The white-haired man had been lying relaxed on one of the beds. Now he was up on one elbow and his other hand was at his shirt, half-way up to the gun in the black holster at his armpit. He looked incuriously at Bond and his mouth was square with the empty letter-box smile. From the middle of his smile a wooden toothpick protruded from between closed teeth like the tongue of a snake.
Bond’s gun held the neutral space between the two men. When he spoke his voice was low and taut.
“Tiffany,” he said slowly and distinctly. “Get down on your knees. Edge away from that man. Keep your head down. Get into the middle of the room.”
He didn’t watch her, and his eyes continued to flicker between the man on the chair and the man on the bed.
Now she was clear of the two targets.
“I’m there, James.” The voice thrilled with hope and excitement.
“Get up and walk straight into the bathroom. Shut the door. Get into the bath and lie down.”
His eyes slid towards her to see that he was being obeyed. She had stood up and was facing him. His eyes registered the red splay of a whole hand on the white skin of her body. Then she had obeyed him and there was the click of the bathroom door shutting.
Now she was safe from the bullets. And she would not witness what had to be done.
There was five yards between the two men and Bond reflected that if they could draw fast enough they had him bracketed. With men like these, even in the split second of his killing one of them, the other would have drawn and fired. While his own gun was silent, its threat was infinite. But with his first bullet, for a flash, the threat would be lifted from the other man.
“Forty-eight sixty-five eighty-six.”
The variation on the American football signal, one of fifty other combinations which they must have practised together a ‘ thousand times, spat out of the fat man’s mouth. Simultaneously he hurled himself on the floor and his hand flashed to his waistband.
In a swirl of motion the man on the bed swung his legs sideways and away from Bond so that his body was now only a narrow head-on target. The hand at his chest flickered up.
‘Thud’.
Bond’s gun gave a single muffled grunt. A blue keyhole opened just beneath the peak of the white hair.
‘Boom’ answered the dead man’s pistol, fired by the last twitch of his finger, and the bullet buried itself into the bed beneath his corpse.
The fat man on the floor let out a scream. He was looking up into the single empty black eye that didn’t care about him one way or the other, but was only interested in which square centimetre of his envelope it would open first.
And the fat man’s gun had only achieved the elevation of Bond’s knees and was pointing futilely between Bond’s braced legs at the white-painted ironwork behind him.
“Drop it.”
There was a small noise as the gun fell to the carpet.
“Get up.”
The fat man scrambled to his feet and stood looking into Bond’s eyes, as a tubercular looks into his handkerchief, with fearful expectancy.
“Sit down.”
Was there a flash of relief in the surrendered eyes? Bond stayed tense as a stalking cat.
The fat man turned slowly. He stretched his hands above his head, although Bond had not told him to do so. He took the two steps back to his chair and slowly turned round as if to sit down.
He stood facing Bond and quite naturally he let his hands fall down to his sides. And the two hands, relaxed, swung naturally back, the right hand more than the left. And then suddenly, at the top of the back-swing, the right arm tautened and flashed forward and the throwing-knife bloomed from the tips of the fingers like a white flame.
‘Thud’.
The quiet bullet and the quiet knife crossed in mid-air, and the eyes of the two men flinched simultaneously as the weapons struck.
But the flinch in the eyes of the fat man turned into an upward roll of the eyeballs as he fell backwards, clawing at his heart, while Bond’s eyes only looked incuriously down at the spreading stain on his shirt and at the flat handle of the knife hanging loosely from its folds.