Devil May Care

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. That’s two hundred and fifty miles per –’

  ‘I know exactly how fast it is,’ said M. ‘But what the hell is it doing in Persia?’

  ‘Well, Pistachio is only relying on word of mouth from a driver who took 007 to the docks, so we can’t really say. But it doesn’t look good. Particularly if it’s been modified.’

  M puffed heavily at his pipe. ‘Well, I trust Pistachio. Did you get that sample he sent back analysed? The bag of stuff from Noshahr that came in this morning?’

  ‘Yes. It’s pure heroin. If heroin can ever be “pure”. Bound for … Well, God knows. It looks as though it was bound for Russia. In the Ekranoplan.’

  ‘That means Gorner has some deal with the Russians. They’ll traffic the heroin on to the West through Eastern Europe. Maybe through the Baltic states. Estonia, probably.’

  ‘I’m rather afraid it looks that way, sir.’

  M went over to the window again. With his back to the chief of staff, he said, ‘I don’t think that’s the whole story, though. I don’t believe it’s only commercial, just a drug deal – however enormous. The Americans are pouring people into Persia at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t they always?’

  ‘Yes. But not like this. I haven’t seen such panic in the Middle East since that man Philby surfaced in Beirut. The people in Langley know something big’s going on.’

  ‘Are things any better between us and Langley?’ said the chief of staff.

  M shook his head. ‘Still cool, I’m afraid. It’s Vietnam that’s the problem. Until the politicians can see eye to eye on that or until we send some troops, there’ll be this degree of … reserve.’

  ‘You mean that as far as Persia’s concerned, we’re both in crash dive but we’re not talking to each other.’

  M sighed heavily. ‘That’s about the size of it, Bill. That’s why we so badly need to hear from 007.’

  ‘What about 004? Any word?’

  ‘Not a squeak. What really worries me is what I’m getting from Washington. Pretty much every spare agent is being shipped off to Tehran. Even some in semi-retirement. It’s all hands on deck.’

  ‘And we don’t really know why. There’s something they’re not telling us.’

  M nodded silently.

  Eventually, after a heavy silence, the chief of staff said, ‘If Gorner has some deal with the Russians so that he can use their Ekranoplan to transport his heroin, then he has to be repaying them in some way.’

  ‘Not just money,’ said M. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘I believe that’s my job, sir,’ said the chief of staff.

  M put down his pipe on the desk and pressed a switch on the intercom. ‘Moneypenny,’ he said. ‘Get me the prime minister.’

  14. The End of the World

  ‘It’s as well for you my hands are tied, Gorner,’ said Bond. He spat the words.

  ‘Tough talk, Bond, but I don’t think my men would let me come to much harm.’ Gorner nodded towards the two armed guards at the door. ‘Don’t you want to look at your little girlfriend? Everyone else is. And by the sound of it, they like her a lot.’

  Bond glanced through the window. Scarlett was running the gauntlet naked along the glass walkway, trying to preserve her modesty with her hands while an armed guard prodded her with a rifle butt and the slave workers roared their approval from below.

  ‘Kill Gorner,’ Poppy had told him. ‘Just kill him.’ Bond would have to wait for his moment, he thought, but when it came, he would relish it.

  ‘Don’t worry about the girls,’ said Gorner. ‘They’re just human flotsam. The kind of people your Empire found expendable.’

  Bond swore succinctly.

  ‘And if you find it so distasteful,’ said Gorner, now fully back in control and obviously enjoying himself, ‘you can return to your cell.’

  Gorner beckoned to the guard and gave him a brief instruction in Farsi. ‘We’ll send your little girlfriend in to join you later, Bond. We won’t let the men have her tonight. I want to build up their appetite first.’

  ∗

  In the solitude of the cell, Bond tried to form a plan of escape. It was possible that he could jump a guard and take his gun, but not until he had somehow loosened the nylon ropes that were biting into his wrists. Even then, he didn’t want to do anything until he had the basis of a plan for getting himself, Scarlett and Poppy out of Gorner’s lair.

