The Last Night at Sea

Chapter One

Atlantic Ocean, December 1971

James Bond had always disliked endings.

Not because he feared them. He had met enough of them to know exactly what they were worth. He disliked them because they rarely stayed ended. A man put a bullet in a villain and the world declared the matter closed, and then the paperwork began, and the paperwork had a way of opening doors that the bullet had closed.

The Atlantic rolled gently beneath the cruise liner, patient and indifferent, the way it had been rolling long before there were ships to complain about it. Somewhere below decks

American tourists were getting drunk, celebrating anniversaries, quarrelling quietly about the food. Above, the stars shimmered with a hard northern brilliance that made the diamonds Bond had spent the last several weeks chasing seem almost ordinary.

That, he decided, was the trouble with the things men killed each other for. Put them next to the sky and they were gravel.

He shifted his weight against the railing and felt the tug of stitches under his left rib. Not serious. The naval doctor who had patched him aboard the escort had called it a graze, which in the service’s dialect meant a hole that had missed everything inconvenient. It hurt when he breathed deeply, and so he had taken to not breathing deeply, which the doctor had not thought worth mentioning.

Tiffany Case leaned against the railing beside him.

She smelled of the sea and of the cheap perfume she had bought in Amsterdam, which she had explained at length had cost a great deal and smelled like a great deal less. She had the particular beauty of a woman who has spent her whole life being looked at and has recently begun to resent it. Bond had known a great many women with that expression. Most of them had not survived knowing him. "Well, James," she said, "I suppose that’s another adventure finished."

Bond looked at her. "Rather untidy business, actually." "You nearly died." "Occupational hazard." "You nearly got me killed." "An unfortunate complication."

She laughed, shaking her head, and the sound of it was more honest than anything either of them had said in three days. "You really are impossible."

He took a cigarette from the silver case, tapped it once against his thumbnail out of a habit he had picked up somewhere and never bothered to lose, and was about to light it when a steward appeared at the far end of the deck. The young man moved with the particular half-trot of a crew member who has been sent to find a passenger and is not entirely certain he wants to succeed. "Mr Bond?"

Bond paused with the lighter halfway up. "A radio message for you, sir."

After twenty years of hearing that sentence, Bond had learned to read the tone beneath it. There was urgency in it, and

something worse than urgency: apology.

He glanced at Tiffany. "Apparently," he said, "even Her Majesty has difficulty allowing a gentleman his holiday."

She did not smile. She watched him with that flat, unblinking

American honesty of hers, the kind that had no patience for charm because charm had been tried on her by experts. "Go on, then. Somebody has to save the world. It might as well be somebody who won’t call me back."

He left her at the rail and followed the steward through the elegant corridors of the ship, past the lounge where a small orchestra was murdering a Cole Porter song, past the purser’s office, down a companionway that smelled of polish and engine oil, into the communications room.

The radio officer was a thin man with ink on his cuff and a hunted expression. He handed over a flimsy without meeting

Bond’s eye.

Bond read it once.

RETURN TO LONDON IMMEDIATELY. EYES ONLY.

M.

He read it a second time, more slowly, because his eye had caught on the line underneath and his mind had refused, at first, to accept it.

DO NOT CONTACT FELIX LEITER. DO NOT USE

STANDARD CHANNELS.

The words sat on the page like a stone in a stream, with the current going around them.

Bond had known Felix Leiter for most of his working life.

They had killed men together in Harlem and in the Florida keys.

Bond had sent him money when the agency let him go, and he had been there when it came back, and there was nothing in the world either of them could not say to the other.

M had never once told him to avoid Felix.

In twenty years there had been cables that were terse, cables that were cold, and one memorable cable that consisted of the single word Explain? alongside an expense claim for a helicopter. But there had never been this. This was not terseness.

This was a hand across the mouth. "Reply, sir?" the radio officer asked.

Bond looked at him properly for the first time, taking in the damp palms and the glance that kept sliding toward the corridor. "No," he said. "There won’t be a reply."

He folded the flimsy and put it in the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, where it lay against his ribs with the weight of nothing at all.

On his way back aft he passed a mirror in the corridor and saw himself in it, briefly and without pleasure. Forty-one years old whatever the file said. A man in evening dress with a healing hole in his side and grey beginning, unmistakably, at the temples. Bond had always taken care with his appearance: a well-cut suit, a clean shave and shoes somebody had been paid to polish were as much part of his equipment as the pistol under his arm, and he had never pretended otherwise to himself. What troubled him now was that no amount of tailoring concealed the fact that he looked like what he was, he looked like a man growing old, and he was not certain he knew how to do that.

