by John Gardner
Bond had only been back on active duty since the beginning of December, following recovery from serious injuries received in the United States of America during his last operation, and things had changed greatly since then. Now, at the start of a new year, he had no desire to go out into his old European haunts until the game of nations had returned to some form of status quo. He believed in the changes that were taking place, but not that the world had seen the death of Communism. He even seemed content to sit shuffling documents or following paperchases from his desk, though he suspected this initial sense of satisfaction would last only a short time.
He arrived at Registry’s work stations via M’s anteroom. Moneypenny, the Chief’s personal assistant whose security clearance bordered on the stratospheric, called down to say that their mutual lord and master had something he wished 007 to read. He did not even have his customary chat with M. Moneypenny, who, after giving him the usual cow-eyed look, handed over a small blue slip – blue being the Registry colour for Most Secret and Above – on which had been typed two words: Fallen Timbers.
‘We’re on battles this month,’ Moneypenny gave him a glittering smile. ‘Lucknow, Marne, the Somme, Arnhem, Blenheim. Fallen Timbers. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it is a battle. Plenty of belligerence.’
Bond raised an eyebrow, a smile turning up one corner of his mouth. ‘Not for me I hope, Penny?’
She gave a mock sigh and reached out to retrieve the blue slip which she popped into a small desktop shredder with a terrible finality. ‘Fighting with you could be rewarding, I should think.’ She followed the sigh with a little moue, and Bond leaned across the desk to kiss her lightly on the forehead.
‘You’re like a sister to me, Penny,’ he smiled, knowing her remark about cryptos being battles was to let him know the file was secret. New. Not some old case taken out to play with while Moscow and the old Eastern Bloc went through its varied agonies.
‘I don’t feel sisterly.’ Moneypenny never even bothered to hide the deep passion she nursed for Bond.
‘Oh, come on, Penny, I don’t want to add incest to injury,’ and with a broad wink, he left the office.
At the Registry work station, Bond typed in his pass number, followed by the words Fallen Timbers. The impersonal screen told him to wait, then informed him that he was cleared for the file. Seconds later the printer started to spit out sheets of paper. There were seventy in all and the cover page bore the usual Most Secret ciphers and the subject heading Scales of Justice; Cross ref Josif Vorontsov, this file.
Most of the facts contained within the three score and ten pages were background: detail concerning Vorontsov’s past and the recent abduction of the man called Joel Penderek from some obscure New Jersey town to, it was thought, a nameless point in Eastern Europe. (There were photographs attached, which meant that either someone had been doing his homework or the pix had already been in Registry for some time.) Then came some scant details regarding the organisation which called itself the Scales of Justice. These last were, if anything, sketchy, even conflicting. But finally, the meat within the file lay, not in the middle, but at the end. It was contained in two separate reports. One from the KGB, which appeared a tad muddled and indecisive, the second from the Israeli Service, the Mossad, which was terse, to the point, factual and not discomposed in any way. Bond was left wondering which report was more accurate, for distracted indecision could in the covert world be a cloak for clarity.
It took an hour to read and digest the file, after which the flimsy printed sheets were consigned to the large shredder by the door. The pieces rolled through into the burn bag which, he knew, would be removed within the next half-hour. Now, with much on his mind, Bond returned to his desk and informed Moneypenny that she could report to the Chief that he had followed instructions.
There was no waiting, and within ten minutes Bond sat on one of the straight-backed chrome skeletal chairs that M had recently installed during a refurbishing of his inner sanctum. He had noticed the changes to his Chief’s office when reporting back to work. He had wondered then if the new decor was a reflection of the massive shifts taking place in the world beyond the surreal existence they all shared in the anonymous, and ugly, tower block overlooking Regent’s Park which was the headquarters of the Service.
The room had lost its old nautical flavour; even the paintings of great naval battles had disappeared from the walls, replaced by uncharacteristically insipid watercolours. M’s desk was now a large steel and glass affair, tidy with heavy transparent In and Out trays, three different-coloured telephones, one of which looked as though it had been a prop in some Hollywood sci-fi epic, and a huge glass ashtray the size of a bird bath in which the Admiral had rested his evil-smelling pipe.
