Silhouettes: A James Bond Story

Silhouettes Part 2

The video was surprisingly clear for what must certainly have been a rush job on the part of the CIA. The angle was poor (M had explained that they'd had to conceal it in a particularly garish chandelier), but the details were quite sharp. Sharp enough, anyway, to convey the sudden shock on the faces of the Pakistani Foreign Minister's two minders when the beautiful woman he'd let into his suite exploded into a sudden, controlled frenzy, pulling a slim, dark knife from her hair and stabbing it into the left one's inner thigh and then the right one's throat.

"Femoral and carotid arteries," Bond noted. M made an approving noise.

The woman then flung herself and desperately-retreating FM, a slight man in a baggy, double-breasted suit, and tackled him to the ground. The two wrestled a bit, but the FM was clearly at a disadvantage, and was soon overpowered by sheer skill and what looked to be raw adrenaline. The woman pivoted, the slit red sheath dress she wore sliding immodestly up to her hips, and then, using all the power in her lower body, he twisted the FM's oblong head between her thighs until it visibly popped from the spinal column. Even without an audio feed, Bond thought he could hear the distinctive crunch.

"And there we have it," M said testily as he keyed the monitor controls on his desk.. "Whatever tenuous diplomatic relationship that existed between The UK and Pakistan just got tossed in the bin and started on fire."

"What do the Pakistani's know?" Bond asked, shifting in his leather chair, and rolling his shoulders inside the tuxedo jacket. It had been bespoke shortly after his return from a self-imposed sabbatical in Turkey, when he had still been physically and emotionally diminished, and it rode him tightly now, like a bad intuition he couldn't shake.

"Thanks to this," M hit a few more keys on his small wireless keyboard, "the whole world knows everything."

The scene on the monitor shifted from the CIA surveillance camera to a YouTube video. A woman's face and the graceful slope of her cleavage filled the frame, and Bond felt a sharp swell of raw lust. She'd been beautiful in the CIA video, but here, with the clarity and immediacy of a laptop's camera, he could see she was downright stunning. Indian and colonial bloodlines warred in her features, and her onyx eyes burned as she addressed the camera. "My name is Indira Manyam," she said angrily. "I am employed by British Secret Service. For the past two years I have worked undercover as a junior political attaché at the British embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, going by the name Christine D'Souza. Tonight," and she gave the date, "I murdered Irfan Muqam, Foreign Minister of Pakistan. I did so in his room in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Kuala Lumpur, where he was attending a regional conference on combatting terrorism in South Asia and Southeast Asia." She sneered. "Such an irony. In fact, British Intelligence has long suspected that Muqam has provided funding, intelligence, and protection to various terrorist groups in order to protect his political position and his life."

Abruptly, the image changed to a still photo of Mumbai's Taj Hotel bathed in orange and yellow light and backlit with flames. It was an image that was familiar to any and all in the intelligence and security community. "But most despicable is Muqam's assistance and direct involvement in the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008. While, our respective governments have danced around or simply elided the truth, the intelligence services of most Western countries have amble evidence that Muqam assisted Lashkar-e-Taiba in their cowardly slaughter of over one-hundred and sixty men, women, and children."

The woman's face was back onscreen now, the dark eyes wet, but still fierce.

"Including my uncle and aunt."

"Oh, bloody hell," Bond whispered.

M stopped the video. "Bloody hell's right. Not only did she murder a foreign diplomat; not only did she blow up our Malaysia operation; and not only did she elevate innuendo and suspicion to known fact, but she did so on a personal vendetta." M's face was pinched with a rage so barely-controlled that Bond felt as if it was disturbing the air of the room itself, like a high-pressure system presaging a storm. "We'd be the laughingstock of the intelligence community if they weren't too busy preparing for a war between India and Pakistan, which seems nigh-inevitable at this point." He killed the video and handed over a black dossier.

"Here's the silly bitch's CV. Study it, Double-Oh Seven. You're now responsible for her."

Bond idly flipped the file open. Customarily there was a recent photo stapled to the inside cover's top left corner. In it, Agent Manyam stood before a solid blue background with a neutral expression on her face, and yet Bond could still catch a hint of sex and sensuality in the gaze.

"Good fitness evaluations," Bond commented as he skimmed the top page. "Some impressive decoration here...nothing to indicate she might go solo." A bold-faced line caught his eye. Bond read the paragraph, then read it again. "She applied for double-oh status?" He looked over the file at M, who barely nodded his leonine head.

"She did, and was washed out of the program. Failed the medical evaluation. Something about a heart murmur."

"Do you think that's what set this off?" Bond asked. "A chance to live out her double-oh fantasies and to avenge her family all in one fell swoop?"

"It's plausible," M said. "It's also immaterial." He leaned over the great, polished mahogany slab of his desk. "We need to control this situation immediately, Double-Oh Seven, and we can't do that with her still in the winds of Southeast Asia. Hunt her down, run her to ground, and bring her in."

"Because a public flogging will reassure the world she acted alone."

"Exactly," M said.

"And if she doesn't come willingly? What kind of assets will I have for a forcible rendition?"

"None," M answered coldly. Bond gave him a quizzical look.

"If she doesn't come willingly, put a bullet in her head."

The room immediately went to ice. Bond blinked, trying to comprehend the order he'd just received. "We would terminate..."

"It wouldn't play on the world stage," M said slowly, deliberately, "but the Pakistani ISI will understand the message: we clean up after our own. That might—might—alleviate enough tension to make this situation manageable."

"Manageable," Bond nodded, leaving an invisible comma of disdain in the air. M didn't miss it, and his face tightened by a magnitude until it was barely more than a mask of pure, contained fury.

"Listen to me...very...carefully, Double-Oh Seven," he ordered, his voice something between a whisper and a hiss. "I don't owe you a bloody thing. Is that understood? You are my tool, my object, my piece of equipment issued to me to effect my work for Her Majesty's government. In the coldest equations of government service, you are a fountain pen. Is that understood?

"But since I choose to believe that we are more than that, and since I choose to believe that honor, loyalty, and duty have meaning and value in defining a man, I will tell you this..." He leaned back in his chair, far enough for the springs and castors to creak through the heavy leather, and his eyes went somewhere else--the inside of a concrete warren, perhaps, or a cheaply-assembled apartment house, leaking cold Belfast rain through its various cracks and ruptures.

"I know very well what it is to have nothing to hold on to but your flag and the faith that the men and women who serve beneath it, and I know what it's like when that faith is the only thin sliver of light you see when you wake up in the morning, every morning. That faith can sustain a man. It can keep him pushing through to the next moment, and the next, until the moment he returns home. Make no mistake, Double-Oh Seven, I am aware of the depths and blackness of the betrayal that we are committing with this operation. But above all else, we serve Her Majesty's government, and right now—at this moment of the night—that government requires us to turn on one of our own, put aside our personal notions of honor, and prevent a damnable bloodbath.

"Are we clear, Bond?" M's eyes drilled into him, pulled from the memory of captivity and torture.

"Absolutely, sir."

"Right," M, said. "Now check in with the Quartermaster for your field kit. Time is not our ally in this affair."