The two FBI men left, Eddie walking very purposefully, head down in his charging bull mode.
As he got his two bags together, Bond hesitated, wondering if he should keep his automatic on him or pack it back into the briefcase’s secure compartment. He felt edgy, his nerves strung out as though stretched to their limit. He went out onto the balcony and took several deep breaths, trying to think through the various possible reasons for Sukie to have died a counterfeit death.
The answers to every equation came up skewed and unpleasant. People change, he reasoned. When he had worked with Sukie all those years ago, her elderly husband had already died, but she insisted that her stepsons were just plain and ordinary businessmen.
She had been in danger then, but that was because of him, and the maze of the operation in which he was embroiled. She had not become part of that de up with?’
If you blow the lid off and they cancel the proceedings, we’ll still see that every likely candidate rtain that the
21
ANTIFREEZE
They waited for almost two hours before the car, with Pete at the wheel, turned into the driveway. Pete, Bond recognized, was the driver who had brought him from the hotel.
While they waited, Prime and Long busied themselves cleaning up the house, and Eddie sat staring into space.
‘Penny for them, Ed?’
‘Hey, James. I’m just a tiny bit worried about any leaks. They’re tracking Beatrice’s homer and she seems to be moving around kinda normally; but I hope to heaven I’m not sending the pair of you in to some kinda ambush.’
Bond nodded. ‘Know what you mean, Eddie, but it’s a chance we have to take. As you people say, I believe, it goes with the territory. If anything gets crazy early on, I presume Beatrice will hit the Mayday button.’
‘She will, and, incidentally, I’ve decided to move things forward a day as far as the first troop is concerned. The guys will now be in position late on Friday night. That’s why I’m anxious to get to Pisa as soon as possible. At least once we’re there I can get that fixed up and also make certain one team is standing at the ready as from tonight. Just in case.’
A second car turned into the driveway. ‘Good,’ from Eddie. ‘That’s Joe, our other driver.’ He raised his voice, ‘Okay guys, get the two phonies down here, in shackles. They’ve got a long flight ahead of them.’
They brought Kzolowitz, and his sidekick – whose real name turned out to be a rather prosaic John Betts – down from the secure room and put them in the lead car with Long who still had his Colt .45 in view.
It took the best part of forty-five minutes to drive out to the airport, where they went through a security checkpoint: the drivers showing authorization passes as they went. For the first time, Bond realized that both cars had tinted windows and the airport security people did not attempt to lean in to see who was inside.
They drew up close to the gangway of an anonymous-looking C-20 Gulfstream III. A young man in grey flannels and smart blazer – obviously FBI acting as a steward – came bounding down the steps to assist Long with the two prisoners, while Eddie remained seated until they were all aboard.
‘I want all of us up there and in the aircraft in double-quick time,’ Eddie commanded. ‘Doc Drake first, then you, James, and you’ll find me right behind you. We’re pretty well hidden from any possible cameras but I’m not taking no chances.’
Not for the first time, Bond noticed that, in moments of stress, Eddie’s grammar seem*ouEeither ed to go a shade awry.
Almost before they got into the aircraft, the pilots started the engines, and one of them came on the PA system telling them they would be under way in a matter of minutes as they had immediate clearance. He also gave the flying time to Pisa and added, ‘Those of you who will be making the onward flight to Washington DC with us will be pleased to hear that our steward, Michael, will be serving you with a full meal tonight. The rest of you only get coffee for the Pisa leg of the trip.’
It was around nine forty-five when they landed at Pisa.
Long and Prime were going on with the two prisoners, while Doc Drake and Eddie were staying with Bond through the entire operation. Prime even gave Bond a chaste kiss on the cheek as he left. Long shook his hand and they both wished him good luck. Eddie raised his eyebrows when Prime was out of earshot, and remarked that the kiss was a first in his experience.
MacRoberts was waiting for them in the back of a limo, with the partition closed off so that the military driver could not listen in to the conversation.