‘Chairs’re damned uncomfortable,’ the Chief growled without looking up from the papers upon which he was working. ‘Ministry of Works tell me they’re more labour-intensive, if that’s a real expression or more assassination of the English language. Suppose it means you’re so damned ill at ease in ’em that you want to get up and out, back to the grind, in double-quick time. Won’t keep you a minute, 007. Pictures are interesting.’
Bond took this as a hint so he left the chair and walked over to one of the watercolours. It was of a flat landscape that could have been Germany or some view of the Fens. Then he gave a little gasp when he spotted the artist’s signature, R Abel.
‘Nice, eh?’ M grunted, his head still down as his gold fountain pen raced along lines of word-processed text.
‘The Colonel Abel?’ Bond asked, for Rudolph Abel had been one of the most successful Russian spies of the fifties, the man whom the Americans had eventually swapped for Gary Powers, the famous U-2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union causing great distress to the Western Alliance.
M finally put down his pen. ‘Oh, yes. Yes indeed. Bought ’em from Walter in Washington. Drove a hard bargain, but they’re there to remind me of how things used to be, and how things are, if you follow my drift. Sit down, 007.’ Walter was a legendary former archivist of the American Service, and it was rumoured that his apartment was papered with rare, very collectable memorabilia of the Cold War. ‘What d’you think of Fallen Timbers?’ M glared.
‘I gather it was a battle.’ Bond returned to the discomfort of the labour-intensive chair.
M grunted again. ‘Yanks. After the Revolution. Battle with Maumee Indians in Ohio. Don’t learn that kind of thing in English schools these days.’
‘Never did.’ Bond adjusted his posture, realising the chair was more endurable if you sat to attention, which, presumably, was one of its design features.
‘Anyway, Fallen Timbers. What d’you think?’
‘Moscow Centre appears to be getting very concerned over a relatively straightforward matter. Old war criminal. Old history. Is it really this man, Penderek?’
‘Appears to be. Just as it appears not to be, if we’re to believe the Israelis.’
‘They’re usually right when it comes to war criminals. The Israelis have long memories, sir.’
‘Quite. They’ve sent one of their best people over to brief us. He’s very good, and we’ve let him into the inner circle. Y’see, I’ve had a request from Moscow. Quite extraordinary, when you consider the past history. They say they need two men. Russian speakers. I think you and the Israeli might fit the bill; do the trick for them. Your Russian still up to snuff, 007?’
‘It was the last time I looked, sir.’
‘Good. There’s a possibility that you might have to go in and take a peep with the Israeli. Could be interesting, working for Moscow Centre after all these years of labouring in an opposing vineyard, so to speak.’
‘Distillery, rather than vineyard, I would have thought.’ Bond gave a quick smile, but saw that M was not amused. ‘Can you expand on the Israeli theory?’ He realised that he was asking questions just for the hell of it. The idea of being sent on attachment, as it were, to the KGB, together with a Mossad agent, was qui
te alien to Bond.
‘Not really. Only what’s in the file.’ M was scraping out his pipe with a metal reamer which seemed to have more tools attached to it than a Swiss Army knife. ‘They’re convinced, as you know. If they’re telling the truth, the Israelis have had Vorontsov under surveillance for the best part of three years, and he’s holed up in Florida. Again, if this is so, then these Scales of Justice people’ve picked the wrong man. The question is did they snaffle the wrong horse on purpose?’
‘Why would they do that, sir?’
M frowned and raised his hands in an untypically Gallic shrug. ‘How the hell would I know? Don’t have a crystal ball, don’t read the runes, don’t sort through the entrails, don’t dabble in ESP. Know as much as you do. Possibly the Mossad Johnny can tell us, but my gut feeling is that the people who really know are stewing in Moscow Centre. You’ll probably be able to get it out of them if you have a mind to. After all, they appear to know something about the Scales of Justice, which is more than we do.’
‘And our man from Mossad?’
