Babushka put her gun into her pocket and nodded towards the man holding Fairburn. She said something quickly that James didn’t understand and the man smiled. He let go of Fairburn and chopped him in the side of the neck with the edge of his palm. He then flung him to one side, where he flopped lifelessly to the ground.
The Russian now climbed on to the platform and advanced on James, his good hand raised.
He was going to push James into the fan.
James had thought of all the colourful ways in which he might die.
Being chewed up by a fan was not on his list.
He got into a crouch, readying himself.
The man grunted and rushed at him.
At the last moment James flung himself backwards, hoping that he had judged it correctly.
He landed on the wooden walkway, flat on his back, and he cried out with the pain.
The big Russian found himself clutching at thin air. He teetered off-balance on the lip of the huge hole, his arms windmilling, his mouth open in a wide O of surprise.
As he toppled forward he made a grab for the walkway.
He missed.
The fan sucked him down into its teeth.
James heard an awful slicing sound and a series of thumps. There was a metallic grating and a grinding of gears and the whine of overloaded machinery, and then vicious shards of broken metal exploded upward out of the hole.
Sparks sprayed out from a junction box on the wall, the amber light flickered, and with a bang, the fan’s engine shut down, the noise dying away like a last breath.
James looked up. Far above he could see an iron grille and blue sky beyond.
The fog had cleared and it looked like a beautiful, crisp winter’s day.
There would be people up there, going about their business.
It was a Monday morning, the shops would be open. The streets of London would be busy with Christmas shoppers.
It was a normal day. They would have no idea what was going on down here, twenty feet beneath the pavement.
He patted his body to check that nothing more was broken, and his hand felt something in his pocket.
In the dead silence that followed the shut down, Babushka walked over to the wooden structure and climbed up on to the platform. She wasn’t quite sure what she would see when she peered over the edge into the hole. The fan would have made quite a mess of the two bodies.
What she never expected to see was the boy, lying on his back above the broken fan, his arm outstretched, a pistol in his hand.
James had completely forgotten he had it, and now it was aimed squarely at Babushka’s head.
She smiled. ‘Stalemate,’ she said.
‘Looks like it,’ said James.
‘You won’t shoot me, though. You’re just a boy.’
‘Won’t I?’ said James. ‘You think I won’t do it just because you’re an old woman?’
‘I am not so old.’
‘And I am not so young,’ said James.
Babushka smiled. ‘You remind me of my own son,’ she said. ‘He is a strong, brave boy.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ said James. ‘Don’t try and play and get me on your side. You don’t have a son.’
‘You are right. They call me Babushka, the Grandmother, because all Russian boys are my children. All of her soldiers. Russia is a beautiful country, but she has seen so much sadness. You would like Russia…’
James realised what she was doing. She was trying to throw him off his guard. She had seen that he was weak and growing weaker by the minute. He could hardly hold the weight of the pistol. Already it was wavering.
‘Shut up,’ he said.
‘You will not shoot me.’
James thought about it. Could he kill someone? He remembered the awful photographs at the Royal College of Surgeons, men with half their faces gone. Could he do that to this woman? It was a terrible thing, to take someone’s life.
He felt very cold and alone.
He knew the answer.
Babushka knew the answer too. She could see it in his eyes. This boy was different.
‘Will you let me go?’ she said quietly. ‘I know now that you could pull that trigger.’ She paused. ‘But you do not want to, do you? So, will you let me go? Just let me walk away from here. I ask you this as one soldier to another. You have what you wanted. You have Fairburn. The machine is gone.’
James’s vision was dimming. He could hear his blood dripping down into the ruined fan.
Enough people had died today.
‘Go,’ he said hoarsely.
Babushka saluted him, slipped over the edge of the hole and climbed down past him through the ruined fan.
It was over at last.
James closed his eyes and slept. It could have been for a few seconds or it could have been for a few years, but when he opened his eyes again he was lying on the chamber floor with Kelly Kelly peering down at him.
There was concern in her deep brown eyes, but her wide mouth was smiling. She looked very beautiful.
‘She knocked you about a bit, didn’t she?’ she said.
James nodded. ‘I think my collarbone’s broken.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have let you go off without me,’ said Kelly. ‘You know you can’t look after yourself.’
Perry’s face appeared next to Kelly’s.
‘It’s never a dull m-moment with you, eh, James?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Sorry I couldn’t help, banged my head again, luckily I’ve no brains to dislodge.’
Perry’s voice was coming from far, far away. He was at the other end of a tunnel.
‘Watch it. Stay awake, old chap,’ said Perry. ‘We need you conscious if we’re going to get you out of here in one piece.’
‘Sorry,’ said James. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Red’s gone to get help,’ said Perry. ‘Some good strong lads.’
‘I could certainly do with some help,’ said James.
They got James to his feet. Then Perry went to check on Fairburn who was sitting up on the floor looking dazed and confused.
Kelly put her arm around James and he could feel the warmth of her body.
‘Talk to me,’ he said.
‘I thought I talked too much.’
‘Never,’ said James. ‘I love to hear you talk. It’s the nicest sound in the world.’
‘And what about m-me?’ said Perry, bringing Fairburn over to them.
‘Like the singing of a lark in springtime,’ said James.
