Carte Blanche

6

After three and a half hours’ sleep James Bond was woken at seven a.m. in his Chelsea flat by the electronic tone of his mobile phone’s alarm clock. His eyes focused on the white ceiling of the small bedroom. He blinked twice and, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, head and knees, rolled out of the double bed, prodded by the urge to get on the trail of the Irishman and Noah.

His clothes from the mission to Novi Sad lay on the hardwood floor. He tossed the tactical outfit into a training kitbag, gathered up the rest of his clothes and dropped them into the laundry bin, a courtesy to May, his treasure of a Scottish housekeeper who came three times a week to sort out his domestic life. He would not think of having her pick up his clutter.

Naked, Bond walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it and scrubbed himself hard with unscented soap. Then he turned the temperature down, stood under freezing water until he could tolerate thatno longer, stepped out and dried himself. He examined his wounds from last night: two large aubergine-coloured bruises on his leg, some scrapes and the slice on his shoulder from the grenade shrapnel. Nothing serious.

He shaved with a heavy, double-bladed safety razor, its handle of light buffalo horn. He used this fine accessory not because it was greener to the environment than the plastic disposables that most men employed but simply because it gave a better shave – and required some skill to wield; James Bond found comfort even in small challenges.

By seven fifteen he was dressed: a navy-blue Canali suit, a white sea island shirt and a burgundy Grenadine tie, the latter items from Turnbull & Asser. He donned black shoes, slip-ons; he never wore laces, except for combat footwear or when tradecraft required him to send silent messages to a fellow agent via prearranged loopings.

Onto his wrist he slipped his steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual, the 34mm model, the date window its only complication; Bond did not need to know the phases of the moon or the exact moment of high tide at Southampton. And he suspected very few people did.

Most days he had breakfast – his favourite meal of the day – at a small hotel nearby in Pont Street. Occasionally he cooked for himself one of the few things he was capable of whipping up in the kitchen: three eggs softly scrambled with Irish butter. The steaming curds were accompanied by bacon and crisp wholemeal toast, with more Irish butter and marmalade.

Today, though, the urgency of Incident Twenty was in full bloom so there was no time for food. Instead he brewed a cup of fiercely strong Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, which he drank from a china mug as he listened to Radio 4 to learn whether or not the train incident and subsequent deaths had made the international news. They had not.

His wallet and cash were in his pocket, his car key, too. He grabbed the plastic carrier bag of the items he had collected in Serbia and the locked steel box that contained his weapon and ammunition, which he could not carry legally within the UK.

He hurried down the stairs of his flat – formerly two spacious stables. He unlocked the door and stepped into the garage. The cramped space was large enough, just, for the two cars that were inside, plus a few extra tyres and tools. He climbed into the newer of the vehicles, the latest model Bentley Continental GT, its exterior the company’s distinctive granite grey, with supple black hide inside.

The turbo W12 engine murmured to life. Tapping the downshift paddle into first gear, he eased into the road, leaving behind his other vehicle, less powerful and more temperamental but just as elegant: a 1960s E-type Jaguar, which had been his father’s.

Driving north, Bond manoeuvred through the traffic, with tens of thousands of others who were similarly making their way to offices throughout London at the start of yet another week – although, of course, in Bond’s case this mundane image belied the truth.

Exactly the same could be said for his employer itself.

Three years ago, James Bond had been sitting at a grey desk in the monolithic grey Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall, the sky outside not grey at all but the blue of a Highland loch on a bright summer’s day. After leaving the Royal Naval Reserve, he had had no desire for a job managing accounts at Saatchi & Saatchi or reviewing balance sheets for NatWest and had telephoned a former Fettes fencing teammate, who had suggested he try Defence Intelligence.

After a stint at DI, writing analyses that were described as both blunt and valuable, he had wondered to his supervisor if there might be a chance to see a little more action.

Not long after that conversation, he had received a mysterious missive, handwritten, not an email, requesting his presence for lunch in Pall Mall, at the Travellers Club.

On the day in question, Bond had been led into the dining room and seated in a corner opposite a solid man in his mid-sixties, identified only as the ‘Admiral’. He wore a grey suit that perfectly matched his eyes. His face was jowled and his head crowned with a sparse constellation of birthmarks, evident through the thinning, swept-back brown and grey hair. The Admiral had looked steadily at Bond without challenge or disdain or excessive analysis. Bond had no trouble in returning the gaze – a man who has killed in battle and nearly died himself is not cowed by anyone’s stare. He realised, however, that he had absolutely no idea what was going on in the man’s mind.

They did not shake hands.

Menus descended. Bond ordered halibut on the bone, steamed, with Hollandaise, boiled potatoes and grilled asparagus. The Admiral selected the grilled kidney and bacon, then asked Bond, ‘Wine?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You choose.’

‘Burgundy, I should think,’ Bond said. ‘Côte de Beaune? Or a Chablis?’

‘The Alex Gambal Puligny, perhaps?’ the waiter suggested.

‘Perfect.’

The bottle arrived a moment later. The waiter smoothly displayed the label and poured a little into Bond’s glass. The wine was the colour of pale butter, earthy and excellent, and exactly the right temperature, not too chilled. Bond sipped, nodded his approval and the glasses were half filled.

When the waiter had departed, the older man said gruffly, ‘You’re a veteran and so am I. Neither of us has any interest in small-talk. I’ve asked you here to discuss a career opportunity.’

‘I thought as much, sir.’ Bond hadn’t intended to add the final word, but it had been impossible not to do so.

‘You may be familiar with the rule at the Travellers about not exposing business documents. Afraid we’ll have to break it.’ The older man withdrew from his breast pocket an envelope. He handed it over. ‘This is similar to the Official Secrets Act declaration.’

‘I’ve signed one-’

‘Of course you have – for Defence Intelligence,’ the man said briskly, revealing his impatience at stating the obvious. ‘This has a few more teeth. Read it.’

Bond did so. More teeth indeed, to put it mildly.

The Admiral said, ‘If you’re not interested in signing we’ll finish our lunch and discuss the recent election or trout fishing in the north or how those damn Kiwis beat us again last week and get back to our offices.’ He lifted a bushy eyebrow.

Bond hesitated only a moment, then scrawled his name across the line and handed it back. The document vanished.

A sip of wine. The Admiral asked, ‘Have you heard of the Special Operations Executive?’

‘I have, yes.’ Bond had few idols, but high on the list was Winston Churchill. In his young days as a reporter and soldier in Cuba and Sudan Churchill had formed a great respect for guerrilla operations and later, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he and the minister for economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, had created the SOE to arm partisans behind German lines and to parachute in British spies and saboteurs. Also called Churchill’s Secret Army, it had caused immeasurable harm to the Nazis.

‘Good outfit,’ the Admiral said, then grumbled, ‘They closed it down after the war. Inter-agency nonsense, organisational difficulties, in-fighting at MI6 and Whitehall.’ He took a sip of the fragrant wine and conversation slowed while they ate. The meal was superb. Bond said so. The Admiral rasped, ‘Chef knows what he’s about. No aspirations to cook his way on to American television. Are you familiar with how Five and Six got going?’

‘Yes, sir – I’ve read quite a lot about it.’

In 1909, in response to concerns about a German invasion and spies within England (concerns that had been prompted, curiously, by popular thriller novels), the Admiralty and the War Office had formed the Secret Service Bureau. Not long after that, the SSB split into the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5, or MI5, to handle domestic security, and Section 6, or MI6, to handle foreign espionage. Six was the oldest continuously operating spy organisation in the world, despite China’s claim to the contrary.

The Admiral said, ‘What’s the one element that stands out about them both?’

Bond couldn’t begin to guess.

‘Plausible deniability,’ the older man muttered. ‘Both Five and Six were created as cut-outs so that the Crown, the prime minister, the Cabinet and the War Office didn’t have to get their hands dirty with that nasty business of spying. Just as bad now. Lot of scrutiny of what Five and Six do. Sexed-up dossiers, invasion of privacy, political snooping, rumours of illegal targeted killings… Everybody’s clamouring for transparency. Of course, no one seems to care that the face of war is changing, that the other side doesn’t play by the rules much any more.’ Another sip of wine. ‘There’s thinking, in some circles, that weneed to play by a different set of rules too. Especially after Nine-eleven and Seven-seven.’

Bond said, ‘So, if I understand correctly, you’re talking about starting a new version of the SOE, but one that isn’t technically part of Six, Five or the MoD.’

The Admiral held Bond’s eye. ‘I read those reports of your performance in Afghanistan – Royal Naval Reserve, yet still you managed to get yourself attached to forward combat units on the ground. Took some doing.’ The cool eyes regarded him closely. ‘I understand you also managed some missions behind the lines that weren’t quite so official. Thanks to you, some fellows who could have caused quite a lot of mischief never got the chance.’

Bond was about to sip from his glass of Puligny-Montrachet, the highest incarnation of the chardonnay grape. He set the glass down without doing so. How the devil had the old man learnt about those?

In a low, even voice the man said, ‘There’s no shortage of Special Air or Boat Service chaps about who know their way around a knife and sniper rifle. But they don’t necessarily fit into other, shall we say subtler, situations. And then there are plenty of talented Five and Six fellows who know the difference between…’ he glanced at Bond’s glass ‘… a Côte de Beaune and a Côte de Nuits and can speak French as fluently as they can Arabic – but who’d faint at the sight of blood, theirs or anyone else’s.’ The steel eyes zeroed in. ‘You seem to be a rather rare combination of the best of both.’

The Admiral put down his knife and fork on the bone china. ‘Your question.’

‘My…?’

‘About a new version of the Special Operations Executive. The answer is yes. In fact, it already exists. Would you be interested in joining?’

‘I would,’ Bond said without hesitation. ‘Though I should like to ask: what exactly does it do?’

The Admiral thought for a moment, as if polishing burrs off his reply. ‘Our mission,’ he said, ‘is simple. We protect the Realm… by any means necessary.’

7

In the sleek, purring Bentley, Bond now approached the headquarters of this very organisation, near Regent’s Park, after half an hour of the zigzagging that driving in central London necessitates.

The name of his employer was nearly as vague as that of the Special Operations Executive: the Overseas Development Group. The director-general was the Admiral, known only as M.

Officially the ODG assisted British-based companies in opening or expanding foreign operations and investing abroad. Bond’s OC, or official cover, within it was as a security and integrity analyst. His job was to travel the world and assess business risks.

No matter that the moment he landed he assumed an NOC – a nonofficialcover – with a fictitious identity, tucked away the Excel spreadsheets, put on his 5.11 tactical outfit and armed himself with a.308 rifle with Nikon Buckmasters scope. Or perhaps he’d slip into a well-cut Savile Row suit to play poker with a Chechnyan arms dealer in a private Kiev club, for the chance to assess his security detail in a run-up to the evening’s main event: the man’s rendition to a black site in Poland.

Tucked away inconspicuously in the hierarchy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the ODG was housed in a narrow, six-storey Edwardian building on a quiet road, just off Devonshire Street. It was separated from bustling Marylebone Road by lacklustre – but camouflaging – solicitors’ quarters, NGO offices and doctors’ surgeries.

Bond now motored to the entrance of the tunnel leading to the car park beneath the building. He glanced into the iris scanner, then was vetted again, this time by a human being. The barrier lowered and he eased the car forward in search of a parking bay.

The lift, too, checked Bond’s blue eyes, then took him up to the ground floor. He stepped into the armourer’s office, beside the pistol range, and handed the locked steel box to redheaded Freddy Menzies, a former corporal in the SAS and one of the finest firearms men in the business. He would make sure the Walther was cleaned, oiled and checked for damage, the magazines filled with Bond’s preferred loads.

‘She’ll be ready in half an hour,’ Menzies said. ‘She behave herself, 007?’

Bond had professional affection for certain tools of his trade but he didn’t personify them – and, if anything, a.40 calibre Walther, even the compact Police Pistol Short, would definitely be a ‘he’. ‘Acquitted itself well,’ he replied.

He took the lift to the third floor where he stepped out and turned left, walking down a bland, white-painted corridor, the walls a bit scuffed, their monotony broken by prints of London from the era of Cromwell to Victoria’s reign and of battlefields aplenty. Someone had brightened up the windowsills with vases of greenery – fake, of course; the real thing would have meant employing external maintenance staff to water and prune.

Bond spotted a young woman in front of a desk at the end of a large open area filled with work stations. Sublime, he had thought, upon meeting her a month ago. Her face was heart-shaped, with high cheekbones, and surrounded by Rossetti red hair that cascaded from her marvellous temples to past her shoulders. A tiny off-centre dimple, which he found completely charming, distressed her chin. Her hazel eyes, golden green, held yours intently, and to Bond, her figure was as a woman’s should be: slim and elegant. Her unpainted nails were trimmed short. Today she was in a knee-length black skirt and an apricot shirt, high-necked, yet thin enough to hint at lace beneath, managing to be both tasteful and provocative. Her legs were embraced by nylon the colour of café au lait.

Stockings or tights? Bond couldn’t help but wonder.

Ophelia Maidenstone was an intelligence analyst with MI6. She was stationed with the ODG as a liaison officer because the Group was not an intelligence-gathering organisation; it was operational, tactical, largely. Accordingly, like the Cabinet and the prime minister, it was a consumer of ‘product’, as intelligence was called. And the ODG’s main supplier was Six.

Admittedly, Philly’s appearance and forthright manner were what had initially caught Bond’s attention, just as her tireless efforts and resourcefulness had held it. Equally alluring, though, was her love of driving. Her favourite vehicle was a BSA 1966 Spitfire, the A65, one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made. It wasn’t the most powerful bike in the Birmingham Small Arms’ line but it was a true classic and, when properly tuned (which, God bless her, she did herself), it left a broad streak of rubber at the take-off line. She’d told Bond she liked to drive in all weather and had bought an insulated leather jumpsuit that let her take to the roads whenever she fancied. He’d imagined it as an extremely tight-fitting garment and arched an eyebrow. He’d received in return a sardonic smile, which told him that his gesture had ricocheted like a badly placed bullet.

She was, it emerged, engaged to be married. The ring, which he’d noted immediately, was a deceptive ruby.

So, that settled that.

Philly now looked up with an infectious smile. ‘James, hello!… Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘I need you.’

She tucked back a loose strand of hair. ‘Delighted to help if I could but I’ve got something on for John. He’s in Sudan. They’re about to start shooting.’

