Bond watched her narrowly as she reached the edge of the tables and came up the aisle. Of course it was hopeless. She was coming to meet someone – her lover. She was the sort of woman who always belongs to somebody else. She was late for him. That’s why she was in such a hurry. What damnable luck – right down to the long blonde hair under the rakish beret! And she was looking straight at him. She was smiling …!
Before Bond could pull himself together, the girl had come up to his table and had drawn out a chair and sat down.
She smiled rather tautly into his startled eyes. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, and I’m afraid we’ve got to get moving at once. You’re wanted at the office.’ She added under her breath: ‘Crash dive.’
Bond jerked himself back to reality. Whoever she was, she was certainly from ‘the firm’. ‘Crash dive’ was a slang expression the Secret Service had borrowed from the Submarine Service. It meant bad news – the worst. Bond dug into his pocket and slid some coins over the table. He said ‘Right. Let’s go,’ and got up and followed her down through the tables and across to her car. It was still obstructing the inner lane of traffic. Any minute now there would be a policeman. Angry faces glared at them as they climbed in. The girl had left the engine running. She banged the gears into second and slid out into the traffic.
Bond looked sideways at her. The pale skin was velvet. The blonde hair was silk – to the roots. He said: ‘Where are you from and what’s it all about?’
She said, concentrating on the traffic: ‘From the Station. Grade two assistant. Number 765 on duty, Mary Ann Russell off. I’ve no idea what it’s all about. I just saw the signal from H.Q. – personal from M. to Head of Station. Most Immediate and all that. He was to find you at once and if necessary use the Deuxième to help. Head of F said you always went to the same places when you were in Paris, and I and another girl were given a list.’ She smiled. ‘I’d only tried Harry’s Bar, and after Fouquet’s I was going to start on the restaurants. It was marvellous picking you up like that.’ She gave him a quick glance. ‘I hope I wasn’t very clumsy.’
Bond said: ‘You were fine. How were you going to handle it if I’d had a girl with me?’
She laughed. ‘I was going to do much the same except call you “sir”. I was only worried about how you’d dispose of the girl. If she started a scene I was going to offer to take her home in my car and for you to take a taxi.’
‘You sound pretty resourceful. How long have you been in the Service?’
‘Five years. This is my first time with a Station.’
‘How do you like it?’
‘I like the work all right. The evenings and days off drag a bit. It’s not easy to make friends in Paris without’ – her mouth turned down with irony – ‘without all the rest. I mean,’ she hastened to add, ‘I’m not a prude and all that, but somehow the French make the whole business such a bore. I mean I’ve had to give up taking the Metro or buses. Whatever time of day it is, you end up with your behind black and blue.’ She laughed. ‘Apart from the boredom of it and not knowing what to say to the man, some of the pinches really hurt. It’s the limit. So to get around I bought this car cheap, and other cars seem to keep out of my way. As long as you don’t catch the other driver’s eye, you can take on even the meanest of them. They’re afraid you haven’t seen them. And they’re worried by the bashed-about look of the car. They give you a wide berth.’
They had come to the Rond Point. As if to demonstrate her theory, she tore round it and went straight at the line of traffic coming up from the Place de la Concorde. Miraculously it divided and let her through into the Avenue Matignon.
Bond said: ‘Pretty good. But don’t make it a habit. There may be some French Mary Anns about.’
She laughed. She turned into the Avenue Gabrielle and pulled up outside the Paris headquarters of the Secret Service: ‘I only try that sort of manoeuvre in the line of duty.’
Bond got out and came round to her side of the car. He said: ‘Well, thanks for picking me up. When this whirl is over, can I pick you up in exchange? I don’t get the pinches, but I’m just as bored in Paris as you are.’
Her eyes were blue and wide apart. They searched his. She said seriously: ‘I’d like that. The switchboard here can always find me.’
Bond reached in through the window and pressed the hand on the wheel. He said ‘Good,’ and turned and walked quickly in through the archway.
