by John Gardner
‘Prepare to surface low. Receiving party to forward hatch.’
The order was acknowledged. Then the sonar operator said, ‘Half a mile, sir.’
Stewart wondered at his own folly. All his instincts told him to get out while they remained undetected. Damn Seahawk, he thought. Seahawk? Bloody silly. Wasn’t it an old Errol Flynn movie?
The radio operator heard the two Morse code Ds clear in his headphones just as Bond transmitted them from the almost stationary inflatable. ‘Two Deltas, sir.’
‘Two Deltas,’ replied Stewart with little enthusiasm. ‘Surface to casing. Black light. Recovery party clear forward hatch.’
The Seahawk party were pulled on board and slithered down the ladder. Preedy came last, having ripped the sides of the inflatable and set the charge that would destroy the craft underwater, leaving no trace. Stewart gave the order to submerge immediately, going deep and changing course. Only then did he move towards the fore-ends to speak to the Seahawk party. He raised his eyebrows at Bond when he saw they were one short.
Bond did not have to be asked the question. ‘He won’t be coming back.’
Then Lt Commander Stewart caught sight of the two new members of the Seahawk team. Women, he thought. Women! Bad luck having women aboard. Submarine drivers are a superstitious breed.
2
SEAHAWK PLUS FIVE
It was spring, the best time of the year, and London was at its most seductive with golden carpets of crocuses in the parks, girls shedding their heavy winter clothes and the promise of summer just around the corner. James Bond felt at peace with the world as, relaxing in his towelling robe, he finished his breakfast with a second large cup of coffee, savouring the unique flavour of the freshly ground beans from De Bry. The sunshine lit the small dining room of his flat, and he could just hear May humming to herself over the inevitable kitchen clatter.
He was on the late shift at Service Headquarters and so had the day to himself. Nevertheless, when on an office assignment, his first duty was to go through all the national daily papers, and the major provincial ones. He had already marked three small stories that appeared that morning in the Mail, Express, and The Times: one concerning the arrest of a British businessman in Madrid; three lines in The Times reported an incident in the Mediterranean; and a full-scale article in the Express claimed the Secret Intelligence Service was in the midst of a huge row with its sister organisation, MI5, over disputed territory.
‘Have you no finished yet, then, Mr James?’ asked May accusingly as she bustled into the room.
Bond smiled. It was as though she took pleasure in chivvying him from room to room when he had a free morning.
‘You can clear, May. I’ve got half a cup of coffee to finish. The rest can go.’
‘Och, you and your newspapers.’ She swept a hand in the direction of the papers spread across the table. ‘There’s ne’er a happy bit of news in them these days.’
‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’ Bond began.
‘It’s terrible, though, isn’t it?’ May pounced on one of the tabloids.
‘What in particular?’
‘Why, this other poor girl. It’s spread all over the front page, and they had yon head policeman on the breakfast television. Another Jack the Ripper, it sounds like.’
‘Oh, that! Yes.’ He had barely read the front pages, which were full of a particularly nasty murder that, according to the newspapers, the police were linking to a killing earlier in the week. He glanced down at the headlines.
TONGUELESS BODY IN WOODSHED.
SECOND MUTILATED GIRL DISCOVERED.
CATCH THIS MANIAC BEFORE HE STRIKES AGAIN.
He picked up the Telegraph, which had the story as a second lead.
The body of twenty-seven-year-old computer programmer Miss Bridget Hammond was found late yesterday afternoon. It was discovered in a disused woodshed by a gardener, near her home in Norwich. Miss Hammond had been missing for twenty-four hours. A colleague from Rightline Computers had called at her flat in Thorpe Road after she had failed to turn up for work that morning.
The police stated the case was clearly one of murder. Her throat had been cut and there were ‘certain similarities’ with the murder of twenty-five-year-old Millicent Zampek in Cambridge last week. Miss Zampek’s body was discovered mutilated on the Backs behind King’s College. It was revealed at the inquest that her tongue had been cut out.
