He was heading north towards St Germain and there was no one else in sight in either direction, except, perhaps half a mile ahead, an almost identical figure - another Royal Corps dispatch-rider. The road was D98, a secondary road serving local traffic in the St Germain area, and the motorcyclist had just passed beneath the Paris-Mantes autoroute already thundering with commuter traffic for Paris. On both sides of the road the moss- and flower- carpeted depths between the great oak trees held the theatrical enchantment of the royal forests of Versailles and St Germain. It was seven o'clock on a May morning and the dead straight road through the forest glittered with the tiny luminous mist of spring. There was nothing in the man or his equipment to suggest that he was not what he appeared to be, except a fully loaded Luger held by a clip to the top of the petrol tank.

The man was dressed in the uniform of a dispatch-rider in the Royal Corps of Signals, and his machine, painted olive green, was, with certain modifications to the valves and the carburettor and the removal of some of the silencer baffles to give more speed, identical with a standard British Army machine. To right and left of the hurtling face under the crash helmet, the black gauntlets, broken-wristed at the controls, looked like the attacking paws of a big animal.

On both sides of the grin the cheeks had been blown out by the wind into pouches that fluttered slightly. Below the goggles, the wind had got into the face through the mouth and had wrenched the lips back into a square grin that showed big tombstone teeth and strips of whitish gum. Protected by the glass of the goggles, they stared fixedly ahead from just above the centre of the handlebars, and their dark, unwavering focus was that of gun muzzles. In the howling speed-turmoil of a BSA M20 doing seventy, they were the only quiet things in the hurtling flesh and metal.

The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint.

James bond for your eyes only book