen again. Suits us fine, it’s not us being invaded. If those few tanks had been repelled at the border, what would our current enemy be? Nothing, it’d be a nothing. There would be no threat. People would ask questions, good questions too, about why we were spending so much on defending ourselves when we know the enemy’s not up to it. And that’s it – people are most afraid of the unknown, fear what they don’t understand. This, this will inform them; the Soviet incapability will become known, and it will never be able to recover from it.

“What the ruling elite will do is wait. They’ll wait and in waiting they will lose their chance, because time will just allow the Soviets to build. Until one day, twenty, thirty years from now, the war that comes will destroy them both. And I can’t allow it. We have to take our advantage now, so the world sees that we are the greater power, the lie is exposed and, with the threat of war lifted, we’re all more secure. There will be certainty. We can get on with our lives, free of it.

“You know what it’s like, in the air, just before a storm? The pressure builds. Imagine that building until comes a storm so cataclysmic, everything is destroyed. I want to get through the storm, quickly, into that clear, crisp air that always follows.

“My country is simply wasting time, and money. The money, to feed the fear. Better spent on improving the country, not oppressing it. Needs a lick of paint. You been to Manhattan lately?”

“I had an apartment there once. I’ve been back a few times since.”

“Yeah? Then you know what the streets are like. If you’re not spending money on unnecessary weapons, spend it on the roads.”

“You’d start a nuclear war because of a few potholes?”

“Can you think of a war that started for a better reason?”

Bond smiled. “I hope you’ve got a stronger budget plan than that. If what you want to do works, I doubt there’ll be any streets. Or any Manhattan, for that matter. Seems to me it’s target number one.”

“Possibly; they only have one strike, of course. More probable they’ll go for military installations within immediate reach; West Germany, Britain maybe. I guess they could go to their east and fire something at the Pacific Coast. Hell, they may aim for San Francisco, get it wrong and hit Vancouver. No matter.”

“No matter? Hundreds of thousands, a million, more, will die.”

“Yeah, but after we retaliate and blow Moscow and Leningrad off the map, that will be it. Shame; they have some nice churches. But no-one will die beyond that. And how many have died already in this war? We’re years beyond zero, Bond. How many men have you killed? Hm. Look, if it gets to a million, there will still be more living. The longer this stalemate goes on, when it eventually comes to the endgame, that’s not as confident a prediction. You know it too.”

Bond sighed. “I can’t decide whether you’re knitting the flag or burning it, Torpenhow. Either way, what you want is just a fantasy, a dream.”

“Better a dream than a nightmare, Bond.”

“Starting a war isn’t a nightmare?”

“What’s that saying about it being darkest just before dawn? I see the dawn, I see daylight. Only in the dark do you get the bogeyman.”

“Which doesn’t exist. Yes, you told me. What you haven’t told me is why you picked here.”

“Heh. If I didn’t think you’d bite me, I’d light you another cigarette, Bond, because you’re going to need it when you learn how you were played.”

“I won’t hurt you if you come around and face me.”

“No chance. I don’t have Camille’s talents, either of them; her talent for disguise or her talent for death. As I said,” Torpenhow continued, “three years ago I told my chief I wanted to do something different. He wasn’t a man to bother with reasons so I spared him those, save that I said I thought I could be useful overseas, ‘Where overseas?’, quoth he. Told him I liked the idea of Africa; I guess he was expecting me to say England or Germany or Brazil or somethin’ more glamorous. Fact is I knew that save for keeping a close eye on Sinai, making sure our tourists don’t get robbed in Casablanca, ensuring the French don’t go insane in Algeria, keeping the Straits of Gibraltar open, for the USA must have its falafel, and a passing interest in your old colonies when they reach independence, CIA just don’t care too much about, or for, Africa. Not a high priority.

“Tell the truth, it hadn’t been for me before I heard Camille’s story two years previously. Chance encounter. She was working in a market on the Lower East Side that was having delivery troubles which, fair enough, I had caused. She was the only woman; it’s not light work hauling frozen carcasses around a warehouse. First time I saw her I thought it was just all the cold that made her so pale. Turns out it’s not. Turns out also that the men are scared of her.