‘They’ve assured me nobody’s got any information out. The senior officers seem to be very conscious of the stealth required,’ he began. Then he pointed out the facts. First, nobody except the three troop leaders and the overall commander had known any details concerning Antifreeze before they were brought into the special facility which lay at the far side of the airport. ‘There are no public telephones, and the troops aren’t allowed to use any of the very few official phones. All calls are automatically logged, and must have an explanation of the call noted. It’s all computerized, and there can’t be any slip-ups.’
‘Yeah,’ Eddie drawled, ‘nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong.’
However, once they were inside the large barracks building, he seemed to relax, and by the time he had spent an hour with the Commanding Officer – a General Bolletti – he had become even more positive, announcing to the members of his team that one troop was being briefed now and would be on permanent standby within the hour. ‘The general tells me they can be airborne in a matter of five minutes. If you look outside, you’ll see the two converted RC-12M aircraft just a spit away. These guys’re on the ball.’
Bond was given a room to himself, up on the second floor, and, while the place was run on a strict military basis, he was kept apart from the troops, except for one viewing when he was paraded in front of the entire force so they would be able to recognize him in the field.
This was done on the following morning, after which Eddie and one of the troop commanders had a long discussion regarding Bond’s infiltration. They decided that a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) jump was too risky. The DZ was limited, and they would be flying relatively close to high ground which swept up from the back of the Villa Tempesta, climbing rapidly once past the more or less flat open land behind the villa into which the first troop would now be moving, on foot, in the early hours of Friday morning.
Beatrice had been told when to expect him to parachute in – mainly so that she could set the misdirection whizz-bang in the boathouse – and the young pilot assigned to the task was the one who made the ultimate suggestion. He was convinced that he could reach the end of the lake, above the area close to Puccini’s house, at around ten thousand feet. Then, he told them, he could cut the engine of the little Cessna he was going to fly, and so glide noiselessly over the lake, arriving silently over the DZ at around eight hundred feet. This would make for an
[email protected] riIQ jump which would put Bond right on target.
During the rest of the week a lot of time was spent discussing what he should take in with him – apart from the electronic Mayday flashers. They wanted him to wear a wetsuit in case he was forced into the water, but he vetoed this in favour of a normal jump suit. He also demanded comfortable canvas shoes, not military-style boots. As for arms he was concerned only with taking his own automatic pistol and four extra magazines – one lightly taped to the butt for speed loading. He also chose the old style Sykes-Fairburn commando dagger because it was the one with which he was most familiar and expert. Against Eddie’s advice, he refused grenades, flash-bangs, smoke or any other explosives. ‘I think the Italian lads will have enough to go around – if we get that far.’
Once this had been settled, he spent the remaining days alternating between resting and taking violent exercise in the gymnasium, which was cleared for him at certain times of day. He worried a little, not so much about the upcoming operation, but for Beatrice, even though each morning and evening the FB
I people told him that she appeared to be moving about the villa and estate perfectly normally.
Late on the Thursday morning, the troop that would be in the field behind the house, left by helicopter to be taken to the vantage point from which they could reach the DZ by the early hours of Friday. Once there and safely hidden they would send back regular reports. The first of these came on the Friday morning, with the news that a team of caterers had been brought into the villa by the lake.
Looking at the report, Eddie said, ‘Seems they’re getting themselves ready for one heckuva big party. Plenty of booze and lots of stuff to eat – from the soup to the nuts.’
‘Ask them if it looks as though the caterers are staying on, or leaving waiters behind.’
When the afternoon report came in, it appeared that the caterers had left and everything was being kept in refrigerators. Bond recalled that the kitchen and cooking area seemed to be at the back of the house, so he presumed that the troops were getting in very close with binoculars.
The Cessna took off at just a little before one in the morning, and at one forty-five his pilot gave him the thumbs-up, cutting his engine at just over ten thousand feet and starting to glide down in a long spiral towards the area of the villa.
