Devil May Care (19 page)

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Hashim had been inconclusive. There were areas of Paris that the police couldn’t really penetrate, either because it was too dangerous for the officers or because the denizens of the high-rises, even if they spoke French, would not co-operate. La Courneuve, a district of St Denis with its infamous Cite´ des 4000, was one. Sarcelles was another: a ghetto with its own violent rules of dog-eat-dog that had little or nothing to do with the laws of the Republic. These places were viewed by most people as the price that France had been made to pay for her imperial misadventures. The French abandonment of Indo-China had been humiliating, but had had few repercussions at home beyond the appearance of a vast number of indistinguishable Vietnamese restaurants. The Algerian war, on the other hand, had saddled the large cities of France, and Paris in particular, with thousands of disgruntled Muslim immigrants. While they were effectively fenced out of the city centres into the high-rise suburbs, Mathis viewed such places as a breeding ground for crime and subversion that would sooner or later explode.

Yusuf Hashim had been one of many runners in a long supply chain of heroin. The police had found the narcotic on the estate and it was notable for both quality and quantity. This was not the fashionable

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dabbling of the cocktail set at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and other nightclubs of Mathis’s youth. This was death-by-drugs, peddled on a national scale, and the supply line was expertly run with so many cut-outs that it was impossible to find the source.

Colleagues in Marseille, working with American detectives, had had some success in closing down shipments to America through what the FBI called the French Connection. What they had further discovered was that, although France was buying more heroin than ever before, the bulk of what came in was being shipped on to London.

It was almost, the French police told him, as though someone with limitless resources was waging a crusade against Britain.

Mathis looked at his watch. He had a few minutes to spare so he ordered another coffee and a small cognac. For several days something had been nagging at the edge of his memory, begging to be let in. And now, as he looked through the glass enclosure of his pavement cafe´ beneath its scarlet awning, it finally came to him.

The tongue removed with pliers . . . He had heard of this punishment before, and now he remembered where. His brother, an infantry major, had fought with the French forces in Indo-China and had told

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him of a particular Viet Minh war criminal they had tried to capture and bring to justice. He had supervised the torture of captured French troops, but had also been an enforcer of Communist doctrine against Catholic missionary schools. His speciality had been the punishment – or torture – of children, many of whom had ended up maimed for life after his attentions.

When Mathis returned to his office, he asked his secretary to search the files for photographs relating to war criminals from the Indo-China war.

After he had seen Bond at lunch, Mathis had commissioned one of his subordinates to find Julius Gorner’s Paris factory and photograph its proprietor. Several prints came in of a tall, handsome Slavic man with a large, white-gloved hand and an intensely dismissive, arrogant expression. In two pictures he was accompanied by a man in a kepi with Oriental, possibly Vietnamese, features.

When the secretary returned with a brown cardboard file, it took Mathis only a few minutes to find a match. Side by side he placed the shiny new monochrome print of a man in a kepi standing next to a black Mercedes 300D Cabriolet and a faded eleven-year-old newspaper cutting showing Pham Sinh Quoc, whose Wanted picture had once been on

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every wall in French Saigon. They were one and the same man.

Mathis, however, did not immediately lift the telephone or order a car to take him to Gorner’s chemical plant. He tried instead to work out whether the Far East connection might mean more to Gorner than having provided him with a psychopathic aidede-camp. Lighting a Gauloise
filtre
, he put his feet up on the desk and considered what commercial gain there might be for Gorner in having an
entre´e
to the dangerous triangle of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Nine hours behind Paris, it was nine o’clock on a bright morning in Santa Monica, and Felix Leiter was making a house call to a Spanish-style home on Georgina Avenue. He limped over the grass and up to the front door.

The grizzled Texan, who had been a partner in some of the most testing cases in James Bond’s career, was working for Pinkerton’s detective agency, and made no secret of his boredom. He had been hired by a producer at one of the Hollywood studios to make inquiries about a missing person. She was called Trixie Rocket, had appeared in two B-pictures, then disappeared from sight, leaving no forwarding

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address, no number, nothing. The girl’s parents, who came from Idaho, had been making threatening noises towards the studio. Suspicion had fallen on the producer who had cast Trixie and who was now anxious to find her so that he could clear his name before his wife got to hear anything.

