Silhouettes: A James Bond Story

Silhouettes Part 6

Bond had booked himself a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, which hugged the edge of Kuala Lumpur's dazzling Golden Triangle district-a wealthy shopping and entertainment district where glittering malls selling Bugati roadsters and £250,000 chronometers jostled for position along the major traffic artery of Jalan Bukit. From his suite, Bond could see the slow river of red brake lights bisecting the assaultive brilliance of the malls' white showlights. Bond swirled his brandy in his glass, then took a sip. It was Chateau Mouton Rothschild and slid down his throat as silkily as mercury. The whole block looked as it was made of crystal. When he lifted his gaze he saw the bold, gleaming twin spires of Petronas Towers-they too were seemingly made of glass, with barely a hint of their steel and concrete undergirding. A glass metropolis, he mused. An emergent economy transforming the old city into a panopticon, and somewhere, hiding from the glass was the woman he was sent to kill.

He pulled himself away from the window and settled down with his triple-encrypted laptop and accessed Manyam's field reports from his Iron Key drive. After about 90 minutes or so of skimming her reports from over the past two years, he developed a grudging respect for her. Whatever her methods, the woman clearly worked hard. Her reports, taken in total, became something like a Dickensian serial novel with a sprawling cast of characters who flitted in and out-some forming substantial plotlines and narrative arcs, while others simply showed to enliven the story or move it along a bit.

Bond could also tell that Manyam had all but weaponized her social graces. The stories were all propelled by her relentless ability to work a room and immediately size up the occupants-who was the most valuable? The most pliable? The most vulnerable? At embassy cocktail parties, she connected Subject A with Subject B and put Plan Z in motion, which yielded Result X. At the long, boozy Sunday brunches with embassy wives, she listened patiently to their complaints and discontents, keenly noting which couples were weak, divisible, exploitable. Breckinridge had dismissed her as a common whore, when in fact she was a master of manipulation. Was the man truly that stupid and sexist that he couldn't recognize such an asset at his disposal? Did he simply dismiss her reports, operations, and the data they yielded?

It turned out to be easier than Bond expected to pick up her trail. Her tell was former Malaysian cabinet minister named Wibowo, who, after losing his seat some years in the past had put his considerable takings into real estate. He never really factored into any of her ops, and yet he popped up fairly consistently in her reports, never with any seeming payoff. When Bond used the laptop's encrypted Internet connection to run Wibowo through MI-6's records, his suspicions were confirmed. Along with a series of high-rise office towers that would form the spine of new business district, Wibowo still held onto a few of the old, low-rent flats that had begun his real estate ventures. They were clustered near the Central Station market, in the neighborhood known colloquially as Little India.

Excitement hummed in his ears, but Bond tamped down the urge to grab the PPK/s and tear off to Little India. Manyam had a safe house, he reasoned. Which meant she was holed up until she could devise a way out of the country under the radar-in all likelihood hopping a boat to Singapore or Indonesia-but she would still need travel documents, and that would take time. So she wasn't going anywhere soon, and there was no reason for Bond to try and roust her in the middle of the night from a neighborhood she blended into and he didn't.

Instead, he shrugged into his suit coat, left his tie on the bed, and headed down to the bar. There were other directions to channel his energy.