by William Boyd
‘Letham is scum. I wouldn’t believe anything he says.’
Breed stepped up to him and punched him in the face. Bond ducked and Breed’s fist slammed into his left temple. He went down. Breed kicked him heavily in the ribs and Bond felt one stave in.
His vision blurred. He heard the noise of the Constellation’s engines grow more shrill as the revs were increased. Bond hauled himself to his feet, swaying, a sharp pain in his side.
‘Look, Breed, whoever told you I—’
He stopped, completely astonished. It was as if he’d seen a vision.
Blessing Ogilvy-Grant had stepped quietly into the room.
‘We’ve got to go,’ she said sharply to Breed.
‘I’ve got unfinished business with Mr Bond, here,’ Kobus said. He dropped his hook with a clang and took a small automatic out of his inside pocket.
Bond was experiencing a kind of accelerated revelation, an unwelcome one, a massive and dramatic reorganisation of everything he thought he knew.
‘Better not mess around,’ Blessing said. She looked at Bond but her eyes were cold, lifeless. ‘We’ve no time.’
‘OK, I know,’ Breed said. ‘Let’s take the lover out of lover-boy – before I string him up by his jawbone.’
He aimed his automatic at Bond’s groin and pulled the trigger.
In that split second Bond turned and the bullet thunked into his right thigh just below the hip with a splash of blood as it exited. Bond felt the hot tear in the meat of his muscle and went down, heavily, spinning with the impact, feeling more pain in his rib. He sensed his trousers dampening with the blood flow.
Hulbert Linck shouted from outside.
‘We leave in ten seconds!’
Blessing snatched Breed’s gun from him.
‘Stop fooling around!’ she snarled and fired.
Bond felt the punch as the bullet hit him in his chest and he fell back.
He heard the door slam shut and sensed his consciousness begin to leave him, encroaching shadows gathering at the edge of his vision. He tried to sit up but his hand slipped in the spreading pool of his own blood and he fell back to the floor again. Best not to move, he told himself as the room went steadily dark, best to stay very still. The last thing he heard was the sound of the Constellation taxiing to the end of the runway and the roar of its engines as it took off, fading, fading, fading . . .
PART THREE
GOING SOLO
1
CARE AND ATTENTION
James Bond stood a little shakily under the hot shower, both hands gripping the chrome rails on either side of the stall. He closed his eyes, letting the water run over his face, hearing the sharp patter of the spray on the sheets of plastic that were taped over his dressings on his thigh and chest. It was his first shower in almost five weeks. It felt like the first shower of his life, so intense was the pleasure he was taking in it. He managed to wash his hair with one hand – still holding on with the other – and then turned off the water and stepped out. He’d forgotten his towel – left on the end of his bed in his room.
The door opened and Sheila McRae, the nurse he liked best, came in, his towel in her hand.
‘Just in time, eh, Commander?’
Bond stood there naked, dripping, as Sheila checked the plastic protection over his dressings. She chattered away.
‘It’s a wee bit chilly this morning but at least it’s no raining. Aye, they’re all fine.’
She helped Bond on with his dressing gown after he’d dried himself and Bond reflected on the curious, intimate non-intimacy that existed between nurse and patient. You could be standing there, naked, as your bedpan was emptied or a catheter was inserted in your penis, chatting to the nurse about her package holiday in Tenerife as if you were passing time at a bus stop waiting for your bus to arrive. They had seen everything, these nurses, Bond realised. Words like prudish, embarrassed, shocked, disgusted or ashamed simply weren’t in their vocabulary. Perhaps that was why people – why men – found them so attractive.
Sheila was in her late twenties with an animated, fresh prettiness about her. She had thick unruly blonde hair that she found difficult to pin up neatly beneath the little starched white bonnet that topped off the nurses’ uniforms here. She had two children and her husband was a welder at the Rosyth dockyards. She had told Bond a great deal about herself over the weeks of his recovery. The covert nature of this wing of the sanatorium meant that all the conversational traffic tended to be one-way.
