Moonraker (James Bond, #3)

by Ian Fleming

It was easier for the men. They had an excuse for fragmentary affairs. For them marriage and children and a home were out of the question if they were to be of any use ‘in the field’ as it was cosily termed.

‘N.A.T.O. Radio Research has recently been experimenting with a form of “scrambler” which can be attached to the wrist of operators with the object of interfering minutely with the nerve centres which control the muscles of the hand.

No newspaper comes to the reading room before it has been ironed.

Across the square from him, high up in the air, a bold electric sign started to flash on and off. The fading light-waves had caused the cathode tube to start the mechanism which would keep the sign flashing through the dark hours until, around six in the morning, the early light of day would again sensitize the tube and cause the circuit to close.

When he had first seen the sign, half-hidden by the building, great crimson letters across the evening sky had flashed a different message. They had said: ‘HELL IS HERE . . . HELL IS HERE . . . HELL IS HERE.’

He also had patches of hair on his cheek-bones.

He tipped the last of the ice-cold champagne into his glass. He felt wonderful. The effects of the benzedrine and champagne had more than offset the splendour of the food.

Morphy, the great chess player, had a terrible habit. He would never raise his eyes from the game until he knew his opponent could not escape defeat. Then he would slowly lift his great head and gaze curiously at the man across the board. His opponent would feel the gaze and would slowly, humbly raise his eyes to meet Morphy’s. At that moment he would know that it was no good continuing the game. The eyes of Morphy said so. There was nothing left but surrender.

the gain to the winner is, in some odd way, always less than the loss to the loser.

‘Addiction, as in the case of marijuana in the United States, begins with one “shot”. The effect is “stimulating” and the drug is habit-forming. It is also cheap – about ten yen (sixpence) a shot – and the addict rapidly increases his shots to the neighbourhood of one hundred a day. In these quantities the addiction becomes expensive and the victim automatically turns to crime to pay for the drug. That the crime often includes physical assault and murder is due to a peculiar property of the drug. It induces an acute persecution complex in the addict who becomes prey to the illusion that people want to kill him and that he is always being followed with harmful intent. He will turn with his feet and fists, or with a razor, on a stranger in the streets who he thinks has scrutinized him offensively.

people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger. They even courted it in a perverse way.

Bond walked carefully across the hall and up the stairs, placing his feet flat on the ground and using the extreme edges of the steps where the boards would be less likely to creak.

The scream of a jay was driven out of Krebs as, like the caricature of a leaping frog,

It took five minutes to revive Krebs and get him into a sitting position with his back to the dressing-table and another five for him to be capable of speaking.

Bond sat on in the silent room, shifting the pieces in the jigsaw so that two entirely different pictures alternated in his mind. In one the sun shone and all was clear and innocent as the day outside. The other was a dark confusion of guilty motives, obscure suspicions, and nightmare queries.

Between the sands of the coast, along the twelve-fathom channel of the Inner Leads, there were half a dozen ships beating up through the Downs, the thud of their engines coming clearly off the quiet sea, and between the evil sands and the sharp outline of the French coast there were ships of all registries going about their business – liners, merchantmen, ungainly Dutch schuyts, and even a slim corvette hastening down south, perhaps to Portsmouth.

She smiled at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I’m sick of the sight of all this concrete.’

The ice of Gala’s reserve melted quickly in the sunshine.

‘There’s an Indian called Professor Bhose, who’s written a treatise on the nervous system of flowers. He measured their reaction to pain. He even recorded the scream of a rose being picked. It must be one of the most heart-rending sounds in the world. I heard something like it as you picked that flower.’

She handed it to him and their hands touched. ‘You can stick it in the muzzle of your revolver,’ she said to cover the flash of contact.

He held nothing back and he showed each false hare as it had been started and finally run to earth, leaving nothing but a thin scent of ill-founded suspicions and a muddle of clues that all ended in the same question mark . . . where was a pattern?

she thought how wonderful it would be to bathe – to step back for a moment into those childish days beside the sea before her life had been caught up in this strange cold profession with its tensions and hollow thrills.

‘What do you think?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gala. ‘I was dreaming. No,’ she answered his question, ‘I think you’re right.

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently, dissatisfied with himself for disowning the intuitions that were so much of his trade. ‘Come on,’ he said, almost roughly. ‘We’re wasting time.’

a Russian suicide squad.