“Reason is she’s armed, all the time. Shows it too. Who’s going to challenge her? Says she needs it for protection. Some of those guys could be animals. Little enough I know, she’s really using it for attack. When she started working there, some questions about why the unsold meat got bullet holes in it before it got dumped; turns out it was target practice. She told me later that she wanted to see what damage could be done to a body.”

Bond bit his cracked lower lip.

“So, no great secret; I kept her under some observation. Didn’t know she was also being observed by a guy called Carmelo Vucci; ever hear of him?”

Bond nodded as best he could. “Of course. The Brooklyn Bear. Big racketeering trial last year.”

“Yeah, Brooklyn Bear, one of the politer names. Guess your press didn’t want to print Brooklyn Bastard; no matter. He was running an unlicensed bookmaker from the same market, numbers racket, and amongst my other duties, I was keeping an eye. Went quiet, the market dispute got itself solved in the usual East River way, straight to the bottom, and I disappear back into my doubts. Six months later, job at Idlewild, midnight I’m overseeing some guy – you forget the names, that the same with you? – getting put on a government ‘plane from which he’s gonna learn skydiving, and who’s that in the next hanger having words with two guys from the airport management staff, but Vucci. I takes me a look, and he’s got muscle with him. It doesn’t look good for the two guys because this ain’t your usual muscle. Doesn’t go well for those two stiffs, does it? The first men she shot. They died quick.”

Bond curled his lip. “She said that she didn’t like to see suffering. Most humane.”

“Shut up.” Torpenhow was irritated at the interruption. “So,” he continued, “me and Camille, we had words. Not then, but a week or so later she passes me in Broome Street. Amongst all the millions of New York, I knew her. Unmistakeable. I follow her home, then next day have her run in, ostensibly for being a known Vucci associate. We have a talk, her story comes out, we agree after some time that it wouldn’t be too good for her if Vucci knew we had met, even though she had said nothing about him and I hadn’t asked. I agree to have her and her mother protected, she would now need to fall back on those particular disguise skills of hers, and she would work for me, under my training. An unofficial CIA asset. Effective, too.” Bond saw the man’s left hand reach around and tug gently – but painfully – at the rope tying his neck to his wrists. “As you can see. Truth told, some of her tale inspired me to choose Africa. The more I learned of Sycorax, the more I reported to her, the more we considered how we could get at him, for our mutual benefits. This is an unstable continent, Mr Bond. There are dozens of Sycoraxes, each capable of pushing the world into war.

“So, I leave New York, and Camille. I promised to bring her over when the time was right. Two years, Mr Bond, I wander the continent, a report now and again to those paying me to do it, some of it true, some of it not; the truth could have damaged my purposes. I’ve seen every country, I’ve seen every country’s fragility and how close it is to tipping into violence once their previous master’s back is turned.

“Two world wars start out of Europe. Europe takes stock, sees the remains of its palaces and considers war A Bad Thing. Official. So, they create a community to avoid a war. It’s a good idea, but it needs money. Money otherwise spent here, and countries like it. So, they get out, and leave their previous charges without any sort of infrastructure, leave them to tear each other apart, and once done tearing each other apart, they’ll go for their neighbours. This is where the Third World War starts, sooner or later.”

“And if you have your way, sooner.”

“Yeah. So, time passes, I have my finger in a number of pies. Inevitably, time would bring me and Sycorax together, six months ago. Whatever he was as a young man, he’s a clever bastard now. Picked me up straight away. Said he had heard of an American agitator appearing all over Africa; wanted to know if it was me. I got myself the impression he already well knew it. He wanted my help. These riots you see, Bond, they don’t just happen. You have to accelerate things sometimes. I have certain skills. I don’t mean Joe Gwembe any harm but his offer wouldn’t have bettered Sycorax’s. So, I explained that I wasn’t strictly on business. Obviously I didn’t tell him what I was doing. I guess he interpreted what I suggested to mean I was doubling for his Soviet friends. That, or that he thought he could blackmail the Americans by exposing my actions. Suited me to let him go on guessing that way. It meant he was close.

