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67
CHAPTER
NINE
Bond shuddered to wakefulness in the early hours of
the morning, bathed in sweat. Relief anaesthetized his screaming body to
something approaching calm as he realised he had been having a nightmare. And
what a nightmare! It had started out as a dream, as every nightmare does, lulling you into a false sense of security before kicking you viciously in the scrotum. In the dream Bond had been trying to recall the identity of the man in the white overall he had seen all too briefly at Façade. He had perused the police rogues gallery at length, examining minutely each and every photo; MI6’s own graphic Who’s Who had been consulted, as had 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 was revealed. It was Roger Federer. Dreams have scant regard for rhyme or reason and he suddenly he found himself not in his hotel room at the Acton Lodge Hotel but on the centre court at Wimbledon, and now he was not seeing Roger Federer as a face in the crowd at the All-England Club but as his opponent on the other side of the net. He became aware of the noise, the hubbub of the crowd. It was not the gentle polite hum of a crowd waiting for a game of men’s singles to begin but the sound of an unruly mob. He looked up into the packed stands surrounding him on all sides, a goldfish in a bowl. The dream now turned into a nightmare as he saw that the entire crowd was composed of former Bond villains, adversaries he had taken on and defeated in the past in the name of Queen and Country. Each and every one of the Bond villains in the crowd was baying for his blood. There was the evil Dr No from the film of the same name; the sly Three Blind Mice, also from Dr No; The infamous Morzeny and Kronstein representing From Russia With Love; The terrifying Oddjob and Kisch from Goldfinger; Emilio Largo from Thunderball; Ernest Stavro Blofeld from You Only Live Twice; Morton Slumber from Diamonds Are Forever; Whisper from Live And Let Die; Francisco Scaramanga from The Man With The Golden Gun. |