2. Unauthorized Entry
If you never say your name out loud to anyone
They can never ever call you by it
- Regina Spektor, "Better"
Bond had been down to Q-Branch more times than he could count, but he realized, dodging sweater-clad techs with their eyes on their mobiles, that he had never been to the Quartermaster's office and had only the vaguest expectations molded from his memories of other, more traditional examples – somehow he doubted Q would keep wine and scotch on hand like M, or craft an intimidating atmosphere with heavy furniture and heavier drapes like the headmaster at Eton.
He found the office in the middle of a bland white hallway of conference rooms, an impassive gray door flanked by more of the same. It looked surprisingly, even disappointingly, ordinary, until Bond had his hand on the knob and caught the nameplates beside the door with the corner of his eye.
Quartermaster
Q
Coder to the Queen
Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant
Holly Mason
Gatekeeper
The lower lines had obviously been added after the fact; though they seemed of professional make, the tint did not precisely match. Child's play, Bond supposed, to fashion joke titles in a department of 3-D printers and people trained to use them. He paused, dashed his eyes again over the rank-and-file ceiling tiles and geometrically patterned carpet, and despite the sobering implications of his mission he allowed the beginnings of a smirk. Oh, there was fun to be had with these people, who handled field agents without looking them in the eye and would now have one in their midst like a wolf among lambs.
When he opened the door, Holly looked up from her computer with surprise that shifted easily into a smile. "Fancy seeing you here, Mr. Bond."
She was sitting alone at the office's only desk. Bond looked directly across the room at a second door, identical to the first, and understood. Holly Mason, Gatekeeper.
"Q's in a meeting; make yourself comfortable." She waved a hand at an ugly, squashy sofa slouched against one whole wall.
Bond seated himself and sank much deeper into the cushions than he had expected. The office around him had no windows, sickly white paint, buzzing florescent lights – the stifling accoutrements that made Bond wonder if bureaucrats had souls – but Holly had slathered so much of her personality over every surface that his smirk stayed, and even betrayed some softness. Film and telly posters (Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Fifth Element); action figures (Iron Man, Wonder Woman, other neon-colored characters Bond couldn't identify); souvenir magnets from holidays (Paris, Lisbon, Venice) hanging up pictures of two children, a gap-toothed, grinning boy and a girl, inheritor of her mother's wild blond curls. Models of various spacecraft, real and fictional, acted as bookends and paperweights, and wedged on a corner shelf – Bond walked over to shift aside an obscuring manual – was a tiny replica of an early punchcard computer, no bigger than a toaster, with wires the thickness of fishing line.
"Am I as much of a boffin as you feared?" Holly asked, with a twinkling wink over her shoulder.
"At least you're honest." Bond moved to her desk, keeping a respectful distance so she would not fear his eyes on her screen (he had stolen a look when he walked in and seen nothing unusual). The corkboard mounted above was plastered with greeting cards: balloons in primary colors, cartoon animals, pastel flowers, flowing script – Congratulations, more than a dozen of them. "What's the occasion?"
For the first time she stopped typing; she swung her chair round to face him and beamed. Bond tried to recall the last time he had seen someone beam within the walls of MI6 and came up empty.
"I've found out that I'm pregnant," she explained, hands resting automatically on a belly that had just barely started to bulge. "Baby's due in February. I've only just told everyone this week, and I'm sure the post room would appreciate your help, Mr. Bond, scanning my many gifts for explosives and pathogens."
Bond chuckled. "Noble work." He skimmed a trained eye over the files and folders on her desk, many of them marked Classified. "Are we going to lose you?"
The smile didn't entirely fade, but something seemed knotted, even regretful. "I'm taking four months' maternity leave, maybe longer, depending." She nodded at the door opposite. "He's not happy."
"He'll live. He's made of stronger stuff than most people realize."
Holly gave him a sharp look, edges blunted a little by sadness. "Oh, I'm well aware."
Bond abandoned his study of the room in favor of studying her, this woman who had likely spent a lifetime underestimated but whose file he had read with a rare avidity, because she had mastered a skill that he had not: forgiveness so great she could catch a criminal and see no contradiction in working for him, even caring for him with enough strength to make her voice shake when Bond had broken down the door and she had asked, over the earpiece, How is he?
There was something else in the room with them, maybe several somethings, the questions they had for each other hovering like flies.
