the mercedes was a beautiful thing. bond pulled his 1 battered grey bentley up alongside it and inspected it.

it was a type 300 s, the sports model with a disappearing hood-one of only half a dozen in england, he reflected. left-hand drive. probably bought in germany. he had seen a few of them over there. one had hissed by him on the munich autobahn the year before when he was doing a solid -ninety in the bentley. the body, too short and heavy to be graceful, was painted white, with red leather upholstery. garish for england, but bond guessed that drax had chosen white in honour of the famous mercedes-benz racing colours that had already swept the board again since the war at le mans and the nurburgring.

typical of drax to buy a mercedes. there was something ruthless and majestic about the cars, he decided, remembering the years from 1934 to 1939 when they had completely dominated the grand prix scene, children of the famous blitzen benz that had captured the world's speed record at 142 m.p.h. back in 1911. bond recalled some of their famous drivers, caracciola, lang, seaman, brauchitsch, and the days when he had seen them drifting the fast sweeping bends of tripoli at 190, or screaming along the tree-lined straight at berne with the auto unions on their tails.

and yet, bond looked across at his supercharged bentley, nearly twenty-five years older than drax's car and still capable of beating too, and yet when bentleys were racing, before rolls had tamed them into sedate town carriages, they had whipped the blown ss-k's almost as they wished.

bond had once dabbled on the fringe of the racing world and he was lost in his memories, hearing again the harsh scream of garacciola's great white beast of a car as it howled past the grandstands at le mans, when drax came out of the house followed by gala brand and krebs.

"fast car," said drax, pleased with bond's look of admiration. he gestured towards the bentley. "they used to be good in the old days," he added with a touch of patronage. "now they're only built for going to the theatre. too well-mannered. even the continental. now then you, get in the back."

krebs obediently climbed into the narrow back seat behind the driver. he sat sideways, his mackintosh up round his ears, his eyes fixed enigmatically on bond.

gala brand, smart in a dark grey tailor-made and black beret and carrying a lightweight black raincoat and gloves, climbed into the right half of the divided front seat. the wide door closed with the rich double click of a faberge box.

no sign passed between bond and gala. they had made their plans at a whispered meeting in his room before lunch-dinner in london at half-past seven and then back to the house in bond's car. she sat demurely, her hands in her lap and her eyes to the front, as drax climbed in, pressed the starter, and pulled the gleaming lever on the steering wheel back into third. the car surged away with hardly a purr from the exhaust and bond watched it disappear into the trees before he climbed into the bentley and moved off in leisurely pursuit.

in the hastening mercedes, gala busied herself with her thoughts. the night had been uneventful and the morning had been devoted to clearing the launching site of everything that might possibly burn when the moonraker was fired. drax had not referred to the events of the previous day and there had been no change in his usual manner. she had prepared her last firing plan (drax himself was to do it on the morrow) and as usual walter had been sent for and through her spy-hole she had seen the figures being entered in drax's black book.

it was a hot, sunny day and drax was driving in his shirtsleeves. she glanced down and to the left at the top of the little book protruding from his hip-pocket. this drive might be her last chance. since the evening before she had felt a different person. perhaps bond had aroused her competitive spirit, perhaps it was revulsion from playing the secretary too long, perhaps it was the shock of the cliff-fall and the zest of realizing after so many quiet months that she was playing a dangerous game. but now she felt the time had come to take risks. discovery of the moonraker's flight-plan was a routine affair and it would give her personal satisfaction to find out the secret of the black notebook. it would be easy.

casually she laid her folded coat over the space between herself and drax. at the same time she made a show of arranging herself comfortably, during the course of which she drew an inch or two nearer drax and her hand came to rest in the folds of the coat between them. then she settled her-self to wait.

her chance came, as she had thought it might, in the congested traffic of maidstone. drax, intent, was trying to beat the traffic lights at the corner of king street and gabriel's hill, but the line of traffic was too slow and he was checked behind a battered family saloon. gala could see that when the lights changed he was determined to cut in front of the car in front and teach it a lesson. he was a brilliant driver, but a vindictive and impatient one who was always anxious for any car that held him up to be given something to remember.

as the lights went green he gave a blast on his triple horns, pulled out to the right at the intersection, accelerated brutally and got by, shaking his head angrily at the driver of the saloon as he passed it.

in the middle of this harsh manoeuvre it was natural for gala to allow herself to be thrown towards him. at the same time her left hand dived under the coat and her fingers touched, felt, and extracted the book in one flow of motion. then the hand was back in the folds of the coat again and drax, all his feeling in his feet and hands, was seeing nothing but the traffic ahead and the chances of getting across the zebra outside the royal star without hitting two women and a boy who were nearly halfway across it.

now it was a question of facing drax's growl of rage as with a maidenly but urgent voice she asked if she could possibly stop for a moment to powder her nose.

a garage would be dangerous. he might decide to fill up with petrol. and perhaps he also carried his money in his hip-pocket. but was there an hotel? yes, she remembered, the thomas wyatt just outside maidstone. and it had no petrol pumps. she started to fidget slightly. she pulled the coat back on to her lap. she cleared her throat.

