On Her Majesty's Other, More Secret, Secret Service
James Bond (007) receives assistance from an agent with highly unusual talents.
Standard Disclaimers: The following is an act of fan fiction. By definition, I am using characters others have created, and who are owned by others, without their permission. This is written strictly for my own entertainment, and hopefully the entertainment of others. More detailed acknowledgements are at the end of the story.
Opening comments: I wrote an earlier version of this story over one night, and was very dissatisfied with the results, even though I posted it. I have rewritten it considerably to help with pacing and intelligibility.
Somewhere on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia (the Persian Gulf)
It was another secret, underground facility, interchangeable in many ways with the other underground secret facilities he had been to before. Like those other visits, with the arrival of Agent 007, James Bond, it was now in chaos. Men were yelling, and alarms were screaming and ringing. The underground halls smelled of smoke and men's fear. In this instance, Bond was enjoying the irony. These men had gathered together to impose on unarmed civilians the very sort of terror and confusion they were now experiencing.
The facility was located underneath the house of a very wealthy and very evil man. This man was well known in anti-terrorism circles, although it was unknown whether he himself was an Islamist terrorist, or simply the type of highly unethical capitalist who was perfectly willing to sell dangerous weapons to anyone who would buy them. The very evil man's underground facility consisted of a large network of tunnels running from under the house to a variety of other locations, including the rocky coastline. Bond had piloted his one man sub into the tunnels from the Persian Gulf. Since the entrance was underwater, it was largely unguarded. Emerging from the underwater pool, Bond shot the two men standing guard with his silenced Walther PPK. Then, after moving approximately 100 meters down the primary tunnel and away from the underwater entrance, Bond turned a corner and, using a remote control on his watch, set off the self destruct charges in the sub. The charges were sufficient to seal off the underwater entrance.
The explosion had the desired effect. Four men came running down the tunnel, but with the tunnel lights flickering it was easy for Bond to hide in the shadows and move past them. Then he looked for other men, men who would be running a different direction. Bond had come for a specific package, one that these men would be very motivated to protect.
The very evil man, through means as yet unknown, had somehow gotten his hands on weapons grade plutonium. Bond remembered how his blood ran cold when M had told him about his mission, which was to secure the plutonium. Then another agent would arrive to extract both the plutonium and him from the facility.
Bond watched from the shadows as seven men, each armed with a fully automatic rifle, ran along a corridor crossing his. Bond followed carefully, turning the corner and staying close to the wall. As he and his technical man Q had suspected, the facility had been rather hastily outfitted with broadcast video and audio equipment, high tech but no land lines. His watch broadcast a broad jamming signal that would shut off the audio visual feeds at a radius of over 100 meters. The men watching the security monitors, on the basis of the pattern of lost feeds, would have a general sense of where the intruder was, but only a general sense. Furthermore, the signal from his watch also jammed communication frequencies, so the men in the tunnels would not be hearing from the people watching the security monitors. As he carefully followed behind the seven men, he knew that the sense of panic in the facility would increase as he got closer to the plutonium. Bond was like a wily wolf fooling the muskoxen into revealing the location of their calves.
Eventually, the seven men stopped and turned to stand guard in front of thick door. Standing around the nearest corner, Bond reached into the right side of his waistband and pulled a long, thin tube that was hidden along his thigh. From his belt he pulled a small trigger and clip. He slid the tube into the handle and clip assembly, then on top of that affixed a mirror sight. The device was almost invisible when held close to the wall and the mirror allowed Bond to line up his targets from around the corner. He lined up his shots and pulled the trigger. The assembly was so quiet he barely heard the exhale of air as the highly modified "gun" sent tiny gnat sized flechettes, each covered with a powerful narcotic, into the necks of the men standing guard. Bond had shot six men with the flechettes before the first one fell, and by the time he hit the floor he had shot the seventh man as well. The men probably wouldn't die, but they would be very sick upon recovering consciousness, to the extent that they would wish they were dead for several days afterward. Bond disassembled the device, then ran over quickly and closely examined the unconscious men. On the digital display on his watch, miniature pictures of men's faces appeared. Bond looked from the faces of the unconscious men to the pictures flashing on the display of his digital watch. This continued until he found a match. Bond pulled out a short but very sharp knife and looked at the man whose face now matched the face on his watch's display.