  In the meantime, he thought his interests were better served by doing as Gorner said. Sooner or later Gorner would have to disclose the details of his proposed ‘military intervention’, and then Bond, given a chance, would at least be in a position to pass a worthwhile message back to London, or to Darius in Tehran. It was probable that he would die in the process, but if he could somehow get word back that enabled defences to be put in place, then at least he would have done his job.

  Eight hours passed with no food, no water and no sign of Scarlett. Bond was dozing fitfully when he was summoned back to Gorner’s office at gunpoint. This time, Chagrin was standing next to his master.

  ‘You’re going on an exercise, Bond,’ said Gorner. ‘You can view it as a kind of reconnaissance before the main action. Sometimes these preliminaries can be as dangerous as the real thing, however. You may not survive, but it will amuse me to see what you’re made of. And I’m sure it’ll be good for you. You’ll learn a lot. I’m going to place you in the care of Chagrin, my most trusted lieutenant.’

  The man in the kepi stepped forward at the sound of his name. He then muttered something to the guard, who clicked his heels and left.

  ‘I think it’s time you knew a little more about Chagrin,’ said Gorner. ‘His real name is Pham Sinh Quoc. He fought for the Viet Minh. He was a dedicated Communist soldier against the French. When the French colonized Indo-China they sent many nuns and missionaries. Religion was not good enough for the great lay Republic of France at home, where church and state had been separate since 1789, but they always exported Catholicism to the little coloured people whose land they stole. I suppose it eased their conscience.’

  The guard, accompanied by three others, had returned with a gibbering workman in a grey uniform. The man fell to his knees, clearly terrified of what lay in wait.

  ‘When Chagrin and his comrades came to a village in the north where the children had been listening to Bible classes, they used to tear out the tongue of the preacher with a pair of pliers. Then he couldn’t preach any more. That’s what we still do to people who talk too much.’

  Gorner nodded to Chagrin, who took a pair of chopsticks from his pocket. Two guards held the workman’s arms rigid behind him while Chagrin inserted a chopstick into each of the man’s ears.

  ‘And this is what Chagrin used to do to the children who had listened to the Bible.’

  Bracing his feet at either side of the man, Chagrin banged the flat of his hands as hard as he could against the ends of the chopsticks, drilling them into the man’s head. Blood spurted from his ears as he screamed and fell forward on the floor.

  ‘He won’t hear anything for a long while now,’ said Gorner. ‘Not till his eardrums grow back. Some of the children never heard again.’

  Two guards dragged the screaming man away while two remained in the room.

  ‘And I expect you’d like to know how Chagrin came by his nickname. The word means both “pain” and “grief” in French. Remarkable that a language should use the same word for both, don’t you think? But there was something else about Chagrin that made him a better, fiercer soldier than anyone else. When the Russians liberated the Nazi concentration camps they took the papers relating to the Nazi doctors’ experiments. A highly secret section of the Soviet health ministry continued with experiments along the same lines for many years afterwards. Unlike the Nazis, they asked for volunteers. Travel costs and a financial reward were guaranteed. Word reached Chagrin’s Communist cell in North Vietnam and he volunteered to go to a clinic in Oms
k. Russian military doctors were interested in the neurological basis of psychopaths – by which we mean men who lack the ability to imagine the feelings of other people. They can’t project. They have no concept at all of “the other”. The doctors thought that such a capacity – or lack of it – might be useful to the army and particularly to the KGB. To cut a long story short, Chagrin was one of a dozen men who underwent brain surgery. Post-mortems of psychopaths had shown some abnormalities in the temporal lobe. Are you still with me, Bond?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Chagrin’s case the operation was a success. They cauterized an area of his temporal lobe the size of a fingernail. I don’t imagine Chagrin was exactly a bleeding heart before, but afterwards his indifference to others has been total. It’s really quite remarkable. Unfortunately, there was a small side-effect. The surgeons damaged a major cluster of pain-sensing neurons in his brain – quite close to the morphine receptors, as it happens. The brain registers pain in some of the same areas that govern emotion. If you try to stop someone feeling compassion, you may take away other feelings. As a result, Chagrin’s ability to experience pain is uneven, sometimes barely existent. This means he has to be careful. He might jump down twenty feet and not even know that he’s broken his ankle. At other times, of course, it can be an advantage. In combat, he is a formidable opponent.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bond. It explained the stroke-victim appearance of part of Chagrin’s face. ‘But why the hat?’

