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The weather in Marseille is lovely at this time of year. Unfortunately for Q, they’re not in Marseille, and although Riga certainly has its charms, he can’t say that the mild, tepid August weather is one of them. He’s wearing a thermal vest, for Christ’s sake, which seems like a hate crime against him in particular, given his Mediterranean predilection for sunlight.
He’s not one to complain, of course, given that he knows exactly what happens to people who dare do that on MI6’s watch, but internally, he’s compiling a very lengthy list of things about his present circumstances that he’d like to modify.
Closing his eyes, he breathes in deeply, exhales, and holds very still. He’s on a beach in Marseille. The sky is a deep wash of cerulean, serene and empty and perfect, stretching from horizon to horizon over the warm sea. There’s sand between his toes, and sunshine on his skin, and he hasn’t forgotten to put sunscreen on a single square millimetre of exposed flesh. Everything is perfect. Peaceful, delicious, and, more importantly, there isn’t so much as the suggestion of—
“All right there, Q?”
Q sighs. The fantasy dissolves, dissipating like the smoke of a guttered candle before he can even appreciate the light. He opens his eyes, back in the covered marketplace in the centre of Riga, and of course, Bond is grinning at him, stupid designer sunglasses concealing his eyes—nothing serene about that blue—and he’s not on holiday, not even remotely, but on a diplomatic mission in Central Europe, and wearing two pairs of socks to boot.
“Quite all right, thank you.”
He straightens the hem of his cardigan, and stares resolutely ahead at the nearest food stall, which appears to mostly consist of ham in various shades of pink, and, somewhat alarmingly, red. He won’t give Bond the satisfaction of knowing just how little he actually wants to be here. Handing that sort of ammunition to Bond is a bit like handing the nuclear codes to a megalomaniac, which is to say that at best it’ll lead to the end of the world, and at worst it’ll make Bond gloat so spectacularly that his head might actually burst from the sheer force of his smugness. Bond is insufferable enough without blackmail material. Q dreads to think how unbearable Bond would become to work with if he knew quite literally a single thing about Q himself. Like the fact that he’s allergic to chemical sunscreens, for example, or that his mother was born in Rhyl, or that he stole the entire state secrets of Luxembourg when he was 14 by hacking into someone’s MySpace account.
Ah, MySpace. Those were the years. God, the hacking had been glorious, then.
“Woolgathering, I see,” says Bond, arms folded. He’s wearing a t-shirt, which offends Q on multiple fronts, not least because it’s at least twice as tight as it ought to be.
“Brushing up on the mission brief,” lies Q. “I thought it might help if at least one of us knew why we were here.”
Bond nods over to the stall that Q had, not three seconds ago, been staring blankly at. “I’m not convinced you’re here at all.”
“Distress signal,” says Q, deciding to ignore him. There’s only one thing worse than letting yourself be seduced by Bond, after all, and that’s letting him know that he’s right about something. “Four days ago, Q Branch received an encrypted message from one of our contacts in Liepāja. Whoever encrypted it had access to proprietary algorithms that only Q Branch knows how to use, so we know it was legitimate. According to our contact—”
“There’s a mole in MI6, they’re siphoning off intel into a hidden server, and half of Europe is about to find out all of our organisation’s dirtiest little secrets,” finishes Bond. “I do listen on occasion, you know.”
“Ghost server,” corrects Q. “Clearly, you weren’t listening at all.”
“Mea culpa,” says Bond. “I listened to the interesting parts.”
Q is about to argue back, but someone pushes into him from behind, shoving him bodily into Bond’s unfortunately firm torso before he can even open his mouth. God, he hates this kind of place. The acoustics are confusing, there are altogether too many people, and it smells of fish.
“Anyway,” he says, recovering his balance, “we have half an hour before our contact is supposed to arrive, so if you wanted to do a spot of shopping, now’s the time.”
“And miss out on the effortless charm of your company? You wound me, Q.”
I’ll show you effortless charm thinks Q, opening his mouth to deliver the kind of barb that will skewer Bond right through the soul.
And then the market stall next to Q explodes, and after that, he supposes it doesn’t really matter altogether too much what Bond thinks about Riga.
M walks the entire length of his office, fingers steepled thoughtfully beneath his chin, then spins smartly on his heel, walks another length, and stops. It’s very theatrical. Q suspects it’s supposed to have the effect of building tension in the room, but it mostly just makes him keenly aware that his Smartwatch has screamed at him six times already this morning to stand up.
Beside him, he can feel Bond bristle. Or, more accurately, he can’t feel Bond bristle at all, given that Bond is a bonafide master of bottling up every single emotion he’s ever felt, and wouldn’t be caught dead doing something as gauche as visibly bristling, of all things, but Q knows Bond well enough to know that he doesn’t like to be kept waiting, and is therefore, more likely than not, considering all the different ways that he might be able to murder M with nothing but a stapler and a paperclip, if M weren’t secretly at least twenty times more deadly with stationery than even Bond could ever hope to be.
For all his faults, Bond doesn’t generally have a death wish unless it might severely threaten to make Q stay late at the office, and given that they’re both stuck in the exact same room at this current moment in time, it would hardly inconvenience Q any further if Bond were to somehow convince M to murder him in cold blood.
Ergo: Bond is bristling.
From somewhere in M’s office, a clock ticks. It ticks again, and again, and Q gets up to 514229 in the Fibonacci sequence.
“Valery Volkov,” says M, after far too much time has elapsed.
By the way he pronounces the name, Q can tell that it’s supposed to mean something outside of being quite an impressive example of alliteration, but it’s not a name that Q recognises. He’s more familiar with MI6’s rolodex of villains than most, given that he’s the poor sod who has to re-encrypt that particular file every time some 12 year old on Reddit comes within a hair’s breadth of hacking into it and causing World War Five, which, after the installation of Q’s world famous firewalls, does only happen twice a month or so these days. So that’s something.
Bond scoffs, and folds his arms. Q prides himself on not even remotely noticing how tightly his suit jacket is fitted. “It can’t be. Volkov’s dead. Has been for years.”
M shrugs. “They don’t call him Lazarus for nothing.”
With that, he produces a manila folder from some ridiculous little secret nook in his desk, and slides it across the table. Q supposes it’s probably meant for Bond, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to be left out of the loop, especially considering he’s given up his mandatory 45 minute lunch break for this meeting, so he swipes it before Bond can get his hands on it.
“I’m a very fast reader,” he says, taking a moment to enjoy the genuine irritation that flashes across Bond’s face for almost an entire millisecond before he tamps it down.
And the thing is, Q really is a very fast reader, which means that it only takes him the work of a moment to learn that Valery Volkov is clearly a nasty bastard of the highest pedigree. Human trafficking, drugs smuggling, and, Heaven forbid, tax evasion—it’s all here. He’s a veritable Bingo of criminal charges, none of which he’s ever actually served time for, of course, because no-one ever seems to know where he actually is.
Not to mention that, according to this very file, he’s been dead for the past 6 years. A 200ft drop from some abandoned parking lot in Belarus. Nasty stuff. They only managed to identify the body from dental records.
When he’s convinced that he’s got the measure of the man, he lowers the folder, places it back down, and sets it at a perfect right angle with the edge of the desk.
“Right,” he says. “So what you’re saying is that a dead man tried to blow us up in Latvia.”
Bond picks up the folder and flicks through it idly. “Stranger things have happened,” he muses. “But Volkov is dead, M. This has to be an ally, or a copycat. A spurned lover. All of the above. But it’s not Volkov.”
“Vacuum bomb in an enclosed space, no regard for civilian casualties,” says M, eyebrow arched. “It’s Volkov.”
“I’m telling you it’s not.”
“How do you know it’s not?” asks Q. “You’ve come back from the dead more times than I’ve had hot dinners. I know I’m not quite the world authority on faking your own demise, but it doesn’t seem that unbelievable to me, personally.”
Bond stares at Q as though he’s just asked the date of Christmas. “How do you think?”
The penny drops. Sometimes, it’s all too easy to forget that Bond isn’t just a twat, but also a very efficient, highly trained killer.
“Ah.” Q shuffles in his seat, suddenly dry-mouthed. “Well. I suppose that clears up the other question I had, then.”
“And what might that be?” says Bond, a note of challenge in his voice.
“Motive,” replies Q. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but if someone pushed me off a 20 storey building, I’d probably be quite tempted to blow them up.”
“If someone pushed you off a 20 storey building, you’d be dead,” points out Bond.
