Devil May Care

how serious he himself had been.
    ‘I’m glad to hear that. But don’t rock the boat, will you?’
    ‘I’ll do what I came here to do,’ said Bond. ‘But I’ve never had any problems with your countrymen.’ He was thinking of Felix Leiter, his great shark-maimed Texan friend. The first time he had met Felix, Bond saw that he held theinterests of his own organization, the CIA, far above the common concerns of the North Atlantic allies. Bond sympathized. The Service was his own first loyalty. He also agreed with Felix in distrusting the French, whom he regarded as riddled with Communist sympathizers at every level.
    ‘That’s good.’ Silver stood up and began to move off. He hailed a taxi from the rapidly moving orange stream.
    ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘This Julius Gorner character. He’s part of a much bigger plan than you can imagine.’
    Silver got into the taxi and wound down the rear window. ‘Don’t go near him, Mr Bond. Please take my advice. Don’t get yourself within a hundred miles of him.’
    The cab pulled off into the main stream without signalling, to be met by a cacophony of horns. Bond stuck out an arm to hail a taxi for himself.
    With Darius unavailable at Farshad’s funeral, Bond was forced to rely on the hotel’s front desk to find him a car and driver for his visit to the Caspian. The concierge said the car firm’s best man, who spoke fluent English, would be available from eight the next morning, and Bond decided it was worth waiting.
    He ordered lunch of caviar and a grilled chicken kebab to be sent to his room with a jug of iced vodka martinis and two fresh limes. After he had eaten, he spread out some maps he had bought from the hotel shop on the bed and made a study of the Noshahr waterfront, its bazaar at Azadi Square, its commercial docks, marinas and pleasure beaches.
    Then he looked at the map of Persia. The country was between Turkey to the west, and Afghanistan to the east. Its southern frontier was the Persian Gulf, its northern limit the Caspian Sea. While it also bordered Soviet Russia in thenorth-west corner, through Azerbaijan, the roads looked poor. But from the northern shore of the Caspian, through Astrakhan, it was only a short way to Stalingrad.
    Bond tried to think through the implications of the geography. If Gorner had a drug connection with the Soviet Union, it was difficult to see how he could get the drugs out by air from a remote airstrip in the southern desert. Small planes wouldn’t have enough fuel, while larger ones would appear on Soviet radar.
    There was something about the Caspian that kept drawing his eye back to it. The problem was that the Soviet town of Astrakhan in the north was about six hundred miles, he calculated, from the Persian littoral in the south. What kind of sea-going vessel could make that distance feasible?
    Meanwhile, the Persian interior was largely taken up by two deserts. To the north, and closer to Tehran, was the salt desert, Dasht-e Kavir. To the south-east, much more remote, was the sand desert, Dasht-e Lut. It appeared to support no human settlement at all, yet it was to its southern edge, at Bam, that Savak had sent its patrol in search of Gorner.
    Presumably Savak knew something. Although it was less convenient for Tehran and the Caspian, this desert, the Dasht-e Lut, had a railway on its southern rim through the sizeable cities of Kerman and Yazd, both of which also had airstrips, though it was hard to tell from the map how big they were. There were also major-looking roads on this southern side of the Dasht-e Lut desert via Zahedan right up to the Afghan border just beyond Zabol.
    Zabol. It sounded like the end of the world. What kind of frontier town might that be? thought Bond. He found his curiosity aroused.
    The telephone on the bedside table let out its strange electronic peal.
    ‘Mr Bond? Is Reception. Is a lady to see you. She no say her name.’
    ‘Tell her I’ll be right down.’
    There was certainly no chance of his being lonely in Tehran, Bond thought grimly, as he went towards the lift. He could only presume this was someone Darius had sent, since no one else, except maybe three people in Regent’s Park, knew his whereabouts.
    Across the white marble floor of the lobby, with her back to him as she looked into the window of the gift shop, was a woman with dark hair tied back in a half-ponytail, wearing a white sleeveless blouse and a navy blue skirt to the knee, with elegant bare legs and