The James Bond MEGAPACK®

by Ian Fleming

  Bond commented: ‘The public agent often does better than the man who has to spend a lot of time and energy keeping under cover.’

  ‘So she sent Kerim the note. Now she wants to know if he can help her.’ M paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘Of course Kerim’s first reactions were exactly the same as yours, and he fished around looking for a trap. But he simply couldn’t see what the Russians could gain from sending this girl over to us. All this time the steamer was getting further and further up the Bosphorus and soon it would be turning to come back to Istanbul. And the girl got more and more desperate as Kerim went on trying to break down her story. Then,’ M’s eyes glittered softly across at Bond, ‘came the clincher.’

  That glitter in M’s eyes, thought Bond. How well he knew those moments when M’s cold grey eyes betrayed their excitement and their greed.

  ‘She had a last card to play. And she knew it was the ace of trumps. If she could come over to us, she would bring her cipher machine with her. It’s the brand new Spektor machine. The thing we’d give our eyes to have.’

  ‘God,’ said Bond softly, his mind boggling at the immensity of the prize. The Spektor! The machine that would allow them to decipher the Top Secret traffic of all. To have that, even if its loss was immediately discovered and the settings changed, or the machine taken out of service in Russian embassies and spy centres all over the world, would be a priceless victory. Bond didn’t know much about cryptography, and, for security’s sake, in case he was ever captured, wished to know as little as possible about its secrets, but at least he knew that, in the Russian Secret Service, loss of the Spektor would be counted a major disaster.

  Bond was sold. At once he accepted all M’s faith in the girl’s story, however crazy it might be. For a Russian to bring them this gift, and take the appalling risk of bringing it, could only mean an act of desperation—of desperate infatuation if you liked. Whether the girl’s story was true or not, the stakes were too high to turn down the gamble.

  ‘You see, 007?’ said M softly. It was not difficult to read Bond’s mind from the excitement in his eyes. ‘You see what I mean?’

  Bond hedged. ‘But did she say how she could do it?’

  ‘Not exactly. But Kerim says she was absolutely definite. Some business about night duty. Apparently she’s on duty alone certain nights of the week and sleeps on a camp bed in the office. She seemed to have no doubts about it, although she realized that she would be shot out of hand if anyone even dreamed of her plan. She was even worried about Kerim reporting all this back to me. Made him promise he would encode the signal himself and send it on a one-time-only pad and keep no copy. Naturally he did as she asked. Directly she mentioned the Spektor, Kerim knew he might be on to the most important coup that’s come our way since the war.’

  ‘What happened then, sir?’

  ‘The steamer was coming up to a place called Ortakoy. She said she was going to get off there. Kerim promised to get a signal off that night. She refused to make any arrangements for staying in touch. Just said that she would keep her end of the bargain if we would keep ours. She said goodnight and mixed in the crowd going down the gangplank and that was the last Kerim saw of her.’

  M suddenly leant forward in his chair and looked hard at Bond. ‘But of course he couldn’t guarantee that we would make the bargain with her.’

  Bond said nothing. He thought he could guess what was coming.

  ‘This girl will only do these things on one condition.’ M’s eyes narrowed until they were fierce, significant slits. ‘That you go out to Istanbul and bring her and the machine back to England.’

  Bond shrugged his shoulders. That presented no difficulties. But... He looked candidly back at M. ‘Should be a piece of cake, sir. As far as I can see there’s only one snag. She’s only seen photographs of me and read a lot of exciting stories. Suppose that when she sees me in the flesh, I don’t come up to her expectations.’

  ‘That’s where the work comes in,’ said M grimly. ‘That’s why I asked those questions about Miss Case. It’s up to you to see that you do come up to her expectations.’

  Chapter 13

  ‘Bea Takes You There...’

  The four small, square-ended propellers turned slowly, one by one, and became four whizzing pools. The low hum of the turbo-jets rose to a shrill smooth whine. The quality of the noise, and the complete absence of vibration, were different from the stuttering roar and straining horsepower of all other aircraft Bond had flown in. As the Viscount wheeled easily out to the shimmering east-west runway of London Airport, Bond felt as if he was sitting in an expensive mechanical toy.

  There was a pause as the chief pilot gunned up the four turbo-jets into a banshee scream and then, with a jerk of released brakes, the 10.30 BEA Flight 130 to Rome, Athens and Istanbul gathered speed and hurtled down the runway and up into a quick, easy climb.

  In ten minutes they had reached 20,000 feet and were heading south along the wide air-channel that takes the Mediterranean traffic from England. The scream of the jets died to a low, drowsy whistle. Bond unfastened his seat-belt and lit a cigarette. He reached for the slim, expensive-looking attaché case on the floor beside him and took out The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler and put the case, which was very heavy in spite of its size, on the seat beside him. He thought how surprised the ticket clerk at London Airport would have been if she had weighed the case instead of letting it go unchecked as an ‘overnight bag.’ And if, in their turn, Customs had been intrigued by its weight, how interested they would have been when it was slipped under the Inspectoscope.

