The following material is excerpted from declassified government files. The manuscript was found in a dining room built inside a volcano, next to the decayed remains of a lobster. The paper was impregnated with volatile organic compounds which were initially assumed to be a toxin. Subsequent analysis concluded that they were some kind of scent. The bottle of wine referenced was never found.

Dear James,

I’ve been expecting you. That’s what I was going to say when we eventually met. The trouble is, I’ve been expecting you too long. I’m pretty much over you now.

I went to a great deal of trouble laying the trail of clues that would eventually bring you to me. When day after day, week after week you did not arrive, I had to conclude that our years of enmity obviously meant more to me than they did to you.

I passed too many nights here, eating a luxurious lobster dinner by myself and crying into my Chateau Mouton Rothschild because you didn’t care enough to come and get me. As the hands of the clock edged towards midnight, I would try to relieve my frustration by murdering a blameless hench person. It never helped.

I spent hours devising ever more excruciating and elaborate ways to kill you. What a waste of time! I had become so obsessed with your death that I had forgotten to live.

All that waiting gave me time for introspection. I had the opportunity to do some work on myself and think about what it is I really want from life. As head of Spectre, I worked constantly in pursuit of wealth and power… someone else’s definition on success. I needed to explore my own values.

I hope it is not too disappointing to make your way here only to find me gone. I don’t flatter myself that you dreamed of killing me with the same feverish intensity that I dreamed of killing you, but it seems possible that you were planning to gun me down in righteous anger, executed for my many and varied crimes? If so, it might be some consolation to you to know that you have put an end to my reign of terror with your thoughtless tardiness just as surely as you would have done with a bullet.

By way of compensation, I have left the last bottle of the ‘47 alongside this note. And so farewell! Believe me when I tell you that I bear you no ill will. I have moved on, James. I hope that you can too.

Ernst.