But Q's door clicked open and the moment doused like a flame. A handful of techs streamed past, each carrying a tablet and wearing a look of excitement, already chattering among themselves about whatever they had just won from their boss.
Holly met the eyes of the youngest and most twitchy, a man barely twenty-five with hair approaching Q's level of untidiness. "Impress him, did you?"
"Full funding," the kid said with a crooked grin. "And he used the word thorough as a compliment."
She nodded appreciatively. "High praise."
"And you lot had best get back to work before I retract any of it."
The techs scattered before Q, framed in his office doorway, a lumpy messenger bag under one arm and a shuttered laptop in the opposite hand. Over his shoulders Bond could see blank walls and an elegant but functional metal desk – in fact, functional described the entire office, since Q had avoided all adornment except for a bumper sticker on the side of a filing cabinet that read We can put our differences behind us for science, you monster.
"You don't have an appointment, 007." Q's eyes swept over Bond, then narrowed in suspicion. "What have you done with Teresa?"
"Your secretary?" The end of the hallway near the lifts had been blocked off with a turnstile and a desk staffed by a small dark-haired woman who looked even smaller because she slouched. Bond's usual flirtation had caused her to blink like a mouse through her glasses and hover her hand over the call button for security, so he had flashed his double-oh badge, which made her squeak but let him pass, and reminded himself that he was a stranger in a strange land. "Nothing."
"I forbid you to play games with her," Q scolded, propping the messenger bag atop a cabinet and stuffing the laptop inside. "She's new here and knows nothing of the sexual appetites of the double-oh section."
"Really, Q, one would think you didn't trust me at all." Bond folded his arms and leaned against the arm of the sofa as though he belonged there, an eyebrow quirked in challenge, and an answering smirk skittered across Q's face.
"Anything in the tubes for the next twelve hours, Holly?" he asked, opening a drawer full of tangled cables.
"Chemicals is going to be up late running some sort of plastics experiment, but otherwise a quiet night in the neighborhood. Jeremy and I are meeting Tanner and Jeffries at the Black Dog at nine. You should come."
Q said, head still bent over the drawer, "I don't think they admit anyone under thirty" – and it was so solemn, even tinged with polite regret, that Bond nearly missed the gibe.
Holly reeled round in her chair. "What did you say?"
Wickedness spiked Q's eyes and voice. "Oh, am I making you feel your age?"
Holly jumped up and advanced on him, shaking an admonishing finger like a saber. "One of these days – bang, zoom, straight to the moon –"
"I'm sorry, I'm much too young to understand that dated telly reference –"
She flung her arm towards the door so violently that Bond had to duck aside. "Get out."
"On my way." Q slammed the drawer and shut his office door with a punctuating finality.
Surprise snapped the teasing from Holly's tone. "You can't possibly, it's only seven."
"Astoundingly, I do have appointments to keep outside the office."
Their banter had lured Bond like an insect to nectar. "Got a date?"
Q's face stayed neutral, but his hands toyed with his mobile in a way that wasn't quite purposeful. "I'm meeting a friend for dinner."
"A sexy friend," Holly clarified with something disturbingly close to glee.
Q stilled and stared at the far wall as though he were marshaling his patience. "Must you? In front of company?"
"If there's no company, there's no one to embarrass you."
"Mrs. Mason makes a great deal of assumptions about my personal life," Q said over his shoulder to Bond, "even though I have assured her that my work leaves me much too worn to be scandalous."
"Deception and equivocation," Holly pronounced.
Q shot her what he clearly meant to be a chastising look, but he couldn't seem to summon the level of sternness he had aimed at the techs. Holly's cheeky grin didn't dim in the slightest.
"If you are leaving, can you drop this off in Sullivan's office?" She proffered a beach postcard marked on the back with a strange circular text Bond couldn't read.
Q took it and rotated it in his hands, head cocked like a dog listening for its master's voice; obviously he didn't know the language either, and that made it much more interesting to him than ordinary news from an exotic country. "Where is he now?"
"Somewhere in the Caribbean. That's as far as I got. Take a crack at it before you run it through the computer."
Bond moved to look over Q's shoulder. "Some kind of code?"
"From the old Quartermaster," Holly explained. "He's spending his retirement visiting all the places he didn't get to see while he was stuck here in the office. He sends us a postcard about once a month, and they're always in a different cipher. Robert uses them to test our decryption algorithms."
