Casino Royale (2006 film) the series, allowing them to show a less experienced and more vulnerable Bond. "Casino Royale" takes place at the beginning of Bond's career as Agent 007, as he is earning his licence to kill. The plot sees Bond on an assignment to bankrupt terrorist financier Le Chiffre in a high-stakes poker game; Bond falls in love with Vesper Lynd, a treasury employee assigned to provide the money he needs for the game. The film begins a story arc that continues in "Quantum of Solace" (2008). Casting involved a widespread search for a new actor to succeed Pierce Brosnan as James
SMERSH (James Bond) grafts, signs of the wound remain in later Bond books). Then, at the end of the novel, Bond's lover and fellow agent Vesper Lynd—in fact a Soviet double agent—commits suicide when she learns that a SMERSH agent has her under surveillance and that the organisation is planning to kill her. As a result of her death, Bond swears vengeance upon SMERSH, which he calls "the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy". His revenge begins in the second novel, "Live and Let Die", wherein he becomes highly interested in disrupting Mr. Big's financing of Soviet operations upon