Devil May Care

don’t know. But Poppy told me she was making efforts to come off the drugs. It’s very difficult. But I think she would come if you were able to find her. Then we could get her into a clinic. The trouble is, Gorner won’t let her go. He’s slowly killing her, and he’s loving every moment of it.’
    Bond swore succinctly. Then he said, ‘Don’t cry, Scarlett. I’ll find her.’
    After one more coffee, Scarlett drove Bond back to his hotel, keeping the Sunbeam rather closer to the speed limit than she had on the way to the Bois.
    ‘You’ll call me with any news, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Bond. ‘If I’m near a telephone.’
    She leaned over from her seat and kissed his cheek. She had put on her sunglasses to conceal her swollen eyes.
    Bond’s hand lingered for a second on the red linen dress. Something about this girl had got right under his defences, and he felt profoundly uneasy.
    He was tempted to turn and wave from the door of the hotel, as Mrs Larissa Rossi had waved from the lift in Rome, but forced himself to push straight through and into the gloom of the lobby.
    ‘Monsieur Bond,’ said the receptionist. ‘A cable for you.’
    Up in his room Bond ripped the cable open. It was marked probond at the beginning and prism at the end, to show that M had cleared it.
    URGENT YOU GO PISTACHIO SOONEST STICK CLOSEST TO SUPPLIER STOP US OFFICE REPORTS CAVIAR SALES LINK IMMINENT STOP LOCAL REP EXPECTS YOU STOP
    He began to pack at once and asked Reception to call the airport. ‘Pistachio’, in the latest codes, was Persia, and ‘Caviar’ the Soviet Union. The US office was the CIA, and if they were feeling edgy about Gorner it could be that the Russian connection M had spoken of in London was further advanced than had been thought.
    Gorner and the Russians, thought Bond. It was a marriage made in hell.

7. ‘Trust Me, James’
    The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation:
it may or it may not come out.
    ROBERT BYRON , The Road to Oxiana
    As the plane began its descent, Bond looked out of the window and lit a cigarette. Away to his left, he could see the tops of the Elburz mountains and, beyond them, a faint blue smudge that must be the southern waters of the Caspian Sea. Work had never previously taken him to the Middle East, and for this he was thankful. He regarded the lands between Cyprus and India as the thieving centre of the world. He’d visited Egypt as a child, when he was too young to remember, and had once spent a few days’ leave in Beirut, but had found it little more than a smugglers’ den – of diamonds from Sierra Leone, arms from Arabia and gold from Aleppo. It was true that the Lebanese women had been far more modern in their attitudes than he’d expected, but he’d been pleased to get back to London.
    He drained the last of the bourbon from his glass as the plane banked for its final approach. There’d been no time for any briefing on Persia and he would be relying on the local head of station, Darius Alizadeh, for guidance. He heard the thump as the landing gear was dropped from the belly of the plane, and the hydraulic whine as the brake flaps slid out of the leading edge of the wings. Then, beneath them, Bond could see what he’d seen a hundred times beforein different continents, the telephone wires, the small cars on the airport ring road, the low terminal buildings, then the sudden rushing strip of concrete with its black skidmarks as the plane thumped twice in a perfect landing and the pilot switched the engines to reverse.
    As soon as he stepped from the plane, Bond felt the intense heat of the desert country. There was no air-conditioning inside the arrivals building, and he was already sweating by the time the customs official had chalked his bags. When going through US Customs, he used a British diplomatic passport, number 0094567, but always hated the thought of his name being flashed to and from CIA headquarters in Langley for clearance. Any wisp of evidence that he was present – even that he existed – diminished his security. In Tehran, the passport he showed to the earnest, moustachioed official in the glass booth identified him as David Somerset, company director. It was an alias Darko Kerim had given him in Istanbul, and he used it in memory of Darko, the loyal friend who’d died in helping him escape from SMERSH.
    Outside the building, after he had swapped some currency, Bond stepped into a taxi and gave the driver