Bond took a step back and examined Q. "Robert."
Q stuck the postcard under his arm to free up a hand with which to shake. "Robert Shaw. Pleased to make your acquaintance."
Bond ignored the proffered hand and the condescension that came with it. "That's not your real name."
The line of Q's lips was like a knife slash, his fringe casting shadows beneath his eyes that recalled the bruises that had taken weeks to fade. "Of course not."
The moment hung, and then Bond let it drop. "Who's Sullivan?"
"My evil twin," Holly said, straight-faced.
"He's the official head of information security." Q leaned over Holly's desk much as Bond had, reordered some of the folders, and took one to add to his bag. "He'll like the postcard, and you may as well meet him, 007, if you're going to be spending time in my Branch."
Holly cut her eyes at Q without turning her head, so fast and so small that Bond suspected he was not meant to see – a warning, or a reminder. Q's mouth thinned, but he turned away in silence, locked his office door with a swipe of a keycard and a punch of a passcode – eight digits, Bond counted – and shouldered the messenger bag.
"Walk with me on my way out." It lifted ever so slightly at the end like a question, but Bond knew the difference between a request and an order.
Holly's evil twin could not be more her opposite. When Q nudged the next door open with his shoulder, a broad-chested black man with a soldier's ramrod posture pushed his chair away from his desk, as if prepared to jump to his feet at a moment's notice, and said respectfully, "Sir." Bond kept close to the wall; this man's scrutiny promised a distinct unwelcome if Bond came anywhere near his work.
"Present from my predecessor." Q dropped the postcard on his keyboard.
A smile cracked Sullivan's solid face. "Our Mrs. Mason couldn't solve it?"
"I don't think she really tried. A luxury for a less anxious time, I suppose." A grim look sparked between them, but Q reverted to polite protocol with admirable speed. "Sullivan, this is James Bond, 007 – Bond, Lamar Sullivan."
"Pleased to finally meet you in the flesh, Commander Bond." He had a firm, dry grip, palm surprisingly callused for a scientist – the term boffin never entered Bond's thoughts. "I don't think I've ever shadowed you on a mission, but I've heard the stories."
"Some of them might even be true," Bond said, with a half-twitch of a grin.
Sullivan settled back in his chair, at ease. "What brings you to my office, Commander?"
Since Q had been the one to suggest that they meet, Bond looked to him to make the excuses – but Q merely raised his eyebrows as if to say, Go on, and then Bond understood why he was being paraded around.
He wouldn't give in to any pissing contest between Q and M. "Familiarizing myself with the top staff of Q-Branch. Lots of new faces. I was dead for three months towards the end of last year, in case you weren't aware."
"I remember something of the sort," Sullivan acknowledged. "Glad you decided it wasn't working out for you."
He had never regretted his choice to come back, but the Skyfall incident occupied a restricted section in the back of his brain, to be taken out only in private moments with a glass of good scotch, and although he had learned to mock his usual level of flippancy, Bond preferred to veer off the subject as quickly as possible. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Q shift his weight impatiently – or perhaps nervously, and a memory stirred of Q-Branch underground, a crowded Tube car, the kid's voice uncertain in his ear.
"I'm out for the evening," Q told Sullivan, hand on the doorknob. "Holly'll be here for another hour, I expect. Call me if anything turns up on your scan."
"Yes, sir."
Sullivan's gaze burned the back of Bond's skull even after the door had closed between them.
They walked to the end of the hallway, passed through Teresa's turnstile, and rounded the corner without speaking. Bond had just resolved to feign ignorance of the Branch's suspicions when Q broke the silence.
"Don't think I don't know why you're here."
The dismissiveness couldn't turn Bond defensive, but he did feel a warning was in order. "This doesn't have to be difficult."
"I have no intention of making it so. I want this person rooted out. But my staff doesn't need to be nannied or distracted, so I won't tolerate either. And I expect that you'll keep either myself or Holly up to speed on anything you discover." He gave Bond a little strained smile, not much different from the way Mallory had brushed aside Bond's quips during their conversation. "Let's not keep secrets from each other, shall we?"
Bond illustrated the impossibility of that promise in the most succinct way he knew. "Are you going to tell me your name?"
Q swung round to face him in the middle of the corridor. Their eyes met, faint surprise and respect and a dark humor all readable in Q's, and Bond realized that for the first time today he had the Quartermaster's full attention.
