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James Bond’s funeral is a somber affair. Leiter thinks he would have hated it. Bond was never somber unless he was furious, and even then there were times when he was quick with a cruel quip. He wouldn’t have liked all of this, the quiet voices, the black umbrellas.
A significant number of the mourners are younger women - almost certainly people whom Bond had wooed throughout his long career. They look as awkward and out of place here as Leiter feels. Leiter wonders if Bond ever let any of them truly know him. Probably not - none of the survivors, anyway. There was Tracy - but Leiter never did get to meet Tracy.
Bill Tanner gives the eulogy. Leiter realizes he doesn’t know anyone here, at all - not even Tanner. The only person he knew around here was James, and now James is gone.
It’s the second time in as many years that Leiter has had to mourn his friend. Last year, Bond was reported MIA on a mission in North Korea, and Leiter had known that he would never see his friend again. He had resigned himself to Bond’s death - until he had heard the news that Bond had been exchanged for another prisoner, and returned to the United Kingdom.
On his return, Bond seemed to be his old self again, ready with a quip and a martini. There had been a little more wear on his face, new lines that made him seem a little older than his forty-four years, but there had also been a new vigor in him, an intensity that Leiter hadn’t seen in him in many years. As if Bond was determined to seize the day now that he had been miraculously spared once again.
Just a few months ago, Leiter and Bond celebrated Bond’s forty-fifth birthday together. Forty-five is the mandatory retirement age from MI6’s double-oh section, but Bond hadn’t seemed down about his upcoming retirement. He’d been in good spirits, drinking and laughing.
“Don’t worry about retirement,” he said to Leiter. “There’s still plenty more adventures left in me, my friend.”
“Why, have you got yourself another job already? New position?” Leiter asked, raising an eyebrow.
Bond laughed, and gestured at him with his martini glass. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
But then there had been the news: the car crash, the search for the body, and, finally, the pronouncement of death. James Bond was gone.
And now the funeral, where Leiter stands, wet and miserable, and listens to Tanner talk. His eyes trail around the other mourners, and catch on one, an elderly woman that he recognizes as Bond’s boss. There’s something in her face that’s different from the other mourners. Her lips are pressed into a line, and at first Leiter thinks it’s grief. But then, as he looks closer, he realizes she’s trying not to laugh.
The first seed of suspicion is planted.
It takes nearly a year for Leiter to convince himself he’s not imagining things. He starts to poke around, using his CIA resources and training to uncover Bond’s trail. One name keeps coming up, a very plain English name: Monica Brown. She had been staying in Bond’s hotel room, she had purchased clothing and makeup using his card, she was everywhere he had been. And yet no one seemed to have so much as glimpsed her. She was elusive. She moved through London like someone with intelligence training, and Leiter wonders if she might have been another MI6 agent. But when he reaches out to his remaining contacts in MI6, he finds nothing. No one named Monica Brown works there, or has ever worked there.
It could be a cover-up. But there’s no anxiety in his contacts’ voices; they seem genuinely puzzled as to why Leiter is asking about someone who doesn’t exist.
A year and a half after Bond’s funeral, Leiter gets the first phone call.
“Hello, is this Felix Lee-ter?” The voice on the phone is young and female. There’s a pause, and Leiter hears someone whispering to her in the background. “Leiter, I mean,” she corrects herself.
“Who is this?” Leiter says, immediately on guard.
“This is - uh - Monica Brown’s secretary,” the voice on the phone says, and giggles. “We’re very close,” she adds.
Leiter’s eyes widen. “And what does Ms. Brown have to say to me?” he says, forcing his voice to stay calm.
“She says to stop looking for her. She’s a very - uh - ” The giggle again. “Private person. She doesn’t need people sticking their noses into her business.”
“Then she should have thought of that before she killed my best friend,” Leiter says, coldly.
The voice in the background starts laughing, and then cuts herself off, as if she’s muffling herself with a hand. She whispers something to the voice on the phone.
“Monica says she would never kill your friend. She says he was - ” Giggle. “The love of her life.”
