Forever and a Day

by Anthony Horowitz

That was the trouble with this damned building. Everyone had their own secrets but no secrets were truly their own.

Feeling the weight of it pressing against his hip reminded Bond why he was here and separated him from the crowd. It was strange, this sense of isolation. As if the sun were shining on everyone except him.

At Monte Carlo, he always felt as if he were auditioning for a part in a play he would never actually want to see.

Bond found her in the Bar Salle Blanche which, with its palm trees and full-length mirrors, its dazzling turquoise and gold mosaics and chandeliers, took wealth and extravagance to places even they might never have imagined they would go.

He had grown used to the idea and had deliberately chosen to go through life with the same carelessness as the little ivory ball that span around a roulette wheel, blithely ignoring the certainty that it must one day drop into double zero.

The moment of death. Bond would encounter it one day and learn all its secrets, but now, staring into the water, he saw only the reflection of himself.

This was Scipio’s translator. He was a slender man, also bald but unafraid to show it, with a head that looked as if it had been carved out of white marble and then polished.

But that is the arrogance of the British. You are a tiny island with bad weather and bad food also but you still think you rule the world. You will not wake up to the fact that you are becoming irrelevant and were it not for your geographical location and your friendship . . . kinship with Europe, you would be irrelevant already.’

The bravest men had not necessarily been the ones who had been killed but those who had been left to struggle through the rest of their lives with however much of them remained.

At night, with the stars thrown carelessly across a black velvet sky and the scent of pine and eucalyptus still heavy in the warm air, with the waves lapping and the luxury cruisers tugging at their anchors, it was hard to imagine anywhere more perfect.

Shame Lady was a brand-new construction built plainly, obviously to impress. It sat in the wooded hills above the little port, rising up on white, concrete legs like an attack dog about to spring.

Aubagne was a pretty enough town, baking in the August sun but cooled, at least, by the breezes from the mountains that surrounded it. Parts of it dated back to the Middle Ages and those were where the streets were at their narrowest, the buildings at their most charming. A church steeple and a clock tower jealously fought for attention but they were largely wasting their time as few tourists ever found their way here. It was typical of so many French towns and villages set back from the sea, existing in its own little world. Dogs would bark and cats would stretch out in the street. Old ladies would sit outside their homes wrapped up in their own thoughts and in clothes too warm for the weather. Everyone would know everything about each other but at the end of the day there wouldn’t be all that much to know.

Bond smiled to himself and quickened his pace. He caught up with her outside a dusty chapel with two angels looking down on him, palms held up as if warning him to stay away.

It was built by an architect who believed in train travel, at a time when travellers enjoyed champagne and caviar on the Orient Express or listened to chamber orchestras playing Tchaikovsky on the Golden Eagle across Russia.

With the warm, velvet touch of the evening, everything smelled of pine and eucalyptus. A thousand cicadas were sawing away as they welcomed a darkness punctured only by a slither of silver moonlight.

They had dinner in the garden with the swimming pool shimmering behind them and the stars crowding out the night sky. Everything was silent. The cicadas had decided enough was enough.

‘By now, my mother was working in a defence factory. My father had got a job helping to build the railway from Montparnasse to Porte de Vanves. I didn’t see either of them very much. I was looked after by a neighbour, an old lady who smelled of sour milk and who talked to her cats.

She fell briefly silent, looking into her wine glass as if it could provide some window into her past life. The robe she was wearing was unfastened at the collar and Bond found himself examining the line of her throat and the valley below. Her hair was still damp from the shower and it suited her, making her look more wild and unpredictable. The moon was behind her and the shadows wrapped themselves around her.

Bond waved a hand and continued forward, a single drop of perspiration drawing a question mark around his ear and then continuing down his neck.

But before he could explain what he had worked out, there was a rush of three armed men pushing through the crowd and heading past them towards the laboratory.

The men didn’t recognise Bond or Sixtine until it was too late. Bond’s gun-hand spoke and two of the men went down.

Like some gigantic bird of prey, the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser came dropping out of the sky over Los Angeles, its wings stretching out and its wheels searching for the two-mile strip of concrete runway. The palm trees on either side bowed briefly in obeisance as it roared past, disappearing into the heat haze. It was midday and the sun was at its most intense, the air thick with the fumes of oil and methanol. The wheels made contact. The pilot slammed the engines into reverse thrust and with a howl of rage the great beast allowed itself to be steered back into captivity.