COLD, first published in 1996, was the sixteenth and final novel by John Gardner featuring Ian Fleming's secret agent, James Bond (including Gardner's novelizations of Licence to Kill and GoldenEye). Carrying the Glidrose Publications copyright, it was first published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton and in the United States by Putnam.
In the United States, the book was retitled Cold Fall. The British title is properly spelled as an acronym (with no periods), but it is also common to find it spelled Cold.
Synopsis
The novel is split into 2 books, the first one titled Cold Front and second one titled Cold Conspiracy.
The first book opens with the crash of a Boeing 747-400 at Washington's Dulles Airport and the apparent death of James Bond's friend & lover, the Principessa Sukie Tempesta. Bond goes to America and teams up with the FBI to investigate Sukie’s family, who are actually organized crime family and is suspected to collaborate with militia radicals. The case ends in an impasse, with Bond and MI6 leaving it to Americans.
In the second book, Bond, following the aftermath of SeaFire, gets a message about the militia radicals resurfacing and is asked to rejoin the investigation.
Plot Summary
Part 1: Cold Front
Briefing
In 1990, on a Tuesday, James Bond is at the MI6 HQ when M asks for him. A Bradbury Airlines Boeing 747-400 just exploded while landing at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., with there being no survivors.
M believes that the explosion was not accidental and since Bradbury Airlines is a British airline (owned by a certain Harley Bradbury), he decides to assign his agent to the official investigation.
M also tells Bond that, not only was old friend of Moneypenny aboard the flight, but so was Bond's old acquaintance, Principessa Sukie Tempesta, whom Bond has not seen since the events of Nobody Lives For Ever.
USA
Bond flies to the United States and when he arrives at his hotel, he runs into Sukie Tempesta, whom he thought was dead. Sukie tells him that she received a message she thought was sent from him; this message asked her to go to Washington DC because she could be in great danger and was falsely signed James Bond.
She tells him that she has family ties to Harley Bradbury and that someone made sure that she did not board flight BD 299 of the Boeing 747-400, but on another.
Bond joins a briefing that's attended by members from the National Transportation Safety Board, the FBI, MI5, amongst others -- during which its determined that the explosion of the airliner was caused by four bombs.
After the meeting, 007 returns to the hotel reception to see Sukie, but she has vanished. Bond then finds a message that she had left for him, saying that she thinks she is in trouble and that she is going to try to go to Villa Tempesta which is near Pisa, Italy. In her message, she also asks Bond to remember an acronym: “COLD.”
Before Bond decides to leave the hotel, a local police officer contacts Bond to tell him that Sukie is dead. Bond is taken to the accident scene of Sukie's exploded car, with the police extracted the body from the car.
They are then joined by Eddie Rhabb of the FBI. Rhabb and the police tell Bond that the Tempestas are really an Italian organized crime family. That the Tempestas own some businesses in the United States and that they Bradbury Airlines are under their thumb.
Bond is brought to Quantico, where he is briefed on the Tempesta family, led by Sukie's stepsons: Luigi and Angelo. Bond meets the female FBI agent Toni Nicoletti, who has infiltrated the Tempestas and is the current mistress of Luigi's. She gets a phone call from Luigi, who tells that he has found that his actual wife, Giulliana, is cheating on him with Harley Bradbury. Bond and the FBI ask Toni to help Bond inside the Tempesta Villa.
Eddie Rhabb also explains to Bond that the Tempestas intend to make a deal with an organization called "Children Of the Last Days". COLD is kind of vigilante militia that fights crime through ruthless means and wants to take control of the US government. The FBI wants to have both Luigi and Angelo come to the United States in order to arrest them and find out who the leaders of COLD are.
Italy
Back at Villa Tempesta, Toni drops Bond's name (saying he is a former lover of hers), with Luigi and Angelo seeming to be very interested in meeting him. They approve of Toni inviting him at the villa, were Bond ever to find himself in Italy. Bond flies to Pisa where he is greeted by Luigi Tempesta at the airport.
They go to the Villa, which is located on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli. There, Bond meets again with Toni, but now meets Angelo, Giulliana for the first time. The brothers ask Bond questions and vice versa. Eventually the Tempesta brothers tell that they may have an idea who killed their stepmother: a retired United States general named Brutus Clay. Clay, who has a private army, was refused by Sukie, when he asked her hand in marriage.
