They walked on down the boulevard, keeping close to the wall. After ten minutes, they came in sight of the twenty-foot-high hoarding that formed a facing wall to the T intersection at the bottom of the street. The moon was behind the hoarding and its face in the shadow. Now Kerim walked even more carefully, putting each foot softly in front of him. About a hundred yards from the hoarding the shadows ended and the moon blazed whitely down on the intersection. Kerim stopped in the last dark doorway and stationed Bond in front of him, up against his chest. ‘Now we must wait,’ he whispered. Bond heard Kerim fiddling behind him. There came a soft plop as the lid of the leather case came off. A thin, heavy steel tube, about two feet long, with a bulge at each end, was pressed into Bond’s hand. ‘Sniperscope. German model,’ whispered Kerim. ‘Infra-red lens. Sees in the dark. Have a look at that big film advertisement over there. That face. Just below the nose. You’ll see the outline of a trap-door. In direct line down from the signal box.’
Bond rested his forearm against the door jamb and raised the tube to his right eye. He focused it on the patch of black shadow opposite. Slowly the black dissolved into grey. The outline of a huge woman’s face and some lettering appeared. Now Bond could read the lettering. It said: NIYAGARA. MARILYN MONROE VE JOSEPH COTTEN and underneath, the cartoon feature, BONZO FUTBOLOU. Bond inched the glass down the vast pile of Marilyn Monroe’s hair, and the cliff of forehead, and down the two feet of nose to the cavernous nostrils. A faint square showed in the poster. It ran from below the nose into the great alluring curve of the lips. It was about three feet deep. From it, there would be a longish drop to the ground.
Behind Bond there sounded a series of soft clicks. Kerim held forward his walking-stick. As Bond had supposed, it was a gun, a rifle, with a skeleton butt which was also a twist breech. The squat bulge of a silencer had taken the place of the rubber tip.
‘Barrel from the new 88 Winchester,’ whispered Kerim proudly. ‘Put together for me by a man in Ankara. Takes the .308 cartridge. The short one. Three of them. Give me the glass. I want to get that trap-door lined up before my men go in at the front. Mind if I use your shoulder as a rest?’
‘All right.’ Bond handed Kerim the Sniperscope. Kerim clipped it to the top of the barrel and slid the gun along Bond’s shoulder.
‘Got it,’ whispered Kerim. ‘Where Vavra said. He’s a good man that.’ He lowered his gun just as two policemen appeared at the right-hand corner of the intersection. Bond stiffened.
‘It’s all right,’ whispered Kerim. ‘That’s my boy and the chauffeur.’ He put two fingers in his mouth. A very quick, very low-pitched whistle sounded for a fraction of a second. One of the policemen lifted his hand to the back of his neck. The two policemen turned and walked away, their boots ringing loudly on the paving stones.
‘Few minutes more,’ whispered Kerim. ‘They’ve got to get round the back of that hoarding.’ Bond felt the heavy barrel of the gun slip into place along his right shoulder.
The moonstruck silence was broken by a loud iron clang from the signal box behind the hoarding. One of the signal arms dropped. A green pinpoint of light showed among the cluster of reds. There was a soft slow rumble in the distance, away to the left by Seraglio Point. It came closer and sorted itself into the heavy pant of an engine and the grinding clangour of a string of badly coupled goods trucks. A faint yellow glimmer shone along the embankment to the left. The engine came labouring into view above the hoarding.
The train slowly clanked by on its hundred-mile journey to the Greek frontier, a broken black silhouette against the silver sea, and the heavy cloud of smoke from its cheap fuel drifted towards them on the still air. As the red light on the brake van glimmered briefly and disappeared, there came the deeper rumble as the engine entered a cutting, and then two harsh, mournful whoops as it whistled its approach to the little station of Buyuk, a mile further down the line.
The rumble of the train died away. Bond felt the gun press deeper into his shoulder. He strained his eyes into the target of shadow. In the centre of it, a deeper square of blackness showed.
Bond cautiously lifted his left hand to shade his eyes from the moon. There came a hiss of breath from behind his right ear. ‘He’s coming.’
Out of the mouth of the huge, shadowed poster, between the great violet lips, half-open in ecstasy, the dark shape of a man emerged and hung down like a worm from the mouth of a corpse.
The man dropped. A ship going up towards the Bosphorus growled in the night like a sleepless animal in a zoo. Bond felt a prickle of sweat on his forehead. The barrel of the rifle depressed as the man stepped softly off the pavement towards them.
When he’s at the edge of the shadow, he’ll start to run, thought Bond. You damn fool, get the sights further down.
