me. Hong Kong has been good to me. I don’t know what the future will bring after the first of July but I’m sure …” Desmond hesitated. He seemed to be searching for the appropriate words. “… it will be business as usual.”
Everyone in the room knew that on 1 July Britain would no longer be in possession of Hong Kong. The entire colony would be handed over to the People’s Republic of China at 12:01 a.m. Despite China’s assurances that Hong Kong would remain a capitalist and free-enterprise zone for at least fifty years, no one could be sure.
“I wish you all the best of luck,” Desmond continued. “Thank you again. And to my good friend Guy Thackeray, the man who really guides EurAsia Enterprises, a very special thank you.”
During the applause, the two men shook hands again. Then Thackeray signalled the band leader and the room filled with the swinging rhythm of Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand.”
Thackeray accompanied Desmond back to the table. “John, I have to get back to Central,” he said. “I suppose I’ll see you at the office tomorrow?”
“Leaving so soon, Guy?” Desmond asked. “Whatever for?”
“I left some unfinished business at the office which must be taken care of. Listen … enjoy your party. I’ll speak to you soon.”
“Guy, wait,” Desmond said. “We need to talk about things. You know we do.”
“Not now, John. We’ll go over it tomorrow at the office, all right?”
Guy walked away without another word. With concern, John Desmond watched his friend leave the room. He knew that the roof was going to cave in when the rest of the Board discovered what he had learned only two days ago. He wondered how Guy Thackeray was going to emerge unscathed.
Guy Thackeray stepped out of the dining room, on to the deck, and into a small shuttle motorboat. The boat whisked him to shore, where his personal limousine was waiting. In a flash it was off to the north part of the island and the panorama of buildings and lights.
By then, the two strange albino Chinese had finished their work. The first man slithered through the storeroom porthole, slid down the rope, and dropped into the waiting rowing boat. His brother followed suit, and moments later the boat was heading east towards a yacht waiting some two hundred metres away. The third man, the one rowing, also had a full head of white hair, pinkish skin, and sunglasses. Not only were the albino brothers the most bizarre trio in the Far East, they were also the most dangerous.
Exactly fifteen minutes later, the
At approximately the same moment that James Bond fell asleep on a red-eye flight from Kingston, Jamaica to London, the sun was beating down on the Australian outback. A young Aboriginal boy who frequented this area of the desert in search of kurrajong, an edible plant, was still frightened of the white men he had seen earlier. The men had driven to this isolated location in four-wheel drives, which the boy knew only as “cars.”
The boy’s family lived at a campsite about a mile away and had done so for as long as he could remember. He knew that further south, more than a day’s walking distance, were towns populated by the white men. To the east, closer to Uluru, the mystical rock-like formation in the desert which the white men called “Ayers Rock,” there were even more encroachments on the Aboriginal home territory.
The white men had arrived early that morning in two “cars.” They had spent an hour at the site, digging in the ground and burying something. Then they left, heading south towards the white man’s civilization. They had been gone three hours before the boy decided to inspect the ground.
The dig occupied an area about six feet in diameter. The dirt was fresh but had already begun to bake and harden in the sun. The boy was curious. He wanted to know what the white men had hidden there, but he was afraid. He knew that he might get into trouble if he was seen by the white men, but now there was no one else around. He thought he should go and find a lizard for that evening’s meal, but his desire to inspect the burial mound was too great.
If he had been wearing a watch, it would have read exactly 12 noon when the sun exploded in his face.
The nuclear explosion that occurred that day two hundred miles north of Leonora in Western Australia sent shock waves throughout the world. It was later determined that the device had roughly threequarters the power of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima: the equivalent of approximately 300 tons of TNT. The blast covered an area of three square miles. It was deadly, indeed, but crude by today’s standards. Nevertheless, had there been a city where the bomb was buried, there would surely have been nothing left of it.
Within hours, an emergency session of the United Nations degenerated into nothing but a shouting match between the superpowers. No one knew what had happened. Australian officials were completely baffled. Inspectors at the site came up with nothing aside from the fact that a “home-made” nuclear device had been detonated. Everyone was grateful that it had been in the middle of the outback, where they assumed there had been no casualties.
What was truly frightening, though, was the implication of the location. It was, in all probability, a test. Someone—a terrorist group or a foreign power operating in Australia—was in possession of rudimentary nuclear weapons.
As Australia, the United States, Russia, and Britain combined forces to investigate the explosion and search for answers, they also waited for the imminent claim of responsibility and possible blackmail. It never came. When James Bond arrived in London in the early hours of the same day, London time, the nuclear explosion was still a total mystery.
THREE
James Bond never had trouble sleeping on a plane, and the flight from Jamaica to England was no exception. He felt refreshed and alert when the office car pulled into the high-security SIS parking garage by the Thames. Things were so open now: Bond was one of the few veterans still around who could remember a time when SIS hid behind the front of Universal Export Ltd.
The British Secret Service had a relatively new leader. Her name was no longer a secret, but Bond would never dare address her by name, just as he had never addressed his irascible former chief, Sir Miles Messervy, that way. Since his retirement, Sir Miles had mellowed considerably. He often invited Bond to Quarterdeck, his home on the edge of Windsor Great Park, for a dinner party or a game of bridge. They still met from time to time at Blades. Once they were strictly a superior officer and a civil servant with mutual respect for each other; but now, after all the years, they were close friends. Even so, Bond had consciously to refrain from addressing the man as “sir.”
Bond couldn’t say he was friends with the new M. He wasn’t even sure he liked her, but he respected her. In her short tenure, she had already shown she was capable of being an effective leader. She wasn’t afraid of proactive operations, something Bond had feared might be discontinued. If some dirty work needed to be performed, she had no problem with ordering Bond, or one of the other Double-Os, to carry it out. She wasn’t squeamish, and she wasn’t gullible. Bond felt he could say whatever he wanted to her, and he would receive an honest response. He also knew what the woman thought of him personally. Bond was a chauvinist and, in her words, “a coldhearted bastard.” She had said it one evening over a working dinner. Bond understood why the woman had called him that, and he didn’t hold it against her because, for one thing, she was right.
He stopped in at his private office on the fourth floor before going up to see M. His Personal Assistant (Bond couldn’t help still thinking of her as a “secretary”), Ms. (not Miss) Helena Marksbury, was busy holding the fort. Helena worked for all of the Double-Os, having been with SIS for about a year. Since the days of Loelia Ponsonby and Mary Goodnight, there had been a steady succession of lissome blondes, brunettes, and redheads occupying the front desk. As for Helena Marksbury, she was a brunette with large green eyes. She was bright, quick-witted, and damnably attractive. Bond thought that had she not been his Personal Assistant, the lovely Helena would have made an enjoyable dinner date … with an option for breakfast the next morning.