“Then why is my investigation making her so nervous?” Leiter demands. “What’s there to hide?”
More whispering. “Er - plenty. Monica came here to get away from the past. She doesn’t want you digging up old skeletons. Leave her alone.”
“Then tell me what happened to James Bond,” Leiter demands. “Tell me, and I’ll leave her alone. All I want is answers.”
“James Bond is dead,” the voice says. “Let him rest in peace.”
“That’s not an - ” Leiter begins, and realizes the line is dead. He looks down at the receiver, and mutters, “Fucker,” and slams the receiver down. Giggling like schoolgirls! What the hell was that? A man is dead.
Once or twice over the years, Leiter and Bond had discussed funeral arrangements. Bond had told Leiter that he planned to donate all of his belongings to a specific charity. Leiter follows the money; the charity had received no donation. Bond’s flat was sold a few days after his death, but no one could say who by. His bank account was emptied, and transferred to a bank in Jamaica.
Two years after Bond’s funeral, Leiter goes to Jamaica. Monica Brown is a ghost there too. But there are more traces. He starts finding a few people who’ve met her, gets a physical description - tall, brown hair, dark eyes, very beautiful. She sounds like Bond’s type. Is that how she got him?
He tracks her down to Montego Bay. A woman in the marina remembers Monica Brown buying a boat. ‘Something about treasure-hunting.’ A local casino has a complaint on file from Monica Brown, accusing another patron of trying to cheat her at cards. (According to the complaint, she had cheated him right back.) A man in a bar caught a woman named Monica sleeping with his wife, and then she left him for Monica.
Leiter is in the process of trying to track the cheating wife when he gets the second phone call.
“Hello?” he says, distractedly. He’s trying to cross reference two long lists of phone numbers.
“Stop trying to find me,” says James Bond’s voice on the phone, and Leiter almost drops the receiver.
“James - ?!” he says. “What the hell?!”
“I should be the one saying that,” Bond says, coolly. “It’s not very gentlemanly, you know, snooping into one’s private affairs. If I’d wanted to talk to you, I would have left a forwarding address.”
“You’re supposed to be dead!” Leiter says. “Christ - my apologies for trying to solve your murder. I should have known I was intruding on your vacation! Where the hell have you been? Is this some sort of job for - for your firm?” As shocked as he is, long training prevents him from blurting out the name of Bond’s employer.
“No,” Bond says. “I don’t work for them anymore. James Bond is dead. So leave me alone.”
And the line cuts off.
Leiter stares down at the receiver, blinking. What the hell? Was that really Bond? Well, it sounded like him. The voice was right. And yet there was a strange stagey quality to the tone, as if the speaker was mimicking James Bond, and slightly overplaying their part.
It’s all an act, you know, Bond’s voice whispers, out of the depths of Leiter’s memory.
Leiter frowns. The whole damn business is strange. Monica Brown’s ‘secretary’ giggling on the phone like this was some schoolgirl prank, M suppressing a smirk, and now Bond himself calling and sounding as if he was reading from a script. None of them were acting as if this was some great conspiracy or vital mission. He isn’t being treated as a serious threat, or even as a serious security risk, the way he might have if he was intruding on some top-secret deep cover MI6 mission. So what the hell is this?
He goes back to work, trailing Monica Brown. He’s still convinced she’ll lead him to Bond. The cheating wife, he decides, is the best lead he’s got on her. She’s a beautiful blonde woman in her thirties, named Isabella. Her husband insists Isabella left him for Monica and that, as far as he knows, they’re still together. That means that Isabella can lead him to Monica, who’ll lead him to Bond.
Leiter takes Isabella’s husband out for drinks and listens to his woes. Then Leiter tells him about Bond, how he’s here searching for his best friend, how he’s worried about him, how much help it would be if he could just find Isabella’s current address . . .
Armed with the address, Leiter stakes out Isabella’s flat and starts trailing her. On the second day, Isabella meets with a tall brunette woman in a white satin turtleneck dress and long black boots. Although Leiter can’t get a close look at her from where he’s standing, he’s certain this is the elusive Ms. Brown.
