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By Root 227 0

When the guard was dead, Bond led Scarlett down the passage from the cell and out into the labyrinth. They ran along the corridor away from Gorner’s office until they came to the open elevator. Bond pointed Scarlett in the direction of the door on the top level, pressed the button and watched her slim figure rise up into the darkness with the dead guard’s gun tucked into the waistband of her trousers. He waited till Scarlett, he calculated, was within range of the door, then ran down the corridor to Gorner’s office. He tapped numbers at random into the entry pad, and stood in full view of the security camera. It was only a few seconds before a red bulb began to flash above the door. At once, the corridor was flooded with harsh light and he heard the screech of a siren, then the barking of furious Alsatian dogs and the sound of feet pounding towards him. Diversion successful, he thought. Now to survive. He placed his hands high in the air above his head.

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16. ‘Shall We Play?’ (II)

Within a few moments, Bond had six semi-automatic rifles against his head and three Alsatian dogs, barely restrained by their handlers, leaping at his face. He stood completely still with his back to the door of Gorner’s office and his hands above his head, hoping that his calculations had been correct.

He believed that Gorner’s men were under orders to keep him alive. In the absence of Bond, Gorner could still have a British passport holder at the controls by coercing the pilot of the hijacked VC-10 back into the cockpit. But with his eye always on maximum provocation, Gorner would never use an unknown as the instrument of attack on the Soviet Union if there was a chance of using a known enemy of long standing. The grand symbolic gesture, Bond thought,

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was a key element of Gorner’s operating method and of the revenge he craved.

Then, at the end of the corridor he saw a burly shape, silhouetted in the night lights as it approached. On its head was a Foreign Legion cap, and Bond felt a new and strange emotion at the sight of Chagrin: relief.

Chagrin barked two words in Farsi as he approached. The guards backed off a little and made room for him.

‘Where is girl?’ said Chagrin.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bond.

They would see the open door and search outside the building. His gamble was that the last place they would imagine a young woman to hide was on board an airliner that she knew was destined to crash the next day. The odds were not great – but it was the only play left open to him.

Chagrin jerked his head down the passageway, in the direction of the cell, and gave a brief order. As Bond was frogmarched away, he became aware of the commotion in the building. Alarms were wailing and hundreds of footsteps seemed to be pounding the floor. ‘Go on, Scarlett,’ he muttered to himself. The picture of the slim figure rising silently into the darkness flashed across his mind.

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Two men stayed with him in the cell, where they retied his hands, and two more guards were stationed outside. After a few minutes, when the alarms and sirens had been stilled, the door was opened and Chagrin came in.

‘Get down,’ he said, pointing to the floor. Bond knelt down, placing his knee on the sand where the two shards of glass had been reburied.

‘Where girl?’ said Chagrin.

‘I’ve told you,’ said Bond. ‘I don’t know. A guard opened the door because she felt ill. She ran away, but I don’t know where she went. I went down the corridor to inform Dr Gorner that one of his guests was missing. I seem to have misremembered the code to his office.’

‘Liar!’ Chagrin screamed at him. ‘Liar!’

The side of his face that moved normally was contracted in fury, while the other side remained unnaturally still. There were flecks of foam at one corner of his mouth.

And this, thought Bond, was the sight that had greeted the eyes of schoolchildren when they had been sitting cross-legged in a circle in a village clearing to listen to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

‘ Tell me where girl go. Tell me!’

Bond looked at the torturer with contempt. A

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verse from long-ago scripture