Bond 03 - Moonraker (18 page)

All his force was behind the point of his shoe and his balance and timing were perfect.

The scream of a jay was driven out of Krebs as, like the caricature of a leaping frog, he hurtled over Bond’s case, across a yard or so of carpet, and into the front of the mahogany dressing-table. His head hit the middle of it so hard that the heavy piece of furniture rocked on its base. The scream was abruptly cut off and he crashed in an inert spreadeagle on the floor and lay still.

Bond stood looking at him and listening for the sound of hurrying footsteps, but there was still silence in the house. He walked over to the sprawling figure and bent down and heaved it over on its back. The face around the smudge of yellow moustache was pale and some blood had oozed down over the forehead from a cut in the top of the skull. The eyes were closed and the breathing was laboured.

Bond knelt down on one knee and went carefully through every pocket of Krebs’s neat grey pin-stripe suit, laying the disappointingly meagre contents on the carpet beside the body. There was no pocketbook and no papers. The only objects of interest were a bunch of skeleton keys, a spring knife with a well-sharpened stiletto blade, and an obscene little truss-shaped black leather cosh. Bond pocketed these and then went to his bedside table and fetched the untouched bottle of Vichy water.

It took five minutes to revive Krebs and get him into a sitting position with his back to the dressing-table and another five for him to be capable of speaking. Gradually the colour came back to his face and the craftiness to his eyes.

‘I answer no questions except to Sir Hugo,’ he said as Bond started the interrogation. ‘You have no right to question me. I was doing my duty.’ His voice was surly and assured.

Bond took the empty Vichy bottle by the neck. ‘Think again,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll beat the daylights out of you until this breaks and then use the neck for some plastic surgery. Who told you to go over my room?’

‘
Leck mich am Arsch
.’ Krebs spat the obscene insult at him.

Bond bent down and cracked him sharply across the shins. Krebs’s body cringed, but, as Bond raised his arm again, he suddenly shot up from the floor and dived under the descending bottle. The blow caught him hard on the shoulder, but it didn’t check his momentum and he was out of the door and halfway down the corridor before Bond started in pursuit.

Bond stopped outside the door and watched the flying figure swerve down the stairs and out of sight. Then, as he heard the scurrying squeak of the rubber-soled shoes as they fled down the stairs and across the hall, he laughed abruptly to himself and went back into his room and locked the door. Short of beating the man’s brains out it hadn’t looked as if he would get much out of Krebs. He had given him something to think about. Crafty little brute. His injuries couldn’t have been so bad after all. Well, it would be up to Drax to punish him.

Unless, of course, Krebs had been carrying out Drax’s orders.

Bond cleaned up the mess in his room and sat down on his bed and gazed at the opposite wall with unseeing eyes.

It had not been only instinct that had made him tell Drax he was going to the firing point instead of to the house. It had seriously crossed his mind that the snooping of Krebs was on Drax’s orders, and that Drax ran his own security system. And yet how did that tally with the deaths of Tallon and Bartsch? Or had the double killing been a coincidence unrelated to the marks on the chart and the fingerprints of Krebs?

As if summoned by his thoughts, there came a knock on the door and the butler came in. He was followed by a police sergeant in road patrol uniform who saluted and handed Bond a telegram. Bond took it over to the window. It was signed Baxter, which meant Vallance, and it read:

‘Thank you,’ said Bond. ‘No answer.’

When the door was closed Bond put his lighter to the telegram and dropped it in the fireplace, scuffing the charred remains into powder with the sole of his shoe.

Nothing much there except that Tallon’s call to the Ministry might indeed have been heard by someone in the house, which might have resulted in the search of his room, which might have resulted in his death. But what about Bartsch? If all this was part of something much bigger how could it be linked up with an attempt to sabotage the rocket? Wasn’t it much simpler to conclude that Krebs was a natural snooper, or more likely that he was operating for Drax, who seemed to be meticulously security-conscious and who might want to be sure of the loyalty of his secretary, of Tallon, and certainly, after their encounter at Blades, of Bond? Wasn’t he just acting like the chief (and Bond had known many of them who would fit the picture) of some super-secret project during the war who had reinforced official security with his own private spy system?

