The Man Behind the Desk

Chapter Two

London, January 1972

It had rained for nine days.

London in January has a way of suggesting that the city itself is only being kept standing by habit, and Bond, who had spent the best part of three weeks being debriefed within an inch of his patience and then informed that his debriefing would continue at some future date yet to be determined, was in no mood to disagree with it.

It was the twenty-fourth of January. What he did not know

— and would not put together for another ten years, with three sheets of paper in front of him in a cell in Virginia — was that twenty days earlier, on the fourth of the month, while he was still being asked the same four questions about Blofeld, somebody had signed a directive declaring Commander James Bond administratively deceased. Nine people had agreed it eighteen days before that, in a room he had never entered. M had not been summoned.

He had come up from the country that morning. The journey had taken longer than it should have done because there was engineering work on the line at Basingstoke, and Bond had spent the delay in a station buffet reading a copy of the Telegraph left behind by a man in a bowler hat. There was a small item on page four about a junior minister resigning for reasons of health. Bond had read it twice, because he had spent enough time around

institutions to know that when a man resigns for reasons of health it is almost never his own.

The entrance near Regent’s Park was the same. The commissionaire behind the glass was the same. Even the smell

— floor polish, hot water pipes, and the faint institutional sadness of corridors that have heard too much — was the same.

Everything else had changed, and Bond’s skin noticed it before his mind did.

There were new faces in the registry, and none of them would meet his eye. The clerk who took his pass had the careful brightness of a man who has been told nothing and suspects everything. On the second floor two men Bond did not recognise stood talking outside a door that had been open, always open, for eleven years. They stopped when he came into view. One of them glanced at Bond’s face and then away again, quickly, the way people look at a man whose sentence has already been passed.

Bond walked on with his hands in his pockets and his expression arranged.

M did not offer him a seat.

That was the first thing.

M had never, in twenty years, neglected to offer Bond a seat.

He had snarled, he had interrupted, he had once thrown a file across the room in a disagreement about aerial photography over

Cuba, and through all of it the chair had been there, pulled out slightly, waiting, because that was how M conducted himself with his own people. A man was seated before he was spoken to.

The chair had not been pulled out.

The second thing was the American standing beside the window.

He was tall, silver-haired, and wearing an expensive suit cut a little too well for a government salary. He stood with the stiff, squared posture of a military man who has spent the last twenty years behind a desk and resents, quietly and permanently, everyone who has not. He did not turn when Bond entered. He studied the rain. "007," M began, without preamble. "This is Mr Richard

Hargreaves, representing certain interests within the American intelligence community."

Bond examined him. "How reassuringly vague."

Hargreaves ignored the remark and continued to look at the window. Bond filed that too, and moved on.

M had been ill. Bond saw it in an instant and wished he had not, because he had no language for it. The old man’s hands, resting on the desk, had the mottled look of hands that have lost their grip on things. His face had thinned. There was a new tremor at the corner of his mouth that he controlled by not moving much at all. He looked like a photograph of himself printed slightly out of register. "We have a problem, Commander," said Hargreaves. "Then I suggest you call someone qualified."

M’s eyes narrowed. Not the good-narrow. The other kind. "Sit down, Bond."

Bond sat.

A folder appeared on the desk.

He opened it. It contained photographs of dead intelligence officers — six of them, all passport style, all with a line drawn beneath in red and a date. Surveillance reports typed on a machine whose ribbon had needed changing. And a series of financial transfers originating from accounts with Caribbean

routing numbers that Bond recognised from three previous lives, all of them belonging at the time to SPECTRE.

He knew the third one.

His name had been Marcus Fellowes, which nobody had ever called him, because for the eleven years Bond had known him he had been Fido to everybody including himself. He had been stationed in Vienna in 1961, where he had run three agents badly and honestly, had drunk too much of somebody’s Riesling, and had once, memorably, been sick into the back seat of the

British Ambassador’s motor car at two in the morning, which had cost him Vienna and had got him Madrid, which nobody survives unharmed.

Bond had last seen him in a corridor in Whitehall in the spring of 1969. Fellowes had said he was going somewhere hot and had seemed almost cheerful about it.

The date beneath the photograph was the twelfth of February

1971.

Bond looked at the face for perhaps four seconds and then turned the page, because there is nothing else to do with a face like that in a room like that, and because twenty years teaches a man that there will be time for it later, and that in any case there will not. "Do you recognise him?" M asked. "I knew him." "Professionally?" "He was briefly very good at something he disliked, and then briefly bad at something he liked." Bond turned another page. "Somebody shot him in a place he told me he was going to in order to be safe." "It says here he died of malaria." "No it doesn’t."

M said nothing, which Bond had always thought of as his best quality, and which he would think about again much later, under circumstances in which there was nobody left to think at all.

He turned the pages with the flat professional interest of a man reading a menu in a restaurant he is about to leave.

Then he turned another page and stopped reading casually.

The list of recipients was not a list of criminals.

A photograph of an American senator, silver-haired and pious, mid-speech. Another of a director of the Central

Intelligence Agency, whose face Bond had seen in a briefing room in Langley in sixty-six. A third showed a naval officer

Bond had once debriefed in Malta, a man who had bought him lunch and told him a great deal about Soviet submarine deployments in the eastern Mediterranean and had been, apparently, entirely happy to be paid twice. "Interesting company Blofeld kept," Bond observed, keeping his voice level.

