Forever and a Day Page 9

  But that wasn’t going to happen today. He followed her through a door and into an office that ran the full length of the building with desks spaced out, like the windows, at precise intervals, the lights uniform and exactly placed, young men and women bent over typewriters and folders. Nobody looked up as they passed, he noticed. Nobody spoke. It may have been a company importing and distributing chemicals, but there was an almost military atmosphere in the place.

  They emerged on the other side and took an uncarpeted staircase up to the second floor. Both Bond and Reade Griffith, walking beside him, were wearing suits despite the heat of the day. He hoped that he looked like a middle-ranking executive from a reasonably successful British company. Once before, Bond had hidden behind the facade of Universal Export, a bland, almost meaningless name which managed to be both respectable and ambiguous. There was even a dedicated phone line within the Regent’s Park office of the secret service where an efficient young woman would field queries from anyone who called and might offer to put you through to ‘Mr Protheroe in sales’ – although it was an offer that was rarely taken up.

  The girl led them down a corridor and into a wide office where two windows framed an olive-skinned man who was sitting at a desk. To begin with, Bond ignored him, looking over his shoulders and out through the windows to the extensive loading bay beyond. There was a lot of activity. Men in overalls were shifting crates and oil drums, helped by forklift trucks that carried their loads into the open warehouses that surrounded them on three sides. More warehouses stretched out behind. Bond saw printed warning signs which echoed those on the quay. AVERTISSEMENT – PERSONNEL AUTORISÉ SEULEMENT. DANGER! Unlike the docks, there was clearly no stop for lunch with wine and cheeses here.

  He turned his attention to the man who had stood up to welcome them. Andria Mariani, the managing director of Ferrix Chimiques, was smiling pleasantly although the dark hair swept back over his forehead, the narrow eyes and aquiline nose had the effect of making him look both distant and disdainful. His grey suit provided an unappealing background for a burgundy tie stamped with a chintzy diamond motif. As he moved forward, there was something oily about his motion. His handshake was weak, unenthusiastic.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Plover. And Mr Howard, I believe. Please, will you be taking a seat. Coffee?’ He had a delicate voice that still succeeded in doing violence to the English language. His accent was both French and Italian, somewhere between the two.

  Bond and Griffith sat down. ‘No thank you, Mr Mariani,’ Griffith said.

  ‘That’s good then, Monique. You can go, please.’

  So the girl’s name was Monique! Bond remembered the name he had seen on the back of the postcard at the Rue Foncet. Suddenly everything was coming together and he wished he had examined her more closely, or at least more professionally, when she had greeted them. But she had already disappeared, gliding through the door and closing it behind her.

  He forced his attention back onto the man sitting opposite him. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Mariani,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure my agent, Mr Plover here, will have informed you, I represent a corporation in London that has recently moved into the field of agronomy. We have acquired extensive farmland in the West Country, Wales and Ireland – mainly fruit and vegetables, some dairy – and we need to buy large quantities of fertiliser and insecticide. I take it these are areas in which you operate.’

  ‘Mr Howard, we operate at every area. Feedstock, fertiliser, medicine, pharmaceutical products.’ He announced each word as if he had just found it in the dictionary. ‘Whatever you want, we can find it for you.’

  ‘Do you import from America?’

  ‘From China, Korea, India, Vietnam … many of our chemical product are from Asia. But also from America. Yes. Sometime.’

  ‘DDT?’

  ‘DDT, sure. But you know, Mr Howard, there are better chemical now. Cheaper and more effective. You hear of toxaphene? Or maybe dieldrin.’ He was suddenly suspicious. ‘You know these product?’

  ‘Of course,’ Bond replied, smoothly. ‘Dieldrin is an organic chloride. It’s developed in Denver, in America, I believe.’ He sighed apologetically. ‘And that’s the problem, Mr Mariani. Like everyone else in Great Britain, we have to deal with import quotas.’ He glanced at Griffith as if seeking his approval. ‘It might be very helpful to us, actually, if we were able to disguise or, shall we say, obscure the country of origin.’