The Sudanese had been fighting the British, the Egyptians, other nearby African nations – and themselves – for more than a hundred years. The Eastern Alliance, several Sudanese states near the Red Sea, wanted to secede and form a moderate secular country. The regime in Khartoum, still buffeted by the recent independence movement in the south, was not pleased by this initiative.

Bond said, ‘I know. I was the one going originally. I drew Belgrade instead.’

‘The food’s better,’ she said, with studied gravity. ‘If you like plums.’

‘It’s just that I collected some things in Serbia that should be looked into.’

‘It’s never “just” with you, James.’

Her mobile buzzed. She frowned, peering at the screen. As she took the call, her piercing hazel eyes swung his way and regarded him with some humour. She said, into the phone, ‘I see.’ When she had disconnected, she said, ‘You pulled in some favours. Or bullied someone.’

‘Me? Never.’

‘It seems that war in Africa will have to soldier on without me. So to speak.’ She went to another work station and handed the Khartoum baton to a fellow spook.

Bond sat down. There seemed to be something different about her space but he couldn’t work out what it was. Perhaps she’d tidied it, or rearranged the furniture – as far as anyone could in the tiny area.

When she came back she focused her eyes on him. ‘Right, then. I’m all yours. What do we have?’

‘Incident Twenty.’

‘Ah, that. I wasn’t on the hot list so you’d better brief me.’

Like Bond, Ophelia Maidenstone was Developed Vetting Cleared by the Defence Vetting Agency, the FCO and Scotland Yard, which permitted virtually unlimited access to top-secret material, short of the most classified nuclear-arms data. He briefed her on Noah, the Irishman, the threat on Friday and the incident in Serbia. She took careful notes.

‘I need you to play detective inspector. This is all we have to go on.’ He handed her the carrier bag containing the slips of paper he’d snatched from the burning car outside Novi Sad and his own sunglasses. ‘I’ll need identification fast – very fast – and anything else you dig up.’

She lifted her phone and requested collection of the materials for analysis at the MI6 laboratory or, if that proved insufficient, Scotland Yard’s extensive forensic operation in Specialist Crimes. She rang off. ‘Runner’s on his way.’ She found a pair of tweezers in her handbag and extracted the two slips of paper. One was a bill from a pub near Cambridge, the date recent. It had been settled in cash unfortunately.

The other slip of paper read: Boots – March. 17. No later than that.Was it code or merely a reminder from two months ago to pick up something at the chemist?

‘And the Oakleys?’ She was gazing down into the bag.

‘There’s a fingerprint in the middle of the right lens. The Irishman’s partner. There was no pocket litter.’

She made copies of the two documents, handed him a set, kept one for herself and replaced the originals in the bag with the glasses.

Bond then explained about the hazardous material that the Irishman was trying to spill into the Danube. ‘I need to know what it was. And what kind of damage it could have caused. Afraid I’ve ruffled some feathers among the Serbs. They won’t want to co-operate.’

‘We’ll see about that.’

Just then his mobile buzzed. He looked at the screen, though he knew this distinctive chirp quite well. He answered. ‘Moneypenny.’

The woman’s low voice said, ‘Hello, James. Welcome back.’

‘M?’ he asked.

‘M.’

8

The sign beside the top-floor office read Director-General.

Bond stepped into the ante-room, where a woman in her mid-thirties sat at a tidy desk. She wore a pale cream camisole beneath a jacket that was nearly the same shade as Bond’s. A long face, handsome and regal, eyes that could flick from stern to compassionate faster than a Formula One gearbox.

‘Hello, Moneypenny.’

‘It’ll just be a moment, James. He’s on the line to Whitehall again.’

Her posture was upright, her gestures economical. Not a hair was out of place. He reflected, as he often did, that her military background had left an indelible mark. She’d resigned her commission with the Royal Navy to take her present job with M as his personal assistant.

Just after he’d joined the ODG, Bond had dropped into her office chair and flashed a broad smile. ‘Rank of lieutenant, were you, Moneypenny?’ he’d quipped. ‘I’d prefer to picture you aboveme.’ Bond had left the service as a commander.

He’d received in reply not the searing rejoinder he deserved but a smooth riposte: ‘Oh, but I’ve found in life, James, that all positions must be earned through experience. And I’m pleased to say I have little doubt that my level of such does not beginto approach yours.’

The cleverness and speed of her retort and the use of his first name, along with her radiant smile, instantly and immutably defined their relationship: she’d kept him in his place but opened the avenue of friendship. So it had remained ever since, caring and close but always professional. (Still, he harboured the belief that of all the 00 Section agents she liked him best.)

Moneypenny looked him over and frowned. ‘You had quite a time of it over there, I heard.’

‘You could say so.’

She glanced at M’s closed door and said, ‘This Noah situation’s a tough one, James. Signals flying everywhere. He left at nine last night, came in at five this morning.’ She added, in a whisper, ‘He was worried about you. There were some moments last night when you were incommunicado. He was on the phone quite often then.’

They saw a light on her phone extinguish. She hit a button and spoke through a nearly invisible stalk mike. ‘It’s 007, sir.’

She nodded at the door, towards which Bond now walked, as the do-not-disturb light above it flashed on. This occurred silently, of course, but Bond always imagined the illumination was accompanied by the sound of a deadbolt crashing open to admit a new prisoner to a medieval dungeon.

‘Morning, sir.’

M looked exactly the same as he had at the Travellers Club lunch when they’d met three years ago and might have been wearing the same grey suit. He gestured to one of the two functional chairs facing the large oak desk. Bond sat down.

The office was carpeted and the walls were lined with bookshelves. The building was at the fulcrum where old London became new and M’s windows in the corner office bore witness to this. To the west Marylebone High Street’s period buildings contrasted sharply with Euston Road’s skyscrapers of glass and metal, sculptures of high concept and questionable aesthetics and lift systems cleverer than you were.

These scenes, however, remained dim, even on sunny days, since the window glass was both bomb- and bullet-proof and mirrored to prevent spying by any ingenious enemy hanging from a hot-air balloon over Regent’s Park.

M looked up from his notes and scanned Bond. ‘No medical report, I gather.’

Nothing escaped him. Ever.

‘A scratch or two. Not serious.’

The man’s desk held a yellow pad, a complicated console phone, his mobile, an Edwardian brass lamp and a humidor stocked with the narrow black cheroots M sometimes allowed himself on drives to and from Whitehall or during his brief walks through Regent’s Park, when he was accompanied by his thoughts and two P Branch guards. Bond knew very little of M’s personal life, only that he lived in a Regency manor-house on the edge of Windsor Forest and was a bridge player, a fisherman and a rather accomplished watercolourist of flowers. A personable and talented Navy corporal named Andy Smith drove him about in a well-polished ten-year-old Rolls-Royce.

‘Give me your report, 007.’

Bond organised his thoughts. M did not tolerate a muddled narrative or padding. ‘Ums’ and ‘ers’ were as unacceptable as stating the obvious. He reiterated what had happened in Novi Sad, then added, ‘I found a few things in Serbia that might give us some details. Philly’s sorting them now and finding out about the haz-mat on the train.’

‘Philly?’

Bond recalled that M disliked the use of nicknames, even though he was referred to exclusively by one throughout the organisation. ‘Ophelia Maidenstone,’ he explained. ‘Our liaison from Six. If there’s anything to be found, she’ll sniff it out.’

‘Your cover in Serbia?’

‘I was working false flag. The senior people at BIA in Belgrade know I’m with the ODG and what my mission was, but we told their two field agents I was with a fictional UN peacekeeping outfit. I had to mention Noah and the incident on Friday in case the BIA agents stumbled across something referring to them. But whatever the Irishman got out of the younger man, it wasn’t compromising.’

‘The Yard and Five are wondering – with the train in Novi Sad, do you think Incident Twenty’s about sabotaging a railway line here? Serbia was a dry run?’

‘I wondered that too, sir. But it wouldn’t be the sort of operation that’d need much rehearsal. Besides, the Irishman’s partner rigged the derailment in about three minutes. Our rail systems here must be more sophisticated than a freight line in rural Serbia.’

A bushy eyebrow rose, perhaps disputing that assumption. But M said, ‘You’re right. It doesn’t seem like a prelude to Incident Twenty.’

‘Now.’ Bond sat forward. ‘What I’d like to do, sir, is get back to Station Y immediately. Enter through Hungary and set up a rendition op to track down the Irishman. I’ll take a couple of our double-one agents with me. We can trace the lorry he stole. It’ll be tricky but-’

M was shaking his head, rocking back in his well-worn throne. ‘It seems there’s a bit of a flap, 007. It involves you.’

‘Whatever Belgrade’s saying, the young agent who died-’

M waved a hand impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, of course what happened was their fault. There was never any question about that. Explanation is a sign of weakness, 007. Don’t know why you’re doing it now.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘I’m speaking of something else. Last night, Cheltenham managed to get a satellite image of the lorry the Irishman escaped in.’

‘Very good, sir.’ So, his tracking tactic had apparently succeeded.

But M’s scowl suggested Bond’s satisfaction was premature. ‘About fifteen miles south of Novi Sad the lorry pulled over and the Irishman got into a helicopter. No registration or ID but GCHQ got a MASINT profile of it.’

Material and Signature Intelligence was the latest in high-tech espionage. If information came from electronic sources like microwave transmissions or radio, it was ELINT; from photographs and satellite images, IMINT; from mobile phones and emails, SIGINT; and from human sources, HUMINT. With MASINT, instruments collected and profiled data such as thermal energy, sound waves, airflow disruption, propeller and helicopter rotor vibrations, exhaust from jet engines, trains and cars, velocity patterns and more.

The director-general continued, ‘Last night Five registered a MASINT profile that matched the helicopter he escaped in.’

Bloody hell… If MI5 had found the chopper, that meant it was in England. The Irishman – the sole lead to Noah and Incident Twenty – was in the one place where James Bond had no authority to pursue him.

M added, ‘The helicopter landed north-east of London at about one a.m. and vanished. They lost all track.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t see why Whitehall didn’t give us more latitude about operating at home when they chartered us. Would have been easy. Hell, what if you’d followed the Irishman to the London Eye or Madame Tussaud’s? What should you have done – rung 999? For God’s sake, these are the days of globalisation, of the Internet, the EU, yet we can’t follow leads in our own country.’

The rationale for this rule, however, was clear. MI5 conducted brilliant investigations. MI6 was a master at foreign intelligence gathering and ‘disruptive action’, such as destroying a terrorist cell from within by planting misinformation. The Overseas Development Group did rather more, including occasionally, if rarely, ordering its 00 Section agents to lie in wait for enemies of the state and shoot them dead. But to do so within the UK, however morally justifiable or tactically convenient, would play rather badly among bloggers and the Fleet Street scribblers.

Not to mention that the Crown’s prosecutors might be counted on to have a say in the matter as well.

But, politics aside, Bond adamantly wanted to pursue Incident Twenty. He’d developed a particular dislike for the Irishman. His words to M were measured: ‘I think I’m in the best position to find this man and Noah and to suss out what they’re up to. I want to keep on it, sir.’

‘I thought as much. And I wantyou to pursue it, 007. I’ve been on the phone this morning with Five and Specialist Operations at the Yard. They’re both willing to let you have a consulting role.’

‘Consulting?’ Bond said sourly, then realised that M would have done some impressive negotiating to achieve that much. ‘Thank you, sir.’

M deflected the words with a jerk of his head. ‘You’ll be working with someone from Division Three, a fellow named Osborne-Smith.’

Division Three… British security and police operations were like human beings: forever being born, marrying, producing progeny, dying and even, Bond had once joked, undergoing sex-change operations. Division Three was one of the more recent offspring. It had some loose affiliation with Five, in much the same way that the ODG had a gossamer thin connection to Six.

Plausible deniability…

While Five had broad investigation and surveillance powers, it had no arrest authority or tactical officers. Division Three did. It was a secretive, reclusive group of high-tech wizards, bureaucrats and former SAS and SBS tough boys with serious firepower. Bond had been impressed with its recent successes in taking down terrorist cells in Oldham, Leeds and London.

M regarded him evenly. ‘I know you’re used to having carte blancheto handle the mission as you see fit, 007. You have your independent streak and it’s served you well in the past.’ A dark look. ‘ Most of the time. But at home your authority’s limited. Significantly. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

So, no longer carte blanche, Bond reflected angrily, more carte grise.

Another dour glance from M. ‘Now, a complication. That security conference.’

‘Security conference?’

‘Haven’t read your Whitehall briefing?’ M asked petulantly.

These were administrative announcements about internal government matters and, accordingly, no, Bond did not read them. ‘Sorry, sir.’

M’s jowls tightened. ‘We have thirteen security agencies in the UK. Maybe more as of this morning. The heads of Five, Six, SOCA, JTAC, SO Thirteen, DI, the whole lot – myself included – will be holed up in Whitehall for three days later in the week. Oh, the CIA and some chaps from the Continent too. Briefings on Islamabad, Pyongyang, Venezuela, Beijing, Jakarta. And there’ll probably be some young analyst in Harry Potter glasses touting his theory that the Chechnyan rebels are responsible for that damned volcano in Iceland. A bloody inconvenience, the whole thing.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll be largely incommunicado. Chief of staff will be running the Incident Twenty operation for the Group.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll co-ordinate with him.’

‘Get on to it, 007. And remember: you’re operating in the UK. Treat it like a country you’ve never been to. Which means, for God’s sake, be diplomatic with the natives.’

9

‘It’s pretty bad, sir. Are you sure you want to see it?’

To the foreman, the man replied immediately. ‘Yes.’

‘Right, then. I’ll drive you out.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Just the shift chief and the lad what found it.’ Casting a glance at his boss, the man added, ‘They’ll keep quiet. If that’s what you want.’

Severan Hydt said nothing.

Under an overcast and dusty sky, the two men left the loading bay of the ancient headquarters building and walked to a nearby car park. They climbed into a people-carrier emblazoned with the logo of Green Way International Disposal and Recycling; the company name was printed over a delicate drawing of a verdant leaf. Hydt didn’t much care for the design, which struck him as mockingly trendy, but he’d been told that the image had scored well in focus groups and was good for public relations (‘Ah, the public,’ he’d responded with veiled contempt and reluctantly approved it).

He was a tall man – six foot three – and broad-shouldered, his columnar torso encased in a bespoke suit of black wool. His massive head was covered with thick, curly hair, black streaked with white, and he wore a matching beard. His yellowing fingernails extended well past his fingertips, but were carefully filed; they were long by design, not neglect.

Hydt’s pallor accentuated his dark nostrils and darker eyes, framed by a long face that appeared younger than his fifty-six years. He was a strong man still, having retained much of his youthful muscularity.

