“Oh, come on,” snorts Suzanne. “Where does the Bible say that?”

“Deuteronomy,” says Nicky.

“Oh,” says Suzanne.

“Poor Suzanne,” whispers Alice to me, “being made to feel guilty about going to some silly clairvoyant.”

The atmosphere has changed.

“Things are coming to the boil,” says Alice. “Can’t you feel the screws being tightened?”

“How are you feeling?” I ask her.

“Judged,” she says.

Annie is no longer freaked-out about speaking in tongues. She feels instead that she experienced God’s love in Kidderminster. “It was the most beautiful experience of my life,” she says. At first, she hated it, but now she realizes that her perception was wrong and that the tongue speakers are the lucky ones. Annie can now speak in tongues.

Nicky asks Tony to tell the group what happened to him in Kidderminster, but he quietly replies, “No comment.”

Then Alice confronts Nicky. She tells him she felt trapped in Kidderminster. “It was group pressure. I am very, very upset. I know that you’re looking at me like I’m a failure.”

Nicky smiles. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply want to create a nonthreatening, nonjudgmental environment.”

“Judged is what I feel,” says Alice.

“Then we have failed,” says Nicky.

Later that night, Nicky holds me back for a moment. I think he’s concerned about how I responded to the tongues. After my Joel mini-testimony, I presume he hoped that I, too, would speak in them.

“Some journalists miss the story,” says Nicky. “Lots of journalists miss the story. But you haven’t. You’ve got the story. I knew it from the beginning.”

“What is the story?” I ask Nicky.

“That something amazing is happening,” he says. “Something incredible. All over the world. In a hundred and sixteen countries.”

“I thought it was a hundred and twelve countries,” I say.

“That was a month ago,” says Nicky. “Now it’s a hundred and sixteen countries.” We laugh. “I would feel absolutely awful about Alice,” he says, “but I feel completely free from responsibility.”

“Do you?” I ask.

“I’m not hypnotizing anybody,” he says. “I don’t know anything about hypnosis.”

It is getting late. Tomorrow is the start of the Alpha international conference. There will be much good news to report. Alpha is up 156 percent in New Zealand; one-third of all churches there now run the course. My personal experience with Alpha finishes here. I miss the last few weeks because I have to travel to America. In my group, of those who lasted the course, about 70 percent were won over.

Alice leaves some messages on my answering machine. She says I have missed some incredible things. I call her and ask what happened.

“It was just amazing,” she says. “Nicky did a session on healing.”

“Healing?”

“Healing by prayer. He started saying, ‘I sense someone here has a lump on their left breast that they’re very concerned about.’ There were maybe twenty-five of these, and he got it right every time. People were standing up and everyone prayed for them. And then I asked them to pray for my horse, who’s ill, and the horse got better. And I had a terrible pain in my left side and I didn’t mention it, but Nicky said he sensed it and everyone prayed for me and now the pain is gone.”

“Wow,” I say.

“Nicky was gutted that you missed it,” says Alice.

“You sound like you’ve changed your mind again,” I say.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Alice. “All I can say is that my horse got better and the pain has gone from my left side.” She pauses. “For all my problems with Kidderminster, I’ve got to say that Nicky is quite brilliant. He’s wonderful.”

And I have to admit that, for all my problems with Kidderminster, I can only agree with her.

PART TWO

HIGH-FLYING LIVES

“Their eyes met and exchanged a flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals.”

—Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

The Name’s Ronson, Jon Ronson

This is the centenary month of Ian Fleming’s birth. There’s an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum dedicated to Bond aesthetics. It’s all a mystery to me. His expensive cars and elegant suits leave me cold. In fact, I’ve only ever been in a Bond-type car once, many years ago. It was a Porsche. The owner—the comedian Steve Coogan—pointed at a button. “Press that,” he said. I did. The lid of the ashtray whirred gracefully open. “Did you see the smoothness of that action? Do you see how the ashtray just opened?” I looked mystified at him and at the ashtray.

Am I missing out on something? I hate not understanding things.

I phone Zoe Watkins at Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the literary estate. She’s known within Bond circles for having an encyclopedic knowledge of the books.

“I want to re-create a great Bond journey,” I say. “I want to take a passage from one of the novels and assiduously match Bond, car for car, road for road, meal for meal, drink for drink, hotel for hotel.”

“What a wonderful idea,” she says. “But which journey do you want to re-create?”

“I dunno,” I shrug. “One in Moonraker?”

“Moonraker is basically a drive from London to Margate,” Zoe says. “Fleming’s fans were disappointed by the absence of exotic locations.”

“Goldfinger?” I say.

“Well,” Zoe says, “in Goldfinger, Bond drove an Aston Martin DB3 from London to Geneva. He stopped at the Hôtel de la Gare in Orléans, had dinner, drove the next day to Geneva, checked into the Hotel des Bergues, and then the journey ended with him getting captured and tortured by Goldfinger’s henchman, Oddjob, in a villa near the hotel.”

“It’s perfect!” I say.

“Great!” Zoe says. Then she turns serious. “For copyright reasons,” she says, “it’s essential you make it clear you’re following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren’t actually James Bond.”

“I’ll make that clear,” I say.

I buy the novel. The journey seems even better once I read the ins and outs. Bond was trailing Goldfinger and had planted a tracking device in the boot of his Rolls-Royce. So Bond’s life was out of his hands. He had to go wherever Goldfinger went. This frustrated Bond, especially when he spotted a pretty woman in a passing Triumph. Under normal circumstances, Fleming wrote, Bond would have pulled her over to have sex with her, but he couldn’t because “today was for Goldfinger, not for love.”

My journey, too, will be out of my hands. I’ll have to go wherever Bond went. I wonder how many passing women I’ll decide not to have sex with en route to Geneva. Probably loads.

I telephone Aston Martin. They enthusiastically offer me an Aston Martin Vantage for three days. They love the Bond association.

“How much would the car normally cost?” I ask Matthew, Aston Martin’s press officer.

“Eighty-two thousand pounds,” he replies. “Plus I’ve put in about nine thousand pounds of extras.”

“Like an ejector seat?” I say.

“Extra-soft leather,” he replies. “And a connection to plug in your iPod.”

“Oh, REALLY?” I say. “An iPod connection?”

The Aston Martin was Bond’s car of choice because he knew that if he lost Goldfinger’s scent, “he’d have to do some fast motoring to catch up again. The DB3 would look after that. It was going to be fun playing hare and hounds across Europe.”