Carte Blanche

19

James Bond awoke from a dream he could not recall but that had him sweating fiercely, his heart pounding – and pounding all the faster from the braying of his phone.

His bedside clock told him it was 5:01 a.m. He grabbed the mobile and glanced at the screen, blinking sleep from his eyes. Bless him, he thought.

He hit answer. ‘ Bonjour , mon ami.’

‘ Et toi aussi !’ said the rich, rasping voice. ‘We are encrypted, are we not?’

‘ Oui . Yes, of course.’

‘What did we do in the days before encryption?’ asked René Mathis, presumably in his office on Boulevard Mortier, in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

‘There were no days before encryption, René. There were only days before there was an app for it on a touch screen.’

‘Well said, James. You are waxing wise, comme un philosophe. And so early in the morning.’

The thirty-five-year-old Mathis was an agent for the French secret service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. He and Bond worked together occasionally, in joint ODG and DGSE operations, most recently wrapping up al-Qaeda and other criminal enterprises in Europe and North Africa. They had also drunk significant quantities of Lillet and Louis Roederer together and spent some rather… well, colourful nights in such cities as Bucharest, Tunis and Bari, that free-wheeling gem on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

It had been René Mathis whom Bond had called yesterday evening, not Osborne-Smith, to ask his friend to run surveillance on Severan Hydt. He had made the decision reluctantly but he had realised he had to take the politically risky step of circumventing not only Division Three but M himself. He needed surveillance but had to make sure that Hydt and the Irishman remained unaware that the British authorities were on to them.

France, of course, has its own snoop operation, like GCHQ in England, the NSA in America and any other country’s intelligence agency with a flush budget. The DGSE was continually listening in to conversations and reading emails of the citizens of other countries, the United Kingdom’s included. (Yes, the countries were allies at the moment, but there wasthat little matter of the history between them.)

So Bond had called in a favour. He’d asked René Mathis to listen to the ELINT and SIGINT from London being hoovered up by the hundred-metre antenna of France’s gravity gradient stabilised spy satellite, searching for relevant key words.

Mathis now said, ‘I have something for you, James.’

‘I’m dressing. I’ll put you on speaker.’ Bond hit the button and leapt out of bed.

‘Does this mean that the beautiful redhead lying beside you will be listening as well?’

Bond chuckled, not least because the Frenchman had happened to pick that particular hair colour. A brief image surfaced of pressing his cheek against Philly’s last night on her doorstep as her vibrant hair caressed his shoulder before he returned to his flat.

‘I searched for signals tagged “Severan Hydt” or his nickname “Noah”. And anything related to Green Way International, the Gehenna plan, Serbia train derailments, or threat-oriented events this coming Friday, and all of those in proximity to any names sounding Irish. But it is very odd, James: the satellite vector was aimed right at Green Way’s premises east of London, but there was virtually no SIGINT coming out of the place. It’s as if he forbids his workers to have mobiles. Very curious.’

Yes, it was, Bond reflected. He continued dressing fast.

‘But there are several things we were able to pick up. Hydt is presently at home and he’s leaving the country this morning. Soon, I believe. Going where, I don’t know. But he’ll be flying. There was a reference to an airport and another to passports. And it will be in a private jet, since his people had spoken to the pilot directly. I’m afraid there was no clue as to which airport. I know there are many in London. We have them targeted… for surveillance only, I must add quickly!’

Bond couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Now, James, we found nothing about this Gehenna plan. But I have some disturbing information. We decrypted a brief call fifteen minutes ago to a location about ten miles west of Green Way, outside London.’

‘Probably Hydt’s home.’

Mathis continued, ‘A man’s voice said, “Severan, it’s me.” Accented but our algorithms couldn’t tell region of origin. There were some pleasantries, then this: “We’re confirmed for seven p.m. today. The number of dead will be ninety or so. You must be there no later than six forty-five.”’

So Hydt either was part of a plan to murder scores of people or was going to do so himself. ‘Who are the victims? And why are they going to die?’

‘I don’t know, James. But what I found just as troubling was your Mr Hydt’s reaction. His voice was like that of un enfantoffered chocolate. He said, “Oh, such wonderful news! Thank you so much.”’ His voice dark, Mathis said, ‘I’ve never heard that kind of joy at the prospect of killing. But, even stranger, he then asked, “How close can I get to the bodies?”’

‘He said that?’

‘Indeed. The man told him he could be very close. And Hydt sounded very pleased at that too. Then the phones went silent and haven’t been used again.’

‘Seven p.m. Somewhere out of the country. Anything more?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Thank you, for all this. I’d better get on with the hunt.’

‘I wish I could keep our satellite online longer but my superiors are already asking questions about why I am so interested in that insignificant little place called London.’

‘Next time the Dom is on me, René.’

‘But of course. Au revoir.’

‘ À bientôt, et merci beaucoup. ’ Bond hit disconnect.

In his years as a Royal Naval Reserve commander and an agent for ODG, he’d been up against some very bad people: insurgents, terrorists, psychopathic criminals, amoral traitors selling nuclear secrets to men mad enough to use them. But what was Hydt’s game?

Purpose… response.

Well, even if it wasn’t clear what the man’s twisted goal might be, at least there was one response Bond could initiate.

Ten minutes later he ran down the stairs, fishing the car key from his pocket. He didn’t need to look up Severan Hydt’s address. He’d memorised it last night.

20

Thames House, the home of MI5, the Northern Ireland Office and some related security organisations, is less impressive than the residence of MI6, which happens to be nearby, across the river on the South Bank. Six’s headquarters look rather like a futuristic enclave from a Ridley Scott film (it’s referred to as Babylon-upon-Thames, for its resemblance to a ziggurat, and, less kindly, as Legoland).

But if not as architecturally striking, Thames House is far more intimidating. The ninety-year-old grey stone monolith is the sort of place where, were it a police headquarters in Soviet Russia or East Germany, you would begin answering before questions were asked. On the other hand, the place doesboast some rather impressive sculpture (Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Britanniaand St George, for instance) and every few days tourists from Arkansas or Tokyo stroll up to the front door thinking it’s Tate Britain, which is located a short distance away.

In the windowless bowels of Thames House were the offices of Division Three. The organisation conscientiously – for the sake of deniability – rented space and equipment from Five (and nobody has better equipment than MI5), all at arm’s length.

In the middle of this fiefdom was a large control room, rather frayed at the edges, the green walls battered and scuffed, the furniture dented, the carpet insulted by too many heels. The requisite government regulatory posters about suspicious parcels, fire drills, health and trade union matters were omnipresent, often tarted up by bureaucrats with nothing better to do.

W E A

R E Y E P R

O T E C

T I O N W H E

N N E C E S

S A R Y

But the computers here were voracious and the dozens of flatscreen monitors big and bright, and Deputy Senior Director of Field Operations Percy Osborne-Smith was standing, arms folded, in front of the biggest and brightest. In brown jacket and mismatched trousers – he’d woken at four a.m. and dressed by five past – Osborne-Smith was with two young men: his assistant and a rumpled technician hovering over a keyboard.

Osborne-Smith bent forward and pressed a button, listened again to the recording that had just been made by the surveillance he’d put in place after the pointless drive up to Cambridge for, as it developed, the sole purpose of eating a meal of chicken curry that had turned on him in the night. The snooping didn’t involve the suspect in Incident Twenty, since no one had been courteous enough to share the man’s identity, but Osborne-Smith’s boys and girls had managed to arrange a productive listen-in. Without informing MI5 that they were doing so, the troops had slapped some microphones on the windows of one of the anonymous evil-doer’s co-conspirators: a lad named James Bond, 00 Section, O Branch, Overseas Development Group, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

And so Osborne-Smith had learnt about Severan Hydt, that he was Noah and that he ran Green Way International. Bond seemed to have neglected to mention that his mission to Boots the road, not Boots the chemist, thank you very much, had resulted in these rather important discoveries.

‘Bastard,’ said Osborne-Smith’s adjutant, a lean young man with an irritating mop of abundant brown hair. ‘Bond’s playing games with lives.’

‘Just calm it now, eh?’ Osborne-Smith said to the youngster, whom he referred to as ‘Deputy-Deputy’, though not in his presence.

‘Well, he is. Bastard.’

For his part, Osborne-Smith was rather impressed that Bond had contacted the French secret service. Otherwise, nobody would have learnt that Hydt was about to leave the country and kill ninety-odd people later today, or at least be present at their deaths. This intelligence solidified Osborne-Smith’s determination to clap Severan ‘Noah’ Hydt in irons, drag him into Belmarsh or Division Three’s own interrogation room, which was not much more hospitable than the prison’s, and bleed him dry.

