Devil May Care (13 page)

‘But of course you do,’ said Bond. The handshake was wet, and Bond discreetly wiped his fingers on the back of his trousers.

‘I wondered if I could buy you a cup of tea. Or a soda.’

Silver had a reedy voice. Up close, his long nose and fair eyelashes gave his face the look, Bond thought, of a watchful fox terrier.

Bond glanced at his watch. ‘I have a few minutes,’

he said.

‘ There’s a cafe´ on Elizabeth Boulevard,’ said Silver.

‘It’s quiet. This your cab?’

Bond nodded and Silver gave the driver instructions. Sitting alongside him, Bond had time to note the Brooks Brothers suit, the button-down striped shirt and college tie. The accent was educated East Coast – Boston, perhaps – and his manner was relaxed.

‘Where you staying?’

‘Uptown,’ said Bond, noncommittally. ‘How’s business? I see a lot of American cars, but not many new ones.’

‘We get along,’ said Silver, unembarrassed. ‘We’ll maybe talk more when we get there.’ He looked meaningfully at the driver.

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Bond was happy to keep silent. The phrase of Darius’s – ‘a citizen of eternity’ – went through his mind.

‘ Tell you what,’ said Silver, ‘maybe we’ll just stay on the sidewalk. Elizabeth Boulevard. It’s named for your queen of England. It has trees, benches, ice-creams . . . I like it there.’

‘I notice there’s a Roosevelt Avenue, too,’ said Bond. ‘Would that be Franklin D. or Kermit?’

Silver smiled. ‘Well, I guess it wasn’t Eleanor at any rate,’ he said.

Bond paid the fare and followed Silver to a bench beneath a tree. Further up the street, he could see the entrance to a park, and on the other side the campus of Tehran University. It was, Bond thought, typical spy country: brush contacts, dead drops, all the rudiments of ‘tradecraft’ could be unobtrusively carried out in this busy, recreational area. In the middle of the road a channel, with swiftly running water, was flanked by plane trees. At intervals there were long sticks with metal drinking cups wired to the end, which thirsty passers-by dipped into the water.

‘Cute, isn’t it?’ said Silver. ‘ The water starts in the Elburz. It’s pretty clean up in Shemiran, but by the time it gets south of the bazaar . . . Oh, boy. But

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they’re proud of it. These little channels are called
jubs
. They come from underground waterways –
quanats
–their big irrigation scheme. They’ve managed to get water down into half the desert. You can tell where they are in the countryside when you see a kind of molehill on the surface.’

‘Is that the access point?’ said Bond.

‘Yeah. It’s their major contribution to modern technology.’ Silver sat down on the bench. ‘You wanna get an ice-cream?’

Bond shook his head. He lit the very last of his Morland’s while Silver went to a vendor a few yards behind them.

When he returned, Silver took out a clean handkerchief and opened it on his lap while he licked the pistachio ice-cream.

‘What is it you want to tell me?’

Silver smiled. ‘Ah, just shooting the breeze. People come into town, they’re new, maybe they don’t get straight away what a delicate situation we have here. You look around, you see these desert guys, like Bedouins, in their run-down automobiles . . . And, hey, look at that.’

A red double-decker bus – a London Routemaster

– went slowly past, leaving a cloud of black diesel exhaust.

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‘You sometimes think it’s kind of like Africa someplace,’ said Silver. ‘And all the kebabs and rice.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’d die happy if I never looked another piece of skewered meat between the eyes. And your people. The English.’

‘British,’ said Bond.

‘Right. We’re sitting on your Queen Elizabeth Boulevard. It all looks hunky-dory, doesn’t it? The Shah’s your pal. The Allies pushed him out in the Second World War because he looked a little too open to the Germans. We were happy enough with the guy who took his place – this Mossadegh in his pyjamas. But you got the wind up when he nationalized the oil and kicked out all the BP men. Boy, did you not like that. You came to us and said,

‘‘Let’s get Mossy out, let’s get the old Shah back and BP running the oil wells again.’’ ’

‘And you did,’ said Bond.

Silver wiped his lips carefully with the handkerchief, then reopened it on his lap. ‘Well, by chance, things started to go wrong. Mossy starts to look too pally with the Soviets. They have a border, you know. This country is the one we watch most carefully, along with Afghanistan. And so we decided to make a move.’

Bond nodded. ‘I’m grateful for the history lesson.’

