Chapter 21: Under the Radar
"Sit down, 007," said M, looking not at Bond but at the leather-bound folder on his desk. Bond did as he was told, his face impassive but a sinking feeling beginning to make itself felt in the pit of his stomach.
He was fairly sure that he knew what was coming. M was going to remove him from active duty. Was going to give him a desk assignment, or arrange to have him train the new young recruits.
M slid the folder across the desk to Bond and then paused before speaking again, biting unconsciously at his lower lip.
"I can't say that I haven't considered retiring you from the field, 007," he finally said stiffly, still not meeting Bond's eyes. "Perhaps you've been expecting that. Perhaps you've been, well, looking forward to a comfortable retirement. But I find that I can't, not now, and perhaps not for some time. Not with the current state of affairs in international crime, and the uptick in terrorism. I'm sorry, 007. If you've no objection to remaining on the active roster…"
Bond slowly let out his breath and kept his expression blank, an attempt to hide the relief he felt and the sense of gladness that suddenly made him feel—oddly enough—as light as air. He had, only a few days earlier, returned from an assignment overseas, and although the outcome had been successful he had wondered, for the duration of the flight home, whether it was going to be his last.
"No objection whatsoever, sir," he replied, and for a moment thought he saw a spark of camaraderie, perhaps even compassion, in Mallory's face. It occurred to him then that M, although not a former MI6 operative, had worked for SAS and had seen his share of dangerous situations firsthand. Perhaps—in spite of his cynical demeanor, and although he certainly didn't show it—he too had been an adrenaline junkie, as Moneypenny often called Bond, bent on staying with the espionage community for as long as they were willing to employ him.
"Good," said M after a brief pause. "In that case. As I believe I've said to you before. Lots to be done."*
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Bond read through the mission dossier in record time, tucked it into his briefcase, left HQ as soon as he could get away, and headed in the direction of Q's flat. They had had vague plans to spend a quiet evening after Bond's talk with M. Although Q had never said a word about it, Bond sensed that he had been nearly as nervous about the outcome of the meeting as Bond had been himself.
When he let himself into Q's flat—he had been given a key shortly after his discharge from hospital—he found his Quartermaster seated at the table in his small dining room, staring into the eyepiece of a microscope at something or other that was virtually invisible. He raised his head as Bond entered the room, cocked his head to one side, but did not speak. His bruises had faded to a faint violet shadow, and the cut across the bridge of his nose had healed nicely. The other bruises Bond had discovered on various parts of his lean, ivory-hued body, the day after his discharge from hospital, were fading too. All things considered, Bond mused as he crossed the room, the occupants of M's car had been fortunate. Tanner, sporting a new cast on his wrist, had gone back to work almost immediately, and according to Moneypenny, Neville the driver—still recovering from surgery—was improving rapidly and nearly well enough to be released. She had sent him flowers; Tanner had ordered a basket of fruit and biscuits to be delivered, and Bond had sneaked a bottle of brandy into his hospital room.
Q was still looking at him questioningly, so Bond cleared his throat and said, "I've a new assignment, three weeks from now. In Greenland. Something to do with recent events at a weather station outside of Nuuk."
There was no sigh of relief from Q; he simply replied, "I don't suppose you'll be needing your augmented dinner jacket for this one, then?"
"I think it's unlikely," Bond said, shrugging. "At a weather station. Still, let's make certain it's in good working order."
At this Q gave a modified eye-roll, stood up, and headed for the sitting room, murmuring, "Drink?" Bond caught a whiff of his faint citrusy-spicy scent—not a cologne, surely; bath soap? hair product?—as he went past.
If he was a jaded, world-weary, experienced cosmopolitan in almost every respect, when it came to relationships, Bond was a neophyte. He had to admit it. He had spent so much time avoiding them that once he was faced with one, for longer than a few weeks' time, he felt—cliché, cliché—like an explorer discovering a new continent, hacking his way through mysterious forests and undergrowth with a previously unused, unfamiliar machete. A highly practiced sexual athlete, he was anything but practiced when it came to emotional commitment of any sort. That brief, tragic involvement with the lovely Vesper Lynd had done little to improve his views on the durability of what novelists and film directors referred to as romance, and he had never felt a genuine urge to settle into a long-term connection with any of the women who had succeeded her.
He had to admit, although almost reluctantly, that spending enough time with another person to discover that person's habits, idiosyncracies, likes and dislikes was quite as fascinating as tracking down an enemy operative or a hidden cache of weapons of mass destruction. And Q, while not a field agent, or anything like one, was as secretive as the most hardened spy.
