Bond shook his head, waiting for the story.

‘All right then,’ said M. There was a note of relief in his voice. He leant back in his chair and gave several quick pulls on his pipe to get it going. ‘This is what’s happened. Yesterday there was a long signal in from Istanbul. Seems on Tuesday the Head of Station T got an anonymous typewritten message which told him to take a round ticket on the 8 p.m. ferry steamer from the Galata Bridge to the mouth of the Bosphorus and back. Nothing else. Head of T’s an adventurous sort of chap, and of course he took the steamer. He stood up for’ard by the rail and waited. After about a quarter of an hour a girl came and stood beside him, a Russian girl, very good-looking, he says, and after they’d talked a bit about the view and so on, she suddenly switched and in the same sort of conversational voice she told him an extraordinary story.’

M. paused to put another match to his pipe. Bond interjected, ‘Who is Head of T, sir? I’ve never worked in Turkey.’

‘Man called Kerim, Darko Kerim. Turkish father and English mother. Remarkable fellow. Been Head of T since before the war. One of the best men we’ve got anywhere. Does a wonderful job. Loves it. Very intelligent and he knows all that part of the world like the back of his hand.’ M. dismissed Kerim with a sideways jerk of his pipe. ‘Anyway, the girl’s story was that she was a Corporal in the M.G.B. Had been in the show since she left school and had just got transferred to the Istanbul centre as a cipher officer. She’d engineered the transfer because she wanted to get out of Russia and come over.’

‘That’s good,’ said Bond. ‘Might be useful to have one of their cipher girls. But why does she want to come over?’

M. looked across the table at Bond. ‘Because she’s in love.’ He paused and added mildly, ‘She says she’s in love with you.’

‘In love with me?’

‘Yes, with you. That’s what she says. Her name’s Tatiana Romanova. Ever heard of her?’

‘Good God, no! I mean, no, sir.’ M. smiled at the mixture of expressions on Bond’s face. ‘But what the hell does she mean? Has she ever met me? How does she know I exist?’

‘Well,’ said M. ‘The whole thing sounds absolutely ridiculous. But it’s so crazy that it just might be true. This girl is twenty-four. Ever since she joined the M.G.B. she’s been working in their Central Index, the same as our Records. And she’s been working in the English section of it. She’s been there six years. One of the files she had to deal with was yours.’

‘I’d like to see that one,’ commented Bond.

‘Her story is that she first took a fancy to the photographs they’ve got of you. Admired your looks and so on.’ M.’s mouth turned downwards at the corners as if he had just sucked at a lemon. ‘She read up all your cases. Decided that you were the hell of a fellow.’

Bond looked down his nose. M.’s face was non-committal.

‘She said you particularly appealed to her because you reminded her of the hero of a book by some Russian fellow called Lermontov. Apparently it was her favourite book. This hero chap liked gambling and spent his whole time getting in and out of scraps. Anyway, you reminded her of him. She says she came to think of nothing else, and one day the idea came to her that if only she could transfer to one of their foreign centres she could get in touch with you and you would come and rescue her.’

‘I’ve never heard such a crazy story, sir. Surely Head of T didn’t swallow it.’

‘Now wait a moment,’ M.’s voice was testy. ‘Just don’t be in too much of a hurry simply because something’s turned up you’ve never come across before. Suppose you happened to be a film star instead of being in this particular trade. You’d get daft letters from girls all over the world stuffed with Heaven knows what sort of rot about not being able to live without you and so on. Here’s a silly girl doing a secretary’s job in Moscow. Probably the whole department is staffed by women, like our Records. Not a man in the room to look at, and here she is, faced with your, er, dashing features on a file that’s constantly coming up for review. And she gets what I believe they call a “crush” on these pictures just as secretaries all over the world get crushes on these dreadful faces in the magazines.’ M. waved his pipe sideways to indicate his ignorance of these grisly female habits. ‘The Lord knows I don’t know much about these things, but you must admit that they happen.’

Bond smiled at the appeal for help. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, sir, I’m beginning to see there is some sense in it. There’s no reason why a Russian girl shouldn’t be just as silly as an English one. But she must have got guts to do what she did. Does Head of T say if she realized the consequences if she was found out?’

‘He said she was frightened out of her wits,’ said M. ‘Spent the whole time on the boat looking round to see if anybody was watching her. But it seems they were the usual peasants and commuters that take these boats, and as it was a late boat there weren’t many passengers anyway. But wait a minute. You haven’t heard half the story.’ M. took a long pull at his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke up towards the slowly turning fan above his head. Bond watched the smoke get caught up in the blades and whirled into nothingness. ‘She told Kerim that this passion for you gradually developed into a phobia. She got to hate the sight of Russian men. In time this turned into a dislike of the régime and particularly of the work she was doing for them and, so to speak, against you. So she applied for a transfer abroad, and since her languages were very good–English and French–in due course she was offered Istanbul if she would join the Cipher Department, which meant a cut in pay. To cut a long story short, after six months’ training, she got to Istanbul about three weeks ago. Then she sniffed about and soon got hold of the name of our man, Kerim. He’s been there so long that everybody in Turkey knows what he does by now. He doesn’t mind, and it takes people’s eyes off the special men we send in from time to time. There’s no harm in having a front man in some of these places. Quite a lot of customers would come to us if they knew where to go and who to talk to.’

Bond commented: ‘The public agent often does better than the man who has to spend a lot of time and energy keeping under cover.’

‘So she sent Kerim the note. Now she wants to know if he can help her.’ M. paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘Of course Kerim’s first reactions were exactly the same as yours, and he fished around looking for a trap. But he simply couldn’t see what the Russians could gain from sending this girl over to us. All this time the steamer was getting further and further up the Bosphorus and soon it would be turning to come back to Istanbul. And the girl got more and more desperate as Kerim went on trying to break down her story. Then,’ M.’s eyes glittered softly across at Bond, ‘came the clincher.’

That glitter in M.’s eyes, thought Bond. How well he knew those moments when M.’s cold grey eyes betrayed their excitement and their greed.

‘She had a last card to play. And she knew it was the ace of trumps. If she could come over to us, she would bring her cipher machine with her. It’s the brand new Spektor machine. The thing we’d give our eyes to have.’

‘God,’ said Bond softly, his mind boggling at the immensity of the prize. The Spektor! The machine that would allow them to decipher the Top Secret traffic of all. To have that, even if its loss was immediately discovered and the settings changed, or the machine taken out of service in Russian embassies and spy centres all over the world, would be a priceless victory. Bond didn’t know much about cryptography, and, for security’s sake, in case he was ever captured, wished to know as little as possible about its secrets, but at least he knew that, in the Russian secret service, loss of the Spektor would be counted a major disaster.