Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [81]
Darius laughed richly. ‘So long as he keeps us in the picture.’
‘You got to do the same for him. You call this number if I’m not around.’ Felix passed him a card.
‘Now don’t you think we should go down to the docks and keep an eye on the Monster?’
Darius looked hard at Felix, as though summing him up one last time. He made up his mind. ‘We don’t need to go,’ he said. ‘We stay here. I have a man on board.’
‘You what?’ said Leiter.
‘I’ve not been idle,’ said Darius. ‘I couldn’t wait all day for the US cavalry. I got to one of the Russians who defected and made the modifications to the
Ekranoplan. He’s radioing to my office in Tehran the exact co-ordinates that they’re feeding into the navigation system. Babak, my man in Tehran, is going to telephone through here.’
‘You are one smart guy,’ said Felix. ‘How did you persuade him?’
‘ The usual,’ said Darius. ‘US dollars. Plenty of them.’
‘Okay, so when we hear, I call Langley and they scramble whatever they got.’
There was a bleep from the bedside telephone. It was the desk clerk.
‘Mr Silver here. I send him up?’
Shortly before eight, Bond, shoeless and still in his worker’s clothes, was taken from his cell to the washroom and thence to Gorner’s office. An air of almost palpable excitement was coming from the man in the linen suit. He had a fresh scarlet carnation in his button-hole and wore what looked like a new shirt and blazing crimson tie. The lank fair hair had been combed back from the high forehead. Even the white glove had been freshly laundered. Gorner held up a BOACuniform with the rank of captain. ‘Five minutes before the end,’ he said,
‘you will change into this. It will be stored on board.
How splendid you will look, Bond, in your captain’s uniform. As swell as an old Etonian. Enjoy your brief moment, won’t you? As the French say, ‘‘ Aujourd’hui roi, demain rien.’’ Today a king, tomorrow – ’
‘I know what it means,’ said Bond.
‘Of course you do. Very unusual to speak a foreign language. Most of your fellow countrymen expect the
‘‘lesser races’’ to understand English if they shout it loud enough. But by this time tomorrow their arrogance and duplicity will be crushed. For ever. Your capital will be a smouldering wreck, your charming
‘‘home counties’’ – Kent and Surrey – a radioactive fallout zone.’
Gorner walked round his desk so he was standing next to Bond. ‘I shall watch you take off in a few minutes, then I shall await the inevitable. Do you have any farewell message to your countrymen? Your queen? Your prime minister?’
Bond bit his lip. Poppy’s words went through his head. ‘Kill Gorner.’
‘Very well, then,’ said Gorner. ‘Shall we play?’
The familiar guards took Bond along the corridor and rammed the muzzles of their guns into his ears as they rose on the telescopic elevator. The electric cart was waiting to transport them to the main doors, where the driver operated the laser beam release.
It was not yet nine o’clock, but the heat of the Persian sun was already intense as they crossed the runway to the brilliantly shining VC-10. The high tail, with the four rear-mounted Rolls-Royce Conway jet engines, gave the aircraft a superbly sleek silhouette, and at any other time the prospect of its ‘hushpower’ ride would have lifted Bond’s spirits. But he knew on this occasion that his only chance of getting out of the plane alive depended on the remote possibility that a slender female investment banker with shining black hair and a Soviet pistol she had not been trained to fire had somehow hidden herself on board.
Bond breathed in deeply and set his foot on the steps up to the main passenger door. Once on board, he was hustled down the gangway and pushed into a window seat towards the back of the first-class section. As he bent his head beneath the overhead locker, he allowed the shard of glass he had secreted in his mouth to drop on to the seat ahead