“I remembered what Camille said of him, and could believe it. What I saw… As the weeks progressed, he let me off the leash and told me what I expect he told you: the Archangel. His protection. He told you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. I did wonder where he’d gone the other day. He slipped my observation. He followed you. Interesting; he doesn’t leave the city; I’d never known him to. Hmm. And he’ll have told me for the same reason as he told you; to scare you into not acting against him, and no doubt some vanity on his part, how clever he had been, how safe he was against his past masters. Problem is for friend Sycorax, it was exactly what I wanted to hear. I hadn’t been expecting it, I was giving the country up as a dead loss, believe me it’s more stable than many, but when it came, it was like every childhood summer. Here was an opportunity on a plate and obviously, with Mlle Dejouis, I had the means of operating. The trick was, how to get her into the country. She couldn’t just walk in and shoot him down. Of all the things he was scared of, it was the white woman. To the point of paranoia. Justifiable paranoia.

“So, you British came into play. Tell me, Bond, you know of a guy called Djennovich? Yvgeny Djennovich?”

Despite the increasing, stifling warmth of the room, Bond went cold. So that was it!

Torpenhow did not wait for an answer. “Course you do. All over your papers, high up Soviet defector. When, in my…uh…previous life, I sourced the Red funds back to Moscow, guess who was the paymaster? So, he and I develop a correspondence over the years, even after he came over to you.”

“You turned Djennovich against the British?”

Torpenhow laughed, unpleasantly. “Hell no. He didn’t turn. He never turned. You took him in but that was your business, your call. What you failed to realise, or what you ignored, was that if he could betray his home, betraying his flag of convenience would be no problem. You just gave him a safe haven from which to act. It doesn’t mean he felt anything for you. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend, and you didn’t see it. As long as the Soviet Union suffers, whatever other damage is caused is simply part of the game. Just chess, Bond. Plays chess, Djennovich, y’know that? As long as you get to the King, if you’ve sacrificed all your other pieces, you still win. He has nothing to preserve. If his ultimate goal is met, destruction elsewhere is just incidental.

“His great advantage was that you dumb bastards were falling at his feet for the information like lovestruck teens. Most of it was true because it hurt the Soviets back. But he and I both knew they were flesh wounds only; the British would send a man like you to Budapest or wherever to put some bullets in some scientist and it would sting, but ultimately heal over. Comes to it, you’re nothing more than a scratch, Bond. What he and I both saw in Sycorax and Archangel and Camille was the opportunity to destroy them; again, different reasons, same result.

“So, he gave you something. He played the coincidence of his latest… heh… relationship having a sister who worked at the clinic in Sengee, the same man being something junior with you.”

Bond creased his face in disgust, and saw before him the overkeen, overscrubbed face of Cremmer, telling his tale. Anger overtook the pain running through him.

“I guess he would have dropped the guy – Cremmer, that it? – if the opportunity hadn’t arisen. I understand that’s how those people work. Still, he got enough out of it for a description of the sister, a description that could be wired to me, from me to Camille. In the meantime, I arrange for a typed letter to be sent from here, supposedly from the sister, to London. The clinic had been attacked, the drugs ransomed, very tragic. Enjoyed writing it.”

“It wasn’t true?”

“Hell no. Or, at least, it wasn’t attacked that day. Far as I know. Coulda been true, I guess. I thought about telling Sycorax to attack it but I know that few if any of his men want to go there. Dangerous place.”

“Seemed quiet to me.”

“Oh, the people are docile; they’re probably very noble, Bond. It’s the place itself. The clinic is…hopeless.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Tempest.

“Simple, Bond. The drugs don’t work. Sure, they would cure the fever, if it was the fever that was the problem. Hell, it’s not that serious – mild irritation, some temporary blindness, half a day say, but not what it now is, these poor bastards scraping their eyes out. The fever, like everything, got itself corrupted. You know what’s in the soil up there, Bond? Did Sycorax tell you, in his little state of the nation address?”

“Yes.” He saw it now; he realised. “Uranium.”

“Yeah. Active isotope, too. Useful. Walking on it won’t kill you but don’t go eating it. Thing is, it’s in the water now. This fly, lays its eggs in or near water, something like it, so the uranium gets into the little fly eggs, into the flies takes years, decades to mutate but that’s happened now and what it means is that it’s not the fever that’s killing people. Mosquitoes, they carry malaria but these little bastards give you radiation poisoning. Your eyes already infected by the fever, which looks like a minor inconvenience in comparison, it hits you at your weakest spot. And, so, the drugs, they won’t work because no-one knows this. By the time the fever clears, it’s too late – your eyeballs are in your hands and you’ll either bleed or starve to death.”

