Solo

he said to himself with a grin, recalling one of the cruder adages of his old friend René Mathis. Yes,
pisser sur les fourmis
and set the ants scurrying for cover.
    Bond crossed the street and pushed open the door of the restaurant. His gaze quickly swept the room. It was bright and airy, decorated in varying shades of blue and embellished with a multitude of nautical motifs on the walls – signal flags, a life belt, a ship’s wheel, cork floats and swags of netting. He thought he caught a glimpse of Blessing in the far corner but he looked no further, smilingly approaching the young woman who stood at a lectern at the entrance to the dining room, and asking if he could make a reservation for that evening. The reservation was made, Bond helped himself to a Baltimore Crab business card from the little pile on top of the lectern and left. He was almost one hundred per cent sure that Blessing would have spotted him talking to the woman at the maître d’s station. In any event, the next few minutes would prove him right or wrong.
    Bond wandered up the street a few yards, hailed a passing cab and climbed in.
    ‘Just wait here for a while,’ he told the driver and handed him a $10 note. He hunched down in the rear seat, keeping his eyes on the restaurant door. Sure enough, in about ninety seconds, Blessing hurried out, agitated, looking up and down the street, scanning the faces of passers-by. Bond smiled to himself – the ants were in a real state. Blessing waved down the first cab she saw and got in.
    ‘Follow that cab,’ Bond said. ‘And there’s another twenty in it for you if we’re not spotted.’
    ‘Hey, no problem,’ the cabbie said. He had a Mexican accent and a droopy, bandit’s moustache. ‘She your girl?’
    ‘Yes – two-timing bitch.’
    ‘Man, don’ get me start on
las chicas
,’ the cabbie said and immediately embarked on a long anecdote about his ex-wife in lewd and abusive detail.
    Bond let him rant on, keeping his eye on Blessing’s cab. He wondered what she would be thinking, what level of shock and astonishment the sight of him would have provoked. To see James Bond saunter into a Washington DC restaurant when she might have assumed he was dead and buried . . . No, Bond thought, the sick jolt of alarm would go quickly and then furious second-guessing would begin. She would intuit almost instantly that this was no coincidence and that he had wanted her to see him. But why? she would ask herself. Then she’d enter the fraught and dangerous labyrinth of pure speculation. This was a man she had shot in the chest in Africa – and yet here he was on her trail in Washington DC. Bond smiled: Blessing’s head would be ringing with a hundred alarm bells – she would be well and truly spooked. He sat back – there were many types of satisfaction to be enjoyed in this job.
    Blessing’s car headed into Georgetown and stopped outside a small, pretty clapboard house on O Street.
    ‘Drive on by,’ Bond said to the cabbie, peering out of the rear window to see Blessing run inside, not paying off the driver, keeping her cab waiting, its engine ticking over. They drove on fifty yards and Bond ordered the cabbie to park and wait.
    ‘We go through a lot of zones, mister,’ the cabbie said. Bond had forgotten the arcane mysteries of cab-fare calculation in DC.
    ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay you well. Get ready to turn around if you have to,’ Bond said and fed the man another $20.
    ‘Hey, you can hire me all day, every day, mister,’ he turned in the front seat and leered at him. ‘I am like to work with you.’
    After five minutes Blessing reappeared again, a suitcase in her hand. She locked the front door and hurried into her cab. It pulled away and passed them.
    ‘Don’t lose it, whatever you do,’ Bond said.
    ‘You got it.’
    Blessing’s cab headed west out of DC and crossed the Key Bridge over the Potomac. About twenty minutes later it pulled into the forecourt of a large and ugly modern motel called the Blackstone Park Motor Lodge.
    ‘Keep going,’ Bond said. They drove on another block or so. ‘Stop.’
    The cab pulled into the side of the road under a vast billboard advertising Kool cigarettes. Through the rear window Bond could see Blessing paying off her cab and a bellhop picking up her suitcase. So this was where she would be staying. She was smart: she assumed her cover was blown and so she immediately changed address, within minutes. Bond relaxed – he knew where