They walked back slowly along the corridor to Bond’s private room, Bond still limping slightly. He had a drain in his thigh wound, a corrugated rubber tube emerging from the muscle with a clamp at the end. When he slipped back into bed it would be connected to a glass Redivac suction jar with two erect antennae that flopped limply when the vacuum was spent. He had developed a perverse dislike for the suction jar but there was still some infection in the thigh wound and the drain still dripped. However, his chest had healed remarkably well, the entry and exit wounds now two puckered rosy coins, new additions to the palimpsest of scars his body carried.
He was in a military sanatorium located in a discreet corner of a large army base to the south of Edinburgh. There were six private rooms in his wing all reserved for soldiers, sailors and airmen with serious health issues requiring twenty-four-hour intensive care. Or, to put it another way, rooms reserved for military personnel who needed to keep their injuries secret – almost all of the patients were from special forces.
‘Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you,’ Sheila said as they reached his door. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’
Bond stepped into his room and to his astonishment saw M standing there looking out of the window. He turned and smiled. He was wearing a heavy brown tweed three-piece suit. He was so out of context that Bond felt it was like seeing Nelson’s Column on a village green.
‘James,’ he said. ‘You’re looking extremely well.’
They shook hands.
‘It’s very good of you to come all this way to visit me, sir,’ Bond said, feeling a great upwelling of affection for this elderly man, all of a sudden.
‘Oh, I didn’t come to see you. I’ve got a few days’ shooting in Perthshire. Thought I’d kill several birds with one stone.’ M chuckled, pleased with his joke. ‘Got anything to drink?’ he asked.
‘They give you a bottle of sherry to help with your appetite but I wouldn’t recommend it. Wouldn’t even cook with it. I haven’t touched a drop.’
‘Thought as much,’ M said and took a half-bottle of Dewar’s whisky out of his pocket and placed it on Bond’s bedside table.
‘I was going to bring grapes and chocolate but I thought you’d prefer this,’ M said. ‘I do hope you won’t get into trouble.’
Bond went into his bathroom and found a tooth-glass. He washed out a teacup and poured a fair-sized dram for them both.
‘Slangevar,’ M said and clinked his glass against Bond’s cup. ‘Here’s to your speedy recovery.’
Bond took a cautious sip of his whisky. It was the first alcohol he’d drunk since Dahum. He felt its wondrous, comforting warmth bloom and fill his throat and chest.
‘Perfectly, magnificently therapeutic,’ he said and topped them both up.
‘When will they let you out?’ M asked.
‘In a week or two, I think. Getting stronger every day.’
‘Well, take a month’s leave when they do,’ M said. ‘Get properly fit again. You deserve it. It’s not every day a man can say he ended a war.’
‘And I even got a medal,’ Bond said, a little sardonically.
‘And you’ve earned the gratitude of Her Majesty’s Government.’ M fished his pipe out of his pocket. ‘Can I smoke in here?’
Bond said he could and lit a cigarette himself.
‘I know you’ll write a full report, eventually,’ M said, ‘so there’s no need to go through the whole business now. But you may have some questions for me.’
Bond did, indeed. ‘How did I
get out?’ he asked. When he’d regained consciousness he was tied down on a gurney in a Royal Air Force transport plane heading for Edinburgh. None of the various doctors who’d treated him since then could give any explanation of what had happened to him.
‘You were found by a journalist called Digby Breadalbane,’ M said. ‘He was making for the airstrip himself but got held up in the chaos – panicking troops, deserters, total disarray. By the time he arrived the last plane had left. Once the planes had gone no defence was offered and the Zanzari army overran the airstrip in minutes. Still, there were a few bullets flying around so this Breadalbane fellow went to take shelter in the control tower and found you, unconscious, lying in a pool of blood.’
Bond took this in, nodding. Digby Breadalbane, his guardian angel . . .
‘Actually there was a rather good article by him in the Observer last Sunday. “Death of a Small Country”. You should read it – no mention of you, of course.’
So Breadalbane had his scoop after all, Bond thought.
M plumed smoke at the ceiling light. ‘Fortunately some of our special forces were with the Zanzarim army.’