If that theory was correct there only remained the double killing. Now that Bond had caught the magic and the tension of the Moonraker the facts of the hysterical shooting seemed more reasonable. As for the mark on the chart, that might have been made any day in the past year; the night-glasses were just night-glasses and the moustaches on the men were just a lot of moustaches.

Bond sat on in the silent room, shifting the pieces in the jigsaw so that two entirely different pictures alternated in his mind. In one the sun shone and all was clear and innocent as the day outside. The other was a dark confusion of guilty motives, obscure suspicions, and nightmare queries.

When the gong sounded for lunch he still did not know which picture to choose. To shelve a decision he cleared his mind of everything but the prospect of his afternoon alone with Gala Brand.

I
T WAS
wonderful afternoon of blue and green and gold. When they left the concrete apron through the guard-gate near the empty firing point, now connected by a thick cable with the launching site, they stopped for a moment on the edge of the great chalk cliff and stood gazing over the whole corner of England where Caesar had first landed two thousand years before.

To their left the carpet of green turf, bright with small wildflowers, sloped gradually down to the long pebble beaches of Walmer and Deal, which curved off towards Sandwich and the Bay. Beyond, the cliffs of Margate, showing white through the distant haze that hid the North Foreland, guarded the grey scar of Manston aerodrome above which American Thunderjets wrote their white scribbles in the sky. Then came the Isle of Thanet and, out of sight, the mouth of the Thames.

It was low tide and the Goodwins were golden and tender in the sparkling blue of the Straits with only the smattering of masts and spars that stretched along their length to tell the true story. The white lettering on the South Goodwins Lightship was easy to read and even the name of her sister ship to the north showed white against the red of her hull.

Between the sands of the coast, along the twelve-fathom channel of the Inner Leads, there were half a dozen ships beating up through the Downs, the thud of their engines coming clearly off the quiet sea, and between the evil sands and the sharp outline of the French coast there were ships of all registries going about their business – liners, merchantmen, ungainly Dutch schuyts, and even a slim corvette hastening down south, perhaps to Portsmouth. As far as the eye could reach the Eastern Approaches of England were dotted with traffic plying towards near or distant horizons, towards a home port, or towards the other side of the world. It was a panorama full of colour and excitement and romance and the two people on the edge of the cliff were silent as they stood for a time and watched it all.

The peace was broken by two blasts on the siren from the house and they turned to gaze back at the ugly concrete world that had been cleaned out of their minds. As they watched, a red flag was broken out above the dome of the launching site and two R.A.F. crash-wagons with red crosses on their sides rolled out of the trees to the edge of the blast-wall and pulled up.

‘Fuelling’s going to begin,’ said Bond. ‘Let’s get on with our walk. There’ll be nothing to see and if there happened to be something we probably wouldn’t survive it at this range.’

She smiled at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I’m sick of the sight of all this concrete.’

They walked on down the gentle slope and were soon out of sight of the firing point and the high wire fence.

The ice of Gala’s reserve melted quickly in the sunshine.

The exotic gaiety of her clothes, a black and white striped cotton shirt tucked into a wide hand-stitched black leather belt above a medium-length skirt in shocking pink, seemed to have infected her, and it was impossible for Bond to recognize the chill woman of the night before in the girl who now walked beside him and laughed happily at his ignorance of the names of the wildflowers, the samphire, Viper’s bugloss, and fumitory round their feet.

Triumphantly she found a bee orchis and picked it.

‘You wouldn’t do that if you knew that flowers scream when they are picked,’ said Bond.

Gala looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, suspecting a joke.

‘Didn’t you know?’ He smiled at her reaction. ‘There’s an Indian called Professor Bhose, who’s written a treatise on the nervous system of flowers. He measured their reaction to pain. He even recorded the scream of a rose being picked. It must be one of the most heart-rending sounds in the world. I heard something like it as you picked that flower.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, looking suspiciously at the torn root. ‘Anyway,’ she said maliciously, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were a person to get sentimental. Don’t people in your section of the Service make a business of killing? And not just flowers either. People.’

‘Flowers can’t shoot back,’ said Bond.