  ‘The surgeons raised what’s called an osteoplastic flap. They drill holes in the skull, then insert a thin saw between the bone and the membranes beneath and cut upwards through the bone. When they’ve got three-quarters of a circle, they lift and fold back the skull. But the gentlemen in Omsk were in a hurry and didn’t finish the job properly. The flap doesn’t really fit. Chagrin feels shy about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bond. ‘But why the cap of the Foreign Legion, when he fought so bitterly against the French?’

  Gorner shrugged. ‘I think perhaps the Russian neuro-surgeons removed his sense of irony.’

  Bond struggled to contain his hatred of this man. Which unwise student, he thought, which unthinking joker at Oxford University had first teased him about his hand and so set his life’s course on this perverted crusade?

  ‘You must be hungry, Bond,’ said Gorner. ‘But today, as I said, is a day of education. The lack of food is to remind you of how the British systematically starved the Irish in the great potato famine. I think a few pangs of yours don’t really compare to the pain of the millions who died. Do you?’

  ‘When do I leave on this venture of yours?’ asked Bond.

  Gorner was looking through the window at the slave workers on his factory floor and seemed not to hear. ‘I did think of another way of bringing Britain to its knees,’ he said. ‘I considered investing the profits from my pharmaceutical company in the newspaper business. Suppose I had bought the most distinguished paper of your Establishment hypocrites, The Times. Then I could have put it in the hands of some malleable editor who shared my hatred of Britain and attacked the country from its own mouthpiece. I could have bought television channels, other papers … I could have piped in pornography and propaganda through every inlet until … But, no, Bond. It would have taken too long. And your “fair play” laws that limit ownership might have stopped me. So I pipe death into the veins, with needles. It’s the same, but quicker.’

  Gorner stood up. ‘Enough of this pleasant daydream. Chagrin, take Bond away. Make him work. Remember what the British did to the Kikuyu in the Mau-Mau rebellion. Go.’

  Chagrin walked in front of Bond while two armed guards followed. They took the open elevator up to the ground floor, then went by electric cart down a vaulted corridor to a barred iron door. Chagrin went to a keypad beside it and punched in a five-figure code.

  Bond memorized the sequence of sounds, as each number Chagrin pressed emitted a slightly different note.

  The door slid away and Bond was pushed into the open and forwards over the desert sand, towards what he recognized at once as a classic Soviet twin-engined Mi-8 Hip. It had a five-blade main rotor and was capable of carrying thirty-six armed men.

  The sun was searingly hot during the short walk to the aircraft. The slowly moving blades were already whipping up the sand as they climbed the steps. There were ten more of Gorner’s men inside, all armed and dressed in plain T-shirts with army combat trousers and heavy ammunition belts. The cargo door was pulled shut, the rotors accelerated and, with an effortless surge, the helicopter swept up into the air, banked left and roared away over the desert.

  Bond could tell from the sun that they were flying east, towards Afghanistan. In his mind, he went over the sound of the electronic keypad Chagrin had used and fixed the sequence of noises in his memory as a primitive tune. He practised it again and again till it had lodged itself in his memory like the most annoying pop song on the radio.

  When the helicopter eventually put down, it was next to a modest caravanserai, a rectangle of improvised buildings to which water had been fed from some distant mountain snowmelt by the system of underground quanats that J. D. Silver had described to him. Bond made out its path running to the building like that of a furiously burrowing desert mole. The men left the helicopter and were given water and food from a table in the open courtyard.

  Bond could smell the kebab and rice and found himself salivating. He hadn’t eaten since dinner with Hamid and Scarlett in Noshahr. But his hands were tied, and when the cook made to offer him some food, Chagrin shook his head.

  ‘Irish men,’ he said. ‘No food.’

  ‘Water?’ said Bond.

  Chagrin poured some water into a bowl. ‘Like dog,’ he said. ‘Like English with slaves.’

