Playlist continuing… Chapter twelve

Paul McCartney and Wings, "Live and Let Die"


"When you were young...
And your heart... was an open book...

You used to say... "live and let live"...
You know you did... you know you did... you know you did..."


She moved the 'Function' switch to 'Tape', then set the volume to '2'. Only a week ago, the object she was handling was still gathering dust in a small shop of Ko Panyi village. A short time after having seen it, she had already given the shop keeper four hundred fifty baht – approximately fourteen dollars –, leaving the place with it under the arm. Not much paid, given all the sentimental value it had for her.

It was a black Sony CFM-140 radio-cassette player, the very same as the one her parents bought back a little before her birth. It then always was a great joy when her twin brother, Akira, and her could have it for the entire Saturday afternoon, listening to the J-AC Top 40 on Kyoto's α-Station or to audio tapes nabbed when their dad wasn't in sight.

She had restored her newly acquired one for hours, cleaning each part very carefully and even replacing the drive belts, which had been a great way to think to something else than what she had done recently. If her family was watching her from wherever they were, they would most likely be terrified. In eleven years, she had ended up with much more blood on the hands than their murderers in a lifetime.

She pushed the 'Stop' button to open the tape door, before slipping a cassette inside and rewinding it. She had found it inside the player, probably forgotten in there for a long time, and only bearing its manufacturer's brand – 'TDK'. What was recorded on it thus remained a complete mystery, at least until she pressed 'Play'.

Some cracks, then a song starting, accompanied by piano music. The recording was quite lousy, still she recognized the melody. A seventies hit performed by the Wings, the band lead by Paul McCartney and his wife Linda after the Beatles' break-up. Live and Let Die.

She stretched out her legs, as sitting on a comfortable chair near an opened sliding window, but then let a curse out when feeling a sudden twinge she had wanted to not happen again. She would have much preferred Xenia's bullets to result into bruises, no matter what size. Yet, if it had been actually the case for one, the other hadn't had such civility. Besides having struck at a rib's level , part of it had made its way to the skin, both cracking the bone and leaving a wound slow as hell to heal. Incidentally, the large purplish black bruise encircling it was too, making the whole thing look all the more terrible… 'Thank you, you goddamned scumbag.'


"But if this ever-changing world... in which we're livin'...
Makes you give in and cry..."


Two weeks ago, she was still crossing the Pacific, in the Bombardier Global 6000 that took her from Los Angeles to Taipei. Even with all the on-board convenience, the flight had been no exception to the rule: as always when taking an aircraft, she couldn't get asleep. But this time not because of some unbearable engine noise.

The TV had made a big deal about the event: the CMGN news channel, one the world's most popular bunches of stupid windbags, particularly seemed to have worked twice as hard as any of its competitors. The same pattern had been repeated over and over again, providing the watchers all the improper morbidity they needed to see. The smartphone footage of an unknown object falling from a comparably unusual tiltrotor aircraft that didn't wait any longer to seek out new horizons, the expert looking host showing the expertly-made looking map of the concerned area, the shock images of emergency and security teams completely thrown off by the ownerless clothes lying around them, and, most lucrative of all, the never-ending commercial breaks.

With nearly fifteen years of draconian antiterrorist policy, the US were likely to get ridiculed internationally. The reason why clothes were wafted over that part of the Las Vegas Strip Boulevard was that anything having had organic tissues within the half-kilometer around the bomb explosion had literally vanished. That was the point: disabling personnel and electronics while leaving infrastructures undamaged.

Of course this was little knowledge on how neutron bombs actually worked, but enough for her to not breathe easy. With the OMEN going off in a place always filled with people, there wouldn't have been any possible outcome else than quite a few dead. So Galore was utterly right. Anybody wouldn't have activated that goddamned device. Yet she had done it, rather having people that didn't ask for it vaporized than the guts to confront directly the two-faced. What a coward she had been.

When not so brooding, she had done the math of all the flight time she had accumulated in the last few days. Eighteen hours of commercial flight from St Petersburg to Las Vegas – including the stops in Moscow and New York –, plus one hour to get to L.A., plus twelve others to Taipei equaled no less than thirty one hours. And then she still had around three thousand kilometers to go before reaching her actual destination, Phuket Island.

