Brokenclaw

4

LORDS AND LORDS DAY

The Bureau Chief, the senior FBI agent working out of San Francisco, was a stocky, battered-looking man in his mid-forties. He sat in his shirtsleeves, his tie pulled loose, the desk of his cluttered office giving the impression that he was not happy with paperwork. His name was Broderick, and he also did not seem to be happy with James Bond.

‘Captain Bond RN,’ he announced to Bond, as though passing on uncertain information. ‘Captain James Bond. Uh?’

‘How can I help?’ 007 was not going to open the batting.

‘Well,’ Broderick ran stubby fingers through greying unruly hair. ‘Well, we’ve been asked to hand you over to your own people. In fact they asked us to keep an eye on you yesterday.’ He grunted again. ‘Truth to tell, I’m a tad angry with myself. The boys are just angry. We all get that way when one of our own meets an untimely and brutal end. You ever set eyes on this man?’ He tossed a five-by-four matt photograph across the desk, and Bond found himself looking into a pleasant young face staring out of the picture with eyes that seemed full of hope and determination.

‘Yes. Yes, I saw this man last night.’

‘Uh-hu? Tell me about it.’

Bond told him, for the photograph was undoubtedly Porpoise, the man he had seen clubbed to death in the Chinatown alley. When he had finished the story, Broderick sighed and nodded. ‘You didn’t think to tell anybody about this?’

‘Yes. I did think about it. But it was necessary for me to wait. There’s someone I felt I had to talk to first.’

‘You didn’t even go to the poor guy’s assistance.’ There was more than a hint of disgust in his voice.

‘No. It wasn’t in anybody’s interest, Mr Broderick.’

‘Particularly your own, eh?’

‘One of the rules of military life is self-preservation. There was no point in my trying to help this man. I was unarmed. Better for me to live and fight another day.’

Broderick nodded again, his face grim, unconvinced by the answer. Then he rose and led Bond over to a detailed map of San Francisco which almost took up an entire wall of his office. ‘Like to try and pinpoint the place where you say you saw the killing?’

Bond zeroed in on the Chinatown area and quickly found the junction on Stockton Street where he had thrown Porpoise by going into the store. He traced his own movements for the FBI man, his return to the street and his own surveillance on Porpoise. Everything was marked on the map, all the tiny alleys and passages which made up the network around the main arteries of Chinatown. It was easy to pick out the narrow street that led to the cul- de-sac courtyard where the murder had taken place.

‘And you just watched him get killed here?’ Broderick did not sound surprised.

‘That’s the place.’

‘Well, they moved the body and dumped him a long way off.’ He sucked in a breath through his teeth, turning his eyes on to Bond as though he despised him. ‘You do realise that Agent Malloney was killed while looking out for you.’

Bond had already been well ahead of him. After all it had become obvious, just as the open hostility towards him was obvious. The pair of agents who had brought him down to their Bureau chief had treated him as though he carried the plague or smelled badly. They had frisked him very thoroughly and without gentleness, taken away his passport and other items, wallet, credit cards and the like.

‘Well, why wasn’t I told he was looking out for me?’ Bond had now become angry.

Broderick raised his head, and Bond saw that his eyes held nothing but a cold and calculating disgust. ‘Surveillance isn’t surveillance if the target knows about it, Captain Bond.’

‘Yes, but. . .’

‘Yes, but we have to deal with your kind quite often.’ Broderick faced him, and for a moment Bond prepared to defend himself. It was clear that the FBI man would have liked to tear him apart. ‘We have orders not to lay a finger on you,’ he said, finally. ‘Seems there are people waiting to talk with you who can take care of all your problems, and you’ve gotten plenty of those, Captain Bond. That should be clear to a drunken June bug, let alone a man of your intelligence.’

‘Sorry, I don’t follow you,’ he began, but was cut short by Broderick shouting for the two agents who had been at the hotel. Their names, it seemed, were Agents Nolan and Wood and they came into their chief’s office like two men hoping there was going to be a fight.

‘Lock him up and keep him happy until we move him.’ Broderick turned away.

‘Look . . .’ Bond began.

‘No, you look, buddy.’ Agent Nolan was close, with a hand around Bond’s wrist. ‘You look and listen, Captain Bond. If it wasn’t for our orders, I’d do something that wouldn’t be nice, like reorganising that plummy English accent of yours or sticking your pearly whites in the roof of your own pink little mouth. So remember that and don’t take chances.’

Bond let the fury build up inside himself, keeping it under control. He could probably do things to Agent Nolan that would come as a very big surprise to the man, but there was no point. Instead he asked if he was being arrested.

‘Not as easy as that, Bond,’ the other agent, Wood, drawled. ‘You’re to be handed back to your own. I just hope they know what to do with a scumbag like you.’

‘I think I have a right, then, to speak to the British Embassy in Washington or one of their representatives here.’

Broderick turned sharply, face flushed. ‘You have no rights! Nothing! Understand? We simply have to turn you over to people who do have rights, so you’d best behave yourself. I’d hate to report that you got yourself shot or messed up by falling down a flight of stone steps while being unco-operative. Get him out of my sight!’

The agents took him by the arms and led him through an outer office, down a small flight of stairs to a holding cell into which they pushed him, clanging the door shut.

‘You’re so damned sensitive that we had to remove the Marshals who usually deal with people in here,’ Nolan said, as though indicating that Bond was causing them unnecessary work and disrupting normal routine.

He heard the heavy clunk of the key in the lock, but did not even try to protest. He did not understand what was going on or why. The only thing plain and simple was the fact that one of their colleagues was dead and he had stood watching while the man met his end. In their place, Bond thought he might feel the same, but he had not bargained on the hostility which came off all the FBI men like static on a dry cold day. There must be something else, but it was best to wait. Wait and find out what the whole damned business was about. After all these men were accredited law enforcement agents, and he was in their country.

He sat down on the small cot which took up almost one wall of the cell and tried to think it through. He had been officially under FBI surveillance. His tail had been killed and he had watched the killing. But, he told himself for the hundredth time, there was more to it than just treating him like a coward for not going to Agent Malloney’s assistance, something deeper, something more disturbing.

Agent Wood came down about an hour later with a polystyrene box containing a dry-looking hamburger, fries, a plastic capsule of tomato sauce and a disposable receptacle containing what could well have been coffee.

He sipped at the muck, chewed on a couple of the fries, which were cold, and left the hamburger untouched. This was a country which appeared to be in the grip of a gigantic health kick – magazines telling you that your body was a machine which had to be cared for, advertisements, public broadcasts and TV commercials, all telling you to watch your cholesterol, watch your weight, look out for your blood pressure, eat wisely and fill your intestines with fibre – yet their fast food joints did a roaring trade in junk food. He could not even bear to let this stuff past his teeth. Cynically, he thought the world had gone crazy. For instance, they were happy about heading for a smoking-