Wing Commander Rattray, Head of Station F, was a fattish man with pink cheeks and fair hair brushed straight back. He dressed in a mannered fashion with turned-back cuffs and double slits to his coat, bow-ties and fancy waistcoats. He made a good-living, wine-and-food-society impression in which only the slow, rather cunning blue eyes struck a false note. He chain-smoked Gauloises and his office stank of them. He greeted Bond with relief. ‘Who found you?’
‘Russell. At Fouquet’s. Is she new?’
‘Six months. She’s a good one. But take a pew. There’s the hell of a flap on and I’ve got to brief you and get you going.’ He bent to his intercom and pressed down a switch. ‘Signal to M., please. Personal from Head of Station. “Located 007 briefing now.” Okay?’ He let go the switch.
Bond pulled a chair over by the open window to keep away from the fog of Gauloises. The traffic on the Champs-Elysées was a soft roar in the background. Half an hour before he had been fed up with Paris, glad to be going. Now he hoped he would be staying.
Head of F said: ‘Somebody got our dawn dispatch-rider from SHAPE to the St Germain Station yesterday morning. The weekly run from the SHAPE Intelligence Division with the Summaries, Joint Intelligence papers, Iron Curtain Order of Battle – all the top gen. One shot in the back. Took his dispatch-case and his wallet and watch.’
Bond said: ‘That’s bad. No chance that it was an ordinary hold-up? Or do they think the wallet and watch were cover?’
‘SHAPE Security can’t make up their minds. On the whole they guess it was cover. Seven o’clock in the morning’s a rum time for a hold-up. But you can argue it out with them when you get down there. M.’s sending you as his personal representative. He’s worried as hell. Apart from the loss of the Intelligence dope, their I. people have never liked having one of our Stations outside the Reservation so to speak. For years they’ve been trying to get the St Germain unit incorporated in the SHAPE Intelligence set-up. But you know what M. is, independent old devil. He’s never been happy about N.A.T.O. Security. Why, right in the SHAPE Intelligence Division there are not only a couple of Frenchmen and an Italian, but the head of their Counter Intelligence and Security section is a German!’
Bond whistled.
‘The trouble is that this damnable business is all SHAPE needs to bring M. to heel. Anyway, he says you’re to get down there right away. I’ve fixed up clearance for you. Got the passes. You’re to report to Colonel Schreiber, Headquarters Command Security Branch. American. Efficient chap. He’s been handling the thing from the beginning. As far as I can gather, he’s already done just about all there was to be done.’
‘What’s he done? What actually happened?’
Head of F picked up a map from his desk and walked over with it. It was the big-scale Michelin Environs de Paris. He pointed with a pencil. ‘Here’s Versailles, and here, just north of the park, is the big junction of the Paris-Mantes and the Versailles autoroutes. A couple of hundred yards north of that, on N.184, is SHAPE. Every Wednesday, at seven in the morning, a Special Services dispatch- rider leaves SHAPE with the weekly Intelligence stuff I told you about. He has to get to this little village called Fourqueux, just outside St Germain, deliver his stuff to the duty officer at our H.Q., and report back to SHAPE by seven-thirty. Rather than go through all this built-up area, for security reasons his orders are to take this N.307 to St Nom, turn right-handed on to D.98 and go under the autoroute and through the forest of St Germain. The distance is about twelve kilometres, and taking it easy he’ll do the trip in under a quarter of an hour. Well, yesterday it was a corporal from the Corps of Signals, good solid man called Bates, and when he hadn’t reported back to SHAPE by seven-forty-five they sent another rider to look for him. Not a trace, and he hadn’t reported at our H.Q. By eight-fifteen the Security Branch was on the job, and by nine the roadblocks were up. The police and the Deuxième were told and search parties got under way. The dogs found him, but not till the evening around six, and by that time if there had been any clues on the road they’d have been wiped out by the traffic.’ Head of F handed the map to Bond and walked back to his desk. ‘And that’s about the lot, except that all the usual steps have been taken – frontiers, ports, aerodromes and so forth. But that sort of thing won’t help. If it was a professional job, whoever did it could have had the stuff out of the country by midday or into an embassy in Paris inside an hour.’