At nightfall, Giulliana goes to 007's room and Luigi, gun in hand, surprises them in bed. Suddenly Toni Nicoletti intervenes by using a tranquilizer gun on Luigi and Giulliana. Bond and Toni escape the Villa on a watercraft and meet with M and Rhabb again.
Bond must now travel to Idaho to investigate Brutus Clay and find out whether or not he has any connection to COLD. Before he has time to leave Italy, Rhabb tells him that M has been kidnapped.
Return to USA, Idaho
Bond flies to the United States, makes an appointment with Clay, meets an FBI contact named Felicia Heard Shifflet (nicknamed "Fliss") and goes to the meeting with her. General Clay arrives with three military helicopters (one AH-1W and two Mil Mi-8s) and asks Bond to surrender, because he has spoken to Luigi and Angelo. With M locked as a hostage in the AH-1W, Clay orders Bond to go kill the Tempesta brothers.
Bond and Fliss sneak over to the AH-1W and board, 007 gets into the pilot's seat and takes off. The two Mil Mi-8s pursue it and try to shoot it down. Bond manages to eliminate his pursuers but his helicopter's engine loses power and 007 lands with a crash in Lake Coeur d'Alene in Northern Idaho.
Bond wakes up in a hospital bed, he learns from the medical staff that M survived, but not Fliss. Bond is visited by the FBI who tell him that they don't know the Tempesta brothers' current location. They ask him if Clay was in one of the Mi-8s he shot down, but Bond doesn't answer.
Later in Washington DC, Bond talks with M, the old man says his captors wanted to know what he knew about COLD and the Tempestas. Bond looks at a notebook he found in the AH-1W, its contents encoded.
He meets with a member of the National Transportation Safety Board to find out if there's any news on the Boeing explosion. Bond is told that nobody has taken responsibility of the terrorist attack. The man also tells 007 that two FBI agents, Allen and Farmer who were escorting a prisoner who was being extradited from London, Dick "The Idiot" Kauffburger, were on the flight.
As M tells him that his department is relinquishing the COLD case. Bond gives the coded notebook to Eddie Rhabb, with the latter telling Bond that Clay could be still be alive.
Over the next few years, various events transpire. Bradbury Airlines goes bankrupt, the Boeing bombers are arrested, COLD organization expands, and the events of Never Send Flowers and SeaFire unfold.
Part 2: Cold Conspiracy
Freddie's condition, Beatrice's message and Quarterdeck
It's now 1994, and continues from the events of SeaFire. Bond flies from Puerto Rico to RAF Lyneham in an ambulance plane with Fredericka von Grüsse (who is now nicknamed "Freddie", not "Flicka") whose face and rest of her body being bruised, following the torture at hands of Sir Maxwell Tarn's underling. The doctor is not enthusiastic about Flicka's condition, notably telling Bond that she could spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Flicka undergoes surgery, she is in a deep coma, and Bond returns to London alone.
In the days that followed, Bond regularly visited Flicka at the clinic, and one day, while opening his mail, he found a cassette tape in a package. Sent by Beatrice Maria da Ricci - whom Bond had previously worked with during Win, Lose or Die - the tape's message reveals that that she is on something that has to do with COLD and arranges Bond to meet her in a hotel in Geneva.
Bond goes to Quarterdeck, M's residence, and discusses Beatrice's message with him. The old man tells Bond that he will soon be retired and his position will be replaced by a woman.
He also tells that that the explosion of the Boeing 747-400 was caused to protect the Tempestas and COLD of blackmail. He explains that during the downsizing of Government Communications Headquarters, a certain Julian Carter was retired. Before leaving, Carter had deleted all the data the GCHQ had on COLD and wanted to blackmail the organization with it. Carter was aboard the flight BD 299 when it exploded.
M also tells Bond that Toni Nicoletti was found dead the previous year, and that Beatrice da Ricci is now assigned infiltrate the Tempesta organization for behalf of the FBI.
Geneva
Bond travels to Geneva where he meets Beatrice who introduces him to her bodyguards, FBI special agents: Allen and Farmer. Bond, remembering the conversation he had a few years earlier about Allen and Farmer extraditing a criminal from London and supposedly dying aboard the BD 299, attacks the two men. Suddenly Eddie Rhabb, accompanied by FBI agent MacRoberts, intervene along with the Swiss police and arrest both Allen and Farmer.
Rhabb explains that FBI has managed to infiltrate Beatrice into the Tempesta family, and that they knew that Allen and Farmer worked for the Tempesta. Also, the criminal they were extraditing - Dick "The Idiot" Kauffburger - has become the main bodyguard of the Tempestas.
