High up over his head a whirling speck soared into the sky. It reached the top of its flight and paused. There came the sharp crack of the maroon. It was the cease-fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE LAST TRICK
IT WAS two days later. Felix Leiter was weaving the black Studillac fast through the lanes of dawdling traffic on the Triborough bridge. There was plenty of time to catch Bond’s plane, the evening BOAC Monarch to London, but Leiter enjoyed shaking up Bond’s low opinion of American cars. Now the steel hook that he used for a right hand banged the gear lever into second and the low black car leapt for a narrow space between a giant refrigerator truck and a mooning Oldsmobile whose rear window was almost obscured by holiday stickers.
Bond’s body jerked back with the kick of the 300 b.h.p. and his teeth snapped shut. When the manoeuvre was completed, and the angry hooting had vanished behind them, Bond said mildly, ‘It’s time you graduated out of the Kiddi-car class and bought yourself an express carriage. You want to get cracking. This pedalling along ages one. One of these days you’ll stop moving altogether and when you stop moving is when you start to die.’
Leiter laughed. He said, ‘See that green light ahead? Bet I can make it before it goes red.’ The car leapt forward as if it had been kicked. There was a brief hiatus in Bond’s life, an impression of snipe-like flight and of a steel wall of cars that someone parted before the whiplash of Leiter’s triple klaxons, a hundred yards when the speedometer touched ninety and they were across the lights and cruising genteelly along in the centre lane.
Bond said calmly, ‘You meet the wrong traffic cop arid that Pinkerton card of yours won’t be good enough. It isn’t so much that you drive slowly, it’s holding back the cars behind they’ll book you for. The sort of car you need is a nice elderly Rolls Royce Silver Ghost with big plate-glass windows so you can enjoy the beauties of nature’ – Bond gestured towards a huge automobile junk heap on their right. ‘Maximum fifty and it can stop and even go backwards if you want to. Bulb horn. Suit your sedate style. Matter of fact there should be one on the market soon – Goldfinger’s. And by the same token, what the hell’s happened to Goldfinger? Haven’t they caught up with him yet?’
Leiter glanced at his watch and edged into the outside lane. He brought the car down to forty. He said seriously, ‘Tell you the truth, we’re all a bit worried. The papers are needling us, or rather Edgar Hoover’s crowd, like hell. First they had a gripe at the security clamp-down on you. We couldn’t tell them that wasn’t our fault and that someone in London, an old limey called M, had insisted on it. So they’re getting their own back. Say we’re dragging our feet and so forth. And I’m telling you, James’ – Leiter’s voice was glum, apologetic – ‘we just haven’t a clue. They caught up with the diesel. Goldfinger had fixed the controls at thirty and had let it run on down the line. Somewhere he and the Korean had got off and probably this Galore girl and the four hoods as well because they’ve vanished too. We found his truck con voy, of course, waiting on the east-bound highway out of Elizabethville. But never a driver, most probably scattered, but somewhere there’s Goldfinger and a pretty tough team hiding up. They didn’t get to the Sverdlovsk cruiser at Norfolk. We had a plain-clothes guard scattered round the docks and they report that she sailed to schedule without any strangers going aboard. Not a cat’s been near that warehouse on East River and no one’s shown at Idlewild or the frontiers – Mexico and Canada. For my money, that Jed Midnight has somehow got them out to Cuba. If they’d taken two or three trucks from the convoy and driven like hell they could have got down to Florida, somewhere like Daytona Beach, by the early hours of D + l. And Midnight’s darn well organized down there. The Coast Guards and the Air Force have put out all they’ve got, but nothing’s shown yet. But they could have hidden up during the day and got over to Cuba during the night. It’s got everybody worried as hell and it’s no help that the President’s hopping mad.’