Bond watched the altimeter unwinding and at two thousand feet he slid back the door on the right-hand side, the pilot using a lot of rudder to maintain control with the wind buffeting inside the cockpit.
They had maintained radio silence so now the pilot yelled a good luck at him, telling him to watch for the Morse Code flash from the DZ. Bond nodded and climbed halfway out onto the wing strut.
Just as he saw the light glimmer up ahead, he was also aware of a larger flash and thud from the direction of the boathouse. Beatrice was doing her work. He peered into the darkness until he saw the pinpoint of light almost directly beneath him. Then he pushed off and felt that old, wonderful tingle as he fell, arms and legs outstretched, into the darkness below. He pulled the cord almost straight away, still enjoying what he usually thought of as one of the ultimate highs, dropping unfettered towards an earth he could not see. The jerk on his harness seemed only a light pull, and when he peered upwards, he could not even see his canopy which was matt black for this night jump.
A whole series of memories flickered across his mind: night jumps when the ground had come up sooner than estimated; night jumps when he had hit turbulence and started to oscillate almost out of control.
[email protected] riIQ it was picture-perfect: he was able to judge his angle of descent; spill air from the canopy; he felt the ground effect as soon as it was close, and broid="MSDIK">&ls
22
DIE LIKE A GENTLEMAN
‘Oh, put the gun away, James. Don’t be foolish,’ Sukie continued, as the huge man who was Kauffburger took a pace forward. He had the face of an idiot child, the kind of inbred relic you used to find in rural areas, places where incest still thrived among small, lonely communities.
He felt his finger take up the pressure on the trigger, then, with alarming speed, Kauffburger was on him, one hand crushing like a vice around his right wrist, twisting and causing a sharp burst of unbearable pain as the gun fell from his fingers.
‘Guns is dangerous,’ Kauffbuiger’s voice was a deep monotone, slow and searching as though he genuinely had to call up the words from his brain before they would form a sentence. ‘Shouldn’t play with guns. They can hurt people. I know that ’cause when I was little kid I played with my daddy’s gun and it went off. Killed my baby brother. We had to put him in the ground ’cause he was deader ’n a doornail.’ The man’s big foot made a small movement and the gun skittered across the floor.
Bond, massaging his wrist, looked at Beatrice who glanced back, her eyes asking if she should hit the Mayday button? He simply moved his own eyes from left to right, signalling ‘No’ without turning his head.
‘You’re dead,’ he said, looking straight at Sukie.
‘I know. It’s wonderful being dead. You can move across frontiers and go all over the place with a new name. But now I’m about to come into my true inheritance.’
Bond recalled meeting her in the hotel at Dulles International, and the strange way she had acted at times. There had been something very odd about her then. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kauffburger leering at Beatrice, and Sukie spoke sharply to him, telling him to back off.
‘How did you manage that trick? Getting yourself blown up with a car bomb?’ He forced his voice to come out in a relaxed slow drawl, drawing attention to the fact that he was not in any way concerned about his situation.
Sukie Tempesta laughed. She had altered terribly, her hair dyed almost frost-white, her eyes narrow and speaking of a kind of madness. ‘You almost spoiled all that, James Bond. I had two reasons for being at Dulles. The first you can probably guess . . .’
He suddenly knew what she meant. ‘Flight BD 299.’ He said it aloud, not really thinking about it, yet once more seeing the horror as he had done first in M’s office: the big jet touching down, then the flowering death, spurting flame and smoke leaping from inside the Boeing 747–400,
[email protected] attering burning remains of both aircraft and passengers along the runway.
Sukie was speaking again, and it came out like a voice-over on the screen of his mind which reran the vivid images that had been the start of all this. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I had the remote. You know the security at Dulles is rather poor. I stood there inside the building and watched as the plane came in. I had the remote in my pocket and they told me that it had a range of almost three miles. I could have sat in a coffee shop and done it, but I wanted to make certain. There was this man, you see . . .’