"oh, excuse me, sir hugo," she said in a strangled voice.

"yes. .what is it?"

"i'm terribly sorry, sir hugo. but could you possibly stop for just a moment. i want, i mean, i'm terribly sorry but i'd like to powder my nose. it's terribly stupid of me. i'm so sorry."

"christ," said drax. "why the hell didn't you… oh, yes. well, all right. find a place." he grumbled on into his moustache, but brought the big car down into the fifties.

"there's a hotel just around this bend," said gala nervously. "thank you so much, sir hugo. it was stupid of me. i won't be a moment. yes, here it is."

the car swerved up to the front of the inn and stopped with a jerk. "hurry up. hurry up," said drax as gala, leaving the door of the car open, sped obediently across the gravel, her coat with its precious secret held tightly in front of her body.

she locked the door of the lavatory and snatched open the notebook.

there they were, just as she had thought. on each page, under the date, the neat columns of figures, the atmospheric pressure, the wind velocity, the temperature, just as she had recorded them from the air ministry figures. and at the foot of each page the estimated settings for the gyro compasses.

gala frowned. at a glance she could see that they were entirely different from hers. drax's figures simply bore no relation to hers whatsoever.

she turned to the last completed page containing the figures for that day. why, she was wrong by nearly ninety degrees on the estimated course. if the rocket were fired on her flight plan it would land somewhere in france, she looked wildly at her face in the mirror over the washbasin. how could she have gone so monstrously wrong? and why hadn't drax ever told her? why, she ran quickly through the book again, every day she had been ninety degrees out, firing the moonraker at right angles to its true course. and yet she simply couldn't have made such a mistake. did the ministry know these secret figures? and why should they be secret?

suddenly her bewilderment turned to fright. she must somehow get safely, quietly to london and tell somebody. even though she might be called a fool and a meddler.

coldly she turned back several pages in the book, took her nail file out of the bag and, as neatly as she could, cut out a specimen page, rolled it up into a tight ball and stuffed it into the tip of a finger of one of her gloves.

she glanced at her face in the mirror. it was pale and she quickly rubbed her cheeks to bring back the colour. then she put back the look of an apologetic secretary and hurried out and ran across the gravel to the car, clutching the notebook among the folds of her coat.

the engine of the mercedes was turning over. drax glowered at her impatiently as she scrambled back into her seat.

"come on. come on," he said, putting the car into third and taking his foot off the clutch so that she nearly caught her ankle in the heavy door. the tyres churned up the gravel as he accelerated out of the parking place and dry-skidded into the london road.

gala was jerked back, but she remembered to let the coat with her guilty hand in its folds fall on the seat between her and the driver.

and now the book back into the hip-pocket.

she watched the speedometer hovering in the seventies as drax flung the heavy car along the crown of the road.

she tried to remember her lessons. distracting pressure on some other part of the body. distracting the attention. distraction. the victim must not be at ease. his senses must be focused away. he must be unaware of the touch on his body. anaesthetized by a stronger stimulus.

like now, for instance. drax, bent forward over the wheel, was fighting for a chance to get past a sixty-foot raf trailer, but the oncoming traffic was leaving no room on the crown of the road. there was a gap and drax rammed the lever into second and took it, his horns braying imperiously.

gala's hand reached to the left under the coat.

but another hand struck like a snake.

"got you."

krebs was leaning half over the back of the driving seat. his hand was crushing hers into the slippery cover of the notebook under the folds of the coat.

gala sat frozen into black ice. with all her strength she wrenched at her hand. it was no good. krebs had all his weight on it now.

drax had got past the trailer and the road was empty.

krebs said urgently in german, "please stop the car, mein kapitдn. miss brand is a spy."

drax gave a startled glance to his right. what he saw was enough. he put his hand quickly down to his hip-pocket, and then, slowly, deliberately, put it back on the wheel. the sharp turning to mereworth was just coming up on his left. "hold her," said drax. he braked so that the tyres screamed, changed down and wrenched the car into the side-road. a few hundred yards down it he pulled the car into the side and stopped.

drax looked up and down the road. it was empty. he reached over one gloved hand and wrenched gala's face towards him.

"what is this?"

"i can explain it, sir hugo." gala tried to bluff against the horror and desperation she knew was in her face. "it's a mistake. i didn't mean…"

under cover of an angry shrug of the shoulders, her right hand moved softly behind her and the guilty pair of gloves were thrust behind the leather cushion.