“Yes, yes, all right, we’ve already established that not all of us are quite so talented in the art of faking our own gruesome demises,” says Q, nobly resisting the urge to snatch the file back and papercut Bond to death with it. “But it makes sense. Our Liepāja contact said that the mole was probably selling our data. If Volkov is the one buying it, then he knew you’d be in Riga. He knew you’d be meeting our contact in that exact marketplace at 12pm. We basically handed you to him on a plate.”
Despite himself, an image of the ham at the market stall floats into his head, and then the image of all that came after, all the people scattered, all the meat. He shudders, and doesn’t miss the look of concern that flits across Bond’s face. Which is great, really. He loves being pitied by a contract killer in a £600 suit.
M, at last, takes his seat opposite. He rests both elbows on the desk, and stares directly into Q’s soul. Q feels himself sitting straighter.
“I’m glad you’ve come to the same conclusion as our finest analysts,” says M, which is a bit of a blow, because Q is one of their finest analysts. He’s quite literally the analyst who employs all of the other analysts. “It brings me to my main point. How’s that aviophobia of yours?”
“Ruinous,” replies Q, honestly. “If you’re about to tell me that you need us to fly to Latvia again, I might have to take a leaf out of Volkov’s book and fake my own death, sir.”
M regards him in much the same way as David Attenborough might regard a rare wasp. “That’s the thing. You’re needed on the ground for this one. In Belarus, as a matter of fact.”
“There’s ample ground here,” protests Q. “In fact, we’re underground, for the most part, so if anything, we’ve transcended the term—”
“This is a honeypot mission,” M interjects. “You’re the honey.”
It takes Q a moment before he realises what M is saying. A pure, blissful moment, full of ignorance and inner peace.
“No,” he says. “Oh, no. Nope. Absolutely not. With all due respect, sir, I’m not honey. I’m not even jam. I’m Marmite. Margarine. Onion chutney, at an absolute push. I really think I’m more useful here.”
He turns to Bond, expecting to see a look of stark disbelief, because this is truly the most ridiculous thing he’s heard in his entire life, and Bond, who is in possession of a fully functional and indeed somewhat prominent pair of ears, whenever he cares to actually use them, must be thinking the same thing.
But Bond’s face is not stricken by shock and horror at all. Quite the opposite.
He looks resigned. For once, he doesn’t look like he wants to argue, and when even Bond is in agreement with something, Q knows that there’s no way out. Daedalus himself could hardly construct a more impregnable prison.
Q opens his mouth, then closes it again.
“And who exactly am I supposed to be tempting? Not Volkov, surely? He’d snap me like a twig. Like a Twiglet, actually. Think of the insurance claim.”
“It has to be you.” M taps the file again. “Volkov has a… shall we say a predilection for younger gentlemen? If we’re going to be sending Bond in on this—which we are, by the way, because every other 00 agent is currently either on mission in Russia or pretending to be dead—then we’re going to need something to sweeten the deal, given that I think we’ve established Volkov has ample reason to treat Bond with suspicion.”
And that’s the bloody rub of it, isn’t it? That’s the part Q resents. He’s not a something. He’s MI6’s most valuable asset, after Bond and the brand new coffee machine in reception. They can’t just pack him off to primp and preen for a Belarusian warlord, on the off-chance that it might convince said Belarusian warlord to lay off blowing up Bond.
Except they can, of course.
“Your tickets are booked,” says M, his tone final. “You land in Minsk at 3pm tomorrow. You’ll be staying at the Crown Hotel, and meeting your contact in the El Dorado casino at 8pm sharp. Eve has picked out a rather fetching number for you in velvet. Forest green, I’m told.”
“Forest green,” repeats Q. Great. He’s going to have to murder Eve, as well, and she’s the only person in this place who can make a decent cup of tea.
“To bring out your eyes, apparently.” M stands up again, brushing an imaginary piece of dust off his impeccably clean lapel, and Q feels himself dismissed.
Beside him, Bond makes the first discernible sound of protest he’s made in the past 10 minutes, which is too little too late, in Q’s mind.
“Do you have any comment on your itinerary, 007?” asks M.
“Forest green is a mistake,” says Bond. “Tell Eve to find something in vermillion. It’s best for olive tones.”
And in that moment, Q really does empathise with Volkov.
There aren’t enough tranquilisers in the world to make flying with Bond bearable. For one thing, whichever way he looks at it, he’s trapped against his will in a tube made of, effectively, cardboard and crepe paper, 35,000 feet above the blessed Earth, for three hours. For another, Bond is an absolutely awful armrest hog, on account of all the biceps, and he’s already completed four Sudoku puzzles and two crosswords. It irks Q to be reminded that Bond is, behind the muscle, not entirely an idiot. He does enjoy flying, though, so there’s clearly something very wrong there.
The plane jerks, and Q grips the armrest tightly, his stomach lurching. Bond regards him quizzically, and lowers his fifth Sudoku. Q takes a moment to relish in the fact that he’s put the number 9 in the wrong column.
“Bit of an odd mission, this,” Bond muses.
“That’s an understatement.”
Everything twists inside him again as the plane makes another shaking motion. His hands are clasped so tightly around the armrests that he may as well be fused with them, which is probably for the best; at least his body is less likely to be eaten by sharks if it’s stuck to the chair. Probably.
“I can’t pretend that I’m looking forward to Volkov’s face when he sees me for the first time,” continues Bond, as though the plane isn’t shuddering all around them. “Might be a bit awkward, I’m afraid.”
“You could apologise,” breathes Q, only half listening. “Maybe he’s the forgiving sort.”
“Ah, I fear not. When I was undercover in his gang, he had someone garrotted for spelling his name wrong on an email.”
“That sounds reasonable to me.” The plane gives one violent jolt, and Q thinks fervently of his family. He’ll never eat his mother’s apple pie ever again.
“My best hope is really that he doesn’t recognise me. I was wearing a balaclava when I pushed him.”
“He clearly knows your name,” says Q. “Your reputation does rather precede you. Hence the bomb.”
Bond smirks at that. “Yes, rather. Hence the pseudonym, of course.”
Q closes his eyes. The plane roils. “The pseudonym. All right, then. Out with it. What am I going to have to call you?”
“Maximus Goldhorn.”
Q opens his eyes, half expecting Bond to be grinning at his own hilarious response. He’s not.
“Seriously?”
“As ever,” says Bond.
“Maximus,” says Q.
“Goldhorn,” returns Bond, one eyebrow almost imperceptibly lifted.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” says Q. “That’s just ridiculous. No-one on Earth is called fucking Maximus Goldhorn. It’s just about the most blatant fake name I’ve ever heard. You sound like a bloody escort.”
“I thought it was rather subtle,” says Bond, shrugging. “Quite understated.”
Q scoffs. “It’s stating that you’re a 14 year old who’s just found the exact right name to troll the chads in a 4Chan raid. It’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means that you 00s never pick names like, I don’t know, Gilbert Smith, or Paul Jones, or Peter Davies, or quite literally anything that sounds even remotely normal, because you’re all so bloody dead-set on sounding like a 00 agent all the time, even when you’re supposed to be quite literally anything but a 00 agent, and it’s a—it’s a liability, is what it is, because as soon as Mr Volkov gets his eyes on the guest list for his little poker night, he’s going to see the name Maximus Goldhorn right there, in black and white, and probably in Comic Sans, because that would really be the cherry on top, and he’s going to immediately think one of two things, which is that he’s either going to realise in two nanoseconds that you’re a badly concealed MI6 agent with a death wish, or he’s going to think that someone hired some saucy entertainment and accidentally put their name in the wrong column.”
“You don’t approve, then.”
“Approve? Absolutely not.” Q can feel that he’s flailing his arms around in indignation, but has no real desire to calm down. It’s quite cathartic, all things told. “Honestly, why not just call yourself Trentington Steroids and be done with it, or Musclebound Hunkford, or Biggus Dickus?”
Bond’s face breaks into a grin. “And reveal that my Achilles’ heel is a dated Monty Python skit from 1979? You wound me, Q.”
Q opens his mouth, then closes it again. He doesn’t even know where to begin with that.
“Of course you know the exact year that Life of Brian came out,” he settles on eventually. “Out of the two of us, you’re the only one who was old enough to see it in the cinema.”
“Yes,” says Bond, refusing to take the bait. “Four times, in fact. At one point, I could quote the entire opening half.”
“Perhaps you could make that your opening gambit to Volkov. Tell him that the cheesemakers are blessed. It’ll distract him from the fact that your name is fucking Maximillian Goldhorn.”
“Maximus.”
Bond is still looking at him, and Q finds it very hard to blink. “We’re going to get blown up within ten minutes.”
