more of a slippery slope, on which not merely a false step, but miscalculation of any detail of the lay-out could be fatal.
Then he heard the boat.
It was approaching from the west, coming round the corner where the islet was. In a couple of minutes it puttered into view, carrying navigation lights and a rather dim white one for'ard. When it had completed its rounding movement it ran parallel with the shore for perhaps a quarter of a mile, then turned in and began to make straight towards the farther of the two houses Bond could see from his post, the one whose lights were still burning. No fuss, no elaborate concealment, no double-bluff blaze of publicity either. Bond nodded to himself and got to his feet. He must get down for a closer look. Losing lateral distance but gaining time, he began by moving back down the way he had come, a zigzagging trough at about ten degrees from the vertical between two banks of granite slabs. Next, an all-fours scramble across a larger, smoother expanse canted like the deck of a foundering stone ship, a drop of eight feet on to bare soil, a piece of straightforward rock-climbing down a cliff-face pocked and knobbed with erosion - the last and most exposed stretch protected from upward view by a bulging overhang. This first leg of the descent had taken care of about half the height he needed to lose, but had brought him a hundred yards or so too far to the east. Here was a handy left turn, a natural terrace running parallel to the shore-line for almost the length of a football-pitch, the first half of it at least in the visual lee of the overhang, and level going. Underfoot was rich springy turf like the green of a well-kept English golf-course. When had he been at Sunningdale? Tuesday afternoon. And this was Friday night, or rather the small hours of Saturday. A fairly strenuous three days.
At the point where the ground began to fall away to his right Bond dropped to his knees and looked down. The boat was coming in at reduced speed. Part of an anchorage was in view but the house itself was still hidden. Further lateral and downward movement needed. He hurried to the end of the terrace-like formation, bending low to use the dark background of a straggle of stunted thorn-bushes. Now, in bright moonlight, a wide bare slope of whitish rock littered with loose stones, the mouth of a narrow gully downhill at its far side. There was no time for a detour. Bond walked slowly and deliberately across the exposed slope, his eyes on the ground. He would be seen only by somebody who happened to be looking in his direction; if he dislodged a stone he would make his presence obvious to anyone with ears. The boat's engine had been cut and he could hear voices. He listened with held breath for the sudden urgency in their tones which would show he had been spotted. They murmured levelly on.
He reached the gully. It was an irregular fissure in the granite, twisting this way and that but leading him down in the general direction of the house, its floor smooth and overgrown with tall coarse grasses, such that it might have been a dried-up stream if watercourses of any sort had existed in the island. Twice he had to push his way into and through the clinging, ripping embrace of bushes that filled his path from wall to wall. Then a swing to the left, a bad moment when those walls leaned towards each other and he had to crawl for five yards or more, a rapid drop eased by a sort of straggling banister on the seaward side, another corner, and he was there, very much there, dangerously near.
Cover first. He glided into the protective shadow of a slab shaped like the gable end of a farmhouse that lay across the lip of the gully as if it had fallen there yesterday, though it must have reached its present position before Vrakonisi was on any map. The nearest angle of the house was less than thirty yards away, its flat roof on a level with where he crouched; that could wait. A little farther off at about ninety degrees, von Richter was just stepping on to a miniature stone quay. Bond caught the shiny, hairless patch of skin above the left ear. A short heavy man with a round head, who had been making fast at the bow of the boat, now moved amidships and, with the help of von Richter's blond assistant, heaved ashore what looked like a large sports-bag. Bond craned forward. The bag bulged oddly and was clearly awkward and heavy. There followed perhaps a dozen boxes about eight inches square, of dark-painted metal as far as could be made out in the illumination of the one light on the boat and another, not much stronger, on a bracket at the corner of the house. The boxes too seemed heavy for their size. Then, incongruously, came two smart tartan-panelled, plastic-covered suitcases. So far, the unloading had proceeded more or less in silence. Now a voice spoke.
The speaker was somewhere at the front of the house and out of view. His voice was pitched at a conversational level, in key with the casual, non-furtive atmosphere of the whole landing procedure. The man addressed von Richter by name and welcomed him to the house in the most ordinary terms. Unexpectedly, he spoke in English, but much more striking were his odd pronunciation, as if instead of learning the language he had had it fed into him mechanically, and, through a thin veneer of pleasantness, the unmistakable ring of authority in his tone. Bond knew that he had heard the enemy leader speaking. He waited as patiently as he could for a sight of the man.
For the moment, evidently, he was to be denied this. Von Richter, calling a greeting in return, moved across to the front of the house, extending his right hand just as he went out of sight. There was more talk (indistinguishable), a laugh or two, and the voices faded as if the speakers had gone indoors. The light on the boat was dowsed. The stocky man and the fair-haired lad picked up the sports-bag between them, carried it past Bond's hiding-place and in at a side door. They returned and made a series of journeys with the boxes, then the suitcases. The door shut with an air of finality. The light at the angle of the house went out. Silence fell, except for a mutter of talk and the occasional faint slap of water under the hull of the moored boat.
Bond stretched himself full length in the darkness and prepared to wait out the chance of something left on board being remembered and returned for. To assume that he had just had a view of the assassination weapon and its ammunition seemed irresistible - part of that weapon, at least: the mounting must be elsewhere, brought here separately. Even so, surely the bloody thing was far too _small__. Nothing that size, with its inevitably puny muzzle-velocity, could do more than bounce a shell off the walls of the house on the islet, stoutly built of local stone. The dismal thought suggested itself that his first guess had been right, that this was to be the centre for a diversion and that the real attack was to come by sea, launched from somewhere there would be no chance of finding. Then he thrust this away. The leaders were here; it was here that mattered.
He hung on for another twenty minutes. No change. He moved.
It took him something over an hour to make a slow, careful circuit of the house and the possible approaches. At the end of that time he had satisfied himself that there were no trip-wires or similar alarm systems, that no sort of access from the sea was both physically practicable and free of a strong risk of immediate detection, and that, in addition to the gully he had used tonight, a good alternative route led directly down the hillside to within ten seconds' dash of a terrace at the back of the house. The terrace was a difficult but possible climb for one man, no problem for two.
Back in his shelter under the horizontal slab, Bond weighed chances and times. At the moment, with the moon down, the darkness was entire, relieved only by starlight, but the first signs of dawn could be expected within fifteen minutes. He must be off soon. But a glimpse of the internal lay-out of the house would be invaluable. He walked briskly down the final slope and across rough stone flags to the side door of the house. Without hesitation he lifted it against its hinges by the shank of the knob and turned slowly, producing a single, almost inaudible squeal of metal. Then, still lifting, alert for the first beginnings of a creak, he pushed. The door yielded. A millimetre at a time now.
In five minutes or so he had an aperture a foot wide. He took in the staircase in profile ahead of him, the beginning of steps on the left that must lead to the rear terrace, a dimlylit corridor with rooms opening off it. At once, as if activated by his glance, the door of one of these rooms opened and somebody started to come out.
What saved Bond for the moment was that whoever was emerging paused at the threshold as if to
