James Bond Anthology (136 page)

Yes, thought Bond. Yes. He was certainly right about that. The French papers would give it such a send-off there’d be no stopping it. They wouldn’t mind how far they went with the pictures or anything else. There wasn’t a press in the world that wouldn’t pick it up. And the Spektor! Would M.’s people or the Deuxième have the sense to guess it was booby-trapped? How many of the best cryptographers in the West would go up with it? God, he must get out of this jam! But how?

The top of Nash’s
War and Peace
yawned at him. Let’s see. There would be the roar as the train went into the tunnel. Then at once the muffled click and the bullet. Bond’s eyes stared into the violet gloom, measuring the depth of the shadow in his corner under the roof of the top bunk, remembering exactly where his attaché case stood on the floor, guessing what Nash would do after he had fired.

Bond said: ‘You took a bit of a gamble on my letting you team up at Trieste. And how did you know the code of the month?’

Nash said patiently, ‘You don’t seem to get the picture, old man. SMERSH is good – really good. There’s nothing better. We know your code of the month for every year. If anyone in your show noticed these things, noticed the pattern of them, like my show does, you’d realize that every January you lose one of your small chaps somewhere – maybe Tokyo, maybe Timbuctoo. SMERSH just picks one and takes him. Then they screw the code for the year out of him. Anything else he knows, of course. But it’s the code they’re after. Then it’s passed round the Centres. Simple as falling off a log, old man.’

Bond dug his nails into the palms of his hands.

‘As for picking you up at Trieste, old man, I didn’t. Rode down with you–in the front of the train. Got out as we stopped and walked back up the platform. You see, old man, we were waiting for you in Belgrade. Knew you’d call your Chief – or the Embassy or someone. Been listening in on that Yugoslav’s telephone for weeks. Pity we didn’t understand the codeword he shot through to Istanbul. Might have stopped the firework display, or anyway saved our chaps. But the main target was you, old man, and we certainly had you sewn up all right. You were in the killing bottle from the minute you got off that plane in Turkey. It was only a question of when to stuff the cork in.’ Nash took another quick glance at his watch. He looked up. His grinning teeth glistened violet. ‘Pretty soon now, old man. It’s just cork-hour minus fifteen.’

Bond thought: we knew SMERSH was good, but we never knew they were as good as this. The knowledge was vital. Somehow he must get it back. He MUST. Bond’s mind raced round the details of his pitifully thin, pitifully desperate plan.

He said: ‘SMERSH seems to have thought things out pretty well. Must have taken a lot of trouble. There’s only one thing …’ Bond let his voice hang in the air.

‘What’s that, old man?’ Nash, thinking of his report, was alert.

The train began to slow down. Domodossola. The Italian frontier. What about customs? But Bond remembered. There were no formalities for the through carriages until they got to France, to the frontier, Vallorbes. Even then not for the sleeping cars. These expresses cut straight across Switzerland. It was only people who got out at Brigue or Lausanne who had to go through customs in the stations.

‘Well, come on, old man.’ Nash sounded hooked.

‘Not without a cigarette.’

‘Okay. Go ahead. But if there’s a move I don’t like, you’ll be dead.’

Bond slipped his right hand into his hip-pocket. He drew out his broad gunmetal cigarette case. Opened it. Took out a cigarette. Took his lighter out of his trouser pocket. Lit the cigarette and put the lighter back. He left the cigarette case on his lap beside the book. He put his left hand casually over the book and the cigarette case as if to prevent them slipping off his lap. He puffed away at his cigarette. If only it had been a trick one – magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man’s face! If only his Service went in for those explosive toys! But at least he had achieved his objective and hadn’t been shot in the process. That was a start.

‘You see.’ Bond described an airy circle with his cigarette to distract Nash’s attention. His left hand slipped the flat cigarette case between the pages of his book. ‘You see, it looks all right, but what about you? What are you going to do after we come out of the Simplon? The conductor knows you’re mixed up with us. They’ll be after you in a flash.’