I’ve left her up there, thought Bond. Christ. “Mlle Dejouis seem unaffected.”

“Nothing does affect her, you notice that, Bond?” Torpenhow laughed. “She knew. I told her. Did you tell your friend, did you tell your friend what Sycorax said?”

“Yes.” No.

Torpenhow coughed. “Then I guess she’ll be OK.” He said it without any evident concern for Tempest, a detached mocking in his voice. Bond wanted to reach up and strangle the man; he had tricked them into going, and now Tempest was going to suffer, horribly, if this proved true. Bond felt certain it would.

“Still,” Torpenhow went on, relaxed, “if it gives you satisfaction, Bond, poor little Cremmer, he believed what he was telling you.”

Bond sniffed. “You’re saying he wasn’t in on it?”

“Hell no. He had to buy it to sell it on. Only careful owners need apply. So he was betrayed by his lover. Happens to us all. But he was only junior, he didn’t matter. It had to be believed by senior people, your people, your superiors. That was the unknown, the thing that could unbalance it all, make it a waste of time. There was no way Camille could get into the city. She got over the border to the clinic but thus far, no further. You had to come and get her and to do that, we had to make it all so very irresistible.

“You people should really check your sources better. Perhaps in other jobs you do. Perhaps this was so tempting, to go and see how the bad children were behaving, that you just let go of all that and let go of your good sense, your famed caution.” The sneer was palpable.

Bond spat hot saliva onto the floorboards. Regrettably, they did not catch fire. Not that he would admit it to this invisible Torpenhow, but M’s eagerness to send him to the DIA no longer looked decisive, but the work of a man easily – and dangerously – manipulated. Or, worse, prepared to believe those who were, without scrutiny. The old man had made a slip. He did not want to believe it but reality smashed at his conscience like a hammer at a bad peach. “Cremmer did have a sister, then?”

“Correct tense.”

“What did she do with her?”

“I don’t ask. Call it squeamish.”

“Odd, for a man wanting millions dead.”

“Yeah, well, those people I don’t have to see die. Anyway,” continued Torpenhow, “you came. Why they sent you, their business. Reputation has it you’re a valuable asset, but they send you here. Screw up somewhere, Bond? Got to be an embarrassment? If you fail out here, fine, you were never meant to succeed; if you succeed, hell of a big “if”, mind, then you re-earn your spurs, that kinda deal?”

Bond saw the envelope, saw the envelope on his desk. Had he remembered it…

“Guess you need to think about that one, right? May not have much time. So, cut a long one short, in you come to town, interesting landing, I heard about it. Now, you must have met my pal Bewick, right? How’s he doing?”

“Dead.”

A silence. “Sorry to hear it.” The bluster deflated, Torpenhow meant it. “Real sorry.”

“I’ll let the family know.”

“Answer for everything, huh?” The contempt came rushing back. “You watch your mouth.”

Again, the room fell quiet, a dense silence only punctuated by Torpenhow’s exhaling of cigarette smoke. Bond shut his mind to the nagging suggestion that this unknown man’s assessment of M’s treatment of him had been right. If it was right, though, how the hell dare M do that? The old bastard had gone too far; thrown him to the bloody wolves this time.

Eventually, Torpenhow resumed his story. “Once you got to the clinic, that was to be it. That was the end of your involvement. You stay in Sengee, you probably go blind, I don’t care; you served your purpose. You were only here to have a look around, report back, get the hell out. And now you turn up again, and all I can guess, another good one, is that you’ve had new orders. The only explanation, don’t waste breath denying it. I’m right.” It was not a question.

“Yes,” said Bond. “I’m under instruction to lift Sycorax, get him away from his power, his people, over the border. There’s a RAF ‘plane waiting in Nairobi to fly him to Aden. After that he’s not my problem. I don’t know why they want him.”

