With a flick of his arm, Bond pushed Xenia out of the way and hammered the would-be assailant in the face.
The man’s feet left the ground for a second and he smashed against the wall with a crunch that made Bond wince.
He turned. “No. No… No… No. Stay just where you are, Xenia,’ the gun once more in his hand. “We’ve had enough foreplay. Now, tell me who sent you and your poor oaf of a friend?”
“Who do you think?’ “I’d bet on Janus.”
“Well, your bet would pay off at a hundred to one. Of course, Janus.”
“Take me to him, then.” She relaxed for a second. “Just as you are, or will you meet him with clothes on?” She said they would meet in Statue Park, then went on to explain what Statue Park really was, going into a lot of details. Bond pretended he was hearing all this for the first time.
She did the monologue lying on his bed, her hands and feet tied with two of his own neckties, a third linking the hands and the feet.
Trussed up like a chicken.
Even in her surly mood she had tried to make a joke about knowing that he must like bondage. He had put on his robe and found her clothes, an old pair of jeans and a shirt which she wore under a robe she had obviously brought down to the spa. They had gone up to his floor in the lift, very close to one another, for he had a restraining lock on one arm and his automatic jammed into her ribs. He finished dressing, then untied her “OK, take me to him.
She drove and Bond kept the pistol in view to discourage her from doing anything stupid. So, finally they pulled up at the extraordinary pile of broken and discarded icons.
The outward and visible signs of a political ideology which may or may not be finished.
“This is it?”
“Yes.” Any trace of the former sexually charged Xenia had disappeared.
“Well, my dear, I’ve had a lovely evening. Was it good for you?”
“The pleasure was all yours.
“Please understand if I don’t call you.”
“I’m not going to lose any sleep over that.” He shifted in his seat, and for a second she must have thought he was going to kiss her. Instead his left hand came down with its leading edge hard on that particular point just behind her right ear. He did not have to hit her again. Her mouth opened at the stab of pain then she slumped forward onto the wheel.
“Sweet dreams,’ he said and climbed out of the car to find himself staring at the base of a statue of Felix - Iron Felix - Dzerzhinsky, founder of what would eventually become the KGB and was now the RIS.
He took two steps into the so called park and through the detritus of the heroes of the Revolution, glimpsed the silhouette of the Tigre helicopter and a human shape, which flitted in and out, behind the broken statues.
Slowly he pulled his pistol and walked towards the helicopter. He had taken four steps when the figure came into sight again: a man, walking calmly into a clearing. Nearby there was the sound of a train.
Then, as moonlight fell across the clearing, the man walked into sight and Bond saw the grotesque face: the left side marked by a skin graft, and his mouth, on the same side, frozen. The voice was all too recognisable.
“Hello, James,’ said Alec Trevelyan.
The God With Two Faces “Alec?” Bond could not believe it at first
He went cold and wanted to vomit, yet his stunned disbelief was gradually turning to anger. He did not need to even ask the question, for he had known Alec Trevelyan as friend and colleague all his active life.
“Yes.” The familiar voice was only slightly slurred by the defect on the left of his mouth. “Yes, James, I’m back from the dead. I’m not just one of those anonymous crosses on the memorial wall at the SIS headquarters.
Does that wall still exist in the new building?” He stopped, as though waiting for a response “What’s the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback? You used to be famous for your one-liners.”
“I’ve got a one-worder for you, Alec.”
“Novel, go ahead.”
“Why?”
“Why? Very droll, James. Why? Because I speak the language well. That do you?”
“No, I think I deserve a decent answer.
“OK, how about going out, risking life and limb; bombing around the world, putting your life on the line, then finally ending up on the scrap heap?”
“Happens to everybody, Alec. We’re no different from soldiers, civil servants. Name any trade and you come to the same answer.
“So you think it’s OK just to win a war, come home and hear the words, “Well done, chaps. You did a good job, but times’ve changed.
Goodbye.” You think that’s fair?”
“Nobody has ever said life is fair.’ “Quite. That’s it. I went missing because I saw there was no future as a worker ant. I went freelance.”
“You went freelance? Even though you’d taken a pledge..
“To what? Queen and Country?”
“It was the job we promised to do.”
“Well done, James. Yes, we had made promises, but the world’s changed.
I happened to move on more or less just in time.”
“The world always changes. That’s part of life and part of the job.” Alec laughed, bitter, with a trace of Biblical wormwood and gall. “Part of the job?
Risk everything, and ~end up with nothing?”
“Depends on what you mean by nothing, Alec. The world’s in constant change. Wars come and go.
At the moment it looks as though our old main enemy has gone, but it’s left chaos behind. In my job - which used to be your job as well there’s more to do now than at any time. Parts of the old Russian empire are crumbling; there are new terrors, and where there are new terrors, we are most needed.”
“Not in my book, James. I’m happy being a freelance, thank you very much.”
“You’d rather cause the chaos than try to stop it?” Bond raised his hand and the pistol came up with it.
“Oh, James, put that peashooter away. Do you really think that I haven’t anticipated your every move?” He turned and began to walk away.
The man, Bond considered, had gone too far to be brought back.
The explosion? Ourumov’s bullet? Whatever had happened after the operation in the eighties? “I trusted you,’ he said aloud.
“James, don’t be so bloody melodramatic. I always took you for a realist” Trevelyan turned back, coming closer.
“Trust?” he asked, mocking Bond’s tone. “Trust’s disappeared, gone, dropped out of the dictionary. The accountants have taken over, or hadn’t you noticed?
Today’s dictator is tomorrow’s diplomat; the bomb thrower and terrorist now catch the Nobel Prize. It’s all money. We’re stuck in the slough of despond which goes under a new name: free market morality. It’s a morality where your friends come and go as quickly as the next bus in Regent Street or Fifth Avenue.” He stopped, obviously trying to let his view of life sink in.
“So, how did the SIS vetting miss the fact that your parents were Lienz Cossacks? That, in itself, made you a security risk.”
“They knew, James. They knew everything, they simply thought I was too young to remember.
“We’re both orphans. Did you ever think about how the Service prefers orphans? The SIS likes to become your family. Your own parents had the luxury of dying in a climbing accident. Mine survived one of the most treacherous acts perpetrated in the name of the British government. They survived Stalin’s death squads, but my father couldn’t live with himself, or let my mother live with it. The SIS really thought I would never remember what happened, so it became a nice little irony. The son went to work for the government whose betrayal caused his father to murder his mother, then take his own life. But I always remembered, James. Even when I was being utterly loyal, I never forgot a thing.’ Bond nodded. “Hence Janus. Well named, Alec. Janus, the two-faced Roman god, come to life.” Trevelyan’s hand came up to the damaged left side of his face. Whether by accident or design he turned so that Bond could see his right profile without blemish, then his left, a scarred and hideous caricature. “It wasn’t God who gave me this face. It was you, James.