Forever and a Day

by Anthony Horowitz

She was about ten years older than him and, for Bond, that made her at least fifteen years too old to be truly desirable . . . yet he had to admit that she had been – and still was – a beautiful woman.

‘I certainly don’t feel like a psychopath,’ he said. ‘And I have less power than you think. I merely do what I’m told. As to the rest of your question, I don’t need to answer it. We’ve both been through a war. There are heroes and there are villains. You just have to decide which side you’re on and you go where that takes you.’

After all, there was no real difference between him and whoever had pulled the trigger three times, ending the life of the man he had now replaced. He remembered M growling at him at that first meeting. ‘It was my decision to send an executioner. Not a lawyer.’ That was what he had allowed himself to become.

As much as he now saw that it was inevitable they should have become lovers, he was worried that he had confused the situation and that he might come to regret it. Put bluntly, it was still quite possible that she was his enemy.

‘I left Danny. We never had a row. We didn’t have any confrontation. I simply took my son and went back to Aunt Lucy. She’d been expecting me. My old room was ready for me and there was another room up in the attic for Julian. I’ll say one thing for Danny. He still sent me money every week. I don’t know whether it was for me, for his son or just for his conscience but I didn’t have to go back to work. I never saw him again. The truth is, in a way, we really had loved each other and we didn’t want to see each other now that everything had changed. It was better just to live with the memories.

I would have liked to have taken Julian to visit his grave but that wasn’t going to happen. Danny was probably weighed down at the bottom of the Thames. He didn’t leave anything behind. Not even a memory.’

Bond turned to run, then thought better of it. He twisted round and, taking out his Beretta, fired half a dozen shots, aiming not at the men but at the machinery. Whatever happened to him and Sixtine in the next few minutes, he was determined that he wasn’t going to leave this obscene place intact.

The dining room had more than fifty tables, doubled and trebled by their reflections in the mirrored walls. Marble columns cut the room into different sections but the identical chairs, the low ceiling and the thick, red carpet reaching from corner to corner only emphasised that this was one vast space. It was another reason why Bond would never have considered taking a cruise – unless he was at gunpoint.