“Really, Q,” says Bond, grinning in a way that would look unbelievably fond if he wasn’t currently facing a tongue-lashing from Q, of all people. “And it’s Benjamin Ford.”
“What’s Benjamin Ford?” asks Q, reeling from the conversational whiplash. He feels slightly high, as though the altitude is scrambling his frontal lobes.
“My pseudonym. I have done this before, you know. And we’ve landed, by the way. You’re welcome for the distraction.”
With a start, Q looks out of the window, still expecting to see that terrifying yawn of blue. Instead, he’s met with rows and rows of enormous grey buildings. Somehow, without even noticing it, he’s survived the entire flight, including the landing.
A clicking sound, and Bond has unbuckled his seatbelt. He claps Q twice on the shoulder, and silently disembarks. All Q can do is stare after him, something very strange twisting in his chest.
Bond, he reminds himself, is still a total bastard.
If the taxpayers of Great Britain could see this hotel, Q thinks they’d probably riot. He can only imagine the Daily Mail headlines. The worst part of it is that he’d agree with them, which is clearly a sign that something is terribly wrong, because the only thing Q has ever agreed with in the Daily Mail is the crossword, and even then it’s 50/50.
The thing is, there’s frankly no need for this sort of opulence. The Crown Hotel was built to host minor European royalty, and it shows. He feels distinctly as though he should be wearing ermine. The sound of his shoes on the freshly stained parquet flooring is like Handel’s Messiah. He’s never seen walls quite so pristinely white; he practically needs sunglasses to find his room number. And the enormous chandelier in the foyer had, he’s reasonably sure, consisted of more diamonds than a Real Housewives engagement ring. Not that he’s ever watched Real Housewives reruns at half 3 in the morning whilst trying to unpick his own code, of course.
Bond has gone up to his own room already, leaving Q to complete a rudimentary security check of the hotel. There’s two adjacent rooms, one for a Mr Benjamin Ford, and one for—Q grits his teeth—a Ricardo Baldacchino.
“That’s a lovely name,” the hotel receptionist had said, stamping their reservation. “Italian?”
“Maltese,” Q had replied, deeply regretting the two beers he’d drunk at the last Christmas party, leading to Bond possessing the knowledge that Q’s lineage hailed from Żebbiegħ. He’d thought Bond might be impressed. More fool him.
Q had looked down at the booking, seen that the room numbers were 69 and 70, and promptly given Bond room 70.
Then he’d surreptitiously checked all of the security cameras from his Smartwatch, ordered a virgin martini at the bar, and downed it in one.
Satisfied that they’ve neither been followed nor anticipated, he goes up to his own room. He fits the key card into the mechanism—he’s already modified the card, of course, so it’ll reset with every use—slips through the door, and closes it silently behind him. He doesn’t even try to be silent. It’s just a very, very fancy door.
God, but this place is ridiculous. Plush carpet, in a luxurious rose pink. Gleaming white furniture with marble finishes, a king-size bed with a deep red canopy. At the far end of the room, a huge French window overlooks the pixel-neat blocks of Minsk and the serpentine silver of the Svislach river.
Taxpayers’ money, thinks Q, and he flops onto the bed, squeezing his eyes shut. Immediately, he’s enveloped by the marshmallow luxury of goosedown and Egyptian cotton, and he has to stop himself from audibly groaning. Bond must be used to this, he thinks, and then scolds himself for bringing Bond into his bed. Not literally, of course. He’s not that stupid.
He opens his eyes, and that’s when he sees it. Up there, staring directly at him from where it’s tucked into the corner of the canopy, is the unmistakable shining wink of a hidden camera.
He scrambles off the bed, dashes towards his briefcase, and pulls out his laptop and the radio frequency scanner that he’d brought for this exact purpose. You fucking idiot, his brain hisses, you should have thought about that.
And he really should have. There’s another camera hidden in the handle of the wardrobe, and, most egregiously, a waterproof one soldered into the showerhead.
Furious, he loops himself into the WiFi and replaces the cameras’ memory banks with blank footage from the past half hour, then dismantles their recording capabilities. Well, that was fucking obvious, his brain helpfully supplies. Hidden cameras, of all things. He’s not even been on this mission an hour, and he’s already dropped the ball spectacularly.
With a sinking feeling, he remembers. Room 69. The room earmarked for Bond.
Someone is onto them. And Bond, although he can take care of himself rather ably, is currently alone.
“Arsing, buggering shit,” says Q, and dashes out.
When Bond at last opens his door, after some of the longest seconds of Q’s life, he’s resplendent in nothing but quite a small white towel. Of course. Why would anything in Q’s life be easy? Atlas himself would be astonished by the weight on Q’s shoulders right now.
Q looks Bond directly in the eye, as difficult as it is, and thinks of England. “We have a problem.”
“Q,” says Bond, around a wry grin. “Always a pleasure.”
“There’s a camera,” Q grits out. “In my room. We should check yours.”
To his credit, Bond does look slightly abashed. “Ah. Bit of a spanner in the works, then. You’d better come in.”
He wraps the towel more tightly around his waist, peers down the corridor, and ushers Q inside with his hand at the small of Q’s back. Q twists out of the touch, because he’s not a damsel in distress, thank you very much, and he’s perfectly capable of entering a room by himself.
Bond’s room is the mirror image of Q’s own. Piece of piss, thinks Q. Hidden cameras aren’t a creative tool, after all. They’re the last refuge of the unimaginative. He’d bet his entire life savings that whoever planted them in one room would plant them in the exact same places in the other.
On one hand, that means he knows exactly where to look. On the other, it means he has to subject himself to the humiliating ordeal of crawling around Bond’s bed while Bond watches incredulously from the other end of the room, clad in nought but a towel. If there are any cameras here, then whoever’s at the other end must be having a field day.
The bed is clear. So is the shower. Finally, he peers inside the wardrobe. There’s nothing there that he can see. The RF detector draws a blank, too. Which is great, he thinks, sitting back down on the bed. That’s ideal. It is, in fact, exactly what he was hoping to find.
But it does rather beg the question of why he wasn’t quite so lucky. Why only one room was bugged.
Clearly, they mixed the rooms up. Benjamin Ford’s alias has done precisely fuck-all to cover Bond’s tracks, and Volkov is onto them.
As for Q? He’s been spared, because he’s a nobody. Q is 5ft 10. Q irons his underwear. Q has the muscle mass of a geriatric ward. And that’s fine; it’s served him well enough over the years. No-one ever notices Q.
Not that it wouldn’t be nice to be noticed sometimes, but that’s irrelevant to the particular situation at hand.
So, Bond’s cover is blown. Damn the man; he should have known better than to try and pass himself off as some kind of mere mortal. The man practically oozes MI6. Q has tried and failed, on no less than fifty occasions, to imagine Bond doing something normal. Ordering a coffee. Perusing the shelf in a bookshop. Cooking a stir fry, then getting halfway through and realising that he’s run out of soy sauce. The image never holds. It appears, ephemeral and dream-like, for a moment or two, and then dissipates entirely.
Of course someone has seen through the ruse. Bond isn’t cut out for undercover work. His last attempt at it is quite literally the reason for their current predicament, after all. Which means that they’re in danger, which means that Q has to get them out of here. Right now.
He taps his earpiece twice, the signal to connect tor Q Branch, and waits for the dulcet tones of X at the other end. One second passes, and then another, and he sighs. He’s probably about to get R on the line, if X has been particularly jammy and taken an extra half hour for lunch, as he’s wont to do on Fridays. There’s only silence. Q frowns, and taps it again. Still nothing. It’s strange. X is a bit of a shit, it’s true, but he wouldn’t leave the comms unmanned. Even R would be better than no-one, and it’s a complete violation of protocol. Surely standards haven’t slipped that far without Q there to keep the underlings in line. It’s only been 24 hours.
Trying to quell the rising flutter of panic between his ribs, Q taps it again, a little more forcefully this time, even though it’s calibrated to respond to the most featherlight touch of his fingerprints imaginable. Again, he’s met with resounding silence, a void where Q branch should be, and it hits Q like a ton of bricks—no, a ton of freight trains, falling 200ft from a carpark—because no-one is there. The line is dead as a doornail.
“Shit,” says Q, with feeling. “Oh, arse and buggering shit. Bollocks and fuck.”
The bed creaks as Bond sits down next to him.
“Oh, come on.” Bond’s tone is light, at complete odds with the anvil currently sitting at the pit of Q’s stomach. Tragically, comically, he’s put on a pair of trousers. “There’ll be other opportunities for someone to film me in the shower, I’m sure.”
