Bond leaned over a woman who was inspecting a length of film through an infrared viewer. ‘Everything all right?’ he shouted, cheerfully, in French, making himself heard above the endless racket.
She nodded nervously, wondering why she had been picked out, then went back to her work.
Minutes later, Bond and Sixtine emerged through another set of double doors, into the fresh air. Here they were sheltered, out of sight of the watchtower. In front of them, some distance away, a man was stacking up crates behind the wheel of a forklift truck.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
Sixtine shook her head. ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ‘It’s a classic film-production facility. Wolfe isn’t doing anything revolutionary. In fact, half that equipment is five years out of date.’
‘Then let’s try one of the new buildings.’
They walked across the compound to the section that had been built more recently, keeping close to the walls, still trying to look as if they knew what they were doing. Two men and a woman passed them. They were deep in conversation and didn’t look at them. They came to an avenue, a clear space that divided one section from the other and saw another warning sign: PERSONNEL AUTORISÉ SEULEMENT. Authorised staff only. Bond heard footsteps and froze, pressing back against the nearest wall. Two guards with rifles walked past just a few feet away but failed to see them.
They crossed from one zone to another, leaving any sense of safety behind them. In front, they saw the first of the new buildings with an unmarked metal door. Bond noted that it fitted flush with the wall and had no keyhole. He cursed silently. It could only be opened from inside. He would have to find another way in. But just as he was about to move on, the door opened and a man came out, holding an unlit cigarette. Bond glanced at Sixtine who nodded. Together, they stepped forward. Sixtine reached the door before it swung shut. At the same time, Bond addressed the man, taking in the fact that he was Corsican.
‘Do you need a light?’ Bond asked.
‘What?’ The Corsican looked at him with dull eyes.
Bond hit him hard, twice, his fist crashing into his jaw, then into the side of his head. The man collapsed onto the ground and Bond dragged him quickly inside. It had been the safest thing to do but he was still annoyed. He had just put a time limit on how long they could stay here. Sooner or later somebody would notice that the man had disappeared. He would certainly come round in ten or fifteen minutes and raise the alarm. By then, he and Sixtine would have to be on their way.
But at least, for the time being, they were in. They continued down a brightly lit corridor with tiled walls and rubber flooring. Thick, snaking pipes suggested a sophisticated air ventilation system. Bond crept forward, passing half a dozen fire extinguishers lined up together. Everything about his surroundings – the extraordinary cleanness, the smell of chemicals – told him that this was different. There was something taking place at Wolfe Europe that was unconnected to film. Ahead of him were two swing doors with little glass portholes such as he might find in a hospital.
‘What is this place?’ Sixtine whispered.
Bond didn’t answer. He moved ahead and pushed the door open. And there it was in front of him. It was the last thing he had expected and yet it made immediate sense: Irwin Wolfe and Jean-Paul Scipio and the Mirabelle and Ferrix Chimiques.
It should have been obvious from the start.
17
Hell’s Kitchen
Everything was white: the walls, the work surfaces, the porcelain sinks, the protective clothes and face masks, the neon lights – even the air being blasted out of steel grilles after hidden machinery had chilled it and sucked it clean. The people employed here were a world apart from those working on the other side of the compound. They were phantoms, utterly silent, moving in slow motion as if performing a macabre dance among the test tubes and Bunsen burners.
Bond had walked into hell’s kitchen. He could think of no other words to describe it. For this was the laboratory where Jean-Paul Scipio and Irwin Wolfe, in business together, had embarked on the mass production of high-grade heroin with an expertise and a sophistication that had never been seen before.
For the past twenty years, heroin production in the south of France had been a cottage industry. There were tiny villages all around Marseilles where run-down farmhouses and villas had been taken over and converted into makeshift factories that could be closed immediately, the moment the police got anywhere near. They might be tucked away in the basements or in disused kitchens with propane gas heaters fitted into stripped-down refrigerators for the drying process and old washing-machine engines converted into mixers. The conditions would be filthy, the operators often so clumsy that it was a miracle they could produce anything of value at all.
It took twenty-four hours to produce twenty pounds of pure heroin and the process was complicated, fraught with dangers. If the morphine mix was overheated, it would explode. The fumes given off were enough to knock out an elephant and a leak could well kill everyone in the room. The purity of the finished product varied from batch to batch – and anyway it would be cut and recut many times before it reached the street.
Of course there were a handful of criminals who had proven themselves to be masters of their art. Antoine Guerini had been famous for the quality of his merchandise, while Joseph Cesari, who had learned his skills in Bandol, produced heroin so pure that it earned him the nickname ‘Monsieur 98 per cent’. It was said that he could process an astonishing seventeen and a half pounds of morphine at a time. But these were the exceptions. The majority of heroin producers were amateurs.
James Bond knew that this laboratory was unique. What he was seeing took heroin production to an entirely new level.
