Goldgengar
- Thread starter SL92
- Start date
Triforce3force
Senior Member
Dang, I thought you were typing about me for half that page. *wipes sweat off brow*
Just make sure to give Ultra a gun or something.
^_^
Just make sure to give Ultra a gun or something.
^_^
CHAPTER FIVE NIGHT DUTY
----IT WAS a week later. Storm stood at the open window of the seventh-floor office of the tall building in New York that is the headquarters of the Invisionfree service. The city lay asleep under a full moon that rode swiftly over the town through a shoal of herring-bone clouds. One of the telephones rang in the dark room. Storm turned and moved quickly to the central desk and the pool of light cast by the green shaded reading-lamp. He picked up the black telephone at the fourth ring. He said,
----'Duty officer.'
----'Station H, sir.'
----'Put them on.' There was the echoing buzz and twang of the usual bad radio connection with Hongkong. Why were there always sunspots over China? A sing-song voice asked,
----'Universal Export?'
----'Yes.' A deep, close voice - New York - said,
----'You're through to Hongkong. Speak up, please.'
----'Clear the line, please.' Storm said impatiently.
----'You're through now. Speak up, please,' the sing-song voice said.
----'Hullo! Hullo! Universal Export?'
---- 'Yes.'
----'Dickson speaking. Can you hear me?'
----'Yes.'
----'That cable I sent you about the shipment of mangoes. Fruit. You know?'
----'Yes. Got it here.' Storm pulled the file towards him. He knew what it was about. Station H wanted some limpet mines to put paid to three Communist spy junks that were using Macao to intercept British freighters and search them for refugees from China. 'Must have payment by the tenth.' That would mean that the junks were leaving, or else that the guards on the junks would be doubled after that date, or some other emergency. Storm said briefly,
----'Wilco.'
----'Thanks.'
----'Bye.'
----"Bye." Storm put down the receiver. He picked up the green receiver and dialled Q Branch and talked to the section duty officer. It would be all right. There was a BOAC Britannia leaving in the morning. Q Branch would see that the crate caught the plane. Storm sat back. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He thought of the badly air-conditioned little office on the waterfront in Hongkong, saw the sweat marks on the white shirt of 279,, whom he knew well and who had just called himself Dickson. Now 279 would probably be talking to his number two: 'It's okay. London says can do. Let's just go over this ops. schedule again.' Storm smiled wryly. Better they than he. He'd never liked being up against the Chinese. There were too many of them. Station H might be stirring up a hornets' nest, but N, the Invisionfree head honcho, had decided it was time to show the opposition that the Service in Hongkong hadn't quite gone out of business. When, three days before, N had first told him his name was down for night duty, Storm hadn't taken to the idea. He had argued that he didn't know enough about the routine work of the stations, that it was too responsible a job to give a man who had been in the double-O section for six years and who had forgotten all he had ever known about station work.
----'You'll soon pick it up,' N had said unsympathetically. 'If you get in trouble there are the duty section officers or the Chief of Staff - or me, for the matter of that.' (Storm had smiled at the thought of waking N up in the middle of the night because some man in Cairo or Tokyo was in a flap.) 'Anyway, I've decided. I want all senior officers to do their spell of routine.' N had looked frostily across at Storm. 'Matter of fact, 008, I had the Treasury on to me the other day. Their liaison man thinks the double-O section is redundant. Says that kind of thing is out of date. I couldn't bother to argue' - N's voice was mild. 'Just told him he was mistaken.' (Storm could visualize the scene.) 'However, won't do any harm for you to have some extra duties now you're back in New York. Keep you from getting stale.' And Storm wasn't minding it. He was half way through his first week and so far it had just been a question of common sense or passing routine problems on down to the sections. He rather liked the peaceful room and knowing everybody's secrets and being occasionally fed coffee and sandwiches by one of the pretty girls from the canteen. On the first night the girl had brought him tea. Storm had looked at her severely.