‘Ah, yes, the “advisers”, of course.’
‘Yes . . . They patched you up as best they could and put you in a helicopter for Sinsikrou. Twenty-four hours later you were on your way here.’
‘I was lucky,’ Bond said, feeling a little disturbed at all these contingencies that had randomly conspired to save him.
‘Lucky 007,’ M said with an unusually warm smile.
Bond thought back to that night at the Janjaville airstrip and the chilling look in Blessing’s eyes as she’d levelled the gun at him and pulled the trigger. Lucky, yes . . . Her shot had hit him high on the right side of his chest, in under the collarbone and out at the shoulder. The right lung collapsed but no other internal damage.
‘Any news of Ogilvy-Grant?’ Bond asked.
‘He’s very well and living in Sinsikrou and wondering why you never made contact.’
‘He?’
‘Edward Benson Ogilvy-Grant, fifty-one years old, ex-Royal Marine captain, head of station in Zanzarim.’
‘The Ogilvy-Grant I dealt with was a young woman.’
M looked shrewdly at him. ‘Yes. You were well duped. And you didn’t follow procedure.’
‘I did follow procedure.’ Bond resented the implication. ‘Q Branch told me Ogilvy-Grant would make contact after I arrived. And she did.’
‘It seems she may have been Ogilvy-Grant’s secretary. Her real name is Aleesha Belem.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Bond shook his head. ‘Which would explain how she knew all about me.’ He paused. ‘But she was damn good – really good . . . So, who was she working for?’
‘We don’t know. But a lot of people are interested in Zanzarim.’
Bond thought of Blessing’s clever duplicities: the perfect shabby office; Christmas, the driver; her own carefully constructed biography – the Scottish engineer father, her Celtic colloquialisms, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Cambridge, Harvard . . . And the lovemaking, of course. At least M didn’t know about that.
‘Could she have been working for the Dahum Republic?’ Bond asked.
‘Could be . . . Did you come across a man called Hulbert Linck?’
‘Yes,’ Bond said. ‘A one-man arms dealer – single-handedly trying to arm, protect and save Dahum. A man of no fixed abode, it seems.’
‘Shady character,’ M said.
‘There was something bogus about him, as if he was acting a part.’
‘Be that as it may, he’s disappeared. So has she. Perhaps someone killed them.’
Bond topped up his whisky – M declined. ‘There was a man called Kobus Breed – a mercenary from Rhodesia,’ Bond said. ‘A psychopath, but a clever one. She was working with him, I now think. Perhaps he killed her.’
‘We can’t find Mr Breed, either. But no, it wouldn’t have been his show. Somebody else was pulling the strings. Still, they may have got out of Dahum but at least they lost everything.’ M smiled. ‘Thanks to you. You can’t be very popular with that lot – don’t expect a Christmas card.’
M stood up and put down his glass, searched his pockets absentmindedly then lifted his hat and coat off the hook on the back of the door.
‘Call in when you get back from your holiday,’ M said. ‘Go somewhere nice and relax. You’ve had a hell of a time and you’re lucky to be alive. Get yourself really fit and well – be self-indulgent.’ He patted Bond’s shoulder.
Bond stood and they shook hands again as they parted. There was a tiny but palpable current of mutual feeling in the room, Bond thought, of barely discernible emotion. For all Bond knew, M only possessed a superior’s affectionate regard for him – the respect due to a trusted and prized operative who’d done a good job and had put his life on the line. But, on his side, Bond wanted to show that he was genuinely grateful for this unexpected, informal visit, all the same – that it marked something out of the ordinary, out of the line of mere duty, somehow – but he couldn’t think of anything to say without making a fool of himself or embarrassing M.
‘Thanks for the whisky, sir,’ was all he could manage in the end.
2
DONALDA AND MAY
Three days later the ward sister yanked out the rubber tube draining Bond’s thigh. It was one of the most unpleasant sensations he could recall experiencing, as if some sinew or vein had been bodily wrenched from his side. His head reeled as she reapplied the dressing and taped it down again. The sister was a rather wonderful woman who treated Bond with pointed egalitarianism – he could have been a duke or a kitchen skivvy and nothing would change in her manner, he knew.