The room was large, filled with equipment that was expensive and brand new: vacuum pumps, electric blenders, venting hoods, electric drying ovens and sophisticated exhaust systems. Close to where he and Sixtine were standing, still framed by the doorway, a man in a white jacket was leaning over the very latest reflux condenser, examining the contents through the glass, while next to him another man loaded gleaming flasks and test tubes into an autoclave, preparing them for sterilisation. There were shelves stacked with measuring cups, syringes, suction pumps, funnels and filter paper and Bond guessed that every item would have been accounted for down to the last strip of litmus. This was a meticulous operation, the IBM of narcotics.
And there was the final product. Bond saw four women in white coats, hair nets and plastic gloves looking bored as they packed the fine white powder into bags, weighing them on electric scales before sealing them. This would be the last stopping point on a journey that had begun in the opium fields of Turkey or Afghanistan. The morphine base would have been smuggled into Marseilles, probably in fishing boats, before being brought here. It had been refined in a solution of alcohol and activated charcoal until the precious flakes had begun to form. And where next? Bond thought he had a good answer to that question.
But it still made no sense.
The French authorities had been investigating and M had sent two agents down to the Riviera because the narcotics supply had come to a halt. They had all been concerned that the criminal activity was being replaced by something else. But looking at the evidence in front of his eyes, Bond could only conclude that the supply line had been brought to a deliberate halt while tons of the drug had gone into production. The obvious conclusion was that Scipio was stockpiling it. But to what purpose?
Bond had been standing at the edge of the laboratory for only a few seconds and even as these thoughts stormed through his mind, he realised that he and Sixtine were in the greatest danger. They had penetrated the very heart of the operation. They had unmasked a criminal enterprise working inside a respected, international business. Getting in had been one thing. Getting out would be quite another. What mattered more to Bond than anything else was that he should relay the information he had discovered back to M in London.
Standing next to h
im, Sixtine grabbed hold of his arm. ‘This is crazy,’ she whispered. She had also worked out what was going on. ‘Wolfe is already a millionaire many times over. He’s sick … maybe dying. Why would he want to get mixed up in narcotics?’
‘Later,’ Bond said. ‘We have to go.’
It was already too late. A man wearing a long, white coat was walking over to them. From a distance he had looked like a doctor but as he drew closer Bond saw that he was unshaven, unfriendly, some sort of supervisor. He had the eyes of a shark. He already knew something was wrong.
He stopped in front of Bond and Sixtine and pointed down. ‘Vos souliers,’ he said.
It was as simple as that. Everyone in the laboratory wore protective covers on their shoes. Bond and Sixtine had their stolen coats and caps but the man had noticed their feet were uncovered and that was what had brought him across.
Bond was about to answer but it was no good.
‘Vos cartes d’identité!’ the man demanded.
‘Certainement!’ Bond reached into his inside pocket as if about to draw out an ID card. Instead, he lashed out, his three extended fingers driving into the man’s throat, cutting off the oxygen. Bond caught him as he collapsed and lowered him to the ground.
For just a fraction of a second he hoped that everyone in the room was so focused on what they were doing that they wouldn’t notice what had just taken place … and indeed there was a moment of frozen silence while the work went on as before. But then half a dozen men came running towards him from all four corners of the laboratory and a moment later every alarm in the compound began to shriek.
Bond turned to run, then thought better of it. He twisted round and, taking out his Beretta, fired half a dozen shots, aiming not at the men but at the machinery. Whatever happened to him and Sixtine in the next few minutes, he was determined that he wasn’t going to leave this obscene place intact. The first bullets smashed glass vials, the next fanned into the circuitry of the blenders and the centrifuges, severing the electric cables. The result was exactly what he had hoped for. There were two or three blinding sparks as the machines short-circuited just as the liquid from the broken vessels came splashing down. He could smell the fumes he had released. What happened next was inevitable. As the laboratory staff screamed and scattered, a great mushroom of flame billowed outwards, rolling over the surfaces and reaching all the way to the ceiling. At once, a sprinkler system burst into operation. A torrent of water cascaded down, drawing a curtain between Bond and the guards closing in on him. He fired off two more shots, emptying his gun, then left, pushing through the two swing doors.
Sixtine was already ahead of him. The strange thing was that she didn’t even seem to be in a hurry. She had examined her options with the same concentration that she brought to a deck of cards before it was dealt and she already knew what she was going to do.
‘The van,’ she said. As they reached the corner, a guard appeared, rushing towards them. Sixtine had her own gun in her hand and shot him. ‘Or one of the jeeps. There’s no other way out of here.’ She had finished her sentence, barely noticing the interruption.
‘Right …’
‘How are you for ammunition?’
‘Empty.’
She grimaced. ‘Then maybe you should have thought twice before shooting the hell out of that lab.’
They reached the next door and opened it cautiously. They were looking back out into the open air and there were people everywhere. There must have been a protocol that directed all the personnel to head for some general assembly point when the alarm sounded. And yet, for the first time, the enemy had made a serious miscalculation. If everyone had stayed at their work stations, if the compound had been clear, Bond and Sixtine would have been picked out easily. As it was, the pair could hide in plain sight. All they had to do was keep their heads down and move at the same pace as everyone else and they would effectively become invisible, disappearing into the crowd.