Gala had been standing beside him watching the eyes that measured and speculated.

Bond was already halfway down the strip of coarse brown sand that led out among the pools to where the incoming tide eddied through the green and black moraine of the rocks.

But her body obstinately tingled with the shock of the kiss and the golden day seemed to have taken on a new beauty.

in the rage of the rescue work, he felt no pain.

He knelt and looked at her, at the terrible white scarecrow that minutes before had been one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen, and as he looked at her and at the streaks of his blood down her face he prayed that her eyes would open.

He was a brilliant driver, but a vindictive and impatient one who was always anxious for any car that held him up to be given something to remember.

Coldly she turned back several pages in the book, took her nail file out of the bag and, as neatly as she could, cut out a specimen page, rolled it up into a tight ball and stuffed it into the tip of a finger of one of her gloves.

The tyres churned up the gravel as he accelerated out of the parking place and dry-skidded into the London road.

She tried to remember her lessons. Distracting pressure on some other part of the body. Distracting the attention. Distraction. The victim must not be at ease. His senses must be focused away. He must be unaware of the touch on his body. Anaesthetized by a stronger stimulus.

A kind of frozen cruelty was showing through the jolly façade of red skin and whiskers. It was a different man. The man behind the mask. The creature beneath the flat stone that Gala Brand had lifted.

So one’s heart really does go into one’s throat. How extraordinary. Such a commonplace and yet there it is and it really does almost stop one breathing.

Without noticing what he was eating Bond wolfed down some food and left the restaurant at 8.45.

The deep note of his two-inch exhaust thundered back at him from the houses on either side and his tyres screamed on the tarmac. He thanked heavens for the new set of racing Michelins that were only a week old.

As if to echo his thoughts the tortured rubber screamed as he left the South Circular road into the A20 and took the roundabout at forty.

So be it, said Bond to himself.

Then he accelerated away from Swanley Junction and was soon doing ninety astride the cats’ eyes down the Farningham by-pass, the wind howling past his ears and the shrill scream of his supercharger riding with him for company.

THERE WERE three separate sources of pain in Gala’s body. The throbbing ache behind her left ear, the bite of the flex at her wrists, and the chafing of the strap round her ankles. Every bump in the road, every swerve, every sudden pressure of Drax’s foot on the brakes or the accelerator awoke one or another of these pains and rasped at her nerves.

The air she breathed was stuffy with a smell of new leather upholstery, exhaust fumes, and the occasional sharp stench of burning rubber as Drax flayed the tyres on a sharp corner.

But the afternoon alone with Krebs was present and dreadful and her mind went back and back to the details of it like a tongue to an aching tooth.

first Krebs had occupied himself with the machines, talking to them in German in a cooing baby-talk. ‘There, my Liebchen. That’s better now, isn’t it? A drop of oil for you, my Pupperl. But certainly. Coming up at once. No, no, lazybones. I said a thousand revolutions. Not nine hundred. Come along now. We can do better than that, can’t we. Yes, my Schatz. That’s it. Round and round we go. Up and down. Round and round. Let me wipe your pretty face for you so that we can see what the little dial is saying. Jesu Maria, bist du ein braves Kind!’ And so it had gone on with intervals of standing in front of Gala, picking his nose and sucking his teeth in a horribly ruminative way. Until he stayed longer and longer in front of her, forgetting the machines, wondering, making up his mind. And then she had felt his hand undo the top button of her dress and the automatic recoil of her body had had to be covered by a realistic groan and a pantomime of consciousness returning.

Bond’s face was a mask of dust and filthy with the blood of flies and moths that had smashed against it. Often he had had to take a cramped hand off the wheel to clear his goggles but the Bentley was going beautifully and he felt sure of holding the Mercedes.

the Gatling crackle of its exhaust, and the thunderous howl of its transmission.

He watched the two sets of tail lights closing

But Bond, his face a tight mask, had hardly checked his speed and there was nothing but revenge in his mind as he hurtled on after the flying Mercedes.

So a murder had taken place in front of his eyes. Or at any rate an attempted murder. So, whatever his motives, Sir Hugo Drax had declared war and didn’t mind Bond knowing it. This made a lot of things easier. It meant that Drax was a criminal and probably a maniac.