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117
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Bond stood outside the Façade factory shortly
before midnight. As he looked around him
to check if there was anyone in the vicinity half his mind was already
wondering what he would discover once inside the factory. It could be almost
anything. He recalled previous Bond villains who had wanted to take over the
world, and the methods they had employed to achieve their crazed ambitions; Sir
Hugo Drax, whose plan it had been to level five square miles of central London
along with over a million of the capital’s populace with the Moonraker rocket and
its nuclear warhead; Auric Goldfinger who sought world domination by acquiring
for himself all of the world’s supply of gold; Dr Zog, who sought the same ends with
his giant rats; Singh Singh, whose evil plan to add a highly concentrated
laxative to the world’s supply of curry ingredients had had the entire
planet shitting itself, both literally and metaphorically, before Bond had
finally brought him to book; the fiendish Baby Big Brother, who sought to
render the entire world brain dead by taking over the world’s television
stations and feeding the viewing public with wall-to-wall reality programmes,
whose influence remains with us to this day; and many, many more. What was it
about these power-hungry fiends who appeared every with certain
regularity that they should want to rule the whole world? Bond didn’t
know, never would, but what he did know was that as long as they kept springing
up so would he keep taking up the cudgel against them to foil their dark
ambitions, or die in the effort. On his first visit to Facade Bond had quite naturally noted the positions of the burglar alarms. They were of a relatively unsophisticated type and would not have detained even an average burglar for very long, far less James Bond, but there was a much simpler and entirely risk free way of breaking into the factory, and bravado is never an option when safety is a certainty in the world of the Secret Service. Bond now observed that the stone sills of the large quartered windows were barely three feet above the level of the pavement, each window quarter measuring three feet by two, easily large enough for a man to climb though once the glazing had been removed. |