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  The other figure appeared in the porthole and snaked through, dropping to the floor. He also had a full head of white hair, pinkish skin, and sunglasses, and was about thirty years old. While the first albino secured the rope to a post, the second opened a backpack, removed some instruments, and set to work.

  Meanwhile, in the dining room, Guy Thackeray stopped the music and began his speech.

  “My friends,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t always give credit where credit is due. On such a special occasion as tonight, I must apologize for that oversight. Everyone who works for me and for EurAsia Enterprises is always deserving of praise. I want you to know that I am very proud of each and every one of you. It is because of you that EurAsia Enterprises is one of the leading shipping and trading establishments in the Far East. But it also took someone with superior management skills, leadership, and fortitude to guide this great ship of ours through sometimes troubled waters. For thirty years he has been an inspiration and mentor to us all.” He looked straight at John Desmond and said, “And you’ve been something of an uncle, or perhaps a second father, to me personally, John.”

  Desmond smiled and shifted in his seat, embarrassed. He was nearly eighteen years older than Thackeray and unlike the CEO, Desmond had been born and raised in Britain, having moved to Hong Kong in the early fifties.

  Thackeray continued, “If ever there was a person deserving of a distinguished service award, it is John Desmond. I, for one, shall miss him. He will be leaving us as of the end of June. What’s the matter, John, afraid the Communists will take away your health benefits come the first of July?”

  There was laughter and applause.

  “Anyway,” Thackeray continued, “without further ado, allow me to present you with this plaque. It reads ‘To John Desmond, in recognition of his thirty years’ distinguished service at EurAsia Enterprises.’ ”

  There was more applause as Desmond left his seat and approached the podium. The two men shook hands. Desmond then turned to the room and spoke into the microphone.

  “Thank you, everyone. It’s been a wonderful thirty years,” he began. “EurAsia Enterprises has been good to me. Hong Kong has been good to me. I don’t know what the future will bring after the first of July but I’m sure …” Desmond hesitated. He seemed to be searching for the appropriate words. “… it will be business as usual.”

  Everyone in the room knew that on 1 July Britain would no longer be in possession of Hong Kong. The entire colony would be handed over to the People’s Republic of China at 12:01 a.m. Despite China’s assurances that Hong Kong would remain a capitalist and free-enterprise zone for at least fifty years, no one could be sure.

  “I wish you all the best of luck,” Desmond continued. “Thank you again. And to my good friend Guy Thackeray, the man who really guides EurAsia Enterprises, a very special thank you.”

  During the applause, the two men shook hands again. Then Thackeray signalled the band leader and the room filled with the swinging rhythm of Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand.”

  Thackeray accompanied Desmond back to the table. “John, I have to get back to Central,” he said. “I suppose I’ll see you at the office tomorrow?”

  “Leaving so soon, Guy?” Desmond asked. “Whatever for?”

  “I left some unfinished business at the office which must be taken care of. Listen … enjoy your party. I’ll speak to you soon.”

  “Guy, wait,” Desmond said. “We need to talk about things. You know we do.”

  “Not now, John. We’ll go over it tomorrow at the office, all right?”

  Guy walked away without another word. With concern, John Desmond watched his friend leave the room. He knew that the roof was going to cave in when the rest of the Board discovered what he had learned only two days ago. He wondered how Guy Thackeray was going to emerge unscathed.

  Guy Thackeray stepped out of the dining room, on to the deck, and into a small shuttle motorboat. The boat whisked him to shore, where his personal limousine was waiting. In a flash it was off to the north part of the island and the panorama of buildings and lights.

  By then, the two strange albino Chinese had finished their work. The first man slithered through the storeroom porthole, slid down the rope, and dropped into the waiting rowing boat. His brother followed suit, and moments later the boat was heading east towards a yacht waiting some two hundred metres away. The third man, the one rowing, also had a full head of white hair, pinkish skin, and sunglasses. Not only were the albino brothers the most bizarre trio in the Far East, they were also the most dangerous.

  Exactly fifteen minutes later, the Emerald Palace exploded into flames. The brunt of the detonation enveloped the dining room, and the dance floor caved inward. It didn’t happen fast enough for the terrified people caught inside the death-trap. Those not burned alive were drowned trying to escape. In twelve minutes, the structure had completely submerged. Everyone was killed, including John Desmond and the entire Board of Directors of EurAsia Enterprises.

  21 JUNE 1997, 11:55 A.M., WESTERN AUSTRALIA

  At approximately the same moment that James Bond fell asleep on a red-eye flight from Kingston, Jamaica to London, the sun was beating down on the Australian outback. A young Aboriginal boy who frequented this area of the desert in search of kurrajong, an edible plant, was still frightened of the white men he had seen earlier. The men had driven to this isolated location in four-wheel drives, which the boy knew only as “cars.”

  The boy’s family lived at a campsite about a mile away and had done so for as long as he could remember. He knew that further south, more than a day’s walking distance, were towns populated by the white men. To the east, closer to Uluru, the mystical rock-like formation in the desert which the white men called “Ayers Rock,” there were even more encroachments on the Aboriginal home territory.