He said to Deputy-Deputy, ‘Run the whole battery on Hydt. I want to know about his good and his bad, what medicine he takes, the Independent or the Daily Sport, Arsenal or Chelsea, his dietary preferences, movies that scare him or that make him cry, who he’s dallying or who’s dallying him. And how. And get an arrest team together. Say, we didn’t get Bond’s firearms authorisation form, did we?’

‘No, sir.’

Now, thispiqued Osborne-Smith.

‘Where’s my eye in the sky?’ he asked the young technician, sitting at his video-games console.

They had tried to find Hydt’s destination the easy way. Since the espionin Paris had learnt the man was departing in a private aircraft, they’d searched CAA records for planes registered to Severan Hydt, Green Way, or any subsidiaries. But none could be found. So, it was to be old-fashioned snooping, if one could describe a £3 million drone thus.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ the technician said, wasting breath. Finally: ‘Got Big Bird peeping now.’

Osborne-Smith regarded the screen. The view from two miles overhead was remarkably clear. But then he took in the image and said, ‘Are you surethat’s Hydt’s house? Not part of his company?’

‘Positive. Private residence.’

The home occupied a full square block in Canning Town. It was separated, not surprisingly, from the neighbours in their council houses or dilapidated flats by an imposing wall, glistening at the crest with razor wire. Within the grounds there were neatly tended gardens, in May bloom. The place had apparently been a modest warehouse or factory around a century ago but had been done up recently, it seemed. Four outbuildings and a garage were clustered together.

What was this about? he wondered. Why did such a wealthy man live in Canning Town? It was poor, ethnically complex, prone to violent crime and gangs, but with fiercely loyal residents and activist councillors who worked very, very hard for their constituents. A massive amount of redevelopment was going on, apart from the Olympics construction, which some said was taking the heart out of the place. His father, Osborne-Smith recalled, had seen the Police, Jeff Beck and Depeche Mode perform at some legendary pub in Canning Town decades ago.

‘Why does Hydt live there?’ he mused aloud.

His assistant called, ‘Just had word that Bond left his flat, heading east. He lost our man, though. Bond drives like Michael Schumacher.’

‘We knowwhere he’s going,’ Osborne-Smith said. ‘Hydt’s.’ He hated to have to explain the obvious.

As the minutes rolled by without any activity at Hydt’s, Osborne-Smith’s young assistant gave him updates: an arrest team had been assembled, firearms officers included. ‘They want to know their orders, sir.’

Osborne-Smith considered this. ‘Get them ready but let’s wait and see if Hydt’s meeting anybody. I want to scoop up the entire cast and crew.’

The technician said, ‘Sir, we have movement.’

Leaning closer to the screen, Osborne-Smith observed that a bulky man in a black suit – bodyguard, he assessed – was wheeling suitcases out of Hydt’s house and into the detached garage.

‘Sir, Bond’s just arrived in Canning Town.’ The man teased a joystick and the field of view expanded. ‘There.’ He pointed. ‘That’s him. The Bentley.’ The subdued grey vehicle slowed and pulled to the kerb.

The assistant whistled. ‘A Continental GT. Now, that’s a bloody fine automobile. I think they reviewed it on Top Gear. You ever watch the show, Percy?’

‘Sadly, I’m usually working.’ Osborne-Smith cast a mournful gaze towards tousle-haired Deputy-Deputy and decided that if the youngster couldn’t muster a bit more humility and respect, he probably wouldn’t survive – career wise – much beyond the end of the Incident Twenty assignment.

Bond’s car was parked discreetly – if the word could be used to describe a £125,000 car in Canning Town – about fifty yards from Hydt’s house, hidden behind several skips.

The assistant: ‘The arrest team’s on board the chopper.’

Osborne-Smith said, ‘Put them in the air. Get them to hover somewhere near the Gherkin.’

The forty-storey Swiss Re office building rising above the City – it looked more like a 1950s spaceship than a pickled cucumber, in Osborne-Smith’s view – was centrally located and thus a good place from which to begin the hunt. ‘Alert security at all the airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, London City, Southend and Biggin Hill.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘More subjects,’ the technician said.

On the screen, three people were leaving the house. A tall man in a suit, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard, walked next to a gangly blond man whose feet pointed outwards. A slight woman in a black suit, her hair white, followed.

‘That’s Hydt,’ the technician said. ‘The one with the beard.’

‘Any idea about the woman?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And the giraffe?’ Osborne-Smith asked with a snide inflection. He was really quite irritated that Bond had ignored his firearms form. ‘Is he the Irishman everyone’s talking about? Get a picture and run with it. Hurry up.’

The trio walked into the garage. A moment later a black Audi A8 sped out through the front gate and pulled into the road, accelerating fast.

‘Head count – all three are in the car, along with the bodyguard,’ Deputy-Deputy called.

‘Lock on it, MASINT. And paint it with a laser for good measure.’

‘I’ll try,’ the technician said.

‘You better had.’

They watched Bond in his Bentley, pulling smoothly into traffic and speeding after the Audi.

‘Pan out and stay on them,’ Osborne-Smith said, with the lisp he was forever trying to slice off, though the affliction had proved a hydra all his life.

The camera latched on to the German car. ‘There’s a good lad,’ he said to the technician.

The Audi speeded up. Bond was following discreetly but never missing a turn. As skilful as the driver of the German car was, Bond was better – anticipating when the chauffeur would try something clever, some aborted turn or unexpected lane change, and counter the measure. The cars zipped through green, amber and red alike.

‘Going north. Prince Regent Lane.’

‘So London City airport’s out.’

The Audi hit Newham Way.

‘All right,’ Deputy-Deputy enthused, tugging at his eruption of hair. ‘It’s either Stansted or Luton.’

‘Going north on the A406,’ another technician, a round blonde woman who had materialised from nowhere, called.

Then, after some impressive fox and hound driving, the competitors, Audi and Bentley, were on the M25 going anticlockwise.

‘It’s Luton!’ the assistant cried.

More subdued, Osborne-Smith ordered, ‘Get the whirly-bird moving.’

‘Will do.’

In silence they followed the progress of the Audi. Finally it sped into the short-term car park at Luton airport. Bond wasn’t far behind. The car parked carefully out of view of Hydt’s.

‘Chopper’s setting down on the anti-terror pad at the airport. Our people’ll deploy towards the car park.’

No one got out of the Audi. Osborne-Smith smiled. ‘I knew it! Hydt’s waiting to meet associates. We’ll get them all. Tell our people to stay under cover until I give the word. And get all the eyes at Luton online.’

He reflected that the CCTV cameras on the ground might make it possible for them to see Bond’s shocked reaction when the Division Three teams descended like hawks and arrested Hydt and the Irishman. That hadn’t been Osborne-Smith’s goal in ordering the video, of course… but it would be a very nice bonus.

21

Hans Groelle sat behind the wheel of Severan Hydt’s sleek, black Audi A8. The thickly built, blond Dutch Army veteran had done some motocross and other racing in his younger days and he was pleased Mr Hydt had asked him to put his driving skills to use this morning. Relishing the memory of the frantic drive from Canning Town to Luton airport, Groelle listened absently to the three-way conversation of the man and woman in the back seat and the passenger in the front.

They were laughing about the excitement of the race. The driver of the Bentley was extremely competent but, more important, intuitive. He couldn’t have known where Groelle was going so he’d had to anticipate the turns, many of them utterly random. It was as if the pursuing driver had had some sixth sense that told him when Groelle was going to turn, to slow, to speed forward.

A natural driver.

But who was he?

Well, they’d soon find out. No one in the Audi had been able to get a description of the driver – he was that clever – but they’d pieced together the number plate. Groelle had called an associate in the Green Way headquarters, who was using some contacts at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea to find out who owned the car.

But whatever the threat, Hans Groelle would be ready. A Colt 1911.45 sat snug and warm in his left armpit.

He glanced once more at the sliver of the Bentley’s grey wing and said to the man in the back seat, ‘It worked, Harry. We tricked them. Call Mr Hydt.’

The two passengers in the back and the man sitting beside Groelle were Green Way workers involved in Gehenna. They resembled Mr Hydt, Ms Barnes and Niall Dunne, who were currently en route to an entirely different airport, Gatwick, where a private jet was waiting to fly them out of the country.

The deception had been Dunne’s idea, of course. He was a cold fish, but that didn’t dull his brain. There’d been trouble up in March – somebody had killed Eric Janssen, one of Groelle’s fellow security men. The killer was dead, but Dunne had assumed there might be others, watching the factory or the house, perhaps both. So he had found three employees close enough in appearance to deceive watchers and had driven them to Canning Town very early that morning. Groelle had then carted suitcases out to the garage, followed by Mr Hydt, Ms Barnes and the Irishman. Groelle and the decoys, who’d been waiting in the Audi, then sped towards Luton. Ten minutes later the real entourage got into the back of an unmarked Green Way International lorry and drove to Gatwick.