If a woman, one of the many Bond had encountered and bedded in his line of work, had ever tried to cajole her way into his life, drawn to the aura of sex and danger so many Double Os seemed to emit, he would have turned her away, as tactfully as possible. Even the thought of a beautiful, negligee-clad female waiting for him at home when he returned from a mission, seductively posed with an ice-cold martini or bottle of wine at hand, lights turned low, music (slow, and heavy on the strings) coming softly from the sound system, had little appeal to him. The very image seemed dull, lacking in spice, a scene from a movie or from the most saccharine example of romance fiction.
Bond knew that if he were to come home after an assignment and find Q there, there would be no dimmed lights, no sheer or provocative garment, no syrupy music, no pre-prepared drink or seductive posturing on the sofa. Rather, he would find his young Quartermaster at the kitchen table, hair awry and Q Branch attire discarded in favor of some homely, shapeless sweater or narrow jeans and a tee shirt, tapping away at the keyboard of his laptop, or engrossed in a book, or a journal of scientific essays. When working at home, or at Bond's, Q listened to Mozart and Miles Davis and Bach—the exquisitely mathematical quality of Bach's concertos was particularly appealing to him—and when not working he might have a Brahms symphony, or a CD of Charles Mingus, or vintage Beatles or Cream or the Stones playing on the sound system. Sometimes contemporary jazz piano, and once Bond had been surprised to find him absorbed by a recent recording of American hip-hop, whose rapid-fire verbal complexities he appeared to find both intriguing and enjoyable. On another occasion, the delicate chimes, gongs, and percussion of Indonesian gamelan, haunting and strangely hypnotic, drifted from the hidden speakers…not at all the sort of thing Bond would have expected his cool-headed, practical-minded Quartermaster to listen to.
They were now spending one to two nights together a week, on a regular basis unless Bond was on assignment overseas, and the hours they spent in bed, or on several occasions on the floor, and once even in the bath—they had both been slightly drunk and the tiled floor had been awash with suds and water once they stumbled out again—were as exciting and eminently satisfying as they had been from the start. Q's slender fragility complimented his own trim, well-muscled and athletic build and they fit together surprisingly well. He had grown rather fond of Q's mildly voiced but acerbic wit, his stuttering laugh, his refusal to give his colleagues a glimpse into what was going on behind those hazel green eyes.
Bond had been staring at the mess of blueprints on Q's dining table, and now he raised his eyes to find his Quartermaster standing in front of him, holding out a glass in which two fingers of scotch glowed gold.
"Thank you, Q," he said clearly as he took it. "Exactly what the doctor ordered."
Q rolled his eyes again.
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Q was under no illusion that a relationship with James Bond, if you could call it that, would be a simple one. 007 was not an easy man to know or to get close to, and Q had no intention of trying to get beneath the hard shell the man had built round himself, perhaps as early as his childhood. He knew Bond wouldn't appreciate prying of any sort.
As for himself, recovery from the events in New York, Vargas' death to be specific, took time. That he was in a kind of surreptitious mourning—in the presence of his Q Branch Staff he behaved as he always had, although more gentle than usual with the younger members—was something he did his best to hide from Bond. 007 seemed to have put his sadness and sense of frustration over the incident behind him, but after returning from his most recent mission, a relatively simple three-day affair involving blackmail and stolen intel, he had invited himself to dinner at Q's and proceeded to tell him, after they finished a bottle of burgundy, that he had had to kill three people to retrieve the stupid, bloody stuff…something that Q, of course, already knew. Dinner had been preceded by a modest amount of Scotch but had been followed by a great deal of brandy, and Bond had gotten drunker than Q had ever seen him, drunker, Bond admitted later, than he had probably been since his youth. He had raised his eyebrows over Q's brandy; obviously, Q thought sourly, it wasn't up to the standard he was used to. (The brandy Bond offered in his own flat had a rich, mellow aroma and taste that spoke of great age and even greater expense.) Ah well, nothing but the best for 007. Q supposed that he ought to take that as a compliment.
Sometime before midnight, he had stood up and led Q, who was nearly sober, into the bedroom, where he pushed him against the wall—not too hard because of the healing bruises—and began unbuttoning his shirt.
"I was thinking of your Miss Vargas," he said, words almost but not quite slurred. "When I had to shoot those three stupid blackmailers."
"What? Why?" Q said, confused. He looked down as several buttons popped off his shirt and went skittering across the floor. "What had they to do with Miss Vargas? They tried to ambush you, didn't they?"