  The white men had arrived early that morning in two “cars.” They had spent an hour at the site, digging in the ground and burying something. Then they left, heading south towards the white man’s civilization. They had been gone three hours before the boy decided to inspect the ground.

  The dig occupied an area about six feet in diameter. The dirt was fresh but had already begun to bake and harden in the sun. The boy was curious. He wanted to know what the white men had hidden there, but he was afraid. He knew that he might get into trouble if he was seen by the white men, but now there was no one else around. He thought he should go and find a lizard for that evening’s meal, but his desire to inspect the burial mound was too great.

  If he had been wearing a watch, it would have read exactly 12 noon when the sun exploded in his face.

  The nuclear explosion that occurred that day two hundred miles north of Leonora in Western Australia sent shock waves throughout the world. It was later determined that the device had roughly threequarters the power of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima: the equivalent of approximately 300 tons of TNT. The blast covered an area of three square miles. It was deadly, indeed, but crude by today’s standards. Nevertheless, had there been a city where the bomb was buried, there would surely have been nothing left of it.

  Within hours, an emergency session of the United Nations degenerated into nothing but a shouting match between the superpowers. No one knew what had happened. Australian officials were completely baffled. Inspectors at the site came up with nothing aside from the fact that a “home-made” nuclear device had been detonated. Everyone was grateful that it had been in the middle of the outback, where they assumed there had been no casualties.

  What was truly frightening, though, was the implication of the location. It was, in all probability, a test. Someone—a terrorist group or a foreign power operating in Australia—was in possession of rudimentary nuclear weapons.

  As Australia, the United States, Russia, and Britain combined forces to investigate the explosion and search for answers, they also waited for the imminent claim of responsibility and possible blackmail. It never came. When James Bond arr
ived in London in the early hours of the same day, London time, the nuclear explosion was still a total mystery.

  THREE

  CALL TO DUTY

  ZERO MINUS TEN: 21 JUNE 1997, 10:15 A.M., ENGLAND

  James Bond never had trouble sleeping on a plane, and the flight from Jamaica to England was no exception. He felt refreshed and alert when the office car pulled into the high-security SIS parking garage by the Thames. Things were so open now: Bond was one of the few veterans still around who could remember a time when SIS hid behind the front of Universal Export Ltd.

  The British Secret Service had a relatively new leader. Her name was no longer a secret, but Bond would never dare address her by name, just as he had never addressed his irascible former chief, Sir Miles Messervy, that way. Since his retirement, Sir Miles had mellowed considerably. He often invited Bond to Quarterdeck, his home on the edge of Windsor Great Park, for a dinner party or a game of bridge. They still met from time to time at Blades. Once they were strictly a superior officer and a civil servant with mutual respect for each other; but now, after all the years, they were close friends. Even so, Bond had consciously to refrain from addressing the man as “sir.”

  Bond couldn’t say he was friends with the new M. He wasn’t even sure he liked her, but he respected her. In her short tenure, she had already shown she was capable of being an effective leader. She wasn’t afraid of proactive operations, something Bond had feared might be discontinued. If some dirty work needed to be performed, she had no problem with ordering Bond, or one of the other Double-Os, to carry it out. She wasn’t squeamish, and she wasn’t gullible. Bond felt he could say whatever he wanted to her, and he would receive an honest response. He also knew what the woman thought of him personally. Bond was a chauvinist and, in her words, “a coldhearted bastard.” She had said it one evening over a working dinner. Bond understood why the woman had called him that, and he didn’t hold it against her because, for one thing, she was right.

  He stopped in at his private office on the fourth floor before going up to see M. His Personal Assistant (Bond couldn’t help still thinking of her as a “secretary”), Ms. (not Miss) Helena Marksbury, was busy holding the fort. Helena worked for all of the Double-Os, having been with SIS for about a year. Since the days of Loelia Ponsonby and Mary Goodnight, there had been a steady succession of lissome blondes, brunettes, and redheads occupying the front desk. As for Helena Marksbury, she was a brunette with large green eyes. She was bright, quick-witted, and damnably attractive. Bond thought that had she not been his Personal Assistant, the lovely Helena would have made an enjoyable dinner date … with an option for breakfast the next morning.

  “Good morning, James,” she said. She had a lilting Welsh accent, something Bond found extremely attractive.

  “How are things, Helena?”

  “I was called in the middle of the night. Again,” she said with a sigh.

  Bond had been briefed about the Australian incident. By now every department was digging into the matter.

  “It happens to the best of us,” Bond replied.

  “I imagine you have no problem rising in the middle of the night,” Helena said with a twinkle in her eye.

  Bond smiled and said, “Don’t believe everything you hear, Ms. Marksbury.”

  “Well, if you ever find that you are up and can’t sleep, Mr. Bond, I have a very nice herbal tea that is very relaxing.”

  “I avoid tea at all costs,” Bond said. “You should know that by now.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have noticed. You don’t drink tea at all, James? How un-English of you!”

  “I’d as soon drink a cup of mud.” He shrugged. “And besides, I’m half Scots, half Swiss.” He smiled warmly at her, then stepped into his office.