A police spokesman declared, ‘This is almost certainly the work of one person. It is possible we have a maniac on the loose.’
An understatement, thought Bond, tossing the paper to one side. These days, perverted murder was a fact of life, brought closer by the speed of modern communications.
The telephone began to ring and he felt a strange sensation – a prickling at the nape of his neck, and an extraordinary sinking in the pit of his stomach, as though he had a premonition of something very unpleasant about to be, as they said in the Service, laid on him.
It was the ever-faithful Miss Moneypenny, using the simple code they had both mastered so well over the years.
‘Can you lunch?’ was all she asked after he recited his number.
‘Business?’
‘Very much so. At his club. 12.45. Important.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Bond cradled the receiver. Lunch at Blades was a rare invitation from M, which did not bode well.
At precisely 12.40, knowing his Chief’s obsession for punctuality, Bond paid off his taxi on Park Lane, taking the usual precaution of walking to Park Street, where that most sought after of gentlemen’s clubs can be found, its elegant Adam facçade set back from the street.
Blades is unique, an offshoot of the exclusive Scavoir Vivre, which closed not long after its founding in 1774. Its successor, Blades, came into being on the old premises in 1776 and it has remained one of the few gentlemen’s clubs to flourish and maintain its standards up to the present day. Its revenue comes almost entirely from the high stakes at the gaming tables and the food is still exceptional. Its membership includes some of the most powerful men in the land who have been shrewd enough to persuade wealthy visiting business associates – Arab, Japanese and American – to use the facilities as guests. Thousands of pounds change hands each evening on the turn of a card or at a game of backgammon.
Bond pushed through the swing doors and walked up to the porter’s lodge. Brevett knew Bond as a very occasional guest at the club and greeted him accordingly. Bond could not help thinking of the man’s father, who had been porter at the time of the great card game when 007 had at M’s instigation unmasked the evil Sir Hugo Drax as a cheat. The Brevett family had been porters at Blades for well over a hundred years.
‘The Admiral’s already waiting in the dining room, sir.’
Brevett motioned discreetly to a young page boy who led Bond up the wide staircase and across the stairwell to the magnificent white and gold Regency dining room. M was seated alone in the far left corner, away from windows and doors and with his back to the wall, so that he had a view of anyone entering or leaving the room. He gave a curt nod as Bond reached the table and glanced at his watch. ‘Bang on time, James. Good man. You know the rules. What d’ye fancy? – bearing in mind we haven’t got all day.’
Bond ordered grilled sole with a large salad, asking for the dressing ingredients to be brought, so that he could prepare it himself. M nodded approval. He knew his agent’s likes and dislikes as well as his own, and appreciated that it was difficult to get a dressing made to your own liking.
The food arrived and M waited in silence as James Bond carefully ground half a teaspoonful of pepper into the small bowl provided with the ingredients. This was followed by a similar amount of salt and sugar, to which he added two and a half teaspoonfuls of powdered mustard, crushing the mixture well with a fork before stirring in three full tablespoons of oil, followed by one of white wine vinegar, which he dribbled in carefully. He added a few drops of water before giving a final stir and pouring th
e mixture over his salad.
‘Make someone a damned good husband, 007.’ The clear grey eyes showed no apology for mentioning marriage, a topic people who knew Bond well steered clear of, and had done since the untimely death of his bride at the hands of spectre.
Bond ignored his Chief’s lack of taste and began to attack his fish with the skill of a surgeon.
‘Well, sir?’ He kept his voice down.
‘Time enough, yet not enough time,’ M said coolly. ‘Words of our late Poet Laureate, not that you’d recognise Betjeman from Larkin, eh?’
‘I know a few good ribald rhymes though, sir – The Jolly Tinker; The Old Monk of Great Renown? I can even recite you the odd limerick.’
M chewed on his fish – he too had ordered the sole, but with new potatoes. He swallowed and looked at Bond, his clear grey eyes cold.