  Mariani’s dark eyes flared. ‘Mr Howard. This is a legitimate company. Nothing we do in this company against the regulation. Everything in white and black.’

  ‘My friend wasn’t suggesting otherwise,’ Griffith cut in. ‘Please don’t get the wrong idea, Mr Mariani. As a matter of fact, the paperwork is very important to us …’

  ‘That’s right.’ Bond picked up the cue. ‘My chairman is actually a stickler for detail.’

  ‘Stickler?’

  ‘He likes everything written down. I’d be interested in looking at your accounts department and your billing systems. I presume that all happens here.’

  Mariani didn’t appear to have understood everything Bond had said but he gestured vaguely. ‘Accounts on the floor underneath.’

  ‘Do you have many clients in London?’

  Bond had changed the subject quickly, as if he weren’t actually interested in the layout of the building right now. Griffith took over, going into details about quantities, costs, timings, export licences and the logistics of moving merchandise from Marseilles to different parts of Britain. The conversation was so ordinary – so businesslike – that Bond had to ask himself why he was being so careful. The invoice that he had found in the Rue Foncet was in his jacket pocket. Why didn’t he just bring it out and show it to the managing director? Wouldn’t Mariani simply tell him what he wanted to know?

  And yet Ferrix Chimiques was involved in some way with organised crime in the south of France. The faded copy of the invoice must have been stolen for a reason and the man who had stolen it had been killed just five minutes away from where they were sitting, on the other side of the basin. With his looks and his broken English, Mariani might be nothing more than the small-time business executive he appeared to be, but Bond wasn’t going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had been told where the invoice department could be found. There were other ways to get the information he needed.

  They finished. Mariani pressed a button on his telephone, then stood up and shook hands with both men. At the same time, the door opened and a second girl came in to escort them downstairs. Bond was annoyed that it wasn’t Monique. Of course, it was a common enough name but he would have been prepared to bet that it was the same Monique who had appeared on the postcard and he had hoped for a chance to speak to her. He wondered if the telephone number he had found connected with the office here. Well, he would have plenty of time to find out later.

  He followed Griffith out of the room and back down two flights of stairs, noticing once again the orderliness of all the activity around him. They reached the main entrance with two glass doors holding the sunlight at bay.

  Bond stopped suddenly and patted the sides of his jacket. ‘How very stupid of me,’ he said. ‘I’ve left my spectacles in Mr Mariani’s office.’

  ‘I will call up for you,’ the woman said. She was about the same age as Monique but more severe, with a studied lack of empathy. This was the first time she had spoken.

  ‘No need. I’ll just run back up.’

  ‘We’ll wait for you here.’ Griffith understood what he was doing. He stepped in front of the girl to prevent her moving and at the same time, before she could protest, Bond hurried back through the office and up the stairs.

  He was moving quickly and, although he passed a few people, nobody had the time or the presence of mind to stop him and ask where he was going. He reached the first floor and found himself looking down a long corridor with vinyl flooring, panels of frosted glass windows and about half a dozen blank doorways facing each other on both si
des. He noticed a red button – a fire alarm – set into the wall beside him and without a moment’s hesitation stabbed out with the heel of his hand. At once, a bell began to jangle hysterically throughout the building. There was a brief, frozen pause. Then, all along the corridor people appeared, streaming out of the doorways and making their way towards him. They did not speak. Nor did they seem particularly concerned. Bond stood there as they brushed past him and down the stairs. He waited until the corridor was empty, then hurried forward, going in the opposite direction to everyone else.

  Nobody seemed to have noticed him and yet the girl downstairs knew that he had gone and might guess what had happened. All too soon someone would realise that it had been a false alarm. Security might be on their way up already. How long did Bond have? A couple of minutes at most.

