Bond looked on as his enemy was bitten and knocked to the ground by the reptile. The other man was dragged away, yelling, unfortunately taking the modified Walther with him. Bond glanced to the ground as the other creature trotted out of its pit on the opposite side and headed to lunch. He managed to step up on the moving creature and jump, propelling himself up just far enough to grab hold of the bridge. He came face to face with a gun pointed at him by his other assailant, a pudgy, bald guy who was sprawled on his back. He had no time to react before a heeled foot stomped on the wrist attached to the hand holding the gun, an oof noise coming from the man. He looked up to see it was Eve, in her long white dress. She held up the suitcase full of money and smirked.
"Thank you," Bond said, pulling himself up to the bridge. That had not gone to plan, though it had been successful. Though he wasn't looking forward to telling Q that he'd destroyed his earpiece and lost the Walther.
Q, meanwhile, was spending his time almost frantically trying to discover the source of the video, the computer that had uploaded the videos to the internet. He was getting nowhere fast. He was interrupted in his work when the signal assigned to Bond's tracker started to go off. He had activated the signal. Q called in the request for backup and had MI6 forces on their way. They went after Bond, who was at sea. He seemed to be heading toward an island. Q tracked his location as he approached it and went ashore. He waited almost impatiently as Bond stopped and did not move for a long while. He knew that Bond was unlikely to be staying perfectly still for a long time by his own will. That and the activation of the transmitter pointed to Bond being held against his will somehow on what he later learned was a deserted island. He called the pilots that were on their way and told them to speed up as he believed that Bond was being held against his will and may be in danger. He was surprised at their efficiency, though, when they arrived long ahead of schedule. Bond was yelling at the time.
"Latest thing from Q branch…called a radio!"
Bond was back within the day.
And Q was given the job of figuring out Silva's computer.
Down in Q division, he pressed 'enter' and streams of white nonsense flew across its screen.
"Now, looking at Silva's computer, it seems to me that he's done a number of slightly unusual things," The Quartermaster, with hair looking tamer than usual, turned to the large center screen on one of the walls of Q division. He was wearing a white shirt, dark tie, his nice glasses and a brown cardigan with a darker collar. He was interested in the doings of the insane ex-agent.
"He's established failsafe protocols to wipe the memory if there's any attempt to access certain files." He adjusted his glasses, looking up and down. "Only about six people in the world could program failsafes like that."
"Of course there are, can you get past them?" asked Bond, whose benefit Q had been talking for. He was standing near the center screen in a sharp navy suit, complete with matching tie and pocket square. His hair looked grayer than usual.
"I invented them," Q stated brusquely, turning away from Silva's technology to grab a few white wires with odd-looking ports. He plugged this in to the computer.
"Right then," he continued, connecting another before straightening back up. "Let's see what you've got for us, Mr. Silva." The white gibberish on the screen reorganized itself into what looked like charts and boxes of intelligible data. There seemed to be lists as well as graphs and blocks of words. "We're in."
"Sir," one of the Q operatives said, interrupting Q's moment of satisfaction. He was a concerned looking dark skinned man, wearing glasses and tapping at a laptop, the screen of which had turned into the same thing showing on Silva's laptop. "What do you make of this?"
Q turned from said laptop to the center screen, which Bond also looked at. On it was a circle made of hundreds of tiny white lines, all pointing at the center as if it held a strange gravity. It pulsed like a heart, growing larger and smaller. The screen then zoomed in on its center, which seemed to contain data. Q looked at it, confused, and Bond looked at him.
"This is omega site. Best encrypted level he has. Looks like obfuscated code to conceal its true purpose. Security though obscurity." As Q tapped away what had been the center point now looked like a tangled web. Bond looked closely at the display as the Quartermaster alternately typed and glanced up at the screen. He spoke rapidly about his discovery as the web started to untangle, blue letters appearing in it.