Now the decoys would remain in the Audi as long as possible to keep whoever was in the Bentley occupied long enough for Mr Hydt and the others to get out of UK airspace.

Groelle said, ‘We have a bit of a wait.’ He gestured at the radio with a glance toward the Green Way workers. ‘What’ll it be?’

They voted and Radio 2 took the majority.

‘Ah, ah. It was a bloody decoy,’ Osborne-Smith said. His voice was as calm as always but the expletive, if that was what it was nowadays, indicated that he was livid.

A CCTV camera in the Luton car park was now beaming an image on to the big screen in Division Three and the reality show presently airing was not felicitous. The angular view into the Audi wasn’t the best in the world but it was clear that the couple in the back seats were not Severan Hydt and his female companion. And the passenger in the front, whom he’d taken to be the Irishman, was not the gawky blond man he’d seen earlier, plodding to the garage.

Decoys.

‘They have to be going to someLondon airport,’ Deputy-Deputy pointed out. ‘Let’s split up the team.’

‘Unless they decided to cruise up to Manchester or Leeds-Bradford.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Send all the Watchers in A Branch Hydt’s picture. Without delay.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Osborne-Smith squinted as he looked at the image broadcast from the CCTV. He could see a bit of the wing of James Bond’s Bentley parked twenty-five yards from the Audi.

If there was any consolation to the flap, it was that at least Bond had fallen for the ruse too. Combined with his lack of co-operation, his questionable use of the French secret service and his holier-than-thou attitude, the lapse might just signal a significant downsizing of his career.

22

The fifteen-foot lorry, leased to Green Way International but unmarked, pulled up to the kerb at the executive flight services terminal at Gatwick airport. The door slid open and Severan Hydt, an older woman and the Irishman climbed out and collected their suitcases.

Thirty feet away, in the car park, sat a black-and-red Mini Cooper, whose interior décor included a yellow rose in a plastic vase wedged into the cup holder. Behind the wheel, James Bond was watching the trio of passengers deploy to the pavement. The Irishman, naturally, was looking around carefully. He never seemed to drop his guard.

‘What do you think of it?’ Bond asked, into the hands-free connected to his mobile.

‘It?’

‘The Bentley.’

‘“It”? Honestly, James, a car like this simply demandsa name,’ Philly Maidenstone chided. She was sitting in his Bentley Continental GT, at Luton airport, having chased Hydt’s Audi all the way from Canning Town.

‘I never got into the habit of naming my cars.’ Any more than I’d give my gun a gender, he reflected. And kept his eyes on the threesome not far away.

Bond had been convinced that after the incidents in Serbia and March, Hydt – or the Irishman, more likely – would suspect he might be tailed in London. He was also concerned that Osborne-Smith had arranged to follow Bond himself. So, after he had talked to René Mathis, he’d left his flat and sped to a covered car park in the City, where he’d met Philly to swap cars. She was to trail Hydt’s Audi, which Bond was sure would be a decoy, in his Bentley, while he, in her Mini, would wait for the man’s true departure, which came just ten minutes after the German car had sped away from Hydt’s Canning Town home.

Bond now watched Hydt, head down, making a phone call. Beside him stood the woman. In her early to mid-sixties, Bond guessed, she had attractive features, though her face was pale and gaunt, an image accentuated by her black overcoat. Too little sleep, perhaps.

His lover? Bond wondered. Or a long-time assistant? From her expression as she looked at Hydt, he decided the former.

Also, the Irishman. Bond hadn’t seen him clearly in Serbia but there was no doubt; the gawky stride, feet turned out, bad posture, the odd blond fringe.

Bond supposed he was the man in the bulldozer in March – who had so ruthlessly crushed his security man to death. He also pictured the dead in Serbia – the agents, the train and lorry drivers, as well as the man’s own associate – and he let the anger rising in him crest and dissolve.

Philly said, ‘In answer to your question, I liked it very much. A lot of engines have horses nowadays; you can get AMG Mercedes estate cars to take the kids to school, for God’s sake – but how many pounds torque does the Bentley have? I’ve never felt anything like it.’

‘A touch over five hundred.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Philly whispered, either impressed or envious, perhaps both. ‘And I’m in love with the all-wheel drive. How’s it distributed?’

‘Sixty-forty rear to front.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘Yours isn’t bad either,’ he told her, of the Mini. ‘You added a supercharger.’

‘I did indeed.’

‘Whose?’

‘Autorotor. The Swedish outfit. Nearly doubled the horsepower. Close to three hundred now.’

‘I thought as much.’ Bond was himself impressed. ‘I must get the name of your mechanic. I have an old Jaguar that needs work.’

‘Oh, tell me it’s an E-type. That’s the sexiest car in the history of motoring.’

Yet one more thing in common. Bond wrapped this thought up and put it quickly away. ‘I’ll leave you in suspense. Hold on. Hydt’s on the move.’ Bond climbed out of the Mini and hid Philly’s key in the wheel arch. He grabbed his suitcase and laptop bag, slipped on a new pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses and eased into a crowd to follow Hydt, the Irishman and the woman to Gatwick’s private jet terminal.

‘You there?’ he asked, into the hands-free.

‘I am,’ Philly replied.

‘What’s happening with the decoys?’

‘They’re just sitting in the Audi.’

‘They’ll be waiting until Hydt takes off and the plane’s out of UK airspace. Then they’ll turn round to lead you – and probably Mr Osborne-Smith – back to London.’

‘You think Ozzy’s watching?’

Bond had to smile. ‘You’ve got a drone hovering about ten thousand feet over you, I’m sure. They’re walking into the terminal now. I should go, Philly.’

‘I don’t get out of the office enough, James. Thanks for the chance to play Formula One.’

Impulsively he said, ‘Here’s an idea. Maybe we’ll take it out into the country together, do some serious driving.’

‘James!’ she said crossly. He wondered if he’d crossed a line. ‘You simply can’t keep referring to this magnificent machine as “it”. I shall rack my brains and think up a proper name for her. And, yes, a trip out to the country sounds divine, provided you let me drive for exactly half the time. And we put in a null-detain request. I already have a few points on my driving licence.’

They rang off and Bond discreetly followed his prey. The threesome paused at a gate in a chain-link fence and presented passports to the guard. Bond saw that the woman’s was blue. American? The uniformed man jotted on a clipboard and gestured the three through. As Bond got to the fence he caught a glimpse of them climbing the stairs to a white private jet, a large one, seven round windows on each side of the fuselage, running lights already on. The door closed.

Bond hit speed-dial.

‘Flanagan. Hello, James.’

‘Maurice,’ he said to the head of T Branch, the group within the ODG that handled all things vehicular. ‘I need a destination for a private plane, departing just about now from Gatwick.’ He read off the five-letter registration painted on the engine.

‘Give me a minute.’

The aircraft moved forward. Dammit, he thought angrily. Slow down. He was all too aware that, if René Mathis’s information was correct, Hydt was on his way to oversee the murder of at least ninety people that evening.

Maurice Flanagan said, ‘I have it. Nice bird, Grumman Five-fifty. State-of-the-art and damned expensive. That one’s owned by a Dutch company in the business of waste and recycling.’

One of Hydt’s, of course.

‘The flight plan’s filed for Dubai.’

Dubai? Was that where the deaths were going to happen? ‘Where will it stop for refuelling?’

Flanagan laughed. ‘James, the range is over six and a half thousand miles. Flies at Mach point eight eight.’

Bond watched the plane taxiing to the runway. Dubai was about 3,500 miles from London. With the time difference the Grumman would land at three or four p.m.

‘I need to beat that plane to Dubai, Maurice. What can you cobble together for me? I have passports, credit cards and three grand in cash. Whatever you can do. Oh, I have my weapon – you’ll need to take that into account.’

Bond kept staring at the sleek white jet, wingtips turned up. It looked less like a bird than a dragon, though that might have been because he knew who the occupants were and what they had planned.

Ninety dead…

Several tense moments passed as Bond watched the jet edge closer to the runway.

Then Flanagan said, ‘Sorry, James. The best I can do is get you on a commercial flight out of Heathrow in a few hours. Puts you in Dubai around six twenty.’

‘Won’t do, Maurice. Military? Government?’

‘Nothing available. Absolutely nothing.’

Damn. At least he could have Philly or Bill Tanner arrange with someone at Six’s UAE desk to have a watcher meet the flight at Dubai airport and tail Hydt and Dunne to their destination.

He sighed. ‘Put me on the commercial flight.’

‘Will do. Sorry.’

Bond glanced at his watch.

Nine hours until the deaths…

He could always hope for a delay to Hydt’s flight.