  He passed one empty room, then another. Everywhere he looked, he saw the same furniture, the same equipment – swivelling chairs and plain wooden desks, Remington ‘Quiet-Riter’ typewriters, anglepoise lamps, wire-framed In and Out trays – all of them statements to the deadening routine of office life. He heard the bang of a drawer and a young man in a white short-sleeved shirt came rushing out carrying a sheaf of papers that he must have thought worth saving from the flames. Bond decided to take a risk and grabbed his arm.

  ‘Le département des comptes. C’est où?’

  The man pointed vaguely with his elbow, in a hurry to be away. The alarm was still echoing. Bond found the door that had been indicated and went in. He knew at once that he had come to the right place. Three of the walls were lined with filing cabinets – at least sixty of them in battleship grey, each one with three solid drawers. There were two rows of desks stretching from one end to the other but they had all been abandoned with files left open and sheets of paper scattered everywhere. Bond picked one up at random. It had the same shape and format as the carbon copy, with an eight-digit number printed in the right-hand corner. Bond drew the copy out of his pocket and memorised its number. 82032150. All he had to do was find the original.

  He tried the nearest drawer. It was locked. Surely the staff hadn’t had time to secure the room in the thirty seconds since the alarm had started? He tried another and this one slid open to reveal several hundred documents, bunched together, hanging vertically in cardboard files. Ignoring the written details – what had been ordered, when and how much had been paid – he examined the numbers, relieved to see that they had been filed in numerical order rather than by company name. This batch ran from 00120206 to 00135555. He glanced at the dates and saw that they were four years old. That made sense. The carbon copy belonged to a much more recent transaction.

  He hurried across the room and pulled open several more drawers before he found what he wanted. There was a clump of invoices, about seven or eight of them, which had all been drawn up at the same time and which related to a single customer. The company hadn’t been named but had the initials ‘W.E.’ It had purchased a number of different chemicals, including potassium iodine, nitric acid, sodium bisulfate and gelatin. He glanced over his shoulder. He was alone in the room. Quickly, he thumbed through the pages until he found the one he wanted. He pulled it out. The invoice had been issued to W.E. on a date nine weeks before, following the delivery of thirty gallons of a substance called acetic anhydride (all the chemicals, Bond noticed, were listed in English). He folded the sheet and slid it into his pocket. With so many thousands of invoices in the room, it was extremely unlikely that anyone would notice it had gone and it hardly mattered if they did. They could put it down to an administrative error. Nobody would know he had been here.

  He slid the drawer shut and at exactly that moment, the bells stopped. The silence, after the hammering of the alarm, was dramatic, and the office, without its workers, felt alien, abandoned. Bond straightened up and turned to see a woman standing in the doorway, staring at him. She could have been the mother of the girl who had taken him back downstairs; a typical French matron with bad skin, her hair tied back in a tight bun, mountainous breasts and even horn-rimmed spectacles with a narrow chain dangling under her chin. She was dressed entirely in black and was looking at him with disgust, as if she were the authoritarian headmistress of a private school and he a boy who had just broken into the tuck shop.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ she asked.

  ‘I was looking for Mr Mariani’s office,’ Bond said innocently. ‘I think I left my reading glasses there.’

  ‘This is not an office. This is the accounts department.’

  ‘I know. I can see that. I was just about to leave.’ Bond smiled at her. ‘I hope there isn’t a fire or something. What was that all about?’

  ‘It was a malfunction. I will show you to the exit.’

  ‘Thank you. We can call up to Mr Mariani from the reception desk. It was very clumsy of me. I can’t imagine how I forgot them.’

  ‘Please, will you come with me.’

  She led him out of the room. The staff hadn’t begun to return yet and the building was quite empty. Bond followed the woman without saying anything more, his eyes fixed on the thick black stockings that covered legs which reminded him of a grand piano.

  ‘Through here,’ she said. They had come to a set of double doors.

  And that was when three thoughts came to Bond at the same moment. The first was that this was not the way he had come. The woman had led him further into the back of the building, away from the staircase. The second was that he had dismissed her because she was stout and elderly. She couldn’t possibly be a threat to him. But although the two of them had never met and he had not spoken a word to her, she had addressed him in English, not French. She knew where he came from, which quite probably meant that she also knew who he was.

