Bond gritted his teethi and his muscles lumped under his coat. He wondered if he could reach the Beretta. He glanced from one gun to the other, measuring, adding up odds. The four eyes above the two guns were greedy, longing for an excuse to kill him. The two mouths were smiling, wanting him to try something. He felt his blood cooling. He gave it another minute and then, with his hands in sight, he stepped slowly out of the car with murder tucked away in the back of his mind.
“Go ahead to the gate,” said suet-face softly. “Look natural. I got you covered.” His gun had disappeared, but his hand was in his pocket. The other man joined them and his right hand was at the waist-band of his trousers. He ranged himself on Bond’s other side.
The three men walked swiftly towards the entrance and the moon rising over the mountains straddled their long shadows in front of them across the white sandy floor.
19
SPECTREVILLE
THE red Jaguar was outside the entrance, up against the wall of the enclosure. Bond let them take his gun and climbed in beside the driver. f-
“No funny tricks if you want to keep your head on straight,” said suet-face, climbing into the rumble seat beside the golf clubs. “There’s a gun on you.”
“Nice little car you once had,” said Bond. The shattered windshield had been lowered flat and a piece of chrome from the radiator stuck up like a pennant between the two wingless front tyres. “Where are we going in the remains?”
“You’ll see,” said the driver, a bony man with a cruel mouth and sideburns. He swung the car out on to the road and accelerated back towards the town, and they were soon in amongst the jungle of neon and then through it and going fast down a two-lane highway that ribboned away across the moonlit desert towards the mountains.
There was a big sign which said ’95’ and Bond remembered what Ernie Cureo had told him and knew that he was on his way to Spectreville. He hunched down in his seat to protect his eyes from the dust and flies and thought about the immediate future and how to revenge his friend.
So these men and the other two in the Chevrolet had been sent to bring him to Mr Spang. Why had four men been necessary? Surely they were a rather heavyweight answer to Bond’s defiance of his orders in the Casino?
The car lapped up the dead-straight road with the needle of the speedometer wavering around eighty. The telegraph poles shifted by with the click of a metronome.
Bond suddenly felt that he didn’t know quite enough of the answers.
Was he completely exposed as an enemy of the Spangled Mob? He could argue himself out of the game of roulette on the grounds that he hadn’t understood his orders, and if he had been a bit troublesome when the four men came for him, he could at least pretend that he had thought it was a tail from, a rival mob. “If you wanted me, why didn’t you just call me in my room?” Bond could hear himself saying in an injured tone of voice.
At least he had shown that he was tough enough for any job Mr Spang might offer him. And in any case, Bond reassured himself, he was just about to achieve his main objective-to get to the end of the pipeline and somehow link Seraffimo Spang with his brother in London.
Bond crouched, his eyes on the luminous dials in front of him, and concentrated on the interview ahead and on wondering how much useful evidence about the pipeline he could possibly extract from it. Later, he thought about Ernie Cureo and the revenge he owed him.
It was not in his make-up to worry about how he himself was going to get away once he had achieved these two objectives. His own safety gave him no concern. He still had no respect for these people. Only contempt and dislike.
Bond was still rehearsing imaginary conversations with Mr Spang when, after two hours’ driving, he felt the speed of the car coming down. He lifted his head above the dashboard. They were coasting up to a section of high wire fence with a gate in it and a big notice lit up by their single spotlight. It said : SPECTREVILLE. CITY LIMITS. DO NOT ENTER. DANGEROUS DOGS. The Car drew up below the notice and beside an iron post embedded in concrete. On the post there was a bellpush and a small iron grill and, written in red : RING AND STATE YOUR BUSINESS.