Bond produced his gunmetal case and lit his fifteenth cigarette of the day.
Only the comely radiologist had introduced a note of light relief. Settling him down in his ridiculous slippers and shift, she had escorted two overweight Arabs towards their chest X-ray and said gaily, and in all innocence, ‘I’ll be with you in a couple of shakes, Mr Bond.’
The stewardess saw Bond smile as she approached with his drink and thought how different his face suddenly looked. Something told her that he did not smile very often. It was a handsome face but something about it frightened her. When the smiled switched off, the features were cold and cruel, the eyes hard as flints. She thought that he would probably make love very well without saying anything.
Bond accepted his drink and stared down through the perspex at the scallop-shaped ridges of sand stretching into infinity. M was convinced that there was no chance of treachery in the U.K. Captain Talbot would have received his orders shortly before sailing, and these directly by word of mouth from Head of Operations at Holy Loch. Rear-Admiral Talbot, Talbot’s father, was a personal friend of M's and his son had received the Queen’s Sword at Dartmouth and done all the things expected of a young naval officer with a brilliant career in front of him. Still, although Bond respected M’s judgment and would willingly have died for it, he remembered that Burgess and Maclean had also had impeccable antecedents.
The possibility of a hoax also existed. If somebody knew of the disappearance of Ranger they might seek to capitalize on it by pretending that they could supply the answer to the riddle in exchange for a large sum of money. This kind of thing happened whenever there was a kidnapping case with a huge ransom demand. But who would know about the disappearance of Ranger apart from those responsible for it? No details had been given to the press. The whole business had been given a TS rating.
Bond sucked the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and luxuriated in its long expulsion over the empty first- class seat in front of him. Why was a blueprint of the tracking system being offered for sale, and not the system itself? One answer seemed more obvious than any other. Whoever was wishing to sell did not own the property he was selling. Somebody connected with an invention that could totally undermine western defence policy had stolen the blueprint and defected.
So, who was the owner of the tracking system? Again, Bond thought he knew the answer. The Russians and their nucleus of German atomic scientists, spirited away from beneath the noses of the Allies in 1945, had been working on something like this for years. Well, now it looked as if they had cracked it. And been cracked in turn. The ghost of a smile haunted Bonds lips. Whoever had defected must have known what he was biting off. SMERSH would be humming like killer wasps. The next world war would be in the bag if the Russians could keep tabs on every allied nuclear submarine and strike at the moment of their choice. Ninety-five per cent of the free world’s nuclear retaliatory strength was tied up in submarines.
Bond felt himself grow cold as he considered the picture he was painting. The Russians would walk barefoot through hell to get that tracking system back. Every airport would be under surveillance. Every spy and agent would be on twenty-four- hour alert. And what would they make of his arrival in Cairo? Especially after the Chamonix affair, which Bond was more and more certain was the work of SMERSH? One thing was certain. He would have to watch his step every inch of the way.
Bond took a taxi from the airport and checked in at the Nile Hilton on the island of Roda, stuck like a lozenge in the throat of the Nile. His suite was air-conditioned and functional, and a welcome escape from the hot sun that burned down outside. He took a cold shower, changed into a blue towelling dressing- gown and called room service for a long glass of tomato juice and a plate of scrambled eggs.
When this arrived, he was staring out of one of the double- glazed windows at the six-hundred-foot Cairo Tower - the tallest, and perhaps the ugliest, building in the East - and considering his first move. On the face of it, everything was very simple. A Mr Fekkesh was the ‘contact’ and Bond had his telephone number. Ring him up and talk business. It was like being given a list of contacts as a salesman. ‘Good morning, sir. My name is Bond. I represent the Great Britain Company. We're interested in old silver, antiques and nuclear submarine tracking-systems.' Bond shook his head at the idiocy of it all. One day, soon, there would be a computer doing his job.
Bond finished chasing the last mouthful of scrambled egg round the plate and dressed himself in a pair of dark blue buckskin shoes purchased from Honest in the Rue Marboeut, off-white cotton trousers and a navy-blue silk shirt with a long collar. His cotton jacket with the propinquitous blue stripes and the single vent, made for him by someone in Hong Kong who makes such things better than anyone else in the world, he threw on the double bed.
Now, thought Bond to himself, we go to work. With a sigh, he drew a table to the window and placed on it the Olivetti Lettcra 32 portable typewriter that he now carried with him every time he travelled by air. He unzipped the cover and with the aid of a small screwdriver swiftly removed the base plate of the machine. Skilfully tucked away beneath the ribbon spools and aligned with the direction-changing arms were the dismembered skeleton grip and breech mechanism of Bond’s Walther PPK 7.65 - Airline Model, as Q Branch called it. Bond unclipped the parts and put them to one side on a dean white handkerchief. Next to be removed was the cylinder. This was hollow and yielded up the barrel of the Walther, assorted pins and nuts and forty rounds of ammunition packed in cylindrical patterns of eight When these had been removed and placed on the handkerchief, Bond replaced the cylinder and unscrewed the nuts that held the ribbon spools in position. These were revealed as being round metal boxes camouflaged with typewriter ribbon. Each of them contained a further fifteen rounds of ammunition.
With his doctored Olivetti, Bond could bypass any airport check in the world. The machine worked when the keys were depressed and the arrangement of the Walther’s constituents had been done in such a way that only the most skilful and unblasé eye would be able to detect an unfamiliar outline when the machine’s working parts were exposed by an X-ray machine.
Bond deftly reassembled the Olivetti and typed ‘The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy doge’ to make sure that it was in perfect working order. Next, he picked up the screwdriver, looked at his watch, and went to work on the gun. Precisely four minutes, forty-eight seconds later he slapped the chamber of the assembled weapon and sat back to look at his Rolex Oyster Perpetual and expel a sigh of pleasure. It was the first time that he had beaten five minutes for the job. Bond cleaned the oil from the gun with the now soiled handkerchief and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands. He wrapped the handkerchief in two Kleenex tissues and dropped it into the waste bin.
This was the moment he loved. The moment when the adrenalin started to pump. The beginning of an assignment. To Bond it was more exciting than the beginning of a love affair. He sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the telephone, feeling that the palms of his hands were already beginning to sweat. A girl’s voice answered in Arabic and then switched to near-faultless English. Bond gave the number that he had memorized and sat back drumming his fingers on the bedside table. There was a silence and. then he could hear the number ringing. And ringing.
Tm sorry-’ It was the operator’s voice telling him that there was no answer. Bond was about to say he would ring again later when there was the click of a receiver being picked up. This was followed by another click which experience told Bond meant that the call was being recorded.