Just then he saw the Grumman turn on to the main runway and, without pause, accelerate fast, lifting effortlessly from the concrete, then shrinking to a dot as the dragon shot higher into the sky, speeding directly away from him.

Percy Osborne-Smith was leaning towards the large, flatscreen monitor, split into six rectangles. Twenty minutes ago, they’d had a CCTV hit on the number plate of a lorry registered to Severan Hydt’s company at the Redhill and Reigate exit from the A23, which led to Gatwick. He and his underlings were now scanning every camera in and around the airport for the vehicle.

The second technician to join them finished securing her blonde hair with an elastic band and pointed a pudgy finger to one of the screens. ‘There. That’s it.’

It seemed that fifteen minutes ago, according to the time stamp, the lorry had paused at the kerb near the private aviation terminal and several people had got out. Yes, it was the trio.

‘Why didn’t Hydt’s face get read when he arrived? We can find hooligans from Rio before they get into Old Trafford but we can’t spot a mass murderer in broad daylight. My God, does that say something about Whitehall’s priorities? Don’t repeat that, anyone. Scan the tarmac.’

The technician manipulated the controls. There was an image of Hydt and the others walking to a private jet.

‘Bring up the registration number. Run it.’

To his credit Deputy-Deputy already had. ‘Owned by a Dutch company that does recycling. Okay, got the flight plan. He’s headed for Dubai. They’ve already taken off.’

‘Where are they now? Where?’

‘Checking…’ The assistant sighed. ‘Just passing out of UK airspace.’

Teeth clenched, Osborne-Smith stared at the still video image of the plane. He mused, ‘Wonder what it would take to scramble some Harriers and force them down?’ Then he looked up to note everyone staring at him. ‘I’m not serious, people.’

Though he had been, just a little.

‘Look at that,’ the male technician interrupted.

‘Look at bloody what?’

Deputy-Deputy said, ‘Yes, somebody elseis watching them.’

The screen was showing the entrance to the private jet terminal at Gatwick. A man was standing at the wire fence, staring at Hydt’s plane.

My God – it was Bond .

So, the bloody clever ODG agent, with a fancy car and without permission to carry a firearm in the UK, had tailed Hydt after all. Osborne-Smith wondered briefly who’d been in the Bentley. The ruse, he knew, had been not only to fool Hydt but to fool Division Three.

With considerable contentment he watched Bond turn from the fence and head back to the car park, head down and speaking into his mobile, undoubtedly enduring a verbal lashing from his boss for having let the fox slip away.

23

Usually we never hear the sound that wakes us. Perhaps we might, if it repeats: an alarm or an urgent voice. But a once-only noise rouses without registering in our consciousness.

James Bond didn’t know what lifted him from his dreamless sleep. He glanced at his watch.

It was just after one p.m.

Then he smelt a delicious aroma: a combination of floral perfume – jasmine, he believed – and the ripe, rich scent of vintage champagne. Above him he saw the heavenly form of a beautiful Middle Eastern woman, wearing a sleek burgundy skirt and long-sleeved golden shirt over her voluptuous figure. Her collar was secured with a pearl, which was different from the lower buttons. He found the tiny cream dot particularly appealing. Her hair was as blue-black as crow feathers, pinned up, though a teasing strand fell loose, cupping one side of her face, which was subtly and meticulously made-up.

He said to her, ‘ Salam alaikum .’

‘ Wa alaikum salam ,’ she replied. She set the crystal flute on the tray table in front of him, along with the elegant bottle of the king of Moëts, Dom Pérignon. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bond, I’ve woken you. I’m afraid the cork popped more loudly than I’d hoped. I was just going to leave the glass and not disturb you.’

‘ Shukran ,’ he said, as he took the glass. ‘And don’t worry. My second favourite way to wake up is to the sound of champagne opening.’

She responded to this with a subtle smile. ‘I can arrange some lunch for you too.’

‘That would be lovely, if it’s not too much trouble.’

She returned to the galley.

Bond sipped his champagne and looked out of the private jet’s spacious window, the twin Rolls-Royce engines pulsing smoothly as it flew towards Dubai at 42,000 feet, doing more than 600 miles an hour. The aircraft was, Bond reflected with amusement, a Grumman, like Severan Hydt’s, but Bond was in a Grumman 650, the faster model, with a greater range than the Rag-and-bone Man’s.

Bond had started the chase hours ago, with the modern equivalent of a scene from an old American police movie, in which the detective leaps into a taxi and orders, ‘Follow that car.’ He’d decided that the commercial flight would get him to Dubai too late to stop the killings so he’d placed a call to his Commodore Club friend, Fouad Kharaz, who had instantly put a private jet at his disposal. ‘My friend, you know I owe you,’ the Arab assured him.

A year ago he had approached Bond awkwardly for help, suspecting he did something that involved government security. On his way home from school, Kharaz’s teenage son had become the target of some hooded thugs, nineteen or twenty years old, who flaunted their anti-social behaviour orders like insignias of rank. The police were sympathetic but had little time for the drama. Worried sick about his son, Kharaz asked if there was anything Bond could recommend. In a moment of weakness, the knight errant within Bond had prevailed and he had trailed the boy home from school one day when nothing much was going on at the ODG. When the tormentors had moved in, so had Bond.

With a few effortless martial arts manoeuvres he had gently laid two of them out on the pavement and pinned the third, the ringleader, to a wall. He had taken their names from their driving licences and whispered coldly that if the Kharaz boy was ever troubled again, the hoodies’ next visit from Bond would not end so civilly. The boys had strode off defiantly, but the son was never troubled again; his status at school had soared.

So, Bond had become Fouad Kharaz’s ‘best friend of all best friends’. He’d decided to call in the favour and borrow one of the man’s jets.

According to the digital map on the bulkhead, beneath the airspeed and altitude indicators, they were over Iran. Two hours to go until they touched down in Dubai.

Just after takeoff, Bond had called Bill Tanner and told him of his destination and about the ninety or so deaths planned for seven o’clock that evening, presumably in Dubai, but perhaps anywhere in the United Arab Emirates.

‘Why’s Hydt going to kill them?’ the chief of staff had asked.

‘I’m not sure he is, but all those people are going to die and he’ll be there.’

‘I’ll go through diplomatic channels, tell the embassies there’s some threat but we don’t have anything concrete. They’ll leak word to the Dubai security apparatus too, through back channels.’

‘Don’t mention Hydt’s name. He needs to get into the country undisturbed. He can’t suspect anything. I have to find out what he’s up to.’

‘I agree. We’ll handle it on the sly.’

He’d asked Tanner to check the Golden Wire about Hydt’s affiliation with the Emirates, hoping there was a specific place he might be headed for. A moment later the chief of staff was back. ‘No offices, residences or business affiliations anywhere in the area. And I’ve just done a data-mining search. No hotel reservations in his name.’

Bond wasn’t pleased. As soon as Hydt landed, he would disappear into the sprawling emirate of two and a half million people. It would be impossible to find him before the attack.

Just as he disconnected, the flight attendant appeared. ‘We have many different dishes but I saw you look at the Dom with appreciation so I decided you would like the best we have aboard. Mr Kharaz said you were to be treated like a king.’ She set the silver tray on the table beside his champagne flute, which she refilled for him. ‘I’ve brought you Iranian caviar – beluga, of course – with toast, not blinis, crème fraîche and capers.’ The capers were the large ones, so large she had sliced them. ‘The grated onions are Vidalia, from America, the sweetest in the world.’ She added, ‘They are kind to the breath too. We call them “lovers’ onions”. To follow, there is duck in aspic, with minted yogurt and dates. I can also cook you a steak.’

He laughed. ‘No, no. This is more than enough.’

She left him to eat. When he had finished, he had two small cups of cardamom-flavoured Arabic coffee, as he read the intelligence that Philly Maidenstone had provided about Hydt and Green Way. He was struck by two things: the man’s care in steering clear of organised crime and his almost fanatical efforts to expand the company throughout the world. She had discovered recently filed applications to do business in South Korea, China, India, Argentina and half a dozen smaller countries. He was disappointed that he could find no clue in any of the material as to the Irishman’s identity. Philly had run the man’s picture, along with that of the older woman, through databases, but found no matches. And Bill Tanner had reported that the MI5 agents, SOCA and Specialist Crime officers who’d descended on Gatwick had been told that, unfortunately, records about the passengers on the Grumman ‘seem to have vanished’.

It was then that he received more troubling news. An encrypted email from Philly. Someone, it seemed, had been unofficially checking with Six about Bond’s whereabouts and planned itinerary.

The ‘someone’, Bond supposed, had to be his dear friend Percy Osborne-Smith. Technically he’d be out of the Division Three man’s jurisdiction, in Dubai, but that didn’t mean the man couldn’t make a great deal of trouble for him and even blow his cover.

