The James Bond Anthology

Her eyes were blue and wide apart. They searched his. She said seriously: ‘I’d like that. The switchboard here can always find me.’

Bond reached in through the window and pressed the hand on the wheel. He said ‘Good,’ and turned and walked quickly in through the archway.

Wing Commander Rattray, Head of Station F, was a fattish man with pink cheeks and fair hair brushed straight back. He dressed in a mannered fashion with turned-back cuffs and double slits to his coat, bow-ties and fancy waistcoats. He made a good-living, wine-and-food-society impression in which only the slow, rather cunning blue eyes struck a false note. He chain-smoked Gauloises and his office stank of them. He greeted Bond with relief. ‘Who found you?’

‘Russell. At Fouquet’s. Is she new?’

‘Six months. She’s a good one. But take a pew. There’s the hell of a flap on and I’ve got to brief you and get you going.’ He bent to his intercom and pressed down a switch. ‘Signal to M., please. Personal from Head of Station. “Located 007 briefing now.” Okay?’ He let go the switch.

Bond pulled a chair over by the open window to keep away from the fog of Gauloises. The traffic on the Champs-Elysées was a soft roar in the background. Half an hour before he had been fed up with Paris, glad to be going. Now he hoped he would be staying.

Head of F said: ‘Somebody got our dawn dispatch-rider from SHAPE to the St Germain Station yesterday morning. The weekly run from the SHAPE Intelligence Division with the Summaries, Joint Intelligence papers, Iron Curtain Order of Battle – all the top gen. One shot in the back. Took his dispatch-case and his wallet and watch.’

Bond said: ‘That’s bad. No chance that it was an ordinary hold-up? Or do they think the wallet and watch were cover?’

‘SHAPE Security can’t make up their minds. On the whole they guess it was cover. Seven o’clock in the morning’s a rum time for a hold-up. But you can argue it out with them when you get down there. M.’s sending you as his personal representative. He’s worried as hell. Apart from the loss of the Intelligence dope, their I. people have never liked having one of our Stations outside the Reservation so to speak. For years they’ve been trying to get the St Germain unit incorporated in the SHAPE Intelligence set-up. But you know what M. is, independent old devil. He’s never been happy about N.A.T.O. Security. Why, right in the SHAPE Intelligence Division there are not only a couple of Frenchmen and an Italian, but the head of their Counter Intelligence and Security section is a German!’

Bond whistled.

‘The trouble is that this damnable business is all SHAPE needs to bring M. to heel. Anyway, he says you’re to get down there right away. I’ve fixed up clearance for you. Got the passes. You’re to report to Colonel Schreiber, Headquarters Command Security Branch. American. Efficient chap. He’s been handling the thing from the beginning. As far as I can gather, he’s already done just about all there was to be done.’

‘What’s he done? What actually happened?’

Head of F picked up a map from his desk and walked over with it. It was the big-scale Michelin Environs de Paris. He pointed with a pencil. ‘Here’s Versailles, and here, just north of the park, is the big junction of the Paris-Mantes and the Versailles autoroutes. A couple of hundred yards north of that, on N.184, is SHAPE. Every Wednesday, at seven in the morning, a Special Services dispatch- rider leaves SHAPE with the weekly Intelligence stuff I told you about. He has to get to this little village called Fourqueux, just outside St Germain, deliver his stuff to the duty officer at our H.Q., and report back to SHAPE by seven-thirty. Rather than go through all this built-up area, for security reasons his orders are to take this N.307 to St Nom, turn right-handed on to D.98 and go under the autoroute and through the forest of St Germain. The distance is about twelve kilometres, and taking it easy he’ll do the trip in under a quarter of an hour. Well, yesterday it was a corporal from the Corps of Signals, good solid man called Bates, and when he hadn’t reported back to SHAPE by seven-forty-five they sent another rider to look for him. Not a trace, and he hadn’t reported at our H.Q. By eight-fifteen the Security Branch was on the job, and by nine the roadblocks were up. The police and the Deuxième were told and search parties got under way. The dogs found him, but not till the evening around six, and by that time if there had been any clues on the road they’d have been wiped out by the traffic.’ Head of F handed the map to Bond and walked back to his desk. ‘And that’s about the lot, except that all the usual steps have been taken – frontiers, ports, aerodromes and so forth. But that sort of thing won’t help. If it was a professional job, whoever did it could have had the stuff out of the country by midday or into an embassy in Paris inside an hour.’