Meanwhile she was one of the most envied girls in the building, and a member of the small company of Principal Secretaries who had access to the innermost secrets of the Service—‘The Pearls and Twin-set’ as they were called behind their backs by the other girls, with ironical reference to their supposedly ‘County’ and ‘Kensington’ backgrounds—and, so far as the Personnel Branch was concerned, her destiny in twenty years’ time would be that single golden line right at the end of a New Year’s Honours List, among the medals for officials of the Fishery Board, of the Post Office, of the Women’s Institute, towards the bottom of the OBEs:
‘Miss Loelia Ponsonby, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Defence.’
She turned away from the window. She was dressed in a sugar-pink and white striped shirt and a plain dark blue skirt.
Bond smiled into her grey eyes. «I only call you Lil on Mondays,» he said. «Miss Ponsonby the rest of the week. But I’ll never call you Loelia. It sounds like somebody in an indecent limerick. Any messages?»
«No,» she said shortly. She relented. «But there’s piles of stuff on your desk. Nothing urgent. But there’s an awful lot of it. Oh, and the powder-vine says that 008’s got out. He’s in Berlin, resting. Isn’t it wonderful!»
Bond looked quickly at her. «When did you hear that?»
«About half an hour ago,» she said.
Bond opened the inner door to the big office with the three desks and shut it behind him. He went and stood by the window, looking out at the late spring green of the trees in Regent’s Park. So Bill had made it after all. Peenemunde and back. Resting in Berlin sounded bad. Must be in pretty poor shape. Well, he’d just have to wait for news from the only leak in the building—the girls’ rest-room, known to the impotent fury of the Security staff as ‘The powder-vine’.
Bond sighed and sat down at his desk, pulling towards him the tray of brown folders bearing the top-secret red star. And what about 0011? It was two months since he had vanished into the ‘Dirty Half-mile’ in Singapore. Not a word since. While he, Bond, No. 007, the senior of the three men in the Service who had earned the double o number, sat at his comfortable desk doing paper-work and flirting with their secretary.
He shrugged his shoulders and resolutely opened the top folder. Inside there was a detailed map of southern Poland and north-eastern Germany. Its feature was a straggling red line connecting Warsaw and Berlin. There was also a long typewritten memorandum headed Mainline: A well-established Escape Route from East to West.
Bond took out his black gunmetal cigarette-box and his black-oxidized Ronson lighter and put them on the desk beside him. He lit a cigarette, one of the Macedonian blend with the three gold rings round the butt that Morlands of Grosvenor Street made for him, then he settled himself forward in the padded swivel chair and began to read.
It was the beginning of a typical routine day for Bond. It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior civil servant—elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford’s; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; week-ends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.
He took no holidays, but was generally given a fortnight’s leave at the end of each assignment—in addition to any sick-leave that might be necessary. He earned £1500 a year, the salary of a Principal Officer in the Civil Service, and he had a thousand a year free of tax of his own. When he was on a job he could spend as much as he liked, so for the other months of the year he could live very well on his £2000 a year net.
He had a small but comfortable flat off the Kings Road, an elderly Scottish housekeeper—a treasure called May—and a 1930 4½-litre Bentley coupé, supercharged, which he kept expertly tuned so that he could do a hundred when he wanted to.
On these things he spent all his money and it was his ambition to have as little as possible in his banking account when he was killed, as, when he was depressed, he knew he would be, before the statutory age of forty-five.
Eight years to go before he was automatically taken off the 00 list and given a staff job at Headquarters. At least eight tough assignments. Probably sixteen. Perhaps twenty-four. Too many.
There were five cigarette-ends in the big glass ashtray by the time Bond had finished memorizing the details of ‘Mainline’. He picked up a red pencil and ran his eye down the distribution list on the cover. The list started with ‘M.’, then ‘CoS.’, then a dozen or so letters and numbers and then, at the end ‘00’. Against this he put a neat tick, signed it with the figure 7, and tossed the file into his OUT tray.
It was twelve o’clock. Bond took the next folder off the pile and opened it. It was from the Radio Intelligence Division of NATO, ‘For Information Only’ and it was headed ‘Radio Signatures’.
Bond pulled the rest of the pile towards him and glanced at the first page of each. These were their titles:
The Inspectoscope — a machine for the detection of contraband.
Philopon — A Japanese murder-drug.
Possible points of concealment on trains. No. II. Germany.
The methods of Smersh. No. 6. Kidnapping.
Route five to Pekin.
Vladivostock. A photographic Reconnaissance by U.S. Thunderjet.
Bond was not surprised by the curious mixture he was supposed to digest. The OO Section of the Secret Service was not concerned with the current operations of other sections and stations, only with background information which might be useful or instructive to the only three men in the Service whose duties included assassination—who might be ordered to kill. There was no urgency about these files. No action was required by him or his two colleagues except that each of them jotted down the numbers of dockets which he considered the other two should also read when they were next attached to Headquarters. When the OO Section had finished with this lot they would go down to their final destination in ‘Records’.
Bond turned back to the NATO paper.
«The almost inevitable manner,» he read, «in which individuality is revealed by minute patterns of behaviour, is demonstrated by the indelible characteristics of the ‘fist’ of each radio operator. This ‘fist’, or manner of tapping out messages, is distinctive and recognizable by those who are practised in receiving messages. It can also be measured by very sensitive mechanisms. To illustrate, in 1943 the United States Radio Intelligence Bureau made use of this fact in tracing an enemy station in Chile operated by ‘Pedro’, a young German. When the Chilean police closed in on the station, ‘Pedro’ escaped. A year later, expert listeners spotted a new illegal transmitter and were able to recognize ‘Pedro’ as the operator. In order to disguise his ‘fist’ he was transmitting left-handed, but the disguise was not effective and he was captured.
«NATO Radio Research has recently been experimenting with a form of ‘scrambler’ which can be attached to the wrist of operators with the object of interfering minutely with the nerve centres which control the muscles of the hand. However…»
There were three telephones on Bond’s desk. A black one for outside calls, a green office telephone, and a red one which went only to M. and his Chief of Staff. It was the familiar burr of the red one that broke the silence of the room.
It was M’s Chief of Staff.
«Can you come up?» asked the pleasant voice.
«M.?» asked Bond.
«Yes.»
«Any clue?»
«Simply said if you were about he’d like to see you.»
«Right,» said Bond, and put down the receiver.
He collected his coat, told his secretary he would be with M. and not to wait for him, left his office and walked along the corridor to the lift.
While he waited for it, he thought of those other times, when, in the middle of an empty day, the red telephone had suddenly broken the silence and taken him out of one world and set him down in another. He shrugged his shoulders—Monday! He might have expected trouble.
The lift came. «Ninth,» said Bond, and stepped in.