“It’s Q Branch,” says Q. He tries very hard to focus on breathing. It’s suddenly become rather vexing. “They’re not there.”
“What do you mean, they’re not there?”
“I mean that I can’t reach them, Bond. They’re gone. Or, more accurately, the line is down, which should be bloody impossible, because it’s a completely secure line, makes the Pentagon look like a petting zoo, and it is gone.”
Bond purses his lips, does that strange little moue of his that, in less life-threatening moments, makes Q think of those videos of babies trying lemons for the first time.
“Right,” says Bond. “And I’m presuming that this is not good.”
Q throws up both hands in despair. “It’s not ideal.”
Bond stands up and begins to pace. It’s so very like M that it makes Q want to scream. All the ways that MI6 imprints on a person. It’s awful.
“Can you patch it?”
Q thinks about it for a moment. Because yes, he’s Q, and he can patch anything except socks. He’s the same Q who, before he was even Q, hacked into the payroll of the upper echelons of the Spanish government and caused a minor public scandal by releasing the salaries of the cleaning staff. He’s fixed more lines than a fake trapeze artist.
But this? This is something else. He knows his own tech. He knows that it shouldn’t be possible for that line to go down.
Which makes the question of fixing it rather difficult, because not only does he need to fix it, but he needs to do it without alerting the person who downed it in the first place. And that, as they say in the industry, is fucking difficult.
“Theoretically,” he answers, slowly. “It’s possible.”
“Then do it.”
“I can’t just do it.” He takes out his earpiece, and holds it out to Bond. “Look, this was encrypted. In order to hack into it, you need to know the exact algorithm I used. Do you know how many people know that algorithm?”
“Let me guess,” sighs Bond. “Only you?”
“Only me. And, of course, whichever absolute fuckwad has just hacked into our systems. But it’s a feedback loop, because I’ve got no idea how they hacked into them without the algorithm. Which means that we can reasonably assume that they have access to everything, including our phones.”
“I see.” Bond folds his arms again in contemplation, and Q has to count to ten to distract himself from Bond’s nipples. “So getting out of here isn’t an option, then.”
“Not via MI6, no. We could risk Easyjet, I suppose.”
Bond barks a laugh entirely devoid of amusement. “Q, I assure you, even the promise of escape from a life or death situation doesn’t merit risking Easyjet.”
“Then yes, we’re trapped here,” confirms Q. “And in three hours, we go to the El Dorado, meet Volkov, and get blown to smithereens.”
It isn’t the most appealing prospect. But as far as Q can tell, it really is their best hope. Either they wait around here, sitting ducks, or they go straight to the source, and work out what the fuck is going on. It won’t be anything good, sure, but at least it gives them a fighting chance of getting out of here.
“You know what M always says,” says Bond. “Oranges are not the only fruit.”
“He is always saying that, isn’t he?” muses Q. “I think I might have more in common with that man than either of us knows.”
Bond raises an eyebrow. “Perish the thought.”
If he’d thought The Crown was opulent, the El Dorado casino makes it look like a Premier Inn. It’s the sort of building that would look at home in a high concept architectural portfolio, or possibly an episode of Stargate Atlantis, all chrome panelling and sweeping glass. The entire roof is a great open eye of mirror glass, bisected by a helipad and what looks like a rooftop bar. Q pulls down the sleeves of his exquisitely tailored suit—vermillion, of course—and tries very hard to follow Bond’s lead.
The appeal of gambling has always eluded him. He’s read all the scientific studies about the risk and reward concept. He’s seen brain scans demonstrating the way that a gambler’s brain is trained to release a rush of dopamine the moment that button is pushed, lighting up like a veritable Christmas tree when the money is first fed into the slot, moments before it vanishes forever. He understands the principle of it. The same sort of drive, he imagines, that convinces certain white men to clamber up mountains, take a blurry selfie, and then die horribly on the way down. The very same sort of drive, if he thinks about it, that gets Bond up in the morning. And hey, it’s not as though Q is entirely immune. He spent half his twenties hacking into the private email servers of French politicians from the comfort of his mum’s spare bedroom, and the other half holed up in the basement of MI6, doing the exact same thing, but authorised on headed paper.
Which is all to say that he understands why casinos exist. He just wishes that they weren’t so… sticky.
It’s not really such a surprise that Bond is such a fan of casinos, when he thinks about it. For Q, though, he just wishes that they’d turn the lights up. The semi-dark of the place, presumably designed to drape all clients in enigma and mystery, just gives him a headache. Bloody astigmatism. He makes a note to try and invent some sort of lens filter for his glasses that makes casinos bearable.
“Just do as I do,” whispers Bond, taking Q by the arm. Q wants to protest, but this really is Bond’s terrain, and all he can do is trust Bond at this point.
Bond leads them through a veritable labyrinth of roulette tables and games of blackjack in progress, through clusters of Versace-clad socialites and men wearing multiple colognes. Q grips Bond’s arm tightly, feeling a bit like a debutante, but also like a fish gasping for air on the banks of a sun-shrivelled pond.
At the far end of the room, a very tall man wearing an earpiece and, impossibly, a fedora approaches them. Bond nods at him curtly, and the man, apparently understanding that gesture completely, lets them pass. After what feels like an age, they descend a small stairwell at the very back of the building, and then in a small, dark room, the harsh strip-lighting illuminating a gold-rimmed poker table, surrounded by three seated men, at varying degrees of middle age.
The youngest is perhaps in his late thirties, French, if Q had to guess, and blond in a way that puts Bond to shame. Next to him is a crimson-clad man in his forties, entirely bald, and square-jawed. On the far side, staring directly at Q, is a man who could be thirty or sixty, his face waxy and taut. His eyes are pale and watery, and could equally speak of allergies or a botched blepharoplasty. Either way, the effect is more than a little unsettling. Q looks away.
One of these men, he knows, is Valery Volkov. The Pooh to his honey. Knowing Q’s luck, it’s the creepy staring guy. The universe has been an absolute dick to him so far. Why would it change tactics now?
“Gentlemen,” says Bond, voice smooth. “Sorry that we’re so late. We found ourselves… indisposed.”
Wax-man raises an eyebrow—or, more accurately, his eyelids twitch in a way that suggests he would be raising an eyebrow if his face could still move—and Q clenches his fists. He knows exactly what Bond intended by that pause, the images that he’s just put directly into the heads of these complete strangers. Give them some honey, M had said. Well, Bond has just informed them all of where that honey is being spread.
Well. Where they’re supposed to think it’s being spread. It’s currently firmly in the jar, of course, and shoved right at the back of the shelf, but they don’t know that.
“It’s no bother,” says the blond one, in a strong French accent. “Come, Ford, sit. We have waited for you to begin.”
The bald one grins, a sharp thing. “Your friend can sit over there, where you can still see him. And so can we.”
Q turns around to see what he means by ‘over there’, and spots a small bar at the back of the room. It’s a bit weird, given that this is clearly a top secret room, but he supposes that even spies and criminals might want a cheeky tipple every now and then.
Bond squeezes Q’s shoulder, and fixes him with a grin so lascivious that it could melt steel. “Be good and wait for me, will you?”
Burning with fury, and something that feels far too intense to be mere embarrassment, Q takes a seat at the bar, and orders a strong glass of cola on MI6’s dime from a very surly bartender. He wishes he were less responsible, that he could convince himself to ask for rum in it, but the thought of losing even an atom of control right now is untenable. He’d probably end up drunkenly pushing Bond into a wall.
He’s contemplating ordering a second fortifying coke when a faint waft of lavender greets him from the adjacent barstool. A young woman has materialised from the ether, or more likely from the shadows that fill most of the room, and taken the seat next to him. He recognises her at once, but it takes a moment or two to place her. It’s Dina von Dieter, he realises. Ostensibly the daughter of a minor politician in Luxembourg, but in reality the heir to an enormous blood diamond empire spanning the entire breadth of Lithuania to Portugal.
Over her shoulder, deep in the shadows, he spies three men dressed in black, each built like a proverbial brick shit-house.
He suddenly feels more than a little hot under the collar.
“Hello,” she says, in entirely unaccented English, elegantly crossing her legs at the ankle. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
Q isn’t really sure what the etiquette is when greeting an uncomfortably powerful woman, whose bodyguards could snap him like a twig before he’s even finished blinking. He probably shouldn’t go for a handshake, he reasons. Best to maintain at least some illusion of enigma. Doing his best to imagine what Bond would do in this exact situation, and simultaneously hoping that Bond has somehow failed to notice that Q has company, he attempts a smile of sorts.
