Solo

by William Boyd

  He waited. Ten minutes, twenty minutes. Other people joined him until summoned into the office suites for appointments or meetings. Forty minutes passed – the place was busy. Bond sat on, a National Geographic magazine open on his knee, his eyes restless – watching, checking, noting. He headed for the restrooms. He was right – there was a door at the end of the corridor that said ‘No entry’. He opened it and saw a flight of concrete stairs and a yellow bucket with a mop in it. Bond relieved himself, checked his disguise and returned to his seat.

  After he’d been there an hour he began to grow a little worried. Either he could meet Adeka – or he couldn’t. He thought of approaching the receptionist again but decided not to – one glimpse of him was all she should have. Then it occurred to him that he was being kept here deliberately, figuring that as long as he was corralled in the lobby anyone could find him. He put the magazine down. Something was now wrong – he was going to abort. He’d been a bit too audacious thinking he’d gain access to Adeka this easily—

  Kobus Breed pushed through the glass doors and went straight to the receptionist.

  Bond stood up immediately, turned his back and walked unconcernedly down the corridor to the restrooms. He was through the service door in a second and clattered down the stairs. He found himself in a storeroom full of cleaning equipment and rubbish bins. He threw his hat and his glasses into a bin, took off his jacket, turned it inside out and folded it over his arm. He opened another door and emerged at the rear of the elevator banks. Looking straight ahead he made his way through the people waiting for the elevators, strolled easily across the marble lobby with its spinning mobile and walked out into the weak sunshine that was bathing Milford Plaza.

  He could still feel the heart-thud of alarm and adrenalin. Breed in Washington DC? Breed summoned to confront this unknown visitor to Gabriel Adeka . . . He had been wearing a dark business suit and a red tie – very smart. Bond remembered that was how he had complimented him in the control tower at Janjaville. Perhaps that suit he’d been wearing that night was the first indication of his new life as an executive of a global charitable foundation.

  Bond began to relax, glancing back as he left the plaza – no one was after him and he had learned a lot from his visit. His request to meet Adeka had brought Kobus Breed from wherever he was residing to investigate. AfricaKIN Inc. had nothing to do with the modest grubby shop in Bayswater. Something much bigger was taking place. Something bigger and very wrong.

  4

  SWITCHBLADE

  That night Bond went to see a film called Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice but found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He left before the end and walked slowly back to the Fairview, smoking a cigarette, his mind working, trying to analyse all the permutations that might make up AfricaKIN Inc. Gabriel Adeka, Colonel Denga and now Breed . . . What kind of strange alliance was this?

  He realised he hadn’t been paying attention and had taken a wrong turn. He could see the top of the lucent tower that was the Fairview a few blocks away and also the floodlit dome of the Capitol on the hill. He reset his bearings and headed off again, aware that he had wandered into a neighbourhood of near-derelict housing, with many windows boarded up, some of them seemingly damaged by fire. He passed a burnt-out car with no wheels; half the street lights weren’t working; stray cats prowled the alleyways. This could happen so easily in DC. One wrong turning and you found yourself in—

  ‘Hey, man, you got a light?’

  Bond looked round slowly. Behind him, on the edge of a yellow semicircle thrown by a lamp above a shuttered thrift-store doorway, three young men stood – teenagers, Bond thought. They were wearing jeans and T-shirts and were all smoking, so the need for a light was redundant. Two black kids and a white guy, slightly older. Bond glanced behind him – no one – so just these three to deal with, then. All right, come and get me.

  They started to walk purposefully towards him flicking away their cigarettes, numbed and heroic with speed, Bond reckoned. The white kid took something out of his pocket and Bond heard the whish-chunk of a switchblade being sprung.

  ‘So you need a light,’ Bond said taking out his Ronson and clicking it on. He turned the small wheel that governed the gas valve and the flame flared up three inches.

  ‘Hey, funny guy,’ one of them said as they fanned out to surround him.