  Q Branch had put together this smart-looking little bag, ripping out the careful handiwork of Swaine and Adeney to pack fifty rounds of .25 ammunition, in two flat rows, between the leather and the lining of the spine. In each of the innocent sides there was a flat throwing knife, built by Wilkinsons, the sword-makers, and the tops of their handles were concealed cleverly by the stitching at the corners. Despite Bond’s efforts to laugh them out of it, Q’s craftsmen had insisted on building a hidden compartment into the handle of the case, which, by pressure at a certain point, would deliver a cyanide death-pill into the palm of his hand. (Directly he had taken delivery of the case, Bond had washed this pill down the lavatory.) More important was the thick tube of Palmolive shaving cream in the otherwise guileless spongebag. The whole top of this unscrewed to reveal the silencer for the Beretta, packed in cotton wool. In case hard cash was needed, the lid of the attaché case contained fifty golden sovereigns. These could be poured out by slipping sideways one ridge of welting.

  The complicated bag of tricks amused Bond, but he also had to admit that, despite its eight-pound weight, the bag was a convenient way of carrying the tools of his trade, which otherwise would have to be concealed about his body.

  Only a dozen miscellaneous passengers were on the plane. Bond smiled at the thought of Loelia Ponsonby’s horror if she knew that that made the load thirteen. The day before, when he had left M and had gone back to his office to arrange the details of his flight, his secretary had protested violently at the idea of his travelling on Friday the thirteenth.

  ‘But it’s always best to travel on the thirteenth,’ Bond had explained patiently. ‘There are practically no passengers and it’s more comfortable and you get better service. I always choose the thirteenth when I can.’

  ‘Well,’ she had said resignedly, ‘it’s your funeral. But I shall spend the day worrying about you. And for heaven’s sake don’t go walking under ladders or anything silly this afternoon. You oughtn’t to overplay your luck like this. I don’t know what you’re going to Turkey for, and I don’t want to know. But I have a feeling in my bones.’

  ‘Ah, those beautiful bones!’ Bond had teased her. ‘I’ll take them out to dinner the night I get back.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ she had said coldly. Later she had kissed him goodbye with a sudden warmth, and for the hundredth time Bond had wondered why he bothered with other w
omen when the most darling of them all was his secretary.

  The plane sang steadily on above the endless sea of whipped-cream clouds that looked solid enough to land on if the engines failed. The clouds broke up and a distant blue haze, far away to their left, was Paris. For an hour they flew high over the burned-up fields of France until, after Dijon, the land turned from a pale to a darker green as it sloped up into the Juras.

  Lunch came. Bond put aside his book and the thoughts that kept coming between him and the printed page, and, while he ate, he gazed down at the cool mirror of the Lake of Geneva. As the pine forests began to climb towards the snow patches between the beautifully scoured teeth of the Alps, he remembered early skiing holidays. The plane skirted the great eyetooth of Mont Blanc, a few hundred yards to port, and Bond looked down at the dirty grey elephant’s skin of the glaciers and saw himself again, a young man in his teens, with the leading end of the rope round his waist, bracing himself against the top of a rock-chimney on the Aiguilles Rouges as his two companions from the University of Geneva inched up the smooth rock towards him.

  And now? Bond smiled wryly at his reflection in the Perspex as the plane swung out of the mountains and over the grosgrained terrazza of Lombardy. If that young James Bond came up to him in the street and talked to him, would he recognize the clean, eager youth that had been him at seventeen? And what would that youth think of him, the secret agent, the older James Bond? Would he recognize himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear—this man with the cold arrogant eyes and the scar down his cheek and the flat bulge beneath his left armpit? If the youth did recognize him what would his judgment be? What would he think of Bond’s present assignment? What would he think of the dashing secret agent who was off across the world in a new and most romantic role—to pimp for England?

  Bond put the thought of his dead youth out of his mind. Never job backwards. What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple—or dead.

  Gazing down on the sun-baked sprawl of Genoa and the gentle blue waters of the Mediterranean, Bond closed his mind to the past and focused it on the immediate future—on this business, as he sourly described it to himself, of ‘pimping for England.’

  For that, however else one might like to describe it, was what he was on his way to do—to seduce, and seduce very quickly, a girl whom he had never seen before, whose name he had heard yesterday for the first time. And all the while, however attractive she was—and Head of T had described her as ‘very beautiful’—Bond’s whole mind would have to be not on what she was, but on what she had—the dowry she was bringing with her. It would be like trying to marry a rich woman for her money. Would he be able to act the part? Perhaps he could make the right faces and say the right things, but would his body dissociate itself from his secret thoughts and effectively make the love he would declare? How did men behave credibly in bed when their whole minds were focused on a woman’s bank balance? Perhaps there was an erotic stimulus in the notion that one was ravaging a sack of gold. But a cipher machine?

  Elba passed below them and the plane slid into its fifty-mile glide towards Rome. Half an hour among the jabbering loudspeakers of Ciampino Airport, time to drink two excellent Americanos, and they were on their way again, flying steadily down towards the toe of Italy, and Bond’s mind went back to sifting the minutest details of the rendezvous that was drawing closer at three hundred miles an hour.