"You're really going to feel lousy in the morning," Bond said to him. Bond leaned down, his knife flashed, and a small amount of blood splashed onto his lower face. Bond wiped it away with a black handkerchief from a black pocket on his very black shirt.
When Bond finished his grisly task, on the end of the knife he was holding a human eye. He held it in front of the retinal scan on the front of the door. The door unlocked. As Bond carefully started to push open the door, he saw four men inside pointing guns in his direction. Bond moved behind the bullet proof door as they started to fire and threw in a small concussion grenade. The explosion pushed open the door and he stepped out of the way. Pulling out his Walther PPK, Bond looked into the room. The room was small, and unlike the seven men lying outside the room, the four men lying on the floor with blood coming out of their nose, mouth, ears, and eyes would never recover any sort of consciousness again. Bond stepped into the small room, immediately finding a very secure looking safe. Underneath a protective acrylic cover, there was a keyboard. Bond shot the lock off the cover, and a new alarm started to sound. Bond ignored it, instead pulling from his belt a new device. Q was very proud of this particular device. The device could be adjusted manually so that it snugly over the keyboard. When Bond switched it on, it rapidly activated keys, then just as rapidly erased the system's memory of the previous keys' activation, until it activated the correct key in the combination. Then it moved on to finding the next key. It took the device approximately 24 seconds to unlock the safe. Opening the safe, he found one black ceramic looking tube. The Geiger Counter on Bond's remarkably all purpose watch picked up a small radiation signature from the tube, identifying it as the package he had come for. Slipping off the small, flat, lead lined backpack he was wearing, Bond removed the package from the safe and carefully nestled it securely into his backpack. Now his job was simply to stay alive until his contact arrived to extract the package and him. He knew that other men would be running towards him, including at the very least the four he had seen running past him in the tunnels.
Gun in hand, Bond carefully sprinted from the room, back the way he came. As he turned a corner, he saw the four heavily armed men running towards him. He got two of them with head shots before the other two got their guns up. Bond backed up and ducked around the corner he had just passed. Holding out his gun, he covered the corner and waited for the men to start firing, but no shots came. Carefully looking back around the corner, he saw the two surviving men were now also down. Standing over the men was a woman in a full Afghani style burqa. The woman looked at Bond and spelled the word "reindeer" in manual alphabet. That was the code word. His contact had arrived.
The woman quickly ran up to him.
"Mr. Bond, I presume," the woman said in a crisp, very British accent. The brown eyes looking at him through the slit in the burqa were quite lovely.
"I am," he said.
"Excellent," the woman said. "I presume that is the package on your back?"
M had been very specific in her briefing. When you meet your contact, you are to surrender the package to this person immediately. No questions.
Bond handed the woman the package, then looked over her head to see if any other men were coming.
"Well, that's done," the woman said. "Sorry I took so long. I had to sign off the master of the house."
"That's done?" Bond said, looking down at the woman. "What do you mean that's …?"
The woman was no longer clad in a burqa. Indeed, there was no sign of the burqa at all. Instead, she was now wearing a black infiltration outfit identical to his. The woman's hair was long, brown, and fell in loose curls below her shoulders. The face was quite beautiful and the outfit revealed a slim, well shaped but athletic body. She looked to be in her mid to late twenties.
But other than the absence of the burqa, there were several other things that were wrong, chief among them that there was no sign of the package he had given her. Feeling the cold stab of despair that came from the realization that he may have failed a mission where failure was not an option, Bond immediately trained his Walther PPK between the woman's eyes.
"Who are you and where is the package?" he demanded icily. He had risked too much, and the package was much too deadly, to be unaccounted for.
"The package is already where it needs to be," the woman said calmly. "And apparently, someone failed to brief you on who and what I am, or you wouldn't be asking me either question."
"Then who are you?" Bond demanded, his aim between the young woman's eyes not faltering a bit. He noticed, absurdly, that the woman appeared to have no gun of her own. Instead she was holding some sort of stick in her left hand, it looked like a miniature billiard stick, or maybe a magic wand.
The woman's brown eyes looked coolly back at him.
"The name's Granger, Hermione Granger," she said. "And I'm with Her Majesty's Other, More Secret, Secret Service."