The van started through his company’s dishevelled grounds, more than a hundred acres of low buildings, rubbish tips, skips, hovering seagulls, smoke, dust…

And decay…

As they drove over the rough roads, Hydt’s attention momentarily slipped to a construction about half a mile away. A new building was nearing completion. It was identical to two that stood already in the grounds: five-storey boxes from which chimneys rose, the sky above them rippling from the rising heat. The buildings were known as destructors, a Victorian word that Severan Hydt loved. England was the first country in the world to make energy from municipal refuse. In the 1870s the first power plant to do so was built in Nottingham and soon hundreds were operating throughout the country, producing steam to generate electricity.

The destructor now nearing completion in the middle of his disposal and recycling operation was no different in theory from its gloomy Dickensian forebears, save that it used scrubbers and filters to clean the dangerous exhaust and was far more efficient, burning RDF – refuse-derived fuel – as it produced energy that was pumped (for profit, of course) into the London and Home County power grids.

Indeed, Green Way International, plc, was simply the latest in a long British tradition of innovation in refuse disposal and reclamation. Henry IV had decreed that rubbish should be collected and removed from the streets of towns and cities on threat of forfeit. Mudlarks had kept the banks of the Thames clean – for entrepreneurial profit, not government wages – and rag pickers had sold scraps of wool to mills for the production of cheap cloth called shoddy. In London, as early as the nineteenth century, women and girls had been employed to sift through incoming refuse and sort it according to future usefulness. The British Paper Company had been founded to manufacture recycled paper – in 1890.

Green Way was located nearly twenty miles east of London, well past the boxed sets of office buildings on the Isle of Dogs and the sea-mine of the O2, past the ramble of Canning Town and Silvertown, the Docklands. To reach it you turned south-east off the A13 and drove towards the Thames. Soon you were down to a narrow lane, unwelcoming, even forbidding, surrounded by nothing but brush and stalky plants, pale and translucent as a dying patient’s skin. The tarmac strip seemed a road to nowhere… until it crested a low rise and ahead you could see Green Way’s massive complex, forever muted through a haze.

In the middle of this wonderland of rubbish the van now stopped beside a battered skip, six feet high, twenty long. Two workers, somewhere in their forties, wearing tan Green Way overalls, stood uncomfortably beside it. They didn’t look any less uneasy now that the owner of the company himself, no less, was present.

‘Crikey,’ one whispered to the other.

Hydt knew they were also cowed by his black eyes, the tight mass of his beard and his towering frame.

And then there were those fingernails.

He asked, ‘In there?’

The workers remained speechless and the foreman, the name Jack Dennisonstitched on his overalls, said, ‘That’s right, sir.’ Then he snapped to one of the workers, ‘Right, sunshine, don’t keep Mr Hydt waiting. He hasn’t got all day, has he?’

The employee hurried to the side of the skip and, with some effort, pulled the large door open, assisted by a spring. Inside were the ubiquitous mounds of green bin liners and loose junk – bottles, magazines and newspapers – that people had been too lazy to separate for recycling.

And there was another item of discard inside: a human body.

A woman’s or teenage boy’s, to judge from the stature. There wasn’t much else to go on, since, clearly, death had occurred months ago. He bent down and probed with his long fingernails.

This enjoyable examination confirmed the corpse was a woman’s.

Staring at the loosening skin, the protruding bones, the insect and animal work on what was left of the flesh, Hydt felt his heart quicken. He said to the two workers, ‘You’ll keep this to yourselves.’

They’ll keep quiet.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Wait over there.’

They trotted away. Hydt glanced at Dennison, who nodded that they’d behave themselves. Hydt didn’t doubt it. He ran Green Way more like a military base than a rubbish tip and recycling yard. Security was tight – mobile phones were banned, all outgoing communications monitored – and discipline harsh. But, in compensation, Severan Hydt paid his people very, very well. A lesson of history was that professional soldiers stuck around far longer than amateurs, provided you had the money. And that particular commodity was never in short supply at Green Way. Disposing of what people no longer wanted had always been, and would forever be, a profitable endeavour.

Alone now, Hydt crouched beside the body.

The discovery of human remains here happened with some frequency. Sometimes workers in the construction debris and reclamation division of Green Way would find Victorian bones or desiccated skeletons in building foundations. Or a corpse was that of a homeless person, dead from exposure to the elements, drink or drugs, hurled unceremoniously upon the bin liners. Sometimes it was a murder victim – in which case the killers were usually polite enough to bring the body here directly.

Hydt never reported the deaths. The presence of the police was the last thing he wanted.

Besides, why should he give up such a treasure?

He eased closer to the body, knees pressing against what was left of the woman’s jeans. The smell of decay – like bitter, wet cardboard – would be unpleasant to most people but discard had been Hydt’s lifelong profession and he was no more repulsed by it than a garage mechanic is troubled by the scent of grease or an abattoir worker the odour of blood and viscera.

Dennison, the foreman, however, stood back some distance from the perfume.

With one of his jaundiced fingernails, Hydt reached forward and stroked the top of the skull, from which most of the hair was missing, then the jaw, the finger bones, the first to be exposed. Her nails too were long, though not because they had grown after her death, which was a myth; they simply appearedlonger because the flesh beneath them had shrunk.

He studied his new friend for a long moment, then reluctantly eased back. He looked at his watch. He pulled his iPhone from his pocket and took a dozen pictures of the corpse.

Then he glanced around him. He pointed to a deserted spot between two large mounds over landfills, like barrows holding phalanxes of fallen soldiers. ‘Tell the men to bury it there.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dennison replied.

As he walked back to the people-carrier, he said, ‘Not too deep. And leave a marker. So I’ll be able to find it again.’

Half an hour later Hydt was in his office, scrolling through the pictures he’d taken of the corpse, lost in the images, sitting at the three-hundred-year-old gaol door mounted on legs that was his desk. Finally he slipped the phone away and turned his dark eyes to other matters. And there were many. Green Way was one of the world leaders in the disposal, reclamation and recycling of discard.

The office was spacious and dimly lit, located on the top storey of Green Way’s headquarters, an old meat-processing factory, dating to 1896, renovated and turned into what interior design magazines might call shabby chic.

On the walls were architectural relics from buildings his company had demolished: scabby painted frames around cracked stained glass, concrete gargoyles, wildlife, effigies, mosaics. St George and the dragon were represented several times. St Joan, too. On one large bas-relief Zeus, operating undercover as a swan, had his way with beautiful Leda.

Hydt’s secretary came and went with letters for his signature, reports for him to read, memos to approve, financial statements to consider. Green Way was doing extremely well. At a recycling-industry conference Hydt had once joked that the adage about certainty in life should not be limited to the well-known two. People had to pay taxes, they had to die… and they had to have their discard collected and disposed of.

His computer chimed and he called up an encrypted email from a colleague out of the country. It was about an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, confirming times and locations. The last line stirred him: The number of dead tomorrow will be significant – close to 100. Hope that suits.

It did indeed. And the desire that had arisen within him when he’d first gazed at the body in the skip churned all the hotter.

He glanced up as a slim woman in her mid-sixties entered, wearing a dark trouser suit and black shirt. Her hair was white, cut in a businesswoman’s bob. A large, unadorned diamond hung from a platinum chain around her narrow neck, and similar stones, though in more complex arrangements, graced her wrists and several fingers.

‘I’ve approved the proofs.’ Jessica Barnes was an American. She’d come from a small town outside Boston; the regional lilt continued, charmingly, to tint her voice. A beauty queen years ago, she’d met Hydt when she was a hostess at a smart New York restaurant. They’d lived together for several years and – to keep her close – he’d hired her to review Green Way’s advertisements, another endeavour Hydt had little respect for or interest in. He’d been told, however, that she’d made some good decisions from time to time with regard to the company’s marketing efforts.

But as Hydt gazed at her, he saw that something about her was different today.

He found himself studying her face. That was it. His preference, insistence, was that she wore only black and white and kept her face free of make-up; today she had on some very faint blush and perhaps – he couldn’t quite be certain – some lipstick. He didn’t frown but she saw the direction of his eyes and shifted a bit, breathing a little differently. Her fingers started towards a cheek. She stopped her hand.

But the point had been made. She proffered the ads. ‘Do you want to look at them?’

‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ he said.

‘I’ll send them off.’ She left his office, her destination not the marketing department, Hydt knew, but the cloakroom where she would wash her face.

Jessica was not a foolish woman; she’d learned her lesson.

Then she was gone from his thoughts. He stared out of the window at his new destructor. He was very aware of the event coming up on Friday, but at the moment he couldn’t get tomorrow out of his head.

The number of dead… close to 100.

His gut twisted pleasantly.

It was then that his secretary announced on the intercom, ‘Mr Dunne’s here, sir.’

‘Ah, good.’

A moment later, Niall Dunne entered and swung the door shut so that the two were alone. The cumbersome man’s trapezoid face had rarely flickered with emotion in the nine months they’d known each other. Severan Hydt had little use for most people and no interest in social niceties. But Dunne chilled even him.

‘Now, what happened over there?’ Hydt asked. After the incident in Serbia, Dunne had said they should keep their phone conversations to a minimum.

The man turned his pale blue eyes to Hydt and explained in his Belfast accent that he and Karic, the Serbian contact, had been surprised by several men – at least two BIA Serbian intelligence officers masquerading as police and a Westerner, who’d told the Serbian agent he was with the European Peacekeeping and Monitoring Group.

Hydt frowned. ‘It’s-’

‘There is no such group,’ Dunne said calmly. ‘It had to be a private operation. There was no back-up, no central communications, no medics. The Westerner probably bribed the intelligence officers to help him. It isthe Balkans, after all. May have been a competitor.’ He added, ‘Maybe one of your partners or a worker here let slip something about the plan.’

He was referring to Gehenna, of course. They did everything they could to keep the project secret but a number of people around the world were involved; it wasn’t impossible that there’d been a leak and some crime syndicate was interested in learning more about it.

Dunne continued, ‘I don’t want to minimise the risk – they were pretty clever. But it wasn’t a major co-ordinated effort. I’m confident we can go forward.’

Dunne handed Hydt a mobile phone. ‘Use this one for our conversations. Better encryption.’

Hydt examined it. ‘Did you get a look at the Westerner?’

‘No. There was a lot of smoke.’

‘And Karic?’

‘I killed him.’ The blank face registered the same emotion as if he’d said, ‘Yes, it’s cool outside today.’

Hydt considered what the man had told him. No one was more precise or cautious when it came to analysis than Niall Dunne. If he was convinced this was no problem, then Hydt would accept his judgement.

Dunne continued, ‘I’m going up to the facility now. Once I get the last materials up there the team say they can finish in a few hours.’

A fire flared within Hydt, ignited by an image of the woman’s body in the skip – and the thought of what awaited up north. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Dunne said nothing. Finally he asked in a monotone, ‘You think that’s a good idea? Might be risky.’ He offered this as if he’d detected the eagerness in Hydt’s voice – Dunne seemed to feel that nothing good could come out of a decision based on emotion.

‘I’ll chance it.’ Hydt tapped his pocket to make certain his phone was there. He hoped there’d be an opportunity to take some more photographs.

10

After leaving M’s lair, Bond walked up the corridor. He greeted a smartly dressed Asian woman keyboarding deftly at a large computer and stepped into the doorway behind her.

‘You’ve bought the duty,’ he said to the man hunched over a desk as loaded with papers and files as M’s was empty.

‘I have indeed.’ Bill Tanner looked up. ‘I’m now the grand overlord of Incident Twenty. Take a pew, James.’ He nodded to an empty chair – or, rather, the empty chair. The office boasted a number of seats, but the rest were serving as outposts for more files. As Bond sat, the ODG’s chief of staff asked, ‘So, most important, did you get some decent wine and a gourmet meal on SAS Air last night?’

An Apache helicopter, courtesy of the Special Air Service, had plucked Bond from a field south of the Danube and whisked him to a NATO base in Germany, where a Hercules loaded with van parts completed his journey to London. He said, ‘Apparently they forgot to stock the galley.’

Tanner laughed. The retired army officer, a former lieutenant colonel, was a solid man in his fifties, ruddy of complexion and upright – in all senses of the word. He was in his usual uniform: dark trousers and light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Tanner had a tough job, running the ODG’s day-to-day operations, and by rights he should have had little sense of humour, though in fact, he had a fine one. He’d been Bond’s mentor when the young agent had joined and was now his closest friend within the organisation. Tanner was a devout golfer and every few weeks he and Bond would try to get out to one of the more challenging courses, like Royal Cinque Ports or Royal St George’s or, if time was tight, Sunningdale, near Windsor.

Tanner was, of course, generally familiar with Incident Twenty and the hunt for Noah, but Bond now updated him – and explained about his own downsized role in the UK operation.

The chief of staff gave a sympathetic laugh. ‘ Carte grise , eh? Must say you’re taking it rather well.’

‘Hardly have much choice,’ Bond allowed. ‘Is Whitehall still convinced that the threat’s out of Afghanistan?’

‘Let’s just say they hopeit’s based there,’ Tanner said, his voice low. ‘For several reasons. You can probably work them out for yourself.’

He meant politics, of course.

Then he nodded towards M’s office. ‘Did you catch his opinion on that security conference he’s been shanghaied to attend this week?’

‘Not much room for interpretation,’ Bond said.

Tanner chuckled.

Bond glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘I’ve got to meet a man from Division Three. Osborne-Smith. You know anything about him?’

‘Ah, Percy.’ Bill Tanner raised a cryptic eyebrow and smiled. ‘Good luck, James,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s best just to leave it at that.’

O Branch took up nearly the entire fourth floor.

It was a large open area, ringed with agents’ offices. In the centre were work stations for PAs and other support staff. It might have been the sales department of a major supermarket, if not for the fact that every office door had an iris scanner and keypad lock. There were many flatscreen computers in the centre but none of the giant monitors that seemed de rigueur in spy outfits on TV and in movies.

Bond strode through this busy area and nodded a greeting to a blonde in her mid twenties, perched forward in her office chair, presiding over an ordered work space. Had Mary Goodnight worked for any other department, Bond might have invited her to dinner and seen where matters led from there. But she wasn’t in any other department: she was fifteen feet from his office door and was his human diary, his portcullis and drawbridge, and was capable of repelling the unannounced firmly and, most important in government service, with unimprovable tact. Although none were on view, Goodnight occasionally received – from office mates, friends and dates – cards or souvenirs inspired by the film Titanic, so closely did she resemble Kate Winslet.

