All this had disappeared when the Service ‘went decimal’, as the jargon described the computerisation of its filing system. The nice young women were history, and though he was familiar, and literate, with computer systems, Bond never felt so positive about files which came seemingly from nowhere at the command of a series of keystrokes. It was, he considered, like a cheap magician’s trick. He liked magicians, because sleight of hand and body was part of his stock-in-trade, but he did not care for the down-market, cheap variety. Their tricks, he thought, could usually be bought for a few pounds sterling, and that was no way to run a railway let alone the Secret Intelligence Service.
He felt all this now as he sat in the vile, white and hygienic cubicles off the main Registry work stations.
Bond had only been back on active duty since the beginning of December, following recovery from serious injuries received in the United States of America during his last operation, and things had changed greatly since then. Now, at the start of a new year, he had no desire to go out into his old European haunts until the game of nations had returned to some form of status quo. He believed in the changes that were taking place, but not that the world had seen the death of Communism. He even seemed content to sit shuffling documents or following paperchases from his desk, though he suspected this initial sense of satisfaction would last only a short time.
He arrived at Registry’s work stations via M’s anteroom. Moneypenny, the Chief’s personal assistant whose security clearance bordered on the stratospheric, called down to say that their mutual lord and master had something he wished 007 to read. He did not even have his customary chat with M. Moneypenny, who, after giving him the usual cow-eyed look, handed over a small blue slip – blue being the Registry colour for Most Secret and Above – on which had been typed two words: Fallen Timbers.
‘We’re on battles this month,’ Moneypenny gave him a glittering smile. ‘Lucknow, Marne, the Somme, Arnhem, Blenheim. Fallen Timbers. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it is a battle. Plenty of belligerence.’
Bond raised an eyebrow, a smile turning up one corner of his mouth. ‘Not for me I hope, Penny?’
She gave a mock sigh and reached out to retrieve the blue slip which she popped into a small desktop shredder with a terrible finality. ‘Fighting with you could be rewarding, I should think.’ She followed the sigh with a little moue, and Bond leaned across the desk to kiss her lightly on the forehead.
‘You’re like a sister to me, Penny,’ he smiled, knowing her remark about cryptos being battles was to let him know the file was secret. New. Not some old case taken out to play with while Moscow and the old Eastern Bloc went through its varied agonies.
‘I don’t feel sisterly.’ Moneypenny never even bothered to hide the deep passion she nursed for Bond.
‘Oh, come on, Penny, I don’t want to add incest to injury,’ and with a broad wink, he left the office.
At the Registry work station, Bond typed in his pass number, followed by the words Fallen Timbers. The impersonal screen told him to wait, then informed him that he was cleared for the file. Seconds later the printer started to spit out sheets of paper. There were seventy in all and the cover page bore the usual Most Secret ciphers and the subject heading Scales of Justice; Cross ref Josif Vorontsov, this file.
Most of the facts contained within the three score and ten pages were background: detail concerning Vorontsov’s past and the recent abduction of the man called Joel Penderek from some obscure New Jersey town to, it was thought, a nameless point in Eastern Europe. (There were photographs attached, which meant that either someone had been doing his homework or the pix had already been in Registry for some time.) Then came some scant details regarding the organisation which called itself the Scales of Justice. These last were, if anything, sketchy, even conflicting. But finally, the meat within the file lay, not in the middle, but at the end. It was contained in two separate reports. One from the KGB, which appeared a tad muddled and indecisive, the second from the Israeli Service, the Mossad, which was terse, to the point, factual and not discomposed in any way. Bond was left wondering which report was more accurate, for distracted indecision could in the covert world be a cloak for clarity.
It took an hour to read and digest the file, after which the flimsy printed sheets were consigned to the large shredder by the door. The pieces rolled through into the burn bag which, he knew, would be removed within the next half-hour. Now, with much on his mind, Bond returned to his desk and informed Moneypenny that she could report to the Chief that he had followed instructions.
There was no waiting, and within ten minutes Bond sat on one of the straight-backed chrome skeletal chairs that M had recently installed during a refurbishing of his inner sanctum. He had noticed the changes to his Chief’s office when reporting back to work. He had wondered then if the new decor was a reflection of the massive shifts taking place in the world beyond the surreal existence they all shared in the anonymous, and ugly, tower block overlooking Regent’s Park which was the headquarters of the Service.
The room had lost its old nautical flavour; even the paintings of great naval battles had disappeared from the walls, replaced by uncharacteristically insipid watercolours. M’s desk was now a large steel and glass affair, tidy with heavy transparent In and Out trays, three different-coloured telephones, one of which looked as though it had been a prop in some Hollywood sci-fi epic, and a huge glass ashtray the size of a bird bath in which the Admiral had rested his evil-smelling pipe.
‘Chairs’re damned uncomfortable,’ the Chief growled without looking up from the papers upon which he was working. ‘Ministry of Works tell me they’re more labour-intensive, if that’s a real expression or more assassination of the English language. Suppose it means you’re so damned ill at ease in ’em that you want to get up and out, back to the grind, in double-quick time. Won’t keep you a minute, 007. Pictures are interesting.’
Bond took this as a hint so he left the chair and walked over to one of the watercolours. It was of a flat landscape that could have been Germany or some view of the Fens. Then he gave a little gasp when he spotted the artist’s signature, R Abel.
‘Nice, eh?’ M grunted, his head still down as his gold fountain pen raced along lines of word-processed text.
‘The Colonel Abel?’ Bond asked, for Rudolph Abel had been one of the most successful Russian spies of the fifties, the man whom the Americans had eventually swapped for Gary Powers, the famous U-2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union causing great distress to the Western Alliance.
M finally put down his pen. ‘Oh, yes. Yes indeed. Bought ’em from Walter in Washington. Drove a hard bargain, but they’re there to remind me of how things used to be, and how things are, if you follow my drift. Sit down, 007.’ Walter was a legendary former archivist of the American Service, and it was rumoured that his apartment was papered with rare, very collectable memorabilia of the Cold War. ‘What d’you think of Fallen Timbers?’ M glared.
‘I gather it was a battle.’ Bond returned to the discomfort of the labour-intensive chair.
M grunted again. ‘Yanks. After the Revolution. Battle with Maumee Indians in Ohio. Don’t learn that kind of thing in English schools these days.’
‘Never did.’ Bond adjusted his posture, realising the chair was more endurable if you sat to attention, which, presumably, was one of its design features.