----'I don't drink tea. I hate it. It's mud. Moreover it's one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.' The girl had giggled and scurried off to spread Storm's dictum in the canteen. From then on he had got his coffee. The expression 'a cup of mud' was seeping through the building. A second reason why Storm enjoyed the long vacuum of night duty was that it gave him- time to get on with a project he had been toying with for more than a year - a handbook of all secret methods of unarmed combat. It was to be called "Stay Alive!" It would contain the best of all that had been written on the subject by the Secret Services of the world. Storm had told no one of the project, but he hoped that, if he could finish it, N would allow it to be added to the short list of Service manuals which contained the tricks and techniques of Secret Intelligence. Storm had borrowed the original textbooks, or where necessary, translations, from Records. Most of the books had been captured from enemy agents or organizations. Some had been presented to N by sister Services such as OSS, CIA and the Deuxieme. Now Storm drew towards him a particular prize, a translation of the manual, entitled simply Defence, issued to operatives of SMERSH, the Soviet organization of vengeance and deletion. That night he was half way through Chapter Two, whose title, freely translated, was 'Come-along and Restraint Holds'. Now he went back to the book and read for half an hour through the sections dealing with the conventional 'Wrist Come-along', 'Arm Lock Come-along', 'Forearm Lock', 'Head Hold' and 'Use of Neck Pressure Points'. After half an hour, Storm thrust the typescript away from him. He got up and went across to the window and stood looking out. There was a nauseating toughness in the blunt prose the Russians used. It had brought on another of the attacks of revulsion to which Storm had succumbed ten days before at Miami airport. What was wrong with him? Couldn't he take it any more? Was he going soft, or was he only stale? Storm stood for a while watching the moon riding, careering, through the clouds. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to his desk. He decided that he was as fed up with the variations of violent physical behaviour as a psychoanalyst must become with the mental aberrations of his patients. Storm read again the passage that had revolted him: 'A drunken woman can also usually be handled by using the thumb and forefinger to grab the lower lip. By pinching hard and twisting, as the pull is made, the woman will come along.' Storm grunted. The obscene delicacy of that 'thumb and forefinger'! Storm lit a cigarette and stared into the filament of the desk light, switching his mind to other things, wishing that a signal would come in or the telephone ring. Another five hours to go before the nine o'clock report to the Chief of Staff or to N, if N happened to come in early. There was something nagging at his mind, something he had wanted to check on when he had the time. What was it? What had triggered off the reminder? Yes, that was it, 'forefinger' -Goldgengar. He would see if Records had anything on the man. Storm picked up the green telephone and dialled Records.
----'Doesn't ring a bell, sir. I'll check and call you back.' Storm put down the receiver. The green telephone rang.
----'Three Goldgengars, sir, but two of them are dead. The third's a Russian post office in Geneva. Got a hairdressing business. Slips the messages into the right-hand coat pocket when he brushes the customers down. He lost a leg at Stalingrad. Any good, sir? There's plenty more on him.'
----'No thanks. That couldn't be my man.'
----'We could put a trace through CID Records in the morning. Got a picture, sir?' Storm remembered the Leica film. He hadn't even bothered to have it developed. It would be quicker to mock up the man's face on the Identicast. He said,
----'Is the Identicast room free?'
----'Yes, sir. And I can operate it for you if you like.'
