yawns, and looks about. 'Have I missed anything?' she asks querulously.
'Not a lot, dear.' Her husband regards her fondly.
Breakfast with the Hitlers, I think, glancing between them.
'Any news'
'Ach.' Eileen hunches like a vulture when she's aware.
'Everything is in order, the central business groups advance on all fronts, nothing to report today.' She glances at me sharply, then at Ramona. 'I think we ought to continue this in the office, though. Flapping ears and all that.'
Billington glances down at the table spread before him. I hastily refill my coffee cup before he looks up. 'All right.'
He nods, then stands up abruptly — still holding Fluffy — and nods at me, then at Ramona. 'Feel free to finish up,' he says curtly. 'Then you may return to your quarters. It won't be long now.'
He and Eileen stalk out of the dining room via a door at the back, leaving me alone with Ramona, the remains of breakfast, and the disturbing sense that I've somehow strayed onto loose gravel at the edge of a precipice, and it may be too late to turn back and reach safe ground. In the end, pragmatism wins: when you're being held prisoner you never know where the next power breakfast is coming from, so I grab some slices of toast and a plate full of other munchies. Ramona sits hunched in her chair, looking out the porthole above the sideboard. Misery and depression is coming off her in black, stultifying waves. **We've not failed yet,*** I tell her silently, my mouth full of hash browns. **As long as we can reestablish communications with Control we can get back on top of the situation.**
**You think?** She holds out her coffee cup and the steward, who's still waiting on us, fills it up. **What do you think they'll do if we tell them what's really going on? Give us time to get off the ship before they start shooting?** She takes a mouthful of coffee and puts her cup down. I can feel it scalding her tongue, too hot to swallow: nevertheless, she gulps it down. I wince at the sudden paralyzing heartburn.
**We'll just have to stop him ourselves, then,** I say, trying to encourage her. **Whatever. It doesn't work that way, Bob.**
**What doesn't?**
**The geas.** She stands up then smiles at the steward. 'If you don't mind?' she says. The steward stands aside. There's nobody human home behind his eyes; I sidle past him with my back to the wall.
Ramona opens the side door beside the staircase. There's a short passage with several doors opening off it. 'I've got something to show you,' she tells me.
Huh? Since when does Ramona have the run of Billington's yacht? I follow her slowly, trying to worry out what's going on.
'In here.' She opens a door. 'Don't worry about the guards they're either down below or up on the superstructure — this is the owner's accommodation area and they're not needed as long as we stay in it. This is the grand lounge.'
The lounge is surprisingly spacious. There are molded leather-topped benches all around the walls, and bookcases and glass cabinets. In the middle of the floor is something that might have been a pool table once, before a monomaniacal model maker repurposed it as his display cabinet.
'What the hell is it?' I lean closer. On one side are two model ships, one being the Explorer, which I recognize from the huge drilling derrick; but the center of the table is occupied by a bizarre diorama: old dog-eared hardback novels and a worn-looking automatic pistol, piled on top of a reel of film and a map of the Caribbean. Something else: a set of fine wires tracing out — 'Shit. That's a Vulpis-Tesla array. And that box must be a — is that a Mod-60 Gravedust board it's plugged into? Summoning up the spirits of the dead. What the hell'
There's a GI Joe doll in evening dress, clutching a pistol.
It's wired up to the summoning grid by its plastic privates.
On either side of it stand two Barbies in ball gowns, one black, one white. Behind them lurks another GI Joe, this time hacked so that he's bald and bearded, in something that looks like Wehrmacht dress grays.
All at once, I get the picture.
'It's the core of his coercion geas, isn't it? It's a destinyentanglement conjuration, on a bigger scale. James Bond, channelling the ghost of Ian Fleming as scriptwriter ...
Jesus.' I glance across the table at Ramona. She looks flushed and apprehensive.
'Yes, James — ' She bites her lip. 'Sorry, monkey-boy. It's too strong in here, isn't it'
I stare at her through narrowed eyes. Oh yes, I'm beginning to get it. I'm half-tempted to shoot the bint now, then stuff her through the porthole before the bad guys get their mileage out of her, but I need all the friends I can get right now, and until I'm sure she's gone over to SPECTRE I can't afford to — What. The. Fuck?
I blink rapidly. 'Is there somewhere we can go that's not quite so ...'
'Yeah. Next door.'
Next door is the library or smoking room or whatever the hell it's called. My head stops swimming as soon as we get a wall between us and that diorama from Hell. 'That was bad.
What's the big idea? Why does Billington want to turn me into James Bond'
Ramona slumps into an overstuffed chair. 'It's not about you, Bob, it's all about plot. The way the geas works, he's set himself up as the evil villain in this humongous destinyentanglement spell targeted against every intelligence agency and government on the planet. The end state for this conjuration is that the hero — which means whoever's being ridden by the Bond archetype — comes and kills the villain, destroys his secret floating headquarters, stymies his scheme, and gets the girl. But Billington's not stupid. He may be riding the Villain archetype but he's in control of the geas and he's got a good sense of timing. Before the Hero archetype gets to resolve the terminal crisis, he ends up in the villain's grasp under circumstances such that nobody else is positioned to deal with the villain's plan. Ellis figures that he can short the geas out before it goes terminal and makes the Bond figure kill him. At which point Billington will be left sitting in an unassailable position since the only agent on the planet who's able to stop him wakes up and suddenly remembers that he's not James Bond.'
I consider this for a full minute. 'Whoops.'
'That's how we screwed up,' she says bleakly. 'Billington had a handle on me all along. I'm his handle on you, and you're his handle on Angleton. He's stacked us up like a row of dominos.'
I take a deep breath. 'What happens if I go next door and smash the diorama'
'The signal strength — ' She shakes her head. 'You noticed how fast it drops off? If you're close enough to smash it the backwash will kill you, but it'll probably leave Billington alive. If we could get word out about what's going on it might be worth trying, but nobody's close enough to do anything right now — so we're back to square one. It really has to be shut down in good order, the same way it was set up, and I'd guess that's why Billington's brought that fucker Pat aboard.'
'Hang on,' I say slowly. 'Griffin was sure there was a shithot Black Chamber assassin in town this week. Some guy code named Charlie Victor. Could he do anything about Billington if we cleared a path'
'Bob, Bob. I'm Charlie Victor.' She looks at me with the sort of sympathetic expression usually reserved for terminal cases.
I consider this for a moment. Then an atavistic reflex kicks in and I snap my fingers. 'Then you must be, Um ...
you're the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, right? Like Major Amasova in the film version of The Spy Who Loved Me, or Jinx in Die Another Day. Does that mean you're the Good Bond Babe archetype or the Bad Bond Babe'
'Well, I don't think I'm bad — ' She's looking at me oddly. 'What the hell are you talking about'
'There are usually two Babes in every Bond movie,' I say slowly. Shit, she isn't British, is she? I keep forgetting. She hasn't suffered through the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two. I'd probably seen them all by the time I was fifteen, and read some of the books, but I've never had to use the knowledge before now ...
'Look, Bond almost always has two Babes. Sometimes it's three and in a few of the later movies they experimented with one, but it's almost always two. The first to show up is the Bad Bond Babe, who usually works for the villain and who sleeps with Bond before coming to a nasty end. The second, the Good Bond Babe, helps him resolve the plot and doesn't shag him until just before the closing credits. You haven't slept with me so far, which probably means you're safe — at least, you're not the Bad Bond Babe. But you might be the glamorous female
