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The outer office at Façade overlooked the
workshop and Bond now took in for a second time the factory floor set out
beneath him. If Façade was a front he needed to know what it was a front
for. However from what he could see from his vantage point it was to all
intents and purposes what it was supposed to be, a shoe manufacturing factory.
There was little in the way of large, sophisticated machinery on the shop floor. When Bond
commented on this to Goldnojaws’ secretary she informed him that
Façade made only top of the range bespoke shoes, largely by hand and by
traditional methods. They were completely organic. This was born out by what
Bond now saw as he looked down into the workshop; rows and rows of tables, a
leather-aproned worker seated at each one shaping leather into shoes. Less like
a factory, more like a giant cobbler’s shop. The rest of the space was
taken up by large piles of sheets of leather in various colours and pallets of
completed footwear here and there.
It was while he
was following the progress of one such pallet, steered by a worker towards some
large rubber doors, that he saw the man in the white lab coat. Bond had seen
the man before somewhere, of that he was quite certain. But where?
Bond never forgot a face. It was one of the reasons he
was a top secret agent. He sometimes failed to immediately put a name to the
face, and where and when and in what context he had seen it, but with due diligence that
invariably came later.
Not too long ago, last
June in fact, he had seen a face in the crowd while he was watching the annual
All England Tennis Championships at Wimbledon on television, an
all too rare treat for Bond, an avid tennis aficionado. He was convinced
he had seen the face before, and quite recently. But where? He searched his
mind but nothing came up. Bond, never a man to give up easily, if ever, left
no stone unturned until he found out the man’s identity. It took up a
whole week of his time. Every hour of that week, apart from a few snatched
hours of sleep, was devoted to putting a name to the face he had seen at
Wimbledon. The police rogues gallery was perused at length, each and every
photo minutely examined; MI6’s own graphic Who’s Who was consulted,
as were pictorial magazines from Hello and OK upwards, and anything else that
may offer up a clue as to the man’s identity. On the eighth day
Bond’s diligence and tenacity paid off and the identity of the mysterious
man at Wimbledon was revealed. It was Roger Federer.
