John Gardner: No Deals, Mr. Bond

M dismissed Bond with an almost cursory flick of his right hand, and he made his way into the bowels of the building where the Armourer, Major Boothroyd, controlled Q Branch. It happened that the Major was away and Bond found the Branch operating under the expertise of his assistant, the long-legged, bespectacled but unashamedly delicious Ann Reilly, known to everyone in the Service as Q’ute. In her early days with Q Branch, Bond and Q’ute had seen a lot of each other, but with the passage of years and Bond’s unreliable timetable, the relationship had become merely friendly.

‘James, how nice,’ she said in greeting. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure? Nothing new brewing, is there?’

‘I’m on leave for a couple of weeks. Thought I’d collect some bits and pieces.’

He deliberately played it down. If he had been on normal leave he would have to sign out a CC500 scrambler telephone. In fact he wanted to pick her brains and maybe borrow some small new technological device.

‘We’ve got a few pieces on test. Maybe you’d like to take away a sample.’ Q’ute grinned, wickedly alluring. ‘Come into my parlour,’ she said and Bond wondered if M had given her guarded instructions.

They walked briskly down the long room where shirtsleeved young men were seated in front of VDUs and others worked through huge lighted magnifiers on electronic boards.

‘Nowadays,’ said Q’ute, ‘everyone wants it smaller, with a longer range, and more memory.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

It was Bond’s turn to smile, though it did not even light up his eyes. His mind was full of the gruesome photographs of two young girls battered to death, even though he knew Q’ute talked of sound-stealing, movement-theft, concealment and deadly devices.

He left half an hour later with some small items in addition to the obligatory CC500. This, according to current instructions, would be no use to him, for both M and the Foreign Office would deny him entirely until the assignment was completed. At the door of her office, Q’ute put a hand gently on Bond’s arm.

‘If you need anything from here, just call and I’ll bring it to you myself.’

He looked into her face and saw that he had been right – instructions of some kind had been given to Q’ute by M.

The participants were to be hoovered clean, given a face lift and then left alone , M had said. Bond knew what that meant. It was like being cut out of some rich relation’s will and if he fouled up, he would suffer the same fate as the Cream Cake agents.

In the Bentley Mulsanne Turbo, tucked away in the underground car park, Bond checked the ASP 9mm automatic, its spare clips and the hard steel telescopic Concealable Operations Baton. With his getaway case, containing a week’s spare clothes, in the boot, he was prepared for what the instructors called street work. He started the engine and the car glided smoothly out of its parking slot and up the ramp into the spring sunshine of London’s streets, where he was conscious of death only a stone’s throw from the pavements.

Some twenty minutes later he was on those very pavements, passing Langan’s Brasserie in Stratton Street, its garish red neon blazing even in the afternoon.

At the Mayfair Hotel Bond handed the car over to the blueliveried doorman with a discreet Parachute Regiment badge in his lapel, knowing it would be quickly put on a parking meter and watched during his absence. From there to the beauty salon Dare To Be Chic at the end of Stratton Street took him only three minutes.

The choice of Dare he could understand, for the girl’s German family name had been Wagen, so this was a literal translation. Where the Heather had come from heaven, and the Service resettlement officers, alone knew.

The windows of the salon were black, the bold lettering daring you to be chic in gold accompanied by an art deco motif of a bobbed-haired woman sporting a cigarette holder. Inside was a minute foyer, thickly carpeted and with a single Kurosaki wood block print, which to Bond resembled a magician’s box opened in front of a row of pyramids. The elevator door was gold and its button was neatly labelled with the Dare motif.

Bond pressed, stepped into the mirrored cage and was whisked silently upwards. Like the foyer, the elevator was carpeted in deep crimson. The lift came gently to a halt and he found himself in another foyer. Double doors led to the rooms where clients subjected themselves to heat, facials and the expertise of hairdressers and masseurs. There was the same red carpet, another Kurosaki print and to the right a door marked ‘Private’. In front of him a golden blonde dressed in a severe black suit and blazing white silk shirt sat at a kidney-shaped desk. She looked as though her face had been cleansed of every particle of dust and grease and each strand of her hair cemented in position. Her lips parted in an encouraging smile while her eyes asked what the hell a man was doing in this woman’s preserve. Bond felt about as welcome as when he visited his sister Service, MI5.

‘Can I be of help, sir?’ She spoke in the accents of a shop assistant emulating an aristocratic drawl.

‘Quite possibly. I wish to see Ms Dare,’ said Bond, giving her his patently insincere smile.

The receptionist’s expression became fixed as she said she was most terribly sorry but Ms Dare was not in this afternoon. The reply lacked conviction and the eyes flickered an instant towards the door marked Private. He sighed, took out a blank card, wrote one sentence on it and pushed it towards the girl.

‘Be a darling and take this to her. I’ll mind the store. It is very important, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to walk in on her without being invited.’

When the girl hesitated, he added that Ms Dare could look at him on the monitor – inclining his head towards the security camera high up in the corner by the door – and if she did not like what she saw he would move on. The blonde still could not make up her mind, so he added that it was official and flashed his ID – the impressive, fully laminated one with coloured lettering rather than the real thing, which was plain plastic in a little leather folder.

‘If you’ll wait one moment I’ll see if she’s come back. Ms Dare was certainly out earlier this afternoon.’

She disappeared through the private door and Bond turned to face the camera. On the card he had written, ‘I come in peace with gifts. Remember the gallant submariners.’ It took five minutes but it worked like a charm. The golden girl showed him through the door, along a narrow corridor and up some steps to another very solid-looking door.

‘She says to go straight in.’

Bond went straight in to find himself staring down the wrong end of a piece of gunmetal blue which, by its size and shape, he recognised as a Colt Woodsman – the Match Target model. In the United States they would call it a plinking pistol, but a plinking pistol can still kill and Bond was always respectful in the presence of any such weapon, particularly when it was held as steadily as this, and pointed directly at him.

‘Irma,’ he said in a slightly admonishing tone. ‘Irma, please put away the gun. I’m here to help.’

As he spoke, Bond noted that there was no other exit and that Heather Dare, née Irma Wagen of Operation Cream Cake, had placed herself in the correct position, with legs slightly apart, back against the left hand side of the rear wall, eyes watching and steady.

‘It is you,’ she said without lowering the pistol.

‘In the flesh,’ he replied with his most genuine smile, ‘though to be honest I wouldn’t have recognised you. The last occasion we spent time together you were a bundle of sweaters, jeans and fear.’

‘And now it’s only the fear,’ she said without a trace of a smile.