‘Peter. Likes to be called Pete. Pete Natkowitz. Incidentally, don’t you think it’s a shade strange that KGB hasn’t brought the Yanks in? After all, this suspect, Penderek, was lifted right out of their bailiwick.’
‘Perhaps Moscow Centre prefer to play with us . . .’
‘Us and the Israelis. Strange bedfellows, what? Would’ve thought the US of A would’ve been called upon at some level.’
‘You can never be sure with KGB, sir. Never could. What about the Mossad man, Natkowitz? When do I get to see him?’
M was now reloading his pipe, lost in some obscure ritual. ‘Natkowitz? Any time you like. He’s been here for the past twenty-four hours. Chief of Staff’s been lookin’ after him. Babysitting him, as they used to say. Actually he’s had him down on the Helford estuary showing him how we operate in shallow waters.’ The Service still retained a small facility on the Helford estuary where trainees went through the rigours of scuba diving, clandestine water landings and all things connected with that kind of work. They had been there since the dark days of World War II and nobody had thought to close the place down.
‘Getting his feet wet?’
‘Who, Tanner?’
‘No, the Israeli. Tanner already has webbed feet. We did the course together more years ago than I like to recall.’
M nodded. ‘Yes, I think Chief of Staff said something about giving Mr Natkowitz the odd mouthful of seawater. Let’s see if they’re back.’ He began to operate the sci-fi telephone console as though he had read and understood the copious manual that obviously came with it. Leisurely M pressed a button, then spoke as though into an answering machine. ‘Chief of Staff,’ he said.
From the built-in speaker there came the ringing of an internal phone followed by a click and Bill Tanner’s voice saying a calm ‘Chief of Staff.’
M gave one of his rare smiles, ‘Tanner. M. Would you care to bring our friend up?’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’ Tanner was always inclined to use naval expressions around M. He had even been heard to refer to the Chief’s office as ‘the day cabin’, and the shrewd old Admiral was, as often as not, amused by what he considered to be Tanner’s peculiarities.
M continued to look at the phone. ‘Don’t like gadgets as a rule, but this is damned clever. You just say the name of the fella you want to talk with and the machine works it all out, dials the number and all that sort of thing. Clever as a performing monkey, eh?’
A few minutes later, Tanner himself stood in the doorway, ushering in a short, stocky man with sandy hair and bright eyes who, for some reason, reminded Bond of Rat in The Wind in the Willows.
‘Pete Natkowitz. James Bond.’ Tanner flapped a hand as he effected the introduction. Bond stuck his own hand out and received an unexpectedly firm shake that all but made him wince. There was nothing ratlike about Natkowitz close to. Just as there was nothing distinctly Israeli about the man’s demeanour or characteristics. His complexion was that of a ruddy gentleman farmer, as were his clothes – cavalry twill slacks, soft, small-checked shirt with a frayed tie which looked regimental and a Harris tweed jacket complete with double vents and a flapped side pocket. He would have passed for the genuine article in an English country pub, and Bond thought to himself that there is nothing so deceptive as cover which matches a man’s natural physical characteristics.
‘So, the famous Captain Bond. I’ve read a lot about you.’ His voice was soft with undertones of the drawl one associates with the British stockbroker belt – the kind of accent that is stuck halfway between East London and Oxbridge, a shade shy of the slur which pronounces ‘house’ as ‘hice’. The smile was warm, almost 100 degrees in the shade, with teeth as white as fake Christmas snow. After all the physical come-on, he added, ‘Mainly in top secret documents I admit, but it’s all been good. Delighted to meet you.’
Bond controlled the urge to play games and say something about access to the Mossad’s files already. Instead he merely smiled and asked if Natkowitz had enjoyed Helford.
‘Oh, there’s absolutely nothing like messing about in boats.’ Natkowitz gave Bill Tanner a sideways glance and Bond went straight for the million-dollar prize. ‘So, they want us to work for the Russians, I gather, Mr Natkowitz.’
‘Pete,’ he said, his face lighting up like Guy Fawkes night, or the Fourth of July, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are standing. ‘Everyone calls me Pete; and, yes. Yes, I’m told we’re going into the old badlands. That should be interesting.’