It was tame work for a man of Leiter’s abilities, but since he’d lost his right leg and arm to a hammerhead shark while helping out Bond in Miami, he was limited in what he could do.

There was a furious barking from behind the front door of 1614 Georgina, then an attractive, darkhaired woman poked her head out. She was on the telephone and gestured to Felix to wait. He went to sit on the grass verge and opened his copy of the
Los
Angeles Times
.

After about twenty minutes on the telephone, the woman, whose name was Louisa Shirer, finally called him in and showed him through to a small backyard, where she brought coffee. Mrs Shirer turned out to be a charming, voluble woman. Trixie Rocket had been her lodger and she remembered her well, but Trixie hadn’t lived there for three months now. She hadn’t left a forwarding address but . . . At that moment the telephone rang again, and Felix had to stare into his coffee for another fifteen minutes.

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The visit had been pleasant but pointless. When he eventually got back to his cheap hotel in West Hollywood, he felt worn out. A slovenly ceiling fan rotated above the potted palms in the lobby and the elevator was stuck on the tenth floor. But there was a message for him at the desk, asking him to ring a number in Washington. Felix recognized the prefix and felt a sudden surge of excitement.

The last real action he had seen was on a train with Bond in Jamaica. Before that, he’d been redrafted by the CIA in the Bahamas when they ran short of manpower. Once you’d been on the books, you were a lifelong reserve.

When the revived elevator had finally taken him up to his room, Felix called the number on the piece of paper. After a barrage of security checks he was eventually put through. A voice spoke to him in a flat, serious tone for almost two minutes.

Leiter stood by the bed, smoking a cigarette, nodding at intervals. ‘Yup . . . yup . . . I see.’

Eventually the voice stopped and Leiter said, ‘And just where the hell is Tehran?’

Meanwhile, it was early evening in that city, and Darius Alizadeh was on his way to the top of the
andaroon
–the women’s section – of his traditional

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house. He was too modern and secular to observe the ritual distinction of the sexes in his household, but used the separate buildings to keep his work and domestic affairs apart. Darius had been married three times for brief periods and had three sons by his different wives. He had followed the Shia provision of the
mut’a
, which allows a couple to contract a marriage for as short a period as they like and to end it without divorce. He was fond of quoting the helpful lines from the Koran: ‘If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three or four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one . . .’

Darius had had no such fears and had provided handsomely for his sons and their mothers. He kept a sharp eye open for the fourth wife the Prophet permitted him, and allowed himself the occasional trial run with likely candidates. He was seeing one of them – Zohreh from the restaurant where he had dined with Bond – later that evening.

The air-conditioned top floor of the
andaroon
, Darius’s office, was a single open-plan space with wooden ‘American’ shutters, a stripped wood floor with a single antique rug from Isfahan and a gilded cage in which he kept a white parakeet. At 1800 hours

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each day he transmitted his report to London. If he failed to come on air at precisely this time there was a reprimand in the shape of a ‘blue call’ from Regent’s Park half an hour later, then a red call at 1900. If that went unanswered, London would set about trying to find out what had happened to him.

Darius had never received reminders of either colour, and this evening he was particularly keen to be on time. He put on the headphones and positioned himself in front of the transmitter. His practised fingers went to work on the keys, tapping out his call sign – ‘PXN calling WWW’ – on 14 megacycles. He heard the sudden hollowness in the ether that meant London was coming in to acknowledge him.

He had a great deal to tell them, but it was important to keep calm as he did so. In the control room in Regent’s Park, there was an entire wall of glass dials with quivering needles which, among other things, measured the weight of each pulse and the speed of each cipher group, and registered any characteristic stumbles Darius had with particular letters – the
s
, for instance, under the weak second finger of his left hand. If the machines didn’t recognize his personal

‘fist’, a buzzer would sound and he would immediately be disconnected. He knew of an agent in the West Indies who,

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when overexcited, frequently transmitted too fast and found himself cut off by the electronic guardians. There were subtle ways in which agents who had been captured could let it be seen from the variations

– either in their ‘fist’ or by previously agreed groups of words in the message – that they were operating under duress. But Darius was distrustful of such measures. The whole of the British SOE group in Holland, having been captured in the war, had faithfully included the agreed tell-tale signs in their Nazisupervised transmissions only for their bosses in Baker Street to come on the line and tell them to stop messing about.

