Close to, Smolin was an even more impressive figure, and his quick response to Bond’s anxious look showed an intelligent and observant awareness.
‘And your people are well trained in how to kill and not quite kill, I’m sure.’ He almost added Smolin’s name, but held back.
‘Trained to perfection, my dear sir.’
Smolin spoke nearly faultless English, though a discerning ear would pick up the fact that it was just a shade too perfect. His charm of manner took Bond by surprise, yet behind it there was an undeniable sense of absolute power and confidence. Smolin was a man who expected to be obeyed, who knew that he would always be in control. He was somewhat taller than Bond had supposed from his previous two sightings, and his body was fit and well-muscled under the expensive anorak, cavalry twill trousers and rollneck.
Smolin looked hard at Bond and there was the trace of humour in his dark, slightly oval eyes. The smile around his mouth appeared amused rather than mocking.
‘May I ask what all this is about?’
Bond had to speak loudly above the engine noise and rattling of the swaying ambulance. Either the driver was unused to handling such a vehicle or they were indeed on a difficult mountain road. The smile turned into a short, almost pleasant chuckle.
‘Oh, come on now, James Bond, you know well enough what it’s about.’
‘I know that I was giving a lift to a lady friend of mine, and suddenly I find we’re kidnapped.’ He paused, then added with mock puzzlement, ‘And you know my name! How the hell do you know my name anyway?’
This time Smolin gave a full-blooded laugh. ‘Bond, my dear good fellow, don’t make me into a fool.’ He nodded his head towards Heather. ‘Do you know who your lady friend is and what she has done? I suspect you know exactly what she has done and exactly who I am. After all, my file is with many foreign agencies. Surely the British Secret Intelligence Service has a dossier on me, just as my own Service has one on you? You know everything about the operation called Cream Cake, and I would be most surprised if you did not have all the details of the punishment at present being dealt out to its protagonists.’
‘Cream Cake?’ Even Bond was pleased with the convincing mixture of query, bewilderment and surprise.
‘Operation Cream Cake.’
‘I know nothing about cream cakes – or chocolate éclairs!’ Bond was pacing himself now, allowing time to build up a good, healthy anger. ‘I do know that Heather asked me to give her a lift . . .’
Smolin gave a rueful smile. ‘Would this be after the little problem in her beauty salon last night?’
‘What problem?’
‘You’re trying to tell me that you were not the man who was with her when some ill-advised idiots tried to kill her in London? That you’re not the man who drove her to the airport . . .’ A hint of uncertainty crept into the smile.
‘I bumped into her in the departure lounge at Heathrow.’ Bond stared at him unwaveringly. ‘I’ve met her only once before. Look, what’s this all about? And why did you set up that road block? Are you a terrorist involved in the North or something?’
He was sizing up the opposition while playing for time. Heather still lay unconscious, Smolin sat quite close to him and the four other men were distributed around the ambulance. Two were in front, the other two by the doors. All were clinging on hard for the roller coaster ride. He could not drag the charade on for much longer and, as they had disarmed him, neither could he contemplate escape.
‘If I didn’t know who you are and had not watched you making your own security precautions, I might just wonder if I’d got the wrong man.’ Smolin was smiling again. ‘But the set-up, together with the weapons you were carrying. Well . . .’ He allowed the conclusion to hang in the air.
‘And what of your set-up?’ Bond asked innocently.
‘I suspect the arrangements were exactly as you would have made in similar circumstances. We had a back-up in radio contact watching you while we went on ahead. We simply closed off the far end of the road a mile farther on. Then we shut off the road behind you when we had you in our zone. It’s the old funnel principle.’
Bond could dissemble no longer. ‘They teach you those kind of skills in that centre of yours on the old Khodinka airfield, do they Colonel Smolin? The place where most of you end up, one way or another, either neat in a box in the crematorium, or alive and screaming because you’ve betrayed your Service – the organisation you jokingly call “The Aquarium”? Or do you learn them in your offices on Knamensky Street?’
‘So, Bond, you do know about my Service. You know about GRU. And you know about me too. I’m flattered – and happy that I was right about you.’