Then Q turned his head and disappeared behind the arcing reflections of the lights in his glasses. "Unfortunately that's not my choice to make."
At times it was fun to be Robert Shaw.
In the earliest days he had resented it, resented that by agreeing to work for the Secret Service he had somehow given up the right to a name and a history – but that history had taken a wrong turn after his eighteenth birthday, found him angry and afraid and a traitor to the nation, and part of him was relieved to leave it behind. MI6 had gifted him a paper man, a fictitious entry that he could flesh out as he chose, and for a few years he curated the name carefully. Robert Shaw liked thrillers, especially the classics, so he went to the London Library and read le Carre and Greene and Maugham. Robert Shaw's father made a solid living in pharmaceuticals, so he selected a house and a secondary school that felt appropriately upper-class and memorized their floor plans. Robert Shaw wore neckties like a respectable adult. It became a science experiment: the creation of an enviable man, not so flawless as to be unapproachable, but lacking the glitches that had made Ben Rossum exploitable by friends and MI6 and his own heart.
Next week with Audrey turned out to be ten days later, a rare Sunday when Q didn't have to go in to work for any length of time, lunch on the outdoor patio of an Italian restaurant and then a meandering stroll through Hyde Park. The lack of structure had aroused Q's skepticism – he couldn't remember the last time he had taken a walk without a destination in mind, or even the last time he had been free for an entire afternoon – but he had not seen Audrey once at the coffee shop since their first date, and although he had typed out several variations of the same text message, none of them sufficiently conveyed his intertwined feelings of concern and anticipation.
"I almost thought you'd forgotten me," he said, a little cruelly, when Audrey plopped into the opposite seat ten minutes late and flipped open a menu without even setting down her handbag, as if to make up for lost time.
"Sorry." A few thin strands of hair had escaped from her bun, and the sunlight burned them as shimmery and insubstantial as an aura. "I've got a new schedule at St. Thomas's – that's why I haven't been at Charing Corner at all this week – and I haven't quite adjusted." She looked down at her hands, busy peeling a straw, dunking it in a glass of water, swirling the ice cubes like a cocktail. A wry smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. "My schedule change was actually the reason I was able to work up the courage to ask you to dinner. I figured if you said no, we'd never see each other again and I could be mortified in private, and if you said yes, we'd come up with ways to see each other besides exchanging coy glances over coffee."
Q couldn't stop himself from returning the smile. "I've been described in many ways – not all of them flattering – but I think coy is new."
She composed a look of playful disdain, lips in a perfect pink moue. "I was mostly describing myself, thank you very much. One of my ex-boyfriends once told me I have sultry eyelashes." Sincerity now, a tiny flash of teeth as she chuckled. "I was flattered, but I also thought it was hilarious, and he sulked at me for several days because I laughed so hard."
They independently decided to order off of the wine menu. "Does this make us day drinkers?" Audrey asked.
"I think it makes us pretentious."
"Why?"
Q cast a pointed look at the building's brick façade, the grape vines carved into the doorframe. "Would we be drinking wine if we were anywhere other than an Italian restaurant? We're falling prey to a particular assumption about how cultured people appreciate food and drink." Then unexpected honesty, the same desire to meet her on her terms, dropped his gaze to the tablecloth. "Also I admit I was attempting to impress you with my knowledge of wine."
Audrey pressed her lips together as though she were struggling against amusement. "You picked the wrong girl for that. I just ordered the one with the most evocative name. Thorny Rose – gives your evening a little fleeting spice, but handle it wrong and you'll have only regrets."
"I assumed as much. When I placed my order you didn't even bat an eye."
Teasing also failed to phase her; in fact, she leaned forward on her folded arms and looked him in the face in a way that was both an examination and a dare, and Q held steady even as something shivered inside of him and his hands tightened on his knees under the table –
They broke the gaze in the same instant, as if scalded. Audrey's voice had the faintest wobble when she said, "How do you know so much about wine?"
From listening to double-ohs insinuate themselves into the parties and head tables and hotel rooms of despots and fences and kingpins, and from occasionally bribing room service to deliver pieces of waterproof tech beneath the ice of the wine bucket. "I have friends who are interested in that sort of thing."
As before, he navigated their conversation with vagueness and half-truths, protection for both of them from outright lies and equally hazardous honesty. And he discovered very quickly the inadequacies of his disguise, the twists he had never thought of and the sentences that had been scripted for him, because Robert Shaw did not really belong to him.
