`You see.’ Bond described an airy circle with his cigarette to distract Nash’s attention. His left hand slipped the flat cigarette case between the pages of his book. `You see, it looks all right, but what about you? What are you going to do after we come out of the Simplon? The conductor knows you’re mixed up with us. They’ll be after you in a flash.’
`Oh that,’ Nash’s voice was bored again. `You don’t seem to have hoisted in that the Russians think these things out. I get off at Dijon and take a car to Paris. I get lost there. A bit of “Third Man” stuff won’t do the story any harm. Anyway it’ll come out later that they dig the second bullet out of you and can’t find the second gun. They won’t catch up with me. Matter of fact,
I’ve got a date at noon tomorrow–Room 204 at the Ritz Hotel, making my report to Rosa. She wants to get the kudos for this job. Then I turn into her chauffeur and we drive to Berlin. Come to think of it, old man,’ the flat voice showed emotion, became greedy, `I think she may have the Order of Lenin for me in her bag. Lovely grub, as they say.’
The train began to move. Bond tensed. In a few minutes it would come. What a way to die, if he was going to die. Through his own stupidity–blind, lethal stupidity. And lethal for Tatiana. Christ! At any moment he could have done something to dodge this shambles. There had been no lack of opportunity. But conceit and curiosity and four days of love had sucked him along on the easy stream down which it had been planned that he should drift. That was the damnable part of the whole business–the triumph for SMERSH, the one enemy he had always sworn to defeat wherever he met it. We will do this, and he will do that. `Comrades, it is easy with a vain fool like this Bond. Watch him take the bait. You will see. I tell you he’s a fool. All Englishmen are fools.’ And Tatiana, the lure–the darling lure. Bond thought of their first night. The black stockings and the velvet ribbon. And all the time SMERSH had been watching, watching him go through his conceited paces, as it had been planned that he would, so that the smear could be built up–the smear on him, the smear on M who had sent him to Istanbul, the smear on the Service that lived on the myth of its name. God, what a mess! If only … if only his tiny grain of a plan might work!
Ahead, the rumble of the train became a deep boom.
A few more seconds. A few more yards.
The oval mouth between the white pages seemed to gape wider. In a second the dark tunnel would switch out the moonlight on the pages and the blue tongue would lick out for him.
`Sweet dreams, you English bastard.’
The rumble became a great swift clanging roar.
The spine of the book bloomed flame.
The bullet, homing on Bond’s heart, flashed over its two quiet yards.
Bond pitched forward on to the floor and lay sprawled under the funereal violet light.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ten Pints of Blood
It had all depended on the man’s accuracy. Nash had said that Bond would get one bullet through the heart. Bond had taken the gamble that Nash’s aim was as good as he said it was. And it had been.
Bond lay like a dead man lies. Before the bullet, he had recalled the corpses he had seen–how their bodies had looked in death. Now he lay totally collapsed, like a broken doll, his arms and legs carefully outflung. He explored his sensations. Where the bullet had crashed into the book, his ribs were on fire. The bullet must have gone through the cigarette case and then through the other half of the book. He could feel the hot lead over his heart. It felt as if it was burning inside his ribs. It was only a sharp pain in his head where it had hit the woodwork, and the violet sheen on the scuffed toecaps against his nose, that said he wasn’t dead. Like an archaeologist, Bond explored the carefully planned ruin of his body. The position of the sprawled feet. The angle of the half-bent knee that would give purchase when it was needed. The right hand that seemed to be clawing at his pierced heart, was within inches, when he could release the book, of the little attaché case–within inches of the lateral stitching that held the flat-bladed throwing-knives, two edged and sharp as razors, that he had mocked when Q Branch had demonstrated the catch that held them.