“Ricardo Baldacchino,” he says. God, that name still sounds so stupid. “And you are?”
She smiles. “Hera Goodfeather, of course,” she lies. “It’s wonderful to meet you. Your attendance has proved quite the distraction for Volkov. It’s all he’s talked about. Apparently, Henri sent him your photograph last night, after Ford confirmed your attendance with him, and he’s been doe-eyed ever since.”
“O-oh.” He swallows, and thinks about those watery eyes, the way that stall had exploded into smithereens back in Riga. He looks down at the barstool she’s sitting on. “Well. That’s flattering. How lovely.”
“Lovely, lovely.” She turns to the bartender, and smiles. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
“It’s coke,” says Q, weakly.
“I’ll have what he’s having, but with rum,” she amends, and the bartender smiles, entirely smitten, and starts doing something very fancy with an ice cube.
She leans in closer to Q, her raven hair sliding over her shoulder like a silken waterfall. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “I don’t have much time, but you are in grave peril. They say that Volkov—”
A hand grips his shoulder tightly. He looks up, directly into Bond’s pained grin.
“Baldacchino.” His voice is calm and measured in a way that can only mean that he’s feeling anything but, and Q’s stomach does a funny little flip. “Might I have a word? Something’s come up.”
Q looks back at Dina. She fixes Bond with a stare entirely devoid of emotion. It’s actually rather impressive; Q thinks at least half of the effect is probably Botox, but it’s still chilling.
“Please, do introduce me first,” says Dina. “Ford, I assume?”
“The very same,” says Bond, smile tight.
“Henri says you’ve been corresponding for nearly six months, but this is your first time here,” she says, making no attempt whatsoever to introduce herself in turn. She pats Q on the knee. “So good of you to bring a… friend.”
Q is utterly lost; he has no idea who Henri is, how he’s supposedly been texting Bond for half a year, or even what this entire poker match is supposed to be about. All he knows is that he really, really wants that second coke.
“I’m notoriously generous,” says Bond, and by this point his smile has attained shark-like qualities. “But unfortunately, I need to temporarily borrow our mutual friend. Would you mind?”
In any other scenario, Q would probably find it quite funny to see Bond reduced to some sort of closeted Regency fop. He can’t exactly flirt with Dina, given that he’s supposed to be here as Q’s envy-inducing lover. It’s probably cutting Bond to the bone, seeing a beautiful woman who he’s not allowed to seduce. His ego may never recover.
Q turns to Dina, and spreads his palms in a gesture that he hopes conveys ‘jealous life partners, what can you do?’
“Do come back before long,” says Dina. “We were having such a scintillating conversation.”
“I bet you were,” says Bond, dragging Q away.
“Ow,” says Q, to Bond. “Terribly sorry,” he says, addressing Dina’s three bodyguards. One of them nods in acknowledgement, and lets them pass.
Manners never hurt anyone, after all.
The temperature has dropped significantly in the past hour or so, but Q is far too amped up to really give a shit. Freezing to death would at least be uncomplicated.
Bond veritably frogmarches the two of them into a small courtyard around the corner from the El Dorado, where a scattering of pathetically tatty pigeons are occupied pecking at some stale crumbs beneath a bin. It’s one of the weirder things about the world, in Q’s opinion, the fact that this sort of grotty little corner is only about twenty feet from a building full of actual royalty. It’s more than a little depressing. As a teenager, he’d spent more hours than most trying to work out how to redistribute the luxuries of the wealthy in order to level the playing field. On more than one occasion, he’d done the redistributing himself. Banks really aren’t as secure as people think they are.
Q shakes that thought away, along with Bond’s arm from Q’s elbow.
“Debrief me immediately,” demands Q. “And if you even think about turning that into a pun, I will blow you up myself.”
“Perish the thought,” says Bond. He glances around, and then, apparently satisfied that the coast is clear, rests his hand on the wall above Q’s head, and leans in, voice low. “All right. Here’s what you need to know. Henri is our contact—”
“—the blond French one, I presume?”
“The very same. He was tipped for the 00 programme himself a few years ago, but MI6 found better use for him, following a particular cartel carrying over £1,000,000 in marked money. He sends his reports every week or so, direct to M. Rather cushy position.” Bond looks contemplative. “Anyway, that’s why M sent us here. Henri sent intel that Volkov found out that MI6 was onto the cartel, and that he’d set up a game here to disperse the money. Henri said he could get us a seat at the table. Bit of a shock, because none of us had any idea that Volkov was in any way involved. Or in any way alive, for that matter. And on that note, I’ve just had yet another surprise.”
“Which is?”
“Volkov isn’t here.”
Q blinks. “But the other guy—”
“Isn’t Volkov,” finishes Bond. “From what I can gather, he’s the ringleader of a minor terrorist group in Switzerland. The other one is wanted for embezzlement in Estonia. Not particularly ethical gentlemen, by any means, but neither one of them has any apparent ties to Volkov. Which means that Henri was either wrong, or lying.”
Q processes that information. “He’s been following them for years, you said. He wouldn’t be wrong.”
“My thoughts exactly. Which does leave a less savoury alternative.”
“But why would he do that? He’d need a motive.”
Bond is uncharacteristically silent.
“Right,” sighs Q. “Of course. You. You’ve pissed off every single person in the Northern hemisphere, haven’t you?”
“I’m on decent terms with Princess Birgitta of Prussia,” argues Bond.
“She’s been dead for two years.”
“Ah. In that case, yes, I have.”
“Including Henri?”
Bond shrugs. “It’s hardly my fault if he took it personally.”
“Took what personally?” presses Q. “Please, don’t hurry. It’s not like our lives are on the line here.”
“I told you,” says Bond, and he has the gall to sound frustrated. “Henri had designs on becoming a 00. There was a vacancy at the time. And then there wasn’t.”
It all falls into place. Bond’s undeath. His own Lazarus stunt. All those months after Spectre, when everyone had been half convinced that this was the death that would stick. Q had actually attended his third funeral. Eve had made a speech. It had included two poems by Walt Whitman. Q had worn his father’s old suit, tailored for the occasion, then got blindingly drunk at the wake and cried into his chop suey on the way home for reasons he wasn’t then able to confront.
All things considered, Q doesn’t really blame Henri for taking it personally.
“Great,” sighs Q. “That’s brilliant. So, Henri is in on it. If we had literally any way of contacting Q Branch, we could tell them that they’re barking up the wrong tree with Volkov. I don’t suppose we could train one of these pigeons to take a message back to London?”
“Following up on that point,” says Bond, “how likely is it that Henri is to blame for that, do you think?”
“I’m sorry, are you asking for my opinion on something related to a mission? I didn’t know you were particularly interested in feedback.”
Bond shrugs. “You’re the computer whizz. I’d be foolish not to defer to you on that one.” He cracks a smile. “My talents are innumerable, but you’re the one with the magic fingers, so they say.”
Q looks at Bond. Bond looks at Q.
Q’s about to retort, when there’s the sound of a door opening from around the corner, then footsteps coming closer.
“Think of England,” whispers Bond, and then, without warning, he’s kissing Q to within an inch of his life.
Q gasps into it, which has the simultaneously terrible and wonderful effect of allowing Bond to slip in his tongue. Despite Bond’s instructions, Q does not, in fact, think of England. He thinks instead of where to put his hands, and decides that they’re quite comfortable hanging onto Bond’s shoulders, actually.
“I see I am interrupting,” says an ostentatiously French voice.
Bond at last releases Q’s mouth, and Q opens his eyes to see that, of course, it’s Henri. He does, in point of fact, want to die just a little bit, not least because Henri is the one who’s most likely to realise that he’s just witnessed a complete sham, and if he has even the slightest inclination that it may have been incrementally less of a sham for one of the participants, then Q is going to have to invent a cannon and shoot himself into the moon.
“If you don’t mind,” prompts Bond.
Henri raises both hands in supplication. “Bien sûr, non,” he says, the faintest trace of amusement playing across his lips. “Continue, as they say.”
As soon as he’s reasonably sure that Henri is out of earshot, Q wrenches himself out of Bond’s regrettably sturdy grasp, and smoothes down his hair. God, this really shouldn’t be his life. He did Latin at GCSE, for goodness’ sake. He went to Cambridge. He’s not stupid. He just can’t turn off the idiotic animal part of his brain. It’s just endorphins, he reminds himself. Dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin. Chemical reactions produced in the brain by sheer virtue of the fact that he just had someone’s tongue in his mouth. He’s no more advanced than primordial slime.