  Bond had never been keen on office decoration. The one piece of artwork on display was an obscure artist’s watercolour of the clubhouse at the Royal St. George’s Golf Course. The one framed photograph on the desk featured Bond and his closest American friend, former CIA agent Felix Leiter, sitting in a bar in New York City. It was an old photo, and the two men looked surprised and slightly drunk. It never failed to make Bond smile.

  He had no urgent messages, so he picked up the phone and dialled Miss Moneypenny’s line (one of the few women at SIS who still didn’t mind being called “Miss”). She answered after the first ring.

  “Hello, James, welcome back.”

  “Penny, you have a wonderful phone voice, did you know that?” he said. “You could start a second career entertaining lonely men with sweet nothings.”

  “Hmmm, and I dare say you’d be a regular client. But I’d have to go the Chinese route and entertain you with sweet and sour nothings.”

  “Now that’s an appetizing idea for a takeaway, Penny,” he said, chuckling.

  She laughed too. “Listen, you’d better get up here right away. She asked for you just five minutes ago.”

  “I’m on my way. Bill there?”

  “He’s here too.”

  “Right.” Bond hung up, left the sanctity of the one quiet place in the building, and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

  Miss Moneypenny’s manner was no-nonsense, but her blue eyes betrayed how pleased she was to see Bond. Throughout the years, their relationship had been a mutually flirtatious one, and it had settled into a comfortable friendship. Like most of Sir Miles’s staff, she had been reticent about working for someone new after such a long time, but for her the new M was a pleasure. They got along splendidly, and Miss Moneypenny had decided not to transfer out but to stay on. It was a good thing, for many believed that SIS wouldn’t function properly without Miss Moneypenny’s vast knowledge of the entire organization and its history.

  Bill Tanner, the Chief of Staff, was also a Service veteran who had been around even longer than Bond. He remained 007’s closest friend inside SIS and one of the few with whom Bond regularly socialized. They enjoyed the occasional game of golf, but the Chief of Staff’s forte was tennis. Tanner had originally resigned when Sir Miles retired, but he was asked by the new M to stay on during what was called the “transition period” of six months. Those six months became a full year, and now Tanner had no intention of leaving.

  “Hello, James, welcome back,” Bill said.

  “Bill … Penny …” Bond nodded with a smile.

  “Sorry you couldn’t spend more time in Jamaica, James,” Moneypenny said. “I received a report on the exercise. It went well, I heard.”

  “I have no complaints,” Bond said, vividly recalling the sight of Stephanie Lane stepping into his shower. “This is about Australia, I suppose?”

  “Isn’t that appalling?” Tanner exclaimed, shaking his head. “No one knows what the bloody hell is going on. Unfortunately, it’s not officially in our laps yet. Australia wants it handled her way for the moment and the PM has agreed to stay away for the time being. God knows, America and Russia are sticking their noses into it. Anyway, that isn’t what she called you in for.”

  Bond was surprised. The atomic blast, even in the few hours since it had happened, had become international news.

  Moneypenny picked up the phone and buzzed M. “007’s here, ma’am.” The green light above the door flashed, indicating that Bond should go in. Some things never changed.

  On the other hand, M’s office had changed drastically with the new regime. Sir Miles’s domain had been the “captain’s quarters” of a naval vessel, while the new look was more akin to a posh psychiatrist’s office. Sparse, ultra-modern furnishings filled the place with a stark black-and-white scheme that was surprisingly pleasing to the eye. There was a lot of shiny metal, glass, and black leather, as well as an array of artwork of all types, including an original Kandinsky on the wall behind the desk.

  M sat at her glass-topped desk, looking down at an open folder. Bond stood in the doorway until she motioned to the black leather chair in front of the desk. Her eyes never left the page until Bond was sitting and facing her. Then she looked u
p at him. M’s striking blue eyes were much like Bond’s—very cool, with thin streaks of white in the irises. She was in her late fifties, had short greyish hair, and a rather severe face. Not a slender woman nor a tall one, M nevertheless possessed a charisma that commanded attention, due mostly to the obvious intelligence within her ice-cold blue eyes. Their shape hinted at some distant Asian blood, but that was only speculation on Bond’s part.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” Bond said.

  “Hello, 007, how was your flight?” Her voice was calm, even, and soft.

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “I understand the training exercise went well.”

  Bond nodded.

  “Your report can wait,” M said. “I’m sure 03 will fill us in. Or do you think 05 will have a more favourable view of events?”

  M looked hard at Bond. He shifted uncomfortably. Sir Miles had never approved of Bond’s womanizing, and it was one of the bones of contention between the new M and 007. Bond swallowed and managed to say, “I’m sure either agent will give you an accurate reconstruction of the exercise.”

  M frowned but nodded briskly.

  Bond quickly changed the subject. “What do we know about this explosion in Australia?”

  “Never mind about that, 007,” M said. “We’ve been told to stay out of it for the moment. Regardless of those orders, I have Section A doing reconnaissance. There’s hardly any information at the moment. Until we hear from the party or parties responsible, I’ve got something else for you to look into.”