"Did you grow up in London?"
"No, Cambridge, near the university." (They had settled on this because he knew the town from his time spent studying, because it was easier to lie about familiar things.)
"Do your parents still live there?"
"Yes. I don't often see them. We're not close." (His parents were buried beside each other in a cemetery in Bedford, the same date of death chiseled twice into their shared headstone, but orphan status was rarer, more noteworthy, than estrangement.)
"Do your friends call you Robert? Or is it Rob, or Bobby?"
"Just Robert." (Always Ben, never Benjamin, unless he was in trouble – his grandmother had called him Benjy and he had hated it until the day she died, until he realized that beneath the adolescent embarrassment there had always been a layer of affection for the name, because it had been given by the only person in his life whose love was as certain as the tide.)
In exchange she told him that she been raised in Reading by an actuary and a bookseller, the youngest and the only girl of three siblings, one of them now the architect and the other a correspondent for the BBC, and Q asked polite questions and pretended that he had not used the considerable resources at his disposal to run checks on the morning of their first date (her father had been arrested, once, for driving while intoxicated, years before her birth; the correspondent brother had recently won an award for spot reporting; her mother had nearly three thousand pounds sitting in an account at a bank no one else in the family used, as a surprise or a safety net or maybe a plan).
But Audrey could paint them in more vibrant colors than the facts or his surmises suggested. The family had owned a massive furball of a dog named Sir Paul, after the Beatle, and they had spread gobs of his fur around the flowerbeds in the back garden to get rid of moles. Her parents had met at the first bookshop her mother owned, in the basement of a lawyer's office in Liverpool, and they celebrated their anniversary every year by driving there and asking a stranger to take their picture in front of the building. The architect claimed to have encountered a young, drunken Prince William at a party during university.
"My mum went to secondary school with Imelda Staunton," Q offered, but then stopped, because he couldn't remember if this was the truth or one of his revisions.
They had a second round of drinks and walked several laps around the lake and got into an animated discussion about the writing on the most recent season of Doctor Who. Q refused to be photographed both for safety and on principle, but Audrey coaxed him into taking silly pictures of her with several of Hyde Park's unusual sculptures – kissing the muzzle of a drinking horse head, fleeing from a giant hand steering a toy car, cowering beneath the scrutiny of a massive long-necked bird. By two o'clock the temperature had achieved unusual heights for late spring, so they bought ice lollies from a street vendor and Q very carefully did not look at the way Audrey sucked hers and licked the purple stickiness from her lips with the tip of a dyed tongue. Eventually they wandered out of the park, along the adjacent streets, and wound up in a chintzy souvenir shop among London Underground magnets and Big Ben salt-and-pepper shakers and Queen's Guard costume hats. Audrey popped open a set of Doctor Who nesting dolls and arranged them in a tableau in front of a panoramic postcard of the Thames. The song playing over the speakers trickled into Q's consciousness like water through gravel; he could match the cadence but not the name, until Audrey began to sing along under her breath.
Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had could make a good man bad
So for once in my life let me get what I want
Lord knows it would be the first time…
She saw him watching her and grinned. "Didn't you know, the romances of all Brits under thirty must be soundtracked by the Smiths. I think it's law."
Q stepped in, close enough to feel the heat of her, see the tiny pale hairs curling on the back of her neck – not touching, not quite. "Is this a romance?"
She had gone very still except for the tilt of her head, craning to look at him over her shoulder with one sharp, glittering eye. When she spoke it was in a whisper so small he had to read her lips to make sure he understood. "How do you define it?"
Then she moved away down the aisle without a backward look, but with a little sway he was sure was meant for him, and Q chewed on his lip in frustration and wonder that such an honest thing should be so complex.
There were more restaurants, more wine and conversation, more wanderings over city pavements fading from simmering daylight to the gilding glow of night. There was the Tate Modern and BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and the National Gallery (Q stopped in front of The Fighting Temeraire and asked her, "What do you see?" and she said, after a long silence, "Mortality," and Q thought, There's the crux). There was the Maughan Library at King's College, which Audrey snuck him into without an appointment or application. There were films, new releases at the multiplex and classics at an art cinema, and they argued so long and so ardently about Mulholland Drive that Audrey turned away and brushed off his hand when he tried to slide it around her hips in the Tube and Q worried that he had crossed some line – but by the end of the evening he had earned back a smile and her fingers laced with his, and if she wondered why he wore gloves even as the weather heated up she kept the question to herself.