Monica loops an arm around Isabella’s waist, and whispers in her ear for a moment. Then they set off, hand in hand, on a stroll through the city. Leiter follows them. But their path becomes increasingly erratic, their speed increasing, and Leiter realizes they’re trying to lose him. He almost doesn’t spot them turning off the road and darting into a bar. He hurries forward, and pushes through the door into the bar -
Monica is sitting alone at the bar. Leiter looks around, but there’s no sign of Isabella.
All right, then. If this is the game they’re playing. Leiter walks up to the bar and sits down on the stool next to Monica.
“Vodka martini,” Monica says to the bartender. “Shaken, not stirred.”
Leiter looks over at her, and gets his first close look at Monica Brown.
She’s about the same age as Leiter. She has long, thick, dark brown hair spilling down to her shoulders, with just a hint of grey showing at her temples. Her eyes are blue, and lined with amusement. Her eyebrows are thin, perhaps even drawn on, as is the current fashion. Her makeup is subtle - a neutral lip gloss, mascara, a hint of eyeshadow on her hooded eyelids. She looks beautiful, dangerous, charming.
But none of that is what makes Leiter’s eyes widen in shock. It’s the fact that Monica Brown is James Bond.
She looks different, certainly. The makeup and the long hair change the shape of her face - enough that Leiter isn’t sure it’s all makeup; she might have had plastic surgery as well. But the eyes . . . the eyes are the same. Cold and friendly and amused all at the same time, like she’s always laughing at some joke that you might be invited in on, if you have what it takes.
“Missed me?” says Monica Bond.
Somehow, despite hearing Bond’s voice on the phone, it didn’t hit him until now that his friend is really alive. Now it strikes him like a tidal wave. Bond is alive. He could hug her. Alternately, he could also punch her, for putting him through all that.
“You bastard,” Leiter says. “I thought you were dead!”
“Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” Monica says, sipping her martini coolly.
“By you,” Leiter snaps. “Exaggerated by you. I thought you were dead, I went to your funeral. I thought you were rotting at the bottom of the ocean! It was the second time in a row!
The edges of her lips turn upward in suppressed amusement. “It took quite a lot of doing. Fortunately, I had M’s help. Faking the car crash was the easy part; the difficult part was getting new ID and transferring my funds. And, of course, I had to stay in England until the surgeries were done. Very difficult to get that kind of care down here.”
“Why?” Leiter demands. “What the hell was the point of all of this?”
She looks down her nose at him. “Come now, Felix, do I really have to explain the word ‘transgender’ to you? It’s 2004. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“I’m not talking about you being a woman!” Leiter snaps. “I’m talking about you faking your death and fleeing the country! You could have - you could have just told me!”
“Oh yes, that would have gone down well, wouldn’t it?” she says, raising a thin eyebrow. “Hello Felix, how’s the new job going, by the way, I’ve always wanted to be a woman and I’m quitting my job to go get my dick lopped off.”
“Is that what you think of me?” Leiter demands. “When have I ever given you reason to think I wouldn’t accept you?”
She meets his eyes, cool and in control as always. “When have you ever given me reason to think you would?”
Leiter swallows, and is silent for a moment. She’s not wrong. They never talked about this sort of thing. Not about sexual orientation or gender, beyond the various half-joking comments they sometimes exchanged about women. Well, back when they’d first met, in Jamaica all those years ago, it wasn’t talked about. Leiter tries to remember if he even knew what “transgender” was back then. There was something in the news, wasn’t there, about a GI who became a woman? Something like that.
It wasn’t a word he would ever have thought to apply to Bond. Not even later, when he thought he was open-minded, when Bond tried to tell him, that night in the bar. It’s only I’ve always thought women rather got the better half of the deal, she said. And Leiter didn’t understand, because it was Bond, and who would have expected Bond to be anything other than a man’s man?
