Devil May Care

been a partner in some of the most testing cases in James Bond’s career, was working for Pinkerton’s detective agency, and made no secret of his boredom. He had been hired by a producer at one of the Hollywood studios to make inquiries about a missing person. She was called Trixie Rocket, had appeared in two B-pictures, then disappeared from sight, leaving no forwarding address, no number, nothing. The girl’s parents, who came from Idaho, had been making threatening noises towards the studio. Suspicion had fallen on the producer who had cast Trixie and who was now anxious to find her so that he could clear his name before his wife got to hear anything.
    It was tame work for a man of Leiter’s abilities, but since he’d lost his right leg and arm to a hammerhead shark while helping out Bond in Miami, he was limited in what he could do.
    There was a furious barking from behind the front door of 1614 Georgina, then an attractive, dark-haired woman poked her head out. She was on the telephone and gestured to Felix to wait. He went to sit on the grass verge and opened his copy of the Los Angeles Times.
    After about twenty minutes on the telephone, the woman, whose name was Louisa Shirer, finally called him in andshowed him through to a small backyard, where she brought coffee. Mrs Shirer turned out to be a charming, voluble woman. Trixie Rocket had been her lodger and she remembered her well, but Trixie hadn’t lived there for three months now. She hadn’t left a forwarding address but … At that moment the telephone rang again, and Felix had to stare into his coffee for another fifteen minutes.
    The visit had been pleasant but pointless. When he eventually got back to his cheap hotel in West Hollywood, he felt worn out. A slovenly ceiling fan rotated above the potted palms in the lobby and the elevator was stuck on the tenth floor. But there was a message for him at the desk, asking him to ring a number in Washington. Felix recognized the prefix and felt a sudden surge of excitement.
    The last real action he had seen was on a train with Bond in Jamaica. Before that, he’d been redrafted by the CIA in the Bahamas when they ran short of manpower. Once you’d been on the books, you were a lifelong reserve.
    When the revived elevator had finally taken him up to his room, Felix called the number on the piece of paper. After a barrage of security checks he was eventually put through. A voice spoke to him in a flat, serious tone for almost two minutes.
    Leiter stood by the bed, smoking a cigarette, nodding at intervals. ‘Yup … yup … I see.’
    Eventually the voice stopped and Leiter said, ‘And just where the hell is Tehran?’
    Meanwhile, it was early evening in that city, and Darius Alizadeh was on his way to the top of the andaroon – the women’s section – of his traditional house. He was too modern and secular to observe the ritual distinction of thesexes in his household, but used the separate buildings to keep his work and domestic affairs apart. Darius had been married three times for brief periods and had three sons by his different wives. He had followed the Shia provision of the mut’a, which allows a couple to contract a marriage for as short a period as they like and to end it without divorce. He was fond of quoting the helpful lines from the Koran: ‘If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three or four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one …’
    Darius had had no such fears and had provided handsomely for his sons and their mothers. He kept a sharp eye open for the fourth wife the Prophet permitted him, and allowed himself the occasional trial run with likely candidates. He was seeing one of them – Zohreh from the restaurant where he had dined with Bond – later that evening.
    The air-conditioned top floor of the andaroon, Darius’s office, was a single open-plan space with wooden ‘American’ shutters, a stripped wood floor with a single antique rug from Isfahan and a gilded cage in which he kept a white parakeet. At 1800 hours each day he transmitted his report to London. If he failed to come on air at precisely this time there was a reprimand in the shape of a ‘blue call’ from Regent’s Park half an hour later, then a red call at 1900. If that went unanswered, London would set about trying to find out what had happened to him.
    Darius had never received reminders of either colour, and