‘One of two things. Either we have a traitor or someone can plot the course of nuclear submarines.’
M looked at his pipe and then put it in the copper ashtray. ‘Our communication from Cairo suggests the latter. This tracing is a sprat to catch a mackerel. Q, if he was not too busy designing rockets to be fired from ski-sticks, could explain it better than I.* It was easy to detect that M belonged to the old school. He did not entirely approve of Q’s ‘gadgets’, as he was wont to call them. ‘He says there’s something called “heat signature recognition". I can’t explain exactly what it is. I’ve always been out of my death with technical gobbledegook. Anyway, it works on the same principle as satellites with infrared sensors that can detect a nuclear missile in flight by its tail fire. It seems that ... someone ... can now locate a submerged nuclear submarine by its wake.’
Bond felt the room growing colder. ‘And the people in Cairo. Just what are they selling? Is Ranger ... what's happened to her?’
‘We don’t know,’ said M briskly. ‘We only know that someone in Cairo is offering to sell us a blueprint of the reputed tracking system. The whole thing may be a hoax. That’s for you to find out.’ The plumbing work restarted on the pipe. ‘The Chief-of-Staff will fill in the details. As regards the disappearance of Ranger, you can imagine who the first suspects are?’
Bond could. ‘Redland.’
‘And don’t forget, James’ - M broke off to strike a match - ‘Sixteen Polaris missiles have a greater destructive potential than all the explosives used in the last war including the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They could blast this country into the earth so that the North Sea and the Atlantic met at Birmingham.’
As if in awe of M’s speech, the rain subsided to a steady drumming. Bond looked at the grey sky and thought of the England that he loved with an intensity that was almost painful.
‘I’ll get right on to it, sir,’ he said.
Introducing Sigmund Stromberg
The room was large and splendidly furnished. The chairs in which the three men sat were deep and luxurious, and the cheerful gleam of the highly polished leather complemented the mirror sheen of the silver bowl tastefully arranged with dew-anointed red roses on the small glass-and-steel table between them. A heavy silver box lay unopened in the middle of the table and contained a mixture of Virginia and Turkish cigarettes both tipped and untipped. Thick glass carafes rested upon circular green mats. At one end of the room was a charming Romney of two small, rosy-cheeked children in Regency dress playing with a kitten.
Two of the three men were dressed in conventional suits, and there was about them an air of respectful unease. The man before them, on the other side of the table, was different, what could be seen of him was enclosed in a loose-fitting black tunic that rose to his neck like a priest’s surplice without the collar. Although he was of more than average height his features were small, and his mouth exceptionally so. It was like a child’s mouth, with the fat Cupid’s bow of the upper lip grotesquely dominating the lower. Had it been possible to turn the feature upside down it would have looked better in the long, thin face although its extreme narrowness would always have seemed incongruous. The short nose barely broke away from the bulbous upper lip and one had to peer closely to see a pallid streak of near-white hairs above the watery blue eyes. The head was not prematurely bald but had never grown hair and the small ears clung to the head like sucker fish to the side of a shark.
‘Doctor Bechmann. Professor Markovitz.’ There was no trace of warmth in the voice. ‘We come to the parting of the ways..
The two men looked at each other nervously and then studied the impassive face before them.
Sigmund Stromberg had been conceived on mid-summer’s day in Apvorst, a small village in northern Sweden. There, the arrival of the longest day is still celebrated with dancing round the maypole and much drinking and fornication. Sigmund Stromberg was conceived as an indirect result of the second of these pursuits and a direct result of the third. His father was a fisherman, which may have had some hereditary influence on his eventual choice of career; not an immediate one, though, because his father never married his mother and as soon as the young Stromberg found himself anywhere it was with an aunt of his mother’s who lived a respectful distance from Apvorst. She was a kindly woman with no children of her own and she and her husband lavished all the love and care that they could muster on young Sigmund - neither name was his by birth but bestowed by his new ‘parents’. Sigmund Stromberg was not a warm-natured child but he worked conscientiously at school and became passionately interested in the sea. Not in ships and naval battles, like other boys, but in life below the surface. He was fascinated by fish and Frun Strom- bcrg bccame disturbed by the long periods of time that the boy spent watching a fish tank in the window of a restaurant in the nearby small town of Magmo. Even on the coldest winter days young Sigmund would be staring through the condensation at the speckled trout living out their last days, a look of rapt concentration on his face, his skin pinched to an onion pallor by the cold. When he was older, he obtained a piranha fish from somewhere, which he kept in a small tank in his bedroom. Frun Stromberg had no idea where the fish came from and did not ask. She was already rather in awe of her adopted son as she chose to think of him.
At night, Sigmund would take a flashlight and go out to seek food for his pet. Frogs, toads, mice and shrews. These were its summer fare.
One night, as she was passing his room, Frun Stromberg heard the agonized squeaks of a mouse and asked if it was necessary for the food to be fed to the fish while it was still alive. Sigmund assured her that it was. She did not believe him but she did not argue, because, when crossed, her ‘son' underwent a strange and disturbing metamorphosis. He would suck in his lips so that his mouth disappeared into his face to be replaced by a tiny dimple like a baby’s umbilicus. His skin would turn a deathly white and his eyes suddenly fill with red as if the blood drained from his cheeks had rushed to fill their sockets. At the same time he would wrap his arms round himself and shake in silent, inchoate rage.
Frun Stromberg was frightened, the more so when she discovered Sigmund having one of his strange shaking fits before the fish tank. She wondered if he was working too hard at school. Reports were coming in that the boy was academically brilliant, with a natural bent towards the sciences. His IQ was so high as to be unmeasurable.
Herr Stromberg was an undertaker. Sigmund would stand in his father's workroom much as he had stood before the fish tank and observe the skills of the trade. The construction of the coffins, the linings, the woods that could be used, the styles and range of handles and accessories, the methods of presentation to the prospective customer.
Although she was wary of mentioning it to her husband for fear of hurting his feelings, Frun Stromberg was worried that her son’s obvious talents might be wasted if he went into the family business.
She did not worry for long. Shortly after Sigmund’s seventeenth birthday, the Saab in which she and her husband were travelling went out of control on a notoriously dangerous comer and plunged into a lake. Both passengers were drowned. Apparently, the brakes on the normally reliable Saab had failed.
Sigmund Stromberg was phlegmatic in the face of the tragedy that had for a second time robbed him of parents, and won the respect of the neighbourhood by undertaking the funeral arrangements himself. His schoolmasters urged him to sell the business, or take on a manager, so that he could continue his studies at university and proceed to the brilliant future that seemed his by right. He disappointed them by saying that he was going to devote himself to running the business.