“You’re my friend,” Leiter says. “You killed the guy who killed my wife, saved my life god-knows-how-many times, and picked me up and put me back on my feet after I’d lost one of ‘em. But in all that time, you never said shit about yourself. I know your parents’ names, I know you’re from Scotland, I know about what happened to your wife - and I know all of that from your dossier. Because you never brought it up, not even when my wife died. You always kept me at arm’s length. I think you always kept everyone at arm’s length. So how the hell was I supposed to know you needed support? You tried to pull me into some convoluted conversation about how ‘women have it better,’ and when that didn’t work, you never brought it up again and then faked your death? That was plan B? Rather than talking to me?”
Bond laughs and leans back against the bar, brushing a hand through her long brown hair. “Support? Felix, what makes you think I needed support? I’ve always worked better on my own. I needed a change - I took care of it. On my own.”
“I can’t believe you,” Leiter says, although in fact he can. Bond has always been infuriating, distant, dismissive.
“I was rather hoping you and I could catch up,” Bond says. “That’s why I sent Isabella away when I realized you were trailing me. Spur of the moment, since apparently you weren’t going to go away on your own.” She sips her martini, and her posture is casual but her eyes are hard. “Perhaps I should have packed up shop and let you keep on looking. New places, new adventures . . . I’m getting tired of Isabella. Jamaica’s been fun, but maybe it’s time to move on.”
“Is that how it goes for you, then?” Leiter bites out. “You have your fun with people - women, men, lovers, friends - and then you move on when you get tired of them? Is this all a game to you?”
“Life’s a game, Felix,” Bond says. “And I always have a way of winning.”
“Fine,” Leiter snaps, and stands. “Then you can play without me. I’ll be on the next plane to New York.”
“Felix - ” Bond starts, and for the first time there’s a hint of doubt in her cold blue eyes. Then she cuts herself off, and looks away. “Better that way, I suppose. Have a good life, Felix.”
“Screw you,” Leiter hisses, and stomps off.
There’s plenty to do and see in Montego Bay, but Leiter doesn’t feel up to doing any of it. He came here to find Bond, and he did, and now he just wants to hide in his hotel room. God, what a mess. His chest hurts. He hates, most of all, that he doesn’t feel shocked. Oh, he’s surprised that Bond is transgender, but he’s not surprised that she’s an asshole. She’s always been like this.
She’s just never done it to him before.
He lurks in his hotel room, reading the book he bought at the airport. It’s The Da Vinci Code, and the twists and turns and factoids of the plot make his head hurt. He should’ve picked up the new Tom Clancy book instead. No - bad idea. It would’ve reminded him of work.
Outside, the sun sets.
Leiter’s leg hurts, below his knee where there isn’t any leg anymore, and he props it up on a pillow, thinking of waking up in the hospital after it all happened and finding out that Della was dead. Thinks about the way Bond turned up several days later, looking grim but satisfied, and told him that Sanchez was dead. It was only later, through CIA dossiers, that Leiter realized how much Bond had risked for him - that she had quit MI6 and gone rogue, chasing down Della’s killers herself. That she had been the one to find Della’s corpse and Leiter’s own unconscious body.
She never talked about it. Instead, she came to visit him in the hospital day after day, talking about cards and women and alcohol and the day-to-day work of espionage. Some days, Leiter had hated her for it, because she was the only thing stopping him from sinking into the peaceful fog of despair, and the normalcy of Bond’s ramblings had felt like an insult to his grief. But at the same time, Bond's visits had been a reminder that there was a life outside of grief.
Once, and only once, Leiter punctured the illusion of normalcy that Bond provided. Thinking of Theresa DiVincenzo, he asked, “Does it ever get better?”
Pain flashed across her eyes, and she looked away. Leiter wondered if she was going to shut him out and change the subject. But then she said, “No. Not really. But you get used to it. Like everything else.” And she gave him a sad, bitter little smile, and Leiter wondered, thinking of the other things in her dossier, just how many traumas were tied up in that ‘everything else.’
