There are times in an operation when you think, I may not get out of this one alive. The thought is fleeting and then you fight like bugger to make sure you do get out alive.
Only this time, I know this is IT. This is the end. No tomorrow.

Part Four.

I would have to say I am not comfortable. Well you cannot be when you are lying spread eagle in shallow water minus your knickers and secured to a cold half inch thick sheet of steel. Oh, and someone is gently rubbing the bud I should not have to stop me pretending to be asleep.

I groan. Or is that moan. But I can’t pretend anymore. And, Ooh God! Breath shudders from me in relief when she stops doing it. I know it is Herr Müller’s little Miss Korea as I can smell her perfume and she has this tinkling light laughter.

Then she rakes her fingernail along my bud and my brain and lower bits explode into that full technicolour fireworks thing writers always go on about and I make nonsensical little bird noises for a while. Oh GOD! This is not supposed to happening! But Oh WOW! Am I in sexual heaven and it is all too late. Because soon I will be dead.

But that girl is perverted and I am positively bi-sexual now and anytime she wants to go to bed with me is ok by me...

Except I know that is not really going to happen. But anything that keeps my mind occupied and not thinking about what is about to happen to me is fine and ok as far as my brain is concerned, given it has worked out where we are now and what is happening.

“Good. You awake now. Herr Müller, he like say, good-bye to you.”

I open my eyes slowly. For some reason Little Miss Korea seems to be floating above and moving away from me. There is the faint hum of electricity. She is laying on her side raised up on one elbow watching me. She smiles when I look at her and gives me a little wave with her fingers.

As she does I cannot ignore the hissing crackling sound on my left anymore and look, seeing another sheet of metal which, I guess is like mine. Except that this one has a plasma cutter doing serious Grievous Bodily Harm to it. The plasma cutter is on a central arm letting it swing around to work on four sheets of steel in turn in the water pool. If it is going in a clockwise direction, and the sheet getting GBH done to it is number one, then I am on number four. Great. I get to watch it cut three up before I get to die screaming in agony as the plasma cutter cuts me in two. If it is going the other way. Not my day.

There are times in an operation when you think, I may not get out of this one alive. The thought is fleeting and then you fight like bugger to make sure you do get out alive.

Only this time, I know this is IT. This is the end. No tomorrow.

On the face of it, I would rather have not known how I was going to die screaming my head off until shock or my lungs buy it. And I think I would have preferred the laser beam as well.

At some point in the future Casandra Belmont will take a last look at my file and then drop it into the shredder at the end of her desk, and Max Johnson will no longer have ever existed. What the hell. It was not my real name, anyway.

“Hello Em-ma, or is it rather, secret agent Max of M.I.6?”

Herr Müller has appeared on my right looming above me. Only this time I can see why, he is standing on some kind of platform over the pool water.

He is grinning down at me.

“That is one hell of a disguise you have their. Turning yourself into a real woman complete with a full set of genuine sexual organs. I give you full marks for dedication. It is just a pity you did not do your research correctly. Trying to sneak in as an old girlfriend. Did you not know?
Emma died in a car crash in Brazil four years ago?”

Fuck. What could I say. I knew my side had screwed me. They do not makes mistakes like that. The offices were full of Oxbridge graduates. They might be useless at anything practical, like parking in our underground garage without hitting something, but they could research the arse off you.

The plasma cutter moves over to the second sheet and starts hissing crackling as it cuts into it. Müller paused, we both watched it for a moment.

“All that effort for nothing. It is a pity I have to return you in two parts. But, after that is done with you.”

He nods to the plasma cutter and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, ‘Sorry about that’. He looks back down at me.

“I was thinking of mounting you in two tanks of formaldehyde. Like the Damien Hirst thing. You know, his cow cut in two. What do you think about becoming two pieces of artwork?”

Should have used the old laser then, me old mate. I think. Less messy. Cleaner cut. But I say nothing. Chin-up, and We about to die, all that rot.

He turns away from me. Says something to someone.

“You think I’ll talk.”

I know JB said that in the movie, but what else is there to say. ‘Sorry old boy. About spying on you and all that. But do you think you could untie me and let me go home now, please’.

He turns back to look at me for a moment.

“Oh, no Max.” He say chuckling. “Or is it, Em-ma. No. I expect you to Die.”