Bond had no relation with Six’s people in Dubai. He’d have to assume, though, that Osborne-Smith might. Which meant Bond couldn’t have local ops or assets meet Hydt’s flight, after all. Indeed, he decided he couldn’t have anything to do with anyof his countrymen – a particular shame because the consul general in Dubai was clever and savvy… and a friend of Bond’s. He texted Bill Tanner and told him to hold off setting up a liaison with Six.

Bond called the pilot on the intercom to learn the status of the jet they were pursuing. It seemed that air-traffic control had slowed their own plane, though not Hydt’s, and they would not be able to overtake him. They would land half an hour, at least, after Hydt did.

Damn. That thirty minutes could mean the difference between life and death for at least ninety people. He stared out of the window at the Persian Gulf. Pulling out his mobile, he was thinking again of the great espionage balance sheet as he scrolled through his extensive phone book to find a number. I’m beginning to feel a bit like Lehman Brothers, he thought. My debts vastly outweigh my assets.

Bond placed a call.

24

The limousine bearing Severan Hydt, Jessica Barnes and Niall Dunne pulled up at the Intercontinental Hotel, situated on broad, peaceful Dubai Creek. The solid, stern driver was a local man they’d used before. Like Hans Groelle in England, he doubled as a bodyguard (and did a bit more than that from time to time).

They remained in the car while Dunne read a text or an email. He logged off his iPhone, looked up and said to Hydt, ‘Hans has found out about the driver of the Bentley. It’s interesting.’

Groelle had told someone at Green Way to check the number-plate. Hydt tapped his long fingernails together.

Dunne avoided looking at them. He said, ‘And there’s a connection to March.’

‘Is there?’ Hydt tried to read Dunne’s eyes. As usual, they remained utterly cryptic.

The Irishman said nothing more – not with Jessica present. Hydt nodded. ‘We’ll check in now.’

Hydt lifted the cuff of his elegant suit jacket and regarded his watch. Two and a half hours to go.

The number of dead will be ninety or so.

Dunne stepped out first; his keen eyes made their usual scan for threats. ‘All right,’ came the Irishman’s slight brogue. ‘It’s clear.’

Hydt and Jessica climbed out into the astonishing heat and headed quickly into the chill of the Intercontinental lobby, which was dominated by a stunning ten-foot-high assembly of exotic flowers. On a nearby wall hung portraits of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling families, gazing down sternly and confidently.

Jessica signed for the room, which they’d taken in her name, another of Dunne’s ideas. Though they would not be staying long – their onward flight was this evening – it was helpful to have somewhere to leave the bags and get some rest. They handed the luggage to the bell captain to have it taken to the room.

Leaving Jessica beside the flowers, Hydt nodded Dunne aside. ‘The Bentley? Who was it?’

‘Registered to a company in Manchester – same address as Midlands Disposal.’

Midlands was connected to one of the bigger organised-crime syndicates operating out of south Manchester. In America the Mob had traditionally been heavily involved in waste management, and in Naples, where the Camorra crime syndicate ruled, refuse collection was known as Il Re del Crimine. In Britain organised crime was less interested in the business, but occasionally some local underworld boss tried to bluster his way into the market, like a heavy in a Guy Ritchie film.

‘And this morning,’ Dunne continued, ‘the coppers came round to the army base site, showing pictures of somebody who’d been spotted in the area the day before. There’s a warrant on him for grievous bodily harm. He worked for Midlands. The police said he’s gone missing.’

As will happen, Hydt reflected, when one’s body is commencing to rot beneath a thousand tons of wrecked hospital. ‘What would he have been doing up there?’ Hydt asked.

Dunne considered this. ‘Probably planning to sabotage the demolition job. Something goes wrong, you get bad publicity and Midlands moves in to pick up some of your business.’

‘So whoever was in the Bentley only wanted to find out what happened to his mate yesterday.’

‘Right.’

Hydt was vastly relieved. The incident had nothing to do with Gehenna. And, more important, the intruder wasn’t the police or Security Service. Merely one more instance of the underbelly of the discard business. ‘Good. We’ll deal with Midlands later.’

Hydt and Dunne returned to Jessica. ‘Niall and I have some things to take care of. I’ll be back for dinner.’

‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ she said.

Hydt frowned. ‘In this heat? It might not be good for you.’ He didn’t like her to stray too far afield. He wasn’t worried that she’d let slip anything she shouldn’t – he had kept all aspects of Gehenna from her. And what she knew of the rest of his darker life, well, that was potentially embarrassing but not illegal. It was just that when he wanted her, he wanted her and Severan Hydt was a man whose belief in the inevitable power of decay had taught him that life is far too short and precarious to deny yourself anything at any time.

‘I can judge that,’ she said, but spoke timidly.

‘Of course, of course. Only… a woman alone?’ Hydt continued. ‘The men, you know how they can be.’

‘You mean Arab men?’ Jessica asked. ‘It’s not Tehran or Jeddah. They don’t even leer. In Dubai they’re more respectful than they are in Paris.’

Hydt smiled his gentle smile. That was amusing. And true. ‘But still… don’t you think it would be best just to be safe? Anyway, the hotel has a wonderful spa. It will be perfect for you. And the pool is partly Plexiglas. You can look down and see the ground forty feet below. The view of the Burj Khalifa is quite impressive.’

‘I suppose.’

It was then that Hydt noticed a new configuration of wrinkles around her eyes, as she peered up at the towering floral arrangement.

He thought, too, of the body of the woman found in the Green Way skip yesterday, her grave now subtly marked, according to the foreman, Jack Dennison. And Hydt felt that subtle unravelling within him, a spring loosening.

‘As long as you’re happy,’ he said to her softly and brushed her face, near the wrinkles, with one of his long nails. She’d stopped recoiling long ago, not that her reactions had ever affected him one bit.

Hydt was suddenly aware of Dunne’s crystalline blue eyes turning his way. The younger man stiffened, ever so slightly, then recovered and looked elsewhere. Hydt was irritated. What business was it of his what Hydt found alluring? He wondered, as he often had, if perhaps Dunne’s distaste for his brands of lust stemmed not from the fact that they were unconventional but from his disdain for anysexuality. In the months he’d known him, the Irishman hadn’t so much as glanced at a woman or man, with bedroom eyes.

Hydt lowered his hand and looked again at Jessica, at the lines radiating from her resigned eyes. He gauged the timing. They would fly out tonight and the plane boasted no private suites. He couldn’t imagine making love to her when Dunne was nearby, even if the man was asleep.

He debated. Was there time now to get to the room, lay Jessica on the bed, pull the curtains wide so that the low sun streamed across the soft flesh, illuminating the topography of her body…

… and run his nails over her skin?

The way he felt at the moment, absorbed with her and thinking of the spectacle at seven o’clock tonight, the liaison wouldn’t take long.

‘Severan,’ Dunne said crisply. ‘We don’t know what al-Fulan has for us. We probably should go.’

Hydt appeared to ponder the words but it was not serious consideration. He said, ‘It’s been a long flight. I feel like a change of clothes.’ He glanced down at Jessica’s weary eyes. ‘And you might like a nap, my dear.’ He directed her firmly to the lift.

25

At around four forty-five on Tuesday afternoon Fouad Kharaz’s private jet eased to a stop. James Bond unbuckled his seatbelt and collected his luggage. He thanked the pilots and the flight attendant, gripping her hand warmly and resisting the urge to kiss her cheek; they were now in the Middle East.

The immigration officer lethargically stamped his passport, slid it back and gestured him into the country. Bond strode through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ lane at Customs with a suitcase containing its deadly contraband, and was soon outside in the piquant heat, feeling as if a huge burden had been lifted.

He was in his element once more, the mission his and his alone to pursue. He was on foreign soil, his carte blancherestored.

The short ride from the airport to his destination at Festival City took Bond through a nondescript part of the town – drives to and from airports were similar throughout the world and this route was little different from the A4 just west of London, or the toll road to Dulles in Washington, D.C., although it was decorated with far more sand and dust. And, as most of the emirate, was immaculately clean.

On the way Bond gazed out over the sprawling city, looking north towards the Persian Gulf. In the late-afternoon, heat-shimmering light, the needle of the Burj Khalifa glowed, soaring above the geometrically complex skyline of Sheikh Zayed Road. It was presently the tallest building on earth. That distinction seemed to change monthly but this tower would surely hold that honour for a long time to come.

He noted one other ubiquitous characteristic of the city – the construction cranes, white and yellow and orange. They were everywhere and busy once again. On his last trip there had been just as many of these looming stalks but most were sitting idle, like toys discarded by a child who’d lost interest in playing with them. The emirate had been hit hard in the recent economic downturn. For his official cover Bond had to keep up on world finance and he found himself impatient with the criticism ladled upon places like Dubai, which often originated in London or New York; yet weren’t the City and Wall Street the more enthusiastic co-conspirators in causing the economic woe?