‘Of course I know, along with anyone who takes the trouble to read the right books. We have a saying in my Service that the tricks of our trade are far from secret. You have only to find the right bookshops in the Charing Cross Road and you can learn it all: tradecraft, addresses, organisation. It just requires a little reading.’
‘Rather more than that, I suspect.’
‘Perhaps, because the GRU likes to let the KGB have the glory, pretending to be backseat boys who bow to the grey men of Dzerzhinsky Square. Yes, we do know you’re more fanatical, more secretive and therefore more dangerous.’
Smolin’s smile was overtly happy. ‘Much more dangerous. Good, I’m glad we know where we stand. It has been a longheld ambition of mine to meet you face to face, Mr Bond. Was it you, perhaps, who concocted the ill-conceived Cream Cake plan?’
‘There you have me, Colonel Smolin. I know nothing of such an operation.’
One of the drivers shouted something from the front of the ambulance and Smolin said, almost apologetically, that they would soon have to take measures to ensure Bond and Heather were silent. The ambulance slowed down, lurched, leaned heavily to the left so that it was necessary to hang on tight as they bumped over rough ground. Gradually they rumbled to a halt. From the front came the sound of the cab door being slammed shut. Then the rear doors were opened and a short, red-faced man dressed in the dark uniform of an ambulance driver peered in.
‘They are not here yet, Herr Colonel,’ he said to Smolin in German.
The Colonel merely nodded in an off-hand way, and told them to watch and wait. Bond craned his neck in an attempt to see out of the rear. A view of trees backed by rocky slopes bore out his original feeling that they had taken a route into the bleak Wicklow hills.
‘Get the girl ready.’
Smolin half turned his head, giving the order to one of the men in the front. The man fumbled with a briefcase and Bond saw a hypodermic syringe being prepared. He made a move towards the syringe bearer, whose partner immediately produced an automatic pistol, the muzzle pointing steadily at Bond. Smolin raised an arm, as though both protecting and restraining Bond.
‘It’s all right. The girl will not be harmed, but I think she should be put under a mild sedation for a while. We have a long drive ahead, and I don’t want her to be conscious. You, friend Bond, will lie on the floor in the back of the car that will arrive at any minute. You will have your face covered and as long as you behave, no harm will come to you.’ He paused, smiled, then added, ‘Yet!’
Heather moved slightly and groaned, as though regaining consciousness. The man with the syringe quietly prepared her for the injection, which he gave skilfully, sliding the needle through the skin of her bared forearm at a neatly calculated angle.
‘So, James Bond, you say that you know nothing of any operation coded Cream Cake?’
Bond shook his head.
‘And I suppose,’ Smolin continued, ‘you’ve never heard of Irma Wagen?’
‘It’s a name not known to me.’
‘But you do know Heather Dare?’
‘I met her once before we saw each other in the airport departure lounge, yes.’
‘And where did you meet her, “once before the airport departure lounge”?’
‘At a party. Through friends.’
‘Fr
iends as in professional friends? I believe, in the terminology of your Service, “friends” are other members of that Service. Or, at least, your Foreign Office refers to them as “the Friends”.’
‘Ordinary friends. A couple called Hazlett – Tom and Maria Hazlett.’
He gave an address in Hampstead, knowing it could be checked with impunity, for Tom and Maria were an active alibi couple. If asked, even in a roundabout way, whether they knew Bond or Heather they would answer, ‘Yes, and isn’t Heather wonderful?’ or ‘Of course, James is an old friend.’ They would also have a surveillance team on to the questioners in double quick time. That was what the Service had trained them to do.
‘So you would claim you did not know that Irma Wagen and Heather Dare of the Dare To Be Chic beauty salon are the same person?’
‘I’ve never heard of any Irma Wagen.’
‘No. No, of course you haven’t, James. You must call me Maxim by the way. I do not respond to the diminutive, Max. No, you haven’t heard of Irma, neither of the doomed Cream Cake operation.’ His smile did not change, but the disbelief rang through his words. Then he came out and said it aloud. ‘I just do not believe you, James Bond. I cannot believe you.’