“How the devil did he know we were here?” he hisses, busying himself brushing down his suit jacket, steadfastly avoiding Bond’s gaze. “Clearly, we’ve not been careful enough. He must have followed us. Do you think he overheard?”
“I’ll handle it,” says Bond, voice slightly rough, with the surety that only a 00 could possibly manage under the current circumstances.
Q regards him very carefully, the slight mussing of his shirt collar, the complete lack of any sign that Bond is at all ruffled by the fact that Q was practically hanging off his mouth not ten seconds earlier.
“You will handle precisely nothing,” he tells Bond. His pulse is starting to go back to normal, thank Christ. “That was far too close a call, and if you’ll pardon my Belarusian, we cannot afford for this mission to go tits up when we’re trapped in the arse end of a casino complex in Minsk with absolutely no way of contacting Q Branch.” He straightens his jacket, and sighs. “Find out whatever you can about Henri, and I’ll work on the Q Branch problem. There has to be something I can jury-rig in that behemoth of a casino. Magic fingers, remember?”
Bond arches an eyebrow. “Noted.”
Amazingly, the rest of the evening is uneventful. Despite the lingering sense of dread that pervades the room like one of M’s £300 colognes, everyone seems to be playing nice, although to what end, Q can hardly guess. The watery-eyed man who is, apparently, not Volkov continues to stare at Q longingly every so often, but he’s distracted enough by the game at the table for it not to be an enormous problem. The bald man in the crimson suit mostly seems occupied by playing on his phone. Judging by the movements of his thumbs, it’s Candy Crush. Dina valiantly tries to embroil Q in polite conversation for a solid half hour, but eventually she’s called away on her own business, presumably something to do with the several thousand diamonds she’s trying to sell to someone in Manila.
Henri, for his part, even manages to be relatively charming, conceding a small loss to Bond with all the grace of a 1950s Hollywood starlet. If Q didn’t already know that something was deeply amiss, he’d probably think that Henri and Bond were almost becoming friends, watching them laugh politely from his vantage point at the bar.
Still, the whole night feels wasted. Q learns nothing. Volkov isn’t Volkov. Henri might be Henri, or he might not be. Everyone, for varying reasons, wants to kill Bond. Questions after questions, and no-one seems to be in any sort of hurry to give him an answer. His phone still doesn’t work, his ear piece is as dead as Jacob Marley, and he’s getting toothache from all the diet coke.
When not-Volkov finally ends the evening, Q is delighted beyond measure.
“Shall we, dear?” says Bond, offering him his arm.
Q shoots him a look that he hopes might, at least, not look too much like he’s remembering the kiss of several hours ago.
“After you, dear,” says Q.
It’s sort of genius of Bond, actually, pretending that they’re together. Now that they’re having to share a room, after the camera fuckery in Q’s, it at least gives them an excuse to bunk up in Bond’s. Not that anyone should be spying on them, of course, but after today’s events, Q knows better than to assume otherwise.
Bond unlocks the room door, and steps back, allowing Q to enter.
“You know,” says Q, “being polite all of the time is all well and good, but everyone still wants to kill you.”
“I’m aware,” says Bond, dryly.
It doesn’t really explain why Dina von Dieter is currently sprawled across Bond’s bed, her gun trained directly on Bond’s forehead, but then again, Q understands the impulse better than most.
“I told you,” sighs Dina, spooning another helping of room service meringue into her mouth from the tray she’d commanded Bond order at gunpoint. “It really wasn’t anything personal. They’re onto me as well, you know.”
Bond eyes the meringue as though it’s insulted his maiden aunt. “So you’ve said.”
“Really, Mr Bond,” says Dina, around a sugary mouthful. “I assure you, my feelings aren’t quite so bruised that I’d stretch to killing you.”
“He did abandon you on an uninhabited island after blowing up your house,” points out Q, who’s still reeling from recent revelations. “You do have a rather excellent motive.”
“Yes, but he also murdered my abusive billionaire husband,” she counters, gesturing at Q with the spoon. “So as far as I’m concerned, the meringue makes us even. I didn’t even come here with the intent of threatening him. I just really wanted dessert, and when the two of you came through that door, inspiration struck.”
“Good to know,” says Bond, dryly. He’s recovered quite well from proceedings, Q thinks. His ego must be battered beyond recognition.
“Then you must have been inspecting someone else,” hedges Q. “Who’s onto you?”
“Excellent question,” says Dina, taking a final mouthful of meringue and setting the little glass bowl back down onto the silver tray. “I don’t actually know.”
Fucking hell, thinks Q. It’s just layers upon layers of confusion at this point. What a load of absolute shite this mission is turning out to be.
Bond stretches his legs out in front of him. He’s settled quite nicely into the armchair beside the bed, where Q is sat rather gingerly next to Dina, the gun still loaded between them. The dim lamplight of the room throws strangely shaped shadows across the walls, and Q is suddenly struck with the unnerving sensation that he’s awaiting his own execution.
“Interesting,” says Bond, in a tone that somehow manages to convey that what he really means is: bollocks. “And I suppose you expect us to join forces, work out whether we have a common enemy.”
Dina regards him coolly. “I don’t expect anything, Mr Bond. I simply noticed about two hours ago that there was some unusual activity on my phone, and when I attempted to retire to my own suite to see what was happening, there was a rather unpleasant surprise awaiting me under the sheets.”
“Was it a horse’s head?” asks Q.
She shoots him a glance that’s equal parts repulsed and confused. “A bomb.”
“Right,” says Q. “Well, that’s probably worse.”
“And this bomb,” says Bond, back ramrod straight. “I presume—”
“Yes, it’s defused,” sighs Dina. “Obviously. I’m not an amateur. But I still didn’t like the idea of staying in that room, so I took my favourite gun and came right over here.”
Something occurs to Q. “But how did you know where our rooms were?”
“Willst du mich veräppeln?” she groans, smacking her forehead, and fixing Q with a frustrated frown. “I flirted with the receptionist and snatched the reservation list when she wasn’t looking. Women are no better than men, you know. We are all dogs.”
Something is niggling at the back of Q’s brain.
“Volkov,” he says. “You said he was excited to see me.”
“Yes,” Dina replies, slowly. “He was. You’re just his type. Henri showed him your photo, and he was very eager to meet you. I think he was very put out that you spent all of your time at the bar, drinking soft drinks.”
“But Volkov wasn’t there,” says Q.
Dina blinks, then blinks again. “Yes, he was.”
“But Bond said—”
“He wasn’t there.” Bond’s tone brokers no disagreement. “I know Volkov. He wasn’t there this evening.”
Dina inspects an invisible speck of dirt beneath her perfectly manicured fingernails. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Regardless of who you might have met in a past life, Volkov has been there the entire evening. He even wore his best crimson suit for the occasion.”
Q looks over at Bond, whose face has gone rather pale. Of course, it’s the bald guy. The one guy they haven’t suspected this entire time. Perhaps he wasn’t playing Candy Crush after all.
One day, Q thinks, they’ll be able to look back on this mission and laugh.
Today is not that day.
“You said that man was wanted for embezzlement in Estonia!” accuses Q, glaring at Bond. “Then who did you—”
“That’s not important right now,” interjects Bond. He sounds very serious, but Q suspects he just doesn’t want to confront the fact that he might have pushed a random man off a car park. “What’s important is that we find a way to get back in touch with Q Branch. Right now.”
Q bristles. It’s not like he doesn’t know that. The problem is that his phone—
—but there’s another phone, isn’t there?
Dina’s handbag is propped neatly against the foot of the bed, but Q knows better than to rummage through a woman’s personal possessions, especially when that woman is personally in possession of a gun.
“Can I borrow your phone?” he asks. “Please. It’s quite urgent.”
Dina reaches over, rummages through the bag in a way entirely unbefitting of a £3,000 Chanel bag from 2005, pulls out a Blackberry, and hands it to him. God, Q hasn’t used a Blackberry since 2013. The fact that touch-screens aren’t some sort of legal mandate sometimes evades him.
“It’s a burner phone,” she says, by way of explanation.
Q turns the device over in his hand. It’s not connected to the WiFi, which is a small mercy. In fact, it doesn’t even look like it has data enabled. It is, essentially, a very expensive landline, which is exactly what Q was hoping for.
Luckily, he’s memorised the only number he’s ever needed.
The sound of the phone ringing is like the sweetest music to Q’s ears. Until it stops without so much as a warning, of course.
He could scream. This isn’t possible. It quite literally cannot be happening. There’s no way for anyone to hack into a Blackberry, for goodness’ sake; it would be like hacking into a sawmill, or a loom. Which can only mean that it’s the entire phone network. Which can, in turn, only mean that everything is really, really shit, and they’re all going to die.