Darius informed London in code that there was still no word from 007 and requested instructions as to whether he should himself proceed to Noshahr. He included the slender details of what he had so far discovered in Tehran – from Hamid among others –

about the Caspian Sea Monster. At lunchtime he had gone downtown to the elegant French club and bought cocktails on the veranda for some old IndoChina hands who viewed themselves as having seen it all. Over
coˆtelettes d’agneau
and red Burgundy, he had learned that they were aware of sightings and that their photographs suggested the Monster had been modified to fire rockets. On his way back, Darius

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called in at the club known only as the CRC, one of the chicest venues in Tehran, where ten-pin bowling was played in a marble alley by the city’s most fashionconscious people to the background music of Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck.

Here, from an American who had drunk too much bourbon, Darius learned something even more interesting. A Vickers VC-10, which was meant to be delivered to the BOAC-owned Gulf Air in Bahrain two weeks earlier, had mysteriously never arrived. The American had heard from a friend whose son worked on a USAF base that the VC-10 had in fact entered western Persian airspace but had not emerged. The plane was thought either to have crashed or to have put down in the sand desert, the Dasht-e Lut, somewhere near Kerman. No trace had been found.

Darius’s fingers relayed the news with measured urgency. He knew that M would understand the implications – and the danger – as completely as if he had transmitted the entire message
en clair
. An hour later, in the middle of the London afternoon, the pulse high on M’s right temple was showing, as it did when he was tense. He struck a match and held it to his pipe, inhaling noisily. On his desk were cables

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from Paris and Washington, as well as Darius’s latest offering from Tehran. Between them they might make up an entire picture, but for the time being they were only fragments – urgent, frustrating, incomplete. On the roof, only a few feet above M’s head, were the three squat masts of the most powerful radio transmitters in Britain. The ninth floor was almost entirely taken up by a hand-picked group of communications experts who spoke a private language about sunspots and the ‘Heaviside layer’. But as they had patiently explained to M, in reply to his tetchy questions, there was not much more they could do to help without further incoming signal traffic. M walked to the window and looked out towards Regent’s Park. A couple of weeks ago he had spent a morning down the road at Lord’s, watching England on their way to victory over the touring Indians by an innings and 124 runs. There was no time for such frivolities now.

He buzzed the intercom. ‘Moneypenny? Send in the chief of staff.’

Down the softly carpeted corridor from the green baize door that separated M’s private staff from the rest of the world came the chief of staff, a lean, relaxed man of about James Bond’s age.

Miss Moneypenny raised an eyebrow as he

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approached. ‘Go straight in, Bill,’ she said, ‘but fasten your seat-belt.’

As the door of M’s office opened and closed, a green light came on above it.

‘ Take a seat,’ said M. ‘What do you make of Pistachio’s cable?’

‘I’ve just had a report from the aviation people,’

said the chief of staff. ‘It’s difficult to be sure from the information we’ve got in the cable, but they think it could be an Ekranoplan.’

‘What the devil’s that?’ said M.

‘It looks like a plane with cut-off wings, but it operates like a hovercraft on what’s called ‘‘ground effect’’. It weighs double the heaviest conventional aircraft, it’s over three hundred feet long and has a wingspan of a hundred and thirty feet. You know when birds come into land – geese on a lake, for instance – and they prolong their glide without effort? That’s ground effect. That upward pressure you feel when a plane comes in to land? That’s ground effect, too. A cushion of air is trapped between the wing and the runway and causes an updraught. The Soviets have found a way of harnessing this power. It’s called a ‘‘wig’’ – or wing-in-ground-effect craft. It’s light years ahead of anything we’ve got. The details are in this report.’ He handed a file across the desk.