"What? More Secret, Secret Service?" Bond said, or at least tried to say. However, he found he could no longer speak, much less keep the gun trained on Granger as she gently pushed his hand and gun aside.
"Now, just stand calmly while I work on getting us out of here," Granger said. Then she started muttering words in some strange language that he had never heard before. As she was doing so, three more guards suddenly appeared around the corner, raising their guns to fire. The woman spun around and yelled "Disarm!" Incredibly, all three men dropped their rifles. As they stood there looking very confused, Granger pointed her stick towards them and said something else. Two of the men fell and did not move. Bond noticed that they remained breathing. The third man, however, had evaded whatever the woman had thrown at them. He ran towards Granger and grabbed the wrist of her left hand, the one holding the stick, and pushed it aside. Simultaneously, he pulled a knife from his belt and stabbed down towards Granger's neck.
As it turned out, however, there was no cause for alarm. Granger's response was as immediate and ruthlessly efficient as his own would have been. Her free right hand flew forward in a rapid thrust into the man's throat, then quickly swung back to intercept and block the descending knife hand at the wrist. As the knife fell clattering to the floor, the woman followed up with a vicious Thai style forearm and elbow combination to the temple. The man went down and didn't move.
"Right then," Granger said. "It's time for us to leave, don't you think?"
Bond suddenly found that he could move again. As he lowered his gun in confusion, Granger grabbed his other wrist and then there was a rushing sound and he was blinded. He felt as if he was in a black wind tunnel. His feet left the ground and he tensed to hit the wall behind him, but nothing happened. Scant seconds later, he landed on solid ground again. Bond opened his eyes, and found himself in a large, indeed very huge, vaulted room. Carved in bold letters over a large arched entryway on one side of the room were the words "Ministry of Magic".
An officious looking man with bright red hair and thick glasses ran up to the two of them. He looked quite ridiculous in a long purple cloak and a huge, peaked hat of the same color.
"That isn't possible!" the man yelled at them. "No one has the ability to apparate into the ministry. That's impossible."
"Not for me it isn't," said Granger.
The officious looking man in the cloak and silly hat immediately paled upon hearing the woman's voice. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm here to report to my superior, the Vampire Queen," Granger said, her voice dropping to a loud whisper when she said Vampire Queen. "Mr. Bond here is my partner. Apparently I miscalculated, Percy. My apologies for popping out here."
Percy, whoever he was, paled at the mention of the "Vampire Queen" and stepped away
Bond head felt as if it was full of cotton. They caught me. They caught me and I am still in the facility where they gave me some sort of powerful hallucinogen.
But before he could act, or even begin to ask Granger questions, she started to walk away from him, towards the arched entrance labeled "The Ministry of Magic". Magic?
"Follow me, Mr. Bond," Granger said crisply.
They walked through a huge hallway. Bond saw a number of people, each more absurdly clothed than the last in a riot of brightly colored robes and odd hats. More disturbing yet was that not all of them were walking on the ground. Some were flying up and down the hall on broomsticks. As they exited the large hallway and moved into a smaller hallway, Bond thought he saw something that looked like a Chinese Dragon being walked by a huge bearded man, one so large he made Bond's old enemy "Jaws" look tiny in comparison.
Hold it together James, he thought. Remember where you really are.
They continued to walk through progressively narrower halls until they were finally walking through a very tight, otherwise featureless white bricked corridor.
"Well," said Granger, stopping to look at Bond. "Now we can finally talk, out of range of prying eyes, ears, noses, and telepaths.
"First of all, you are not hallucinating. You have not been captured and put on drugs. I am a witch, and I teleported the package here with real magic. Fortunately, I am somewhat better at teleportation than I am at apparating. Also fortunately, I believe that Percy was the only one to see me, and he won't talk and wouldn't be believed if he did."
"Teleporting?" Bond said. "Apparating?"
"As I said, I'm a witch, Mr. Bond," said Granger. "One of the best in the world, or so I'm told. Certainly I am among the best covert witches in the world. I was brought in because our primary enemy was a wizard who used alchemy to turn spent uranium into plutonium. Fortunately, he won't be doing that again."
"Because you signed him off," Bond said. "What a familiar turn of phrase. Do you…do you hang out at the Treadmill by any chance and talk with its proprietor Willie?"