"sehen sie her, mein kapitдn. i saw her edging up close to you. it seemed to me strange."

with his other hand krebs had whipped the coat away and there were the bent white fingers of her left hand crushed into the cover of the notebook still a foot away from drax's hip-pocket. "so."

the word was deadly cold and with a shivering finality. drax let go her chin, but her horrified eyes remained locked into his.

a kind of frozen cruelty was showing through the jolly fa3ade of red skin and whiskers. it was a different man. the man behind the mask. the creature beneath the flat stone that gala brand had lifted.

drax glanced again up and down the empty road. then, looking carefully into the suddenly aware blue eyes, he drew the leather driving gauntlet off his left hand and with his right whipped her as hard as he could across the face with it.

only a short cry was forced out of gala's constricted throat, but tears of pain ran down her cheeks. suddenly she began to fight like a mad woman.

with all her strength she heaved and fought against the two iron arms that held her. with her free right hand she tried to reach the face that leant over her hand and get at the eyes. but krebs easily moved his head out of her reach and quietly increased the pressure across her throat, hissing murderously to himself as her nails tore strips of skin off the backs of his hands, but noting with a scientist's eye as her struggles became weaker.

drax watched carefully, with one eye on the road, as krebs brought her under control and then he started the car and drove cautiously on along the wooded road. he grunted with satisfaction as he came upon a cart-track into the woods and he turned up it and only stopped when he was well out of sight of the road.

gala had just realized that there were no noise from the engine when she heard drax say 'there'. a finger touched her skull behind the left ear. krebs arm came away from her throat and she slumped gratefully forward, gasping for air. then something crashed into the back of her head where the finger had touched it, and there was a flash of wonderfully releasing pain and blackness.

an hour later passers-by saw a white mercedes draw up outside a small house at the buckingham palace end of ebury street and two kind gentlemen help a sick girl out and through the front door. those who were near could see that the poor girl's face was very pale and that her eyes were shut and that the kind gentlemen almost had to carry her up the steps. the big gentleman with the red face and whiskers was heard to say quite distinctly to the other man that poor mildred had promised she wouldn't go out until she was quite well again. very sad.

gala came to herself in a large top-floor room that seemed to be full of machinery. she was tied very securely to a chair and apart from the searing pain in her head she could feel that her lips and cheek were bruised and swollen.

heavy curtains were drawn across the window and there was a musty smell in the room as if it was rarely used. there was dust on the few pieces of conventional furniture and only the chromium and ebonite dials on the machines looked clean and new. she thought that she was probably in hospital. she closed her eyes and wondered. it was not long before she remembered. she spent several minutes controlling herself and then she opened her eyes again.

drax, his back to her, was watching the dials on a machine that looked like a very large radio set. there were three more similar machines in her line of sight and from one of them a thin steel aerial reached up to a rough hole that had been cut for it in the plaster of the ceiling. the room was brightly lit by several tall standard lamps, each of which held a naked high wattage bulb.

to her left there was a noise of tinkering and by swivelling her half-closed eyes in their sockets, which made the pain in her head much worse, she saw the figure of krebs bent over an electric generator on the floor. beside it there was a small petrol engine and it was this that was giving trouble. every now and then krebs would grasp the starting-handle and crank it hard and a feeble stutter would come from the engine before he went back to his tinkering.

"you dam' fool," said drax in german, "hurry up. i've got to go and see those bloody oafs at the ministry."

"at once, mein kapitдn," said krebs dutifully. he seized the handle again. this time after two or three coughs the engine started up and began to purr.

"it won't make too much noise?" asked drax.

"no, mein kapitдn. the room has been soundproofed," answered krebs. "dr walter assures me that nothing will be heard outside."

gala closed her eyes and decided that her only hope was to feign unconscious for as long as possible. did they intend to kill her? here in this room? and what was all this machinery? it looked like wireless, or perhaps radar. that curved glass screen above drax's head that had given an occasional flicker as drax fiddled with the knobs below the dials.

slowly her mind started to work again. why, for instance, was drax suddenly talking perfect german? and why did krebs address him as herr kapitдn? and the figures in the black book. why did they nearly kill her because she had seen them? what did they mean?

ninety degrees, ninety degrees.

lazily her mind turned the problem over.

ninety degrees difference. supposing her figures had been right all the time for the target eighty miles away in the north sea. just supposing she had been right. then she wouldn't have been aiming the rocket into the middle of france after all. but drax's figures. ninety degrees to the left of her north sea target? somewhere in england presumably. eighty miles from dover. yes, of course. that was it. drax's figures. the firing plan in the little black book. they would drop the moonraker just about in the middle of london.

but on london! on london!!

so one's heart really does go into one's throat. how extraordinary. such a commonplace and yet there it is and it really does almost stop one breathing.

and now, let me see, so this is a radar homing device. how ingenious. the same as there would be on the raft in the north sea. this would bring the rocket down within a hundred yards of buckingham palace. but would that matter with a warhead full of instruments?

it was probably the cruelty of drax's blow across her face that settled it, but suddenly she knew that somehow it would be a real warhead, an atomic warhead, and that drax was an enemy of england and that tomorrow at noon he was going to destroy london.

gala made a last effort to understand.

through this ceiling, through this chair, into the ground, the thin needle of the rocket. dropping fast as light out of a clear sky. the crowds in the streets. the palace. the nursemaids in the park. the birds in the trees. the great bloom of flame a mile wide. and then the mushroom cloud. and nothing left. nothing. nothing, nothing.

"no. oh, no!"

but the scream was only in her mind and gala, her body a twisted black potato crisp amongst a million others, had already fainted.