‘Gentlemen and madam.’ He looked sadly round the group. ‘I have received bad news. Our friend Mr Helmut Springer has met with an accident. He fell down the stairs. Death was instantaneous.’
‘Ho, ho!’ Mr Ring’s laugh was not a laugh. It was a hole in the face. ‘And what does that Slappy Hapgood, his torpedo, have to say about it?’
Goldfinger said gravely, ‘Alas, Mr Hapgood also fell down the stairs and has succumbed to his injuries.’
Mr Solo looked at Goldfinger with new respect. He said softly, ‘Mister, you better get those stairs fixed before me and my friend Giulio come.to use them.’
Goldfinger said seriously, ‘The fault has been located. Repairs will be put in hand at once.’ His face grew thoughtful. ‘I fear these accidents may be misconstrued in Detroit.’
Jed Midnight said cheerfully, ‘Don’t give it a thought, mister. They love funerals up there. And it’ll take a load off their minds. Old Hell wouldn’t have lasted much longer. They been stoking the fires under him these twelve months.’ He appealed to Mr Strap who stood next to him. ‘Am I right, Jacko?’
‘Sure, Jed,’ said Mr Strap sagely. ‘You got the score. Mr Helmut M. Springer had to be hit.’
‘Hit’ – mobese for murder. When Bond at last got to bed that night, he couldn’t wipe the word out of his mind. Oddjob had got the signal, a double ring,-and Springer and his guard had got hit. There had been nothing Bond could have done about it – even if he had wanted to, and Mr Helmut Springer meant nothing to him, probably richly deserved to be hit anyway – but now some 59,998 other people were going to get hit unless he, and only he, could do something about it.
When the meeting of paramount hoods had broken up to go about their various duties, Goldfinger had dismissed the girl and kept Bond in the room. He told Bond to take notes and then for more than two hours went over the operation down to the smallest detail. When they came to the doping of the two reservoirs (Bond had to work out an exact timetable to ensure that the people of Fort Knox would all be ‘under” in good time) Bond had asked for details of the drug and its speed of action.
‘You won’t have to worry about that.’
‘Why not? Everything depends on it.’
‘Mr Bond.’ Goldfinger’s eyes had a faraway, withdrawn look. ‘I will tell you the truth because you will have no opportunity of passing it on. From now, Oddjob will not be more than a yard from your side and his orders will be strict and exact. So I can tell you that the entire population of Fort
Knox will be dead or incapacitated by midnight on D-l. The substance that will be inserted in the water supply, outside the filter plant, will be a highly concentrated form of GB.’
‘You’re mad! You don’t really mean you’re going to kill sixty thousand people!’
‘Why not? American motorists do it every two years.’
Bond stared into Goldfinger’s face in fascinated horror. It couldn’t be true! He couldn’t mean it! He said tensely, What’s this GB?’
‘GB is the most powerful of the Trilone group of nerve poisons. It was perfected by the Wehrmacht in 1943, but never used for fear of reprisals. In fact, it is a more effective instrument of destruction than the hydrogen bomb. Its disadvantage lies in the difficulty of applying it to the populace. The Russians captured the entire German stocks at Dyhern-furth on the Polish frontier. Friends of mine were able to supply me with the necessary quantities. Introduction through the water supply is an ideal method of applying it to a densely populated area.’
Bond said, ‘Goldfinger, you’re a lousy,—bastard.’
‘Don’t be childish. We have work to do.’
Later, when they had got to the problem of transporting the tons of gold out of the town, Bond had had one last try. He said, ‘Goldfinger, you’re not going to get this stuff away. Nobody’s going to get their hundred tons of gold out of. the place – let alone five hundred. You’ll find yourself tearing down the Dixie Highway in a truck with a few gold bars loaded with gamma rays and the American Army on your tail. And you’ll have killed sixty thousand people for that? The thing’s farcical. Even if you do get a ton or two away, where the hell do you think you’re going to hide it?’