‘Please yourself.’ Bond gave the impression of complete lack of concern.
‘Where were you driving Fräulein Wagen, whom you know as Heather Dare?’
‘To Enniscorthy.’
‘Why should she want to go to Enniscorthy?’ Smolin shook his head, as though to underline his disbelief. ‘And where were you going that enabled you to be able to help her that way?’
‘We simply recognised each other at the airport and sat next to one another on the aeroplane. I told her I was going to Waterford and she asked if she could cadge a lift.’
‘What were you going to do in Waterford?’
‘Buy glass, what else? I’m very fond of Waterford crystal.’
‘Of course you are. And it’s so difficult to buy in London, isn’t it?’ The heavy sarcasm betrayed Smolin’s Russian side.
‘I am on leave, Herr Colonel Smolin. I repeat, I know of no Irma Wagen and have never heard of an operation called Cream Cake.’
‘We shall see,’ Smolin replied smoothly. ‘But just to clear the air, I will tell you what we know of this ludicrously named operation. It was what used to be called a honeytrap. Your people baited it with four very young and attractive girls.’ He held up four fingers, grasping one for each name, as though ticking them off. ‘There was Franzi Trauben, Elli Zuckermann, Irma Wagen and Emilie Nikolas.’ He laughed pleasantly again. ‘Emilie is a good name when you consider that we always spoke of our honeytrap targets as Emilies. But you know all that.’ He ran a hand through his dark hair. ‘Each of these girls had a well placed target, and they might have got away with it but for the fact that I was included.’ Suddenly his whole demeanour altered. ‘They used me as a target for their games. Me, Maxim Smolin, as though I could be caught and netted by a slip of a girl with about as much idea of how to set up an entrapment as a raw recruit.’ His voice rose. ‘That’s what I can never forgive your people for doing. Sicking an amateur on me; so amateur that she gave the game away within minutes of her first pass at me, and eventually brought down the whole nasty little network. Your Service, Bond, took me for some kind of fool! A professional would have been different but an amateur like her,’ he jabbed a finger towards Heather’s prone body, ‘an amateur I can never forgive.’
So, this was the real Smolin – proud, arrogant, and unforgiving.
‘Surel y the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye also uses casual labour from time to time, Maxim?’ Bond asked the question with the ghost of a smile.
‘Casual labour?’ A fine spray of spittle clouded the air in front of Smolin’s lips as he spat the words out. ‘Of course we would train casual labour but never would we use it against a target of my importance.’
There he had it. My importance. Colonel Maxim Smolin regarded himself as inviolable, essential to the smooth running of one of the topmost secret organisations within the Soviet Union. The other was Bond’s older enemy, the onetime smersh, now totally reorganised as Department 8 of Directorate S, following their loss of credibility as Department V as in Victor. Smolin was breathing heavily, and Bond felt that old and ice-cold hand trace an invisible finger down his spine, an indication of fear. He recognised the stone-hard face of a killer, the muscular body, that brightness in the dark eyes.
From far away came the sound of a car’s horn. It gave three short blasts followed by a longer one.
‘They’re here,’ said Smolin, speaking again in German.
The ambulance doors were opened, revealing the full view of green slopes strewn with outcrops of grey rock and a half circle of trees. They were parked well off the road. Two cars, a BMW and a Mercedes, were making slow progress towards them. Bond looked at Smolin and cocked his head towards Heather.
‘I honestly have no knowledge of this Cream Cake business.’ He spoke quietly, hoping that in his blind rage Smolin might believe him. ‘It sounds more like a BND job than our people . . .’ Smolin turned. ‘It was your Service, James Bond. I have proof, believe me; just as you must believe we’ll sweat you until your very bones turn to water. There are still a couple of mysteries that need solving, and I’m here to solve them.’
‘Mysteries?’
The cars were near now and two of the men had descended from the ambulance, preparing for the transfer of their prisoners.
‘We have dealt with two of that nest of spiders – Trauben and Zuckermann. You might recognise them better as Bridget Hammond and Millicent Zampek. They were small fry, but they had to be squashed. This girl – my girl – may hold some of the answers in her tiny brain; and there’s another yet to come. Nikolas – Ebbie Heritage. Those two, and you, should fill in the gaps before we send you to hell and damnation.’
