already leaped to another desk and was no longer a good target.
“Everyone get down!” Bond shouted. People did as they were told, some of them translating Bond’s orders into Cantonese for those who needed it.
The assassin jumped from desk to desk, flinging files and papers into the air, until he reached the other end of the floor. He ran through a door and into another office space leading back in the direction of the lifts and stairwell. Bond decided not to follow him through there, but instead to go back the way he had come in the hope of meeting him in the stairwell. The three security guards in pursuit burst into the room with their guns drawn. They shouted at Bond to halt.
“I’m a British policeman!” he shouted. “I’m not the man you’re after, he’s coming round through the room next-door!” The guards looked confused, unsure whether to believe him or not. Suddenly, the assassin ran into the lift area. He had a frightened Chinese woman with him, a bank employee, and his gun was to her head.
He shouted in Cantonese. Bond didn’t have to translate his words. The guards froze, as did Bond. Bond said in his best Cantonese, “You won’t get away with this.”
An empty lift opened behind the assassin, and he took the opportunity to step inside, taking the woman with him. The door closed and the lift started moving up towards the top of the building. Bond immediately pressed the “UP” button and waited for another lift. One guard was speaking in Cantonese into a walkie-talkie, informing other men where the assassin was headed. They had obviously decided to believe that Bond was on their side.
Just as another lift arrived, Bond noted that the assassin’s lift had stopped on level forty-two. Bond and the guards took the lift up to the same level and stepped out. It was a large executive conference room with a bar along one side.
“Oh, no,” a guard muttered. He pointed towards an exit leading outside.
They could see the assassin on a catwalk on the other side of the window. He was inching his way along with the woman in tow. He looked as frightened as she did.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Bond asked. “He can’t escape now!”
A guard said, “He could get on one of our hydraulic lifts on the extension. There is a ladder there he can use to climb down to another floor.”
Bond could see what the guard meant. Extended on an aluminium-clad structure was a box-like “cherry picker” which apparently could move up and down the building and was used to clean the windows. Sure enough, the assassin began to force the woman towards the box. She was too terrified to move. The man pointed his gun at her, shouting at her, but this only made her terror worse.
“I’m going out there,” Bond said, and moved towards the emergency exit. The killer, meanwhile, had abandoned the woman and was making his way towards the box alone. Bond stepped on to the catwalk and was surprised by the force of the wind. He didn’t want to look down, for he would surely have difficulty maintaining his balance. All of Hong Kong lay before him. If it had not been from such a precarious perch, it would have been a spectacular view.
The woman was clutching a round beam that formed part of the extension, holding on for dear life. Bond reached out to her. “Give me your hand!” he shouted. The woman cried, but wouldn’t move. “Please! He’s gone!” Bond said. “The man is gone! Give me your hand and I’ll help you get back inside!”
The woman looked at him through her tears. She was about forty, and very, very frightened. She said something in Cantonese that Bond didn’t understand, but he kept his hand outstretched. He smiled at her and nodded encouragingly. Finally, she nervously extended her arm and clutched Bond’s hand. She was trembling furiously.
“All right, I’m going to count to three, then you let go of the beam! Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“One … two … three!” She let go of the beam and Bond tugged on her arm. Luckily, she was very lightweight. She flew at Bond and he grabbed her around the waist with his other arm. She clutched him, hugging him in a vice- like grip. He held her, stroking her head, muttering soothing words in her ear. She looked up at him and kissed him several times on the cheek. He laughed, and she managed to smile, too.
Bond got her back inside, but by then the assassin had made his way down the ladder to another floor. There was no telling where he was now. He was probably already back in the building, trying to find a way out.
“Ever seen that man before?” he asked one of the guards as they ran back to the lifts. The guard shook his head.
They heard the sound of distant gunfire. “We should take the stairs,” said the guard. Bond nodded. That way they could evaluate the situation on every floor as they went down. They entered the stairwell and flew down the steps, taking them two at a time. The guard’s intercom chirped when they reached the thirty-fourth floor. The assassin had been spotted near the twelfth floor again.
“The lift!” Bond said. One of the guards used his card key to leave the stairwell, and punched the “DOWN” button by the lifts. It came quickly, and the four men piled in.
Back on the twelfth floor, Bond found utter chaos. Civilians were lying on the floor, and one security guard was dead on the carpet. Two more guards were crouched against a low railed wall and aiming off into the distance. The killer had another hostage, a man, and was moving around the perimeter of the atrium on the east side. Bond looked down the atrium and saw that several Royal Hong Kong Police officers had arrived and were making their way into the building and towards the lifts. He thought that perhaps he should let them handle this. He had got himself too involved already. He wasn’t sure what the status of his mission was anymore, now that Thackeray was dead. He needed to get back to the safe house and report to London. Yet somehow he felt a responsibility to the hostage and to the people of the bank. If he hadn’t chased the man inside, there might not have been any casualties. There might be even more before this was finished. On the other hand, if he hadn’t chased the assassin into the bank, he would have got away.
Bond decided that he wouldn’t let that happen. The man was going down. Now. He quickly calculated the distance to the assassin. He needed to be no further away than 180 feet away for the Walther to be effective.
“Talk to him. Distract him,” Bond said to the guard who was now his ally. The man shouted towards the assassin in Cantonese. Bond crouched down below the rail and moved around the side of the atrium, closer to the killer and his hostage. He used a desk for cover and was ultimately able to take a position behind them. The killer was oblivious to Bond’s approach for the guard was successfully distracting him. Bond wouldn’t need the gun after all. He tackled the man hard, causing him to release the hostage. Bond leaned him back over the railing, holding on to his gun-arm. A shot went off into the air and people screamed.
The two men struggled for the pistol as 007 attempted to keep the assassin’s arm high so that no one would be endangered. Face to face, they glared venomously at each other. Bond had never seen the other man before. As a fighter, he wasn’t much of a match, obviously exhausted from all the running and the stress of the chase. Bond used his right fist to hit him in the face. The assassin dropped the gun, and it fell the nine levels to the double-glass floor of the atrium. The man attempted to fight back but quickly realized it was no use. Bond hit him again. This time the man shoved Bond away from him, then performed a daredevil leap over the railing. Bond tried to grab his legs to stop him, but it was too late. He fell 170 feet to his death, slamming into the double-glass floor below. Surprisingly, the glass didn’t break.
The man had killed himself rather than let himself be caught. Who had hired him? Where did he come from?
The guards all started down, and Bond followed them. They seemed to have forgotten all about him as the employees got up and began milling about. Bond couldn’t afford to be questioned by the police. He needed to get away quickly and quietly. On his way towards the lift, he took a tan sports jacket and dark sunglasses from someone’s desk and put them on. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it might work if he hurried. He rode the crowded lift down to the third level, where everyone was watching the police climb on to the glass floor to retrieve the killer’s body. Bond surreptitiously moved through the crowd towards the escalator down to the plaza, and managed to get out without being seen.
Once on the street, he saw that the police were still at the scene of the explosion, talking to witnesses. He walked west, away from the area, and finally flagged down a taxi.
The cab took him to Upper Lascar Row. He paid the driver and walked up the street towards the Woos’ antiques shop. There, he got another shock.
The front door of the shop was smashed, the lock broken. No one was inside minding the store. He made his way to the keypad at the back, punched in the numbers, and went upstairs. The place had been ransacked. Files