‘Then recite me one about Seahawk, James. You remember Seahawk?’
Bond nodded, remembering vividly though it was now five years ago. Dave Andrews had been killed on the Seahawk mission and Bond would never forget the days and nights spent in the cramped quarters of the submarine, trying to calm and comfort the two girls.
‘What if I tell you the truth about Seahawk?’ said M.
‘If there’s need to know, sir.’
The Service always operated on a need-to-know basis so that all Bond had been told about Seahawk was that he had to take off two agents. He remembered Bill Tanner, M’s Chief-of-Staff, saying the two he was to rescue were getting out in their socks, meaning they were leaving fast to save their skins.
Almost to himself, he said, ‘They were so damned young.’
‘Eh?’ snapped M.
‘I said, they were very young. The girls we got out.’
‘They weren’t the only ones.’ M looked away. ‘We pulled the whole shooting match out over a matter of seven days. Four girls, a young man and their parents. We did it; you brought a couple of girls home. Now, James, two of the girls are dead. You probably read about it this morning. They had new names, new backgrounds. They were untraceable. But someone’s got to at least two of them. Brutally killed, their tongues removed. You read about the maniac on the loose?’
Bond nodded. ‘You mean . . . ?’ he began.
‘I mean that both those young women were rehabilitated after doing sterling service for us, and there are still three agents out there waiting for an executioner who cuts out tongues.’
‘A KGB hit squad leaving us a message?’
‘With each death, yes. They’re slicing up Cream Cake, James, and I want it stopped – fast.’
‘Cream Cake?’
‘Finish your lunch, then we’ll take a stroll in the park. What I have to tell you is too sensitive for even these walls. Cream Cake was one of our most effective operations in years. I suppose that’s why there’s a penalty. Revenge, they say, is a dish best eaten cold. Five years is cold enough, I reckon.’
M did not look at Bond, as they strolled – two businessmen reluctantly returning to their offices – through Regent’s Park.
‘Cream Cake was a ploy to get our own back. You know what an Emily is?’
‘Of course. The jargon’s outdated, but I know what it means.’
Bond had not heard the term Emily for years. It was the name their American sister service used to denote special targets of the KGB. Emilies had been found mainly in West Germany. They were usually colourless girls leading dull lives, destined to remain single for the rest of their days. The lack of romance in their lives was often the result of their having to look after an elderly parent so that they had little time to spare – working all day and looking after an ailing mother or father at home. But Emilies had something else in common. They usually worked for a government department, mostly in Bonn, and often as secretaries inside the BfV. The Bundesamt für Verfassungersschutz was the West German equivalent of MI5, but attached as a department to the Ministry of the Interior, or the BND (the Bundesnachrichtendienst). This intelligence-gathering organisation works very closely with the British SIS, the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
The KGB had exploited numerous women in the Emily category over the years. A man would suddenly come into an Emily’s life and quite quickly the drabness would disappear. She would receive gifts, be taken to expensive restaurants, theatres, the opera. Above all she would feel attractive and wanted. Then the unbelievable would happen – she would sleep with the man. Being in love, nothing else would matter, not even her lover asking her to do little favours such as smuggling a few documents out of the office, or copying some unimportant details from a dossier. Before she knew it, an Emily was in so deep that if things went wrong she had to flee eastwards with her lover. When she was set up in a new life in the DDR, or even Russia itself, the lover would disappear.
Bond thought for a second. Emilies had certainly not gone out of style, for there had been several recent defections in that category. Neither were Emilies confined to the female sex.
‘We decided to use the Emily ploy in reverse,’ M said, cutting through Bond’s thoughts. ‘But our targets were very big guns indeed, senior officers of the HVA. It was they who began the Emily business themselves, and even trained the seducer agents.’
Bond nodded. M spoke of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Chief Administration, Intelligence – the most efficient organisation next to the KGB in the Eastern Bloc.