To avoid herself sinking into paranoid delirium by having blown the neutron bomb and only napped for five hours since she had left St Petersburg, she refused to move an inch within the three following days. Still, the big joke was that the Midas Grand's attack had, comparatively, lasted for less than two miserable hours.

Three days' rest did her a world of good, letting her reconsider the whole story with a cool head. The plan was originally GoldenEye pressing the button and getting out without anything to wonder for. These people would have died anyway, so there was nothing to deplore. To their eyes, she never existed. To hers, neither they did. And then, she had dragged herself along the skid row long enough to have seen the hidden face of the great humanity. Everybody was only thinking of their own interests : as rushing headlong to Piter – St Petersburg – would have led her to disaster, it wouldn't have done her any harm to think a little more of hers.

After four final hours spent on a Cessna Citation CJ2+, she finally reached Thailand, yet welcomed by heavy rain. 'Oh well', she had thought while hastily stepping outside the jet, 'let's deal with it.' Her host Scaramanga had come personally to pick her up to his talked-about private island, only accessible by boat. And she had spent all her time in there since her arrival, stifling her persistent remorse and waiting for her injury to heal by going to the surrounding places, walking around or buying some replacement stuff to compensate the loss of the backpack she had brought in Vegas, then, after her trip to Ko Panyi, by fixing the Sony cassette player.


"Say live and let die."


She looked outside the window, enjoying the view on the sea and on that peculiar mushroom-shaped Ko Tapu islet, lying about forty meters from the shore. According to what she had been told, the island where she was, Khao Phing Kan, used to be deserted until some nebulous millionaire bought it in the early seventies. He then spent his wealth to have a cave blasted into the side of one of the island's hills and a whole villa built inside it. Yet, when Scaramanga first visited the site, the previous proprietor had left it for a long time and the entire island had been forbidden to tourist access, as having become part of the Ao Phang Nga National Park.

The spot was ideal for someone that wanted privacy, but was in serious need of renovation: that's where part of Scaramanga's own millions went into, along with persuading the local authorities to let him settle in the now protected area. One of the biggest improvements brought then was the renewal of the private solar plant located on another part of the island, now ensuring total energy independence. The benefits of tropical climate… lots of rain, but lots of sunshine too.

"Good afternoon, miss Morikawa.", she heard Scaramanga's voice saying behind her. "It seems you finally reached your goal."

She turned around, slightly wincing because of the inevitable twinge.

"Oh… Indeed. The belts you gave me are working perfectly, as you can hear."

"Good.", he said with a nod, before a pause. "How come is that injury still bothering you?"

"Like the one who inflicted it… managing to be always worth a slap."

He smiled at that, while she turned back to stop the cassette.

"By the way, what did that… what's his name, again? Oh yes, that mister… Narkhirunkanokgosh, and I thought Aksornpan was a lousy one… well, I mean, did he tell you anything convincing?"

"I agree on the fact that Thai people have rather special surnames." (She nodded in agreement.) "On what he told me, I'd say it is quite satisfying. Doctor No has apparently difficulty to recover from the crushing defeat you made him suffer."

"Like it had been so pleasant for me…", she sighed. "Never mind. Technically, what does it do?"

"Oh, things like keeping him at bay and depriving him of a significant part of his power, but that is certainly not what you would be most interested to learn. Now, what would you say if learning about a deterioration of relations between him and Janus?"

"If so, I'd certainly ask: To what extent?", she answered with a large grin.

"Mister Narkhirunkanok's contact spoke about a surprising drop in the proportion of weapons ordered from the Janus Syndicate, even though it had been No's main and preferred supplier for years."

"While part of the stock has been hopelessly lost... right ?"

Scaramanga nodded. Of course that wasn't some fatal blow to the two-faced's business, as there was always demand in arms trafficking, but she enjoyed the news as a personal victory. Short-term optimism was much more relaxing than imagining the kind of things the гад would have in store if he ever happened to get her from now on. Even if being only able to pray for Jessi was already starting to grind her gears.