  Bond tossed the flaring lighter at the boy with the switchblade. Reflexively, he ducked and swore and in that moment of inattention Bond grabbed his wrist and dislocated it with a brutal jerk. The boy screamed and the knife dropped with a clatter on the sidewalk. Bond turned on the black kid who was rushing him and kicked him heavily in the groin. He fell to the ground, bellowing and writhing in agony – Bond’s loafers were fitted with steel caps at the toe. The other black kid began to back off. Bond stooped and picked up the switchblade and held it out.

  ‘You want this?’ he said.

  The boy turned and ran away into the night.

  Bond found his Ronson and pocketed it – then considered his two assailants. The boy with the dislocated wrist was kneeling, holding his wrist with his good hand and sobbing with the pain, his hand hanging limply and at the wrong angle. The other kid was still on the ground clutching his smashed groin and keening in a high-pitched whine of misery, his knees drawn up to his chest.

  Bond stamped down hard on his ribcage and kicked the other kneeling boy in the side with his steel toecaps, knocking him flying, making him scream again. Ribs broken or fractured, he assumed. They would remember him and this night for the next couple of months – every time they coughed or laughed or reached for something.

  Bond leaned over them both and swore at them picturesquely, then he added, ‘Way past your bedtime, kiddies, run along home.’

  He strolled off towards the Fairview, closing the switchblade. It was quite a nice knife, he thought, with a dull ebony handle inlaid with a nacreous pattern of diamonds. He slipped it in his pocket, beginning to feel a little guilty at the unreasonable force of his retaliation. He realised he had vented some of his pent-up rage from Janjaville on these three unfortunates. This was the first ‘action’ he had seen since he had left the war zone. His blood had come up spontaneously and he had administered swift and efficient retribution. They weren’t to know whom they were trying to rob, nor what dark, embittered grudges their potential victim was harbouring: still, he thought, maybe he might have saved them from a life of crime. But he knew he’d taken out his anger on those street punks and punished them for the sins of others. Just their bad luck . . . Tough. He eased his right shoulder as he approached the hotel – no pain – and he massaged the muscle of his wounded thigh. Everything seemed fine after his physical exertions – he was healing fast.

  He spent a fruitless morning the next day in his office in the Alcazar building, scrutinising Milford Plaza but recognising no familiar faces. He started to wonder if there was a rear entrance for more private comings and goings but he had observed that most people arriving by car were dropped off in the indented parking area off the busy street, so he assumed that was the norm.

  Then, just before noon, he saw her. Blessing Ogilvy-Grant came out of the main door of 1075 and began to walk across the plaza. Bond zoomed in with the sniper-scope. She looked different – she was wearing a belted beige trouser suit with wide flared trousers but her hair had changed and was now styled in a short bushy Afro, natural and unoiled – very much the young radical, he thought. She stopped at a hot-dog stand to buy a soda and Bond took his opportunity, racing out of his suite of rooms and down the stairs.

  When he emerged from the Alcazar on to the plaza he thought he’d lost her but then he caught sight of her heading up the street towards The Mall. She crossed it on 7th Street and he followed her, being very careful, always staying fifty yards or so behind, sometimes crossing the street and doing a parallel follow, looking back to check that she wasn’t being covered in any way, before ducking back behind her again.

  He felt the contrasting emoti
ons seethe within him. His heart had lurched spontaneously when her face had grown large in the sniper-scope, as he remembered her beauty and the tenderness she’d shown him. Without thinking, he’d approved of this new look she’d created – very American, very cutting-edge. Then he recalled how casually and coldly she had shot him, taking Kobus’s gun and levelling it at his chest without a tremor or any sign of regret. The lover’s fond assessment gave way to a bitter, reasoned anger – she had played him exceptionally well, from the moment they had met. She was a highly trained operative, prepared to put her body on the line should it prove necessary, and give herself to her adversary – and also to shoot to kill. He slowed, making sure he kept his distance, assuming that she would routinely verify that she was being followed or not. Bond’s expertise had to be at least as good as hers, if not better.

  A point worth repeating regularly, Bond told himself, as he watched her turn into a restaurant on E Street called the Baltimore Crab. Bond hovered outside, across the street, watching other lunchers arrive and wondering whom she might be meeting. Perhaps it was just a friend and not sinister business. Even double agents were allowed a personal life from time to time, he told himself.