Sixtine had arrived at the same conclusion. She slipped her gun into her pocket and began to walk, keeping her face hidden. At the same time, the alarm abruptly cut out. It had made its point.
‘Wolfe can’t have known about this,’ she muttered as they pressed forward. ‘He’s made a fortune out of film. Why would he risk everything to get into narcotics?’
‘He can’t not have known about this,’ Bond returned. ‘Hiding a heroin factory inside a film-production plant in the middle of nowhere … in a way, it’s brilliant. But he must have cooperated. You’re not telling me he never noticed?’
‘It would certainly explain why he never brought me here.’
‘And there’s something else …’
‘What?’
‘The Mirabelle …’
But before he could explain what he had worked out, there was a rush of three armed men pushing through the crowd and heading past them towards the laboratory. Bond broke off and he and Sixtine separated, knowing instinctively that the guards were looking for two intruders. They would be safer walking apart.
It was only when the baker’s van was in sight that they came back together again and Bond saw at once that they couldn’t use it. Someone must have noticed that it had been parked there far too long and a guard carrying a light machine gun was posted beside the front cabin, waiting for the baker to return. A short distance away, the man Bond had seen earlier was still working on the Willys MB French army jeep but even as the two of them approached, he slammed the hood and wiped his hands on a rag. Bond made his decision. He just hoped the mechanic had done a good job.
Ignoring the van, he continued as if heading for the kitchen area then, at the last moment, swerved to the right. The mechanic stared at him, aware that something was wrong. But too late. Bond grabbed hold of the side of the jeep and used it to lever himself into the air, both legs lashing out, his feet slamming into the man’s head. The guard at the van saw what had happened and shouted out, bringing his machine gun round. Sixtine shot him in the chest.
The sound of gunfire changed everything. The factory workers scattered and now, finally, they were alone on the empty ground with the sun pinning them down like a huge spotlight, making them an obvious target. There were three gunshots from the watchtower, spitting up the dust close to their feet. Bond leapt into the driver’s seat of the jeep and flicked the ignition switch. Sixtine scrambled in beside him, twisting round to fire at two men who were racing towards them across the concourse. One of them went down. The other veered away and took cover.
Sixtine reloaded.
Another gunshot slammed into the door and ricocheted with a loud twang. Bond wrenched at the gearstick and spun the jeep into reverse even as two more bullets hit the side panels. The mechanic was unconscious in front of him. The guard Sixtine had shot was lying face down to one side. Bond drew a savage arc in the dust, furiously manoeuvred the gears and sent the jeep hurtling towards the barrier and the way out.
‘Get down!’ he shouted.
There were two guards in front of him. They had come out of the concrete block and were emptying their pistols into the windscreen. Sixtine crouched down. His hands still gripping the steering wheel, Bond leaned sideways, taking partial cover behind the dashboard. The windscreen shattered. A second later, the jeep hit the barrier, smashing it. Bond felt the vehicle shudder once and then again as it rammed into the two men, batting them away. There was another gunshot from the tower, the bullet tearing into the canvas seat behind him. But then they were away, speeding up the lane, leaving the empty security block, the unconscious men and the broken barrier behind.
Bond and Sixtine straightened up. Bond had thought she might be shaken but she looked exhilarated.
‘We need to head back to Menton,’ she said. She looked behind them. For the time being, the lane was empty. ‘If we go further into the hills, the road goes on for miles and they may be able to catch us. But if we go the other way, there’s not much they can do once we get to the sea.’
She was right. The choice was be
tween a corkscrew ride into the mountains, climbing ever further into wasteland and forest, or a fast run down to a busy coastal road with traffic, police cars and plenty of witnesses. The jeep seemed to have shrugged off the injuries inflicted by all the gunfire but Bond would feel more confident if it was heading downhill. How long would it take before the guards came after them? The engine coughed and he cast his eye at the fuel gauge. It was touching red: the tank was almost empty. That was one twist of the knife he hadn’t considered.
Branches and leaves raced past them in a jumble. With the glass shot out in front of them, the wind hammered into their faces, sending Sixtine’s hair flying. She had reloaded her Browning and twisted round in her seat, ready to use it. But for the time being, they were still alone. The outer barrier and concrete administration block rose up ahead. Two more guards were waiting for them but they were young and nervous. They had begun firing too soon, quickly emptying their guns, and could only hurl themselves out of the way as Bond slammed the jeep through the barrier and onto the last section of the lane. A minute later, he reached the main road and spun round without stopping, the tyres howling as they bit into the concrete.
Bond was beginning to relax. The jeep was handling perfectly even if it must be wolfing down what little fuel remained, and Castellar, the first village, was only a few miles away. It was beginning to look as if they had made it to safety. What next? He would report to M that evening and afterwards the whole thing could be handed over to the French authorities. The plant would be closed down, Irwin Wolfe arrested. Finding Scipio might be more difficult but that wasn’t his business. Basically, he had done exactly what he had been told.
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