What would James say about Mikhail Petrov’s death? Moneypenny remembered the briefing over at Vauxhall with M and Bill Tanner. 009 was in attendance too, the simple mission a chance to kick the boy wonder’s training wheels.
If Bond could have been said to have modeled himself after one man, it was M. Not in style, M was far too relaxed for Bond—scuffed red Converse, crisp jeans, striped T-shirt, and linen blazer—but in charm. Under Sir Miles’s gruff oversight, Sir Emery had been an incorrigible older brother to Bond. When Sir Miles retired, Sir Emery took up the role of father at the point where Bond most needed one. A voice like honey over gravel that sometimes had to slip an octave higher in order to escape his closing throat. When M looked you in the eyes and smiled, you blushed and smiled back before you knew what you were doing. M had been a Double O himself, kicking up trouble in every quarter of the Cold War. There was something debonair and devil-may-care about M, a quality lauded then lamented by the four wives in the rearview mirror. He had the body of a dancer or a fencer, though his arms were skinny and knotted now. Bald, a short white beard, white-gray eyebrows—which he just had to lift ever so slightly to make you feel he understood the weight of your pain, the whole world’s pain. This display of compassion was something he gifted to cabinet secretaries and his driver, but it was out of place that day.
Bill Tanner, M’s roving Chief of Staff, was perched on the windowsill, hands shoved in his pockets, foot tapping.
Bond unbuttoned his jacket and sat down. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Bill.”
“I’m protesting the cafeteria lunch.”
Moneypenny took the seat next to Bond. She read the coding upside down on the two files on M’s desk, then studied M’s face.
Adjusting his cuffs, Bond looked across the desk at the spy chief who after all these years, Moneypenny knew, held a great deal of his love, and all his loyalty and obedience. 009 remained standing behind them at the center of the rug, hands clasped behind his back—Moneypenny observed his unusually erect posture in the reflection of the framed portrait that hung over M’s head. If M was Bond’s mentor, and Bond was Bashir’s, the man behind the glass—Sir Miles Messervy—had been M’s, and his battleship eyes peered down on the generations now.
“New call sheet,” said M. “Mikhail Petrov’s grown bored of the walk-on husband bit. Thinks he deserves a better billing.”
Moneypenny heard 009’s shoe scuff the rug as the latest Double O brought all his attention to bear on Bond’s current case. She wondered if Sid Bashir truly represented the new and improved model, or only the next best thing to 007. She also wondered, with a grim smile, how Johanna Harwood would answer that question.
Tanner leaned forward. “Mikhail, Russia’s foremost climate scientist, wants you to wine, dine, and fuck him. If you’re not too busy doing the same to his wife.”
Moneypenny spoke before Bond could. “When did this come in?”
M slid one of the files to her. “Confirmed in the last hour. Mikhail wants to come over to our side. Quaint, isn’t it? But only if Bond will meet him and Anna in Barcelona and do the niceties in two weeks’ time.” He considered Bond. “We sent you to woo the wife in question so you could use her access to his files. We never imagined it would endear you to her husband.”
“Mikhail Petrov wanted to be a poet,” said Bond.
M sighed theatrically. “Didn’t we all?”
Bond gave a one-shouldered shrug. “When Mikhail told me that he knew about the nature of my relationship with Anna, he wasn’t angry. Had the idea it made us closer. Affection for the same woman, I suppose. Poetic.”
Bond was silent as Moneypenny, M, and Tanner discussed how best to use Mikhail’s kamikaze love for poetry, Anna’s kamikaze love for Bond, and Bond’s kamikaze love of—what, duty?—until it was decided that Bond would meet the Petrovs in Barcelona. Bashir would shadow him, observe how to bring in a defector.
As the angles were debated, Bond’s gaze drifted to the portrait of Sir Miles Messervy, where 009 was reflected in the glass. Moneypenny could only imagine what Bond was thinking at the prospect of taking Bashir with him so 009 could study Bond’s charm with another man’s wife, when Harwood had so recently chosen Bashir and accepted his ring. Moneypenny glanced over her shoulder. Bashir’s hands were loose now, and he was fiddling with his ring finger.
But when M gave a friendly rap on the table, Bond’s expression gave nothing away. M said: “Let Bashir learn from the best, hmm?”
A small smile. “That’s what I did, sir.”
M pushed back from his desk. “You’ll get me all aflutter, 007.”
Bond winked to Moneypenny. “I meant her, sir.”
Moneypenny remembered this with a stone dropping through her stomach. Because now James was missing, presumed dead after seventeen months, Mikhail had been found poisoned in a hotel room in Sydney, and Anna had disappeared.
She tapped the intercom. “Any sign of him, Phoebe?”
“The lift’s just gone down, ma’am.”
Moneypenny twisted her brooch. James had stopped her as they summoned the lift that afternoon, told her he knew what Tanner had said to Harwood: James is a good-looking chap, but don’t fall for him. I don’t think he’s got much heart. That might be true. His heart might have been buried in Scotland at his parents’ empty graves, or Royale-les-Eaux, or on the road north of Rosenheim, under the careless gaze of the white peaks. Perhaps he wasn’t willing to hazard what remained. Or perhaps he’d never had much of a heart to begin with. Perhaps that’s how he ended up in this job.
Bond had been brought to his knees by love and luck only twice before, and knew if there were to be a third, Harwood could be the author of it. Either way, whatever was left of his capacity for love he had shared with 003, no matter how drifting the relationship—not that Bond would ever use such a word—and no matter what status their connection was given by those watching for vulnerabilities in Regent’s Park: active, inactive, as they pursued weekends away and embraces on his doorstep or hers, then retreated, then came back together for another mission, another night. Until Harwood chose Bashir. There were few people in the world Bond cared about, and would do anything for. She was on a very short list.
Moneypenny thought of Harwood on her way to Shrublands now. A formidable agent, adaptable to the point of camouflage. Olive skin, brown hair so dark it was almost black, which curled at her shoulders. Eyebrows just as dark, a thick sweep. High cheekbones, a jawline that commanded respect, and a soft nose. Bronze eyes that could wither a man at forty paces, or light up with mischief. She’d gone undercover as everything from Albanian to Afghan to Ukrainian. Tall and slim, with a young face, she’d also cut off her hair and passed for a boy in Saudi Arabia. Bond liked to say they were both products of European unions, him Swiss-Scottish, her French–Northern Irish. Both were products of colonialism too, in different ways: Harwood’s mother Algerian-French, and Bond the poster boy for a waned empire.
He’d realized on their first mission he could fall and stay fallen, when 003 performed a tracheostomy on a boy under live fire in a public square with a Biro for a tube. It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people in cold blood in the course of a job. You were told to take care of a bent Japanese cipher agent in New York or a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm, so you did. Your victims might have been decent people, but they were caught up in the gale of the world. But one wanted it to count. And Harwood made it count.
There by the lift, on that last day, Bond asked Moneypenny if she thought he had a cold heart.
“No,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
Before she could add another word, M had called James back, and she never told him what she meant. That his heart, or his sentiment, or whatever you wanted to call it—the wounds that never healed, the emptiness—that this broken heart of his would get him killed unless he gripped tight to that list of people he cared about. Because Moneypenny knew, and perhaps only she knew it, that James Bond, CMG, conqueror of SMERSH, and defender of the realm, was running out of reasons to live.
And she very much wanted him to come home.
But she never got the chance to tell him any of that.
The door opened.
Moneypenny stood up, ludicrous hope at her throat.
004 said, “You expecting somebody else?”