"Fine...", she stated after a moment. "But what's all this about if Goldfinger doesn't want to take an interest in me?"

The thought had kept running through her head for the last days. She had risked a lot to change sides, but now nobody wanted to tell her anything about it... even though the situation was obviously evolving day by day.

"Don't be mistaken: so far you've been anything but forgotten."

"Then what's the matter? GoldenEye having suddenly got paranoid about me?"

"He scarcely said anything, but I don't think so. Auric would rather have."

Her eyes instantly widened. The 'Auric' he was talking about was none other than Goldfinger himself.

"How come he would...?!"

"His thought comes down to this: if you've been able to deceive someone like Janus, then you're perfectly able to deceive him too."

"Oh come on...", she stated with exasperation. "Galore telling me that two weeks ago was OK, but now... And seriously, even if I were a mole, I don't think I'd have been silly enough to raise Janus' hackles the way I did. What do you think?"

"Do you understand why I didn't want to tell you about it, then?"

She looked at him, slightly raising the eyebrows.

"Sure.", she sighed.

He silently went sit down in a nearby armchair, looking like having something quite unpleasant to say. Actually, it even took some time before he decided to let it out.

"Auric wanted something impracticable. That's the point."

"What kind?", she asked with apprehension.

"Bringing him Janus' head on a spike."

"You… must be joking…", she whispered.

It did sound like a joke. A bad one. The man she wanted to help her clipping the two-faced wanted her to first clip the two-faced. It was ridiculous enough to force a nervous laughter out of her.

"I said we couldn't afford to waste your energy in such a crucial period."

"Dr No can strike back just anytime, right?"

"Precisely. Actually, if you killing Janus seems to no longer be in his short-term agenda, he now wants to get information about the man... which is still irrelevant to me."

"Information?"

"Oh, you didn't know?" (She shrugged, showing she didn't get it.) "Nobody knows anything tangible about your... ex-employer. No name, no face, no background. By all accounts, he has everything of a ghost. Some even asserted he couldn't exist."

She absently turned the head, thinking deeply on what she heard. As long as she knew the two-faced, she had never wondered about that. For her, he had always been the reddish-blond man in dark suits of whom she used to be the puppet. Perhaps she even didn't want to know.

"You seem to be as unknowing as we are." (She nodded.) "But is there anyone that wouldn't be?"

She smiled. Such an elegant way to ask if she could find the information herself... some way to stop having to negotiate for her. It was all more about his energy wasted than hers.

"Some enemy he has, maybe?", he continued.

'Hm... not as far as I know.', she said to herself. But she continued racking her brain. It has to be a long-time enemy, otherwise chances of getting anything interesting would be pretty slim. 'Wait, long-time...?'

"The name was Zu... ah, Zuk, Zuv-something...", she thought aloud. "Damn! Can't remember... Well, that dates me anyway..."

"Who was it?"

"Some mob boss from St Petersburg. I don't even know if he's still alive, as Janus got rid of quite some of those... I believe they couldn't stand each other, but then it was years ago."

Scaramanga seemed to be very satisfied with that, even relieved.

"I'll do some research. Maybe we'll eventually find something."

"I hope so. If I knew about such little game for joining Goldfinger, I'd have made inquiries myself..." (She slightly shook the head.) "Oh and, by the way..."

"Tell me.", he simply said.

"Just to see how much I'm ripped off: did GoldenEye have to play the little game too?"

"Now you come to mention it… he does. The only difference is that he plausibly never worked for doctor No." (She frowned.) "Are you aware of what he was before Auric hired him?"

"A... future Double-0 agent?"

"Do you know what it means?"

"Elite spy, or something?"

"Correct. So, now: how do you think somebody like him has sunk so low?"

"How would I know? I've only been told he went rogue."

By way of answer, her interlocutor simply tapped next to his right eye.

"His eye...", she said. "Dr No's doing?"

"Surprised?"

"Not really.", she admitted. "Makes sense, actually."


"What does it matter… to you…?
When you got a job to do…
You gotta… do it well…

You gotta give the other fellow hell…"