She looked at the orchis. ‘Now you’ve made me feel like a murderer. It’s very unkind of you. But,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘I shall have to find out about this Indian and if you’re right I shall never pick a flower again as long as I live. What am I to going to do with this one? You make me feel it’s bleeding all over my hands.’

‘Give it to me,’ said Bond. ‘According to you, my hands are dripping with blood already. A little more won’t hurt.’

She handed it to him and their hands touched. ‘You can stick it in the muzzle of your revolver,’ she said to cover the flash of contact.

Bond laughed. ‘So the eyes aren’t only for decoration,’ he said. ‘Anyway it’s an automatic and I left it in my room.’ He drew the stalk of the flower through one of the button-holes in his blue cotton shirt. ‘I thought a shoulder-holster would look a bit conspicuous without a coat to cover it. And I don’t think anyone will be going over my room this afternoon.’

By tacit agreement they edged away from the moment of warmth. Bond told her of his discovery of Krebs and of the scene in his bedroom.

‘Serves him right,’ she said. ‘I’ve never trusted him. But what did Sir Hugo say?’

‘I had a word with him before lunch,’ said Bond. ‘Gave him Krebs’s knife and keys as proof. He was furious and went straight off to see the man, muttering with rage. When he came back he said that Krebs seemed to be in a pretty bad way and was I satisfied that he’d been punished enough? All that business about not wanting to upset the team at the last moment and so forth. So I agreed that he’d be sent back to Germany next week and that meanwhile he would consider himself under open arrest – only allowed out of his room under surveillance.’

They scrambled down a steep cliff-path to the beach and turned to the right beside the deserted small-arms range of the Royal Marine Garrison at Deal. They walked along in silence until they came to the two-mile stretch of shingle that runs at low tide beneath the towering white cliffs to St. Margaret’s Bay.

As they trudged slowly through the deep smooth pebbles Bond told her of all that had gone through his mind since the previous day. He held nothing back and he showed each false hare as it had been started and finally run to earth, leaving nothing but a thin scent of ill-founded suspicions and a muddle of clues that all ended in the same question mark … where was a pattern? Where was a plan into which the clues would fit? And always the same answer, that nothing Bond knew or suspected seemed to have any conceivable bearing on the security from sabotage of the Moonraker. And that, when all was said and done, was the only matter with which he and the girl were concerned. Not with the death of Tallon and Bartsch, not with the egregious Krebs, but only with the protection of the whole Moonraker project from its possible enemies.

‘Isn’t that so?’ Bond concluded.

Gala stopped and stood for a moment looking out across the tumbled rocks and seaweed towards the quiet glimmering swell of the sea. She was hot and out of breath from the hard going through the shingle and she thought how wonderful it would be to bathe – to step back for a moment into those childish days beside the sea before her life had been caught up in this strange cold profession with its tensions and hollow thrills. She glanced at the ruthless brown face of the man beside her. Did he have moments of longing for the peaceful simple things of life? Of course not. He liked Paris and Berlin and New York and trains and aeroplanes and expensive food, and, yes certainly, expensive women.

‘Well?’ said Bond, wondering if she was going to come out with some piece of evidence that he had overlooked.

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gala. ‘I was dreaming. No,’ she answered his question, ‘I think you’re right. I’ve been down here since the beginning and although there’ve been odd little things from time to time, and of course the shooting, I’ve seen absolutely nothing wrong. Every one of the team, from Sir Hugo down, is heart and soul behind the rocket. It’s all they live for and it’s been wonderful to see the whole thing grow. The Germans are terrific workers – and I can quite believe that Bartsch broke under the strain – and they love being driven by Sir Hugo and he loves driving them. They worship him. And as for security, the place is solid with it and I’m sure that anyone who tried to get near the Moonraker would be torn to pieces. I agree with you about Krebs and that he was probably working under Drax’s orders. It was because I believed that, that I didn’t bother to report him when he went through my things. There was nothing for him to find, of course. Just private letters and so on. It would be typical of Sir Hugo to make absolutely sure. And I must say,’ she said candidly, ‘that I admire him for it. He’s a ruthless man with deplorable manners and not a very nice face under all that red hair, but I love working for him and I’m longing for the Moonraker to be a success. Living with it for so long has made me feel just like his men do about it.’