Leiter looks up from his book, and thinks that he's got no reason to be so upset over this. He's not a loner like Bond; he has other friends, other people who love him and have never faked their deaths to get away from him. So Bond doesn't want to be his friend anymore - or, at least, she cares more about never having to talk about anything directly than she does about Leiter's feelings. It sucks, but Leiter has lost friends before, and in much worse conditions than this. At least Bond is alive. Even if he never sees her again, he'll have the comfort of knowing that she's out there still, alive and well. That's more than he can say of some of his friends.
There's a knock at the door. Leiter frowns. He hung up the little 'do not disturb' sign, and clearly someone is disturbing him. "I don't want my room cleaned - " he starts, opening the door, and then stops when he sees Monica Bond standing there.
She’s dressed in a slim, flared black jacket with a big fur ruff over a v-neck shirt and tight black pants. Felix has gone in and out of phases where he cares about how he dresses, so he recognizes that the outfit is expensive, probably designer. He wonders where she gets the money from, assuming that MI6 isn't footing the bill anymore. He knows she inherited a good chunk from her parents, like Leiter himself, but he doesn't know if she spent it all over the years, on fast cars and faster women.
“Please, Felix, you know I’ve never cleaned anything in my life,” she says. She has a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and two glasses in her other hand, and she holds them up. “Can I come in?”
Leiter seriously considers shutting the door in her face. It would make him feel better. In the short term, at least. But he knows he’ll hate himself for it later. If he chases Bond away now, she could vanish into the shadows and he might never see her again.
So he nods and steps back from the door.
Bond steps inside, glances around at his hotel room, and sets her bottle and glasses down on the little table. Leiter notices that the bottle of whiskey is already open, and there’s about one glass’s worth missing. She started drinking before she came here. Dutch courage, he thinks.
“A bottle of wine is more traditional for an apology,” she says, pouring two glasses, “But I thought something stronger might be required for this conversation.”
“Is this going to be an apology?” Leiter says, skeptically. He hasn’t gotten one yet.
Bond’s eyes flicker to his, and then away, and she hands him one of the glasses. “Let’s drink, Felix,” she says, sitting down at the table and gesturing for him to sit across from her.
Leiter sighs, and sits down. He takes a sip of his whiskey. It’s good stuff. “Fine,” he mutters. “But don’t think you can charm me, J - Monica. I know you too damn well for that.”
“No charm,” she says, meeting his eyes. “I just want to drink.”
And so they drink. Out the hotel window, the crimson and golden majesty of the sunset fades to darkness. Bond doesn’t say anything. Neither does Leiter. But the silence isn’t awkward - they’ve known each other too long for silence to be awkward between them. And despite himself, Leiter is glad that Bond is here. He missed her.
Finally, when the bottle of whiskey is half-empty and the sky outside is nearly black, Bond says, “I didn’t tell anyone, you know. Except for M . . . and only because I had to. I needed her help to escape it all.” She chuckles into her glass of whiskey. “She always did think I was a misogynist dinosaur. Well, maybe she was right . . .” Her lips twist. “I suppose there was no one to tell, except for you and Bill and M. I realized a long time ago that I couldn’t afford to have a personal life and to do that job. I had to pick one or the other. And for a long time, I picked the job. I didn’t know what I would be without it. Or maybe I did, and I was afraid . . .”
“Afraid of what?” Leiter asks, gently.
She’s silent again for a few moments, and when she speaks again, it’s to change the subject. “Do you remember when we first met?”
“Of course,” Leiter says.
Bond laughs. “Of course you do. You pulled a gun on me. Terribly rude of you.” She takes a sip of her whiskey. “We were so young then. I still had my accent back then, didn’t I?”
From Leiter’s perspective, she still does, but he doesn’t dispute that. “Scottish?” he asks. “Yeah.”