When he reached the deck Tiffany was standing exactly where he had left her, which surprised him. Most people at the end of an affair rearranged themselves before you came back, as though they had been caught standing in the wrong place.

"Bad news?" "Business." "Isn’t it always?"

He considered telling her the truth, which was that he did not know. He did not tell her. Instead he looked out at the ocean, black and moving, and felt something he had not expected to feel again.

For twenty years he had understood his life as a series of doors. There was always another door, and behind the door another man with a gun or a bomb or an ambition, and after that another door. He had gone through them because going through them was what he did, and because somewhere at the very back of everything there had once been a woman with a face he could still summon without wanting to, and a promise he had made to her that he had gone on keeping in the worst possible way.

Blofeld was dead, Bond had decided, and he had decided it eighteen times between Florida and Southampton, which is seventeen more times than a man decides anything that is simply true. He had seen the man go down, with his own hands around the throat of it, which is a thing a man does not forget and does not discuss, and there had been a body, and there had been a debriefing in which four careful people had agreed about it in writing.

What he did not believe, and had not believed since the second week, was that it was over. There is no paperwork conclusive enough to kill a man like Blofeld, and Bond had spent two years learning to mistrust any conclusion he wanted very much to be true.

He had expected relief.

He had got three days on a ship, a woman who did not love him, and a glass of indifferent brandy he had not finished.

There was a word for what he had felt, standing over Blofeld in the last fifteen seconds of it, and Bond had spent three days refusing to say it to himself. It was not justice. It was not even revenge, which is a warm dish and this was cold. It was simply the cessation of a task, and after two years of having his days arranged by one hatred, he had discovered he did not know what to do with a Tuesday.

In the wardroom of a destroyer off the Florida coast he had slept for nineteen hours, which the doctor had called shock and which Bond had privately considered the most sensible thing his body had done in two years. On waking he had asked for breakfast, eaten all of it, and then sat for an hour at a porthole looking at nothing at all with the complete absence of thought of a man whose engine has been switched off.

They had asked him whether he wanted to talk to somebody.

He had said no.

He had always said no.

There is a photograph somewhere in a drawer in a flat in

Chelsea which nobody else has ever been permitted to look at, and Bond did not need to look at it to see it. A woman with dark hair standing in wind by a car on a coast road in Portugal with her arms folded because she was cold and would not admit it.

Teresa di Vicenzo, who had called him by his name at the end and whom he had married on the twenty-second of December

1969 in a registry office in Munich with eight people present and who, five hours later, had been shot through the head by a man on a mountain road.

He had spent two years hunting that man.

Somebody had once asked him, professionally and at length, whether killing Ernst Stavro Blofeld was personal. Bond had said no, of course not. It had been a lie which he had told so well

that he had almost believed it himself, and here on the last night of 1971 with an ocean going past underneath him he understood finally what the lie had been for. Revenge would have been an emotion, and emotions end. Duty doesn’t. He had dressed murder up as duty so that the day he finally put his hands around

Blofeld’s throat there would still be something left of him afterwards.

There was almost nothing left.

The hatred that had organised his days for two years had simply lost its object, like a hand closing on air. And what he discovered when the hand closed was not peace. It was simply vacancy, and beneath that, a question he did not enjoy, which had been following him around since Munich: whether a man who has built his whole life out of obligation is capable of wanting anything at all once the obligation has been discharged.

He had no answer to that. He had been three days at sea with no answer to it and no interest in having one, and he thought, standing at the rail with the Atlantic going past, that if he were honest he should probably be frightened of how little he cared.

There is fear, and there is foreboding, and the difference between them is the difference between a gun and a diagnosis.

Fear says: something is going to happen now. Foreboding says: something has already happened, and it is simply walking toward you. "James?"

He realised he had been standing silent rather a long time. "Nothing," he said. "Only that we dock at Southampton in four days, and I doubt very much whether I’ll be aboard."

She looked at him then with something close to pity, which was worse than anger and considerably more accurate.

"You know," Tiffany Case said, "for a man who’s supposed to be so clever, you are the most frighteningly lonely person I have ever met."

Bond lit his cigarette at last, because his hands had decided to stop shaking and it seemed a waste not to. "Yes," he said. "Well."

Below them the great ship drove on through the dark, carrying its drunks and its honeymooners and its quiet American thieves toward England, and somewhere ahead of it London sat under its winter rain, turning over a file.

The diamonds had been recovered. The villain was finished.

The world had been saved again, on schedule and within budget.

But somebody in London had decided that James Bond’s greatest mission was about to begin.

And nobody had thought to tell him.

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