Because the thing is that Q is more than a little out of his element here. Even Bond seems wrongfooted, which is unfathomably bizarre to witness, like someone has drawn eyebrows on the Mona Lisa.
“No joy, I presume.” There’s not much of it in Bond’s voice, either. “Christ, I’m sorry, Q. This whole mission has been a balls-up from the start.”
“Yes, it has,” returns Q. “And it would be a darn sight less vexing if you could just remember who exactly has motive to kill you, and what they bloody look like.”
Bond starts counting on his fingers. “Right. Well, there’s Henri, for reasons already ascertained. There’s Volkov, for reasons previously ascertained, although now that he appears to have come back from the dead as an entirely different person, I think we can put him down as reasons unknown.”
“And me,” mutters Q, “because after all of this, if we survive long enough to get back to London, I am personally going to murder you, and then M, and then myself.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Dina throws her head back in frustration. “I didn’t order anything else!”
“I’ll get it,” says Q, magnanimously. Honestly, MI6 owes him a pay rise after all this shit. Preferably along with a stiff drink. Lady Grey, perhaps, or Earl. He opens the door.
“Doom service,” says the hotel receptionist, looking rather frazzled. The pistol she’s currently pointing at him doesn’t help matters.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Q.
It makes sense that having your hands tied behind your back in the damp, murky depths of a hotel basement should be deeply uncomfortable. It’s not a torture method in and of itself, not so far as Q knows, but perhaps it should be, because his shoulders are aching something chronic. Still, Bond probably has it worse, given that his mouth is also currently taped. At least the receptionist has saved Q that particular humiliation. However Bond has managed to piss her off too, he’ll never know.
He wriggles on the chair, and the receptionist turns to glare at him.
“Stop it,” she demands.
“I’m sorry,” he says, half meaning it. He really doesn’t mean to be an inconvenience. “It’s just that my arms don’t actually bend that way.”
“No-one’s do,” she replies, which, he supposes, is the point.
“Right, right, yes,” he says. “True. It’s just that—well, if you’re pissed off at that blond man over there, then firstly, I don’t blame you at all, it’s the only sane response to spending more than five seconds in his company, and secondly, do you think that you might offer me a bit of a reprieve? Honestly, if you’ve got a gripe with him, the best way to resolve it is probably to let me go.”
From his own sedentary prison, Bond glares at him, silent.
The receptionist doesn’t so much as blink. “No. You both stay.”
“There’s three of us, actually,” pipes up Dina, from her own chair. “I thought we got on so well earlier. I take it this means that you’re not going to text me back?”
The receptionist doesn’t dignify that with a response, and leaves without so much as a word. Bit rude, thinks Q, listening to the key click in the lock behind her. Bollocks. Manual locks are always so much harder to pick than digital.
“I really did like her,” sighs Dina. “Still. I suppose I don’t need to feel quite so guilty about this, in that case.”
And before Q can ask her what the fuck she’s talking about, Dina stands up, stretches her arms out, then picks up her chair and sets it neatly in the far corner of the room.
“Honestly,” she says. “A bit of gardening twine, and she thinks I’ll be rendered senseless? Please. I’d expected better from a Pisces.”
“Erm,” says Q, who’s currently rendered very much senseless by gardening twine. “I don’t suppose you might fancy untying me as well?” Bond makes a sort of grunting nose behind the duct tape. “And him, I suppose.”
Dina grins. “You know, I just might. I probably owe you for the meringue.”
“Ta ever so.”
Once his hands are free, he flexes his joints and feels the warmth rush back into his extremities. Untying Bond is easier than he expected; the knots are surprisingly lax. Clearly, the receptionist has never been to Scouts. He rips the tape off Bond’s mouth, and Bond breathes a great sigh of relief, flexing his arms.
“Bond,” says Q. “Bond, what the fuck is going on?”
“Just give me a bloody second,” says Bond. “I’m thinking.”
“I’m giving you multiple!” hisses Q. “And now we’re locked in a basement, and even the bloody receptionist wants to kill us! Who the fuck have you pissed off?”
“I don’t know,” says Bond. “I don’t know! None of this was in the bloody brief, Q. I know about as much as you do.”
“Which is much, much more than I know,” Dina grumbles. “I’m only here because I was promised a rigged win at the roulette table, and now look at me, trapped in a basement with Tünnes and Schäl.”
Bond and Q both glare at her. Q is about to ask what, exactly, she means by a rigged roulette table, when an ungodly screeching noise blares out from the very air around them, and his heart just about stops.
“Jesus fucking wept,” groans Q, clapping both hands over his ears.
Whatever Bond says in response, Q doesn’t stand a hope in Hell of hearing.
After what feels like an age, but is probably only a couple of seconds, the hideous sound cuts off, like a scream wrenched from a throat.
And then it begins.
Softly at first, the tinkling of bells, not unlike a high-pitched cowbell. Strings, jaunty and jubilant. And then the vocals kick in.
Q’s heart sinks into his feet.
Bond glances up at the ceiling. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Is that—” Dina scrunches up her face, deep in thought.
“Barry Manilow,” says Q, staring up in an accusatory fashion at the diaphragm of a large loudspeaker, wedged underneath the fire exit sign above the door. How had he not noticed that before?
“Copacabana,” clarifies Bond, through gritted teeth.
“It’s awful,” says Dina. “Oh, Gott im Himmel, I’m not staying to listen to that.”
Bond gestures towards the door, one hand still clasped over his left ear. “After you, then. I don’t suppose you need one of us to get the door?”
“Absolutely not,” sniffs Dina.
And with that, she produces a hair pin from her lustrous updo, strides over the door, and unlocks it.
“I’ll see you both on the other side,” she says.
“Looking forward to it,” says Q.
In her absence, the Barry Manilow is awful. Every single syllable seems tailor-made to draw anguish from the very depths of Q’s soul. The jocular tune scratches at the nerves of his spine, and if only there was a way to turn it off—
The sound of gunfire from down the hallway rings out, and the blood runs cold in Q’s veins.
“Oh God,” he whispers. “Bond, Bond, do you have a gun?”
“I don’t.”
“Because if you have a secret gun hidden in your sock, or a garrotte, or a pair of nunchucks—”
“Q.” Bond puts both hands on Q’s shoulders and spins him around, staring directly at him. It really should be illegal, having eyes that blue. There’s just no point. “I don’t have anything. The receptionist took it. We’re unarmed.”
Oh, Copacabana, thinks Q. What would Lola do?
“No, we’re bloody not,” he says.
As quick as he possibly can, given that his heart is currently threatening to burst out of his chest, Q grabs the chair he’d been tied to, steadies it beneath the door, and gets up onto it. Wrenching the speaker free is actually harder than he’d anticipated—he’d probably have had better luck asking Bond to be the muscle, but explaining his plan just felt like it would take too long—but after a truly terrifying moment or two, he feels it rip free from the wire, and the weight of it almost topples him backwards.
Crime rings these days, can’t even afford a decent speaker. It’s quite sad, really.
“Q,” says Bond, voice low. “What are you doing?”
“Improvising,” says Q, and when the first gunman rounds the open door, Q takes a deep breath, thinks of England, and whacks the speaker into his forehead with all his might. The dull sound of metal on bone makes Q want to throw up.
The man crumples like a concertina, his gun spinning onto the concrete floor with a silver sound. Quick as lightning, Bond darts forward and grabs it, then checks the barrel.
“It’ll do,” he assesses.
“Oh, thank fuck for that. I really don’t think I could do it again.”
Bond laughs, but there’s not much humour in it. “Don’t worry. I’ll take it from here.”
“You carry on.”
Q ducks behind Bond, and watches him take down another two henchmen. How many are there, for God’s sake? Is the entirety of the hotel staff in on this? Who even sent them? And what, in the name of ever-loving God, was the point of the Barry Manilow? Was it just supposed to torture them, or to embarrass them into a murder-suicide, or—
“Oh my God,” breathes Q, as the weight of what he’s done crashes into him, knocks the air from his lungs. “It’s the iTunes guy.”
Bond shoots him a look of immense confusion, and then shoots an advancing henchman in the temple. Q, to his credit, immediately grabs the henchman’s gun and hands it to Bond, who adds it to his artillery.
“Who’s the iTunes guy?”
Q closes his eyes, and enjoys the luxury of his final breath before telling Bond everything.
“When I was younger—”
Bond fires off another round, and a man drops to the floor like a sack of potatoes. “The quick version, if you please.”
“Right,” says Q, hurriedly. “Let’s just say that before MI6, I led an interesting life.”