----'Thanks. I'll come down.' Storm told the switchboard to let heads of sections know where he would be and went out and took the lift down to Records on the first floor. The big building was extraordinarily quiet at night. Be neath the silence there was a soft whisper of machinery and hidden life - the muffled clack of a typewriter as Storm passed a door, a quickly suppressed stammer of radio static as he passed another, the soft background whine of the ventilation system. It gave you the impression of being in a battleship in harbour. The Records duty officer was already at the controls of the Identicast in the projection room. He said to Storm,
----'Could you give me the main lines of the face, sir? That'll help me leave out the slides that are obviously no good.' Storm did so and sat back and watched the lighted screen. The Identicast is a machine for building up an approximate picture of a suspect - or of someone who has perhaps only been glimpsed in a street or a train or in a passing car. It works on the magic lantern principle. The operator flashes on the screen various head-shapes and sizes. When one is recognized it stays on the screen. Then various haircuts are shown, and then all the other features follow and are chosen one by one - different shapes of eyes, noses, chins, mouths, eyebrows, cheeks, ears. In the end there is the whole picture of a face, as near as the scanner can remember it, and it is photographed and put on record. It took some time to put together Goldgengar's extraordinary face, but the final result was an approximate likeness in monochrome. Storm dictated one or two notes about the sunburn, the colour of the hair and the expression of the eyes, and the job was done. 'Wouldn't like to meet that on a dark night,' commented the man from Records. 'I'll put it through to CID when they come on duty. You should get the answer by lunch time.' Storm went back to the seventh floor. On the other side of the world it was around midnight. Eastern stations were closing down. There was a flurry of signals that had to be dealt with, the night's log to be written up, and then it was eight o'clock. Storm telephoned the canteen for his breakfast. He had just finished it when there came the harsh purr of the red telephone. N! Why the hell had he got in half an hour early?
----'Yes, sir.'
----'Come up to my office, 008. I want to have a word before you go off duty.'
----'Sir.' Storm put the telephone back. He slipped on his coat and ran a hand through his hair, told the switchboard where he would be, took the night log and went up in the lift to the eighth and top floor. Neither the desirable Miss Moneypenny nor the Chief of Staff was on duty. Storm knocked on N's door and went in. 'Sit down, 008.' N was going through the pipe-lighting routine. He looked pink and well scrubbed. The lined sailor's face above the stiff white collar and loosely tied spotted bow tie was damnably brisk and cheerful. Storm was conscious of the black stubble on his own chin and of the all-night look of his skin and clothes. He sharpened his mind. 'Quiet night?' N had got his pipe going. His hard, healthy eyes regarded Storm attentively. 'Pretty quiet, sir. Station H
----IT WAS a week later. Storm stood at the open window of the seventh-floor office of the tall building in New York that is the headquarters of the Invisionfree service. The city lay asleep under a full moon that rode swiftly over the town through a shoal of herring-bone clouds. One of the telephones rang in the dark room. Storm turned and moved quickly to the central desk and the pool of light cast by the green shaded reading-lamp. He picked up the black telephone at the fourth ring. He said,
----'Duty officer.'
----'Station H, sir.'
----'Put them on.' There was the echoing buzz and twang of the usual bad radio connection with Hongkong. Why were there always sunspots over China? A sing-song voice asked,
----'Universal Export?'
----'Yes.' A deep, close voice - New York - said,
----'You're through to Hongkong. Speak up, please.'
----'Clear the line, please.' Storm said impatiently.
----'You're through now. Speak up, please,' the sing-song voice said.
----'Hullo! Hullo! Universal Export?'
---- 'Yes.'
----'Dickson speaking. Can you hear me?'
----'Yes.'
----'That cable I sent you about the shipment of mangoes. Fruit. You know?'
----'Yes. Got it here.' Storm pulled the file towards him. He knew what it was about. Station H wanted some limpet mines to put paid to three Communist spy junks that were using Macao to intercept British freighters and search them for refugees from China. 'Must have payment by the tenth.' That would mean that the junks were leaving, or else that the guards on the junks would be doubled after that date, or some other emergency. Storm said briefly,
----'Wilco.'
----'Thanks.'
----'Bye.'