He had been on the other end of the comm link almost the entire time, but 007 appeared to have forgotten this, in his inebriated state. He made no reply, but continued to hold Q in a grip of iron, leaning forward to capture his mouth. Q returned the kiss but, thinking of his buttons, squirmed a bit in an attempt to free himself.
Another button went flying and Bond's mouth was pressed against Q's disheveled hair. "Stop wriggling about, I want you," he whispered into Q's ear.
"You'd want anyone who was standing here with a pulse," Q retorted hoarsely, giving up entirely on the state of his shirt.
Q had heard what sounded like a faint snort of laughter before Bond, having dealt with what remained of the buttons, slid both hands under the shirt before tugging him into bed. He had wordlessly consented to being manhandled—he knew that Bond would stop if he asked him to—and after a while had ridden 007 to the point where he literally saw stars exploding behind his tightly closed eyelids, in the ecstatic moments before he came. That had been a memorable night.
Now 007 was finishing his scotch and casting an eye in the direction of Q's kitchen.
"I've said it before…you are entirely a creature of the senses," Q said flatly. "It's plain to see you're thinking about feeding."
"So I am," Bond responded, setting down his glass. "I think perhaps we should go out."
"Yes of course, if you'd like," Q said. "I do have some left over Chinese takeaway in the fridge. Not the cordon bleu you're accustomed to, but—"
Bond gave his lopsided half smile. "It'll do, I think, Quartermaster," he murmured amicably, as he stood up and strolled off toward the kitchen. Q followed, and they managed to put together a perfectly filling and tasty meal from the contents of the paper cartons and containers he had saved from the previous evening. There was a bottle of white wine cooling in an ice bucket on the kitchen counter, and Q fetched glasses and chopsticks from the depths of a cabinet before wolfing down his food in a matter of minutes as he watched Bond eat his share at a more leisurely pace.
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Bond smiled as he poured out their wine. "You ate like a student after a day of exams. And from not too much of a distance you could still pass for one."
"I certainly drink a good deal more in your company than I did in the pubs of my student days."
"So it wasn't all algorithms and engineering, then."
"Certainly not," Q replied, narrowing his eyes. "I'm a human being, Bond. Although study—algorithms, coding, and engineering, among other things—probably did take up more than fifty percent of my time. It wasn't tedious. I enjoyed it."
"Yes, I imagine you did," Bond said dryly. "You're hardly the type to go in for speed dating, or chatrooms, or orgies."
"Orgies," murmured Q with a sudden grin. "I was invited to one, once, by fellow students at uni. They were all toffs, all reading Classics, which seems appropriate. The Classics department was famous, at the time, for its party-going students. A lot of money, a lot of drugs. But I never went back; it wasn't my thing."
"And you look like such an innocent," Bond said, hiding his very real surprise. "An orgy."
"I told you, it wasn't really my thing."
"I can well believe that," Bond replied, his mind suddenly filled with images of a younger, even more fragile-looking Q surrounded by hot-eyed, nude young men wandering about with in a dimly lit room; stoned twenty-two year old Cambridge classicists quoting Ovid or Catullus and doing lines of cocaine on gilded marquetry tabletops, or inhaling poppers of amyl nitrate, or whatever it was the young did to heighten arousal in those not so long ago days.
"It wasn't really my social milieu, either. They probably thought of me as a jumped-up little bourgeois, but certainly more than good enough academically, and well-spoken enough, to mingle with the likes of them. Are you shocked?"
"Noooo," Bond drawled meditatively. "Not really." Which was something of a lie, because, yes, he was rather shocked at the thought of his serious, bespectacled Quartermaster, unclothed, taking some young toff's upper class cock in the midst of an or—
"I'm sure my sexual exploits are nothing at all compared to yours."
Bond coughed but made no effort to deny this. "I've heard of wild goings-on at some of those so-called 'toga parties' at fraternity houses, in American universities, but really, Q."
"I didn't stay long. I left rather early, in fact."**
"It's all right. I won't ask any questions."
Q cackled briefly. "Well, I've no need to ask you any, as it's common knowledge that your conquests are legion."
Bond shifted in his seat, a little impatiently. All this talk of orgies. "Speaking of which, I've something that does need attending to, as soon as possible."
Q glanced down at him, and then smiled, almost gently. "Oh, that. There's an algorithm for that, of course. It's not particularly complex, 007, and I think even you could learn it."
