‘All right. Report progress. And don’t think I’m not interested in this case.’ M’s voice had changed. So had his expression. His eyes had become urgent, commanding. ‘Now I’ll give you one piece of information the Bank didn’t give you. It just happens that I also know what Mr Goldfinger’s gold bars look Like. As a matter of fact I was handling one today – scratched Z and all. It had come in with that haul we made last week when the Redland Resident Director’s office “caught fire” in Tangier. You’ll have seen the signals. Well, that’s the twentieth of these particular gold bars that have come our way since die war.’
Bond interrupted, ‘But that Tangier bar was out of the SMERSH safe.’
‘Exactly. I’ve checked. All the other nineteen bars with the scratched Z have been taken from SMERSH operatives.’ M paused. He said mildly, ‘D’you know, 007, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Goldfinger doesn’t turn out to be the foreign banker, the treasurer so to speak, of SMERSH.’
James Bond flung the DBIII through the last mile of straight and did a racing change down into third and then into second for the short hill before the inevitable traffic crawl through Rochester. Leashed in by the velvet claw of the front discs, the engine muttered its protest with a mild back-popple from the twin exhausts. Bond went up into third again, beat the lights at the bottom of the hill and slid resignedly up to the back of the queue that would crawl on for a quarter of an hour – if he was lucky – through the sprawl of Rochester and Chatham.
Bond settled back into second and let the car idle. He reached for the wide gunmetal case of Morland cigarettes on the neighbouring bucket seat, fumbled for one and lit it from the dashboard.
He had chosen the A2 in preference to the A20 to Sandwich because he wanted to take a quick look at Goldfinger-land – Reculver and those melancholy forsaken reaches of the Thames which Goldfinger had chosen for his parish. He would then cross the Isle of Thanet to Ramsgate and leave his bag at the Channel Packet, have an early lunch and be off to Sandwich.
The car was from the pool. Bond had been offered the Aston Martin or a Jaguar 3.4. He had taken the DBIII. Either of the cars would have suited his cover – a well-to-do, rather adventurous young man with a taste for the good, the fast things of life. But the DB III had the advantage of an up-to-date triptyque, an inconspicuous colour – battleship grey -and certain extras which might or might not come in handy. These included switches to alter the type and colour of Bond’s front and rear lights if he was following or being followed at night, reinforced steel bumpers, fore and aft, in case he needed to ram, a long-barrelled Colt .45 in a trick compartment under the driver’s seat, a radio pick-up tuned to receive an apparatus called the Homer, and plenty of concealed space that would fox most Customs men.
Bond saw a chance and picked up fifty yards, sliding into a ten-yard gap left by a family saloon of slow reactions. The man at the wheel, who wore that infallible badge of the bad driver, a hat clamped firmly on the exact centre of his head, hooted angrily. Bond reached out of the window and raised an enigmatically clenched fist. The hooting stopped.
And now what about this theory of M’s? It made sense. The Russians were notoriously incompetent payers of their men. Their centres were always running out of funds – their men complaining to Moscow that they couldn’t afford a square meal. Perhaps SMERSH couldn’t get the valuta out of the Ministry of Home Security. Or perhaps the Ministry of Home Security couldn’t get the money out of the Ministry of Finance. But it had always been the same – endless money troubles that resulted in missed chances, broken promises and waste of dangerous radio time. It would make sense to have a clever financial brain somewhere outside Russia who could not only transmit funds to the centres but also, in this case, make profits large enough to run the SMERSH centres abroad without any financial assistance from Moscow. Not only that. On the side, Goldfinger was appreciably damaging the currency base of an enemy country. If all this was correct, it was typical of SMERSH – a brilliant scheme, faultlessly operated by an outstanding man. And that, reflected Bond as he roared up the hill into Chatham, putting half a dozen cars behind him, would partly explain Goldfinger’s greed for more and still more money. Devotion to the cause, to SMERSH, and perhaps the dangled prize of an Order of Lenin, would be the spur to pick up even ten or twenty thousand dollars when the odds were right or could be favourably adjusted. The funds for Red Revolution, for the discipline by fear that was the particular speciality of SMERSH, could never be big enough. Goldfinger was not making the money for himself. He was making it for the conquest of the world! The minor risk of being found out, as he had been by Bond, was nothing. Why? What could the Bank of England get him if every single one of his past operations could be exposed? Two years? Three?