City of Dust and Ghosts: A James Bond Halloween Story

The Fields of the Dead

Mercifully, they didn't put him in the trunk. Instead Bond was piled in the back of a car he very much suspected was the SUV he'd tailed earlier in the evening. There was one man in the back with him, and every so often the muzzle of the man's rifle would poke him in the ribs. Bond guessed there was another man in the passenger seat, though he didn't say much, and Bond couldn't understand what little he did say.

Reichlin said nothing to Bond, but made terse conversation with the other men in French. Bond could make out a few terms: lock down, security protocols, just to be certain...Reichlin wasn't an amateur and wasn't going to let too much information out into the atmosphere.

Abruptly they lurched about in their seats as the SUV's tires left pavement for unimproved roads. They'd left the ring road, Bond knew, and mentally calculated the direction they took. Not north, for that would put them too close to the airport, and east was too heavily developed. South, Bond guessed, to the banks of the Charl River.

The car bounced on for a few more miles, before it came to a merciful stop. "All right," he heard Reichlin say. "Everyone out." Bond was grabbed roughly and dragged from the vehicle, grunting a bit as his knees barked against the doorframe, then thrown into an unceremonious heap on the ground. He smelled dirt and sand through the hood.

"We're cutting loose your hands," Reichlin said. His voice came from Bond's one o'clock, and he made a mental note of it. "We just don't want to do it after we kill you. The less we have to handle the corpses, the better." Bond felt his arms pulled upward as a knife blade slipped beneath the plastic ties on his wrists. "Don't try to fight or it will go much worse for you. We are very much alone here, and we can make your death very painful and most undignified." With a snap! Bond felt the flex cuffs give way, and his hands became cool, then hot with the return of circulation.

"No use for my organs, then?" Bond asked as he lifted himself into a sitting position. "You know I'm liable to take offense to that."

"We need you to die a certain way," Reichlin said as if discussing a business model. "Make it look like retaliation for N'Gozi. Scheisse! Now we'll have all the commandoes coming here looking for militants to fight. This plan is fucked."

"But there are no militants, are there?" Bond asked, his pulse racing. Now that he knew Reichlin's plans for him, all he could do was play for time until some opportunity—some impossible opportunity—presented itself. "You were working with N'Gozi on this...whatever your plan is."

"He was a good partner." Bond could have sworn that Reichlin sounded wistful. "We could have continued for, I think, another eighteen months maybe before the world started getting suspicious of their aid workers going missing. But the British diplomat's cousin caused us too many problems. We had to do something to satisfy the questions."

"And you didn't want to leave it to me to kill him. You had to do it yourself."
"We Germans are thorough. Not going to leave things to the British. We just needed you here for show." A foot impacted between Bond's shoulder-blades and he hunched forward. "But you were stupid and curious."

Bond heard the bolt being worked on a Kalashnikov, and his thought desperately for something to say to stave off the bullet for just one more second. As his brain scrambled, he heard her whisper in his ear, even felt her breath on his cheek as if she was under the hood with him.

"You have work to do."

Suddenly, Bond heard the men on either side of him scream with such pure, unfiltered terror, Bond could only describe them as blood-curdling. They were drown out by the explosive chatter of a Kalashnikov firing. He yanked the hood from his head, and winced against the muzzle-flash from the man to his left. Bond kicked out at the knees of the man on his right and brought him down. Disoriented, his face a mask of abject horror, the rifle came easily out of his hands. Bond fired once into the man's chest, then let the barrel fall against his shoulder like a soldier bringing his rifle to shoulder-arms, and fired a raking burst behind him. He leapt to his feet and spun around in time to see the second man stagger forward, fire a last burp from his gun before the bolt slammed shut on an empty chamber, then pitch face-first into the dirt.

The SUV was a few meters directly in front of him, and bathed in the scarlet light of the tail lights. Reichlin clumped against the bumper. His legs kicked at the ground with decreasing effect, and after a moment Bond noticed the darkening stain spreading on the left side of his chest.

"Your men need better trigger control," Bond said, levelling the rifle at him. "They weren't shooting at you, so who did they kill you just to miss?" But he could see the man was gone. His legs kicked out uselessly one last time before he slumped the ground, propped up only by the SUV. His eyes were staring at something beyond Bond—maybe beyond anything. "Mein Gott! Es ist ihr!" His voice was a panicked whisper. "Sie ist zurück gekommen! Gut, helft uns allen, dass sie zurückkommt...sie ist zurück gekommen...sie ist zurück gekommen..." he broke off into a choke, then a bloody gargle, and then he went still.

Bond looked around. He was standing in a massive empty lot which was probably the abandoned footprint of some long-demolished building. The ground was dirt and dust with crumbling concrete beams jutting forth like sclerotic limbs. In the far distance, he could see the unlit buildings of N'Djamena slouching against the night like teeth in the mouth of a corpse.

"Linnea!" he called out, but got no response. Bond tossed the rifle aside and rummaged through the front seat of the SUV. In the glove box he found a his cel phone, a SureFire flashlight, and Colt 10mm pistol with spare magazines. Bond swept the area with the light, but it yielded nothing more than he already could make out. He shouted her name again, but felt foolish this time. She wasn't here. Her voice, her breath were just the misfiring synapses of a panicked mind.

The wind was beginning to pick up, quickly and viscously, as if nature itself was as offended by what was going on as Bond was. Amid the clouds of dust he could make out a crumpled shape in the near distance, perhaps twenty meters away. Bond knew what he'd find even before he stood above the body and painted it with the SureFire. There was no telling how old the person had been—not after the elements had ravaged it—but the empty chest cavity gazed at him like the socket of a gouged-out eye. Beyond it, on a decline into a half-collapsed structure were two more.

Bond turned and walked back to the SUV. The wind was buffeting him now and beginning to cry out as it whipped between the distant buildings. He jumped in the Mercedes and called M on his secure line.

"There are some loose ends to tie up before my return," he told M when the man answered.

"Loose ends? You said you completed the mission."

"I did," Bond explained, "but now I have to kill a close friend of England. Won't be long."

He ended the call and tossed the phone aside.

He had work to do.