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Silver’s tongue came out and licked neatly round the edges of the ice-cream. ‘What I’m trying to say is that this is a place where everything is on the move. There’s not just two sides – us and them. The Persians know that better than anyone. That’s why they put up with us. More than that, they use us to protect them. They have American arms and thousands of our personnel. And do you know what? Three years ago they passed a law making all Americans stationed in Persia immune from prosecution.’

‘All of you?’ said Bond.

‘You got it. If the Shah runs over my pet dog, he gets called to account. If I run over the Shah, they can’t lay a finger on me.’

‘I’d still take cabs if I were you,’ said Bond. Silver wiped his mouth one more time and, having finished his ice-cream, folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his coat pocket.

He looked across the street, through the plane trees and the column of orange taxis.

He turned to Bond and smiled. ‘It’s not easy, Mr Bond. We need to work together. Things are balanced on a knife edge here. America is fighting a lonely war for freedom in Vietnam and, despite all we did back there in the Second World War, you haven’t sent a single soldier in to help. Sometimes the people back

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in Washington – not me, but those guys – they get to thinking that you people aren’t serious about the war on Communism.’

‘Oh, we’re serious about the Cold War,’ said Bond. His own body bore the scars of just how serious he himself had been.

‘I’m glad to hear that. But don’t rock the boat, will you?’

‘I’ll do what I came here to do,’ said Bond. ‘But I’ve never had any problems with your countrymen.’

He was thinking of Felix Leiter, his great sharkmaimed Texan friend. The first time he had met Felix, Bond saw that he held the interests of his own organization, the CIA, far above the common concerns of the North Atlantic allies. Bond sympathized. The Service was his own first loyalty. He also agreed with Felix in distrusting the French, whom he regarded as riddled with Communist sympathizers at every level.

‘ That’s good.’ Silver stood up and began to move off. He hailed a taxi from the rapidly moving orange stream.

‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘ This Julius Gorner character. He’s part of a much bigger plan than you can imagine.’

Silver got into the taxi and wound down the rear

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window. ‘Don’t go near him, Mr Bond. Please take my advice. Don’t get yourself within a hundred miles of him.’

The cab pulled off into the main stream without signalling, to be met by a cacophony of horns. Bond stuck out an arm to hail a taxi for himself. With Darius unavailable at Farshad’s funeral, Bond was forced to rely on the hotel’s front desk to find him a car and driver for his visit to the Caspian. The concierge said the car firm’s best man, who spoke fluent English, would be available from eight the next morning, and Bond decided it was worth waiting.

He ordered lunch of caviar and a grilled chicken kebab to be sent to his room with a jug of iced vodka martini and two fresh limes. After he had eaten, he spread out some maps he had bought from the hotel shop on the bed and made a study of the Noshahr waterfront, its bazaar at Azadi Square, its commercial docks, marinas and pleasure beaches.

Then he looked at the map of Persia. The country was between Turkey to the west, and Afghanistan to the east. Its southern frontier was the Persian Gulf, its northern limit the Caspian Sea. While it also bordered Soviet Russia in the north-west corner, through Azer

baijan, the roads looked poor. But from the northern shore of the Caspian, through Astrakhan, it was only a short way to Stalingrad.

Bond tried to think through the implications of the geography. If Gorner had a drug connection with the Soviet Union, it was difficult to see how he could get the drugs out by air from a remote airstrip in the southern desert. Small planes wouldn’t have enough fuel, while larger ones would appear on Soviet radar. There was something about the Caspian that kept drawing his eye back to it. The problem was that the Soviet town of Astrakhan in the north was about six hundred miles, he calculated, from the Persian littoral in the south. What kind of sea-going vessel could make that distance feasible?

Meanwhile, the Persian interior was largely taken up by two deserts. To the north, and closer to Tehran, was the salt desert, Dasht-e Kavir. To the south-east, much more remote, was the sand desert, Dasht-e Lut. It appeared to support no human settlement at all, yet it was to its southern edge, at Bam, that Savak had sent its patrol in search of Gorner.

Presumably Savak knew something. Although it was less convenient for Tehran and the Caspian, this desert, the Dasht-e Lut, had a railway on its southern rim through the sizeable cities of Kerman and Yazd,

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both of which also had airstrips, though it was hard to tell from the map how big they were. There were also major-looking roads on this southern side of the Dasht-e Lut desert via Zahedan right up to the Afghan border just beyond Zabol.