"He's using a polymorphic engine to maintain the code. Whenever I try to gain access, it changes. It's like solving a Rubik's cube that's fighting back." The web rapidly spun as Q typed, a column of letters and numbers at its right side showing sudden connections with it through thin white lines that appeared and disappeared. Some of those letters and numbers were quickly highlighted in white or light blue. A few near the bottom were all highlighted, grouped together. The letters spelled out something. Bond looked like he knew something.
"Stop. Go in on that," he demanded, looking more closely at the grouped, highlighted letters. Q glanced up at it and then looked back down, typing a bit and making the columns of numbers and letters that Bond was interested in line up. They spelt something out. "Granborough. Granborough Road. It's an old tube station on the Metropolitan line, been closed for years." Bond paced in front of the screen as he spoke, then turned to the young man at the computer. He gestured to it. "Use that as the key." Q typed in the name and it seemed to give him access. The word blinked red and the color spread across the entire web. It shifted, quickly becoming more and more red. It seemed to be spreading out and detangling to show a network of lines, some curvy, some straight.
"Oh, look, it's a map!" Q seemed interested and excited that they'd cracked it.
Bond stepped over to one of the smaller screens to get a better look at the red lines on an overlay. "It's London. Subterranean London."
Q turned away from the center screen as a pneumatic puff sounded. He glanced over to see that one of the glass doors in the floor of Q division had swung open. "What's going on?" The second one swung open as well, then the third. Bond turned to look. "Why are the doors open?" Bond started to run, past the open doors and out of the glass doors of the division.
Q looked after him, concerned. Then he glanced back at the center screen, where a blue box had popped up on top of the red map. It read 'SYSTEM SECURITY BREACH.' A light blue bar which seemed to signify downloading or something started to fill. "Oh, no!" he said quietly, and then turned to his division. "Can someone tell me how the hell he got into our system?" Q glanced back down at Silva's computer. The red map which had been on the screen quickly condensed, red now forming an elaborately decorated skull with lines protruding from it. Its eyes blinked red and black and the words "Not such a clever boy" appeared underneath them. "Oh, shit!" He swore, sounding taken aback. He stepped quickly forward to yank the white cables out of the computer. "Shit, shit, shit! He hacked us."
Meanwhile, Bond was running underneath MI6, through a dimly lit tunnel. He heard an alarm blaring through the place. A red light flashed. "Oh, no," Bond said as he approached the cell that Silva had been held in. Two unconscious or dead guards lay near it. "Q, he's gone," the agent said, relying on his earpiece and microphone to send the message up to the division. He jogged over to what appeared to be a hole in the floor, seeing that two grates had been pushed apart to reveal a stairway below. He climbed down it. "I'm on a stairwell below isolation. Do you read me, Q?"
The sound came from a small, repurposed conference call speaker on the Quartermaster's desk, near his Scrabble tea mug. "I can hear you. I'm looking for you."
Bond noticed the escapee down far beneath him.
Meanwhile Q was tracking Bond's location on a glowing red schematic of what now housed MI6. The picture zoomed in on a tunnel heading downwards, and small square showed up marked "Bond." "Got you. Tracking your location. Just keep moving forward. Enter the next service door on your right." Bond followed the instructions, gun at the ready. "If you're through that door, you should be in the tube."
007 looked around the belowground cylindrical corridor. He stepped off the small platform that connected the tunnel he'd walked through to the long passageway. "I'm in the tube."
"Bond, this isn't an escape, this was years in the planning." Q spoke rapid-fire, turning from the screen to the computer as Bond walked through the quiet tunnel. "He wanted us to capture him, he wanted us to access his computer. It was all planned. Blowing up HQ, all the emergency protocols, knowing we'd retrieve down here."
"I got all that. What he's got planned next, that worries me," Bond said gruffly, still alert through his gun was down.
Q was looking at the large screen in front of him, following Bond. "District line is the closest. There should be a service door on your left."
Down in the tunnels, Bond glanced in the direction mentioned. "Got it." He reached forward to try to open it. The door rattled but did not give way. "It won't open."
"Of course it will. Put your back into it."
