The red sansserif letters, still damp, said: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.
Bond said nothing. He nodded and picked up the docket and walked out of the room.
Two days later, Bond took the Friday Comet to Montreal. He did not care for it. It flew too high and too fast and there were too many passengers. He regretted the days of the old Stratocruiser – that fine lumbering old plane that took ten hours to cross the Atlantic. Then one had been able to have dinner in peace, sleep for seven hours in a comfortable bunk, and get up in time to wander down to the lower deck and have that ridiculous BOAC ‘country house’ breakfast while the dawn came up and flooded the cabin with the first bright gold of the Western hemisphere. Now it was all too quick. The stewards had to serve everything almost at the double, and then one had a bare two hours snooze before the hundred-mile-long descent from forty thousand feet. Only eight hours after leaving London, Bond was driving a Hertz U-drive Plymouth saloon along the broad Route 17 from Montreal to Ottawa and trying to remember to keep on the right of the road.
The Headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are in the Department of Justice alongside Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Like most Canadian public buildings, the Department of Justice is a massive block of grey masonry built to look stodgily important and to withstand the long and hard winters. Bond had been told to ask at the front desk for the Commissioner and to give his name as ‘Mr James’. He did so, and a young fresh-faced RCMP corporal, who looked as if he did not like being kept indoors on a warm sunny day, took him up in the lift to the third floor and handed him over to a sergeant in a large tidy office which contained two girl secretaries and a lot of heavy furniture. The sergeant spoke on an intercom and there was a ten minutes’ delay during which Bond smoked and read a recruiting pamphlet which made the Mounties sound like a mixture between a dude ranch, Dick Tracy and Rose Marie. When he was shown in through the connecting door a tall youngish man in a dark blue suit, white shirt and black tie turned away from the window and came towards him. “Mr James?” the man smiled thinly. “I’m Colonel, let’s say – er – Johns.”
They shook hands. “Come along and sit down. The Commissioner’s very sorry not to be here to welcome you himself. He has a bad cold – you know, one of those diplomatic ones.” Colonel ‘Johns’ looked amused. “Thought it might be best to take the day off. I’m just one of the help. I’ve been on one or two hunting trips myself and the Commissioner fixed on me to handle this little holiday of yours,” the Colonel paused, “on me only. Right?”
Bond smiled. The Commissioner was glad to help but he was going to handle this with kid gloves. There would be no come-back on his office. Bond thought he must be a careful and very sensible man. He said: “I quite understand. My friends in London didn’t want the Commissioner to bother himself personally with any of this. And I haven’t seen the Commissioner or been anywhere near his headquarters. That being so, can we talk English for ten minutes or so – just between the two of us?”
Colonel Johns laughed. “Sure. I was told to make that little speech and then get down to business. You understand, Commander, that you and I are about to connive at various felonies, starting with obtaining a Canadian hunting licence under false pretences and being an accessory to a breach of the frontier laws, and going on down from there to more serious things. It wouldn’t do anyone one bit of good to have any ricochets from this little lot. Get me?”
“That’s how my friends feel too. When I go out of here, we’ll forget each other, and if I end up in Sing-Sing that’s my worry. Well, now?”
Colonel Johns opened a drawer in the desk and took out a bulging file and opened it. The top document was a list. He put his pencil on the first item and looked across at Bond. He ran his eye over Bond’s old black and white hound’s-tooth tweed suit and white shirt and thin black tie. He said: “Clothes.” He unclipped a plain sheet of paper from the file and slid it across the desk. “This is a list of what I reckon you’ll need and the address of a big second-hand clothing store here in the city. Nothing fancy, nothing conspicuous – khaki shirt, dark brown jeans, good climbing boots or shoes. See they’re comfortable. And there’s the address of a chemist for walnut stain. Buy a gallon and give yourself a bath in the stuff. There are plenty of browns in the hills at this time and you won’t want to be wearing parachute cloth or anything that smells of camouflage. Right? If you’re picked up, you’re an Englishman on a hunting trip in Canada who’s lost his way and got across the border by mistake. Rifle. Went down myself and put it in the boot of your Plymouth while you were waiting. One of the new Savage 99Fs, Weatherby 6 x 62 ‘scope, five-shot repeater with twenty rounds of high-velocity .250-3.000. Lightest big game lever action on the market. Only six and a half pounds. Belongs to a friend. Glad to have it back one day, but he won’t miss it if it doesn’t turn up. It’s been tested and it’s okay up to five hundred. Gun licence,” Colonel Johns slid it over, “issued here in the city in your real name as that fits with your passport. Hunting licence ditto, but small game only, vermin, as it isn’t quite the deer season yet, also driving licence to replace the provisional one I had waiting for you with the Hertz people. Haversack, compass – used ones, in the boot of your car. Oh, by the way,” Colonel Johns looked up from his list, “you carrying a personal gun?”