‘Good morning, Goodnight.’

That play on words, and others like it, had long ago moved from flirtatiousness to affection. They had become like an endearment between spouses, almost automatic and never tiresome.

Goodnight ran through his appointments for the day but Bond told her to cancel everything. He’d be meeting a man from Division Three, coming over from Thames House, and afterwards he might have to be off at a minute’s notice.

‘Shall I hold the signals too?’ she asked.

Bond considered this. ‘I suppose I’ll plough through them now. Should probably clear my desk anyway. If I have to be away, I don’t want to come back to a week’s worth of reading.’

She handed him the top-secret green-striped folders. With approval from the keypad lock and iris scanner beside his door Bond entered his office and turned on the light. The space wasn’t small by London office standards, about fifteen by fifteen, but was rather sterile. His government-issue desk was slightly larger than, but the same colour as, his desk at Defence Intelligence. The four wooden bookshelves were filled with volumes and periodicals that had been, or might be, helpful to him and varied in subject from the latest hacking techniques used by the Bulgarians to Thai idioms to a guide for reloading Lapua.338 sniper rounds. There was little of a personal nature to brighten the room. The one object he might have had on display, his Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, awarded for his duty in Afghanistan, was in the bottom drawer of his desk. He’d accepted the honour with good grace, but to Bond, courage was simply another tool in a soldier’s kit and he saw no more point in displaying indications of its past use than in hanging a spent cipher pad on the wall.

Bond now sat in his chair and began to read the signals – intelligence reports from Requirements at MI6, suitably buffed and packaged. The first was from the Russia Desk. Their Station R had managed to hack into a government server in Moscow and suck out some classified documents. Bond, who had a natural facility for language and had studied Russian at Fort Monckton, skipped the English synopsis and went to the raw intelligence.

He got one paragraph into the leaden prose when two words stopped him in his tracks. The Russian words for ‘Steel Cartridge’.

The phrase pinged deep inside him, just as sonar on a submarine notes a distant but definite target.

Steel Cartridge appeared to be a code name for an ‘active measure’, the Soviet term describing a tactical operation. It had involved ‘some deaths’.

But there was nothing specific on operational details.

Bond sat back, staring at the ceiling. He heard women’s voices outside his door and looked up. Philly, holding several files, was chatting with Mary Goodnight. Bond nodded and the Six agent joined him, taking a wooden chair opposite his desk.

‘What’ve you found, Philly?’

She sat forward, crossing her legs, and Bond believed he heard the appealing rustle of nylon. ‘First, your photo skills were fine, James, but the light was too low. I couldn’t get high enough resolution of the Irishman’s face for recognition. And there were no prints on the pub bill or the other note, except for a partial of yours.’

So, the man would have to remain anonymous for the time being.

‘But the prints on the glasses were good. The local was Aldo Karic, Serbian. He lived in Belgrade and worked for the national railway.’ She pursed her lips in frustration, which emphasised the charming dimple. ‘But it’s going to take a little longer than I’d hoped to get more details. The same with the haz-mat on the train. Nobody’s saying anything. You were right – Belgrade’s not in the mood to co-operate.

‘Now for the slips of paper you found in the burning car. I got some possible locations.’

Bond noted the printouts she was producing from a folder. They were of maps emblazoned with the cheerful logo of MapQuest, the online directions-finding service. ‘Are you having budget problems at Six? I’d be happy to ring the Treasury for you.’

She laughed, a breathy sound. ‘I used proxies, of course. Just wanted an idea of where on the pitch we’re playing.’ She tapped one. ‘The receipt? The pub is here.’ It was just off the motorway near Cambridge.

Bond stared at the map. Who had eaten there? The Irishman? Noah? Other associates? Or someone who’d hired the car last week and had no connection whatsoever with Incident Twenty?

‘And the other piece of paper? With the writing on it?’

Boots – March. 17. No later than that.

She produced a lengthy list. ‘I tried to think of every possible combination of what it could mean. Dates, footwear, geographical locations, the chemist.’ Her mouth tightened again. She was displeased that her efforts had fallen short. ‘Nothing obvious, I’m afraid.’

He rose and pulled down several Ordnance Survey maps from the shelf. He flipped through one, scanning carefully.

Mary Goodnight appeared in the doorway. ‘James, someone downstairs to see you. From Division Three, he says. Percy Osborne-Smith.’

Philly must have caught the sea change in Bond’s expression. ‘I’ll make myself scarce now, James. I’ll keep on at the Serbs. They’ll crack. I guarantee it.’

‘Oh, one more thing, Philly.’ He handed her the signal he’d just been reading. ‘I need you to catch everything you can about a Soviet or Russian operation called Steel Cartridge. There’s a little in here, not much.’

She glanced down at the printout.

He said, ‘Sorry it’s not translated but you can probably-’

‘Ya govoryu po russki.’

Bond smiled weakly. ‘And with a far better accent than mine.’ He told himself never to sell her short again.

Philly examined the printout closely. ‘This was hacked from an online source. Who has the original data file?’

‘One of your people would. It came out of Station R.’

‘I’ll contact the Russia Desk,’ she said. ‘I’ll want to look at the metadata coded in the file. That’ll have the date it was created, who the author was, maybe cross references to other sources.’ She slipped the Russian document into a manila folder and took a pen to tick off one of the boxes on the front. ‘How do you want it classified?’

He debated for a moment. ‘Our eyes only.’

‘“Our”?’ she asked. That pronoun was not used in official document classification.

‘Yours and mine,’ he said softly. ‘No one else.’

A brief hesitation and then, in her delicate lettering, she penned at the top: Eyes only. SIS Agent Maidenstone. ODG Agent James Bond.‘And priority?’ she wondered aloud.

At this question Bond did not hesitate at all. ‘Urgent.’

11

Bond was sitting forward at his desk, doing some research of his own in government databases, when he heard footsteps approaching, accompanied by a loud voice.

‘I’m fine, just great. You can peel off now, please and thank you – I can do without the sat-nav.’

With that, a man in a close-fitting striped suit strode into Bond’s office, having discarded the Section P security officer who’d accompanied him. He’d also bypassed Mary Goodnight, who had risen with a frown as the man stormed past, ignoring her.

He walked up to Bond’s desk, thrusting out a fleshy palm. Slim but flabby, unimposing, he nonetheless had assertive eyes and large hands at the end of his long arms. He seemed the sort to deliver a bone-crusher so Bond, darkening his computer screen and standing up, prepared to counter it, shooting his hand in close to deny him leverage.

In fact, Percy Osborne-Smith’s clasp was brief and harmless, though unpleasantly damp.

‘Bond. James Bond.’ He motioned the Division Three officer to the chair Philly had just occupied and reminded himself not to let the man’s coiffure – dark blond hair combed and apparently glued to the side of his head – pouting lips and rubbery neck deceive. A weak chin did not mean a weak man, as anyone familiar with Field Marshal Montgomery’s career could certify.

‘So,’ Osborne-Smith said, ‘here we are. Excitement galore with Incident Twenty. Who thinks up these names, do you wonder? The Intelligence Committee, I suppose.’

Bond tipped his head noncommittally.

The man’s eyes swept around the office, alighted briefly on a plastic gun with an orange muzzle used in close-combat training and returned to Bond. ‘Now, from what I hear Defence and Six are firing up the boilers to steam down the Afghan route, looking for baddies in the hinterland. Makes you and me the awkward younger brothers, left behind, stuck with this Serbian connection. But sometimes it’s the pawns that win the game, isn’t it?’

He dabbed his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. Bond couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen anyone under the age of seventy employ this combination of gesture and accessory. ‘Heard about you, Bond… James. Let’s go with givens, shall we? My surname’s a bit of a mouthful. Crosses to bear. Just like my title – Deputy Senior Director of Field Operations.’

Rather unskilfully inserted, Bond reflected.

‘So, it’s Percy and James. Sounds like a stand-up act at a Comic Relief show. Anyway, I’ve heard about you, James. Your reputation precedes you. Not “exceeds”, of course. At least, not from what I hear.’

Oh, God, Bond thought, his patience already worn thin. He pre-empted a continuation of the monologue and explained in detail what had happened in Serbia.

Osborne-Smith took it all in, jotting notes. Then he described what had happened on the British side of the Channel, which wasn’t particularly informative. Even enlisting the impressive surveillance skills of MI5’s A Branch – known as the Watchers – no one had been able to confirm more than that the helicopter carrying the Irishman had landed somewhere north-east of London. No MASINT or other trace of the chopper had been found since.

‘So, our strategy?’ Osborne-Smith said, though not as a question. Rather, it was a preface to a directive: ‘While Defence and Six and everybody under the sun are prowling the desert looking for Afghans of mass destruction, I want to go all out here, find this Irishman and Noah, wrap them up in tidy ribbons and bring them in.’

‘Arrest them?’

‘Well, “detain” might be the happier word.’

‘Actually, I’m not sure that’s the best approach,’ Bond said delicately.

For God’s sake, be diplomatic with the natives…

‘Why not? We don’t have time to surveille.’ Bond noticed a faint lisp. ‘Only to interrogate.’

‘If thousands of lives are at risk, the Irishman and Noah can’t be operating alone. They might even be pretty low in the food chain. All we know for sure is that there was a meeting at Noah’s office. Nothing ever suggested he was in charge of the whole operation. And the Irishman? He’s a triggerman. Certainly knows his craft but basically he’s muscle. I think we need to identify them and keep them in play until we get more answers.’

Osborne-Smith was nodding agreeably. ‘Ah, but you’re not familiar with my background, James, my curriculum vitae.’ The smile and the smarminess vanished. ‘I cut my teeth grilling prisoners. In Northern Ireland. And Belmarsh.’

The infamous so-called ‘Terrorists’ Prison’ in London.

‘I’ve sunned myself in Cuba too,’ he continued. ‘Guantánamo. Yes, indeed. People end up talking to me, James. After I’ve been going at them for a few days, they’ll hand me the address where their brother’s hiding, won’t they? Or their son. Or daughter. Oh, people talk when I ask them… ever so politely.’

Bond wasn’t giving up. ‘But if Noah has partners and they learn he’s been picked up, they might accelerate whatever’s planned for Friday. Or disappear – and we’ll lose them until they strike again in six or eight months when all the leads’ve gone cold. This Irishman would have planned for a contingency like that, I’m sure of it.’

The soft nose wrinkled with regret. ‘It’s just that, well, if we were on the Continent somewhere or padding about in Red Square, I’d be de lighted to sit back and watch you bowl leg or off breaks, as you thought best, but, well, it isour cricket ground here.’

The whip crack was, of course, inevitable. Bond decided there was no point in arguing. The dandified puppet had a steel spine. He also had ultimate authority and could shut out Bond entirely if he wished to. ‘It’s your call, of course,’ Bond said pleasantly. ‘So, I suppose the first step is to find them. Let me show you the leads.’ He passed over a copy of the pub receipt and the note: Boots – March. 17. No later than that.

Osborne-Smith was frowning as he examined the sheets. ‘What do you make of them?’ he asked.

‘Nothing very sexy,’ Bond said. ‘The pub’s outside Cambridge. The note’s a bit of a mystery.’

‘March the seventeenth? A reminder to drop in at the chemist?’

‘Maybe,’ Bond said dubiously. ‘I was thinking it might be code.’ He pushed forward the MapQuest printout that Philly had provided. ‘If you ask me, the pub’s probably nothing. I can’t find anything distinctive about it – it’s not near anywhere important. Off the M11, near Wimpole Road.’ He touched the sheet. ‘Probably a waste of time. But it ought to be looked into. Why don’t I take that? I’ll head up there and look around Cambridge. Maybe you could run the March note past the cryptanalysts at Five and see what their computers have to say. That holds the key, I think.’

‘I will do. But actually, if you don’t mind, James, it’s probably best if I handle the pub myself. I know the lie of the land. I was at Cambridge – Magdalene.’ The map and the pub receipt vanished into Osborne-Smith’s briefcase, with a copy of the March note. Then he produced another sheet of paper. ‘Can you get that girl in?’

Bond lifted an eyebrow. ‘Which one?’

‘The pretty young thing outside. Single, I see.’

‘You mean my PA,’ Bond said drily. He rose and went to the door. ‘Miss Goodnight, would you come in, please?’

She did so, frowning.

‘Our friend Percy wants a word with you.’

Osborne-Smith missed the irony in Bond’s choice of names and handed the sheet of paper to her. ‘Make a copy of this, would you?’

With a glance towards Bond, who nodded, she took the document and went to the copier. Osborne-Smith called after her, ‘Double-sided, of course. Waste works to the enemy’s advantage, doesn’t it?’

Goodnight returned a moment later. Osborne-Smith put the original in his briefcase and handed the copy to Bond. ‘You ever get out to the firearms range?’

‘From time to time,’ Bond told him. He didn’t add: six hours a week, religiously, indoor here with small arms, outdoor with full-bore at Bisley. And once a fortnight he trained at Scotland Yard’s FATS range – the high-definition computerised firearms training simulator, in which an electrode was mounted against your back; if the terrorist shot you before you shot him, you ended up on your knees in excruciating pain.

‘We have to observe the formalities, don’t we?’ Osborne-Smith gestured at the sheet in Bond’s hand. ‘Application to become a temporary AFO.’

Only a very few law enforcers – authorised firearms officers – could carry weapons in the UK.

‘It’s probably not a good idea to use my name on that,’ Bond pointed out.

Osborne-Smith seemed not to have thought of this. ‘You may be right. Well, use a nonofficial cover, why don’t you? John Smith’ll do. Just fill it in and do the quiz on the back – gun safety and all that. If you hit a speed bump, give me a shout. I’ll walk you through.’

‘I’ll get right to it.’

‘Good man. Glad that’s settled. We’ll co-ordinate later – after our respective secret missions.’ He tapped his briefcase. ‘Off to Cambridge.’

He pivoted and strode out as boisterously as he’d arrived.

‘What a positively wretched man,’ Goodnight whispered.

Bond gave a brief laugh. He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair and tugged it on, picked up the Ordnance Survey. ‘I’m going down to the armoury to collect my gun and after that I’ll be out for three or four hours.’

‘What about the firearms form, James?’

‘Ah.’ He picked it up, tore it into neat strips and slipped them into the map booklet to mark his places. ‘Why waste departmental Post-it notes? Works to the enemy’s advantage, you know.’

12

An hour and a half later, James Bond was in his Bentley Continental GT, a grey streak speeding north.

