Devil May Care

the other side the campus of Tehran University. It was, Bond thought, typical spy country: brush contacts, dead drops, all the rudiments of ‘tradecraft’ could be unobtrusively carried out in this busy, recreational area. In the middle of the road a channel, with swiftly running water, was flanked by plane trees. At intervals there were long sticks with metal drinking cups wired to the end, which thirsty passers-by dipped into the water.
    ‘Cute, isn’t it?’ said Silver. ‘The water starts in the Elburz. It’s pretty clean up in Shemiran, but by the time it gets south of the bazaar … Oh, boy. But they’re proud of it. These little channels are called jubs. They come from underground waterways – quanats – their big irrigation scheme. They’ve managed to get water down into half the desert. You can tell where they are in the countryside when you see a kind of molehill on the surface.’
    ‘Is that the access point?’ said Bond.
    ‘Yeah. It’s their major contribution to modern technology.’ Silver sat down on the bench. ‘You wanna get an ice-cream?’
    Bond shook his head. He lit the very last of his Morland’s while Silver went to a vendor a few yards behind them.
    When he returned, Silver took out a clean handkerchief and opened it on his lap while he licked the pistachio icecream.
    ‘What is it you want to tell me?’
    Silver smiled. ‘Ah, just shooting the breeze. People come into town, they’re new, maybe they don’t get straight away what a delicate situation we have here. You look around, you see these desert guys, like Bedouins, in their run-down automobiles … And, hey, look at that.’
    A red double-decker bus – a London Routemaster – went slowly past, leaving a cloud of black diesel exhaust.
    ‘You sometimes think it’s kind of like Africa someplace,’ said Silver. ‘And all the kebabs and rice.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’d die happy if I never looked another piece of skewered meat between the eyes. And your people. The English.’
    ‘British,’ said Bond.
    ‘Right. We’re sitting on your Queen Elizabeth Boulevard. It all looks hunky-dory, doesn’t it? The Shah’s your pal. The Allies pushed him out in the Second World War because he looked a little too open to the Germans. We were happy enough with the guy who took his place – this Mossadegh in his pyjamas. But you got the wind up when he nationalized the oil and kicked out all the BP men. Boy, did you not like that. You came to us and said, “Let’s get Mossy out, let’s get the old Shah back and BP running the oil wells again.”’
    ‘And you did,’ said Bond.
    Silver wiped his lips carefully with the handkerchief, then reopened it on his lap. ‘Well, by chance, things started to go wrong. Mossy starts to look too pally with the Soviets. They have a border, you know. This country is the one we watch most carefully, along with Afghanistan. And so we decided to make a move.’
    Bond nodded. ‘I’m grateful for the history lesson.’
    Silver’s tongue came out and licked neatly round the edges of the ice-cream. ‘What I’m trying to say is that this is a place where everything is on the move. There’s not just twosides – us and them. The Persians know that better than anyone. That’s why they put up with us. More than that, they use us to protect them. They have American arms and thousands of our personnel. And do you know what? Three years ago they passed a law making all Americans stationed in Persia immune from prosecution.’
    ‘All of you?’ said Bond.
    ‘You got it. If the Shah runs over my pet dog, he gets called to account. If I run over the Shah, they can’t lay a finger on me.’
    ‘I’d still take cabs if I were you,’ said Bond.
    Silver wiped his mouth one more time and, having finished his ice-cream, folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his coat pocket.
    He looked across the street, through the plane trees and the column of orange taxis.
    He turned to Bond and smiled. ‘It’s not easy, Mr Bond. We need to work together. Things are balanced on a knife edge here. America is fighting a lonely war for freedom in Vietnam and, despite all we did back there in the Second World War, you haven’t sent a single soldier in to help. Sometimes the people back in Washington – not me, but those guys – they get to thinking that you people aren’t serious about the war on Communism.’
    ‘Oh, we’re serious about the Cold War,’ said Bond. His own body bore the scars of just