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35
CHAPTER
FIVE
These days the name and occupation of James Bond was
known throughout the world, and because Bond's fame invariably preceded him he had
long since been forced into using a false name whilst on an assignment. The
nom-de-plume he used was James Band. Dreamed up by M, it had originally been
James Bund. It was a devilishly cunning ploy, since Bund was so close to
Bond’s real name that no one would ever suspect that a man wishing to hide
his identity would be so stupid as to pick a name that differed from his real
name by only a single vowel. Bond himself had not been completely sold on the
idea but had gone along with it at M’s insistence, just grateful that his
name wasn’t James Cont. He had later got M’s permission to change it
to Band as he felt more comfortable with that name and it had worked like a
charm, the only hiccup being once when he’d introduced himself as James
Band to a Mr Greenberg and Greenberg had tried to book him for his son’s bar
mitzvah party. Now, posing as James Band, an entrepreneur
who was considering re-locating his rubber conglomerate to Stockport, Bond was
in the office of the Stockport Information Officer, Mr Medlock. “Stockport has always been an important town. In pre-Roman days it was a strategic link across the River Mersey from the south into the north-west. Today it remains the nexus of a national and international communications network,” Medlock said for the third time that morning. His speech on Stockport, which he recited quite regularly to school groups, trippers and frequent visiting parties from Stockport’s twin towns Beziers in France and Heilbronn in Germany, took fifteen minutes. Medlock, a meticulous man to a fault, knew it was fifteen minutes because he had timed it at that, and on the occasions he had checked, he had been accurate to plus or minus ten seconds. However today it had already taken fourteen minutes and he was still only five minutes into it due to the fact that Bond had twice fallen asleep. Medlock, not knowing quite how much information Bond had missed whilst asleep, and determined that Bond should get a complete picture of Stockport, had started again from the beginning on each occasion. The reasons why Bond was finding it difficult to stay awake were twofold; Medlock, as is often the case with people who have to deliver the same speech time after time, did it on automatic pilot it and in a dull monotone; Bond was by no means the first recipient of Medlock’s speech to be driven into the arms of Morpheus. |