He was reflecting on his deception of Percy Osborne-Smith. He’d decided that the lead to the Cambridge pub wasn’t, in fact, very promising. Yes, possibly the Incident Twenty principals had eaten there – the bill suggested a meal for two or three. But the date was more than a week ago so it was unlikely that anyone on the staff would remember a man fitting the Irishman’s description and his companions. And since the man had proved to be particularly clever, Bond suspected he rotated the places where he dined and shopped; he would not be a regular there.

The lead in Cambridge had to be followed up, of course, but – equally important – Bond needed to keep Osborne-Smith diverted. He could simply not allow the Irishman or Noah to be arrested and hauled into Belmarsh, like a drug dealer or an Islamist who’d been buying excessive fertiliser. They needed to keep both suspects in play to discover the nature of Incident Twenty.

So Bond, a keen poker player, had bluffed. He’d taken inordinate interest in the clue about the pub and had mentioned it was not far from Wimpole Road. To most people this would have meant nothing. But Bond guessed that Osborne-Smith would know that a secret government facility connected to Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological weapons research centre in Wiltshire, happened also to be on Wimpole Road. True, it was eight miles to the east, on the other side of Cambridge and nowhere near the pub, but Bond believed that associating the two would encourage the Division Three man to descend on the idea like a seabird spotting a fish head.

This relegated Bond to the apparently fruitless task of wrestling with the cryptic note. Boots – March. 17. No later than that.

Which he believed he had deciphered.

Most of Philly’s suggestions about its meaning had involved the chemist, Boots, which had shops in every town across the UK. She’d also offered suggestions about footwear and about events that had taken place on 17 March.

But one suggestion, towards the end of her list, had intrigued Bond. She’d noted that ‘Boots’ and ‘March’ were linked with a dash and she had found that there was a Boots Road that ran near the town of March, a couple of hours’ drive north of London. She had seen, too, the full stop between ‘March’ and ‘17’. Given that the last phrase ‘no later than that’ suggested a deadline, ‘17’ made sense as a date but was possibly 17 May, tomorrow.

Clever of her, Bond had thought and in his office, waiting for Osborne-Smith, he had gone into the Golden Wire – a secure fibre-optic network tying together records of all major British security agencies – to learn what he could about March and Boots Road.

He had found some intriguing facts: traffic reports about road diversions because a large number of lorries were coming and going along Boots Road near an old army base and public notices relating to heavy plant work. References suggested that it had to be completed by midnight on the seventeenth or fines would be levied. He had a hunch that this might be a solid lead to the Irishman and Noah.

And tradecraft dictated that you ignored such intuition at your peril.

So, he was now en route to March, losing himself in the consuming pleasure of driving.

Which meant, of course, driving fast.

Bond had to exercise some restraint, of course, since he wasn’t on the N-260 in the Pyrenees, or off the beaten track in the Lake District, but was travelling north along the A1 as it switched identities arbitrarily between motorway and trunk road. Still, the speedometer needle occasionally reached 100 m.p.h., and frequently he’d tap the lever of the silken, millisecond-response Quickshift gearbox to overtake a slow-moving horsebox or Ford Mondeo. He stayed mostly in the right lane, although once or twice he took to the hard shoulder for some exhilarating if illegal overtaking. He enjoyed a few controlled skids on stretches of adverse camber.

The police were not a problem. While the jurisdiction of ODG was limited in the UK – carte grise, not blanche, Bond now joked to himself – it was often necessary for O Branch agents to get around the country quickly. Bond had phoned in an NDR – a Null Detain Request – and his number plate was ignored by cameras and constables with speed guns.

Ah, the Bentley Continental GT coupé… the finest off-the-peg vehicle in the world, Bond believed.

He had always loved the marque; his father had kept hundreds of old newspaper photos of the famed Bentley brothers and their creations leaving Bugattis and the rest of the field in the dust at Le Mans in the 1920s and 1930s. Bond himself had witnessed the astonishing Bentley Speed 8 take the chequered flag at the race in 2003, back in the game after three-quarters of a century. It had always been his goal to own one of the stately yet wickedly fast and clever vehicles. While the E-type Jaguar sitting below his flat had been a legacy from his father, the GT had been an indirect bequest. He’d bought his first Continental some years ago, depleting what remained of the life-insurance payment that had come his way upon his parents’ deaths. He’d recently traded up to the new model.

He now came off the motorway and proceeded towards March, in the heart of the Fens. He knew little about the place. He’d heard of the ‘March March March’, a walk by students from March to Cambridge in, of course, the third month of the year. There was Whitemoor prison. And tourists came to see St Wendreda’s Church – Bond would have to trust the tourist office’s word that it was spectacular; he hadn’t been inside a house of worship, other than for surveillance purposes, in years.

Ahead loomed the old British Army base. He continued in a broad circle to the back, which was surrounded by vicious barbed-wire fencing and signs warning against intrusion. He saw why: it was being demolished. So this was the work he’d learnt of. Half a dozen buildings had already been razed. Only one remained, three storeys high, old red brick. A faded sign announced: Hospital.

Several large lorries were present, along with bulldozers, other earth-moving equipment and caravans, which sat on a hill a hundred yards from the building, probably the temporary headquarters for the demolition crew. A black car was parked near the largest caravan, but no one was about. Bond wondered why; today was Monday and not a bank holiday.

He nosed the car into a small copse, where it could not be seen. Climbing out, he surveyed the terrain: complicated waterways, potato and sugarbeet fields and clusters of trees. Bond donned his 5.11 tactical outfit, with the shrapnel tear in the shoulder of the jacket and tainted from the smell of scorching – from rescuing the clue in Serbia that had led him here – then stepped out of his City shoes into low combat boots.

He clipped his Walther and two holsters of ammunition to a canvas web utility belt.

If you hit a speed bump, give me a shout.

He also pocketed his silencer, a torch, tool kit and his folding knife.

Then Bond paused, going into that other place, where he went before any tactical operation: dead calm, eyes focused and taking in every detail – branches that might betray with a snap, bushes that could hide the muzzle of a sniper rifle, evidence of wires, sensors and cameras that might report his presence to an enemy.

And preparing to take a life, quickly and efficiently, if he had to. That was part of the other world too.

And he was all the more cautious because of the many questions this assignment had raised.

Fit your response to your enemy’s purpose.

But what was Noah’s purpose?

Indeed, who the hell was he?

Bond moved through the trees, then cut across the corner of a field dotted with an early growth of sugarbeet. He diverted around a fragrant bog and moved carefully through a tangle of brambles, making his way towards the hospital. Finally he came to the barbed-wire perimeter, posted with warning signs. Eastern Demolition and Scrap was doing the work, they announced. He’d never heard of the company but thought he might have seen their lorries – there was something familiar about the distinctive green-and-yellow colouring.

He scanned the overgrown field in front of the building, the parade grounds behind. He saw nobody, then began to clip his way through the fence with wire cutters, thinking how clever it would be to use the building for secret meetings relevant to Incident Twenty; the place would soon be torn down, which would destroy any evidence of its use.

No workers were nearby but the presence of the black car suggested someone might be inside. He looked for a back door or other unobtrusive entrance. Five minutes later he found one: a depression in the earth, ten feet deep, caused by the collapse of what must have been an underground supply tunnel. He climbed down into the bowl and shone his torch inside. It seemed to lead into the basement of the hospital, about fifty yards away.

He started forward, noting the ancient cracked brick walls and ceiling – just as two bricks dislodged themselves and crashed to the floor. On the ground there were small-gauge rail tracks, rusting and in places covered with mud.

Halfway along the grim passage, pebbles and a stream of damp earth pelted his head. He glanced up and saw that, six feet above, the tunnel ceiling was scored like a cracked eggshell. It looked as if a handclap would bring the whole thing down on him.

Not a great place to be buried alive, Bond reflected.

Then he added wryly to himself, And just where exactly wouldbe?

‘Brilliant job,’ Severan Hydt told Niall Dunne.

They were alone in Hydt’s site caravan, parked a hundred yards from the dark, brooding British Army hospital outside March. Since the Gehenna team had been under pressure to finish the job by tomorrow, Hydt and Dunne had halted demolition this morning and made sure that the crew stayed away – most of Hydt’s employees knew nothing of Gehenna and he had to be very careful when the two operations overlapped.

‘I was satisfied,’ Dunne said flatly – in the tone with which he responded to nearly everything, be it praise, criticism or dispassionate observation.

The team had left with the device half an hour ago, having assembled it with the materials Dunne had provided. It would be hidden in a safe-house nearby until Friday.

Hydt had spent some time walking around the last building to be razed: the hospital, erected more than eighty years ago.

Demolition made Green Way a huge amount of money. The company profited from people paying to tear down what they no longer wanted, and by extracting from the rubble what other people didwant: wooden and steel beams, wire, aluminium and copper pipes – beautiful copper, a rag-and-bone man’s dream. But Hydt’s interest in demolition, of course, went beyond the financial. He now studied the ancient building in a state of tense rapture, as a hunter stares at an unsuspecting animal moments before he fires the fatal shot.

He couldn’t help but think of the hospital’s former occupants too – the dead and dying.

Hydt had snapped dozens of pictures of the grand old lady as he’d strolled through the rotting halls, the mouldy rooms – particularly the mortuary and autopsy areas – collecting images of decay and decline. His photographic archives included shots of old buildings as well as bodies. He had quite a number, some rather artistic, of places like Northumberland Terrace, Palmers Green on the North Circular Road, the now-vanished Pura oil works on Bow Creek in Canning Town and the Gothic Royal Arsenal and Royal Laboratory in Woolwich. His photos of Lovell’s Wharf in Greenwich, a testament to what aggressive neglect could achieve, never failed to move him.

On his mobile, Niall Dunne was giving instructions to the driver of the lorry that had just left, explaining how best to hide the device. They were quite precise details, in accord with his nature and that of the horrific weapon.

Although the Irishman made him uneasy, Hydt was grateful their paths had intersected. He could not have proceeded as quickly, or as safely, on Gehenna without him. Hydt had come to refer to him as ‘the man who thinks of everything’ and indeed he was. So, Severan Hydt was happy to put up with the eerie silences, the cold stares, the awkward arrangement of robotic steel that was Niall Dunne. The two men made an efficient partnership, if an ironic one: an engineer whose nature was to build, a rag-and-bone man whose passion was destruction.

What a curious package we humans are. Predictable only in death. Faithful only then too, Hydt reflected and then discarded that thought.

Just after Dunne disconnected, there was a knock on the door. It opened. Eric Janssen, a Green Way security man, who’d driven them up to March, stood in the doorway, his face troubled.

‘Mr Hydt, Mr Dunne, someone’s gone into the building.’

‘What?’ Hydt barked, turning his huge equine head the man’s way.

‘He went in through the tunnel.’

Dunne rattled off a number of questions. Was he alone? Had there been any transmissions that Janssen had monitored? Was his car nearby? Had there been any unusual traffic in the area? Was the man armed?

The answers suggested that he was operating by himself and wasn’t with Scotland Yard or the Security Service.

‘Did you get a picture or a good look at him?’ Dunne asked.

‘No, sir.’

Hydt clicked two long nails together. ‘The man with the Serbs? From last night?’ he asked Dunne. ‘The private operator?’

‘Not impossible, but I don’t know how he could have traced us here.’ Dunne gazed out of the caravan’s dirt-spattered window as if he wasn’t seeing the building. Hydt knew the Irishman was drafting a blueprint in his mind. Or perhaps examining one he’d already prepared in case of such a contingency. For a long moment he was motionless. Finally, drawing his gun, Dunne stepped out of the caravan, gesturing to Janssen to follow.

13

The smells of mould, rot, chemicals, oil and petrol were overwhelming. Bond struggled not to cough and blinked tears from his stinging eyes. Could he detect smoke too?

The hospital’s basement here was windowless. Only faint illumination filtered in from where he’d entered the tunnel. Bond splayed light from his torch around him. He was beside a railway turntable, designed to rotate small locomotives after they’d carted in supplies or patients.

His Walther in hand, Bond searched the area, listening for voices, footsteps, the click of a weapon chambering bullets or going off safety. But the place was deserted.

He’d entered through the tunnel at the south end. As he moved farther north and away from the turntable, he came to a sign that prompted a brief laugh: Mortuary.

It consisted of three large windowless rooms that had clearly been occupied recently; the floors were dust-free and new cheap work benches were arranged throughout. One of these rooms seemed to be the source of the smoke. Bond saw electricity cables secured to the wall and floor with duct tape, presumably providing power for lights and whatever work had been going on. Perhaps an electrical short had produced the fumes.

He left the mortuary and came to a large open space, with a double door, to the right, east, opening to the parade ground. Light filtered through the crack between the panels – a possible escape route, he noted, and he memorised its location and the placement of columns that might provide cover in the event he had to make his way to it under fire.

Ancient steel tables, stained brown and black, were bolted to the floor, each with its own drain. For post-mortems, of course.

Bond continued to the north end of the building, which ended in a series of smaller rooms with barred windows. A sign here suggested why: Mental Health Ward.

He tried the doors leading up to the ground floor, found them locked and returned to the three rooms next to the turntable. A systematic search finally revealed the source of the smoke. On the floor in the corner of one room there was an improvised hearth. He spotted large curls of ash, on which he could discern writing. The flakes were delicate; he tried to pick one up but it dissolved between his fingers.

Careful, he told himself.

He walked over to one of the wires running up the wall. He pulled off several pieces of the silver duct tape securing the cord and sliced them into six-inch lengths with his knife. He then carefully pressed them on to the grey and black ash curls, slipped them into his pocket and continued his search. In a second room something silvery caught his eye. He hurried to the corner and found tiny splinters of metal littering the floor. He picked them up with another piece of tape, which he also pocketed.

Then Bond froze. The building had begun to vibrate. A moment later the shaking increased considerably. He heard a diesel engine rattling, not far away. That explained why the demolition site had been deserted; the workers must have been at lunch and now they’d returned. He couldn’t get to the ground or higher floors without going outside, where he’d surely be spotted. It was time to leave.

He stepped back into the turntable room to leave through the tunnel.

And was saved from a broken skull by a matter of a few decibels.

He didn’t see the attacker or hear his breathing or the hiss of whatever he swung, but Bond sensed a faint muting of the diesel’s rattle, as the man’s clothing absorbed the sound.

Instinctively, he leapt back and the metal pipe missed him by inches.