And turns away laughing shaking his head as the platform starts to move away from me. Then stops, and looks back at me still shaking his head laughing. He calls back to me. “I almost said, Mr Bond, then.”
And turns away laughing to himself.

The plasma cutter turns to the third sheet and crackles back into life dead in line with me now, and starts cutting. I watch as it cuts through the steel sheet from end to end knowing I have only a minute or two at the most left to live.

“Of course.” He says. He is back looming above me with Little Miss Korea beside him toting a whacking great big hand gun in her small hands.

My eyes are fixed on the plasma cutter. Watching it leave the sheet of steel cut in two. Watching it start towards my sheet. I shut my eyes shut tight and wait to scream in pain as it cuts through me till I am dead and hope the shock kills me quickly, knowing it will not. It is amazing how much destruction the body can stand if you do not take out anything vital before it gives up the ghost.

“If you like.” My eyes flick back to his as he watches my face. “Suki could put a bullet in your brain.”

He makes a motion with his hands to say ‘if you want her too?

It is almost to my sheet.

Then there is a hard crack like the sound of lighting striking as six feet from my spread ankles the plasma cutter starts up again and begins to cut into the sheet I am laying on.

I turn my head away and say nothing. But I think, you are a bloody fool. He is offering you a painless way out and you turn your head away. I close my eyes tight and wait.

There is a soft putt…

Ms Casandra Belmont looked at the Max Johnson/Emma DeVoe’s file on her desk. And at the hand written note from the head of MI6 beside it. Telling her to put the file down the Slot. She had refused to do so, so far. Despite many requests from up above. Even if the consensus was he, or rather she, had died on the day or soon after at Müller’s hands.

She held the file lightly in her fingers. She knew this time with a hand written note she could not disobey him. If she did, she would get a text informing her of her instant retirement as she travelled home tonight, and her replacement would make putting the file down the slot the first thing he or she did in the morning.

They had been more than pleased with the results of operation Müller three years ago. Delighted at how well and to plan it had all gone, and of course the information gained had been invaluable.

When Operation Müller first arrived in her office it had already been running for six months and they came knowing who they wanted from her. The woman Emma, from the Paris operation. They said she was perfect double of a woman Müller had known. They were shocked when she told them Emma had been a man in disguise, but then to her surprise were for some reason delighted by it.

She had objected to the Head of MI6 when she found her man was being thrown away as a decoy who would be blown the moment he/she met Herr Müller and said that name with little or no chance of escape.

She had still set up a quick escape route with the Spanish and had waited all night in the hope of getting the signal telling her that her girl was on the way home mad as hell on finding just how real she had become. But the call never came. And that seemed to please the people behind the operation even more.

The sole purpose of Operation Müller had been to protect their real source of information inside Herr Müller’s organisation. And they were prepared to sacrifice one of her people to do it. They had known the real Emma DeVoe had died during an attempted kidnap attempt at Herr Müller’s estate in Brazil and that the knowledge had been a closely guarded secret known only to a very few.

She dropped the file down the slot to the shredder, and picked up an internal phone. Pressed a button and waited, then said with a sad voice. “Tell him, it has been done.”

And wished the person on the other end a good week-end, and put the phone down.

With a small smile she went into the secure email program on the laptop she used. She clicked on a photo and sent it to her office printer, which she placed in her purse. Then she deleted the email and a small worm program worked its way back through the internet destroying any scrap of evidence it had ever existed.

On the way home in the car that evening she leant back in the rear seat watching London’s night lift pass her by outside. She was nearly forty-three and had been in charge of the dirty tricks department for twelve years now. Maybe it was time to retire. She would see how she felt in the morning.

Then, she thought of the photograph in her purse, and took it out. Gently smiling at it. Remembering the words on the email it came in.

HMG of course was Her Majesty’s Government. And EDV, well. The photograph showed a smiling Wolfgang Müller with his arm around a smiling very proud Emma DeVoe in a bikini on a super yacht. In front of them a happy pretty little blonde haired girl of about two years of age played in a child’s plastic sand pit.

The End

A point of consideration – I haven’t a clue what a plasma cutter sounds like. So you will have to forgive writers license to how I describe it.
Be Seeing You.