His unseen captor squeezed Bond’s shoulders, digging those thick, muscular fingers into the bruised flesh. “Nice try. Yours isn’t a lift operation.” The man released his grip, but still rested his palms on Bond. “See the gun, Bond? Your gun, yeah? That’s a sniper’s weapon, you know that. Lee-Enfield. And damn big. Lifting a man is close-quarter work; you need something small, something you conceal so you get up nice and tight and walk him calmly out of the building, friendly like. You also need help. It’s always two man, mebbe three. Where’s your backup, Bond? Nowhere, that’s where. You’re here on kill orders, you’re acting as a sole agent to enhance deniability; nothing else fits.”

Bond shot out warm saliva, praying that it carried pain with it. “You’re not an idiot, Torpenhow. You must see that this is full of holes. What if she doesn’t get to him?”

“Then you shoot him.”

“What if I choose not to?”

“Then your people shoot you, or at least dispose of you in whatever humane way they put down old or disobedient dogs. Whatever life you call this Bond, would end. You’ll be remembered as a failure. Maybe worse, a traitor. You decide whether that’s better alive or better dead”

“What if either of us does kill him but nothing happens? No war breaks out, Archangel was a delusion, a trick. You’ll have failed.”

Torpenhow laughed. “Come on, Bond! You think this is the only finger, the only pie? Maybe it’s all that rope cutting off sense to your brain, but have you been listening? Jesus, this is just a hell of an opportunity. Two days’ time I’ll be in Chad. Ever been to Chad, Bond? Don’t go. It’s worse. And that might be the little trigger event. Or it might be the guy I’ve got scouting out the Soviet embassy in Algiers. Who knows? Bond, you must have some history, right? First World War didn’t really start with the Archduke getting shot, y’know. That was one event of many, just the most – hell – dramatic. You know that expression, the theatre of war? It fits. We remember the big, instant events, give them a hell of a lot of importance but war is a cumulative process, it’s a domino pattern. You just have to decide how near the trigger any of those individual dominoes falls.”

“So this may all fail?”

“Of course. I just move onto the next one. She gets her revenge – deserves it, yeah? – or dies trying, and I just move on. And of course, the opposite is equally so. If Archangel is true, what if he decides to do it anyway, regardless of Sycorax and this toxic dustbowl? Baikonur’s a hell of a long way away from here, Bond. Lot of miles over which a man can change his mind.”

“If that happens, then all your little schemes are pointless, Torpenhow.”

“Mebbe. But I won’t cry over that; I’ll have what I want, and you won’t need to worry about killing Sycorax or not, will you? If you think that’s likely, you may as well go ahead and do it.” Torpenhow laughed. “Seems to me, Bond, you got yourself a problem. Beyond the obvious. I need him dead. She wants him dead. You have no idea whether you want him dead or not, but I guess those are your orders. We’re all of us after the same thing. Can’t see why you want to stop us. If you’re right and Archangel’s going to destroy things for the Russians anyway, Sycorax may as well die. Depends, I guess, whether you believe him. Do you?”

“It doesn’t matter whether I believe him or not.”

“Ah, not this time. The luxury of detachment just disappeared. Get real, Bond. You really saying he’d be just another kill?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. You expect me to believe that, that you’d feel nothing, you wouldn’t care about the consequence? If that’s the case, you might as well do it.”

“And might as well not. Camille would understand.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps so. Interesting to watch you two talking.”

“She did most of it.”

“That was what was interesting. Known her three years and she said near as much to you as she ever has to me. What is that? Some sort of camaraderie for killers?”

“Perhaps she likes me more than she likes you. It’s not hard.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Torpenhow breathed deeply, bored. “You think I don’t know killers? I know killers, Bond. Your have routines, your games, you don’t like the unexpected. You’re a superstitious breed. What’s your superstition? Hers, it’s odd. Cut flowers, she hates ‘em.”

Bond recognised, in the changing of the subject, an attempt to recapture a position of knowing the girl better. Was this jealousy; were they lovers? Did it matter? “Beauty cut down in its prime. Not difficult to see the relevance.”

“Guess so.”

“Call mine the same, then.”

Torpenhow lit another cigarette. “Guess we won’t see eye to eye on this, Bond. Excuse the expression. Still, you gotta admit, you’re the only one with a problem.”

“That suggests you’re not going to kill me.”

A grunt from Torpenhow. “You’ll never know how close it came, Bond. All this time and you still don’t know. Believe me when I say that most of this morning you’ve been at gunpoint. I thought you might say more if you didn’t know.”

Damn him.