----"Bye." Storm put down the receiver. He picked up the green receiver and dialled Q Branch and talked to the section duty officer. It would be all right. There was a BOAC Britannia leaving in the morning. Q Branch would see that the crate caught the plane. Storm sat back. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He thought of the badly air-conditioned little office on the waterfront in Hongkong, saw the sweat marks on the white shirt of 279,, whom he knew well and who had just called himself Dickson. Now 279 would probably be talking to his number two: 'It's okay. London says can do. Let's just go over this ops. schedule again.' Storm smiled wryly. Better they than he. He'd never liked being up against the Chinese. There were too many of them. Station H might be stirring up a hornets' nest, but N, the Invisionfree head honcho, had decided it was time to show the opposition that the Service in Hongkong hadn't quite gone out of business. When, three days before, N had first told him his name was down for night duty, Storm hadn't taken to the idea. He had argued that he didn't know enough about the routine work of the stations, that it was too responsible a job to give a man who had been in the double-O section for six years and who had forgotten all he had ever known about station work.
----'You'll soon pick it up,' N had said unsympathetically. 'If you get in trouble there are the duty section officers or the Chief of Staff - or me, for the matter of that.' (Storm had smiled at the thought of waking N up in the middle of the night because some man in Cairo or Tokyo was in a flap.) 'Anyway, I've decided. I want all senior officers to do their spell of routine.' N had looked frostily across at Storm. 'Matter of fact, 008, I had the Treasury on to me the other day. Their liaison man thinks the double-O section is redundant. Says that kind of thing is out of date. I couldn't bother to argue' - N's voice was mild. 'Just told him he was mistaken.' (Storm could visualize the scene.) 'However, won't do any harm for you to have some extra duties now you're back in New York. Keep you from getting stale.' And Storm wasn't minding it. He was half way through his first week and so far it had just been a question of common sense or passing routine problems on down to the sections. He rather liked the peaceful room and knowing everybody's secrets and being occasionally fed coffee and sandwiches by one of the pretty girls from the canteen. On the first night the girl had brought him tea. Storm had looked at her severely.
----'I don't drink tea. I hate it. It's mud. Moreover it's one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.' The girl had giggled and scurried off to spread Storm's dictum in the canteen. From then on he had got his coffee. The expression 'a cup of mud' was seeping through the building. A second reason why Storm enjoyed the long vacuum of night duty was that it gave him- time to get on with a project he had been toying with for more than a year - a handbook of all secret methods of unarmed combat. It was to be called "Stay Alive!" It would contain the best of all that had been written on the subject by the Secret Services of the world. Storm had told no one of the project, but he hoped that, if he could finish it, N would allow it to be added to the short list of Service manuals which contained the tricks and techniques of Secret Intelligence. Storm had borrowed the original textbooks, or where necessary, translations, from Records. Most of the books had been captured from enemy agents or organizations. Some had been presented to N by sister Services such as OSS, CIA and the Deuxieme. Now Storm drew towards him a particular prize, a translation of the manual, entitled simply Defence, issued to operatives of SMERSH, the Soviet organization of vengeance and deletion. That night he was half way through Chapter Two, whose title, freely translated, was 'Come-along and Restraint Holds'. Now he went back to the book and read for half an hour through the sections dealing with the conventional 'Wrist Come-along', 'Arm Lock Come-along', 'Forearm Lock', 'Head Hold' and 'Use of Neck Pressure Points'. After half an hour, Storm thrust the typescript away from him. He got up and went across to the window and stood looking out. There was a nauseating toughness in the blunt prose the Russians used. It had brought on another of the attacks of revulsion to which Storm had succumbed ten days before at Miami airport. What was wrong with him? Couldn't he take it any more? Was he going soft, or was he only stale? Storm stood for a while watching the moon riding, careering, through the clouds. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to his desk. He decided that he was as fed up with the variations of violent physical behaviour as a psychoanalyst must become with the mental aberrations of his patients. Storm read again the passage that had revolted him: 'A drunken woman can also usually be handled by using the thumb and forefinger to grab the lower lip. By pinching hard and twisting, as the pull is made, the woman will come along.' Storm grunted. The obscene delicacy of that 'thumb and forefinger'! Storm lit a cigarette and stared into the filament of the desk light, switching his mind to other things, wishing that a signal would come in or the telephone ring. Another five hours to go before the nine o'clock report to the Chief of Staff or to N, if N happened to come in early. There was something nagging at his mind, something he had wanted to check on when he had the time. What was it? What had triggered off the reminder? Yes, that was it, 'forefinger' -Goldgengar. He would see if Records had anything on the man. Storm picked up the green telephone and dialled Records.