Hargreaves finally turned from the window. "We believe certain SPECTRE operations were facilitated by people within our government." "People?" Bond repeated. "Or departments?"

The American said nothing, which was an answer of a kind.

Bond continued through the file with the same flat attention, turning pages faster now, feeling the edges of the thing. Then he came to a page that was not like the others.

A photograph, black and white, grain at the edges, taken in bright flat sunlight.

November 1963.

Dallas, Texas.

Three men standing near a government vehicle with the casualness of people who work in the same building and have been asked to stand together for a photograph they would rather not be in. Two of them unimportant. The third, younger by eight years, with darker hair and the same squared shoulders, was

Richard Hargreaves.

Bond looked at the photograph for rather a long time.

What it told him once was simple enough: Richard

Hargreaves had been standing in Dallas in November 1963 next to men whose business was not motorcades, and had not considered that worth a sentence of the introduction he had given sixty seconds earlier. What it told him twice was more useful.

Somebody had put it there. There is no other reason for an uncaptioned photograph to survive in a folder assembled as carefully as this one, and Bond knew precisely what it meant when a man spends one of his own secrets to buy your attention.

Underneath it there was no caption. There never was. He had learned that early: the most important documents in any intelligence file are the ones nobody has written a caption for.

He raised his eyes. "Well, now," said Bond. "This is becoming interesting."

The temperature in the room did something subtle and definite.

M closed the folder with his palm, the way a man closes a box he does not want anyone else opening. "Your assignment is to recover the remaining records and bring them to London." "From whom?"

Hargreaves answered, and there was a certain strained dignity to it. "The United States government."

Bond stared at him. Then, slowly, he smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile he had learned to use on men who had just told him something unforgivable and expected him to accept it as policy. "You’ll forgive me," he said. "But that sounds suspiciously like stealing."

M looked at him steadily. The rain ticked at the window.

Somewhere in the building a telephone rang twice and was answered. "It is," said M.

Bond waited for more. There was no more.

He understood, in that silence, two separate things at once.

The first was that M was too ill to be in this room. The second was that M had come anyway, and had brought Bond in as well, which meant whatever was happening had gone past the point of being contained by ordinary people doing their jobs. "You realise," Bond said carefully, "that if this is true — if even a third of what’s in that folder is true — then the Americans will not permit me to walk into their archives and ask politely." "That’s why we’re asking you," Hargreaves said. "No," Bond said mildly. "You’re asking me because if it goes badly you can watch from a distance and issue a press release."

M’s mouth tightened. "That will do, 007."

Bond held his tongue. It was, he reflected afterwards, the last time for a very long while that he would be able to say that and mean it as obedience rather than contempt. "When do I leave?" "You’ll be briefed separately on cover," M said. "The details will be handled by a section you don’t normally deal with."

"Who handles the travel?" "Registry."

Bond almost laughed. Registry had never handled anything larger than a train ticket to Aldershot. He had booked his own hotels for eleven years, usually badly, always in cash.

All of which meant that somebody else had charge of his movements now, and that M was not entirely in the possession of this room.

Bond stood, because he understood he was being dismissed.

He was halfway to the door when M spoke his name — not 007, but the other one, quietly — and Bond turned.

The old man looked at him for a moment with something

Bond could not identify. An older officer wishing a younger one luck would have looked like something. This was not that. It was closer to a man checking whether a door is locked and discovering too late that he does not have the key. "Take care, James," M said.

Bond thought about asking what, precisely, he should take care of, and about, and against whom.

He said, "Sir," and closed the door.

In the corridor outside, Hargreaves fell in beside him without looking at him. "Commander. A word."

They walked to the end of the corridor, past the lift, to an empty office where someone had left a typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it and nobody had come back to finish the sentence.

Hargreaves shut the door. "I want you to understand something about me," he said, quietly and very fast, the way people speak when they have decided to be brave for exactly as long as it takes. "Nineteen

sixty-three was a long time ago. I was a security officer. I was told to stand where I was told to stand." "Everyone was." "I know who you are," Hargreaves said. "You think you’ve never been that man. Standing where you’re told."

Bond considered him. Up close the American looked older than he had from across the desk, and there was something in his eyes that Bond recognised with a small cold shock. It was the look of a man who has been walking around with a sentence in his head for eight years and has finally decided to say it out loud to a stranger. "I have stood exactly where I was told to stand," Bond said. "Rather more often than I care to admit. The trick is knowing when to stop obeying."

Hargreaves let out a breath of a laugh without any humour in it. "That’s very good." "It’s a very old joke." "Does it help?" "No."

Hargreaves looked at the empty typewriter. "It’s just that they’re still doing it, Commander. That’s the thing nobody in your building seems able to take seriously. It didn’t stop. It got a budget."

Bond watched him carefully. "And you’re giving it to me." "I’m giving it to somebody," Hargreaves said, "who isn’t afraid of being told no." "And if it turns out I am?"

Hargreaves looked him dead in the eye.

"Then I hope you have a very good memory, Commander

Bond. Because when this is finished there may not be a single piece of paper left that says either of us was in that room."

He opened the door and was gone down the corridor before

Bond could decide whether that had been a threat or the most honest warning anyone had ever given him.

Later — years later, with a great deal of time in which to reconsider it — Bond would find himself returning to that conversation in the empty office with the abandoned typewriter, and to the two things Hargreaves had done wrong.

The first was that he had trusted Bond.

The second, far worse, was that he had been right to.

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