"Of course," Granger said. "It's the place to unwind for Her Majesty's top spies."
The two resumed walking down the hall until they reached a dead end. Magic, broomsticks, dragons, giants, and was that really a man being followed by a walking bathtub he'd seen in the large hall?
"Follow me, Mr. Bond," Granger said as she walked through the wall at the end of the corridor.
Hologram, thought Bond. No magic required.
Then Bond walked into the wall. As he staggered back, Granger's hand reached out of the wall and pulled him through it.
"Sorry," Granger said. "I forgot to tell you that you needed to follow me immediately, no hesitation."
In the small, otherwise featureless room they had entered, two people were sitting at two desks. Opposite of the way they had come in was a single door. The front room back room arrangement was familiar enough that Bond found it reassuring. More reassuring yet was the sight of Miss Moneypenny working at her desk on a high tech laptop computer.
"Hallo, James," she said brightly.
"Hallo, Moneypenny," Bond said with somewhat less than his usual assurance.
"Quite the sights here, eh James?" Moneypenny said with a mischievous smile.
Bond's sense of reassurance came to an end as he looked at the man at the other desk. The man was very old, with very white bushy hair and an equally white and bushy mustache. He sat at his desk and stared at a quill and a scroll. The quill was writing on the scroll by itself. There was nothing else on the desk. Not even an inkwell.
"Hallo, Farnsworth," said Granger. "Is she in?"
"Yes," said Farnsworth. "The Vampire Queen is in, and she has a guest."
He nodded to the door.
"The guest is M, James," said Moneypenny. "And she is awaiting your report."
Granger turned to look at Bond and smiled.
"Well, Mr. Bond," she said. "Let's not keep our superiors waiting, shall we?"
With that, she rapped smartly on the door and then opened it. Bond followed.
On the other side was a very large desk with one woman sitting behind it, and another woman sitting on it with her long legs crossed.
The woman sitting behind the desk was familiar, with very short grey hair and a stern facial expression that softened, just a little, as her gaze centered upon Bond.
"Excellent work, 007," M said. "You will be glad to know that the package has been secured and is being disposed of as we speak."
The other woman, apparently M's supervisory counterpart for Hermione Granger, was dressed in a long, slinky black dress that revealed a lot of leg. She had light, sandy brown hair tied up in a loose bun. She appeared to be decades younger than M, no more than 40.
"And you also have done well, Miss Granger," she said. The woman's voice was sensuality incarnate.
"Thank you, Mrs. Harker," said the young female agent. "It was truly a joint effort, and an honor to work with the legendary 007."
Vampire queen? Bond thought. Mrs. Harker?? Surely not! Really, really nice legs though…
"I would suggest you stop looking at Mrs. Harker like that, 007," said M. "I assure you that she is quite out of even your league."
"Yes, M," said Bond.
"Welcome to SISS, or Secret Intelligence and Sorcery Service," said M. "It's a combined offshoot of our SIS and the Ministry of Magic. It's also known as MI8."
My God, thought Bond. Those really were wizards out there! And Granger's stick, it's a bloody magic wand! And her superior, Mrs. Harker, really is…
"Mrs. Mina Harker, I presume?" asked Bond.
"That would be correct, Mr. Bond," said Mrs. Harker.
"007," M resumed. "In our agency only Miss Moneypenny and I have clearance to know about the Ministry of Magic and SISS. As a result, you will not be able to remember your experience here. You will remember a more conventional version of your mission's success. Agent Granger and Mrs. Harker will edit your memories."
Bond turned towards Granger, who was holding out her right hand.
Granger smiled.
"It was truly an honor to work with the legendary 007," she said. "Perhaps we will do so again. And if nothing else, I'll see you at the Treadmill."
"I look forward to it," said Mr. Bond, who was only referring to the possibility of seeing Granger at the Treadmill. The other possibility was a bit too much even for him.
As Bond took her right hand, Granger brought up her left hand, the one holding the wand.
"Forget," she said.
And he did.
End
Acknowledgements: Copyright on James Bond held by UA/MGM and I would presume the estate of Ian Fleming. Hermione Granger, Percy Weasly, and the huge bearded man are the creations of J.K. Rowling. Willie is the creation of Peter O'Donnell, and Mina Harker was the creation of Bram Stoker (as interpreted by some more modern authors).