Bill Tanner coughed and gave M a quick look which said, ‘Have you told them the bad news yet?’
M made one of his harrumphing noises which were often the advent of unpleasant tidings. ‘Mr Natkowitz,’ he began, ‘I have no control over your decisions, but, for the sake of James, I must advise you both of the dangers, and your rights, in the matter we now call Fallen Timbers.’
The pause was long enough for Bond to register the fact that his old Chief had used his first name, always a prelude to fatherly advice, and usually a signal for him to beware of dragons.
‘James,’ M continued, looking down at his desk, ‘I have to say that this operation must be undertaken on a voluntary basis. You can step down and walk away at any point before we begin and nobody’ll think any the worse of you. Just hear me out on a couple of points, then give me your decision.’ He looked up, clamping his eyes directly on Bond. ‘It is our opinion that what we are going to ask of the pair of you could be damned dangerous. Also, Moscow is in an unconscionable hurry. Too quick off the mark if you ask me. But then, everyone has a right to be jittery. They’ve got the Baltic States. America and ourselves have the Iraqis – as indeed do you, Mr Natkowitz.’
Bond opened his mouth, frowning and puzzled, but M held up a hand. ‘Hear me out first.’ He made a grim little movement of the lips, half smile and half grimace. ‘We’ll tell you what we know, and Mr Natkowitz, here, will tell you what he knows. It’s not a lot, and it leaves huge blank spaces. Dead ground, as it were.’ Another pause, during which the only sound came from outside the building. An aircraft on approach to Heathrow. Bond’s mind suddenly filled, unbidden, with pictures of disaster, wrecks and bodies overlapped and floated vividly in his head. These near nightmarish images were so clear that he had to make an effort to pull his mind back to what M was saying.
‘The disappearance of an elderly man in New Jersey, followed by that puzzling communiqué from these people who call themselves the Scales of Justice, seem to have caused unnatural concern in Moscow. They are asking for the pair of officers to sniff out the Scales of Justice and bring in this fellow Penderek. Specifically they’ve asked for two members of our Service with good Russian. The cover will be fully provided in situ. If this goes forward, I’ve agreed that we will not tell them that Mr Natkowitz has been made an honorary member of the SIS, which is fair enough because I have to admit that I’m leery of letting anyone go. Old habits die hard, and I cannot feel wholly happy a
bout my people talking to their people, as they seem to say in business circles these days.
‘Finally, and here’s the rub, to do this properly, Moscow says you’ll have to operate under their control, as it is a job none of their people can do. What’s more they want you in Moscow yesterday, or more realistically, by tonight. It’s all too fast and too iffy, but it might, just might, be of great importance to the continued freedom and stability of the world. You follow me?’
‘Not really, sir.’ Bond had already heard the warning bells ringing behind the technicolor pictures of disaster which he could not exorcise from his mind.
3
FIRST LONDON BRIEFING
Holiday Avenue is, perhaps, the most exclusive street in the small community of Holiday which lies off Route 19, a few miles north of Tampa, Florida. It is a side road, flanked by luxury single-storey dwellings, set back from well-manicured lawns, shaded by palms and foliage.
Most of these houses show outward signs of protection. The windows are tastefully barred, and telltale red boxes, or stickers, let the casual and not so casual passer-by know that they are shielded by such and such a security firm or system.
In this pleasant, affluent little cul-de-sac, the homes are owned by retired doctors, lawyers or former financial Indian chiefs from the East coast. These good people live out the September of their years in the mild climate, shielded from the sun by a well-ordered rearrangement of nature’s bounty, from poverty by their own good sense and careful management and from the would-be criminal by electronic devices which alert the nearest police headquarters in seconds.
They live quiet, though rich, lives these people of Holiday Avenue. They attend the same cocktail parties, meet at the same nearby ‘country’ club – an excusable misnomer in this part of Florida – and they lounge by their secluded pools, exercising with a daily swim most of the year round, though this turning of the year had been one of the coldest on record, with the citrus fruit hanging encased with ice, an indicator of hardships yet to come.