----'Doesn't ring a bell, sir. I'll check and call you back.' Storm put down the receiver. The green telephone rang.
----'Three Goldgengars, sir, but two of them are dead. The third's a Russian post office in Geneva. Got a hairdressing business. Slips the messages into the right-hand coat pocket when he brushes the customers down. He lost a leg at Stalingrad. Any good, sir? There's plenty more on him.'
----'No thanks. That couldn't be my man.'
----'We could put a trace through CID Records in the morning. Got a picture, sir?' Storm remembered the Leica film. He hadn't even bothered to have it developed. It would be quicker to mock up the man's face on the Identicast. He said,
----'Is the Identicast room free?'
----'Yes, sir. And I can operate it for you if you like.'
----'Thanks. I'll come down.' Storm told the switchboard to let heads of sections know where he would be and went out and took the lift down to Records on the first floor. The big building was extraordinarily quiet at night. Be neath the silence there was a soft whisper of machinery and hidden life - the muffled clack of a typewriter as Storm passed a door, a quickly suppressed stammer of radio static as he passed another, the soft background whine of the ventilation system. It gave you the impression of being in a battleship in harbour. The Records duty officer was already at the controls of the Identicast in the projection room. He said to Storm,
----'Could you give me the main lines of the face, sir? That'll help me leave out the slides that are obviously no good.' Storm did so and sat back and watched the lighted screen. The Identicast is a machine for building up an approximate picture of a suspect - or of someone who has perhaps only been glimpsed in a street or a train or in a passing car. It works on the magic lantern principle. The operator flashes on the screen various head-shapes and sizes. When one is recognized it stays on the screen. Then various haircuts are shown, and then all the other features follow and are chosen one by one - different shapes of eyes, noses, chins, mouths, eyebrows, cheeks, ears. In the end there is the whole picture of a face, as near as the scanner can remember it, and it is photographed and put on record. It took some time to put together Goldgengar's extraordinary face, but the final result was an approximate likeness in monochrome. Storm dictated one or two notes about the sunburn, the colour of the hair and the expression of the eyes, and the job was done. 'Wouldn't like to meet that on a dark night,' commented the man from Records. 'I'll put it through to CID when they come on duty. You should get the answer by lunch time.' Storm went back to the seventh floor. On the other side of the world it was around midnight. Eastern stations were closing down. There was a flurry of signals that had to be dealt with, the night's log to be written up, and then it was eight o'clock. Storm telephoned the canteen for his breakfast. He had just finished it when there came the harsh purr of the red telephone. N! Why the hell had he got in half an hour early?
----'Yes, sir.'
----'Come up to my office, 008. I want to have a word before you go off duty.'
----'Sir.' Storm put the telephone back. He slipped on his coat and ran a hand through his hair, told the switchboard where he would be, took the night log and went up in the lift to the eighth and top floor. Neither the desirable Miss Moneypenny nor the Chief of Staff was on duty. Storm knocked on N's door and went in. 'Sit down, 008.' N was going through the pipe-lighting routine. He looked pink and well scrubbed. The lined sailor's face above the stiff white collar and loosely tied spotted bow tie was damnably brisk and cheerful. Storm was conscious of the black stubble on his own chin and of the all-night look of his skin and clothes. He sharpened his mind. 'Quiet night?' N had got his pipe going. His hard, healthy eyes regarded Storm attentively. 'Pretty quiet, sir. Station H
