The immense blaze of starlight in the velvety late-summer sky outside drove away these thoughts. Good flying weather. Where were they taking M? Never mind that for now: no point in guessing in a vacuum. There was a faint chill in the night air and Bond realized he was hungry. Never mind that either. There would be nothing to eat before London, if then.
At Tanner's side, Bond passed the dark bulks of the two police cars and made for his Bentley, still where he had parked it an age ago. Tanner put a hand on his shoulder.
'No, James. You're riding with me. I'll see about your car tomorrow.'
'Nonsense, I'm perfectly all right.'
'And we can't be sure the thing isn't booby-trapped.'
'That's nonsense too, Bill. They wanted me alive and uninjured.'
'Then they did. Nobody knows what they might want now.'
Chapter 4
Love from Paris
SIR RANALD Rideout, the Minister concerned, was not best pleased at being abruptly summoned from the late stages of a dinner-party given by an Austrian princess whose circle he had been trying to infiltrate for years. The telephone message stressed the magnitude of the matter requiring his attention without revealing anything about what it was. The underling who spoke to him had rung off before Sir Ranald had had the chance to protest at the impropriety of his being allowed no say in the arrangements for this meeting or conference or whatever. So he was to present himself at the offices of the Transworld Consortium, i. e. the headquarters of the Secret Service, was he? That confounded old admiral, notorious for his obstinate resistance to political guidance, was in trouble, then. The fellow should have been given the push long ago. It was a more than mildly irritated Sir Ranald who, at the horrid hour of one twenty in the morning, trotted up the steps of the big grey building that overlooks Regent's Park, an agile little figure of sixty in perfect condition, this as a result not of any self-discipline but of that indifference to food and drink which so often accompanies interest in power. The facts were baldly laid before him. He looked about with angry incredulity at the faces ranged round the battered oak table: the Permanent Under-Secretary to his Ministry, Assistant Commissioner Valiance from Scotland Yard, the man whose office this was and whose insignificance was shown clearly enough by the condition of its furnishings, the spy called Bond who seemed responsible for the mess, and some policeman or other from Windsor.
'Well, gentlemen, really.' Sir Ranald inflated his cheeks and blew out long and noisily. 'A pretty kettle of fish, I must say. This will have to go to the Prime Minister. I hope you realize that.'
'I'm glad to find you agree with us, sir,' said Tanner in level tones. 'But, as you know, the Prime Minister flew to Washington today - yesterday. He can't do anything about this from there, and I doubt if he'll be able to cut short his stay. So it looks as if we must push ahead ourselves.'
'Of course we must.' This time Sir Ranald sniffed emphatically. 'Of course we must. The question is where. Push ahead where? You people seem to have nothing at all that can be called information. Extraordinary. Take this man you found shot. Not the servant, the gangster or whatever he was. All you appear to know about him is that he met his death by a bullet shattering his skull. Most helpful. Is that really as much as anybody can say? Surely something must have been found on him?'
Inspector Crawford spoke up at once and Sir Ranald frowned slightly. One might have expected the least important man present to satisfy himself that none of the comparatively senior people wanted to answer, before pushing himself forward. At least, one might once have expected that.
'Oddly enough there were some belongings, sir,' the Inspector was saying. He nodded towards the small heap of miscellaneous objects that Valiance was turning over. 'But they don't tell us much. Except - '
'Do they tell us anything about who the man was?'
'Not in my view, sir.'
Valiance, dapper as ever in the small hours, glanced over at Crawford and shook his head in agreement.
'Then may I take leave to ask my question again? Who was he? Assistant Commissioner?'
'Our fingerprint files are being gone over now, Sir Ranald,' said Valiance, his direct gaze on the Minister's face. 'And of course it's conceivable that this chap will be on them. We're also checking abroad, with Interpol and so on, but it'll be a couple of days at least before all the returns are in. And I feel strongly that we shan't learn anything useful from anywhere. To my way of thinking, the mere fact that he was left behind like that, just as he was, proves that knowing his identity wouldn't help us.'
'I agree with Valiance,' said Tanner. 'We're in the same position here exactly and I'm sure we shall get the same results, or lack of them. No, sir - this chap'll turn out to be one of a comparatively new type of international criminal who's been turning up in rather frighteningly large numbers in the sabotage game, terrorism and so on. They're people without a traceable history of any sort, probably white Africans with a grudge, various fringe Americans - but that's all supposition because they turn up out of thin air. The lads in Records here call them men from nowhere. Damn silly twopenny-blood sort of name but it does describe them. What I'm saying, sir, is that it's a waste of time trying to find who this fellow was, because in a sense he wasn't anybody.'
'You're guessing, aren't you, Tanner?' said Sir Ranald, crinkling up his eyes as he spoke to show he wasn't being personally offensive yet. 'Just guessing. Educated guess-work no doubt you'd call it but that's a matter of taste. I'm afraid I was trained to observe carefully, impartially and thoroughly before venturing on any theorizing. Now... Bond,' the Minister went on with a momentary expression of distaste, as if he found the name unaesthetic in some way, 'you at any rate saw this man when he was alive. What could you say about him that might help?'
'Almost nothing, sir, I'm afraid. He seemed completely ordinary apart from his skill in unarmed combat, and he could have learnt that anywhere in the world. So...'
'What about his voice? Anything there?'
Bond was tired out. His head throbbed and there was a metallic taste in his mouth. The parts of his body on which the dead man had worked were aching. The ham sandwich and coffee he had grabbed in the canteen were hardly a memory. Even so, he would not have answered as he did if he had not been repelled by the politician's air of superiority in the presence of men worth twenty of him.
'Well, he addressed me in English, sir,' said Bond judicially. 'By my standards correct English. I listened carefully, of course, for any traces of a Russian or Albanian or Chinese accent but could detect none. However, he spoke no more than about twenty words in my hearing, which may have been too small a sample upon which to base any certain conclusions.'
At the other end of the table, Valiance went into a mild attack of coughing.
Sir Ranald appeared not in the least put out. He flicked his eyes once at Valiance and spoke to Bond in a gentle tone. 'Yes, you weren't about the place very long, were you? You were anxious to be off. I congratulate you on your escape. No doubt you would have considered it ridiculously old-fashioned to have stayed and fought to save your superior from whatever fate was in store for him.'