Devil May Care

craved.
    Then, at the end of the corridor he saw a burly shape, silhouetted in the night lights as it approached. On its head was a Foreign Legion cap, and Bond felt a new and strange emotion at the sight of Chagrin: relief.
    Chagrin barked two words in Farsi as he approached. The guards backed off a little and made room for him.
    ‘Where is girl?’ said Chagrin.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Bond.
    They would see the open door and search outside the building. His gamble was that the last place they wouldimagine a young woman to hide was on board an airliner that she knew was destined to crash the next day. The odds were not great – but it was the only play left open to him.
    Chagrin jerked his head down the passageway, in the direction of the cell, and gave a brief order. As Bond was frogmarched away, he became aware of the commotion in the building. Alarms were wailing and hundreds of footsteps seemed to be pounding the floor. ‘Go on, Scarlett,’ he muttered to himself. The picture of the slim figure rising silently into the darkness flashed across his mind.
    Two men stayed with him in the cell, where they retied his hands, and two more guards were stationed outside. After a few minutes, when the alarms and sirens had been stilled, the door was opened and Chagrin came in.
    ‘Get down,’ he said, pointing to the floor.
    Bond knelt down, placing his knee on the sand where the two shards of glass had been reburied.
    ‘Where girl?’ said Chagrin.
    ‘I’ve told you,’ said Bond. ‘I don’t know. A guard opened the door because she felt ill. She ran away, but I don’t know where she went. I went down the corridor to inform Dr Gorner that one of his guests was missing. I seem to have misremembered the code to his office.’
    ‘Liar!’ Chagrin screamed at him. ‘Liar!’
    The side of his face that moved normally was contracted in fury, while the other side remained unnaturally still. There were flecks of foam at one corner of his mouth.
    And this, thought Bond, was the sight that had greeted the eyes of schoolchildren when they had been sitting cross-legged in a circle in a village clearing to listen to the parable of the Good Samaritan.
    ‘Tell me where girl go. Tell me!’
    Bond looked at the torturer with contempt. A verse from long-ago scripture lessons came into his head. ‘“Suffer the little children to come unto me,”’ he said, ‘“and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of –”’
    Chagrin kicked his boot into Bond’s ribs and Bond heard a crack of bone. Then, from his shirt pocket, Chagrin withdrew a leather case, and, from inside it, two ivory chopsticks with scarlet Chinese lettering.
    One guard jerked back Bond’s head by the hair and the other gripped him under the jaw while Chagrin inserted a chopstick slowly and deeply into his left ear.
    The guard held Bond in a headlock while Chagrin, with equal care and precision, inserted the second chopstick. Bond could feel the tip work through to his eardrum.
    ‘You hear bad things you no tell,’ said Chagrin. ‘This what Pham Sinh Quoc do when man hear bad thing.’
    Bond braced himself as Chagrin moved closer and spread his feet. He could see the army boots worming their way into the sand for better purchase as Chagrin spread his stubby arms wide.
    As he breathed in deeply, Bond closed his eyes and did not see the face from whose mouth came the single word ‘Stop.’
    He looked up, and could see at the open grille of the cell door the long fingers of an outsized white glove. The door was opened and Gorner came in, wearing a crimson silk dressing-gown.
    ‘Thank you, Chagrin. You can go. I want Bond to be able to hear instructions when he’s flying. Stand up.’
    Bond got to his feet. ‘So,’ said Gorner, ‘the bitch has escaped. The workers are going to be disappointed if I don’tget her back. But I think we’ll manage something even without her, don’t you?’ He smirked.
    Poppy, thought Bond. He would make her stand in for her sister, and the workers would never know the difference.
    ‘Well,’ said Gorner, ‘I suppose I had to expect to sacrifice a pawn in this game. To win a war, you may occasionally lose a skirmish – and, frankly, the girl was a nuisance. The big fish is still in my net. Aren’t you, Bond?’
    ‘What time do we take off?’
    ‘I see no reason to change my plans,’ said Gorner. ‘Not for the sake of a girl my men will find within the hour. You board at nine. Your navigator is one of my best