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James. Welcome back.”
    “M?” he asked.
    “M.”

Chapter 8
    The sign beside the top-floor office read D IRECTOR -G ENERAL .
    Bond stepped into the anteroom, where a woman in her midthirties sat at a tidy desk. She wore a pale cream camisole beneath a jacket that was nearly the same shade as Bond’s. A long face, handsome and regal, eyes that could flick from stern to compassionate faster than a Formula One gearbox.
    “Hello, Moneypenny.”
    “It’ll just be a moment, James. He’s on the line to Whitehall again.”
    Her posture was upright, her gestures economical. Not a hair was out of place. He reflected, as he often did, that her military background had left an indelible mark. She’d resigned her commission with the Royal Navy to take her present job with M as his personal assistant.
    Just after he’d joined the ODG, Bond had dropped into her office chair and flashed a broad smile. “Rank of lieutenant, were you, Moneypenny?” he’d quipped. “I’d prefer to picture you above me.” Bond had left the service as a commander.
    He’d received in reply not the searing rejoinder he deserved but a smooth riposte: “Oh, but I’ve found in life, James, that all positions must be earned through experience. And I’m pleased to say I have little doubt that my level of such does not begin to approach yours.”
    The cleverness and speed of her retort and the use of his first name, along with her radiant smile, instantly and immutably defined their relationship: She’d kept him in his place but opened the avenue of friendship. So it had remained ever since, caring and close but always professional. (Still, he harbored the belief that of all the 00 Section agents she liked him best.)
    Moneypenny looked him over and frowned. “You had quite a time of it over there, I heard.”
    “You could say so.”
    She glanced at M’s closed door and said, “This Noah situation’s a tough one, James. Signals flying everywhere. He left at nine last night, came in at five this morning.” She added, in a whisper, “He was worried about you. There were some moments last night when you were incommunicado. He was on the phone quite often then.”
    They saw a light on her phone extinguish. She hit a button and spoke through a nearly invisible stalk mic. “It’s 007, sir.”
    She nodded at the door, toward which Bond now walked, as the do-not-disturb light above it flashed on. This occurred silently, of course, but Bond always imagined the illumination was accompanied by the sound of a deadbolt crashing open to admit a new prisoner to a medieval dungeon.
    “Morning, sir.”
    M looked exactly the same as he had at the Travellers Club lunch when they’d met three years ago and might have been wearing the same gray suit. He gestured to one of the two functional chairs facing the large oak desk. Bond sat down.
    The office was carpeted and the walls were lined with bookshelves. The building was at the fulcrum where old London became new and M’s windows in the corner office bore witness to this. To the west Marylebone High Street’s period buildings contrasted sharply with Euston Road’s skyscrapers of glass and metal, sculptures of high concept and questionable aesthetics and lift systems cleverer than you were.
    These scenes, however, remained dim, even on sunny days, since the window glass was both bomb- and bulletproof and mirrored to prevent spying by any ingenious enemy hanging from a hot-air balloon over Regent’s Park.
    M looked up from his notes and scanned Bond. “No medical report, I gather.”
    Nothing escaped him. Ever.
    “A scratch or two. Not serious.”
    The man’s desk held a yellow pad, a complicated console phone, his mobile, an Edwardian brass lamp and a humidor stocked with the narrow black cheroots M sometimes allowed himself on drives to and from Whitehall or during his brief walks through Regent’s Park, when he was accompanied by his thoughts and two P Branch guards. Bond knew very little of M’s