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corner better than Bond, The old Bentley was a bit high off the ground for
this sort of work.
Bond stamped on his brakes and risked a howl on his triple klaxons as a
homeward-bound taxi started to weave over to the right. It jerked back to the
left and Bond heard a four-letter yell as he shot past.
Clapham Common and the flicker of the white car through the trees. Bond ran
the Bentley up to eighty along the safe bit of
48
road and saw the lights go red just in time to stop Drax at the end of it. He
put the Bentley into neutral and coasted up silently. Fifty yards away. Forty,
thirty, twenty. The lights changed and Drax was over the crossing and away
again, but not before Bond had seen that Krebs was beside the driver and there
was no sign of Gala except the hump of a rug over the narrow back seat.
So there was no question. You don't take a sick girl for a drive like a sack
of potatoes. Not at that speed for the matter of that.
So she was a prisoner. Why? What had she done? What had she discovered? What
the hell, in fact, was all this about?
Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond's
shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool. Blind, blind,
blind. From the moment he had sat in his office after the night at Blades and
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made his mind up about Drax being a dangerous man he should have been on his
toes. At the first smell of trouble, the marks on the chart for instance, he
should have taken action. But what action? He had passed on each clue, each
fear. What could he have done except kill Drax? And get hanged for his pains?
Well, then. What about the present? Should he stop and telephone the Yard?
And let the car get away? For all he knew Gala was being taken for a ride and
Drax planned to get rid of her on the way to
Dover. And that Bond might conceivably prevent if only his car could take it.
As if to echo his thoughts the tortured rubber screamed as he left the South
Circular road into A20 and took the round about at forty. No. He had told M.
that he would stay with it. He had told Vallance the same. The case had been
dumped firmly into his lap and he must do what he could. At least if he kept
up with the Mercedes he might shoot up its tyres and apologize afterwards. To
let it get away would be criminal.
So be it, said Bond to himself.
He had to slow for some lights and he used the pause to pull a pair of goggles
out of the dashboard compartment and cover his eyes with them. Then he leant
over to the left and twisted the big screw on the windscreen and then eased
the one beside his right hand. He pressed the narrow screen flat down on the
bonnet and tightened the screws again.
Then he accelerated away from Swanley Junction and was soon doing ninety
astride the cat's eyes down the Farningham by-
pass, the wind howling past his ears and the shrill scream of his supercharger
riding with him for company.
A mile ahead the great eyes of the Mercedes hooded themselves as they went
over the crest of Wrotham Hill and disappeared down into the moonlit panorama
of the Weald of Kent.
CHAPTER XX
DRAX'S GAMBIT
THERE WERE three separate sources of pain in Gala's body. The throbbing ache
behind her left ear, the bite of the flex at her wrists, and the chafing of
the strap round her ankles.
Every bump in the road, every swerve, every sudden pressure of Drax's foot on
the brakes or the accelerator awoke one or another of these pains and rasped
at her nerves. If only she had been wedged into the back seat more tightly.
But there was just room enough for her body to roll a few inches on the
occasional seat so that she was constantly having to twist her bruised face
away from contact with the walls of shiny pig-skin.
The air she breathed was stuffy with a smell of new leather upholstery,
exhaust fumes, and the occasional sharp stench of burning rubber as Drax
flayed the tyres on a sharp corner.
And yet the discomfort and pain were nothing.
Krebs! Curiously enough her fear and loathing of Krebs tormented her most. The
other things were too big. The mystery of
Drax and his hatred of England. The riddle of his perfect command of German.
The Moonraker. The secret of the atomic warhead. How to save London. These
were matters which she had long ago put away in the back of her mind as
insoluble.
But the afternoon alone with Krebs was present and dreadful and her mind went
back and back to the details of it like a tongue to an aching tooth.
Long after Drax had gone she had kept up her pretence of unconsciousness. At
first Krebs had occupied himself with the machines, talking to them in German
in a cooing baby-talk. "There, my
Liebchen
. That's better now, isn't it? A drop of oil for you, my
Pupperl
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? But certainly. Coming up at once. No, no, lazybones. I said a thousand
revolutions. Not nine hundred.
Come along now. We can do better than that, can't we. Yes, my
Schatz
. That's it. Round and round we go. Up and down.
Round and round. Let me wipe your pretty face for you so that we can see what
the little dial is saying.
Jesu Maria, hist du ein braves Kind
!"
And so it had gone on with intervals of standing in front of Gala, picking his
nose and sucking his teeth in a horribly ruminative way. Until he stayed
longer and longer in front of her, forgetting the machines, wondering, making
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