Not all of the pieces fit. Their schedules did not compromise. Audrey canceled twice, including once when he had already been waiting at the restaurant for forty-five minutes, channeling his unease at her absence and silence into passive-aggressive ordering of appetizers that he ate by himself. Q moved dates and times so frequently that her phone greetings became shaded with wariness, a slowly wearing willingness to be flexible, to try again.
They were rarely alone with each other. The city chaperoned, permitting the holding of hands in art galleries, a quick kiss just before intermission ended, maybe a furtive snog against the back wall of a pub, interrupted by opening doors and staggering drinkers. Q's body attuned to even a delicate touch, and as they grew bolder but not bold enough he suddenly understood one of the songs Holly was always listening to at the office:
Oh, imagination you are cruel
And uncomfortable
Q had long ago resigned himself to masturbating in the shower, and the idea of rumors running loose at Six made him want to knock his head against a wall, but frustration so savaged dignity that several times he almost crawled to Mallory's office to renegotiate the terms of his parole. Audrey did not volunteer her flat, and he did not press. His salary could support hotel rooms, but even the most expensive suite wouldn't settle the tawdry associations that came with paying for that kind of privacy, or his fear of the inevitable conversation about why they had to hide.
Because they didn't really have to hide at all – she was real, and whole, and honest, and had no idea that those adjectives didn't apply to him. Some nights when they parted he rested his head against the window of the Tube car and gripped his left wrist, worked a finger under his cuff and traced it over scar tissue raised like speed bumps, and considered unintended consequences and the myriad ways to hurt a man.
(He hadn't even been back in the office for a full day when Holly had said, "Show me," and nodded to his bandaged arm.
Q hesitated. She fixed him with a firm look, the one that sent the new hires scurrying but to which Q was mostly immune.
In a low voice she said, "I heard Bond's reaction when he was patching you up at the safe house. I know it's not pleasant, but if I'm going to cover for you or lie for you I would like to know exactly what I'm helping you hide."
And she would lie if he asked – she had already lied for him, many times, even though dissembling was not in her nature, not something she valued or enjoyed.
So Q worked his arm out of the sling and rolled up his sleeve, let the coils of gauze shuffle off like dead skin so Holly could take his hand in hers. He watched her eyes sweep across the scarring letters, her mouth shape the syllables of Property, and through their single point of contact, palm to palm, he felt her start to quiver.
She made a painful coughing noise as though she had tried to clear her throat but couldn't. "Tell me at least one of you got a good crack at him."
"I pistol-whipped him, at the end," Q reassured. "Bond said I should have just shot him."
She bowed her head against her laughter, as if she meant to protect him from it. Through the curls curtaining her face he saw her eyes close for a moment. When they opened again there was something in them that he couldn't read, something that frightened him, because he thought he knew every permutation of this woman's face and he had never been able to acknowledge calmly the times he was proven wrong.
Her voice was clotted. "I hope he rots."
Q could not replace the bandage by himself. They both ignored the trembling of Holly's hands, the three tries it took her to tie the knot. As he left the office he spared one glance back, just in time to see her sink down on the sofa with her head in her hands, and ultimately he was a coward who would not watch her cry.)
Author's Notes:
Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant
Holly Mason
Gatekeeper
The idea that Q's second-in-command is codenamed "R" was originally raised in The World is Not Enough, where Bond jokingly says to Q's assistant, "If he's Q, does that make you R?" (Fear Pierce Brosnan's rapier wit!) I wasn't planning to use this designation because it's not technically canon, but then I discovered that in the British Army the Quartermaster is assisted by a Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant. I believe the words that came out of my mouth were, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Holly jumped up and advanced on him, shaking an admonishing finger like a saber. "One of these days – bang, zoom, straight to the moon –"
Holly's doing Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners.
(Q stopped in front of The Fighting Temeraire and asked her, "What do you see?" and she said, after a long silence, "Mortality," and Q thought, There's the crux).
In Skyfall Q poses the same question about the same painting to Bond, and Bond's response is, of course, "A bloody big ship."
The song lyrics embedded in the chapter come from The Smiths' "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" and Danielle Ate the Sandwich's "Some Other Girl," which, ironically, is about unrequited lesbian crushes.