**We'll just have to stop him ourselves, then,** I say, trying to encourage her. **Whatever. It doesn't work that way, Bob.**
**What doesn't?**
**The geas.** She stands up then smiles at the steward. "If you don't mind?" she says. The steward stands aside. There's nobody human home behind his eyes; I sidle past him with my back to the wall.
Ramona opens the side door beside the staircase. There's a short passage with several doors opening off it. "I've got something to show you," she tells me.
Huh? Since when does Ramona have the run of Billington's yacht? I follow her slowly, trying to worry out what's going on.
"In here." She opens a door. "Don't worry about the guards they're either down below or up on the superstructure — this is the owner's accommodation area and they're not needed as long as we stay in it. This is the grand lounge."
The lounge is surprisingly spacious. There are molded leather-topped benches all around the walls, and bookcases and glass cabinets. In the middle of the floor is something that might have been a pool table once, before a monomaniacal model maker repurposed it as his display cabinet.
"What the hell is it?" I lean closer. On one side are two model ships, one being the Explorer, which I recognize from the huge drilling derrick; but the center of the table is occupied by a bizarre diorama: old dog-eared hardback novels and a worn-looking automatic pistol, piled on top of a reel of film and a map of the Caribbean. Something else: a set of fine wires tracing out — "Shit. That's a Vulpis-Tesla array. And that box must be a — is that a Mod-60 Gravedust board it's plugged into? Summoning up the spirits of the dead. What the hell"
There's a GI Joe doll in evening dress, clutching a pistol.
It's wired up to the summoning grid by its plastic privates.
On either side of it stand two Barbies in ball gowns, one black, one white. Behind them lurks another GI Joe, this time hacked so that he's bald and bearded, in something that looks like Wehrmacht dress grays.
All at once, I get the picture.
"It's the core of his coercion geas, isn't it? It's a destinyentanglement conjuration, on a bigger scale. James Bond, channelling the ghost of Ian Fleming as scriptwriter ...
Jesus." I glance across the table at Ramona. She looks flushed and apprehensive.
"Yes, James — " She bites her lip. "Sorry, monkey-boy. It's too strong in here, isn't it"
I stare at her through narrowed eyes. Oh yes, I'm beginning to get it. I'm half-tempted to shoot the bint now, then stuff her through the porthole before the bad guys get their mileage out of her, but I need all the friends I can get right now, and until I'm sure she's gone over to SPECTRE I can't afford to — What. The. Fuck?
I blink rapidly. "Is there somewhere we can go that's not quite so ..."
"Yeah. Next door."
Next door is the library or smoking room or whatever the hell it's called. My head stops swimming as soon as we get a wall between us and that diorama from Hell. "That was bad.
What's the big idea? Why does Billington want to turn me into James Bond"
Ramona slumps into an overstuffed chair. "It's not about you, Bob, it's all about plot. The way the geas works, he's set himself up as the evil villain in this humongous destinyentanglement spell targeted against every intelligence agency and government on the planet. The end state for this conjuration is that the hero — which means whoever's being ridden by the Bond archetype — comes and kills the villain, destroys his secret floating headquarters, stymies his scheme, and gets the girl. But Billington's not stupid. He may be riding the Villain archetype but he's in control of the geas and he's got a good sense of timing. Before the Hero archetype gets to resolve the terminal crisis, he ends up in the villain's grasp under circumstances such that nobody else is positioned to deal with the villain's plan. Ellis figures that he can short the geas out before it goes terminal and makes the Bond figure kill him. At which point Billington will be left sitting in an unassailable position since the only agent on the planet who's able to stop him wakes up and suddenly remembers that he's not James Bond."
I consider this for a full minute. "Whoops."
"That's how we screwed up," she says bleakly. "Billington had a handle on me all along. I'm his handle on you, and you're his handle on Angleton. He's stacked us up like a row of dominos."
I take a deep breath. "What happens if I go next door and smash the diorama"
"The signal strength — " She shakes her head. "You noticed how fast it drops off? If you're close enough to smash it the backwash will kill you, but it'll probably leave Billington alive. If we could get word out about what's going on it might be worth trying, but nobody's close enough to do anything right now — so we're back to square one. It really has to be shut down in good order, the same way it was set up, and I'd guess that's why Billington's brought that fucker Pat aboard."
"Hang on," I say slowly. "Griffin was sure there was a shithot Black Chamber assassin in town this week. Some guy code named Charlie Victor. Could he do anything about Billington if we cleared a path"
"Bob, Bob. I'm Charlie Victor." She looks at me with the sort of sympathetic expression usually reserved for terminal cases.
I consider this for a moment. Then an atavistic reflex kicks in and I snap my fingers. "Then you must be, Um ...
you're the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, right? Like Major Amasova in the film version of The Spy Who Loved Me, or Jinx in Die Another Day. Does that mean you're the Good Bond Babe archetype or the Bad Bond Babe"
"Well, I don't think I'm bad — " She's looking at me oddly. "What the hell are you talking about"
"There are usually two Babes in every Bond movie," I say slowly. Shit, she isn't British, is she? I keep forgetting. She hasn't suffered through the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two. I'd probably seen them all by the time I was fifteen, and read some of the books, but I've never had to use the knowledge before now ...
"Look, Bond almost always has two Babes. Sometimes it's three and in a few of the later movies they experimented with one, but it's almost always two. The first to show up is the Bad Bond Babe, who usually works for the villain and who sleeps with Bond before coming to a nasty end. The second, the Good Bond Babe, helps him resolve the plot and doesn't shag him until just before the closing credits. You haven't slept with me so far, which probably means you're safe — at least, you're not the Bad Bond Babe. But you might be the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, who's sort of a revisionist merge between the Bad Bond Babe and the Good Bond Babe, who turns up later, gets Bond out of a load of grief, tries to kill him, and eventually sleeps with him — "
" — I hope this isn't a come-on, monkey-boy, because if it is — "
"The setup's skewed. And I reckon we're going to have company soon."
"Huh? What do you mean"
"There are never two girls in the movies that feature the glamorous rival assassin," I say, trying to get my head around what this signifies. "And this plot doesn't fit that mold. Not with Mo on her way out here."
"Mo? Your girlfriend?" Ramona gives me a hard-edged stare.
I look around. The shelves are covered in business administration titles with an admixture of first editions of Ian Fleming novels — boosters for the geas, at a guess — and the portholes show me a view of a dark blue sea beneath a turquoise sky.
"She said she was coming out here right after she finished reaming Angleton," I add, and wait for the double take.
"I find that hard to believe," Ramona says primly. "I've read her dossier. She's just an academic who stumbled into some classified topics!"