  Bond lit a cigarette and weighed up his options. He had located AfricaKIN. His surveillance was in place and functioning. Nobody knew he was in the US. But there was no point in just watching – some kind of catalyst was needed, and one of his own making; not like Kobus Breed arriving unannounced at the AfricaKIN offices. Il faut pisser sur les fourmis, he said to himself with a grin, recalling one of the cruder adages of his old friend René Mathis. Yes, pisser sur les fourmis and set the ants scurrying for cover.

  Bond crossed the street and pushed open the door of the restaurant. His gaze quickly swept the room. It was bright and airy, decorated in varying shades of blue and embellished with a multitude of nautical motifs on the walls – signal flags, a life belt, a ship’s wheel, cork floats and swags of netting. He thought he caught a glimpse of Blessing in the far corner but he looked no further, smilingly approaching the young woman who stood at a lectern at the entrance to the dining room, and asking if he could make a reservation for that evening. The reservation was made, Bond helped himself to a Baltimore Crab business card from the little pile on top of the lectern and left. He was almost one hundred per cent sure that Blessing would have spotted him talking to the woman at the maître d’s station. In any event, the next few minutes would prove him right or wrong.

  Bond wandered up the street a few yards, hailed a passing cab and climbed in.

  ‘Just wait here for a while,’ he told the driver and handed him a $10 note. He hunched down in the rear seat, keeping his eyes on the restaurant door. Sure enough, in about ninety seconds, Blessing hurried out, agitated, looking up and down the street, scanning the faces of passers-by. Bond smiled to himself – the ants were in a real state. Blessing waved down the first cab she saw and got in.

  ‘Follow that cab,’ Bond said. ‘And there’s another twenty in it for you if we’re not spotted.’

  ‘Hey, no problem,’ the cabbie said. He had a Mexican accent and a droopy, bandit’s moustache. ‘She your girl?’

  ‘Yes – two-timing bitch.’

  ‘Man, don’ get me start on las chicas,’ the cabbie said and immediately embarked on a long anecdote about his ex-wife in lewd and abusive detail.

  Bond let him rant on, keeping his eye on Blessing’s cab. He wondered what she would be thinking, what level of shock and astonishment the sight of him would have provoked. To see James Bond saunter into a Washington DC restaurant when she might have assumed he was dead and buried . . . No, Bond thought, the sick jolt of alarm would go quickly and then furious second-guessing would begin. She would intuit almost instantly that this was no coincidence and that he had wanted her to see him. But why? she would ask herself. Then she’d enter the fraught and dangerous labyrinth of pure speculation. This was a man she had shot in the chest in Africa – and yet here he was on her trail in Washington DC. Bond smiled: Blessing’s head would be ringing with a hundred alarm bells – she would be well and truly spooked. He sat back – there were many types of satisfaction to be enjoyed in this job.

  Blessing’s car headed into Georgetown and stopped outside a small, pretty clapboard house on O Street.

  ‘Drive on by,’ Bond said to the cabbie, peering out of the rear window to see Blessing run inside, not paying off the driver, keeping her cab waiting, its engine ticking over. They drove on fifty yards and Bond ordered the cabbie to park and wait.

  ‘We go through a lot of zones, mister,’ the cabbie said. Bond had forgotten the arcane mysteries of cab-fare calculation in DC.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay you well. Get ready to turn around if you have to,’ Bond said and fed the man another $20.

  ‘Hey, you can hire me all day, every day, mister,’ he turned in the front seat and leered at him. ‘I am like to work with you.’

  After five minutes Blessing reappeared again, a suitcase in her hand. She locked the front door and hurried into her cab. It pulled away and passed them.

  ‘Don’t lose it, whatever you do,’ Bond said.

  ‘You got it.’

  Blessing’s cab headed west out of DC and crossed the Key Bridge over the Potomac. About twenty minutes later it pulled into the forecourt of a large and ugly modern motel called the Blackstone Park Motor Lodge.

  ‘Keep going,’ Bond said. They drove on another block or so. ‘Stop.’