Once more he saw the slyness in her eyes, more prominent now than it had been in the Dulles hotel. ‘I know all about Julian Carter,’ he said.
‘Clever you. He was a blackmailer, James. He deserved to die.’
‘With all those innocent people?’
She gave a vulpine grin. ‘Well, there was that, of course, but you see, we wanted to bankrupt Bradbury, and we did. What happened to him by the way? You never hear anything about Harley Bradbury these days.’
‘He’s making a come-back, actually. Some people are like that, they drop to rock bottom and then claw their way back.’
‘Good for old Harley. I suppose we should have killed him off like the others, but Luigi organized things so that he wasn’t even on that plane.’
Keep her talking, he thought. While she was talking, Sukie seemed to be in a dream world, reliving old triumphs. ‘So you were the button lady for BD 299. You said you came to Dulles for two reasons.’ He took half a step towards her, but Kauffburger moved over and gave him a slight push in the chest. A slight push from Kauffburger had him reeling back to the wall behind. ‘That man doesn’t know his own strength.’
Sukie was taking no notice, still off on a monologue of her own. ‘Yes, and you nearly messed up the whole thing, James. I actually had a room at that hotel. One there and one at the other place – the Hilton. I got the fright of my life when you came waltzing in. Though I’d never ruled you out. Carried that nice little forged note from you for a long time. Good, wasn’t it? You had to be turned to my advantage though. I quickly realized that. You would be a first-class witness of my terrible death. Clever of me, I think.’
‘Very clever, Sukie. You came up to my room and played games.’
‘Nice games, James – as long as a girl doesn’t take you too seriously.’ She shifted her eyes to look at Beatrice. ‘I do hope you don’t take this man too seriously, my dear. He’s your basic sexist: gathers himself cherries while he may, then when he’s had his fill, he just leaves the ladies feeling lonely and used.’ He heard her in the past, at their last meeting, bounding nervously from subject to subject, her mind out of control.
Beatrice stiffened and gave Sukie a look of contempt. ‘I’ve known James for a long time, and I’ve always found him to be a complete gentleman. What he does with girls is always fair play. I reckon
every female who’s been with him has done that of her own choosing – even you, Principessa. I bet you didn’t say no to him. I didn’t, and I had enough good sense to work it out. I knew the score. But, then, I’m lucky because he came back to me, and I think he’s probably here to stay.’
‘Oh, he’s here to stay all right. You’re here to stay as well, Beatrice. You’ve both earned the death sentence, I should imagine, and it’ll be carried out: quite soon if you don’t co-operate.
[email protected]; margin-bottom: ad dleow night if you decide to go along with what I shall propose.’
‘Sukie, how did you do it?’ Bond asked again.
‘Do what? Oh, my death and incineration. Yes, well . . . Yes, I came to do the airliner first. Then I was going to get myself killed. Your sudden appearance, James, was turned to my advantage as you now know.’ The sly child stirring deep in her eyes.
She went on talking until the whole story was out. She had stayed in the hotels near Washington Dulles International for ten days prior to being the trigger for the Bradbury Airlines disaster. During that time she shuttled between the two places, alternating nights at each and looking for the perfect victim. ‘It had to be somebody roughly my build and age,’ she told them, and she had found the perfect young woman at the Hilton. ‘She was Mexican, just a smidgen younger than me, but who was counting?’
Sukie had become friendly with the girl, who worked as a chambermaid on the floor where Sukie’s room was situated. ‘I could see that she’d be easy. She had that look. You know, the look that says “Why should she have it all? Why has she got money? Why can’t I get a better job and make more than they pay me here?” I played her like a fish, James. You would’ve been proud of me.’
‘I wonder.’
Eventually, Sukie had offered her a job in Italy as her personal maid, at a ludicrous salary. Nothing would be difficult. She would love it in Italy – especially with all that money. She could get the visa and work permit in no time. ‘And of course she fell for it. Yes, she said. When can I leave, she said.