1. Ideally, 007 should identify the enemy agents entrusted with his abduction, evade capture and tail them to the next higher echelon with a view to locating M.
2. This can be ruled out as a practical proposition .007 will be unable to identify these agents in advance, and the degree of practical efficiency displayed in the Quarterdeck operation strongly suggests that they will render evasion of capture impossible.
3. Therefore, 007 must invite capture and depend on the following safeguards: (a) Operatives of Station G will keep 007 under surveillance at all times and trace the movements of the abduction party with a view to intervention in force.
(b) A midget homing-transmitter will await 007 on arrival in Athens for installation in his clothing.
(c) Escape devices in clothing.
(a) and (b): Head of Station G for action.
(b) and (c): Head of Q Branch for action.
Bond smiled thinly to himself. Station G was famous throughout the Service; its Head, a mild-looking Welshman called Stuart Thomas, had served long and valiantly as 005 before an eye defect had begun to impair his ability with firearms, since when he had run the Athens unit with unsurpassed skill and imagination. But even Thomas could not be expected to produce the kind of supermen demanded by Bill Tanner's 3(a), which the enemy must have taken into account and would surely guard against. While as for 3(b) and 3(c)...
A packet containing the midget transmitter had been awaiting Bond when he checked in at the hotel, and he had duly installed it in the compartment Q Branch had made for it in the heel of his left shoe. A miniature pick-lock was fitted into the right heel, and two wafer-thin tungsten steel hacksaw blades, hardly less pliable than the cloth itself, in the lapels of his charcoal-green mohair suit. Such devices grew more sophisticated every year; their possible hiding-places remained constant. Men like the ones who had planned and carried out the Quarterdeck operation would be unlikely to overlook any of them. Bond realized grimly that, on this assignment as on all his previous ones, the tools he basically had to depend on were invisible, intangible, within himself. They would be tested to the utmost by what lay ahead. Everything else was uncertain.
He had a look around the crowded, decorously noisy bar. Perhaps, merely for curiosity's sake, he would be able to pick out the local agents whose job it was to keep him under their eye. (Standard Service procedure, aimed at minimizing the possibility of betrayal under torture, dictates that no agent shall have any knowledge of his co-agents that is not absolutely necessary.) The place seemed full of conventional business and professional types and their women, Athenian bankers, ship-owners from the islands, politicians from Salonika, less readily classifiable visitors from Istanbul, Sofia, Bucharest - not forgetting the tourists - all with the appearance of solid respectability.
Bond had chosen to stay at the Grande Bretagne because it was public in the way he wanted and because he had always responded to its slightly seedy grandeur, inter-war in period with a thin veneer of modernism. He enjoyed the lofty foyer with its stained glass, green marble pillars and handsome Gobelin tapestry, a good copy of the original in the Louvre, depicting Alexander the Great entering Babylon on a fat, crafty-looking horse, a dignified figure at the head of his retinue but gone a bit blowzy, more like Cleopatra than a Macedonian prince. Bond accepted too the rather Frenchified style of the bar, all broken pediments, terracotta friezes and heavy, expensive silk curtains, plus the very un-French sedate courtesy of the waiters.
It was ten o'clock, the hour when fashionable Athens considers where it will dine. Bond was hungry. Arrival at the hot, crowded little airport under Mount Hymettus early that afternoon had found him too tired to eat. He had dropped his bags at the Grande Bretagne and gone straight to a pavement café in the square. A quick carafe of cheap wine in the sun had been an ideal prelude to seven hours of wallowing sleep in the comfortable bed of the room he always asked for, 706 on the top floor, far from quiet, but with a fine view of the Acropolis and a glimpse of the sea.
By now the enemy would have confirmed Bond's arrival, finalized his own plans and moved his units into position. Time to go. Bond signalled to the waiter. Almost simultaneously, a man sitting not far away, his back half-turned to Bond, made the same bill-summoning gesture. He looked the most comfortably bourgeois of all the bar's customers, and had been sitting chatting quietly with his companions, a replica of himself and two handsome but unglamorized women. Thomas's sort of people. No pairs of silent toughs in dark suits for him. It would be interesting to see whether...
Bond's bill came. He was reaching for his money when his eye was caught by a sudden movement at the little table on his other side. A tubby, swarthy man with a thick moustache, a Turk by the look of him, had seized the bare upper arm of the girl next to him, pulled her close and was talking into her ear in something between a whisper and a snarl. She was young and strikingly pretty, with the delicate features, full breasts and tobacco-blonde hair of the most attractive physical type in this region. Now she was straining away from the Turk's heavy head and writhing red mouth, trying to undo his hand, her tan-coloured eyes wide with what looked like shock and fright. Their glance fell on Bond, who was only a few yards off and the nearest unattached male.
'Please,' she called in English, not loudly but urgently. 'Please do something.'
Bond weighed it up briefly. He could perfectly well pay and leave. The waiters could deal quite adequately with the man if he persisted. On the other hand, Bond's instinct told him, as just now, that here was something relevant, something that stuck out from the innocently busy social scene round him. And the girl certainly was a beauty.... And there was nothing to be lost. He made his decision.
'Bring it to me in a moment, please,' he told the waiter, walked across and sat down next to the Turk on the corner of the green plush bench. 'Now what is all this?'
'He's annoying me,' said the girl with much resentment. 'He says awful, obscene things to me. I beg you to get rid of him.'
Bond's Greek was small but well-chosen. He leant close to the man, who was staring at him contemptuously, and said in his deadliest tone, '_Fíye apo tho, málaka__.'
This, though probably as obscene as anything the man had been saying to the girl, is a standard Greek insult. What made it effective was Bond's air of determination and his sudden grip on the man's nearer arm. There was a pause while the two men stared at each other and Bond tightened his grip, noticing half-consciously that the arm was distinctly harder than its owner's general corpulence would have suggested. Then the Turk quickly and quite calmly let go the girl, waited for his own arm to be released, rose to his feet, adjusted his jacket, and walked out of the bar. His departure did not go unnoticed by the two couples Bond had picked out earlier. 'Thank you,' said the girl in excellent American English. 'I'm sorry about that. I could see no other way without a public disturbance. You dealt with him very competently.' She chuckled suddenly, a warm-hearted, gay sound that showed remarkably quick recovery from the fear she had been displaying. 'You must have had practice.'
'Shall we have a drink?' asked Bond, raising his hand. 'Yes, I rescue girls from obscenity-spouting Turks all the time.'
'Thank you. Tzimas isn't a Turk. He just behaves like one. But he is obscene. My family have been pushing me at him - he has a good carpet-manufacturing business here. After this tonight my mother will talk to my father and there'll be no more pushing in that direction. Are you married?'