Bond grabbed it firmly in his left hand and his attacker stumbled, off balance, too surprised to release his weapon. The young blond man wore a cheap dark suit and white shirt, a security man’s uniform, Bond assessed. He had no tie; he’d probably removed it in anticipation of the assault. His eyes wide in dismay, he staggered again and nearly fell but righted himself fast and clumsily launched himself into Bond. Together they crashed to the filthy floor of the circular room. He was not, Bond noted, the Irishman.

Bond jumped up and stepped forward, clenching his hands into fists, but it was a feint – he intended to get the muscular fellow to step back and avoid a blow, which he accommodatingly did, giving Bond the chance to draw his weapon. He didn’t, however, fire; he needed the man alive.

Covered by Bond’s.40-calibre pistol, he froze, although his hand went inside his jacket.

‘Leave it,’ Bond said coldly. ‘Lie down, arms spread.’

Still, the man remained motionless, sweating with nerves, hand hovering over the butt of his gun. A Glock, Bond noted. The man’s phone began to hum. He glanced at his jacket pocket.

‘Get down now!’

If he drew, Bond would try to wound but he might end up killing the man.

The phone stopped ringing.

‘Now.’ Bond lowered his aim, focusing on the attacker’s right arm, near the elbow.

It appeared the blond man was going to comply. His shoulders drooped and in the shadowy light his eyes widened with fear and uncertainty.

At that moment, though, the bulldozer must have rolled over the ground nearby; bricks and earth rained down from the ceiling. Bond was struck by a large chunk of stone. He winced and stepped back, blinking dust out of his eyes. Had his assailant been more professional – or less panicked – he would have drawn his weapon and fired. But he didn’t; he turned and ran down the tunnel.

Bond slipped into his preferred stance, a fencer’s, left foot pointing forward and the right perpendicular and behind. Two-handed, he fired a single deafening shot that struck the man in the calf; screaming, he went down hard, about ten yards from the entrance to the tunnel.

Bond raced after him. As he did so, the shaking grew stronger, the rattle louder, and more bricks fell from the walls. Cascades of plaster and dust poured from the ceiling. A cricket ball of concrete landed directly on Bond’s shoulder wound and he grunted at the burst of pain.

But he kept moving steadily along the tunnel. The assailant was on the ground, dragging himself towards the fissure where sunlight eased in.

The bulldozer seemed directly overhead now. Move, dammit, Bond told himself. They were probably about to knock the whole bloody place down. As he got closer to the wounded man, the chug chug chugof the diesel engine rose in volume. More bricks plummeted to the floor.

Not a great place to be buried alive…

Only ten yards to the wounded man. Get a tourniquet on him, get him out of the tunnel and under cover – and start asking questions.

But at a stunning crash, the soft illumination of the spring day at the end of the tunnel dimmed. It was replaced by two burning white eyes, glowing through the dust. They paused and then, as if they belonged to a lion spotting its prey, shifted slightly, turning directly towards Bond. With a fierce cough, the bulldozer ploughed relentlessly forward, pushing a surge of mud and stone before it.

Bond aimed his gun but there was no target – the blade of the machine was high, protecting the operator’s cab. The vehicle crawled steadily on, pushing before it a mass of earth, brick and other debris.

‘No!’ cried the wounded man, as the bulldozer pressed forward. The driver didn’t see him. Or if he did, he couldn’t have cared less about the man’s death.

With a scream, Bond’s assailant disappeared under the rocky blanket. A moment later the rattling treads rolled over the spot where he was buried.

Soon the headlights were gone, blocked by debris, and then all was total darkness. Bond clicked his torch on and sprinted back to the turntable room. At the entrance he tripped and fell hard as earth and brick piled up to his ankles, then calves.

A moment later his knees were held fast.

Behind him the bulldozer continued to ram forward, shoving the muddy detritus farther into the room. Bond was now gripped to the waist. Another thirty seconds and his face would be covered.

But the weight of the debris mountain proved too much for the bulldozer or perhaps it had hit the building’s foundation. The tide ceased to move forward. Before the operator could manoeuvre for better purchase, Bond dug himself free and scrabbled out of the room. His eyes stung, his lungs were in agony. Spitting dust and grit, he shone the torch back up the tunnel. It was completely plugged.

He hurried back through the three windowless rooms where he’d collected the ash and the bits of metal. He paused beside the door that led to the autopsy chamber; had they sealed the exit to force him into a trap? Were the Irishman and other security people waiting in there? He screwed the silencer on to his Walther.

Inhaling deep breaths, he paused for a moment then pushed the door open fast, dropping into a defensive shooting position, torch pointing forward from his left hand, on which rested his right, clutching the pistol.

The massive empty hall yawned. But the double doors he’d seen earlier, admitting a shaft of light, were sealed; the bulldozer had piled tons of dirt against them too.

Trapped…

He sprinted to the smaller rooms on the north side of the basement, the mental health ward. The largest of these – the office, he assumed – had a door but it was securely locked. Bond aimed the Walther and, standing at an oblique angle, fired four wheezing shots into the metal lock plate, then four into the hinges.

This had no effect. Lead, even half-jacketed lead, is no match for steel. He reloaded and slipped the spent magazine into his left pocket, where he always kept the empties.

He was regarding the barred windows when a loud voice made him jump.

‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči!’

Swinging around, Bond looked for a target.

But the voice came from a loudspeaker on the wall.

‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči! This is the three-minute warning! ’ The last sentence, a recording, was repeated in Dutch, Polish and Ukrainian.

Warning?

‘ Evacuate immediately! Danger! Explosive charges have been set!’

Bond shone the torch around the room.

The wires! They weren’t to provide electricity for construction – they were attached to explosives. Bond hadn’t seen them since the charges were taped to steel joists high in the ceiling. The entire building had been rigged for demolition.

Three minutes…

The torch revealed dozens of packets of explosive, enough to turn the stone walls around him to dust – and Bond into vapour. And all the exits had been sealed. His heart rate ratcheting, sweat dotting his forehead, Bond slipped the torch and pistol away and gripped one of the iron bars over a window. He tugged hard, but it held.

In the hazy light trickling through the glass, he looked about, then climbed a nearby girder. He ripped one of the explosive packets down and leapt back to the floor. The charges were an RDX composite, to judge from the smell. With his knife he cut off a large wad and jammed it against the knob and lock on the door. That should be enough to blow the lock without killing himself in the process.

Get on with it!

Bond stepped back about twenty feet, steadied his aim and fired. He hit the explosive dead on.

But, as he’d feared, nothing happened – except that the yellow-grey mass of deadly plastic fell undramatically to the floor with a plop. Composites explode only with a detonator, not with physical impact, even that of a bullet travelling at 2,000 feet per second. He’d hoped this substance might prove the exception.

The two-minute warning resounded through the room.

Bond looked up, to where the detonator he’d pulled from the charge now dangled obscenely. But the only way to set it off was with an electric current.

Electricity…

The loudspeakers? No, the voltage was far too low to set off a blasting cap. So was the battery in his torch.

The voice rang out again, giving the one-minute warning.

Bond wiped the sweat from his palms and worked the pistol’s slide, ejecting a bullet. With his knife he prised out the lead slug and tossed it aside. He then pressed the cartridge, filled with gunpowder, into the wad of explosive, which he moulded to the door.

He stepped back, aimed carefully at the tiny disc of his cartridge and squeezed off a round. The bullet hit the primer, which set off the powder and in turn the plastic. With a huge flare the explosion blew the lock to pieces.

It also knocked Bond to the floor, amid a shower of wood splinters and smoke. For a few seconds he lay stunned, then struggled to his feet and staggered to the door, which was open, though jammed. The gap was only about eight inches wide. He grabbed the knob and began to slowly wrest the heavy panel open.

‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči!’

14

In the site caravan, Severan Hydt and Niall Dunne stood beside each other, watching the old British Army hospital, in tense anticipation. Everybody – even the gear-cold Dunne, Hydt speculated – enjoyed watching a controlled explosion bring down a building.

Since Janssen had not answered his phone and Dunne had heard a gunshot from inside, the Irishman had told Hydt he was sure the security man, Eric Janssen, had to be dead. He had sealed the hospital exits, then sprinted back to the caravan, running like an awkward animal, and had told Hydt that he was going to detonate the charges in the building. It was scheduled to come down tomorrow but there was no reason that the demolition couldn’t be brought forward.

Dunne had activated the computerised system and pressed two red buttons simultaneously, starting the sequence. An insurance liability policy required that a 180-second recorded warning be broadcast throughout the building in languages representing those spoken by ninety per cent of the workers. It would have taken longer to override the safety measure but if the intruder wasn’t buried in the tunnel he was stuck in the mortuary. There was no way he could escape in time.

If, tomorrow or the next day, someone came asking about a missing person Hydt could reply, ‘Certainly, we’ll check… What? Oh, my God, we had no idea! We did all we were supposed to with the fence and the signs. And how could he have missed the recorded warnings? We’re sorry – but we’re hardly responsible.’

‘Fifteen seconds,’ Dunne said.

Silence as Hydt mouthed the countdown.

The timer on the wall now hit 0 and the computer sent its prearranged signal to the detonators.

They couldn’t see the flash of the explosions at first – the initial ones were internal and low, to take out the main structural beams. But a few seconds later bursts of light flared like paparazzi cameras, followed by the sound of Christmas crackers, then deeper booms. The building seemed to shudder. Then, as if kneeling to offer its neck to an executioner’s blade, the hospital slowly dipped and went down, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling outwards fast.

After a few moments, Dunne said, ‘People will have heard it. We should go.’

Hydt, though, was mesmerised by the pile of debris, so very different from the elegant if faded structure it had been a few moments ago. What had been something had become naught.

‘Severan,’ Dunne persisted.

Hydt found himself aroused. He thought of Jessica Barnes, her white hair, her pale, textured skin. She knew nothing about Gehenna so he hadn’t brought her today, but he was sorry she wasn’t there. Well, he’d ask her to meet him at his office, then drive home.

His belly gave a pleasant tap. A sensation supercharged by the memory of the body he’d found at Green Way that morning… and in anticipation of what would happen tomorrow.

A hundred deaths…

‘Yes, yes.’ Severan Hydt collected his briefcase and stepped outside. He didn’t climb into the Audi A8 immediately, though. He turned to study once more the dust and smoke hovering over the destroyed building. He noted that the explosive had been skilfully set. He reminded himself to thank the crew. Rigging charges is a true art. The trick is not to blow up the building but simply to eliminate what keeps it upright, allowing nature – gravity, in this case – to do the job.

Which was, Hydt now reflected, a metaphor for his own role on earth.

15

Early-afternoon zebra bands of sun and shadow rolled over the low rows of sugarbeet in the Fenland field.

James Bond lay on his back, arms and legs splayed, like a child who’d been making angels in snow and didn’t want to go home. Surrounded by the sea of low green leaves, he was thirty yards from the pile of rubble that had been the old army hospital… the pile of rubble that had very nearly entombed him. He was – temporarily, he prayed – deprived of his hearing, thanks to the shockwaves from the plastic explosive. He’d kept his eyes closed against the flash and shrapnel, but he’d had to use both hands to manage his escape, wrenching open the mental-health ward’s door, as the main charges detonated and the building came down behind him.

He now rose slightly – sugar beet in May provided scant cover – and gazed around for signs of a threat.

Nothing. Whoever had been behind the plan – the Irishman, Noah or an associate – wasn’t searching for him; they were probably convinced he had died in the collapse.

Breathing hard to clear his lungs of dust and sour chemical smoke, he got to his feet and staggered from the field.

He returned to the car and dropped into the front seat. He fished a bottle of water from the back and drank some, then leant outside and poured the rest into his eyes.

He fired the massive engine, comforted that he could now hear the bubble of the exhaust, and took a different route out of March, heading east to avoid running into anyone connected with the demolition site, then doubling back west. Soon he was on the A1, heading back to London to decipher whatever cryptic messages about Incident Twenty the scraps of ash he’d collected might hold.

At close to four that afternoon Bond pulled into the ODG car park beneath the building.

He thought of having a shower but decided he didn’t have time. He washed his hands and face, stuck a plaster on a small gash, courtesy of a falling brick, and hurried to Philly. He handed her the pieces of duct tape. ‘Can you get these analysed?’

‘For God’s sake, James, what happened?’ She sounded alarmed. The tactical trousers and jacket had taken the bulk of the abuse but some new bruises were already showing in glorious violet.

‘Little run-in with a bulldozer and some C4 or Semtex – I’m fine. Find out everything you can about Eastern Demolition and Scrap. And I’d like to know who owns the army base outside March. The MoD? Or have they sold it?’

‘I’ll get on to it.’

Bond returned to his office and had just sat down when Mary Goodnight buzzed him. ‘James. That man is on line two.’ Her tone made clear who the caller was.

Bond stabbed the button. ‘Percy.’

The slick voice: ‘James. Hello! I’m en route back from Cambridge. Thought you and me should have a chinwag. See if we’ve found any pieces to our puzzle.’

You and me… Unfortunate pronoun from an Oxbridge man. ‘How about yourexcursion?’

‘When I got up there, I did some looking around. Turns out the Porton Down folk have a little operation nearby. Stumbled across it. Quite by chance.’

This amused Bond. ‘Well, that’s interesting. And is there a connection between biochemicals and Noah or Incident Twenty?’

‘Can’t say. Their CCTVs and visitor logs didn’t turn up anything that stood out. But I’ve got my assistant toiling away.’

‘And the pub?’

‘Curry was all right. The waitress didn’t remember who’d ordered the pie or the ploughman’s so long ago but we could hardly expect her to, could we? What about you? Did the mysterious note about the chemist and two days past the Ides of March pan out?’

Bond had prepared for this. ‘I tried a long shot. I went to March, Boots Road, and ran across an old military base.’

A pause. ‘Ah.’ The Division Three man laughed, though the sound seemed devoid of humour. ‘So you’d misread the clue when we were chatting earlier. And was the infamous number seventeen tomorrow’s date, by any chance?’

Whatever else, Osborne-Smith was sharp. ‘Possibly. When I got up there, the place was being demolished.’ Bond added evasively, ‘It turned up more questions than anything else, I’m afraid. The techies are looking at some finds. A few small things. I’ll send over their reports.’

‘Do, thanks. I’m peering into all things Islamic here, Afghan connection, spikes in SIGINT, the usual. Should keep me busy for a while.’

Good. Bond couldn’t have asked for a better approach to Deputy Senior Director of Field Operations Mr Percy Osborne-Smith.

Keep him busy…

They rang off and Bond called Bill Tanner to brief him about what had happened in March. They agreed to do nothing for now about the body of the man who had attacked Bond at the hospital, preferring to keep his cover intact rather than learn anything about the corpse.

