James Bond lit another cigarette. "I'm not telling you anything the Russians don't know. The only secret side of the business is the addresses of these people. There's a man I'll call Boris. He's been settled in Canada, in Toronto. He was a prize—twenty-four-carat. He was a top naval constructor in Kronstadt—high up in their nuclear submarine team. He got away to Finland and then to Stockholm. We picked him up and flew him to England. The Russians don't often say anything about their defectors—just curse and let them go. If they're important, they round up their families and ship them off to Siberia—to frighten other waverers. But it was different with Boris. They sent out a general call to their secret services to eliminate him. As luck would have it, an organization called SPECTRE somehow listened in."
James Bond took a hard look at the two men on the other side of the room. They hadn't moved. They sat there and watched and waited. What for? James Bond turned back to me. "I'm not boring you?"
"Oh, no. Of course not. It's thrilling. These SPECTRE people. Haven't I read about them somewhere? In the papers?"
"I expect you have. Less than a year ago there was this business of the stolen atomic bombs. It was called Operation Thunderball. Remember?" His eyes went far away. "It was in the Bahamas."
"Oh, yes. Of course I remember. It was in all the papers I could hardly believe it. It was like something out of a thriller. Why? Were you mixed up in it?"
James Bond smiled. "On the sidelines. But the point is that we never cleaned up SPECTRE. The top man got away. It was a kind of independent spy network—The Special Executive for Counterespionage, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion,' they call themselves. Well, they've got going again and, as I say, they came to hear that the Russians wanted Boris killed and somehow they found out where he was. Don't ask me how. These people are too damned well informed for comfort. So they put it to the top K.G.B. man in Paris, the local head of the Russian Secret Service, that they'd do the job for one hundred thousand pounds. Presumably Moscow agreed, because the next thing that happened was that Ottawa—the famous Mounties—got on to us. They have a Special Branch that we work with pretty closely on this sort of thing, and they reported that there was an ex-Gestapo man in Toronto, chap called Horst Uhlmann, making contact with the gangs there, and did we know anything about him? It seemed he wanted some unspecified foreigner bumped off and was prepared to pay fifty thousand dollars for the job. Well, two and two got put together, and some bright chap in our show had a hunch this might be an attempt on Boris by the Russians. So"—James Bond's mouth curled down—"I was sent out to look into the business."
He smiled at me. "You wouldn't rather switch on the television?"
"Oh, no. Go on, please."
"Well, you know they've been having a lot of trouble in Toronto. It's anyway a tough town, but now gang war has broken out in a big way, and you probably read that the Mounties even went so far as to call in two top C.I.D. sleuths from Scotland Yard to help them out. One of these C.I.D chaps had managed to plant a smart young Canadian in 'the Mechanics,' which is the name of the toughest Toronto gang, with affiliations over the border with Chicago and Detroit. And it was this young man who got wind of Uhlmann and what he wanted done. Well, I and my Mountie pals went to work and, to cut a long story short, we found out that it was Boris who was the target and that the Mechanics had agreed to do the job last Thursday—that's just about a week ago. Uhlmann had gone to ground, and we couldn't get a smell of him. All we could discover from our man with the Mechanics was that he had agreed to lead the murder squad that was to consist of three top gunmen from the mob. It was to be a frontal attack on the apartment where Boris lived. Nothing fancy. They were just going to blast their way through the front door with sub-machine-guns, shoot him to bits, and get away. It was to be at night, just before midnight, and the Mechanics would mount a permanent watch on the apartment house to see that Boris came home from his job and didn't go out again.
"Well, apart from protecting Boris, my main job was to get this Horst Uhlmann, because by now we were certain as could be that he was a SPECTRE man, and one of my jobs is to go after these people wherever they show up. Of course, we couldn't leave Boris in danger, but if we got him away to safety there would be no attempt on his life and so no Uhlmann. So I had to make a rather unpleasant suggestion." James Bond smiled grimly. "Unpleasant for me, that is. From his photographs, I had noticed that there was a superficial resemblance between Boris and me—about my age, tall, dark, clean-shaven. So I took a look at him from a ghost car one day—that's an undercover prowl car—and watched how he walked and what he wore. Then I suggested that we get Boris away on the day before the murder job, and that I should take his place on the last walk back to his apartment."
I couldn't help saying anxiously, "Oh, but you shouldn't have taken the risk. Supposing they'd changed the plan. Supposing they'd decided to do it as you walked down the street, or with a time bomb or something!"
He shrugged. "We thought of all that. It was a calculated risk, and it's those I'm paid for taking." He smiled. "Anyway, here I am. But it wasn't nice walking down that street, and I was glad to get inside. The Mounties had taken over the flat opposite to Boris, and I knew I was all right and simply had to play the tethered goat while the sportsmen shot the wild game. I could have stayed out of the flat, hidden somewhere in the building until it was all over, but I had a hunch that the goat must be a real goat, and I was right, because at eleven o'clock the telephone rang and a man's voice said. 'Is that Mr. Boris?' giving his assumed name. I said, 'Yes. Who is dat?' trying to sound foreign, and the man said, 'Thank you. Telephone Directory here. We're just checking the subscribers in your district. Night.' I said good night and thanked my stars I had been there to take the bogus call that was to make sure Boris was at home.
"The last hour was nervous work. There was going to be a lot of gunfire and probably a lot of death, and no one likes the prospect of those things, even if they don't expect to be hit. I had a couple of guns, heavy ones that really stop people, and at ten to twelve I took up my position to the right of the door in an angle of solid masonry and got ready just in case Uhlmann or one of the hoodlums managed to bust through the Mounties across the passage. To tell you the truth, as the minutes went by and I could imagine the killer car coming down the street and the men piling out and running softly up the stairs, I wished 1 had accepted the Mounties' offer that one of their men should share this vigil, as they called it, with me. But it would have been a five-hour tête-à-tête and, apart from not knowing what we would talk about during all that time, I've always had a preference for operating alone. It's just the way I'm made. Well, the minutes and the seconds ticked by, and then, bang on time, at five minutes to midnight, I heard a rush of rubber soles on the stairs and then all hell broke loose."
James Bond paused. He rubbed a hand down over his face. It was a gesture that was either to clear his mind's eye or to try and wipe some memory away from it. Then he lit another cigarette and went on.