If he wanted Heather and Ebbie alive, why had he sent the thug with the mallet and the two who chased them down the fire escape? Smolin had spoken of the incident earlier as ‘some ill-advised idiots trying to kill her’. The most devious of ideas filtered into Bond’s mind as he watched Heather being carried to the Mercedes. He was surprised to see the driver loading the packages they had bought in Dublin into the boot. They had moved with great speed, Bond thought, to get everything out of his rented car in so short a time. But then the GRU were organised on military principles and the kidnap would be run with military precision. This was the first time he had been up against the GRU, and he was impressed by their strict standards.
In Moscow, they worked out of that decorative mansion at 19 Knamensky Street – once the property of a Tsarist millionaire – and were constantly at loggerheads with the KGB, who always claimed to have the upper hand, even though the GRU, by virtue of its military roots, was effectively set apart from the larger and better known intelligence and security service.
He felt Smolin’s arm on his shoulders.
‘Your turn, Mr Bond.’
They frogmarched him to the BMW, where they drew a thick sack over his head, handcuffed his wrists securely behind his back and forced him on to the floor. The sack smelled of grain, making his throat dry in a matter of minutes. He heard the sound of the ambulance starting up, and felt Smolin’s feet pressing down on his back as he took his seat. A moment later, the car started and they began to move away.
Smolin had said, ‘The honeytrap . . . was baited with four very young and attractive girls.’ Only the four girls had been mentioned. He had not spoken of Jungle Baisley and Fräulein Captain Dietrich, whom Heather had described as one of the two prime targets. Why? As he concentrated on trying to deduce their speed and direction, a more sinister scheme began to take shape. Was Jungle not yet blown as a member of the network? Had M performed a neat piece of misdirection when briefing him, or was there something more dangerous at work? Was there a connection with Norman Murray’s rumour of an officer more senior to Smolin in the field? Was Smolin under pressure?
He remembered Murray’s smiling face as he said, ‘Maxim Smolin . . . a stupid code name – Basilisk.’ Bond delved into what little he knew of mythology. The basilisk was a particularly revolting monster hatched from a cockerel’s egg by a serpent. Even the purest and most innocent humans perished by looking at the basilisk’s eyes. The creature would lay the whole world to waste but for its two enemies, the cockerel and the weasel. The weasel was immune and the basilisk died at the sound of a cock’s crow.
Bond wondered whether he was a cock, a weasel, or neither.
9
SCHLOSS GRUESOME
By Bond’s reckoning, they drove for roughly three hours. After half that time he lost all sense of direction, although his instincts told him they were crossing their own path again and again. In the dark, stuffy sack, cramped and uncomfortable on the floor of the car, he tried to work out exactly where they might be heading. When he was forced to abandon this, he began to examine the various theories that had first come to mind in the ambulance.
He did not doubt that Smolin’s threat to get a full rundown on Cream Cake from them would be carried out. The man’s reputation was enough to convince him of that. If Norman Murray’s vague information bore any truth, Smolin might not be entirely his own man. If the huge arrogance he had shown in the ambulance had been dented, it could be that the GRU officer would act irrationally and that could be Bond’s lever. He knew that it was now up to him somehow to influence events.
They stopped once. Smolin did not leave the car but said to Bond, ‘Your lady friend appears to have woken up, so they’re taking her for a short walk. She is quite safe. She will anyway remain docile for a while yet.’
Bond moved, trying to shift his position, but Smolin’s heel came down hard on one shoulder, almost causing him to shout with pain. He realised that his interrogation, when it came, would not be conducted along sophisticated lines but rather in an atmosphere of brutality.
Eventually they seemed to leave the well made road and follow an upward course on a rougher track. They were moving at around thirty miles an hour and bouncing a good deal. Then they met a good surface, turned slightly and came to a halt. He heard the engines dying and doors opening. He felt fresh air on his body. Smolin moved and hands pulled away the sack and freed his wrists.