Mary Goodnight stuck her head through the door. ‘Philly called when you were on the phone. She’s found a few things for you. I told her to come up.’ His PA was frowning, her eyes turned to one of Bond’s dim windows. ‘A shame, isn’t it? About Philly.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I thought you’d heard? Tim broke it off. He sat her down a few days ago – they even had the church booked, and her hen do was planned. A girls’ weekend in Spain. I was going.’

How observant am I? Bond thought. That’s what was missing from her desk on the third floor. The pictures of her fiancé. Probably the engagement ring had gone MIA too.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘I suppose it’s always more than one thing, isn’t it? They hadn’t been getting on well recently, more than a few bad patches – rows about her driving too fast and working all hours. She missed a big family reunion at his parents’. Then, out of the blue, he had the chance of a posting to Singapore or Malaysia. He took it. They’d been together for three years, hadn’t they?’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

The discussion of the drama ended, though, with the arrival of the person in question.

Not noticing the still atmosphere into which she’d walked, Philly strode past Goodnight with a smile and into Bond’s office, where she dropped breezily into a chair. Her sensuous face seemed to have narrowed and her hazel eyes shone with the intensity of a hunter picking up sure track. It made her even more beautiful. A hen party in Spain with the girls? God, he simply could notpicture that, any more than he could see Philly lugging home two Waitrose carrier bags to assemble a hearty dinner for a man named Tim and their children Matilda and Archie.

Enough! he upbraided himself and concentrated on what she was telling him. ‘Our people could read one scrap of the ash. The words were “the Gehenna plan”. And below that “Friday, 20 May”.’

‘Gehenna? Familiar, but I can’t place it.’

‘There’s a reference to it in the Bible. I’ll find out more. I only ran “Gehenna plan” through the security agencies and criminal databases. It returned negative.’

‘What’s on the other piece of ash?’

‘That was more badly damaged. Our lab could make out the words “term” and “five million pounds” but the rest was beyond them. They sent it to Specialist Crime at the Yard, under an eyes-only order. They’ll get back to me by this evening.’

‘“Term”… terms of the deal, I’d guess. Payment or down payment of five million for the attack or whatever it’s to be. That suggests Noah’s doing it for money, not for the sake of politics or ideology.’

She nodded. ‘About the Serbian connection: my Hungarian ploy didn’t work. The folk in Belgrade are really quite cross with you, James. But I had your I Branch set me up as somebody from the EU – the head of the Directorate of Transportation Safety Investigations.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘I made it up. I did a pretty good Swiss-French accent, though I say it myself. The Serbs are dying to do anything they can to keep the European Union happy so they’re scurrying to get back to me about haz-mats on the train and more details about Karic.’

Philly was truly golden.

‘And Eastern Demolition have headquarters in Slough. They were low bidders for the demolition project at the British Army base in March.’

‘Is it a public limited company?’

‘Private. And owned by a holding company, also private: Green Way International. It’s quite big and operates in half a dozen countries. One man owns all the shares. Severan Hydt.’

‘That’s really his name?’

She laughed. ‘At first I wondered what his parents were thinking. But it seems he changed it by deed poll when he was in his twenties.’

‘What was his birth name?’

‘Maarten Holt.’

‘Holt to Hydt,’ Bond mused. ‘I don’t see the point – though it’s hardly remarkable – but Maarten to Severan? Why, in heaven’s name?’

She shrugged. ‘Green Way is a huge rubbish-collection and recycling operation. You’ve seen their lorries but probably haven’t thought much about them. I couldn’t find a great deal because they’re not public and Hydt stays clear of the press. Article in The Timesdubbed him the world’s richest rag-and-bone man. The Guardian ran a profile of him a few years ago and was fairly complimentary but he gave them only a few generic quotes and that was it. I found out he was Dutch-born, kept dual citizenship for a time and is now just British.’

Philly’s body language and the hunter’s sheen in her eyes hinted that she hadn’t revealed all.

‘And?’ Bond asked.

She smiled. ‘I found some online references to when he was a mature student at the University of Bristol, where he did rather well, by the way.’ She explained that Hydt had been active in the university’s sailing club, captaining a boat in competitions. ‘He not only raced but built his own. It earned him a nickname.’

‘And what was it?’ Bond asked, though he had a feeling he knew.

‘Noah.’

16

The time was now half past five. Since it would be several hours before Philly received the intelligence she was waiting for, Bond suggested they meet for dinner.

She agreed and returned to her work station, while Bond composed an encrypted email to M, copying in Bill Tanner, saying that Noah was Severan Hydt and including a synopsis of his background and what had happened in March. He added that Hydt referred to the attack involved in Incident Twenty as the ‘Gehenna plan’. More would be forthcoming.

He received a terse reply:

007 -

Authorised to proceed. Appropriate liaison with domestic organisations expected.

M

My carte grise…

Bond left his office, took the lift to the second floor and entered a large room filled with more computers than an electronics shop. A few men and women laboured at monitors, or at the type of work stations to be found in a university chemistry laboratory. Bond walked to a small, glass-walled office at the far end and tapped on the window.

Sanu Hirani, head of the ODG’s Q Branch, was a slim man of forty or so. His complexion was sallow and his luxuriant black hair framed a face handsome enough to get him roles in Bollywood. A brilliant cricketer, known for his fast bowling, he had degrees in chemistry, electrical engineering and computer science from top universities in the UK and America (where he had been successful in everything except introducing his sport to the Yanks, who could neither grasp the game’s subtleties, nor tolerate the length of a Test match).

Q Branch was the technical support enclave within the ODG and Hirani oversaw all aspects of the gadgetry that has always been used in tradecraft. Wizards for departments like Q Branch and the CIA’s Science and Technology Division spent their time coming up with hardware and software innovations, like miniature cameras, improbable weapons, concealments, communications devices and surveillance equipment – such as Hirani’s latest: a hypersensitive omnidirectional microphone mounted within a dead fly. (‘A bug in a bug,’ Bond had commented wryly to its creator, who had replied that he was the eighteenth person to make the joke and, by the way, a fly was not, biologically speaking, a bug.)

Since the ODG’s raison d’êtrewas operational, much of Hirani’s work lay in ensuring he had sufficient monoculars, binoculars, camouflage, communications devices, specialised weapons and counter-surveillance gear to hand. In this regard he was like a librarian who made sure the books were checked out appropriately and returned on time.

But Hirani’s particular genius was his ability to invent and improvise, coming up with devices like the iQPhone. The ODG was, of all things, the patent holder on dozens of his inventions. When Bond or other O Branch agents were in the field and found themselves in a tight spot, one call to Hirani, at any time of day or night, and he would find a solution. He or his people might put something together in the office and pop it into the FCO diplomatic pouch for overnight delivery. More often, though, time was critical and Hirani would enlist one of his many wily innovators and scroungers around the world to build, find or modify a device in the field.

‘James.’ The men shook hands. ‘You’ve bought Incident Twenty, I hear.’

‘Seems so.’

Bond sat down, noticing a book on Hirani’s desk: The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith. It was one of his own favourites on the history of gadgetry in espionage.

‘How serious is it?’

‘Rather,’ Bond said laconically, not sharing that he’d nearly been killed twice already in pursuing the assignment, which he’d had for less than forty-eight hours.

Sitting beneath pictures of early IBM computers and of Indian cricketers, Hirani asked, ‘What do you need?’

Bond lowered his voice so that the closest Q Branch worker, a young woman raptly staring at her screen, could not hear. ‘What kind of surveillance kits do you have that one man could put in place? I can’t get to the subject’s computer or phone but I may be able to plant something in his office, vehicle or home. Disposable. I probably can’t retrieve it later.’

‘Ah, yes…’ Hirani’s luminescent eyes dimmed.

‘Some problem, Sanu?’

‘Well, I must tell you, James. Not ten minutes ago I had a call from upstairs.’

‘Bill Tanner?’

‘No – farther upstairs.’

M. Dammit, Bond thought. He could see where this was going.

Hirani went on: ‘And he said that if anyone from O Branch wished to check out a surveillance kit I was to let him know immediately. A touch coincidental.’

‘A touch,’ Bond said sourly.

‘So,’ Hirani said, with a qualified smile, ‘shall I tell him that someone from O Branch wishes to check out a surveillance kit?’

‘Perhaps you could hold off for a bit.’

‘Well, get it sorted,’ he said, the gleam in his face restored. ‘I have some wonderfulpackages for you to choose from.’ He sounded like a car salesman. ‘A microphone that’s powered by induction. You only have to place it near a power cord, no battery needed. It’ll pick up voices from fifty feet away and adjust the volume automatically so there’s no distortion. Oh, and another thing we’ve been having great success with is a two-pound coin – the ’ninety-four tercentenary of the Bank of England commemorative. It’s relatively rare so a target tends to keep it for good luck but not so rare that he would sell it. Battery lasts for four months.’

Bond sighed. The off-limits devices sounded so damn perfect. He thanked the man and told him he’d be in touch. He returned to his office, where he found Mary Goodnight at her desk. He saw no reason for her to stay. ‘Scoot on home now. Good evening, Goodnight.’

She glanced at his latest injuries and forewent the opportunity for mothering him, which from past experience she knew would be deflected. She settled for ‘See to those, James,’ then gathered up her handbag and coat.

Sitting back, Bond was suddenly aware of the stench of his sweat and the crescents of brick dust under his nails. He wanted to get home and shower. Have his first drink of the day. Yet there was something he had to sort out first.

He turned to his screen and entered the Golden Wire’s general information database, from which he learnt where Severan Hydt’s business and home were located, the latter, curiously, in a low-income area of East London known as Canning Town. Green Way’s main premises were on the Thames near Rainham, abutting the Wildspace Conservation Park.

Bond peered at satellite maps of Hydt’s home and Green Way’s operation. It was vitally important to set up surveillance on the man. But there was no legitimate way to conduct it without enlisting Osborne-Smith and the A Branch snoop teams from MI5 – and the instant the Division Three man learnt Hydt’s identity he’d move in to ‘detain’ him and the Irishman. Bond considered the risk again. How realistic was his concern that if the two were pulled in, other co-conspirators would accelerate the carnage, or vanish until they struck again next month or next year?

Evil, James Bond had learnt, can be tirelessly patient.

Surveillance or not?

He debated. After a moment’s hesitation, he reluctantly picked up the phone.

17

At half past six, Bond drove to his flat and, in the garage, reversed into the spot beside his racing-green Jaguar. He climbed the stairs to the first floor, unlocked the door, disarmed the alarm and confirmed with a separate security function – a fast-framed video – that only May, his housekeeper, had been there. (Feeling somewhat embarrassed, he’d told her when she’d started working for him that the security camera was a requirement of his government employer’s; the flat had to be monitored when he was away, even if she was working there. ‘Considering what you must do for the country, being a patriot and all, it’s no bother’s,’ the staunch woman had said, using the fragment of ‘sir’, a mark of respect reserved for him alone.)

He checked messages on his home phone. He had only one. It was from a friend who lived in Mayfair, Fouad Kharaz, a wily, larger-than-life Jordanian, who had all manner of business dealings, involving vehicles mostly: cars, planes and the most astonishing yachts Bond had ever seen. Kharaz and he were members of the same gaming club in Berkeley Square, the Commodore.

Unlike many such clubs in London, where membership could be had with twenty-four hours’ notice and five hundred pounds, the Commodore was a proper establishment, requiring patience and considerable vetting to join. Once you were a member, you were expected to adhere strictly to a number of rules, such as the dress code, and behave impeccably at the tables. It also boasted a fine restaurant and cellar.

Kharaz had called to invite Bond to dine there tonight. ‘A problem, James. I have fallen heir to two beautiful women from Saint-Tropez – how it happened is too long, and delicate, a story to leave as a message. But I can’t be charming enough for both of them. Will you help?’

Smiling, Bond rang him back and told him he had another engagement. A rain check was arranged.

Then he went through his shower ritual – steaming hot, then icy cold – and dried himself briskly. He ran his fingers over his cheeks and chin and decided to maintain a lifelong prejudice against shaving twice in one day. Then he chided himself: why were you even thinking about it? Philly Maidenstone’s pretty and clever and she rides a hell of a fine motorcycle – but she’s a colleague. That’s all.

The black leather jumpsuit, however, made an unbidden appearance in his mind.

In a towelling robe Bond stepped into the kitchen and poured two fingers of bourbon, Basil Hayden’s, into a glass, dropped in one ice cube and drank half, enjoying the sharp nutty flavour. The first sip of the day was invariably the best, especially coming as this one did – after a harrowing excursion against an enemy and ahead of an evening with a beautiful woman…

He caught himself again. Stop.

He sat in an old leather chair in the living room, which was sparsely furnished. The majority of the items in it had been his parents’, inherited when they had died and kept in storage near his aunt’s in Kent. He’d bought a few things: some lamps, a desk and chairs, a Bose sound system he rarely had a chance to listen to.

On the mantelpiece there were silver-framed photos of his parents and grandparents – on his father’s side in Scotland, his mother’s in Switzerland. Several showed his aunt Charmian with the young Bond in Kent. On the walls were other photographs, taken by his mother, a freelance photojournalist. Mostly black and white, the photos depicted a variety of images: political gatherings, labour union events, sports competitions, panoramic scenes of exotic locations.

There was also a curious objet d’artin the mantelpiece’s centre: a bullet. It had nothing to do with Bond’s role as an agent in the 00 Section of the ODG’s O Branch. Its source was a very different time and place of Bond’s life. He walked to the fireplace and turned the solid piece of ammunition in his hand once or twice, finally replacing it and returning to his chair.

Then, despite his protest that he keep affairs with Philly – that he keep matters relating to Agent Maidenstonepurely professional, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a woman.

And one no longer betrothed.

Bond had to admit that what he felt for Philly was more than pure physical lust. And he now asked himself a question that had arisen at other times, about other women, albeit rarely: could something serious develop between them?

Bond’s romantic life was more complicated than most. The barriers to his having a partner were to some degree his extensive travelling, the demands of his job and the constant danger that surrounded him. But more fundamental was the tricky matter of admitting who he really was and, more tellingly, his duties within the 00 Section, which some, perhaps most, women would find distasteful, if not abhorrent.

He knew that at some point he would have to admit to at least part of it to any woman who became more than a casual lover. You can keep secrets from those you’re close to for only so long. People are far more clever and observant than we think and, between romantic partners, one’s fundamental secrets stay hidden only because the other chooses to let them remain so.

Plausible deniability might work in Whitehall but it didn’t last between lovers.