  The cab pulled into the side of the road under a vast billboard advertising Kool cigarettes. Through the rear window Bond could see Blessing paying off her cab and a bellhop picking up her suitcase. So this was where she would be staying. She was smart: she assumed her cover was blown and so she immediately changed address, within minutes. Bond relaxed – he knew where to find her now. She’d check into her room and start making anxious phone calls, warning everyone. The ants’ nest would be in swarming disarray.

  5

  SUITE 5K

  Bond spent the rest of the afternoon in his Alcazar office watching the comings and goings on Milford Plaza. None of the usual suspects appeared but he wasn’t too concerned. As it grew dark he went back to the Fairview, put a pillow and a bottle of bourbon in his suitcase and went out to his car. He drove the Mustang out west across the Potomac to the Blackstone Park Motor Lodge, found a space for his car and went into reception with his suitcase. He had deliberately not checked out of the Fairview – sometimes having rooms in two hotels in a city was better than one.

  He was given a large double room in the main block. The Blackstone Park wasn’t cheap and nasty, just overused. The sheets on the bed were crisp cotton but the carpet was threadbare and the paintwork was chipped and scarred. The air conditioner worked but hummed a little too loudly. The lavatory was protected by a sheet of cellophane and the tooth-glass had a little cardboard cap on it, but the shaving mirror was cracked and the shower tray’s enamel had been scoured through. Anonymous, large, functional – perfect to hide yourself in.

  Bond went down to reception and slipped the bellhop on duty $10.

  ‘Keep this between ourselves,’ Bond said, ‘but I think my wife’s checked into this motel under a false name.’

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘Got it in one,’ Bond said, putting on an embittered face. ‘Yeah – she doesn’t know I know.’

  The bellhop’s name, according to the plastic badge above his breast pocket, was Delmont. His acne had almost gone but had left his skin dimpled like a golf ball. The wispy moustache he was trying to grow was no asset either, but he bought into the male sodality that Bond offered and they talked briefly of the perfidy of beautiful women like two men of the world.

  ‘She’s coloured,’ Bond said, ‘but pale-skinned, you know. Very sexy with a kind of Afro hairstyle.’

  ‘We got two hundred rooms here, sir,’ Delmont said. ‘But I’ll ask around. A babe like that will have been noticed by my colleagues, know what I mean?’

/>   ‘I just need her room number,’ Bond said. ‘I’ll give you five bucks for it – leave the rest to me,’ Bond smiled. ‘I’m Mr Fitzjohn, room 325.’

  Bond went back to room 325 and poured himself two fingers of bourbon from his bottle and switched on the television while he waited for Delmont. He watched a game of baseball uncomprehendingly – the Senators versus the Royals – thinking that it made cricket seem exciting. Delmont’s knock on the door came ten minutes later.

  ‘She’s in suite 5K in the new annexe in back by the parking lot,’ Delmont said, folding away Bond’s $5 into a small pocket in his jacket. ‘She paid for two weeks in advance – so it don’t look like she’s planning on coming home soon.’ Delmont commiserated and said if there was anything else he could do then Mr Fitzjohn shouldn’t hesitate. Call the front desk and ask for Delmont.

  ‘A thousand thanks,’ Bond said, and he meant it. Life was becoming more intriguing by the hour.

  Bond was up at dawn and drove into DC, stopping at a diner for scrambled eggs and bacon and the hot brown liquid that passed for coffee in this country. He took up his position armed with his binoculars and watched the office workers arrive for the daily round.

  Just after nine o’clock, Kobus Breed stepped out of a Chevrolet Impala and strode across the plaza to 1075. Ten minutes later Denga’s car arrived and there – Bond swivelled the binoculars – there was Blessing herself, walking fast, her head turning constantly, checking to see if she was being followed. Bond smiled. A council of war? The day was young.

  An hour went by, then two. Bond dashed to the restrooms at the end of the corridor, cursing the diuretic potency of American coffee, and raced back, hoping he hadn’t missed anything or anyone. When he saw Kobus Breed appear twenty minutes later, he relaxed. Kobus was swiftly followed by Blessing.