Free Win, Lose or Die by John Gardner

his face.
    After a couple of heartbeats, Bond said - “Christmas on Ischia, then, sir. Just tell me what to do.”
    “First,” M began, “you’ll have to run the thing solo. We can give you only modest cover. Nothing fancy, and certainly not the local police…” He went on for the next hour, and as he progressed, Bond realised that, as ever, the whole business would be down to him. Sit there and wait for a woman out to kill him, and who would possibly have a back-up; then outwit her; and, finally, bring her back into the UK with everyone, including himself, alive and kicking.
    “Run of the mill sort of job really,” he said when M stopped talking.
    “The kind of thing you should be able to do, armed with a butterfly-net and a killing jar, 007.”
    “I’ll settle for the killing jar.” Bond smiled. “Preferably mm with a lot of kick to it. You know, the kind of thing any Christmas stalking-horse carries around.” At just about the same moment as Bond was being apprised of how he would spend a happy Christmas, Harry and Bill were putting some bad news to their old friend the Petty Officer Engineer.
    “It’s not that we don’t like you, Blackie,” Bill was saying.
    “We’re under a certain amount of pressure ourselves.”
    “I mean we didn’t know they took photographs in that place, and there’s a fair old collection now as you can see.” Harry laid out some thirty black and white prints on the table.
    They were in Harry’s room at his usual Plymouth hotel. The photographs, with their grainy texture, looked almost as dirty as the cavortings they had captured for all time. The PO looked very miserable. “You’d send these to the wife?” It was not so much a question as a shocked statement.
    “No, “course we wouldn’t,” Harry’s voice was low, soothing.
    Oil on troubled waters. “We’re in the mire as much as you are, Blackie. We didn’t know.”
    “And there’s all that money.” Bill tried to look as miserable as his colleague. “I mean we put things on our expense accounts.
    Now, we’re both in the same boat. It’s coming to something when two companies, with two different interests, turn down your expenses.
    “And we always understood that place with the girls was buckshee.
    They never charged us a penny before.”
    “How… How much are we talking about?” The Petty Officer was chalk-white. He could real the blood draining from his cheeks.
    Harry sighed. “Seven thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
    “And sixty-two pence,” Bill added.
    “But I can’t … There’s no way. The wife’ll kill me - at best leave me - and there’s no way I can get my hands on that kind of money.
    “Second mortgage on the house?” Harry asked.
    “First bloody mortgage isn’t paid off yet.” The gloom was almost tangible.
    Harry gathered the photographs up into a neat pile. “They have offered us a way out, but I said you’d as like do it as fly using your arms.
    “What is it? The way out?”
    “Well, I don’t think you’d want to hear it.”
    Bill, who had poured them each a stiff whisky, interrupted.
    “They’re offering money on top, though. Best tell him.”
    “Well,” Harry sighed again. “Okay, it gets us all off the hook, and they’ll throw in one hundred K for you, Blackie, seeing as how you’d be taking the biggest risk.”
    “A hundred grand? For me? Who’ve I got to kill?”
    “It’s not a matter of killing.” Harry moved closer, and began to make the Petty Officer the offer which, in the circumstances, he could not afford to refuse.
    See Naples and . Naples was not James Bond’s favourite city.
    Now, sitting in a bumper-to-bumper, horn-hooting, yelling traffic jam, cramming one of the narrow streets leading down to the harbour, he placed it almost at the bottom of his list. The double-lane freeway from the airport had not been too bad, but, as ever, the city streets were crowded and in a state of chaos. To make matters worse it was raining: that