  Was it all a complicated MGB plot of which he couldn’t find the key? Was he walking into some trap that not even the tortuous mind of M could fathom? God knew M was worried about the possibility of such a trap. Every conceivable angle of the evidence, for and against, had been scrutinized—not only by M, but also by a full-dress operations meeting of Heads of Sections that had worked all through the afternoon and evening before. But, which ever way the case had been examined, no one had been able to suggest what the Russians might get out of it. They might want to kidnap Bond and interrogate him. But why Bond? He was an operating agent, unconcerned with the general working of the Service, carrying in his head nothing of use to the Russians except the details of his current duty and a certain amount of background information that could not possibly be vital. Or they might want to kill Bond, as an act of revenge. Yet he had not come up against them for two years. If they wanted to kill him, they had only to shoot him in the streets of London, or in his flat, or put a bomb in his car.

  Bond’s thoughts were interrupted by the stewardess. ‘Fasten your seat-belts, please.’ As she spoke the plane dropped sickeningly and soared up again with an ugly note of strain in the scream of the jets. The sky outside was suddenly black. Rain hammered on the windows. There came a blinding flash of blue and white light and a crash as if an anti-aircraft shell had hit them, and the plane heaved and bucketed in the belly of the electric storm that had ambushed them out of the mouth of the Adriatic.

  Bond smelt the smell of danger. It is a real smell, something like the mixture of sweat and electricity you get in an amusement arcade. Again the lightning flung its hands across the windows. Crash! It felt as if they were the centre of the thunder clap. Suddenly the plane seemed incredibly small and frail. Thirteen passengers! Friday the Thirteenth! Bond thought of Loelia Ponsonby’s words and his hands on the arms of his chair felt wet. How old is this plane, he wondered? How many flying hours has it done? Had the death-watch beetle of metal fatigue got into the wings? How much of their strength had it eaten away? Perhaps he wouldn’t get to Istanbul after all. Perhaps a plummeting crash into the Gulf of Corinth was going to be the destiny he had been scanning philosophically only an hour before.

  In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane-room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for BEA Flight No130.

  Almost at once it got lighter in the cabin. The rain stopped crashing on the Perspex window and the noise of the jets settled back into their imperturbable whistle. Bond opened the door of his hurricane-room and stepped out. He slowly turned his head and looked curiously out of the window and watched the tiny shadow of the plane hastening far below across the quiet waters of the Gulf of Corinth. He heaved a deep sigh and reached into his hip-pocket for his gunmetal cigarette case. He was pleased to see his hands were dead steady as he took out his lighter and lit one of the Morland cigarettes with the three gold rings. Should he tell Lil that perhaps she had almost been right? He decided that if he could find a rude enough postcard in Istanbul he would.

  The day outside faded through the colours of a dying dolphin and Mount Hymettus came at them, blue in the dusk. Down over the twinkling sprawl of Athens and then the Viscount was wheeling across the standard concrete airstrip with its drooping windsock and the notices in the strange dancing letters Bond had hardly seen since school.

  Bond climbed out of the plane with the handful of pale, silent passengers and walked across to the transit lounge and up to the bar. He ordered a tumbler of ouzo and drank it down and chased it with a mouthful of ice water. There was a strong bite under the sickly anisette taste and Bond felt the drink light a quick, small fire down his throat and in his stomach. He put down his glass and ordered another.

  By the time the loudspeakers called him out again it was dusk and the half moon rode clear and high above the li
ghts of the town. The air was soft with evening and the smell of flowers and there was the steady pulsebeat of the cicadas—zing-a-zing-a-zing—and the distant sound of a man singing. The voice was clear and sad and the song had a note of lament. Near the airport a dog barked excitedly at an unknown human smell. Bond suddenly realized that he had come into the East where the guard-dog howls all night. For some reason the realization sent a pang of pleasure and excitement into his heart.

  They had only a ninety-minute flight to Istanbul, across the dark Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. An excellent dinner, with two dry Martinis and a half-bottle of Calvet claret put Bond’s reservations about flying on Friday the thirteenth, and his worries about his assignment, out of his mind and substituted a mood of pleased anticipation.

  Then they were there and the plane’s four propellers wheeled to a stop outside the fine modern airport of Yesilkoy, an hour’s drive from Istanbul. Bond said goodbye and thank you for a good flight to the stewardess, carried the heavy little attaché case through the passport check into the customs, and waited for his suitcase to come off the plane.

  So these dark, ugly, neat little officials were the modern Turks. He listened to their voices, full of broad vowels and quiet sibilants and modified u-sounds, and he watched the dark eyes that belied the soft, polite voices. They were bright, angry, cruel eyes that had only lately come down from the mountains. Bond thought he knew the history of those eyes. They were eyes that had been trained for centuries to watch over sheep and decipher small movements on far horizons. They were eyes that kept the knife-hand in sight without seeming to, that counted the grains of meal and the small fractions of coin and noted the flicker of the merchant’s fingers. They were hard, untrusting, jealous eyes. Bond didn’t take to them.