Yet with Philly Maidenstone this was not a problem. There would be no confessions about his profession over dinner or amid tousled morning bedclothes; she knew his CV and his remit – knew them intimately.

And she’d suggested a restaurant near her flat.

What sort of message lay in that choice?

James Bond glanced at his watch. It was time to dress and attempt to decipher the code.

18

At eight fifteen the taxi dropped Bond at Antoine’s in Bloomsbury and he immediately approved of Philly’s choice. He hated crowded, noisy restaurants and bars and on more than one occasion had walked out of upmarket establishments when the decibel level had proved to be too irritating. Upscale pubs were more ‘ghastly’ than ‘gastro’, he’d once quipped.

But Antoine’s was quiet and dimly lit. An impressive wine selection was visible at the back of the room and the walls were filled with muted portraits from the nineteenth century. Bond asked for a small booth not far from the wall of bottles. He settled into the plush leather, facing the front, as always, and studied the place. Business people and locals, he judged.

‘Something to drink?’ asked the waiter, a pleasant man in his late thirties, with a shaved head and pierced ears.

Bond decided on a cocktail. ‘Crown Royal, on ice, a double, please. Add a half-measure of triple sec, two dashes of bitters and a twist of orange peel.’

‘Yes, sir. Interesting drink.’

‘Based on an Old Fashioned. My own creation, actually.’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for the right one.’

A few moments later it arrived and he took a sip – it was constructed perfectly and Bond said so. He’d just set the glass down when he saw Philly coming through the door, radiant with a smile. It seemed that her pace quickened when she saw him.

She was in close-fitting black jeans, a brown leather jacket and, under it, a tight dark green sweater, the colour of his Jaguar.

He half rose as she joined him, sitting to his side, rather than across. She was carrying a briefcase.

‘You all right?’ she said.

He’d half expected something a bit more personal than this rather casual greeting. But then he asked himself sternly, Why?

She had barely taken off her jacket before she’d caught the eye of the waiter, who greeted her with a smile. ‘Ophelia.’

‘Aaron. I’ll have a glass of the Mosel Riesling.’

‘On its way.’

Her wine arrived and Bond told Aaron they’d wait to order. Their glasses nodded at one another but did not clink.

‘First,’ Bond murmured, edging a little closer, ‘Hydt. Tell me about him.’

‘I checked with Specialist Operations at the Yard, Six, Interpol, NCIC and CIA in America and the AIVD in the Netherlands. I made some discreet enquiries at Five too.’ She’d obviously deduced the tension between Bond and Osborne-Smith. ‘No criminal records. No watchlists. More Tory than Labour but doesn’t have much interest in politics. Not a member of any church. Treats his people well – no labour unrest of any kind. No problems with the Inland Revenue or Health and Safety. He just seems to be a wealthy businessman. Verywealthy. All he’s ever done professionally is rubbish collection and recycling.’

The Rag-and-bone Man…

‘He’s fifty-six, never married. Both parents – they were Dutch – are dead now. His father had some money and travelled a lot on business. Hydt was born in Amsterdam, then came here with his mother to live when he was twelve. She had a breakdown so he grew up mostly under the care of the housekeeper, who’d accompanied them from Holland. Then his father lost most of his money and vanished from his son’s life. Because she wasn’t getting paid, the housekeeper called in Social Services and vanished – after eightyears of looking after the boy.’ Philly shook her head in sympathy. ‘He was fourteen.’

Philly continued, ‘He started working as a dustman at fifteen. Then he’s off the radar until he’s in his twenties. He opened Green Way just as the recycling trend caught on.’

‘What happened? Did he inherit some money?’

‘No. It’s a bit of a mystery. He started penniless, as far as I can tell. When he was older he put himself through university. He read ancient history and archaeology.’

‘And Green Way?’

‘It handles general rubbish disposal, wheelie-bin collection, removal of construction waste at building sites, scrap metal, demolition, recycling, document shredding, dangerous-materials reclamation and disposal. According to the business press, it’s moving into a dozen other countries to start up rubbish tips and recycling centres.’ Philly displayed a printout of a company sales brochure.

Bond frowned at the logo. It looked like a green dagger, resting on its side.

‘It’s not a knife,’ Philly said, laughing. ‘I thought the same thing. It’s a leaf. Global warming, pollution and energy are the sexiest subjects in the au courantenvironmental movement. But rising quickly are planet-friendly rubbish disposal and recycling. And Green Way’s one of the big innovators.’

‘Any Serbian connection?’

‘Through a subsidiary he owns part of a small operation in Belgrade. But, like everybody else in the organisation, nobody there has any criminal past.’

‘I just can’t work out his game,’ Bond said. ‘He’s not political, has no terrorist leanings. It almost looks like he’s been hired to arrange the attack, or whatever it’s to be, on Friday. But he hardly needs money.’ He sipped his cocktail. ‘Right, then, Detective Inspector Maidenstone, tell me about the evidence – that other bit of ash from up in March. Six made out the “Gehenna plan” and “Friday, 20 May”. Did Forensics at the Yard find anything else?’

Her voice dropped, which necessitated his leaning closer. He smelt a sweet but undefined scent. Her sweater, cashmere, brushed the back of his hand. ‘They did. They think the rest of the words were “Course is confirmed. Blast radius must be a hundred feet minimum. Ten thirty is the optimal time.”’

‘So, an explosive device of some kind. Ten thirty Friday – p.m., according to the original intercept. And “Course” – a shipping route or plane most likely.’

‘Now,’ she continued, ‘the metal you found? It’s a titanium-steel laminate. Unique. Nobody in the lab has ever seen anything like it. The pieces were shavings. They’d been machined in the past day or so.’

Was that what Hydt’s people had been doing in the basement of the hospital? Were they building a weapon with this metal?

‘And Defence still owns the facility but it hasn’t been used for three years.’

His eyes swept over her marvellous profile from forehead to breasts as she sipped her wine.

Philly continued, ‘As for the Serbs, I practically said I’d force them to take on the euro in place of the dinar if they didn’t help me. But they came through. The man working with the Irishman, Aldo Karic, was a load scheduler with the railway.’

‘He’d have known exactly which train the haz-mat was on.’

‘Yes.’ Then she frowned. ‘About that, though, James. It’s odd. The material was pretty bad. Methyl isocyanate, MIC. It’s the chemical that killed all those people in Bhopal.’

‘God.’

‘But, look, here’s the inventory of everything on board the train.’ She showed him the list, translated into English. ‘The chemical containers are practically bullet-proof. You can drop one from a plane and supposedly it won’t break open.’

Bond was confused by this. ‘So a train crash wouldn’t have produced a spill.’

‘Very unlikely. And another thing: the wagon with the chemical contained only about three hundred kilos of MIC. It’s really bad stuff, certainly, but at Bhopal, forty-two thousandkilos were released. Even if a few of the drums had broken open, the damage would have been negligible.’

But what else would the Irishman have been interested in? Bond looked over the list. Aside from the chemicals, the cargo was harmless: boilers, vehicle parts, motor oil, scrap, girders, timber… No weapons, unstable substances, other risky materials.

Maybe the incident had been an elaborate scheme to kill the train driver or someone living at the bottom of the hill below the restaurant. Had the Irishman been going to stage the death to look like an accident? Until they could home in on Noah’s purpose, there could be no effective response. Bond could only hope that the surveillance he’d reluctantly put into play earlier in the evening would pay off. He asked, ‘Any more on Gehenna?’

‘Hell.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Her face broke into a smile. ‘Gehenna is where the Judaeo-Christian concept of hell came from. The word’s a derivation of Gehinnom, or the Valley of Hinnom – a valley in Jerusalem. Ages ago, some people think, it was used as a site to burn rubbish and there may have been natural gas deposits in the rocks that kept the fires going perpetually. In the Bible, Gehenna came to mean a place where sinners and unbelievers would be punished.

‘The only recent significant reference – if you can call a hundred and fifty years ago recent – was in a Rudyard Kipling poem.’ She’d memorised the verse and recited, ‘“Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, / He travels the fastest who travels alone.”’

He liked that and repeated it to himself.

She said, ‘Now, for my other assignment, Steel Cartridge.’

Relax, Bond told himself. He raised an eyebrow nonchalantly.

Philly said, ‘I couldn’t see any connection between the Gehenna plan and Steel Cartridge.’

‘No, I understand that. I don’t think they’re related. This is something else – from before I joined the ODG.’

The hazel eyes scanned his face, pausing momentarily on the scar. ‘You were Defence Intelligence, weren’t you? And before that you were in Afghanistan with the Naval Reserve.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Afghanistan… The Russians were there, of course, before we and the Americans decided to pop in for tea. Does it have to do with your assignments there?’

‘Could very well. I don’t know.’

Philly realised she was asking questions he might not want to answer. ‘I got the original Russian data file that our Station R hacked and I went through the metadata. It sent me to other sources and I found out that Steel Cartridge was a targeted killing operation, sanctioned at a high level. That’s what the phrase “some deaths” referred to. I can’t find out whether it was KGB or SVR, so we don’t know the date yet.’

In 1991 the KGB, the infamous Soviet security and spy apparatus, was redesigned as Russia’s FSB, with domestic jurisdiction, and the SVR , with foreign. The consensus among those following the espionage world was that the change was cosmetic only.

Bond considered this. ‘Targeted killing.’

‘That’s right. And one of our clandestine operators – an agent with Six – was in some way involved but I don’t know who or how yet. Maybe our man was tracking the Russian assassin. Maybe he wanted to turn him and run him as a double. Or our agent might even have been the target himself. I’m getting more soon – I’ve opened channels.’

He noticed that he was staring at the tablecloth, brow furrowed. He gave her a fast smile. ‘Brilliant, Philly. Thanks.’

On his mobile, Bond typed a synopsis of what Philly had told him about Hydt, Incident Twenty and Green Way International, omitting the information on Operation Steel Cartridge. He sent the message to M and Bill Tanner. Then he said, ‘Right. Now it’s time for sustenance, after all our hard work. First, wine. Red or white?’

‘I’m a girl who doesn’t play by the rules.’ Philly let that linger – teasingly, it seemed to Bond. Then she explained: ‘I’ll do a big red – a Margaux or St Julien – with a mild-mannered fish like sole. And I’ll have a Pinot Gris or Albariño with a nice juicy steak.’ She relented. ‘I’m saying whatever you’re in the mood for, James, is fine with me.’ She buttered a piece of her roll and ate it, with obvious pleasure, then snatched up the menu and examined the sheet like a little girl trying to decide which Christmas present to open first. Bond was charmed.

A moment later Aaron, the waiter, was beside them. Philly said to Bond, ‘You first. I need seven seconds more.’

‘I’ll start with the pâté. Then I’ll have the grilled turbot.’

Philly ordered a rocket and Parmesan salad with pear and, to follow, the poached lobster, with haricots verts and new potatoes.

Bond picked a bottle of an unoaked Chardonnay from Napa, California.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘The Americans have the best chardonnay grapes outside Burgundy but they really must have the courage to throw out some of their damned oak casks.’

Bond’s opinion exactly.

The wine arrived and then the food, which proved excellent. He complimented her on her choice of restaurant.

Casual conversation ensued. She asked about his life in London, recent travels, where he’d grown up. Instinctively, he gave her only the broad brush of information that was already in the public domain – his parents’ death, his childhood with his aunt Charmian in idyllic Pett Bottom, Kent, his brief tenure at Eton and subsequent attendance at his father’s old school in Edinburgh, Fettes.

‘Yes, I heard that at Eton you got into a spot of bother – something about a maid?’ She let those words linger a bit too. Then smiled. ‘I heard the official story – a touch scandalous. But there were other rumours too. That you’d been defending the girl’s honour.’

‘I think my lips must remain sealed on that.’ He offered a smile. ‘I’ll plead the Official Secrets Act. Un-officially.’

‘Well, if it’s true, you were quite young to play knight errant.’

‘I think I’d just read Tolkien’s Sir Gawain,’ Bond told her. And he couldn’t help but note that she’d certainly done her research on him.

He asked about her childhood. Philly told him about growing up in Devon, boarding school in Cambridgeshire – where, as a teenager, she’d distinguished herself as a volunteer for human rights organisations – then reading law at the LSE. She loved to travel and talked at length about holidays. She was at her most animated when it came to her BSA motorcycle and her other passion, skiing.

Interesting, Bond thought. Something else in common.

Their eyes met and held for an easy five seconds.

Bond felt the electric sensation with which he was so familiar. His knee brushed against hers, partly by accident, partly not. She ran a hand through her loose red hair.

Philly rubbed her closed eyes with her fingertips. Looking back to Bond, she said, her voice low, ‘I must say, this was a brilliant idea. Dinner, I mean. I definitely needed to…’ She trailed off, her eyes crinkling with amusement as she couldn’t, or didn’t want to, explain further. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for the night to be over. Look, it’s only half past ten.’

Bond leant forward. Their forearms touched – and this time there was no regrouping.

Philly said, ‘I’d like an after-dinner drink. But I don’t know exactly what they have here.’ Those were her words but what she was actually telling him was that she was had some port or brandy in her flat just over the road, a sofa and music too.

And very likely something more awaited.

Codes…

His next line was to have been: ‘I could use one too. Though maybe not here.’

But then Bond happened to notice something, very small, very subtle.

The index finger and the thumb of her right hand were gently rubbing the ring finger of her left. He noted a faint pallor where the tan from a recent holiday was missing; it had been cloaked from the sun by Tim’s crimson engagement ring, now absent.

Her radiant golden-green eyes were still fixed on Bond’s, her smile intact. He knew that, yes, they could settle the bill and leave and she would take his arm as they walked to her flat. He knew the humorous repartee would continue. He knew the love-making would be consuming – he could tell that from the way her eyes and voice sparkled, from how she’d dived into her food, from the clothes she wore and how she wore them. From her laugh.

And yet he knew, too, that it wasn’t right. Not now. When she’d slipped the ring off and handed it back, she’d also returned a piece of her heart. He didn’t doubt she was well on the way to recovery – a woman who fishtailed a BSA motorcycle at speed along Peak District byways wouldn’t be down for long.

But, he decided, it was better to wait.

If Ophelia Maidenstone was a woman he might let into his life, she would continue to be so in a month or two.

He said, ‘I believe I saw an Armagnac on the after-dinner list that intrigued me. I’d like to sample some.’

And Bond knew he’d done the right thing when her face softened, relief and gratitude outweighing the disappointment – though only by a nose. She squeezed his arm and sat back. ‘You order for me, James. I’m sure you know what I’d like.’