something must have been found on him?'
Inspector Crawford spoke up at once and Sir Ranald frowned slightly. One might have expected the least important man present to satisfy himself that none of the comparatively senior people wanted to answer, before pushing himself forward. At least, one might once have expected that.
'Oddly enough there were some belongings, sir,' the Inspector was saying. He nodded towards the small heap of miscellaneous objects that Valiance was turning over. 'But they don't tell us much. Except - '
'Do they tell us anything about who the man was?'
'Not in my view, sir.'
Valiance, dapper as ever in the small hours, glanced over at Crawford and shook his head in agreement.
'Then may I take leave to ask my question again? Who was he? Assistant Commissioner?'
'Our fingerprint files are being gone over now, Sir Ranald,' said Valiance, his direct gaze on the Minister's face. 'And of course it's conceivable that this chap will be on them. We're also checking abroad, with Interpol and so on, but it'll be a couple of days at least before all the returns are in. And I feel strongly that we shan't learn anything useful from anywhere. To my way of thinking, the mere fact that he was left behind like that, just as he was, proves that knowing his identity wouldn't help us.'
'I agree with Valiance,' said Tanner. 'We're in the same position here exactly and I'm sure we shall get the same results, or lack of them. No, sir - this chap'll turn out to be one of a comparatively new type of international criminal who's been turning up in rather frighteningly large numbers in the sabotage game, terrorism and so on. They're people without a traceable history of any sort, probably white Africans with a grudge, various fringe Americans - but that's all supposition because they turn up out of thin air. The lads in Records here call them men from nowhere. Damn silly twopenny-blood sort of name but it does describe them. What I'm saying, sir, is that it's a waste of time trying to find who this fellow was, because in a sense he wasn't anybody.'
'You're guessing, aren't you, Tanner?' said Sir Ranald, crinkling up his eyes as he spoke to show he wasn't being personally offensive yet. 'Just guessing. Educated guess-work no doubt you'd call it but that's a matter of taste. I'm afraid I was trained to observe carefully, impartially and thoroughly before venturing on any theorizing. Now... Bond,' the Minister went on with a momentary expression of distaste, as if he found the name unaesthetic in some way, 'you at any rate saw this man when he was alive. What could you say about him that might help?'
'Almost nothing, sir, I'm afraid. He seemed completely ordinary apart from his skill in unarmed combat, and he could have learnt that anywhere in the world. So...'
'What about his voice? Anything there?'
Bond was tired out. His head throbbed and there was a metallic taste in his mouth. The parts of his body on which the dead man had worked were aching. The ham sandwich and coffee he had grabbed in the canteen were hardly a memory. Even so, he would not have answered as he did if he had not been repelled by the politician's air of superiority in the presence of men worth twenty of him.
'Well, he addressed me in English, sir,' said Bond judicially. 'By my standards correct English. I listened carefully, of course, for any traces of a Russian or Albanian or Chinese accent but could detect none. However, he spoke no more than about twenty words in my hearing, which may have been too small a sample upon which to base any certain conclusions.'
At the other end of the table, Valiance went into a mild attack of coughing.
Sir Ranald appeared not in the least put out. He flicked his eyes once at Valiance and spoke to Bond in a gentle tone. 'Yes, you weren't about the place very long, were you? You were anxious to be off. I congratulate you on your escape. No doubt you would have considered it ridiculously old-fashioned to have stayed and fought to save your superior from whatever fate was in store for him.'
The Under-Secretary turned away suddenly and stared into an empty corner of the room. Inspector Crawford, sitting opposite Bond, went red and shuffled his feet.
'Mr Bond showed great courage and resource, sir,' he said loudly. 'I've never heard of anybody who could hope to subdue four able-bodied men single-handed and unarmed let alone being full of a drug that incapacitated him a few minutes later. If Mr Bond hadn't escaped, the enemy's plans would be going ahead _in toto__. As it is, they'll have to be modified, they may even be fatally damaged.'
'Possibly.' Sir Ranald beat the air with his hand. With another grimace of displeasure, he said to his Under-Secretary, 'Bushnell, get a window open, will you? The air in here isn't fit to breathe with three people chain-smoking.'
While the Under-Secretary hastened to obey, Bond was hiding a grin at the memory of having read somewhere that hatred of tobacco was a common psychopathic symptom, from which Hitler among others had been a notable sufferer.
Rubbing his hands briskly, as if he had won an important point, Sir Ranald hurried on. 'Now just one matter that's been bothering me. There doesn't seem to have been any guard or watch on Sir Miles's residence. Was that normal, or had somebody slipped up?'
'It was normal, sir,' said Tanner, who had started to redden in his turn. 'This is peacetime. What happened is unprecedented.'
'Indeed. You agree perhaps that it's the unprecedented that particularly needs to be guarded against?'
'Yes, sir.' Tanner's voice was quite colourless.
'Good. Now have we any idea of who's behind this business and what its purpose is? Let's have some educated guesses on that.'
'An enemy Secret Service is at any rate the obvious one. As regards purpose, I think we can rule out a straight ransom job, if only because they could have operated that from inside the country and so avoided the immense risk of getting out with Sir Miles, and presumably Mr Bond too if they'd managed to hold on to him. And why hold two people to ransom? The same sort of reasoning counts against the idea of interrogation or brainwashing or anything of that sort. No, it's something more... original than that, I'm certain.'
Sir Ranald sniffed again. 'Well? What sort of thing?'