‘Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?’
‘At least you make me laugh,’ said James and his vision dimmed.
Perry shook him. ‘I say,’ he said, propping him up so that he was supported between him and Kelly, ‘you never finished telling m-me what you were going to do with all that m-money.’
‘Well,’ said James, ‘the Bamford and Martin’s gone to the big garage in the sky, but there’s a lovely wreck behind a pub in Slough that needs some attention.’
‘You sly dog,’ snorted Perry. ‘You’re going to buy the Bentley!’
***
Twelve years later, at the close of the Second World War, Commander James Bond R.N.V.R. drove his lovingly restored 41/2 litre Bentley convertible to a secret location fifty miles north-west of London. Over the years he had made some modifications to the car and added an Amherst Villliers supercharger. She was big and powerful and painted battleship grey.
The secret location was known in the service only as Station X and it was located at Bletchley Park. Station X was Britain’s best-kept secret. It was here during the war that a brilliant team of scientists had worked night and day to break Nazi Germany’s toughest military codes.
To do it they had built the world’s first working semi-programmable computer.
Bond arrived to find the place being packed up and mothballed. Nobody was to know for a very long time what had gone on here. Even Bond himself had been told only what he needed to know – that he was to take a
code breaker back to London for debriefing at the ministry headquarters, and that he was never to talk about it to anyone else.
As he entered the main hall of the big house at the centre of the Bletchley complex, he saw a man standing lost in thought, staring out of the window at the rain.
He was perfectly ordinary-looking, but something about him seemed familiar, and, when he turned and saw Bond, he too frowned in recognition.
‘Don’t I know you?’ he said.
‘Probably shouldn’t say,’ said Bond. ‘This is all supposed to be very hush-hush.’
‘I know,’ said the man, and he raised his eyebrows, humour sparkling in his eyes. ‘But I’ve never been very good at all that cloak-and-dagger stuff. Were you at Cambridge?’
‘Afraid not,’ said James, and then it struck him. The man was Alan Turing, the student he had met that day at Trinity all those years ago. The young man who had been working with Professor Peterson.
Before he could say anything, however, there was a shout from across the room.
‘James? James Bond?’
Now James got his second surprise of the day. The man who he was to take down to London was none other than Alexis Fairburn. His hair wilder, his nose and ears even bigger.
On the way back to town in the Bentley, Fairburn told James a little about Bletchley Park. There were many men like him there: mathematicians, code breakers, cipher experts, cryptologists.
‘And crossword addicts?’ Bond shouted over the noise of the Bentley’s supercharged engine.
‘Them too,’ Fairburn yelled back. ‘As a matter of fact, one of the tests for applicants at the beginning of the war was to complete a cryptic crossword.’
James laughed. ‘Hell of a way to fight a war!’ he said.
‘In the future,’ said Fairburn, ‘wars are going to be fought more and more by men like me, and less and less by men like you.’
‘Oh, they’ll always need someone who can knock a few heads together,’ said Bond and he turned and grinned at Fairburn.
‘I’d love to talk,’ said Fairburn, ‘but I’m afraid I’m sworn to secrecy.’
‘I’m just thinking out loud here, you understand,’ said Bond, ‘but my guess is that you’ve been working on something like the Nemesis machine.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Fairburn. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing. After my run in with Charnage and the Russians I wanted nothing more to do with superbrains and thinking machines. I wanted to put all that stuff out of my mind for good, but the war effort, the evil of the Nazis… I wanted to help.’
‘I expect they couldn’t have done it without you.’
‘Ah. Not me, I’m afraid,’ said Fairburn. ‘Alan Turing. He’s the clever one. His ideas are way ahead of mine. Charnage kidnapped the wrong man. Do you know, I still to this day have no idea if my Nemesis machine would have worked. I sometimes dream about it. Being back there, in that hot and sweaty hold on the Amoras, my machine chattering away. They’re the future, Bond, these machines. We’ve barely scraped the surface of what they could be used for.’
‘Well, your secret’s safe with me,’ said Bond. ‘I never did understand how your machine worked and exactly what it did. As you say, I’m just a foot soldier. I tend to solve problems with my fists, or with a gun, and I suppose I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life trying to sort out the problems that the clever people of this world make for the rest of us.’
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
The Hungry Machine
Part One: FRIDAY
1
Thoughts in a Bamford and Martin Tourer
2
Stevens and Oliver
3
The Raid on Codrose’s
4
Apex X
5
Gordius
6
Shoot the Moon
7
A Lovely Wreck
8
See Cambridge and Die
9
The Smith Brothers
Part Two: SATURDAY
10
The Big Smoke
11
Scrambled Eggs
12
A Clarinet Sang in Berkeley Square
13
Breaking the Code
14
Soft Tissue
15
It’s Your Funeral
16
Carcass Row
17
Paradice
18
What’s Your Poison?
19
A Volatile Substance
Part Three: SUNDAY
20
The Monstrous Regiment
21
The Knight Who Did a Deal With the Devil
22
The Pneumatic Railway
23
Into the Lion’s Jaws
24
Nemesis
25
The Empress of the East
26
Babushka
27
Wake Up or Die
28
Out of the Fog
29
The Eyes of a Killer
Charlie Higson, Double or Die
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