‘There you are, Commander,’ she said, with an ironic smile, using his rank for the first time. ‘A normal human being once more – no tubes hanging out of you.’
After she’d gone Bond went into his bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He was pale and he’d lost weight and the scar on his face stood out more starkly, he thought. He felt well enough but not particularly strong, not his usual self. Still, he couldn’t hang around until his physical status quo returned. There was work to be done. He had been thinking hard since M’s visit and the unexpected offer of a month’s leave. A whole month – what could be achieved in four weeks? As far as M was concerned he had carried off his mission with flying colours, but from Bond’s point of view there was a sour taste of bitter dissatisfaction and incompleteness. Two people had tried to kill him – one had tried to maim him in the most brutal way possible; the other was a woman he had made love to in all openness and generosity of spirit, and she had tried to deliver the coup de grâce to a man who was already grievously wounded. He couldn’t forget those terrible seconds in the control tower at Janjaville airstrip – he would never forget them. To stare death in the face like that, to feel bullets impact on your own vital body . . . You couldn’t, you shouldn’t, just write that down to experience, walk away with a shrug and congratulate yourself on your luck. Fate and blind chance had conspired to keep him alive. Many people had tried to kill Bond over his career and, more often than not, he had managed to show them the folly of that ambition. M had told him to relax, get well, cosset himself – but at the forefront of his mind he wanted retribution, he wanted to hunt these people down and confront them. He wanted to be their grim nemesis and revel in that moment. What was the point of a month’s holiday when this was your frame of mind? No – this was an opportunity to be seized. His superior officer had gifted him a month of repose and idleness. Bond decided instead, with hardening resolve, that these days were going to be put to exceptionally good use.
He pulled on his dressing gown over his pyjamas, and left the private wing, going down to the ward sister’s station at the foot of the stairs. He asked if he could make some telephone calls and was directed to a glassed-in cubicle with a pay telephone inside. Once he’d borrowed some change he made three calls: first to his bank to arrange a tra
nsfer of money; then he telephoned Donalda and asked for an address and finally he was put through to his secretary, Minty Beauchamp, and told her he was going on holiday for a month and would be out of contact.
As he lay in bed that night, Bond plotted the nature of his revenge in more detail – revenge on Blessing Ogilvy-Grant (or whatever name she was now going under) and Kobus Breed, the man with two faces. And throw in Hulbert Linck for good measure, he thought, if it turned out he’d been involved in Bond’s purported assassination. And as he speculated about what he might do to these people, as and when he caught up with them, he felt peace of mind slowly returning, but he didn’t forget that they too, if they were alive, might simultaneously be plotting their revenge on James Bond, the man who had messed up their little war in Africa. Somehow he was sure that they would know he hadn’t died in the concrete cell beneath the Janjaville control tower. Any dead Briton found in the aftermath of Dahum’s collapse would have made some newspaper or news bulletin, somewhere. No, the absence of comment would be seen as confirmation of his unlikely survival.
In any event, a plan was slowly taking shape in his mind – but it was a plan he had to carry out himself. It could have nothing to do with his role as a Double O operative, M or the Service. It had to be wholly unauthorised – it had to be rogue action. He smiled to himself in the darkness of his room: in a way the fact that it would be unauthorised would make it all the sweeter. He intended to ‘go solo’, as he phrased it to himself. In the unwritten ethos of the Secret Service he knew that such solo personal initiatives were strictly forbidden. Punishments for going solo were draconian. Bond smiled to himself – he didn’t care. He knew absolutely what he wanted to do.
The next day he dressed in a dark navy flannel suit, white shirt and black tie (his clothes had been sent from Chelsea by Donalda) and went down to administration and informed the duty officer that he was discharging himself. A doctor was summoned who strictly forbade him to leave – he needed at least another week to ten days to recover fully. Bond said he was going to stay with a cousin on his estate in South Uist in the Hebrides and gave a name and address – there was no telephone but he could always be reached by telegram – and took full responsibility for his decision.