Chapter Text
James Bond braced himself against the violent squirms of an opponent beneath him. Dust rose up around them, kicked into the air by their fight. Despite the desperate force the man hurled at Bond, he stayed down, pinned by a hand around his thin neck and a knife jammed into the inside of his thigh.
There was a look in the dead man’s eyes that begged Bond not to move the knife. This dead man had information. That’s why Bond was here. He’d frantically chased this man for hours, ending here on the dusty floor of a ruined warehouse.
In a few minutes, Bond’s head would clear. He’d look back and remember feeling like his mind was filled with static, but at the moment it felt clear. His path forward wasn’t blocked by all of the subtleties and possibilities that usually jammed up his brain. Labels like “asset” or “lead” didn’t exist, only Raul Silva’s smooth voice whispering that the man below him was a rat. He was already dead, he just didn't know it yet.
Bond pulled the knife toward himself, along the dead man’s femoral artery. The rat wailed as denim and flesh ripped open. Bond felt his lip twitch as he looked around the room, searching for cameras on reflex. The walls bore bullet wounds; some old and some new.
As cries echoed through the cavernous room, Bond’s eyes trained once again on the dead man. Somewhere in Bond’s mind, indistinct memories of dying rats boiled to the surface. They breathed their last on balconies, in cars, in basements, and warehouses just like this one.
Bond’s eyelids fluttered and he looked back up to the warehouse walls. Broken windows, aged industrial machinery, hanging chains, and motes of dust greeted him. Bond inhaled unsteadily and exhaled with calm, centered assuredness.
The rat beneath him stopped squirming.
—
“James, do I have to ask if you killed him?” Felix Leiter drawled inside his ear. The audio compression of the com lent the voice a tinny quality.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been under the impression that this is America,” Bond said, pulling his sunglasses out of his inner pocket and casually placing them atop the scuffed bridge of his nose. “When in Rome, Felix.”
He stepped out into the Nevada sun, watching heat rise over the Mojave desert. Bond adjusted his earpiece and started thumbing through the cloth wallet he’d taken off the dead man. The cash and cards stuck together with drying blood.
“When you get tired of that godforsaken island, consider defection.”
“I don’t know Felix. You dragged me to Las Vegas, Nevada, and what do I find? Banned from every poker table within 50 kilometers.”
Bond smiled, feeling the dry skin of his bottom lip beginning to split. No one could stop him from gambling, not even Leiter. Bond had money and the CIA would never have a long enough reach to stop someone from trying to take it. The ban was more of a suggestion than a rule, but he couldn’t help feeling a mixture of flattery and offense.
“James, your talent with cards is theft. Can’t have a Brit making off with half the money in Nevada.”
“But if I were to, say, give up my allegiance to queen and country?”
“Well then, we might be able to come to an arrangement.”
Bond felt his smile grow wider as he sorted through the wallet’s contents. His dry skin tugged at itself and he stopped himself from wetting his lips. The dramatic shift in climate from the damp gloom of London to the dry heat of Southern Nevada hadn’t done wonders for his skin.
He didn’t like the temptation Leiter presented, lighthearted though it was. A year ago, before his scrap with Raul Silva, he wouldn’t even have acknowledged the defection offer. Now he found it refreshing beyond words that Felix didn’t ask questions.
“There are several IDs here, Felix. I think all of them are fake,” Bond said, prying the contents of the wallet apart. He would have thought a trained killer would at the very least know not to keep them all next to each other. Even teenagers knew to hide their other IDs when attempting to pass off a fake.
“Not a surprise. We can run a check on the names anyway.”
“Edward Strait, Connecticut ID, born on March 5th, 1993. Nathanial Houghton, Florida, born September 10th, 1992. And Gavin Hill, Texas, born January 2nd, 1993.”
“Those dates are close together. Did he seem young?”
Yes, he did, Bond thought. The plea in the dead man’s eyes spoke of inexperience. No reason to have that on record, though.
“No, not when we were fighting. I suppose he could have got an early start in the trained killer business.”
“Maybe,” Felix paused, not pushing the subject further. “Anything useful?”
“Two more cards. A business card for a tailor and a, uh—”
Bond paused, regarding the next blood fringed card with amusement.
“A what, James?”
“A stamp card for a butchery.”
Bond examined the rectangle carefully, noting the high-quality off-white cardstock wasn’t warping from the blood seeping into the paper. Printed above rows of empty boxes sat a stylized meat hook hanging next to the business' name: Martin’s Meats.
“A bit grim,” Bond said, glancing quickly at the blank reverse side.
“Are you giving those out, James? I’ll make you one.”
Bond heard Leiter’s grin through the earpiece. He hesitated for a moment, unsure how to reply. He smiled and looked back inside the warehouse. At the dead man.
“Does that kid count as stamp one?”
He felt like he might be pushing it, but Leiter didn’t back down.
“That’s stamp three. Le Chiffre was one, Greene two.”
“I didn’t kill either of them personally, you know.”
“But you’re the reason I don’t have to deal with them anymore.”
“Can your former boss count as a fourth, then?”
He could hear Felix smother a laugh at the other end of the com. Maybe that was a bit much for company airwaves.
“James, that’s gotta count for two.”
“What do I get for filling up a card?”
“I’ll figure that out when we get there.”
Bond put the cards in the pocket of his leather jacket and started his inspection of the warehouse. Bond appreciated Leiter’s voice in his ear as he walked around the outside of the building, not noticing anything strange. His friend’s slight Texas accent proved a good companion for desert snooping.
“If your last boss was two, how many stamps would I get for your current boss?” Bond asked, glancing toward where he knew the nearby Colorado river seeped out of Hoover Dam, out of sight behind broken bluffs.
“James, please don’t talk about assassinating the director of the CIA over company airwaves.”
They argued the stamp values for various targets while Bond worked. Besides the mystery of a warehouse out in the middle of the Mojave, miles away from anything besides ghost towns and roads in need of a repave, nothing jumped out at Bond. He began to grow bored, ready to leave the warehouse and the body within to a clean-up crew.
“I think I’m done here, Felix.”
“Alright, c’mon back. How does a drink sound?”
“You’re my tormenter and savior, all in one,” Bond said, glancing down at the contents of the dead man’s wallet. “I need a new evening jacket and maybe some choice steaks. Do you cook, Felix?”
“Not if the meat’s from a butcher whose card you found in a murderer’s pocket, but I’ve been known to fire up a grill.”
“Wonderful, I’ll meet you back at the field base soon.”
“Try to be subtle about it,” Leiter said with the tired pessimism of every superior Bond ever had.
“It’s the Las Vegas strip. Subtlety may as well scream ‘the CIA is working domestically.’”
A chuckle sputtered out from Bond’s earpiece and the com went dead. With a glance at the warehouse and the corpse within, Bond made his way toward the bike he’d rode in on, loose dirt compressing under his boots.
The dead man’s bike lay not too far away. Neither had belonged to them, but the world had its way of providing. Someone else could return the bike to its rightful owner after he’d borrowed it for a few more hours.