exchange a word with another person inside the room. Bond shut the side door in an agonized conflict of care and speed, turned and ran. Before he was halfway up the slope the external light flicked on. He dived into his refuge and was facing the house, Walther in hand, without an instant's conscious thought.
This was a justified precaution. The side door opened and von Richter came out. He glanced around for a moment or two, then walked purposefully up the slope straight for where Bond was lying. Bond took aim at the German's chest. The man came on until he was a bare five yards away. Abruptly he turned aside and passed out of view. Bond waited two minutes, three minutes. He could hear nothing, assumed that von Richter had halted somewhere close by. Waiting for something, for somebody. Now another man came out of the side door and Bond had his first sight of Colonel Sun Liang-tan.
He stared hard at the tall spare figure as it approached, the shoulders and hips loosely jointed, rolling easily, the yellow face set in a faint smile, presumably in the direction of von Richter, but not altering its basic impassivity. Movements and expression gave an air of vast careless power. This was a man who would do anything. Bond was considerably impressed, but he grinned savagely to himself at this confirmation of another guess. All the way from China, by God!
The man followed the direction von Richter had taken. Ten to fifteen yards away, and slightly above Bond's position the two began to talk.
'Is this place suitable for your purposes?' asked the first voice in English, the same English as Bond had heard earlier from the front of the house.
'Yes, Colonel, I'm sure it will do admirably.' An unexpected light drawl, accented but agreeable. 'Not on the rock, of course. I may have to water the soil a little, but I can experiment with that later. So. Quite satisfactory. Perhaps we could have the light off now.'
'Certainly.' The Chinese raised his voice. 'Evgeny! The light, please.'
Evgeny: a Russian. That would be the stocky man.
'Now we shall see exact operating conditions,' the curious tones went on. 'I think you'll find we've timed it correctly.'
The light went out.
'We shall have to wait a little while to recover our full vision,' said von Richter, 'but it looks to me already all right.'
All right indeed! Bond bit his lip. Ten seconds was enough to show him that dawn was already on the way. The first faint tinges of colour were beginning to steal into his surroundings, the rocks, the vegetation, the side of the house. How long were these two going to continue their parley?
Infuriatingly, neither spoke for several minutes. Then the German said, 'There! You see him?'
'Ah yes. Excellent.'
'We're using a simple colour code which we've brought to something near perfection this last month. As I told you, we had every facility. Enjoyable work. And the necessary _research__' - von Richter put a special emphasis on this word; Bond imagined an accompanying grimace or gesture - 'was fascinating.'
'And conclusive, I hope.'
'Yes, yes. It'll look right and be right. Ballistically and medically. You can be positive on that point.'
The Chinese muttered something polite and silence fell again.
Bond was sweating. He had just made up his mind to shoot both men in the back as they returned to the house and count on surprise to deal with Evgeny and the blond boy and whoever else was about. He wiped his right hand on the torn knee of his slacks and settled himself more firmly.
'Well, I think we've seen enough for now,' said von Richter. 'Willi and I will line up after breakfast.'
'Very good. This Willi - how did a boy like that take to the research?'
'Remarkably well. He's had rather an interesting history, young Willi. His father was one of Himmler's men; the Americans hanged him at Nuremberg - you know, the usual war-crimes fantasy. Willi was a baby in arms then...'
There was more, but Bond stopped listening. The voices were retreating in the direction of the anchorage. He brought his gun up and waited. Perversely, the two did not cross diagonally from where they had been standing, but evidently walked straight to the water's edge. When they finally came into sight they were between seventy and eighty feet away. Bond dismissed it at once as not worth trying: the light was still poor and the chances of an effective left-and-right negligible. Unless they turned back... But no; awkwardly bunched from his point of view, they strolled past the upper-works of the boat and disappeared behind the front of the house. So much for that.
Poor the light might have been for an aimed shot, but it was already uncomfortably good enough for movement to be spotted, and increasing as if a screened lamp-wick were being turned up. Bond spent a minimal three minutes listening for any sign of the return of the German and the Chinese, then came out of his shelter and started up the gully. But going up was slower than coming down, and by the time he reached the upper end the sun was showing signs of appearing. He paused here to breathe and consider; the stony slope looked horribly exposed; still, there it was, a naked streak of hillside he would have to climb a hundred feet to get round. So... He got to his feet, squared his shoulders and walked steadily over to the far side. Up on to the level stretch, walking as before - no point in using the thorn-bushes as background in this light - and into the shelter of the overhang. On to where the flat pathway ended.
Ahead of him now, and below, lay an extraordinary geological formation, or rather hundreds of these: a great jumble of squarish and near-rectangular stone blocks twenty and thirty feet high and stretching for half a mile, piled next to and upon and across one another so haphazardly that gaining ten yards in the desired direction meant climbing and descending twice as many. Above and below were cliffs. On Bond's outward journey it had taken him fifty minutes to cross this dump of outsize nursery bricks; even now he could not hope to do it in less than thirty. Still, once past it there was a short rise to a level platform of rock, and after that an easy descent to the beach and the boat. On with it, then.
In the event it took him well over the half-hour. He was moving up on to the rock platform when a man on the far side of it got up and levelled a revolver at him.
He was a tall man in a cheap dark suit, now crumpled and torn. Binoculars in a green plastic case were slung across his shoulder. He said in a thick Russian accent, 'Good morning, Mister Shems Bond,' and
