The Spy Who Loved Me

The girl’s mouth opened and closed like that of a dying fish. ‘He is meeting someone. At the pyramids. Son-et -'

Her head fell sideways and Bond felt the life rush from the body. He laid her back against the cushions and rose swiftly to wash the blood from his hands.

Death of a Salesman

‘You have come tonight to the most fabulous and celebrated place in the world ..

The male voice was cold and almost condescending. With the assistance of fourteen loudspeakers it began to swell dramatically. ‘Here, on the plateau of Gizeh, stands for ever the mightiest of human achievements. No traveller - emperor, merchant or poet - has trodden on these sands and not gasped in awe.’

Like a gas-jet being turned up, light slowly flooded the eastern face of the Pyramid of Cheops. There was an obedient and reverential murmur from the serried rows of tourists as their heads tilted back and their eyes rose four hundred and fifty-five feet into the night sky.

All the tourists except one.

Major Anya Amasova, sitting at the end of the fifth row with an empty seat beside her, took advantage of the sudden burst of light to check that the two men assigned to her by General Nikitin were in position. They were. Standing, it seemed to her, self-consciously, at either diagonal of the audience. They were both looking up at the enormous, overpowering structure, taking advantage of the unexpected history lesson. Instantly, they were snatched from view as the lighting changed, throwing the pyramid into silhouette.

‘The curtain of night is about to rise and disclose the stage on which the drama of a civilization took place ..

Anya looked at her watch. Fekkesh was late.

To the left, the Sphinx slowly appeared as if illuminated by the first rays of dawn. There was an admiring gasp from the audience in which Anya found herself joining. It was impossible not to be moved in these surroundings. Disconcertingly so. She should not have agreed to this meeting place.

‘With each new dawn I see the Sun-god rise on the banks of the Nile. His first ray is for my face, which is turned towards him.'

Bond stood in the shadows, listening to the neutered voice of the Sphinx and wondering if the Pharaoh Chephren had really talked like that. Still, the sculptors and the metteurs en scene of the son-et-lumiere must know best. There was certainly something sexually ambiguous about the Sphinx.

When light permitted, Bond sorted through the rows of tourists looking for Fekkesh. Only the beautiful, erect girl in the fifth row did not seem to belong to a tour party. Poor devils, he thought, Cairo, Giza, Memphis, El Amarna, Abydos, Luxor, Kamak, Assuan. Five thousand years of history in three weeks, two donkey rides and a bout of gastro-enteritis.

‘... and for five thousand years I have seen all the suns men can remember come up into the sky ..The girl in the fifth row was worth concentrating on. It was impossible to see her clearly but there was a quality of luminosity about her that drew her forward from the lumpy women with clumsy cardigans draped round their sunburnt shoulders. But maybe this was not the best time to be a girl watcher. Similarly placed to himself were two men wearing lightweight suits that looked as if they had been made out of cardboard boxes. They appeared uncomfortably out of place - like Toby Mugs amongst Dresden Shepherdesses. They looked like the kind of failed Bulgarian weightlifters that Redland recruited to eliminate • enemies of the State. Maybe they were friends of the man on the concert grand who would never find anyone to play a duet with him.

Bond was concentrating on the two men when he saw something that made him draw back into the shadows. As a patch of light hit the Pyramid of Chephren, a small man with hunched shoulders appeared on the other side of the audience from Bond. His head started nodding as he counted the rows of seats. Bond could not be certain but he thought he recognized the face he had seen in the photograph at the flat.

Then the lights went out.

Anya recognized Fekkesh immediately and breathed a sigh of relief. He was standing within ten feet of her, looking

nervous and insecure as he always did. She wondered if he remembered where she had said she would be. Yes. His eyes were travelling to the right-hand corner of the audience and methodically counting back. One, two, three, four, five. His smile was more one of relief than welcome. He stepped forward and she moved her knees to let him pass. Then he stopped. His face registered transparent fear as if he had suddenly seen a ghost and he turned on his heel. Anya half rose to her feet as he hurried away into the shadows.

Then the lights went out.

Bond cursed and started to run towards the back of the audience. In the darkness, his feet caught against a cable and he tripped and nearly fell. He cursed again and there was an impatient ‘Ssh!!’ from the hypnotized onlookers. Why the hell had Fekkesh taken off like that? Who had he seen? Could he have recognized Bond? Hardly likely. One of the heavies? Possibly. Bond abandoned speculation and concentrated on running as fast as he dared. A sudden blaze of an illumination on the pyramid of Mycerinus showed him a figure and its grotesquely larger shadow running down the north side of Cheops. By some strange, optical illusion, the shadow seemed to be moving out of time with its owner, almost as if giving chase to iL Bond pulled out his Walther and sprinted, the distorted voices from the amplifiers bombarding his ears as he ran past Now it was dark again. God ! This was like the night barrage before the battle of El Alamein. The blinding flashes of the twenty-five pounders throwing into relief the advancing infantry.

As if to demonstrate the image, the Sphinx was once more illuminated, and as Bond’s eyes were automatically drawn towards the source of light he saw a sight which brought him abruptly to a halt. Silhouetted against the distant Sphinx was a giant figure which at first glance seemed like some statue, unrecorded since the dawn of history. Its head was huge and ungainly and its arms stood away from the body in the pose of a wrestler flexing to take hold of an opponent. Viewed behind it, the Sphinx seemed an appropriate mount to bear this Colossus away across the desert. And then the giant moved. The head swivelled towards Bond, the eyes blazed and the light shone from its mouth as from a lighthouse.

And then everything was plunged into darkness.

Fekkesh was desperate. Desperate as a man who has taken out a mortgage he cannot repay, or gambled in a game when the stakes are too high, or promised a woman he loves something he can never give her. But most of all he was desperate because he knew that his time was running out. That he was going to die. When he found the opening in the wall, he pressed into it like a bug into a crack. Anywhere to get away from the big man who killed for Stromberg. Why? Why had he listened to them? What had they been able to do to him to make him believe that he could ever turn against Stromberg and get away with it? Especially with this. It was too big. He had been insane. He should have stayed on the fringe. Taken the money, been grateful.

Something impeded the passage of air to his nostrils and Fekkesh froze. The man was standing in the opening. In the darkness, the sound of his heavy breathing sounded like the sawing of wood. At that moment, Fekkesh gave up the ghost. He hunched his shoulders and began to whimper. God, please make it quick, he prayed. Please spare me too much pain. He thought of his children and of Felicca, waiting at the flat, but most of all his mind was full of a blind inchoate terror that numbed him like an injection sinking deeper and deeper into his gums. He pressed his eyes tight shut and dug his nails into his palms. God, let it happen soon. He was tightening like a spring that had to break.

When the hand fell upon his knee it was almost a relief. He braced himself and opened his eyes. The outline of the face was visible against the stars. There seemed to be no malice in it. No hatred. No cruelty. If this was the face that animals wore before they ate each other then it was not too bad. And then the mouth opened and Fekkesh saw the two rows of jagged, stainless-steel teeth. And then he started screaming. And Jaws pulled him down like a rag doll upon the scaffold of his knee and bit through the back of his neck as easily as if it had been a stick of celery.

To Bond, the noise that ended the screams was like that of a stick breaking. He raced towards it and arrived as the huge man materialized from between two blocks of stone like a spirit escaping from some rifled sarcophagus. For a second the two men faced each other and then Jaws showed his gleaming teeth in a contemptuous smile and turned on his heel to be swallowed up by the night. Bond hesitated, torn between the knowledge that he must find