  Bond knelt down and lapped at the warm water.

  There were about a dozen tethered camels in the caravanserai. The local men placed ladders against their flanks, climbed up and thrust their hands through cauterized cuts into their humps. Their bloodied forearms were then withdrawn and in their hands were polythene-wrapped parcels, like the ones Bond had seen at Noshahr. Bond presumed the camels had been trained to follow a route across the desert by being heavily watered at each end.

  ‘Go,’ said Chagrin, pushing Bond towards an all-terrain army vehicle that was waiting with its engine already running.

  It was a six-hour drive over rough desert tracks, then up through the mountains before the first sight of any human habitation. Bond remembered from his study of the maps that there were proper roads along the southern edge of the Dasht-e Lut, going from Bam to Zahedan, then up to Zabol at the border. But where there were roads there would be roadblocks and police searches, so the desert route was clearly better for Gorner’s purpose.

  The landscape became greener as they came down from the mountains and drove across the plain towards Zabol. About ten miles short, the all-terrain vehicle stopped, and the men transferred to ten waiting open-topped Jeeps. With the Jeep drivers, Bond and Chagrin, the party now totalled twenty-two. They left at three-minute intervals, not wanting, Bond presumed, to be seen as a group. The military lorry itself, though big enough to carry back several hundredweight of opium, was obviously too conspicuous to be seen in town.

  A few minutes later, Bond was in the city he’d imagined, in his hotel in Tehran, as the end of the world. It was a dusty, treeless place of grey-brown walls made of mud bricks. The streets were laid out on a closed grid, which gave it a tight, claustrophobic feeling. The dry heat was intense, and unmediated by any tall buildings. Although there were some Persians of the kind he’d seen in Tehran, in Western clothes, there were many more dark-skinned tribesmen with Afghan headdresses and unkempt black beards. Sizeable though it was, Zabol had the lawless feel of an old frontier town.

  Bond was ordered out of his Jeep, which then drove off to avoid being seen in the city. He was walked through the bazaar with the muzzle of Chagrin’s revolver against his lower vertebrae. It was a tawdry market. Instead
of silk, the stalls sold cigarettes and imitation Western goods – records, perfumes, plastics – made in China. In the food section there were displays of Sistani sugar melons, ruby grapes, boxes of Bami dates and orange-coloured spices, but over them all hung the sickly smell of opium, the Papaver somniferum.

  ‘Taliak,’ hissed an old man at Bond, gesturing him to follow behind a curtain. His grey beard was yellow from years of smoking the taliak or opium he hoped to sell.

  Chagrin pushed the old man in the chest, and he fell back through his curtain. What surprised Bond was how few police there seemed to be in Zabol. From this he concluded that the main trafficking was done far away from the bazaar and that the police were tolerant of small-scale dealing, no doubt because they were themselves implicated.

  They walked through the town till they came to an industrial area. Here, Bond saw the ten Jeeps reassembled outside a low mud-brick warehouse which, to judge from the illustrated hoarding beside it, was supposed to deal in melons. The corrugated doors were reeled back, screeching on their runners, and the Jeeps drove in.

  In the gloom inside, a dozen Afghans, their tribal costumes criss-crossed with bandoleers of ammunition, pointed Soviet rifles at Chagrin’s men as they loaded wooden tea chests into the back of the Jeeps. There were twenty in all, two for each Jeep. It was a colossal amount of raw opium, Bond thought, but nothing like enough to keep the wheels of Gorner’s factory turning. Heaven knew how much he was flying in from Laos.

  Under heavy cover from his men, Chagrin walked to the middle of the warehouse and placed a thick foolscap envelope on an empty crate. He stood his ground while one of the Afghans opened it and counted the fistfuls of US dollar bills it contained.

  At the Afghan’s silent nod of approval, Chagrin turned and gestured to the men. There was the sound of ten engines starting, and the convoy left at one-minute intervals. Bond and Chagrin were in the final Jeep, which was driven rapidly round the edge of town by the youngest and most nervous-looking of the drivers. About ten minutes outside Zabol, they joined the nine other vehicles behind a hill of sand and rock.