Goldfinger (james Bond, #7)

The seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series opens with Bond, a British Secret Service agent who holds the Double Zero prefix (a licence to kill), stranded at Miami Airport after destroying a heroin-smuggling pipeline in Mexico and killing an assassin who ambushed him. Feeling stale and morbid, he accepts when a wealthy American named Junius Du Pont offers $10,000 to discover how a man named Auric Goldfinger cheats at two-handed canasta. Du Pont has lost $25,000 in a week to Goldfinger, a British citizen domiciled in Nassau and rated one of the richest men in the Caribbean, but cannot detect his method.

At Du Pont's hotel, Bond gets his first look at Goldfinger: a short, disproportionate man with a huge round head, crew-cut red hair, and a compressed, powerful demeanor. Goldfinger claims agoraphobia forces him to sit facing the hotel, which positions Du Pont with his back to the building. Bond deduces someone above is reading Du Pont's cards. In Goldfinger's suite, he finds a blonde named Jill Masterton, Goldfinger's paid companion, relaying Du Pont's hand through a microphone connected to a transmitter tuned to Goldfinger's hearing aid. Bond photographs the setup and orders Goldfinger to write a $50,000 cheque to cash, covering Du Pont's losses and Bond's fee. He takes Jill on the Silver Meteor train to New York, where she reveals Goldfinger's obsessive love of gold and his habit of traveling with a million dollars' worth sewn into his luggage. Bond sends her back to Goldfinger despite misgivings about her safety.

In London, M, head of the Secret Service, summons Bond with alarming news: The Governor of the Bank of England has traced a massive gold leak to Goldfinger. Gold bars bearing his mark, a tiny scratched "Z," have turned up with operatives of SMERSH, the Soviet assassination and espionage organization. M suspects Goldfinger is SMERSH's treasurer and orders Bond to investigate. Colonel Smithers at the Bank of England fills in Goldfinger's background. A refugee from Riga, Latvia, Goldfinger arrived in England in 1937, built pawnbroking shops, set up a factory called Thanet Alloy Research staffed by Korean workers, and accumulated roughly twenty million pounds in self-smelted gold bars stored in vaults around the world.

Bond drives to Kent in the Aston Martin DB III, a pool car equipped with a Homer radio tracking device, reinforced bumpers, and a concealed weapon. At the Royal St Marks golf club in Sandwich, he baits Goldfinger into a $10,000 match. Goldfinger cheats subtly, but Bond's caddie Hawker spots the methods and engineers a counter-cheat, secretly swapping Goldfinger's ball at the seventeenth hole. When Goldfinger unknowingly plays the wrong ball, Bond reveals the switch, winning the match under the strict rules Goldfinger himself demanded.

That evening at Goldfinger's mansion, The Grange, Bond is left alone in brilliantly lit rooms while concealed cameras film his movements. He searches the premises, spots workers stripping panels from the Rolls-Royce in the factory, and discovers the cameras, exposing the film. He drops a cat into the camera bin as a thin alibi, preserving just enough doubt to stay alive. During dinner, Goldfinger introduces his Korean bodyguard Oddjob, a karate Black Belt whose hands and feet are hardened into horn-like callus. Oddjob chops through an oak banister and throws his steel-rimmed bowler hat hard enough to embed it in a wooden panel. Bond builds a cover story, hinting at criminal experience, but Goldfinger makes no offer.

Bond follows Goldfinger across France using the Homer transmitter. Near Moulins, he digs up a gold bar hidden beneath a bridge where Goldfinger stopped, confirming that Goldfinger funds Soviet espionage through SMERSH "postbox" drops. Bond also disables a Triumph TR3 that has been tailing Goldfinger. Its driver, a young British woman who has been independently following Goldfinger and who later proves to be Jill Masterton's sister, identifies herself as Tilly Soames and asks for a ride to Geneva. After dropping her off, Bond tracks Goldfinger to Coppet, Switzerland, where the factory Entreprises Auric A.G. manufactures aircraft seating for Mecca Airlines, a charter line flying to India. Bond deduces the smuggling scheme: The Rolls-Royce's bodywork is solid eighteen-carat white gold disguised as armour plating. At Reculver the gold is riveted on; at Coppet it is stripped and moulded into airline seats; in India the gold is sold to brokers at enormous premiums.

Returning that night, Bond finds Tilly prone with a rifle aimed at the factory. Her real name is Tilly Masterton, Jill's sister. She reveals that Goldfinger murdered Jill by having Oddjob paint her entire body in gold, blocking her skin pores and killing her. A sonic detector alerts Goldfinger's guards, and Oddjob captures them both. Goldfinger quotes: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action" (210). He orders them to his torture chamber, which he calls "The Pressure Room." Bond endures karate torture and a slowly advancing circular saw before desperately offering to work for Goldfinger. The gambit saves their lives.

Bond wakes imprisoned in a New York warehouse. Goldfinger reveals Operation Grand Slam: a plan to rob fifteen billion dollars in gold from the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He will kill the town's sixty thousand inhabitants with GB, a lethal nerve agent supplied by the Soviets, blast the vault with an atomic warhead, and ship the gold to Russia aboard a Soviet cruiser. The American gangsters he has recruited as accomplices are expendable. Among them is Pussy Galore, leader of the Cement Mixers, a Harlem gang, and a former trapeze artiste who turned her team into expert cat burglars. Tilly becomes visibly infatuated with Pussy. Bond types a report of the entire plan, wraps it with a $5,000 reward slip addressed to Felix Leiter at Pinkerton's Detective Agency in New York, and hides it in the lavatory of a chartered plane during an aerial survey of Fort Knox.

Days later, the gang boards a special train at Pennsylvania Station disguised as Red Cross medical workers. At Fort Knox, bodies litter the streets. The bomb squad advances toward the vault, and Goldfinger gloats. Then a signal explodes in the sky: The "dead" soldiers spring to life. The army and FBI, alerted by Bond's message, staged the mass-casualty illusion to achieve maximum incrimination. In the chaos, Tilly breaks away from Bond to run toward Pussy Galore. Oddjob flings his bowler hat into Tilly's neck, killing her instantly. Goldfinger and Oddjob escape aboard a diesel engine.

At Idlewild Airport, a fake doctor sedates Bond. He wakes aboard a hijacked BOAC Stratocruiser. Goldfinger explains that he escaped with his gold, killed the four remaining gang leaders, and contacted SMERSH, who identified Bond as a Secret Service agent. The plane heads for Soviet territory. Pussy, posing as a stewardess, secretly passes Bond a note pledging her support. Bond punctures the pressurized cabin window with a knife hidden in his shoe; the explosive decompression kills Oddjob. Bond then strangles Goldfinger in hand-to-hand combat, takes command of the cockpit, and arranges an emergency ditching near a North Atlantic weathership. The plane breaks apart on impact, and the heavy gold drags the wreckage and crew to the ocean floor. Bond and Pussy, thrown clear in life jackets, are rescued. Aboard the weathership, Pussy reveals that childhood sexual abuse by her uncle shaped her distrust of men. Bond prescribes tender loving care, and the novel ends with them together.