“Interesting,” repeats Bond, shooting some poor sod in the knee.
“I trolled criminals and politicians,” explains Q, ducking behind Bond’s bicep to avoid a punch from the aforementioned poor sod. “Hacked into their emails, posted their shopping lists, printed out their embarrassing photos, that sort of thing.”
Bond glares at him over his shoulder, whilst shooting the same man again in the other knee.
“Oh, don’t give me that look,” says Q, dodging another swing, quite impressively, he thinks. “We all have hobbies. You like shooting people in the temple, and wearing too much cologne. I used to like vigilante humiliation. Both are equally valid.” Bond shoots another man in the temple. Q winces. “Admittedly, yours has more merits right now.”
“So the iTunes guy—you leaked his playlist online? For fun?”
“Yes,” replies Q, miserably. “In my defence, I didn’t even think Barry Manilow was that embarrassing. I quite like Mandy.”
“Christ,” murmurs Bond. “You think you know someone.”
“And now, apparently, he’s out for my blood, and—” Realisation, when it dawns, hits Q like a barstool to the face. His moral high ground dissolves into dust like the storied kingdoms of old. “Oh, Jesus alive, he was after me this whole time! That fucking—that bastard, I’m going to kill him.”
“Q,” says Bond, face entirely neutral. “If we get out of this, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”
Dear God, the sheer level of I told you so will be unbearable.
“I’m afraid so,” says Q. “And I’ll deserve every single moment of it.”
Bond fires off one more shot, this time into the abdomen of the final henchman. “Right. Well, before we get to that point, I think we should get out of here, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” says Q, somewhat miserably. “After you.”
By the grace of whichever god isn’t currently punishing Q, they don’t encounter any other henchmen before they get to the hotel lobby. Unfortunately, they do immediately encounter a very familiar blond man, standing right in the middle of the abandoned opulence, ammo belt strapped across his chest, machine gun cocked and loaded, suit sleeves rolled up to the elbow, toothpick firmly between his teeth.
“Quartermaster, Bond,” says Henri. “We meet again.” He turns to Q, who gulps. “Or should I call you HackerPrince420?”
“Please don’t,” whispers Q.
“Henri, always a pleasure,” lies Bond, smoothly. “I suppose this is all your doing?”
“But of course.” The clipped French vowels are gone, replaced by what Q thinks might be—of all things—an Anglesey accent. “I have waited. You have no idea how long.”
“Nine years and three months,” says Q, who has an eidetic memory and isn’t afraid to use it. “Which is honestly a bit weird, if you think about it. It was just an iTunes playlist.”
“It was not just an iTunes playlist,” snaps Henri, voice cold. “It was my entire reputation. It was everything I was, everything I wanted to be, up in flames. It was the end of my life as I knew it. Every time I walked through that prison canteen, they called me Mandy. Lola, if I was lucky. Asked me if I’d had fun in Copacabana. Told me that they couldn’t smile without me, asked me if I was ready to take a chance again. It was relentless. They’d harmonise. And you did that to me. I wanted you to burn.”
“Well, you’ve done a shit job so far,” retorts Q. “You’ve probably pissed Bond off more than me.”
Henri’s cackle reverberates around the debris-stricken room. “You don’t get it, do you? That bomb in Riga wasn’t meant for you. It was meant for him. But it was targeting you.”
Suddenly, awfully, it all makes a sick kind of sense.
The camera in Q’s room, but nothing in Bond’s. It wasn’t a mistake. It was so that he and Bond would be together, in one room. Easy targets. The tape over Bond’s mouth, designed to make Q feel sorry for him, so that Q would feel pain. Volkov, or whoever he really is, his flirtation targeted at Q, so that Bond would be forced to pretend that they were together, so that Q would know what he was missing out on.
Jesus Christ, Henri is a bitch. No wonder he was so good at pretending to be French.
“And that’s why you put the bomb in Dina’s bed?” says Q in disbelief. “So that she’d end up in Bond’s bedroom? You were setting them up?”
Henri flicks his hand dismissively. “A childish tactic, I admit, but it would have been effective, walking in on the two of them mid-coitus, had you not turned up at the same time. I didn’t consider quite how joined at the hip you’ve proven to be.”
“It wouldn’t have been effective at all, because Bond blew up Dina’s house and she absolutely hates him,” says Q. “Listen, I’m as gay as a fairy, and even I understand women better than that. Of all the women you could have paid to come on this little gambling trip, you picked the absolute worst one. I think she might actually be a lesbian, to be honest.”
“Look,” says Bond. “Henri. I understand. He’s upset you. He’s very, very sorry.”
“I’m really not,” says Q, and Bond glares at him. “I’m not! I was, but now he’s just being an arsehole. He deserves it.”
“Ignore him, Henri,” sighs Bond. Q splutters, but Bond takes his own advice. “Trust me, we’ll deal with him back at headquarters. He will be reprimanded. Thoroughly. I shall see to it myself. None of this should have happened in the first place. You’ve outsmarted us, and you’ve won. Now, drop the weapon, and we can all go back to MI6, and follow this up through the appropriate HR channels.”
Henri tilts his head, appraising the two of them through new eyes.
“You can’t possibly mean that,” he says.
“I really don’t,” agrees Bond, and he shoots him in the forehead.
They see Dina off to the nearest port, against all odds, hand-in-hand with the receptionist, whose name, it emerges, is Frida. They’re working things out, apparently. It wasn’t Frida’s fault, after all, that an eager Frenchman had told her that the way to Dina’s heart was hardcore BDSM espionage roleplay. Q doesn’t have the highest hopes for that relationship, in all honesty, but he’s read enough Jeanette Winterson to know that it isn’t entirely doomed.
For his own part, he feels a little bit like he’s been scraped very, very thin, and then held up to a laser beam and eviscerated. The feeling doesn’t dissipate at all during the almost silent flight back to London, during which Q imbibes so much Calpol that he practically falls into a coma. Nor does it dissipate for the entirety of his first day back at the office, where Q locks his door with three keypads and a deadbolt, just to be sure.
It certainly doesn’t dissipate at the end of that first day, when he packs up his laptop after a long six hours of staring blankly at the screen, opens his office door, and finds Bond calmly leaning in the empty corridor outside it, doing a sudoku, wearing his overcoat.
“Oh,” says Q, rather stupidly. “You’re here.”
“Debrief,” says Bond. “Do you mind?”
“I’ve already debriefed M,” says Q, miserable. “It was excruciating.”
It really was. The bollocking M gave him will reverberate through the hallowed halls of MI6 for years to come. Q doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to look anyone on the sixth floor in the eye ever again.
“It’ll only take a moment,” promises Bond.
Q sighs. Bond didn’t even make a debriefing joke, which doesn’t bode well. Q’s heart sinks.
Before Bond can say anything else, Q puts up both hands, and stops Bond in his tracks.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he says. “And listen, I deserve it. I shouldn’t have assumed that you were the target, even though about half the population of Earth currently wants you dead, and the other half thinks you already are. And I definitely shouldn’t have hacked into Henri’s iTunes—”
“Gethin,” supplies Bond. “His real name is Gethin Morgan.”
“—into Gethin’s iTunes and posted his embarrassing obsession with Barry Manilow onto my Bebo account,” finishes Q. “I was young and stupid at the time, but it was idiotic of me not to think that it would come around and bite me on the arse later down the line. I should have considered it earlier.”
“You should,” agrees Bond, but for some reason, he’s smiling.
“All right,” says Q, taking a deep breath in and closing his eyes. “I’m ready. Lay it on me.”
And Bond does. But it’s not quite the I told you so Q had expected. His breath is practically knocked from his lungs with the force of the kiss, Bond’s hands at his jaw, and he’s hardly managed to kiss Bond back before Bond is already pulling away, grinning.
“What,” says Q, after a moment. “What was that?”
“You’re brilliant,” says Bond. “It’s a thank you. Christ, that’s the most fun I’ve had in years.”
Q points at his mouth. “That?”
“Well, yes,” acknowledges Bond. “That, obviously, and Belarus. I had no idea what was happening, Q. It was exhilarating.”
“Exhilarating,” says Q. “Are you sure? Because I nearly got you killed, Bond. Twice. Maybe more than that, if I’m being deadly honest with us both.”
Bond just beams at him. “I counted at least four. Q, you’re a marvel. How many more villains from your past do you think might be out for your blood?”
Q considers it. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe twelve?”
“Oh God,” says Bond, and after that, Q decides it’s probably best to just keep the door locked.
You never know who’s lurking around the corner, after all.