The unmistakeable barrel of a Colt, much used, came into view alongside Bond’s left eye, and then retreated. “Standard CIA protocol, Bond. Most effective way to scare a man is not to show him anything. As I said, using the unknown, fear.”

“I thought you didn’t approve.”

“Yeah, well I’m sure I’ll get angry with myself later.”

“Angrier when you’re stopped.”

“Yeah?” The man’s left hand again tugged at the rope binding Bond to the chair; Bond bit into his lip as fiercely as the rope bit into his chest. “What can you do, Bond? You don’t know what I look like, you don’t know what the girl will. Gonna give me up?” The last question was a snarl of derision. “Who gets me? Fajeur? You ever met Fajeur? Surrender me to him and his men, those lawful authorities? Hell, Bond, you know as well as I do the only law in this town is gravity.”

Bond hoped his voice carried his smile. “It’s the risk if you keep me alive.”

“Y’know, I wondered about it. Then I realised you could be useful.”

“What?”

“It’s simple, Bond. From what you tell me, and from what I know and what I guess, you interest Sycorax. Why else would he follow you up country? I thought that would be a problem, but I see now that you’re a hell of a gift.”

“What does that mean?”

“You distract him, and I need him distracted. I doubt it’s for amusement value; I think he wants to prove a point to the British, for certain. Call it the colonial thing. And there’s a parallel, see? Hundred years ago, more, your majors and colonels and such, bagging their lions, sticking heads on plinths and hanging them off the wall; you know the thing. How did they get those lions? How did these half-assed, half-blind half-dead drunks never get a scratch? They laid a trap. They tie a goat or a lamb or some such to a tree, climb the branches, wait all day. Lion, hears the bleating, gets distracted, comes to investigate and as he’s helping himself to breakfast, boom!

“You, Mr Bond, you’re my goat. I read it as you being too tempting a prize for Sycorax to let go. And whilst he’s occupied with you, like the lion amazed at his good fortune, well…”

Bond breathed deeply. “Bait. And here comes Mlle Dejouis, creeping up behind him, shooting him down.”

“Yeah.”

Bond sighed. “You remain a mole, Torpenhow. Bad vision, moles. Can’t see long-distance. Sycorax won’t fall for it. He’ll be immediately suspicious, you’ll put him on greater guard. The girl won’t get anywhere near him.”

“Yeah… If it were anyone else as bait, Bond, I’d agree. But think of the prize – humiliation of the British by capture of a spy ordered to kill him; a show trial, if any trial at all, you’ll be damn lucky, a scandal that will bring your government down. The excitement will blind him, blindness enough for Camille to catch him off guard. Think about it. The current situation is embarrassing enough for your people as it is; you wouldn’t be here otherwise, you wouldn’t have had those orders of yours. This makes it worse. For him, better. Gives him a hell of a lot of ballast with his neighbours, instant credibility, probably hasten Britain’s exit from the whole damned continent. In your remaining colonies, the mistrust will be huge. Who knows, he may even have you executed on television; they still have the death penalty here. You introduced it. British justice; he’ll see the irony.” Torpenhow snorted, amused. “He’s a politician; they always look to the best political angle and you, Mr Bond, are that best political angle. Hell, when he sees you, he’ll think he’s President for life.”

“Which won’t be very long.”

“You got it.”

Behind him, beneath him, the front door slammed. Bond sensed Torpenhow’s face close to his neck. “Hear that, Bond?” the man whispered. “Remember it as the sound of war starting.”

Bond exhaled, at length. “What happens now?”

“Me and you are going on a car ride, Bond. You won’t know too much about it.” Torpenhow’s right hand came into view, as did the label on the little brown bottle it held. When it came, one hand firmly on his left shoulder, the other holding the chloroformed rag before his face, Torpenhow said “Just a little shut-eye; not enough to kill you. When you wake, I expect you’ll wish it had. We won’t meet again Bond; hell, we never did...”

***

Soft music.

Soft music, a harp. Harp?

Had Torpenhow been wrong? Had it killed him? Was it over?

“Wake him up.”

No, that was no St. Peter. Nearer the Devil.

A splash of rancid water hit him in the face. Bond coughed, spat, shook his head. Vision blurred by the drug and the water, he blinked hard, repeatedly.

