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kill the Havelocks if they wouldn't sell and then put pressure on the
daughter. There's a daughter, by the way. Should be about twenty-five by now.
Never seen her myself.
Anyway, that's what happened. They killed the Havelocks. Then two weeks ago
Batista sacked Hammerstein. May have got to hear about one of these jobs. I
don't know. But, anyway, Hammerstein cleared out and took his little team of
three with him.
Timed things pretty well, I should say. It looks as if Castro may get in this
winter if he keeps the pressure up."
Bond said softly: "Where have they gone to?"
"America. Right up in the North of Vermont. Up against the Canadian border.
Those sort of men like being close to frontiers. Place called Echo Lake. It's
some kind of a millionaire's ranch he's rented. Looks pretty from the
photographs.
Tucked away in the mountains with this little lake in the grounds. He's
certainly chosen himself somewhere where he won't be troubled with visitors."
"How did you get on to this, sir?"
"I sent a report of the whole case to Edgar Hoover. He knew of the man. I
guessed he would. He's had a lot of trouble with this gun-running from Miami
to Castro. And he's been interested in Havana ever since the big American
gangster money started following the casinos there. He said that Hammerstein
and his party had come into the States on six months visitors'
visas. He was very helpful. Wanted to know if I'd got enough to build up a
case on. Did I want these men extradited for trial in
Jamaica? I talked it over here with the Attorney General and he said there
wasn't a hope unless we could get the witnesses from
Havana. There's no chance of that. It was only through Castro's Intelligence
that we even know as much as we do. Officially the Cubans won't raise a
finger. Next, Hoover offered to have their visas revoked and get them on the
move again. I thanked him and said no, and we left it at that."
M sat for a moment in silence. His pipe had died and he relit it. He went on:
"I decided to have a talk with our friends the
Mounties. I got on to the Commissioner on the scrambler. He's never let me
down yet. He strayed one of his frontier patrol planes over the border and
took a full aerial survey of this Echo Lake place. Said that if I wanted any
other co-operation he'd provide it. And now," M slowly swivelled his chair
back square with the desk, "I've got to decide what to do next."
Now Bond realised why M was troubled, why he wanted someone else to make the
decision. Because these had been friends of M. Because a personal element was
involved, M had worked on the case by himself. And now it had come to the
point when justice ought to be done and these people brought to book. But M
was thinking: is this justice, or is it revenge? No judge would take a murder
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case in which he had personally known the murdered person. M wanted someone
else, Bond, to deliver judgement. There were no doubts in Bond's mind. He
didn't know the Havelocks or care who they were. Hammerstein had operated the
law of the jungle on two defenceless old people. Since no other law was
available, the law of the jungle should be
13
visited upon Hammerstein. In no other way could justice be done. If it was
revenge, it was the revenge of the community.
Bond said: "I wouldn't hesitate for a minute, sir. If foreign gangsters find
they can get away with this kind of thing they'll decide the English are as
soft as some other people seem to think we are. This is a case for rough
justice an eye for an eye."
M went on looking at Bond. He gave no encouragement, made no comment.
Bond said: "These people can't be hung, sir. But they ought to be killed."
M's eyes ceased to focus on Bond. For a moment they were blank, looking
inward. Then he slowly reached for the top drawer of his desk on the left-hand
side, pulled it open and extracted a thin file without the usual title across
it and without the top-secret red star. He placed the file squarely in front
of him and his hand rummaged again in the open drawer. The hand brought out a
rubber stamp and a red-ink pad. M opened the pad, tamped the rubber stamp on
it and then carefully, so that it was properly aligned with the top right-hand
corner of the docket, pressed it down on the grey cover.
M replaced the stamp and the ink pad in the drawer and closed the drawer. He
turned the docket round and pushed it gently across the desk to Bond.
The red sansserif letters, still damp, said: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.
Bond said nothing. He nodded and picked up the docket and walked out of the
room.
Two days later, Bond took the Friday Comet to Montreal. He did not care for
it. It flew too high and too fast and there were too many passengers. He
regretted the days of the old Stratocruiser that fine lumbering old plane
that took ten hours to cross the Atlantic. Then one had been able to have
dinner in peace, sleep for seven hours in a comfortable bunk, and get up in
time to wander down to the lower deck and have that ridiculous BOAC 'country
house' breakfast while the dawn came up and flooded the cabin with the first
bright gold of the Western hemisphere. Now it was all too quick. The stewards
had to serve everything almost at the double, and then one had a bare two
hours snooze before the hundred-mile-long descent from forty thousand feet.
Only eight hours after leaving London, Bond was driving a Hertz U-drive
Plymouth saloon along the broad Route 17 from
Montreal to Ottawa and trying to remember to keep on the right of the road.
The Headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are in the Department of
Justice alongside Parliament Buildings in
Ottawa. Like most Canadian public buildings, the Department of Justice is a
massive block of grey masonry built to look stodgily important and to
withstand the long and hard winters. Bond had been told to ask at the front
desk for the
Commissioner and to give his name as 'Mr James'. He did so, and a young
fresh-faced RCMP corporal, who looked as if he did not like being kept indoors
on a warm sunny day, took him up in the lift to the third floor and handed him
over to a sergeant in a large tidy office which contained two girl secretaries
and a lot of heavy furniture. The sergeant spoke on an intercom and there was
a ten minutes' delay during which Bond smoked and read a recruiting pamphlet
which made the Mounties sound like a mixture between a dude ranch, Dick Tracy
and
Rose Marie.
When he was shown in through the connecting door a tall youngish man in a dark
blue suit, white shirt and black tie turned away from the window and came
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towards him. "Mr James?"
the man smiled thinly. "I'm Colonel, let's say er Johns."
They shook hands. "Come along and sit down. The Commissioner's very sorry not
to be here to welcome you himself. He has a bad cold you know, one of those
diplomatic ones." Colonel 'Johns' looked amused. "Thought it might be best to
take the day off. I'm just one of the help. I've been on one or two hunting
trips myself and the Commissioner fixed on me to handle this little holiday of
yours," the Colonel paused, "on me only. Right?"
Bond smiled. The Commissioner was glad to help but he was going to handle this
with kid gloves. There would be no come-
back on his office. Bond thought he must be a careful and very sensible man.
He said: "I quite understand. My friends in
London didn't want the Commissioner to bother himself personally with any of
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