Zabol. It sounded like the end of the world. What kind of frontier town might that be? thought Bond. He found his curiosity aroused.

The telephone on the bedside table let out its strange electronic peal.

‘Mr Bond? Is Reception. Is a lady to see you. She no say her name.’

‘ Tell her I’ll be right down.’

There was certainly no chance of his being lonely in Tehran, Bond thought grimly, as he went towards the lift. He could only presume this was someone Darius had sent, since no one else, except maybe three people in Regent’s Park, knew his whereabouts. Across the white marble floor of the lobby, with her back to him as she looked into the window of the gift shop, was a woman with dark hair tied back in a half-ponytail, wearing a white sleeveless blouse and a navy blue skirt to the knee, with elegant bare legs and silver-thonged sandals.

Bond felt his pulse quicken a fraction as he

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approached. At the sound of his footsteps, the woman turned. When he saw her face, Bond could not keep the exhilaration from his voice. ‘Scarlett,’

he said. ‘What on earth are you – ’

She smiled and placed her finger on his lips. ‘Not here. Perhaps your room.’

Bond was not so disorientated by seeing Scarlett again that he was likely to forget elementary precautions. ‘We’d better go for a walk.’

‘I have five minutes.’

‘ There’s a small park down that way.’

When they were outside, with the noise of the traffic pressing their ears, Bond said, ‘ Tell me, Scarlett – ’

‘I’m not Scarlett.’

‘What?’

‘I’m Poppy.’

‘She told me – ’

‘She told you I was younger? She always says that.’

Poppy smiled briefly. ‘And so I am. By twenty-five minutes. We’re twins. Though we’re dizygotic.’

‘You’re what?’

‘We’re not in fact identical, we just – ’

‘You could have fooled me. Come on, let’s move.’

A hundred yards or so up the road, there was a green area between the houses, with wooden seats

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and some children’s swings. They sat on a bench and put their heads together. To outside observers, Bond hoped, they would look like lovers in negotiation.

‘I’m here with Gorner,’ said Poppy. ‘He knows you’re in Tehran. He let me out of the office to post a letter. Chagrin will kill me if they know I’ve seen you. I’ve got something for you.’

After looking round, she handed him a folded piece of paper.

Bond felt the desperate pressure of her eyes on him.

‘Are you going to Noshahr?’ she said.

Bond nodded.

‘Good. That paper will help.’

‘Where’s Gorner’s desert headquarters?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’ve been there.’

‘I live there. We go in by helicopter. But he puts me to sleep so I don’t know. Only the pilot knows.’

‘Is it near Bam?’ said Bond.

‘Maybe, but my guess is that it’s nearer Kerman. We drive to Yazd first. That’s where he dopes me.’

Bond looked steadily into Poppy’s wide, pleading eyes. She was so like her sister that it was almost frightening. Was she an ounce or two skinnier? Was there a slight flush of drug-fever high in the cheeks?

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Was her accent slightly more Chelsea and less French cosmopolitan? The full mouth was the same. The only real difference he could see was that where Scarlett had deep brown eyes, Poppy’s were a lighter hazel, flecked with green.

‘Poppy,’ he said gently, placing a hand on hers. He felt it twitch beneath his grasp. ‘What do you want me to do?’

The girl looked deep into his eyes. ‘Kill Gorner,’

she said. ‘ That’s the only thing you can do. Kill him.’

‘Just walk up and – ’

‘Kill him. It’s too late for anything else. And, Mr Bond, it’s – ’

‘James.’

‘James. It’s not just for me. I do need your help, it’s true, I desperately need your help . . .’ She faltered for a moment, then regained control. ‘But it’s more than that. Gorner’s going to do something terrible. He’s been planning it for months. He’s ready to do it any day and there’s nothing I or anyone else can do to stop him. If I had access to a gun I’d kill him myself.’

‘I’m not an assassin, Poppy,’ said Bond. ‘I’m here first of all to find out what the man is doing, then report to my people in London.’

Poppy swore – a single pungent word that Bond

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had never heard a woman use before. Then she said,

‘Forget it. Forget reports. There isn’t time. Don’t you understand, James?’

‘Everyone I meet keeps telling me to be careful or to stay away from Gorner altogether. Now you’re saying I need to get in close to him. Kill without question.’