  They were no longer alone. The third thought arrived too late for Bond to take action. A man had stepped out of a doorway behind him. He heard a footstep on the wooden floor and began to turn just as something flashed down in the corner of his vision. He felt it hit him, hard, on the back of the head, propelling him towards the woman, the black fabric of her jacket and dress stretching out to become an entire world of blackness into which Bond folded himself, leaving consciousness far behind.

  10

  The Acid Test

  When Bond came to, he found himself seated with his mouth gagged and his head slumped forward. His hands were securely tied behind him, not with cord but with some sort of metal wire that was cutting into his flesh. There was no possibility of movement. His fingers were already numb. His ankles were also secured to the legs of the solid, wooden chair on which he had been placed. His head was throbbing and he could taste blood but as far as he could tell, he hadn’t been seriously hurt. Whoever had attacked him must have used a leather billy club or perhaps a sap, a weapon still carried by the police in some parts of America. Worse damage had been done to his self-esteem. He had allowed himself to be led into an obvious trap and now he was helpless, tied up and alone.

  No. Reade Griffith was still in the compound and would come looking for him eventually. He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few minutes so the CIA agent had to be somewhere near. The question was, would he arrive soon enough?

  Bond hadn’t moved or opened his eyes. There might be something to learn, some advantage to be gained if he pretended he was still unconscious. He waited a few more seconds until he was certain that he was alone. Then, slowly, he lifted his head and looked around him.

  He must have been taken to one of the warehouses he had seen from the office – somewhere on the edge of the main complex, away from any witnesses. There were shelves on both sides of the room with dozens of glass flagons, cartons and different-shaped packages neatly arranged in long lines. He could not see any doors or windows and assumed that the only way in must be behind him. A row of bare light bulbs dangling overhead threw a dim, yellow light across the concrete floor. Bond tried to find some purchase in the wire but moving his wrists only caused him unnecessary, self-inflicted pain. He
examined the products that surrounded him. The bottles had labels that identified the contents only by their chemical formulae: HNO3, H2SO4, Al2S3 and so on. It was obvious that this part of the compound wasn’t in day-to-day use. The writing on the boxes had faded. Everything was covered in dust.

  He heard a loud grinding, the sound of metal against metal and, somewhere out of his field of vision, a door slid open. It was followed by footsteps on concrete. The door slammed shut again with an echoing crash and he looked round to see four men walking towards him, in no hurry, taking their time. They knew he was helpless and that very thought sent a tendril of fear twisting through his stomach. He fought back, reminding himself that he was in one of the world’s busiest industrial ports and that this was the middle of the day! There were at least a hundred people working for Ferrix Chimiques and quite a few of them must have seen him being brought here. They were ordinary Frenchmen and women and no matter how scared they were of Mariani or whoever was behind him, they might still talk. It would be an extraordinary man who would rely, absolutely, on their silence.

  That man stood in front of him.

  Bond recognised Jean-Paul Scipio from the photographs he had seen both in London and in Nice. How could he fail to? Scipio must have been one of the most recognisable men in France. The photograph that Bond had seen didn’t do him justice. The actual physicality of the man – the amount of space he occupied – was breathtaking. It seemed incredible that he could move, that somewhere inside this explosion of flesh there was an actual, working skeleton. He was dressed in the same three-piece suit that he had worn at La Caravelle but it now seemed to Bond that the heavily buttoned waistcoat and belt had a secondary purpose: they were holding all the monstrous parts together. He had taken his time as he crossed the warehouse, wheezing with the effort and using a shooting stick to support himself. When he was facing Bond, he unfolded it and sat down, the leather seat vanishing into the soft, obscene curves of his buttocks. He rested his hands on his stomach and Bond saw that he was wearing an assortment of rings, some gold, some silver, some set with precious stones; one on almost every finger. As he perched there with his legs apart he looked for all the world like a cannibal king, perhaps one who had just eaten his entire court.