‘Oh that,’ Nash’s voice was bored again. ‘You don’t seem to have hoisted in that the Russians think these things out. I get off at Dijon and take a car to Paris. I get lost there. A bit of “Third Man” stuff won’t do the story any harm. Anyway it’ll come out later when they dig the second bullet out of you and can’t find the second gun. They won’t catch up with me. Matter of fact, I’ve got a date at noon tomorrow – Room 204 at the Ritz Hotel, making my report to Rosa. She wants to get the kudos for this job. Then I turn into her chauffeur and we drive to Berlin. Come to think of it, old man,’ the flat voice showed emotion, became greedy, ‘I think she may have the Order of Lenin for me in her bag. Lovely grub, as they say.’

The train began to move. Bond tensed. In a few minutes it would come. What a way to die, if he was going to die. Through his own stupidity – blind, lethal stupidity. And lethal for Tatiana. Christ! At any moment he could have done something to dodge this shambles. There had been no lack of opportunity. But conceit and curiosity and four days of love had sucked him along on the easy stream down which it had been planned that he should drift. That was the damnable part of the whole business – the triumph for SMERSH, the one enemy he had always sworn to defeat wherever he met it. We will do this, and he will do that. ‘Comrades, it is easy with a vain fool like this Bond. Watch him take the bait. You will see. I tell you he’s a fool. All Englishmen are fools.’ And Tatiana, the lure – the darling lure. Bond thought of their first night. The black stockings and the velvet ribbon. And all the time SMERSH had been watching, watching him go through his conceited paces, as it had been planned that he would, so that the smear could be built up – the smear on him, the smear on M. who had sent him to Istanbul, the smear on the Service that lived on the myth of its name. God, what a mess! If only … if only his tiny grain of a plan might work!

Ahead, the rumble of the train became a deep boom.

A few more seconds. A few more yards.

The oval mouth between the white pages seemed to gape wider. In a second the dark tunnel would switch out the moonlight on the pages and the blue tongue would lick out for him.

‘Sweet dreams, you English bastard.’

The rumble became a great swift clanging roar.

The spine of the book bloomed flame.

The bullet, homing on Bond’s heart, flashed over its two quiet yards.

Bond pitched forward on to the floor and lay sprawled under the funereal violet light.

27 | TEN PINTS OF BLOOD

It had all depended on the man’s accuracy. Nash had said that Bond would get one bullet through the heart. Bond had taken the gamble that Nash’s aim was as good as he said it was. And it had been.

Bond lay like a dead man lies. Before the bullet, he had recalled the corpses he had seen – how their bodies had looked in death. Now he lay totally collapsed, like a broken doll, his arms and legs carefully outflung.

He explored his sensations. Where the bullet had crashed into the book, his ribs were on fire. The bullet must have gone through the cigarette case and then through the other half of the book. He could feel the hot lead over his heart. It felt as if it was burning inside his ribs. It was only a sharp pain in his head where it had hit the woodwork, and the violet sheen on the scuffed toecaps against his nose, that said he wasn’t dead.

Like an archaeologist, Bond explored the carefully planned ruin of his body. The position of the sprawled feet. The angle of the half-bent knee that would give purchase when it was needed. The right hand that seemed to be clawing at his pierced heart, was within inches, when he could release the book, of the little attaché case – within inches of the lateral stitching that held the flat-bladed throwing-knives, two edged and sharp as razors, that he had mocked when Q Branch had demonstrated the catch that held them. And his left hand, outflung in the surrender of death, rested on the floor and would provide upward leverage when the moment came.

Above him there sounded a long, cavernous yawn. The brown toecaps shifted. Bond watched the shoe-leather strain as Nash stood up. In a minute, with Bond’s gun in his right hand, Nash would climb on to the bottom bunk and reach up and feel through the curtain of hair for the base of the girl’s neck. Then the snout of the Beretta would nuzzle in after the probing fingers, Nash would press the trigger. The roar of the train would cover the muffled boom.

