Devil May Care

you. Your flight’s at six. You’ve just got time for your first session of deep breathing and relaxation exercises. I’ve made a booking for you at two thirty. On the second floor.’
    ‘You wait till I get back from Paris,’ Bond said, as he headed towards the lift. ‘Then I’ll give you cause for heavy breathing.’
    ‘“Deep breathing” was the expression, James. There is a difference.’
    ‘Or if you insist on splitting hairs I shall have to resort to something firmer. A good spanking, perhaps. So you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’
    ‘Really, James, you’re all talk these days.’
    The lift doors closed before Bond could come up with a reply. As he sank through the floors of the building, he remembered Larissa’s puzzled face in the hotel doorway in Rome. All talk. Perhaps Moneypenny was right.
    Bond passed forty-five minutes with a man called Julian Burton, who wore a collarless white shirt and instructed him on how to breathe from the pit of his belly.
    ‘Think of a jug you’re trying to fill with water. That’s your breathing. Take it right down to the base of your spine and your kidneys. Feel that jug fill up. Now close your eyes and think about a pleasant scene. Perhaps a beach or a lovely stream in a wood. A special private place. Just shut out all the cares of your day and concentrate on that one lovelypeaceful place. Now keep on breathing. Deeply in, right down to the small of your back. Shut out all other thoughts, just keep yourself in your one special place.’
    The ‘special place’ to which Bond’s thoughts kept returning was not a sylvan retreat but the skin on Larissa’s throat and neck he’d noticed in the hotel bar. Perhaps there was life in the old dog yet … At the end of the ‘session’, Bond promised Julian he’d do his deep-breathing exercises every day. Then he ran down the steps, rather than take the lift, to the front desk. He’d left it too late to achieve full operational fitness, but every little helped.
    He could feel the old juices begin to flow again at the thought of Dr Julius Gorner. He had never taken such a profound dislike to anyone at first sight. There was also something particularly underhand in trying to attack a country through the gullibility of its young people rather than through guns and soldiery.
    He found himself anxious to impress M. After all he’d done, thought Bond, heading the Locomotive south off Bayswater Road and into Hyde Park, surely he had no need to prove himself. Perhaps it had been the mention of the other double-O agents that had made him uneasy. Of course, there would always be others who were licensed to kill – indeed, the average length of time in the job before meeting a fatal accident ensured that recruitment and training was a continuous process – but Bond had always believed himself to be unique: the agent of choice. Perhaps M had deliberately withheld his full confidence on this occasion in order to concentrate Bond’s mind. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that that was what the old fox was up to.
    Back in his flat, he found that May had already launderedand pressed his clothes from Italy. It was tea-time, but she knew better than to bother him with that old ladies’ brew. Instead, she knocked at his bedroom door with a silver tray on which sat a soda syphon, a bucket of ice, a cut-glass tumbler and a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.
    ‘For your health’s sake, Mr Bond,’ she said, placing it on top of the chest of drawers. ‘Here, let me pack those for you.’
    Bond had not quite completed three months on the wagon, but if in M’s eyes he was fit to return to work, then … He poured a conservative two fingers of whisky into the glass, added a lump of ice and the same amount of soda.
    ‘Your good health,’ he said, then tossed the whole lot down in a single gulp.
    As Bond left Hammersmith and headed along the Great West Road, he became aware of a motorcycle in his wing mirror and instinctively hit the brake. These speed cops seemed to be everywhere, and his selfish, showy car was a natural magnet. However, the bike seemed to fall back at the same moment. Without signalling, Bond swerved left at the roundabout and took the road towards Twickenham, away from the main flow of rush-hour traffic leaving the capital. He changed down and kicked the accelerator to beat the first red light before checking his mirror again. The bike was still there.
    Bond felt a