Christopher Wood: The Spy Who Loved Me

‘I apologize for my late appearance, Comrade General. You heard of the technical problems with the Ilyushin?’

Nikitin held up a peremptory hand that told her that her question was unnecessary. ‘I was informed.’ He paused and looked hard into her face. ‘How was the course?’

Anya was thrown by the suddenness of the question. It redoubled her fears that she had been summoned because of her relationship with Sergei. She could feel herself blushing. For the first time she wondered if his mission might have been engineered to separate them.

‘Very interesting, Comrade General.’

‘Very interesting?’ General Nikitin smiled. His face was rough and calloused, like a potato left to dry in the sun, but the eyes could have been prised from a week old corpse. There was no visible sign of life behind them.

Anya felt her blush deepen. ‘It was a most unusual and unexpected assignment.’

‘Which you took the fullest advantage of.’

Somewhere, in a distant corner of the room, a blue-bottle was beating against a window pane. A furious, high-pitched buzz and then silence for ten seconds. Then the buzzing starting again. Nikitin was still probing her with his cold, lustreless eyes.

‘The scope of the course came as a surprise to me.’ This was if anything an understatement. The movement order assigning her to the dacha on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea had confined itself to the words ‘Cold War Techniques’. It had come as considerably more than a surprise on the first morning of the course, in the company of twenty attractive young men and women, to be confronted by a folder with ‘Sex as a Weapon’ printed in bold letters on its shiny cover. What followed had been a revelation. Lectures, films, demonstrations, what was discreetly described as ‘Controlled Participation’ with electrodes attached to various parts of the body to measure the degree of response, tests, more measurements, interviews, instruction in the latest cosmetics available in the west and how to apply them, a course in haute couture. Military Records had suddenly seemed like a different world. Anya’s final rating had been ‘E Sensual’, which she knew meant that she made love well and enjoyed it. Despite every laboratory test that the scientists could devise her emotional stability had remained an unknown quantity. The private report which she did not see said that she had exceptional potential but with an element of risk attached to it.

And in the middle of all this she had fallen in love. It must have been that to which Colonel General Nikitin had been referring with his talk of taking the fullest advantage. Suddenly she felt a rush of anger. What right did they have to tell her if she could love or not? Was she to be punished because amongst all the guile and artifice, the antiseptic passion and the throbbing wires she had found something that could never be contained in any tawdry manual of eroticism? She stared back into Nikitin’s soulless eyes with a new determination.

The Colonel-General nodded as if in agreement with some sentiment that needed no expression. ‘He was a fine young man. One of our best operatives.’ He studied her wondering face. ‘Your’ - a slight pause - ‘relationship could not escape notice.

Anya felt alarmed. What did he mean - ‘was’?

‘And up to now, conspicuously efficient. It just shows how these affairs of the heart can affect people.’

‘What do you mean?’ Anya saw the pinpoint of red behind the eyes and corrected herself. ‘What do you mean, Comrade General?’

Nikitin rcached into a drawer and produced a small, rectangular scrap of paper. A light was extinguished before he opened his mouth.

‘I very much regret to inform you that Comrade Sergei Borzov was killed on active service behind enemy lines. I have just heard the news.’ He listened to the girl’s short intake of breath, then dropped his hand to switch off the tape-recorder below the desk.

With unusual haste, the general levered himself from his chair and circumvented the desk. ‘You must not blame yourself too much, my dear. Others might read more into the whole business than it warrants but you can rely upon me to keep an open mind. If Sergei’s judgment was at fault it was not because of you - because of your, your affair.’ The General seemed pleased at having found the word. ‘You are young and very beautiful, and you have need of guidance - of protection. You need a friend who is well placed. Especially at the moment.’ The rough hand dropped to her knee like a paw.

‘Where did he die?’

‘In the French Alps. He was on a mission to eliminate a British agent. He failed.’ With the recorder turned off, Nikitin was letting the words tumble out. His eyes had found life from somewhere and they glistened as he watched his hand push up her skirt like a burrowing animal.

Anya felt her nostrils twitch before the scent of roses that some Russian men wear to disguise the fact that they cannot be bothered to wash. Nikitin’s head was bending towards her lap and she saw that the crimped line across his forehead denoted a wig. An obscene dribble of rust-coloured adhesive leaked from beneath the hairline.

Anya fought a desire to be sick. Her skirt was now pressed back against her waist and the animal hand ... She rose to her feet and thrust Nikitin aside as she launched herself at the desk. She pressed a finger to her lips and snatched up a thin state-issued ballpoint. Nikitin watched her like an animal ready to spring.

The record of Sergei’s death still lay on the desk and Anya turned it over and wrote urgently. This had to work. She had seen Nikitin’s hand drop below the desk and she knew what it meant.

She finished her message and thrust it into Nikitin’s wary hand. He looked at her with slow-burning hate and raised it to his eyes. ‘Most honoured. But I know from Military Records that there is another microphone hidden in your room.’

Nikitin raised his eyes from the message and for a second let them rest on the ceiling. Then he slowly made his way back round the table. He lowered himself into his chair and a slight subsidence of the right shoulder revealed that a hand had been dropped. The eyes that looked towards Anya were as devoid of expression as the face of the moon.

‘But I did not bring you here to discuss the unfortunate death of Comrade Borzov. There is an assignment of great importance for which I think you may be suited ..

Hunt the Submarine

August had committed an act of treachery against the English summer and rain was lashing the windows of M’s office overlooking Regent’s Park.

The old man was having trouble with his pipe as usual. Bond let him get on with it and gazed around at the familiar fittings he had come to know so well over the years. The Venetian blinds that gave an impression of coolness even on the hottest day; the dark green Wilton carpet leading to the big, red leather-topped desk; the twin-bladed tropical fan, now immobile, set in the ceiling directly above M’s desk.

The Head of Britain’s Secret Service had lost no time in summoning Bond to his office. No sooner had Station J contacted him at Chamonix and told him that his presence was urgently required at headquarters than he had screamed down the motorway to Geneva and caught the first plane to London. And no sooner was he behind his desk staring glumly at the pile of routine signals and reports marked ‘for your urgent attention’ that always arrived in droves when he left the country than the telephone had rung.

‘007.’

‘Can you come up?’ It was the Chief-of-Staff.

‘M?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it all about?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s serious.'

It always is, thought Bond as he put down the receiver. He left his office and took the lift up to the top floor. The walk down the long, quiet corridor was familiar and he knew exactly how many paces it would take. Thirty, before he came to the outer door of M’s office. The girl behind the desk was un