blast.
There’s nothing, or very little, left. Sorry,” she added, as though apologising.
Bond sat, staring into space as though he was taking nothing in.
“She gave me the right daily codes,” he said, his voice like that of a robot.
“They had the telephone in here wired. Picked it all up at the big villa.” Clover, in her pleated grey skirt, sweater and sensible shoes, felt she was still not really getting to him. “Captain Bond?
James? Sir?” she tried. But he still sat, staring into space.
Someone switched on the radio in the kitchen. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” the late Bing Crosby sang in English, and she saw Bond’s head lift, cocked to one side.
“Put that oft’ you clown!” Clover shouted, then turned back to Bond. “They’ve found the regular start’ and the watchers our people put in. At least they’re alive: gagged and bound in the wine cellars.
We’ll know more when our fellows provide their reports and descriptions. Now, I have to get you out of here, sir. Do you understand? We really do have to debrief you as well.”
Finally, Bond nodded, slowly, as though common sense had started to prevail. In his head, whenever someone made a noise, dropped something, or talked too loudly, he heard the deafening double-crump again, and clearly saw Beatrice smiling at him, pulling open the car door, then being engulfed by the explosion.
The ringing in his ears had turned into a permanent whine. He looked up at Clover Pennington. “I want to speak, personally, to M,” he said, coldly.
“Not yet, James - er sir. Not yet. We do have to move you on.
And we have to be very careful. M’s instructions are that you remain in deep cover. That’s essential. We have to drop you out of sight again so that you can re-emerge when you join The invincible, in just over a week.”
Bond made a gesture that signified he understood. Though this was not borne out by his next question - “If she was BAST, what happened?
Did they kill her by mistake?”
“Later, sir. Please. I really think it would be dangerous for you to stay on here. We have a helicopter coming in to pick you up.
They’ll take you to a secure base on the mainland. There’s a debriefing team standing by, and they have good doctors, in case you need medical .
“I’m not in need of doctors, First Officer Pennington.”
“With respect, sir, you need them to give you the once-over.”
There was the clattering sound of a helicopter, getting louder as it swept in from the sea to circle above the villa.
“I take the pistol, sir?” from one of the thick-set men in civilian clothes.
“Not on your life.” Bond was now becoming really angry.
“I’m not a child, nor am I about to do anything stupid.” He glared around him. “What’re we waiting for, then? Let’s go.”
Outside, hovering directly over the villa, an old Agusta chopper, carrying Italian Naval markings, began to descend.
One of Clover Pennington’s men gave hand-signals and they lowered a crewman with a harness, and winched Bond into the chopper. The last thing he looked at, as the helicopter turned away, heading for the coast, was the black, charred and twisted remains of the Fiat, and local police blockades at each end of the road.
An hour later he was inside a small military base, near Caserta.
Bond’s local geographic knowledge was enough to follow the route.
From the air, the base looked anything but military, with half a dozen oblong buildings, and a triple security perimeter: a sandwich of heavy-duty razor wire between two high chain-link fences. The guards at the main gates were armed but did not seem to be uniformed.
He was given a large, airy room, functional, with minimal comfort, a small bathroom and no TV or distracting pictures on the wall.
Somehow they had managed to pack his case at the villa and it now stood neatly just inside the door. Bond stretched out on the bed, placing the Browning within reach. At least they had not disarmed him. There were a dozen or so paperbacks in a pile on the night table, a couple of thrillers, one Deighton, a Greene, two thick Forsyths and a little assorted bunch which included Joyce’s Uljsses and a copy of War & Peace. He knew from his own strung-out state that he needed something to keep his mind working, but this was a bizarre little collection, and he felt very tired, too fatigued to read, but not enough flaked out to sleep. Anyway, he had read the lot, apart from an odd little thriller masterpiece by some unknown author boasting the title Moonlight and Bruises.
He played back the memory which blazed in his head. The Fiat, the steps, the wrought iron gates, Beatrice smiling and opening the car door, then being blotted out by the ball of fire.
No, was it his memory playing tricks? It was not really like that.
She waved and smiled. What next? The violence of the explosion throwing him back? No, something else. She was smiling and pulling the car door open. Smoke. There was a lot of smoke with the fireball, wind and crack-thump of the explosion. What kind of explosive could they have used that made so much smoke? It did not happen with Semtex or RDX. This was something he would have to report. It could be that some terrorist organisations were using a new type of explosive: or was it an old mixture which, with age, produced more smoke than usual?
Anyway, it had wiped out an unusually cold-blooded terrorist princess.
How many terrorist princesses does it take to wire up a time-bomb?
Three: one to get the wire, one to get the gold Rolex and one to call the expert. There was a tap on the door and he called “Come,” with one hand slipping off the Browning’s safety and turning the pistol towards the door.
The man was tall, dressed casually in slacks and a sweater.
He had the dark leathery looks of the Middle East, but his voice was pure Oxford English.
“Captain Bond?” he queried, though Bond got the distinct impression that he was merely adhering to some kind of ritual.
He nodded.
“Name’s Farsee.” He was in his forties, carried himself in an alert military manner, adjusting everything to make it seem as though he was pure civilian to the marrow. His laugh, when it came, lacked real humour. “Julian Farsee, though my friends call me Tomato. Play on words, kind of thing, you see. Tomato Farsee. Tomates Farcies - the old French stuffed tomatoes. See?”
“What’s bloody going on?” Bond asked, his voice brittle and with undertones of violence.
“The quacks want to give you a bit of a going over. I jut dropped in to see if you were feeling okay, and ready for that kind of thing, right?”
“And who exactly are you, Julian? Where are we; what are you; and what’s going on?”
“Well, I’m the Two I/C actually. Right?” (Two I/C was military for Second-in-Command, just like Jimmie The One, in the Royal Navy, stood for First Lieutenant, who could hold the rank of Commander or even Captain, depending on the Captain’s rank, which could even be Rear-Admiral. Some people found it confusing.) “You’re Second-in-Command of what, exactly?”
“This.” Farsee waved a hand in the direction of the window.
It was like prising a grape-pip from a peach. “And what is this?”
“Nobody told you?”
“If they had, I wouldn’t be asking you,Julian.”
“Oh, ya; right. We’re slightly irregular actually.”
“How irregular?”
“Comes under NATO installations, right? Highly classified, you might say. Very highly classified. We’re not even in the book, as they say, right?”
“More!” Bond almost shouted. He could stand Yuppies up to a point, but not Yuppie military.
“CO’s American, right?”
“CO of what?”
“We sort of handle things. Hide folk away when we don’t want the world to see them - or I should say when some of the intelligence people don’t want the world to see them.”
“Such as my self?”