Something big involving the Children Of the Last Days is going to happen soon, as the main leaders of COLD will meet at Villa Tempesta next week. The FBI thought Bond would like to join the investigation.
After Bond has made love with Beatrice, he is woken up by the telephone call. It's Eddie Rhabb, who tells him that Flicka died at the clinic. Bond feels nothing when he hears the news.
Bond, Beatrice and the FBI are going over the final details of the assault on Villa Tempesta. During which Rhabb gives Bond a photo of a woman who was just seen at the Villa -- it's Sukie Tempesta.
The FBI asks Allen and Farmer to call Luigi Tempesta to tell him they saw Bond. Luigi asks them to take him back to the Villa.
Tempesta Villa
Later, James Bond is parachuted towards the Villa, and discreetly joins Beatrice, who is staying there. Suddenly Sukie Tempesta and Kauffburger appear on the scene. Sukie says she's happy to see Bond at the Villa and tells him she's getting married tomorrow -- wanting him to lead her to the altar.
Kauffburger disarms Bond and Sukie then tells him that it was she who detonated the bombs on board the Boeing 747-400, for purpose of killing Julian Carter and to bankrupt Bradbury Airlines. She explains to him how she staged his fake death and that they are going to change the world. She is going to use COLD to rule over United States and exterminate all crime in the country by extreme means -- such as executing drug dealers, cutting off rapists' genitalia, etc.
Indeed, she tells that she is going to be the joint leader of COLD, the "Ice Queen". And that her future husband, the "Ice King", is none other than Brutus Clay. Clay had survived the helicopter battle with Bond, but received serious injuries -- having lost his legs and being now severely disfigured.
Bond and Beatrice are brought to Luigi, Angelo and Brutus before being locked in a room. Bond then accompanies Sukie to the wedding ceremony which takes place in the ballroom of the Tempesta villa.
A little later, Bond and Beatrice are taken back to the ballroom, which has now been turned into a meeting room. About fifty people are present and Brutus Clay joins them. From a podium, Clay says that the Tempesta brothers have provided most of the weapons for the upcoming operation, "Operation Blizzard", which will take place on the morning of Christmas Day.
For his coup, General Clay gives his men targets, mainly government buildings in various cities. He intends to make people believe that the explosions he will trigger will in fact be the work of foreign terrorists before his troops intervene to secure the territory of the United States, and enter the White House to offer his services to the President.
Once COLD's plan is overheard, Bond has Beatrice press a button on a belt that instructs the NOCS (the police tactical unit of the Polizia di Stato, one of Italy's national police forces) that are waiting outside the villa, to commence the raid.
As the tactical unit approach closer, Clay takes Bond and Beatrice hostage and takes them with him through a secret exit. They emerge into a room in which there is Sukie's corpse. Clay explains to Bond that he had killed her because he found her to be crazy and useless, and that he had killed her prior husband as well.
They enter another secret passage which leads to a boathouse, where they board a boat. Bond manages to disarm one of Clay's men and fights Clay, who ends up falling into the water. Clay is picked up by a police boat, but they then throw him back into the water, where Clay drowns, just to avoid paperwork.
Bond returns to London where he collects Flicka's ashes. M has now retired and his successor is in place. While he is at home with Beatrice, men from the secret services come to take him to the new M, who wants to see him...
Characters
- James Bond
- M
- Sukie Tempesta
- Luigi Tempesta
- Angelo Tempesta
- Beatrice Maria da Ricci
- Flicka von Grüsse
- General Brutus "Brute" Clay
- Toni Nicoletti
- Eddie Rhabb
- Felicia Heard Shifflet
Behind the scenes
COLD was the last James Bond book by writer John Gardner, who managed to write a book per every year of his tenure from 1981 to 1996 (except for 1985 and 1995).
There are some slight differences between the American version and the English versions. Both versions have select sentences that are mutually exclusive. Notably, the American version/Cold Fall specifies that the first part of the story takes place in 1990 and the second takes place in 1994, while British/COLD does not give dates.
While COLD is John Gardner's last James Bond in the order of publication of the novels, but not in the chronology of the events. The first part, Cold Front, takes place somewhere between the novels Win, Lose or Die and Never Send Flowers while the second begins shortly after the end of SeaFire. Most of Gardner's GoldenEye novelization takes place after COLD.
References
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