Yes, there had been excess here and many ambitious projects might never be finished – like the artificial archipelago in the shape of a map of the world, composed of small sand islands offshore. Yet the reputation for swelling luxury was but a small aspect of Dubai – and, in truth, no different from Singapore, California, Monaco and hundreds of other places where the wealthy worked and played. To Bond, in any event, Dubai was not about unfettered business or real estate but about its exotic ways, a place where new and old blended, where many cultures and religions coexisted respectfully. He particularly enjoyed the vast, empty landscape of red sand, populated by camels and Range Rovers, as different from his boyhood vistas of Kent as one could imagine. He wondered if his mission today would take him to the Empty Quarter.

They drove on, past small brown, white and yellow one-storey buildings whose names and services were disclosed in modest green Arabic lettering. No gaudy billboards, no neon lights, except for a few announcements of forthcoming events. The minarets of mosques rose above the low residences and businesses, persistent spikes of faith throughout the hazy distance. The intrusion of the ubiquitous desert was everywhere and date palm, neem and eucalyptus trees formed gallant outposts against the encroaching, endless sand.

The taxi driver dropped Bond, as directed, at a shopping centre. He handed over some ten-dirham notes and climbed out. The mall was packed with locals – it was between Asirand Maghribprayer times – as well as many foreigners, all carting carrier bags and crowding the shops, which were doing brisk business. The country was often referred to as ‘Do buy’, he recalled.

Bond lost himself in the crowd, looking around, as if he were trying to find a companion he’d agreed to meet. In fact, he was searching for someone else: the man who’d been following him from the airport, probably with hostile intent. Twice now he’d seen a man in sunglasses and a blue shirt or jacket: at the airport and then in a dusty black Toyota behind Bond’s taxi. For the drive he had donned a plain black cap but, from the set of his head and shoulders and the shape of his glasses, Bond knew he was the man he’d seen at the airport. The same Toyota had just now eased past the shopping centre – driving slowly for no apparent reason – and vanished behind a nearby hotel.

This was no coincidence.

Bond had considered sending the taxi on a diversionary route but, in truth, he wasn’t sure he wanted to lose the tail. More often than not it’s better to trap your pursuer and see what he has to say for himself.

Who was he? Had he been waiting in Dubai for Bond? Or somehow followed him from London? Or did he not even know who Bond was, but had chosen merely to keep an eye on a stranger in town?

Bond bought a newspaper. Today it was hot, searingly so, but he shunned the air-conditioned interior of the café he had selected and sat outside where he could observe all the entrances and exits to and from the area. He looked around occasionally for the tail but saw nothing specific.

As he sent and received several text messages, a waiter came to him. Bond glanced at the faded menu on the table and ordered Turkish coffee and sparkling water. As the man walked away, Bond looked at his watch. Five p.m.

Only two hours until more than ninety people died somewhere in this elegant city of sand and heat.

Half a block away from the shopping centre, a solidly built man in a blue jacket slipped a Dubai traffic warden several hundred dirhams and told him in English that he’d only be a short while. He’d certainly be gone before the crowds returned after sunset prayer.

The warden wandered off as if the conversation about the dusty black Toyota, parked illegally at the kerb, had never occurred.

The man, who went by the name Nick, lit a cigarette and lifted his backpack over his shoulder. He eased into the shadows of the shopping centre where his target was nonchalantly sipping espresso or Turkish coffee and reading the paper as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

That was how he thought of the man: target. Not bastard, not enemy. Nick knew that in an operation like this you had to be utterly dispassionate, as difficult as that might be. This man was no more of a person than the black dot of a bull’s-eye.

A target.

He supposed the man was talented but he’d been pretty damn careless leaving the airport. Nick had easily followed him. This gave him confidence at what he was about to do.

Face obscured by a baseball cap with a long brim and sunglasses, Nick moved closer to his target, dodging from shadow to shadow. Unlike in other places, the disguise did not draw attention to him; in Dubai everyone wore head coverings and sunglasses.

One thing that was a bit different was the long-sleeved blue jacket, which few local people wore, given the heat. But there was no other way to hide the pistol that was tucked into his waistband.

Nick’s gold earring, too, might have earned him some curious glances but this area of Dubai Creek, with its shopping malls and amusement park, was filled with tourists and as long as people didn’t drink alcohol or kiss each other in public, the locals forgave unusual dress.

He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then dropped and crushed it, easing closer to his target.

A hawker appeared suddenly and asked, in English, if he wanted to buy rugs. ‘Very cheap, very cheap. Many knots! Thousands upon thousands of knots!’ One look from Nick shut his mouth and he vanished.

Nick considered his plan. There would be some logistical problems, of course – in this country everyone watched everyone else. He would have to get his target out of sight, into the car park or, better, the basement of the shopping centre, perhaps during prayer time, when the crowds thinned. Probably the simplest approach was the best. Nick could slip up behind him, shove the gun into his back and ‘escort’ him downstairs.

Then the knife work would begin.

Oh, the target – all right, maybe I will think of him as a bastard – would have many things to say when the blade began its leisurely journey across his skin.

Nick reached under his jacket and pushed up the safety lever of his pistol, moving smoothly from shadow to shadow.

26

James Bond had his coffee and water in front of him as he sat with the Nationalnewspaper, published out of Abu Dhabi. He considered it the best newspaper in the Middle East. You could find every sort of story imaginable, from a scandal about Mumbai firemen’s inefficient uniforms to pieces about women’s rights in the Arab world to a half-page exposé on a Cypriot gangster stealing the body of the island’s former president from his grave.

Excellent Formula One coverage too – important to Bond.

Now, however, he was paying no attention to the paper but was using it as a prop… though not with the cliché of an eyehole torn from the gutter between ads for Dubai’s Lulu Hypermarkets and the local news. The paper sat flat in front of him and his head was down. His eyes, however, were up, scanning.

It was at that moment that he heard a brief rasp of shoe leather behind him and was aware of someone moving quickly towards his table.

Bond remained completely still.

Then a large hand – pale and freckled – gripped the chair beside him and yanked it back.

A man dropped heavily into it.

‘Howdy, James.’ The voice was thick with a Texas accent. ‘Welcome to Dubai.’

Du-bah…

Bond turned to his friend with a grin. They shook hands warmly.

A few years older than Bond, Felix Leiter was tall and had a lanky frame, on which his suit hung loose. The pale complexion and mop of straw-coloured hair largely precluded most undercover work in the Middle East unless he was playing exactly who he was: a brash, savvy guyfrom the American South, who’d ridden into town for business, with no small amount of pleasure thrown in. His slow manners and easy-going speech were deceptive; he could react like a spring knife when the occasion demanded… as Bond had seen first hand.

When the pilot of Fouad Kharaz’s Grumman had reported that they weren’t going to beat Hydt’s to Dubai, it was Felix Leiter whom Bond had rung, calling in his Lehman Brothers favour. While Bond was uneasy using the MI6 connections here, because of Osborne-Smith’s inquiries earlier, he had no such reservations about enlisting the CIA, which had an extensive operation throughout the United Arab Emirates. Asking Leiter, a senior agent in the Agency’s National Clandestine Service, to help out was risky politically. Using a sister agency without clearance from the top might result in serious diplomatic repercussions and Bond had already done so once with René Mathis. He was certainly putting his newly reinstated carte blancheto the test.

Felix Leiter was more than willing to meet Hydt’s plane and follow the trio to their destination, which had turned out to be the Intercontinental Hotel – it was connected to the shopping centre where the two men now sat.

Bond had briefed him about Hydt, the Irishman and, ten minutes ago via text, about the man in the Toyota. Leiter had remained in surveillance positions at the shopping centre for a time to – literally – watch Bond’s back.

‘So, do I have a friend hanging about?’

‘Spotted him moving in, about forty yards to the south,’ said Leiter, smiling as if counter-surveillance was the last thing on his mind. ‘He was by the entrance, thataway. But the son-of-a-bitch vanished.’

‘Whoever he is, he’s good.’

‘You got that right.’ Gazing around, Leiter now asked, ‘You believe the shopping here?’ He gestured at the patrons. ‘You have malls in England, James?’

‘Yes indeed. Televisions too. And running water. We’re hoping to get computers some day.’

‘Ha. I’ll come visit some time. Soon as you learn how to refrigerate beer.’

Leiter flagged down the waiter and ordered coffee. He whispered to Bond, ‘I’d say “Americano”, but then people might guess my nationality, which’d blow my cover all to hell.’

He tugged at his ear – a signal, it seemed, for a slightly built Arab man, dressed like a local, appeared. Bond had no idea where he’d been stationed. The man looked as if he might have been piloting one of the abra boat taxis that plied Dubai Creek.