‘The targets were senior HVA and attached KGB officers, including one woman. We had several sleepers but they’d been left so long that they were really past it. They were married couples we had thought would be of great use. In the end, we used their children. Five families were chosen because of their kids. They were all attractive, in their late teens, over the age of consent, if you follow me?’ M sounded embarrassed, as he always did when discussing ‘honeypot ops’, as the trade knew them. ‘We sounded them out. Satisfied ourselves. Slipped in a bit of on-the-ground training. We even brought two of them into the West for a while.’ He paused as they passed a group of nannies wheeling perambulators and chatting about their employers.
‘It took a year to set up Cream Cake. We had great success, with a little help from others. We put the bite on the woman, who was pure old-school KGB, and snaffled a couple of highgrade HVA men. But there was one very big fish who could still be dangerous. Then it was blown with practically no warning. You know the rest. We brought them home and gave them a golden pat on the back, homes, training, careers. We got a lot out of it, 007. Until last week, when one of the girls was murdered.’
‘Not one I . . .’
‘No. But it alerted us. We couldn’t be sure, of course. Couldn’t tip off the police. We still can’t. Now they’ve got a second one, the Hammond girl in Norwich.’ He took a deep breath. ‘They’ve signalled loud and clear by this bizarre removal of tongues. It could be KGB, it might be HVA – even GRU. But there are still two young girls out there and one personable young man. They’ve got to be pulled in, 007. Brought to a safe place, and put under protection until we’ve rolled up the hit team.’
‘And I’m the one who’s going to pull them?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
Bond knew that gruff tone of voice only too well.
M looked away as he continued, ‘You see, it’s not going to be an easy operation.’
‘There’s no such thing.’ Bond realised he was trying to raise his own sinking spirits.
‘This is going to be tough, 007. We know where two of them are – the girls you brought out, as it happens. But the young man’s a different kettle of fish. He was last known to be in the Canary Islands.’ M gave a frustrated sigh. ‘One of the girls is in Dublin, by the way.’
‘I can get the girls quickly, then?’
‘It’s up to you, James.’ It was rare for M to address Bond by his Christian name. Today he had done so three times. ‘I cannot sanction any saving operation. I cannot give you orders.’
‘Ah!’
‘In the event of anything
going wrong we shall have to deny you – even to our own police forces. After Cream Cake was blown the Foreign Office watchdogs gave strict instructions. The participants were to be hoovered clean, given a face lift and then left alone. We were to make no further contact. If I went to the powers-that-be asking for protection for these people and then used one of them as a tethered goat to deal with the hit team, the answer would come back as callous as . . .’
‘Let them eat cream cake.’ Bond spoke sombrely.
‘Precisely. Let them die and have done with it. No compromises. No communication.’
‘So what do you want, sir?’
‘What I’ve told you. You can have names and addresses. I can point you in the right direction, let you delve into the files, even the murder reports, which naturally we have – er – acquired. That should take you the rest of the afternoon. I can give you leave of absence for a couple of weeks. Alternatively you carry on with your normal duties. You understand?’
‘Point me.’ Bond’s voice was gritty. ‘Point me and give me leave. I’ll pull them in . . .’
‘Nothing official. I can’t even let you use a safe house . . .’
‘I’ll see to that, sir. Point me and I’ll get them, and the hit team. I’ll see to it that nobody but the hit team’s masters knows what’s gone on.’
The silence seemed to go on for ever. Then M took a deep breath.
‘I’ll give you names and the file numbers for Registry as we walk back to the shop. After that, you’re relieved of duty for two weeks. Good luck, 007.’
Bond knew he needed a great deal more than good luck.
3
DARE TO BE CHIC
The Headquarters Registry was on the second floor, guarded by girls usually dressed in casual jeans and shirts. Until a few years ago the uniform was twin sets, pearls and well cut skirts from Harrods or Harvey Nichols. M rarely went near the Registry since the rules had been relaxed, but he had been as good as his word in giving Bond the information he needed.