It would be a near thing. Bond desperately tried to remember simple anatomy. Where were the mortal places in the lower body of a man? Where did the main artery run? The Femoral. Down the inside of the thigh. And the External Iliac, or whatever it was called, that became the Femoral? Across the centre of the groin. If he missed both, it would be bad. Bond had no illusions about being able to beat this terrific man in unarmed combat. The first violent stab of his knife had to be decisive.

The brown toecaps moved. They pointed towards the bunk. What was the man doing? There was no sound except the hollow iron clang as the great train tore through the Simplon – through the heart of the Wasenhorn and Monte Leone. The toothglass tinkled. The woodwork creaked comfortably. For a hundred yards on both sides of the little death cell rows of people were sleeping, or lying awake, thinking of their lives and loves, making little plans, wondering who would meet them at the Gare de Lyon. And, all the while, just along the corridor, death was riding with them down the same dark hole, behind the same great Diesel, on the same hot rails.

One brown shoe left the floor. It would have stepped half across Bond. The vulnerable arch would be open above Bond’s head.

Bond’s muscles coiled like a snake’s. His right hand flickered a few centimetres to the hard stitching on the edge of the case. Pressed sideways. Felt the narrow shaft of the knife. Drew it softly half way out without moving his arm.

The brown heel lifted off the ground. The toe bent and took the weight.

Now the second foot had gone.

Softly move the weight here, take the purchase there, grasp the knife hard so that it wouldn’t turn on a bone, and then …

In one violent corkscrew of motion, Bond’s body twisted up from the floor. The knife flashed.

The fist with the long steel finger, and all Bond’s arm and shoulder behind it, lunged upwards. Bond’s knuckles felt flannel. He held the knife in, forcing it further.

A ghastly wailing cry came down to him. The Beretta clattered to the floor. Then the knife was wrenched from Bond’s hand as the man gave a convulsive twist and crashed down.

Bond had planned for the fall, but, as he sidestepped towards the window, a flailing hand caught him and sent him thudding on to the lower bunk. Before he could recover himself, up from the floor rose the terrible face, its eyes shining violet, the violet teeth bared. Slowly, agonizingly, the two huge hands groped for him.

Bond, half on his back, kicked out blindly. His shoe connected; but then his foot was held and twisted and he felt himself slipping downwards.

Bond’s fingers scrabbled for a hold in the stuff of the bunk. Now the other hand had him by the thigh. Nails dug into him.

Bond’s body was being twisted and pulled down. Soon the teeth would be at him. Bond hammered out with his free leg. It made no difference. He was going.

Suddenly Bond’s scrabbling fingers felt something hard. The book! How did one work the thing? Which way up was it? Would it shoot him or Nash? Desperately Bond held it out towards the great sweating face. He pressed at the base of the cloth spine.

‘Click!’ Bond felt the recoil. ‘Click-click-click-click.’ Now Bond felt the heat under his fingers. The hands on his legs were going limp. The glistening face was drawing back. A noise came from the throat, a terrible gargling noise. Then, with a slither and a crack, the body fell forward on to the floor and the head crashed back against the woodwork.Bond lay and panted through clenched teeth. He stared up at the violet light above the door. He noticed that the loop of the filament waxed and waned. It crossed his mind that the dynamo under the carriage must be defective. He blinked his eyes to focus the light more closely. The sweat ran into them and stung. He lay still, doing nothing about it.

The galloping boom of the train began to change. It sounded hollower. With a final echoing roar, the Orient Express sped out into the moonlight and slackened speed.

Bond lazily reached up and pulled at the edge of the blind. He saw warehouses and sidings. Lights shone brightly, cleanly on the rails. Good, powerful lights. The lights of Switzerland.

The train slid quietly to a stop.

In the steady, singing silence, a small noise came from the floor. Bond cursed himself for not having made certain. He quickly bent down, listening. He held the book forward at the ready, just in case. No movement. Bond reached and felt for the jugular vein. No pulse. The man was quite dead. The corpse had been settling.

Bond sat back and waited impatiently for the train to move again. There was a lot to be done. Even before he could see to Tatiana, there would have to be the cleaning up.