‘Yusuf Nasad,’ Leiter introduced him. ‘This is Mr Smith.’

Bond assumed that Nasad was not the Arab’s real name either. He would be a local asset and, because Leiter was running him, he’d be a damn good one too. Felix Leiter was a master handler. It was Nasad who’d helped him track Hydt from the airport, the American explained.

Nasad sat down. Leiter asked, ‘Our friend?’

‘Gone. He saw you, I am thinking.’

‘I stand out too damn much.’ Leiter laughed. ‘Don’t know why Langley sent me here. If I was undercover in Alabama, nobody’d notice me.’

Bond said, ‘I didn’t get much of a view. Dark hair, blue shirt.’

‘A tough boy,’ Nasad said, in what Bond thought of as American TV English. ‘Athletic. Hair’s cut very short. And he has a gold earring. No beard. I tried to get a picture. But he was gone too fast.’

‘Besides,’ Leiter filled in, ‘all we’ve got is crap to take pictures with. You still have that fellow giving you folks neat toys? What’s his name again – Q Somebody? Quentin? Quigley?’

‘Q’s the branch, not a person. Stands for Quartermaster.’

‘And it was a jacket he was wearing,’ Nasad added, ‘not a shirt. Like a windbreaker.’

‘In this heat?’ Bond asked. ‘So he was carrying. You see what type of weapon?’

‘No.’

‘Any idea who he might be?’

Nasad offered, ‘Definitely not Arab. Could have been a katsa.’

‘Why the hell would a Mossad field officer be interested in me?’

Leiter said, ‘Only you can answer that, boy.’

Bond shook his head. ‘Maybe somebody recruited by the secret police here?’

‘Naw, doubt it. The Amn al-Dawla don’t tail you. They just invite you to their four-star accommodations in the Deira, where you spill everything they want to know. And I mean everything.’

Nasad’s quick eyes took in the café and surrounding area and apparently noted no threats. Bond had observed him doing this since his arrival.

Leiter asked Bond, ‘You think it was somebody working for Hydt?’

‘Possibly. But if so I doubt they know who I am.’ Bond explained that before he’d left London he’d been concerned that Hydt and the Irishman would get too suspicious that he was on their trail, especially after the flap in Serbia. He’d had T Branch adjust the records of his Bentley to link the number plate to a disposal company in Manchester with possible underworld ties. Then Bill Tanner had sent agents posing as Scotland Yard officers to the March demolition site with a story about one of Midlands Disposal’s security men going missing in the area.

‘It’ll put Hydt and the Irishman off the scent at least for a few days,’ Bond said. ‘Now, have you heard any chatter here?’

The American’s otherwise cheerful face tightened. ‘No relevant ELINT or SIGINT. Not that I care much about eavesdropping.’

Felix Leiter, a former marine whom Bond had met in the service, was a HUMINT spy. He vastly preferred the role of handler – running local assets, like Yusuf Nasad. ‘I pulled in a lot of favours and talked to all my key assets. Whatever Hydt and his local contacts’re up to, they’re keeping the lid on really tight. I can’t find any leads. Nobody’s been moving any mysterious shipments of nasty stuff into Dubai. Nobody’s been telling friends and family to avoid this mosque or that shopping centre around seven tonight. No bad actors’re slipping in from across the Gulf.’

‘That’s the Irishman’s doing – keeping the wraps on everything. I don’t know exactly what he does for Hydt but he’s bloody clever, always thinking about security. It’s as if he can anticipate whatever we’re going to do and think up a way to counter it.’

They fell silent as they casually surveyed the shopping centre. No sign of the blue-jacketed tail. No sign of Hydt or the Irishman.

Bond asked Leiter, ‘You still a scribbler?’

‘Sure am,’ the Texan confirmed.

Leiter’s cover was as a freelance journalist and blogger, specialising in music, particularly the blues, R &B and Afro-Caribbean. Journalism is a commonly used cover for intelligence agents; it gives credence to their frequent travelling, often to hotspots and the less-savoury places of the world. Leiter was fortunate in that the best covers are those that mirror an agent’s actual interests, since an assignment may require the operative to be undercover for weeks or months at a time. The filmmaker Alexander Korda – recruited by the famed British spymaster Sir Claude Dansey – reportedly used location scouting expeditions as a cover to photograph off-limits areas in the run-up to the Second World War. Bond’s bland official cover, a security and integrity analyst for the Overseas Development Group, subjected him to excruciatingly boring stints when he was on assignment. On a particularly bad day he would long for an official cover as a skiing or SCUBA instructor.

Bond sat forward and Leiter followed his gaze. They watched two men come out of the front door of the Intercontinental and walk towards a black Lincoln Town Car.

‘It’s Hydt. And the Irishman.’

Leiter sent Nasad to fetch his vehicle, then pointed to a dusty old Alfa Romeo in a nearby car park, whispering to Bond, ‘Over there. My wheels. Let’s go.’

27

The Lincoln carrying Severan Hydt and Niall Dunne eased east through the haze and heat, paralleling the massive power lines conducting electricity to the outer regions of the city-state. Nearby was the Persian Gulf, the rich blue muted nearly to beige by the dust in the air and the glare of the low but unrelenting sun.

They were taking a convoluted route through Dubai, cruising past the indoor ski complex, the striking Burj Al-Arab hotel, which resembled a sail and was nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and the luxurious Palm Jumeirah – the sculpted development of shops, homes and hotels extending far into the Gulf and fashioned, as the name suggested, in the likeness of an indigenous tree. These areas of glistening beauty upset Severan Hydt: the new, the unblemished. He felt much more comfortable when the vehicle slipped into the older Satwa neighbourhood, densely populated by thousands upon thousands of working-class folk – mostly immigrants.

The time was nearly five thirty. An hour and a half before the event. It was also, Hydt had noted, with irony, an hour and a half until sunset.

Curious coincidence, he reflected. A good sign. His ancestors – his spiritual, if not necessarily genetic forebears – had believed in omens and portents and he allowed himself to do so as well; yes, he was a practical, hard-headed businessman… but he had his otherside.

He thought again about tonight.

They continued to cruise along the roads in a complicated fashion. The purpose of this dizzying tour wasn’t to sightsee. No, taking the roundabout route to get to a spot merely five miles from the Intercontinental had been Dunne’s idea of security.

But the driver – a mercenary with experience in Afghanistan and Syria – reported, ‘I thought we were being followed, an Alfa and possibly a Ford. But if so, we’ve lost them, I’m sure.’

Dunne looked back, then said, ‘Good. Go to the works.’

They circled back to the city. In ten minutes they were at an industrial complex in the Deira, the cluttered and colourful area in the centre of town nestled along Dubai Creek and the Gulf. This was another place in which Hydt felt immediately comfortable. To enter the neighbourhood was to take a step back in time: its uneven houses, traditional markets and the rustic port along the Creek, whose docks teemed with dhows and other small vessels, might have been the backdrop to a 1930s adventure film. The ships were piled impossibly high with stacks of cargo lashed into place. The driver found the destination, a good-sized factory and warehouse, with attached offices, one storey, the shabby beige paint peeling. Razor wire, rare in low-crime Dubai, topped the chain-link fence surrounding the place. The driver pulled up to an intercom and spoke in Arabic. The gate slowly swung open. The Town Car eased into the car park and stopped.

The two men climbed out. With an hour and fifteen minutes to sunset, the air was cooling, even as the ground radiated heat banked during the day.

Hydt heard a voice, carried on the dusty wind. ‘Please! My friend, please come in!’ The man waving his hand was in a white dishdasharobe – in the uniquely Emirates style – and had no head covering. He was in his mid-fifties, Hydt knew, although, like many Arab men, he looked younger. A studious face, smart glasses, Western shoes. His longish hair was swept back.

Mahdi al-Fulan strode over sprays of red sand, which drifted along the tarmac and sloped against the kerb, the walkways and the sides of buildings. The Arab’s eyes were bright, as if he were a schoolboy about to show off a treasured project. Which wasn’t far from the truth, Hydt reflected. A black beard framed his smile; Hydt had been amused to learn that, while hair colouring was not a good product to market in a land where both male and female heads were usually covered, beard dye was a bestseller.

Hands were gripped. ‘My friend.’ Hydt didn’t try to offer an Arabic greeting. He had no talent for languages and believed it a weakness to attempt anything you were not skilled at.

Niall Dunne stepped forward, his shoulders bouncing as they always did in his gangling walk, and also greeted the man, but the pale eyes were gazing past the Arab. For once, they were not searching for threats. He was staring raptly at the bounty that the warehouse held, which could be seen through the open door: perhaps fifty or so machines, in every shape a geometrician could name, made of raw and painted steel, iron, aluminium, carbon fibre… who knew what else? Pipes protruded, wires, control panels, lights, switches, chutes and belts. If robots had pleasant dreams, they would be set in this room.