“Your hands are free, Mr Bond.” The voice rumbled over him. “Dry your eyes; dry them now.”

Bond did so, and, the blindness clearing, he stared around him. He was lying, free of any rope, face upwards upon a polished wooden floor – a ballroom floor, that was it. He must be in the hotel. What was the name? He could not remember. It hardly mattered. He pushed up, to sit, the surroundings coming into focus, shaking his head free of the last blindspots of the chloroform. A bizarre sight, this long, wide chamber; there were no walls evident, just long, velvet sheets draped ceiling to floor, above him the same, a handful of single, unshaded bulbs dangling listlessly, haphazardly. Equally sporadically around the room, perched upon orange boxes and empty catering tins, fire torches; at the smell of burning petrol so close to him, Bond felt a nausea that he struggled to suppress. Even closer, two men, each in threadbare combat uniform and the absurd sashes, one holding the now empty tin pail, the other a revolver aimed at Bond’s face.

On the stage, the harp, playing it the small boy, that small boy. Sycorax’s boy. His eyes were closed, his small fingers trying their best, the instrument at least twice his height and several strings well beyond his short arms. A noble effort, Bond had to acknowledge; there was a tune, if not one readily recognisable. Beside the boy, upon what Bond suspected was probably only a dining-room chair, albeit one also casually splashed in rich, purple cloth, sat Sycorax, his eyes closed, his right hand stretched out before him, waving the Lee-Enfield along to the music as if conducting the last orchestra in Hell. Over his suit, which Bond suspected was the same of the first meeting, he had draped a sheet, evidently the best effort at a toga. It could have been ridiculous. It should have been.

It was not.

Without opening his eyes, Sycorax spoke, the measured boom of the voice oddly complimentary to the light music. “I warned you away, Mr Bond. You did not listen.”

Bond cleared his throat. “You’re in danger, Sycorax. Now it’s my turn to warn you.”

Sycorax steadied his hand, pointing the rifle at Bond. Still the eyes remained closed. “I am always in danger, Mr Bond. I need no warning of it.”

“This is different. You’ve been conspired against; we both have.”

The man opened his eyes, staring into Bond. “It is a risk of my position; and, now that yours reveals itself through this weapon,” he shook the gun gently, “yours too. Think yourself lucky that you sit before me now.”

“Look,” Bond said, urgently, “I haven’t got time for all this playacting. There’s a man called Torpenhow.”

The voice was untroubled. “Of whom I have not heard, Mr Bond.”

Of course not. That’s not his name, is it? “The American. Your American friend?”

Sycorax did not respond, but Bond noted the narrowing of the eyes, and knew that he had to go further. “He’s found her. Camille Dejouis. She’s here.”

Two words, two words only and the music stopped. The boy, his eyes bloated, stared at his father. Sycorax pushed himself up from his throne and, putting the gun down in his place, slowly removed the sheet from him; the playacting was coming to an end. He stood on the stage, staring down at Bond, a picture of controlled anger and agitation. When he finally spoke, the voice had lost much of its rumble of certainty. “Where?”

Bond had known then question would come, but could not conceive of the answer. “I don’t know.”

To this, Sycorax inhaled. In the flickering of the makeshift torches, it seemed as if he was sucking all the air from the room. “I have never believed you, Mr Bond. I am not starting now. You,” he pointed at the guard still holding the water bucket. “Put that down, pick him up.” Bond was pulled to his feet. Sycorax still did not approach. “I have made an error, Mr Bond. When it was reported to me ten minutes ago that you had been found on the steps of this, my temple, I indulged an interest, a fascination to see you again, especially so given that the gun was with you; I wanted to be proved right. A vanity, an indulgence. Now I realise that I should have trusted my instinct, to have you shot on sight, for now you bring doubt, now you bring more pain, and you do so without any weapon in your hand. You speak of the woman; I do not know if this is true. If it is true, you speak of not knowing where she hides; this may be untrue.

“You have lied enough, Mr Bond. It is time to introduce you to truth. I must have truth. If it should mean that your dishonest tongue is torn from your lying head, then so be it.” He raised his bonearm, the savage hooked end pointed directly at Bond. Then, apparently thinking better of it, he lowered his arm and nodded at the guard. “Give him to Fajeur.”