“I finally trained it out of myself,” Bond says, distantly. “Took me years. I was quite defensive of it when I was a child. When you’re young, you know, anything that makes you stick out makes you a target. Bad enough to have an accent, worse to be a poof.” She sips her whiskey. “That’s what they thought I was. And I didn’t like that, because I knew I liked girls as much as anyone else.” Another sip. “And perhaps I didn’t want another reason to be a target. No - no. That’s not it. I’m no coward. I didn’t mind giving them another reason to fight me.” Her lips curl in a smirk. “I had a way of winning even then. But I didn’t want to be a punchline.” Those sharp blue eyes flicker to Leiter. “Can you understand that?”
Leiter wonders if yes is the right answer. He’s never had to deal with any of that - he’s never quite been the man’s man that everyone thought Bond was, but he’s always known he was straight and a man. He’s never had to be afraid, the way she has. Would saying yes be sympathy, or stolen valor? “Kids are assholes,” he says, instead. “Adults too, sometimes. A lot of the time.” He draws in a breath. “I’m American, you know. We think the whole world’s America. A Scottish accent isn’t so different from an English one to me.” He’s not actually talking about accents, and he thinks maybe it sounds like he is, so he hurries to follow it up. “And I don’t, I don’t care if you’re a girl.” Is that right? “Or I care because you care, if . . . if you care. Because you’re my friend. You - don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
Bond looks away, and finishes her whiskey. “Maybe it’s time I explained myself to someone,” she says, and then she laughs at herself. “You know, I - I thought this would all be easier afterwards. Men never are very good at talking about their bloody feelings, are they?” She refills her glass, and takes a gulp from it. “But it turns out the problem wasn’t men after all. It was just me.”
Leiter doesn’t know what to say. He’s out of his depth. “Maybe I’m not so good at talking either,” he admits. “That’s why you brought the booze, isn’t it?”
Bond laughs, and lifts her glass in a toast. “To emotional repression, eh, Felix?”
Leiter clinks his glass against hers. “You’re right about men. We are bad at talking. But I - I’m here to listen.”
Bond swallows whiskey, and laughs, softly. “If it was just men, I wouldn’t still be running away from my problems.”
Leiter thinks of dates and facts and events written down in black and white in a CIA dossier. “You’ve got more to run away from than most.”
Bond turns her head and fixes Leiter with that icy blue gaze of hers. “I don’t need your pity,” she snaps.
In response, Leiter shoots her a look of irritation, and downs his whiskey. “You’re the one who brought it up,” he says. “I told you you don’t have to explain anything to me. I came all the way down here to find you. So if you just want to drink, or if you want to talk about anything else, that’s fine. But if you’re going to talk, don’t snap at me just because you don’t like having to talk.”
Bond’s eyes narrow, and for a moment Leiter thinks she’s going to storm out. Then she lets out a breath and looks away. “You’re right,” she says, after a moment. “I didn’t come here to be an arse to you. I’ve done enough of that already, haven’t I?”
“You’re damn right you have,” Leiter says.
Bond laughs. “Oh, Felix, I’ve missed you,” she says. “I’m sorry I’ve screwed it all up. You were never supposed to find out. It was supposed to be a clean break. A fresh start. New life. New me. That’s how they used to make you do it, you know. Move away, change your name, start living ‘full-time’ . . . that’s what I wanted. I was tired of my job. Tired of killing, tired of pretending to be someone I never was.” She sits back in her chair, and smiles wryly. “It’s like I told you back then. I was always pretending. James Bond, action hero! And sometimes it was fun. Playing a fantastic role, with an ever-changing audience of beautiful, attentive women. But it was always a role. It was never me. I don’t suppose anyone could ever be who I pretended to be, man or woman. And when I got home from Korea . . . I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize the man I saw looking back. Didn’t like him much anymore, either. When all the fighting was over, all the adventures, and Zao and Graves were dead . . . I couldn’t do it anymore, Felix.” She looks over at him, desperate for him to understand.
