John Gardner - Win, Lose Or Die

But the car door moved and opened. As it did so, she looked up at him, laughing, happy. Then the ball of flame erupted from inside the Fiat. The wind from the explosion hit him a second later, knocking him backwards, making his ears sing, scorching his eyes as the flame leaped from the shattered car.

He reached for the pistol and had it up as someone seized him from behind.

Then life changed. There were cars and people. Men in uniform, others in plain clothes. Some dashed around to the rear of the villa, and through his singing ears, Bond thought he heard barking, then shots, from the garden.

Somehow he was back in the villa, sitting with the remnants of their Christmas meal still on the table, and a familiar figure was striding through the sliding doors.

“Dragon tooth, Captain Bond,” Clover Pennington said. “I’m sorry, but it was the only way, and it almost didn’t work. Can you hear me, sir? Dragontooth.”

Bond looked up at her with loathing and spat out, “Dragontooth, and all the other Demons of the Pit to you!” He even seemed to be cringing back against the chair, as though to get away from her.

Even though he had seen the ambulance people, firemen, and the police around the twisted and blackened shell that had once been the Fiat, James Bond could not take all of it in. Vaguely, in the far corner of his mind, he realised that he must be in shock, but every time he turned to Clover Pennington he expected to see the trim and bubbly Beatrice Maria da Ricci. He could not believe she was dead, even though Clover was spelling it out to him: slowly, as one explains to a child, and loudly as his ears still rang from the explosion.

“She was either “Cat’ or one of “Cat’s’ close accomplices,” Clover told him, time and time again. It was like being beaten over the head.

Occasionally a plainclothes man came to her, muttered in her ear and received a reply. “M had the staff here checked out. One of our people spotted there had been some kind of a switch when they saw the man called Franco in the gardens.

We went on full alert then. Nobody was sure of the situation.

That is until I spotted you with her yesterday.” Another couple of men came in through the french windows and spoke to her. Clover’s eyes flicked towards Bond, then away.

When the men left she said that, unhappily, the two men Beatrice had at the house had been killed in the firelight. “My orders were to be absolutely ruthless, though we had to try and get at least one of the team alive. Unhappily we didn’t manage it, and I’m uncertain whether the Ricci girl was the “Cat’ or not .

And she paused, embarrassed. “And I don’t know if we’ll ever get confirmation. She must have taken the full blast.

There’s nothing, or very little, left. Sorry,” she added, as though apologising.

Bond sat, staring into space as though he was taking nothing in.

“She gave me the right daily codes,” he said, his voice like that of a robot.

“They had the telephone in here wired. Picked it all up at the big villa.” Clover, in her pleated grey skirt, sweater and sensible shoes, felt she was still not really getting to him. “Captain Bond?

James? Sir?” she tried. But he still sat, staring into space.

Someone switched on the radio in the kitchen. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” the late Bing Crosby sang in English, and she saw Bond’s head lift, cocked to one side.

“Put that oft’ you clown!” Clover shouted, then turned back to Bond. “They’ve found the regular start’ and the watchers our people put in. At least they’re alive: gagged and bound in the wine cellars.

We’ll know more when our fellows provide their reports and descriptions. Now, I have to get you out of here, sir. Do you understand? We really do have to debrief you as well.”

Finally, Bond nodded, slowly, as though common sense had started to prevail. In his head, whenever someone made a noise, dropped something, or talked too loudly, he heard the deafening double-crump again, and clearly saw Beatrice smiling at him, pulling open the car door, then being engulfed by the explosion.

The ringing in his ears had turned into a permanent whine. He looked up at Clover Pennington. “I want to speak, personally, to M,” he said, coldly.

“Not yet, James - er sir. Not yet. We do have to move you on.

And we have to be very careful. M’s instructions are that you remain in deep cover. That’s essential. We have to drop you out of sight again so that you can re-emerge when you join The invincible, in just over a week.”

Bond made a gesture that signified he understood. Though this was not borne out by his next question - “If she was BAST, what happened?

Did they kill her by mistake?”

“Later, sir. Please. I really think it would be dangerous for you to stay on here. We have a helicopter coming in to pick you up.

They’ll take you to a secure base on the mainland. There’s a debriefing team standing by, and they have good doctors, in case you need medical .

“I’m not in need of doctors, First Officer Pennington.”

“With respect, sir, you need them to give you the once-over.”

There was the clattering sound of a helicopter, getting louder as it swept in from the sea to circle above the villa.

“I take the pistol, sir?” from one of the thick-set men in civilian clothes.

“Not on your life.” Bond was now becoming really angry.

“I’m not a child, nor am I about to do anything stupid.” He glared around him. “What’re we waiting for, then? Let’s go.”

Outside, hovering directly over the villa, an old Agusta chopper, carrying Italian Naval markings, began to descend.

One of Clover Pennington’s men gave hand-signals and they lowered a crewman with a harness, and winched Bond into the chopper. The last thing he looked at, as the helicopter turned away, heading for the coast, was the black, charred and twisted remains of the Fiat, and local police blockades at each end of the road.

An hour later he was inside a small military base, near Caserta.

Bond’s local geographic knowledge was enough to follow the route.

From the air, the base looked anything but military, with half a dozen oblong buildings, and a triple security perimeter: a sandwich of heavy-duty razor wire between two high chain-link fences. The guards at the main gates were armed but did not seem to be uniformed.

He was given a large, airy room, functional, with minimal comfort, a small bathroom and no TV or distracting pictures on the wall.

Somehow they had managed to pack his case at the villa and it now stood neatly just inside the door. Bond stretched out on the bed, placing the Browning within reach. At least they had not disarmed him. There were a dozen or so paperbacks in a pile on the night table, a couple of thrillers, one Deighton, a Greene, two thick Forsyths and a little assorted bunch which included Joyce’s Uljsses and a copy of War & Peace. He knew from his own strung-out state that he needed something to keep his mind working, but this was a bizarre little collection, and he felt very tired, too fatigued to read, but not enough flaked out to sleep. Anyway, he had read the lot, apart from an odd little thriller masterpiece by some unknown author boasting the title Moonlight and Bruises.

He played back the memory which blazed in his head. The Fiat, the steps, the wrought iron gates, Beatrice smiling and opening the car door, then being blotted out by the ball of fire.

No, was it his memory playing tricks? It was not really like that.

She waved and smiled. What next? The violence of the explosion throwing him back? No, something else. She was smiling and pulling the car door open. Smoke. There was a lot of smoke with the fireball, wind and crack-thump of the explosion. What kind of explosive could they have used that made so much smoke? It did not happen with Semtex or RDX. This was something he would have to report. It could be that some terrorist organisations were using a new type of explosive: or was it an old mixture which, with age, produced more smoke than usual?