He quietly moved along the ancient corridors and down a flight of stone stairs. He came upon a man in full Scottish regalia, blaring away, rather badly.
‘Get on with it’ a familiar voice commanded.
The man in the kilt dropped the pipe from his mouth and simultaneously fired bullets from one pipe and a jet of flame from another. The target was a realistic dummy twenty feet away, which quickly became a molten, bullet-ridden mess.
‘I suppose we all have to pay the piper sometime, right, Q?’ Bond quipped.
‘Pipe down, Double-0 Seven,’ Major Boothroyd said, more annoyed than usual.
‘Was it something I said?’
‘No.’Boothroyd folded his arms. ‘Something you destroyed.’ It was then that Bond noticed the mangled Q Boat sitting in the middle of the laboratory.
‘My fishing boat,’ Boothroyd said. ‘For my retirement. Away from you.'
‘Had I known, I would have returned it in. . . what do you say . . . ‘pristine condition’?’
Boothroyd shuddered. ‘Grow up, Double-0 Seven.’
Q Branch never slept. There were always technicians working round the clock. Major Boothroyd, who was looking forward to the day he would finally retire, loathed leaving London for the remote Castle Thane. Nevertheless, when M called, naturally he came. He was tired and irritated.
‘Come over here. Let’s get this over with. It’s past my bedtime,’ he said. ‘I want you to meet the young man I'm grooming to follow me.’
He led Bond to a pool table which, with the press of a button, parted. The floor opened to reveal a rising platform and on it was a brand new battleship-grey BMW Z8 with a black convertible top. A man was loading a missile into one of the side grilles, but he didn’t notice that the tail of his white lab coat was caught in the door. When he realised it, he turned the wrong way to get out.
Bond and Boothroyd exchanged a look.
‘It helps if you open the door,’ Bond suggested, reaching for the handle and releasing the man.
The man turned to Bond and asked, imperiously, ‘And you might be . . .?’
‘This is Double-0 Seven,’ Boothroyd said.
‘If you’re Q,’ Bond said to Boothroyd, facetiously, ‘does that make him “R”?’ He knew full well, of course, that ‘Q’ stood for ‘Quartermaster’.
The Deputy controlled himself and said, ‘Ahh, yes. The legendary Double-0 Seven wit. I, of course, am laughing inside. But I dare say you’ve met your match in this machine.’ The man was very tall, had a high forehead and a moustache. Bond noticed the sunglasses in his pocket and took the liberty of examining them.
‘New model? Improved specs?’ he asked.
‘I thought you were on the inactive roster. Some kind of injury,’ the Deputy said.
Bond picked up the glasses and shrugged. ‘We’ll see about that.’ He motioned to the car. ‘Do go on.’
‘As I was saying. . ’ the Deputy said as he stepped around the car. ‘The absolute latest in intercepts and countermeasures. Titanium armour, a multi-tasking heads-up display, six beverage cup holders . . . All in all, rather stocked’
‘ “Fully loaded” I think is the term,’ Q said. ‘Why don’t you try on that coat for Double-0 Seven?’
The Deputy hesitated, then walked over to a table and began to put on a sleek, black jacket.
Boothroyd gestured to the sunglasses and said, ‘You’re right. New refinement. Sort of X-ray vision. For checking concealed weapons.’ He then led Bond to another table and handed him an Omega watch. ‘Your nineteenth, I believe? Try not to lose this one, all right? It has dual lasers and a miniature grappling hook with fifty feet of high-tensile filament, able to support eight hundred pounds’
Bond was impressed, slipping it on his wrist. They turned back to the Deputy, when he said, That’s odd.’
He was looking down at something on the jacket. ‘Somebody forgot to remove this tag . . .’ He yanked on it, and the jacket snapped abruptly to become an airbag. It enveloped him, impossibly ensnaring the man.
‘He seems well suited for the job,’ Bond said to Boothroyd. They moved out of the laboratory. Bond asked, ‘You’re not retiring anytime soon, are you, major?’
‘Pay attention, Double-0 Seven,’ Boothroyd said, looking at Bond with a hint of mischief in his eyes. ‘There are two things I’ve always tried to teach you. First: never let them see you bleed. ’
‘And second?’ Bond asked.
‘Always have an escape plan, the major said. A sudden whoosh of smoke enveloped Boothroyd as an ancient trap door in the wall opened behind him. When the smoke cleared, Q was gone.
The Research Department was a remote version of the recendy installed Visual Library at the London headquarters, a computerised encyclopedia on a grand scale. One merely had to punch in a topic and the Visual Library would find every file available on the subject and organise it into a cohesive multimedia presentation.
Bond wanted to look into the story of Elektra King’s kidnapping. As M had said, the story had disappeared from the news remarkably quickly. All he knew was that she had escaped and the kidnappers had been killed — except for the leader, who somehow got away.
He began by going over the history of Robert King’s rise to fame and fortune. The monitor displayed photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles and television snippets - all to do with King’s life and times. King Industries seemed to be always in the news, especially in the financial sections of the papers. The knighthood was covered extensively. The press had made a big deal out of his second marriage. The birth of their daughter, Elektra, had also been big news.
Bond turned his attention to information relating to Elektra. While her early life was not too detailed, there were the occasional reports of her growth into adulthood — a photo from her sixteenth birthday, a brief article on her going up to university and a small piece in The Tunes when she joined King Industries in hopes of following in her father’s footsteps in the family business. She had grown up all over the world, apparently - a boarding school in Paris, university in Scotland, summers and holidays in the Middle East with her mother’s family and later, at her father’s villa in A2erbaijan.
The next story, though, was the dominant one. It started with a newspaper headline that screamed, ‘ELEKTRA KING KIDNAPPED!’
Bond clicked on the ‘Police Files’ icon and found a Polaroid that had been sent to Robert King by the captors. It showed Elektra, savagely beaten, bruised, her ear bandaged. She was holding the newspaper with the ‘KIDNAPPED!’ headline. Beneath the photo, someone had scrawled the ransom figure - $5,000,000.
According to Elektra’s statement to the police, she had decided early on that she would risk her life to escape. At one point during the ordeal, she had kicked one of the kidnappers in the groin. While he was doubled up on the floor, she took his gun and shot him with it. She killed another captor and literally blasted her way out of the country cottage in Dorset where they had kept her hidden. Unfortunately, the leader of the team was not present at the time and had got away. Elektra had stumbled blindly to the main road, where a lorry driver had picked her up and taken her to a police station.
Bond clicked on the ‘Police Interview’ icon. Elektra appeared on the monitor, shaken, emotional, near hysterics. Her wounds had been treated, but she looked terrible. Tears ran down her face.
‘Tell me again how you got the gun’ the interrogator probed gently.
‘How many bloody times do I have to tell you?’ Elektra cried. ‘There was one guy who was trying to molest me . . . he came into my room . . . my cell. . . and tried to touch me.’
‘And this was at night?’
‘Early morning. The sun was just coming up, I think. It was up when I got out of the house’