“And I couldn’t - oh, hell.” Words seem to fail her, and she tops up her glass, and then gulps down half of it in one go. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone,” she says, thickly. Her eyes are gazing off into the distance. “I mean, how would it have gone? ‘Hello, Felix, hello, Bill, I’ve always secretly wanted to wear women’s clothes . . .’ Hah! It’s a bad joke. No. I couldn’t do it. So that’s when I hatched this bloody plan. It would be safer, after all. After a career like mine, who knows who could’ve been waiting for me when I went to retire? So I planned it all out. But I had to tell M. I didn’t have the resources for that kind of cover up . . . I was never that kind of agent. I hated every moment of that conversation. Felt like a schoolgirl in front of the headmistress, asking permission to be a woman. She was the first person I ever told. At least, the first person I ever told sober.”
She swallows down whiskey. “She understood, I think, in a way. Even though she’s even older than we are. But she’d . . . that . . . that was always the trouble with us, you know. I resented her for not being the old M . . . and she thought I was another man who couldn’t handle taking orders from a woman. She was already . . .” Bond gestures vaguely with her glass. “She wasn’t playing her role. So I suppose she understood why I didn’t want to either. She helped me pull the whole thing off, although not without a few snide remarks at the expense of my ‘sense of drama.’ Well, why shouldn’t James Bond go out with a bang, after the life he led?” She looks away, out the window at the rising moon. For a moment, she’s silent. “I suppose it was easier to tell another woman,” she says. “And it’s not as if M had a great deal of respect for me to lose.”
Leiter frowns. “I think you’re an asshole,” he says. “But it’s not as if I don’t respect you. Respect you as a woman, or an agent, or a - anything.”
Bond makes a jerky, abortive gesture with her whiskey glass that almost threatens to slosh amber liquid all over the hotel carpet. “That’s not it,” she says. “It’s not about that, Felix. It’s not about . . . it’s not about you. It’s not that I didn’t trust you. Look at me.” She gestures vaguely. “I’m absolutely pissed, and why? Because that’s the only way I can talk about all of this. Thought it would get easier when I wasn’t playing anymore. But I suppose it’s just me.”
Leiter studies her face. They’re both quite drunk now, he knows. “I don’t think it’s that simple,” he offers. “I suppose it’s like when you leave the military. It takes a long time to stop being a soldier.”
Bond laughs. “And I suppose the two of us never did stop being soldiers, did we? Out of the military, into the Cold War . . . I never thought I’d live this long, you know. Living the life I do. So it didn’t seem so unreasonable, to play the role for a while, until someone finally got me in the back. And then I looked up, and it was 2002, and I wasn’t a young man anymore.” She drains her glass, and looks up at the ceiling. “So. There’s my story. And my apology, such as it is. I suppose the rest is all up to you, Felix.”
“Is it?” Leiter asks, quietly. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, once the hangover goes away, are you gonna vanish into the shadows again? Find a new identity and a new place to hide?”
“No,” Bond says, firmly. “I’m done running. I’m Monica. Monica Brown, Monica Bond . . . maybe I’ll go back to that. But Monica.” She draws in a breath, and pushes the last of her glass of whiskey away. “I’ll be here, if you want to visit,” she says, not meeting his eyes still. “Or if I’m somewhere else, I’ll send you the address. If you still want to, after I’ve made a hash of everything.”
Leiter sighs. “You know, that was the shittiest apology I’ve ever got,” he says. “I’m still mad at you and you’re still an asshole. But if you’re asking me if I still want to be your friend, the answer is yes. It always has been.”
Bond smiles at him, that charming, brilliant grin that makes girls swoon at her feet. “You know, it wasn’t all bad,” she says, softly. “The whole show. My role was a load of old bollocks . . . but I had a few good co-stars over the years. Some good memories.”
Leiter chuckles. “Well, you nearly got me killed every time, but you’re not wrong.”
“Your fault,” Bond says, “For introducing yourself pistol-first. As I recall, you had me frisked, too.”
“Your fault, for nearly shooting two of my agents,” Leiter shoots back. He picks up the nearly empty bottle of whiskey, and fills up his glass with the last of it. He lifts it in a toast to Bond.
“To friendship, then?” Bond asks, picking up her glass and knocking it against his.
“To friendship,” Leiter says, smiling.