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"And I thought algorithms were for mathematics and computers and the like," Bond mumbled drowsily. Q's sharp cheekbone was resting against his collarbone, one hand curled lightly on top of his chest.
"Oh," Q half-whispered, and Bond could feel him starting to grin. "An algorithm is simply a set of steps or rules which, when followed precisely, produces a specific result, or solves a specific problem. The term isn't solely applicable to computer operations or mathematical problem solving, and can even be used to define the procedure of lacing up a pair of boots."
"Ah yes, of course," said Bond, who was only just beginning to get his second wind as he pulled the duvet up over both of them. It was odd how protective he sometimes felt about this enigmatic head of Q Branch…not only because of his slight build and deceptively vulnerable appearance but perhaps because most of the people he had truly cared about in his own life had died before their time. His mother and father. His first guardian, Hans Oberhauser. Vesper Lynd. The previous M. A handful of friends and colleagues killed in the line of duty. "And an exceptionally nice algorithm that was. I liked the two-fisted approach. How dexterous you are, head of Q Branch."
There was enough light from the bedside lamp that he could see the blush that brightened Q's cheekbones for a moment, before he turned his face away.
"So…three weeks until Greenland," Q said after a pause.
"Yes. And after that," Bond shifted under the duvet, drawing Q's head onto his shoulder. "After that I've some unfinished business to tend to. Concerning that video message left by our previous M. And, incidentally, concerning the death of your Miss Vargas."
Q frowned. "I take it this is something unofficial. Not an assignment."
"Definitely not an assignment," Bond murmured, the corner of his mouth twitching. "Well, don't look like that, Q. I don't expect it to be particularly dangerous."
Q propped himself up on one elbow and stared. "You know M won't like it, if he hears anything about it. And where is this 'non-assignment' taking you? If you'll be needing backup…"
"I don't know for certain, yet. But I will keep you informed, so you needn't look so critical. And when that's over and done with, I might actually take a few weeks off."
"Seriously?"
"You've never really taken time off from Q Branch, have you." It was a statement rather than a question. "I don't know why not. Young Michaels could handle things if you went away for a week or two. Unless you're worried about one of the Young Turks in your section trying to take over while you're away."
"I'd be only too delighted if one of my staff surpassed me at what I do," Q murmured, frowning. "Not that they're likely to. But I'd be able to share some of my responsibilities. And I'm not one of those jealous, suspicious types who thinks everybody is after his job. People like that sack their most promising employees, instead of promoting them."
"Yes, true. I've been thinking of Marrakesh." Bond folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. "It's a long time since I was there."
"Seriously? Morocco?"
"Care to join me? When I was…your age, I went hiking in the Rif but you'd probably prefer to stroll through the bazaars in the medina." Bond opened his eyes and gestured at the indigo blue Berber carpet on Q's bedroom floor, the only colorful object in the otherwise white room. "You could probably find a match for this without difficulty."
"Bond!" Q exclaimed, half sitting up, his voice rising to something like a squeak. "I can't go on holiday with you! There would be a…a scandal at MI6."
"No doubt," Bond replied, eyes closed again. "We'd need to do it under the radar."
"You're joking."
"Not at all."
"What? But we can't…"
"We can and we should. Before things get busy again. But we can discuss it tomorrow, if you prefer." Bond tugged Q back down and reached out to switch off the bedside lamp. "Just now, I think we need sleep. That was a very nice private orgy, Q, but I'm beginning to think that a man of, er, my years needs to recharge his batteries on occasion."
"You are the most impossible—" Q was beginning to splutter. "Don't you dare to make plans for me without—" but Bond put one warm palm lightly across his mouth.
"Yes, Quartermaster, I know you outrank me, but I'm going to sleep no matter how impossible you think I am. Discussion postponed until tomorrow." There was a rustling of bedclothes but no response. "Good night, Q."
There was a pause and then Bond felt Q's curly head come to rest against his shoulder, and his arm slid across Bond's chest, beneath the duvet. He could imagine the expression on his Quartermaster's face, a mingling of frustration and genuine affection.
Q's silvery whisper came out of the darkness, his breath ghosting across Bond's skin. "Good night, James."
* M's words to 007 at the end of "Skyfall."
** The idea of Q at an orgy came from the BBC Two five-part series, "London Spy", in which Ben Whishaw's character attends an orgy at the home of a wealthy record producer, played by Mark Gatiss. (Mr Gatiss has remarked that their screen kiss ranked high on his list of kisses, second to that of his first kiss with his husband.)
