It was a hot, sunny day and Drax was driving in his shirt-sleeves. She glanced down and to the left at the top of the little book protruding from his hip-pocket. This drive might be her last chance. Since the evening before she had felt a different person. Perhaps Bond had aroused her competitive spirit, perhaps it was revulsion from playing the secretary too long, perhaps it was the shock of the cliff-fall and the zest of realizing after so many quiet months that she was playing a dangerous game. But now she felt the time had come to take risks. Discovery of the Moonraker’s flight plan was a routine affair and it would give her personal satisfaction to find out the secret of the black notebook. It would be easy.
Casually she laid her folded coat over the space between herself and Drax. At the same time she made a show of arranging herself comfortably, during the course of which she drew an inch or two nearer Drax and her hand came to rest in the folds of the coat between them. Then she settled herself to wait.
Her chance came, as she had thought it might, in the congested traffic of Maidstone. Drax, intent, was trying to beat the traffic lights at the corner of King Street and Gabriel’s Hill, but the line of traffic was too slow and he was checked behind a battered family saloon. Gala could see that when the lights changed he was determined to cut in front of the car in front and teach it a lesson. He was a brilliant driver, but a vindictive and impatient one who was always anxious for any car that held him up to be given something to remember.
As the lights went green he gave a blast on his triple horns, pulled out to the right at the intersection, accelerated brutally and got by, shaking his head angrily at the driver of the saloon as he passed it.
In the middle of this harsh manoeuvre it was natural for Gala to allow herself to be thrown towards him. At the same time her left hand dived under the coat and her fingers touched, felt, and extracted the book in one flow of motion. Then the hand was back in the folds of the coat again and Drax, all his feeling in his feet and hands, was seeing nothing but the traffic ahead and the chances of getting across the zebra outside the Royal Star without hitting two women and a boy who were nearly halfway across it.
Now it was a question of facing Drax’s growl of rage as with a maidenly but urgent voice she asked if she could possibly stop for a moment to powder her nose.
A garage would be dangerous. He might decide to fill up with petrol. And perhaps he also carried his money in his hip-pocket. But was there an hotel? Yes, she remembered, the Thomas Wyatt just outside Maidstone. And it had no petrol pumps. She started to fidget slightly. She pulled the coat back on to her lap. She cleared her throat.
‘Oh, excuse me, Sir Hugo,’ she said in a strangled voice.
‘Yes. What is it?’
‘I’m terribly sorry, Sir Hugo. But could you possibly stop for just a moment. I want, I mean, I’m terribly sorry but I’d like to powder my nose. It’s terribly stupid of me. I’m so sorry.’
‘Christ,’ said Drax. ‘Why the hell didn’t you … Oh, yes. Well, all right. Find a place.’ He grumbled on into his moustache, but brought the big car down into the fifties.
‘There’s a hotel just around this bend,’ said Gala nervously. ‘Thank you so much, Sir Hugo. It was stupid of me. I won’t be a moment. Yes, here it is.’
The car swerved up to the front of the inn and stopped with a jerk. ‘Hurry up. Hurry up,’ said Drax as Gala, leaving the door of the car open, sped obediently across the gravel, her coat with its precious secret held tightly in front of her body.
She locked the door of the lavatory and snatched open the notebook.
There they were, just as she had thought. On each page, under the date, the neat columns of figures, the atmospheric pressure, the wind velocity, the temperature, just as she had recorded them from the Air Ministry figures. And at the foot of each page the estimated settings for the gyro compasses.
Gala frowned. At a glance she could see that they were entirely different from hers. Drax’s figures simply bore no relation to hers whatsoever.
She turned to the last completed page containing the figures for that day. Why, she was wrong by nearly ninety degrees on the estimated course. If the rocket were fired on her flight plan it would land somewhere in France. She looked wildly at her face in the mirror over the washbasin. How could she have gone so monstrously wrong? And why hadn’t Drax ever told her? Why, she ran quickly through the book again, every day she had been ninety degrees out, firing the Moonraker at right angles to its true course. And yet she simply couldn’t have made such a mistake. Did the Ministry know these secret figures? And why should they be secret?
Suddenly her bewilderment turned to fright. She must somehow get safely, quietly to London and tell somebody. Even though she might be called a fool and a meddler.
Coldly she turned back several pages in the book, took her nail file out of the bag and, as neatly as she could, cut out a specimen page, rolled it up into a tight ball and stuffed it into the tip of a finger of one of her gloves.
She glanced at her face in the mirror. It was pale and she quickly rubbed her cheeks to bring back the colour. Then she put back the look of an apologetic secretary and hurried out and ran across the gravel to the car, clutching the notebook among the folds of her coat.
The engine of the Mercedes was turning over. Drax glowered at her impatiently as she scrambled back into her seat.
‘Come on. Come on,’ he said, putting the car into third and taking his foot off the clutch so that she nearly caught her ankle in the heavy door. The tyres churned up the gravel as he accelerated out of the parking place and dry-skidded into the London road.
Gala was jerked back, but she remembered to let the coat with her guilty hand in its folds fall on the seat between her and the driver.
And now the book back into the hip-pocket.
She watched the speedometer hovering in the seventies as Drax flung the heavy car along the crown of the road.
She tried to remember her lessons. Distracting pressure on some other part of the body. Distracting the attention. Distraction. The victim must not be at ease. His senses must be focused away. He must be unaware of the touch on his body. Anaesthetized by a stronger stimulus.
Like now, for instance. Drax, bent forward over the wheel, was fighting for a chance to get past a sixty-foot R.A.F. trailer, but the oncoming traffic was leaving no room on the crown of the road. There was a gap and Drax rammed the lever into second and took it, his horns braying imperiously.
Gala’s hand reached to the left under the coat.
But another hand struck like a snake.
‘Got you.’
Krebs was leaning half over the back of the driving seat. His hand was crushing hers into the slippery cover of the notebook under the folds of the coat.
Gala sat frozen into black ice. With all her strength she wrenched at her hand. It was no good. Krebs had all his weight on it now.
Drax had got past the trailer and the road was empty. Krebs said urgently in German, ‘Please stop the car, mein Kapitän. Miss Brand is a spy.’
Drax gave a startled glance to his right. What he saw was enough. He put his hand quickly down to his hip-pocket, and then, slowly, deliberately, put it back on the wheel. The sharp turning to Mereworth was just coming up on his left. ‘Hold her,’ said Drax. He braked so that the tyres screamed, changed down and wrenched the car into the side-road. A few hundred yards down it he pulled the car into the side and stopped.
Drax looked up and down the road. It was empty. He reached over one gloved hand and wrenched Gala’s face towards him.