"Why don't you come down and put your back into it?" Bond snapped, mostly jesting. He put his shoulder against the door and tried to shove it open to no avail. "No, it's stuck." He stepped away a bit to glance down the tunnel. "Oh, good, there's a train coming." He began to get more and more illuminated as the train rounded the bend to face the agent.
Q was looking at the map of the Underground. A small, moving white square showed the location of the oncoming train. "Hmm, that's vexing."
Bond threw his entire weight at the door again and again as the train rapidly came closer. Q watched its progress wide-eyed, through his voice had betrayed little emotion. Bond kept trying, and finally gave up, shooting the lock on the door as the train was merely fifteen feet from him. He shot twice and threw himself through the opening, flattening himself against the door as the train sped past him. "I'm through."
"Told you! We've alerted security, police are on their way," Q reported. Bond raised his gun and went through the tunnel that the door had led to. He was walking parallel to a tube station and glanced through a gate, trying to get a glimpse of Silva. He pushed on the gate to see if it would open and it swung in, letting him into the station. Absolutely nobody seemed to notice. He slipped into the crowd, edging his way ahead as the train stopped. "Where are you now?" Q asked, glancing at the screen.
"Temple tube station, along with half of London." He sounded slightly irritated being surrounded by so many people. He knew that it would be hard to find Silva in this mess.
"Oh, I see. Here you are," Q remarked, scanning security camera footage to find Bond looking directly at one of them.
"I know where I am, Q. Where is he?" He navigated through the people towards the train.
"Just a second, I'm looking for him," came the younger man's voice into Bond's ear. Q kept looking through the security camera footage in hopes of spotting the escaped villain.
Bond stepped into the train to glance around. "There's too many people, I can't see him."
"Welcome to rush hour on the tube. Not something you'd know much about," Q said mildly, eyes still darting back and forth between the screens.
Bond stepped off of the train to hear the announcement being made. There were a few moments of radio silence as Q and Bond both tried to spot the escapee. "Train's leaving. Do I get on the train?" asked Bond, sounding somewhat stressed but still in control.
"Don't get on the train unless he's on it. Give us a minute." Q tapped something into his computer right as the train screeched and began to move.
"Do I get on the train?" Bond asked again, sounding pressed.
Q was examining a feed from the security cameras, focusing it on an officer who was on the train. It was Silva. "Bond?" Q asked tersely.
"What?"
"Get on the train."
Bond actually rolled his eyes before running after the train, which was now moving at a good clip. He ran faster, not letting it pass him completely. Right as it was almost fully into the tunnel, he jumped from the platform and managed to grab onto the back of the train, holding on tightly. He slammed into the glass window on the door and reeled a bit before steadying himself.
"He's keen to get home," said a man on the station witnessing the spectacle.
"Open the door, please," Bond said quickly to the startled woman inside the train, who had been reading the paper. She just looked shocked and made no move to help. "Open the door!" he said louder, enunciating. She reached over and unlatched it, letting Bond into the train. "Health and safety. Carry on," he said professionally as he entered, then crossed the length of the small enclosure and continued on into the rest of the train. People looked at him with confusion as he started walking through towards the front.
Q's voice, stressed, came through the earpiece. "Where are you?"
"Take a wild guess, Q."
"He's in disguise now, he's dressed as a policeman," Q informed him.
"Of course he is." Meanwhile, Silva was doing the same thing as Bond, passing through cars to get to the front.
Q tapped at the laptop in front of him, which zoomed out the screen, displaying a wider view of the tunnel that the train was currently speeding through. "Where is he going? Where is he going?" He asked, half to himself and half to Bond, who looked up at a subway map.
"He's going for M. Tell Tanner, get her out of there." M was currently on tribunal, in the same place that the train was speeding to. It looked as if Silva wanted to get to her. Q sent a message to Tanner, and it popped up on the agent's open laptop. "Silva's escaped," he warned M. "Bond's in pursuit. We need to get you to a secure location immediately, ma'am."
"Like hell I am going to show him my back," M snapped.