John Gardner - Win, Lose Or Die

“Eat your hearts out, Franco and Umberto.”

“Mmmm,” she nodded. “I’m going up to the big villa now.

Give them instructions. Make an obligatory “phone call. Then I’ll be back and the celebrations can commence.” She gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek, and he felt that his face had never yet been kissed like this. Beatrice had the art of kissing a cheek, as though it were his mouth, or even his deepest secret being.

Kissing, he considered, was a lost art in this crumbling, shock ridden world. Beatrice had rediscovered it, and now practised the craft in a way that had been hidden for centuries. He stood on the rear terrace, listening to her footsteps on the stone path, wondering what had happened to him. He had never been one for quick, serious decisions of the heart. Quick, serious decisions were for operational service matters, not for women. Yet this girl had certainly worked a powerful and potent magic. He felt, after one day, that he had known her for most of his life.

It was untypical, and it worried him, for, in this short space of time, Beatrice had started to command his heart. Bond’s discipline was such that this rarely happened. Even the courting of his now dead wife had taken time. Apart from that one instance he was one of life’s natural playboy bachelors as far as women were concerned: one who had so often lived by the three Fs Find, Fornicate and Forget. It was the safest way in his job, for basically he believed Field Officers should only be married if they needed the cover. It was a cold and clinical approach, but the right one. Beatrice was turning it upside down.

He thought about this dilemma for some time, then remembered there was a new code word to collect, so lie turned back into the villa and dialled London.

The number in England picked “\?” as usual, on the third ring.

“Predator,” said Bond. “Day two.

“Dragon tooth,” the voice was clear from the distant line.

“Repeat. Dragontooth.”

“Acknowledge.” Bond put down the receiver. So, some of the intelligentsia who burrowed away in the Regent’s Park office were trying to be clever. In his extreme youth, Bond had read much, and his memory was almost photographic. He called back the lines now, from Dante’s Inftrno from The Divine Comedy.

Front and centre here, Grizzly and Hellkin .

You too, Dead dog.

Curly beard, take charge of a squad often.

Take Grafier and Dragontooth along with you.

Pigfusk, Catclaw, Cramper and Crazyred.

They were some of the named demons with forked claws and rakes who tended, and goaded, the damned in their cauldron of boiling pitch. So, those at headquarters were now deeply influenced by the strange mystic concept of the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism - BAST, the three-headed monster who rode on a viper.

“Dragontooth, James.” He had not even heard her come in through the french windows behind him. She had been as silent as a cat.

“Correct. Dragontooth,” he said, thinking, “Cat”. Could the Pennington girl be the Cat of BAST - Saphii Boudai?

“Dragontooth,” he said again, giving Beatrice a sad smile.

Behind the smile his brain worked at the equation. Saphii Boudai’s file showed her as a dedicated terrorist from her teens.

The British authorities had been close to her on two occasions, yet she remained, like the other members of the BAST hierarchy, a ghost; an insubstantial, if deadly, figure with no true form or shape, of which there was no real description. The Pennington girl had a history. A good family. He even knew her uncle, Sir Arthur Pennington, Master of Pennington Nab in the West Country. Her cousins had both been close to him at one time or another. The background was impeccable. Or was it? Another thought struck him.

“What’s wrong, James?” Beatrice had come to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and looking into his face with her hypnotic black eyes. The eyes seemed almost to weaken him, and their bottomless darkness drew him into her brain so that all he could see was a possible future with her: a future free from danger and responsibility - except to her.

Bond drew back, holding Beatrice at arm’s length. “I saw someone in Forio. Someone who shouldn’t be there.”

Her face underwent a change. Just a slight twitch of concern, but enough to reveal that this delightful girl had the tough inner resources required by people in their mutual trade. She drew him over to the couch and started to question him - her queries all aimed at the heart of the problem, the reason he was here, in the villa on Ischia.

It was plain that, as well as everything else, Beatrice was a skilled interrogator.

He told her everything, in its chronological sequence. First Officer Pennington at Yeovilton, her lax sense of security, and the fact that she was to be in charge of a section of Wrens on draft to the invincible - something very much out of the norm for the Royal Navy.

“And she knew of your drafting?” Beatrice asked.

“To where?” he countered, still in control of his own sense of need-to-know, the central pin of all security matters.

“Invincible, of course. James, you don’t think they would have put me in charge of this assignment without a complete briefing.

She knew you were to be in Invincible for Landsea “89 - the Pennington girl, I mean?”

He nodded. “Yes, and she didn’t seem to think it was something she had to keep quiet about. Clover had access to all the draft orders. It was like giving classified information to a gossip columnist. She had as much idea of security, and keeping her mouth shut, as a town crier.

“Mmmm.” Beatrice frowned, and Bond thought she even looked attractive when her face became re-patterned with anxiety.

“Look, James,” she laid a hand on his thigh, which seemed to ass a current of signals to alert his most basic physical needs.

“Look, I have a secure radio-link back to the big villa. This is something I should report now, before it’s too late. It won’t take long. Are you up to some menial chores, like doing vegetables for tomorrow’s dinner?”

Bond rarely bothered himself with the preparation of food. For years it had always been something others did for you. But he simply nodded, and went into the little kitchen while Beatrice left the Villa Capricciani, hurrying, her face reflecting the fact that she considered Clover Pennington’s presence on the island, and nearby, to be something of grave concern.

In the kitchen, Bond began to prepare the vegetables, smiling wryly and thinking how M would love to see him now. He would not have been surprised to learn that M had given Beatrice Maria da Ricci instructions to “Put Bond in his place.” He could hear the Old Man telling her that 007 was sometimes a shade too conscious of his class for his own good. “Get him to do some physical jobs, like swabbing the decks of that villa.” It was the kind of devilment in which M would revel.

In England that Christmas Eve, M was down at Quarterdeck, but not at ease. An extra secure telephone link had been installed so that he could get information concerning Bond and his situation within seconds of it coming in to Headquarters.

Though M was naturally a solitary person, he did have relatives: a daughter, now married to an academic who worked on incomprehensible and obscure pieces of European history at Cambridge. They had provided M with two grandchildren, a boy and girl, whom he adored and spoiled in, for him, a most uncharacteristic manner.

The tree was trimmed, Mrs. Davison had everything ready, and, during the previous week, M had gone, with her husband, on a spending-spree, most of the purchases being extravagant playthings for the grandchildren. At Christmas, M seemed to turn into the reformed Scrooge - in fact, part of the Quarterdeck Christmas ritual was a reading from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.