They entered the warehouse, which was devoid of workers. Dunne paused to study and occasionally even caress some device or other.

Mahdi al-Fulan was an industrial product designer, MIT educated. He shunned the kind of high-profile entrepreneurship that gets you on the cover of business magazines – and often into the bankruptcy court – and specialised instead in designing functional industrial equipment and control systems for which there was a consistent market. He was one of Severan Hydt’s main suppliers. Hydt had met him at a recycling-equipment conference. Once he’d learnt about certain trips the Arab took abroad and about the dangerous men to whom he sold his wares, they’d become partners. Al-Fulan was a clever scientist, an innovative engineer, a man with ideas and inventions important to Gehenna.

And with other connections too.

Ninety dead…

At that thought, Hydt involuntarily consulted his watch. Nearly six.

‘Follow me, please, Severan, Niall.’ Al-Fulan had caught Hydt’s glance. The Arab led them through the various rooms, dim and still. Dunne again slowed his step to examine some machinery or a control panel. He’d nod approvingly or frown, perhaps trying to understand how a system worked.

Leaving behind the machines with their scent of oil, paint and the unique metallic, almost blood-like odour of high-powered electrical systems, they entered the offices. At the end of a dim corridor al-Fulan used a computer key to open an unmarked door and they stepped into a work area, which was large and cluttered with thousands of sheets of paper, blueprints and other documents on which were words, graphs and diagrams, many of them incomprehensible to Hydt.

The atmosphere was eerie, to say the least, both because of the dimness and the clutter… and because of what decorated the walls.

Images of eyes.

Eyes of all sorts – human, fish, canine, feline and insect – photos, computerised three-dimensional renderings, medical drawings from the 1800s. Particularly unsettling was a fanciful, detailed blueprint of a human eye, as if a modern-day Dr Frankenstein had used current engineering techniques to construct his monster.

In front of one of the dozens of large computer monitors sat an attractive woman, a brunette, in her late twenties. She stood up, strode to Hydt and shook his hand vigorously. ‘Stella Kirkpatrick. I’m Mahdi’s research assistant.’ She greeted Dunne too.

Hydt had been to Dubai several times but had not met her before. The woman’s accent was American. Hydt supposed she was clever, hard-headed and typical of a common phenomenon in this part of the world, one that went back hundreds of years: the Westerner in love with Arab culture.

Al-Fulan said, ‘Stella worked up most of the algorithms.’

‘Did you now?’ Hydt asked, with a smile.

She blushed, the ruddy colour stemming from her affection for her mentor, whom she glanced at quickly, a supplication for approval, which al-Fulan provided in the form of a seductive smile; Hydt was not a participant in this exchange.

As the decorations on the walls suggested, al-Fulan’s speciality was optics. His goal in life was to invent an artificial eye for the blind that would work as well as those ‘Allah – praise be to Him – created for us’. But until that happened he would make a great deal of money designing industrial machinery. He had come up with most of the specialised safety, control and inspection systems for Green Way’s sorters and document-destruction devices.

Hydt had recently commissioned him to create yet another device for the company and had come here today with Dunne to see the prototype.

‘A demonstration?’ the Arab said.

‘Please,’ Hydt replied.

They all walked back into the garden of machines. Al-Fulan led them to a complicated device, weighing several tons, sitting in the loading bay beside two large industrial refuse compactors.

The Arab hit buttons and, with a growl, the machine slowly warmed up. It was about twenty feet long, six high and six wide. At the front end a metal conveyor-belt led into a mouth about a yard square. Inside all was blackness, although Hydt could just make out horizontal cylinders, covered with spikes, like a combine harvester. At the rear, half a dozen chutes led to bins, each containing a thick grey plastic liner, open at the top to catch whatever the machine disgorged.

Hydt studied it carefully. He and Green Way made a lot of money from destroying documents securely, but the world was changing. Most data resided on computer and flash drives nowadays and this would be increasingly the case in the future. Hydt had decided to expand his empire by offering a new approach to destroying computer data storage devices.

A number of companies did this, as did Green Way, but the new approach would be different, thanks to al-Fulan’s invention. At the moment, to destroy data effectively, computers had to be dismantled by hand and hard drives had to be wiped of data with magnetic degaussing units, then crushed. Other steps were required to separate the other components of the old computer – many of them dangerous e-waste.

This machine, however, did everything automatically. You simply tossed the old computer on to the belt and the device did the rest, breaking it apart while al-Fulan’s optical systems identified the components and sent them to appropriate bins. Hydt’s sales people could assure his customers that this machine would make certain not only that the sensitive information on the hard drive was destroyed but that all the other components were identified and disposed of according to local environmental regulations.

At a nod from her boss, Stella picked up an old laptop and set it on the ribbed conveyor-belt. It vanished into the dim recesses of the device.

They heard a series of sharp cracks and thuds and finally a loud grinding noise. Al-Fulan directed his guests to the rear, where after five or six minutes they watched the machine spit the various sorted bits of scrap into different bins – metal, plastic, circuit boards and the like. In the bin liner marked ‘Media Storage’ they saw fine metal and silicon dust, all that was left of the hard drive. The dangerous e-waste, like the batteries and heavy metals, was deposited in a receptacle marked with warning labels and the benign components were dropped into recycling bins.

Al-Fulan then directed Hydt and Dunne to a monitor, on which a report about the machine’s efforts scrolled past.

Dunne’s icy façade had slipped. He seemed almost excited.

Hydt, too, was pleased, very pleased. He began to ask a question. But then he looked at a clock on the wall. It was six thirty. He could concentrate on the machinery no longer.

28

James Bond, Felix Leiter and Yusuf Nasad were fifty feet from the factory, crouching beside a large skip, observing Hydt, the Irishman, an Arab in a traditional white robe and an attractive dark-haired woman through a loading-bay window.

With Bond and Leiter in the American’s Alfa, and Nasad in his Ford bringing up the rear, they’d started to follow the Lincoln Town Car from the Intercontinental but both agents immediately recognised that the Arab driver was starting evasion techniques. Worried that they’d be spotted, Bond used an app in his mobile to paint the car with a MASINT profile and took its co-ordinates with a laser, then uploaded the data to the GCHQ tracking centre. Leiter eased off the accelerator and let the satellites follow the vehicle, beaming the results to Bond’s mobile.

‘Damn,’ Leiter had drawled, looking at the phone in Bond’s hand. ‘I want one of them.’

Bond had followed the Town Car’s progress on his map and directed Leiter, with Nasad following, in the general direction that Hydt was going, which was proving to be a very circuitous route. Finally the Lincoln headed back to the Deira, the old part of town. A few minutes later Bond, Leiter and his asset arrived, left the cars in an alleyway between two dusty warehouses and sliced their way through the chain-link fence for a closer view of what Hydt and the Irishman were up to. The driver of the Lincoln had remained in the car park.

Bond plugged in an earpiece and trained his phone’s camera eye on the foursome, eavesdropping with an app that Sanu Hirani had developed. The Vibra-Mike reconstructed conversation observed through windows or transparent doors by reading vibrations on glass or other nearby smooth surfaces. It combined what it detected sonically with visual input of lip and cheek movement, eye expression and body language. In circumstances like this it could reconstruct conversations with about 85 per cent accuracy.

After listening to the conversation, Bond told the others, ‘They’re talking about equipment for the Green Way facilities, his legitimate company. Dammit.’

‘Look at the bastard,’ the American whispered. ‘He knows that around ninety people are going to die in a half-hour and it’s like he’s talking to a store clerk about pixels on big-screen TVs.’

Nasad’s phone buzzed. He took the call, speaking in staccato Arabic, some of which Bond could decipher. He was getting information about the factory. He disconnected and explained to the agents that the place was owned by a Dubai citizen, Mahdi al-Fulan. A picture confirmed he was the man Hydt and the Irishman were with. He was not suspected of having any terrorist ties, had never been to Afghanistan and seemed to be merely an engineer and businessman. He did, however, design and sell his products to, among others, warlords and arms dealers. He had recently developed an optical scanner on a land mine that could differentiate between enemies’ and friendlies’ uniforms or badges.

Bond recalled notes he’d found up in March: blast radius…

As conversation in the warehouse resumed, Bond cocked his head and listened once more. Hydt was saying to the Irishman, ‘I want to leave for the… event. Mahdi and I will go there now.’ He turned to his Arab associate with eerie, almost hungry, eyes. ‘It’s not far, is it?’

‘No, we can walk.’

Hydt said to his Irish partner, ‘Maybe you and Stella could work out some of the technical details.’

The Irishman turned to the woman as Hydt and the Arab vanished into the warehouse.

Bond closed down the app and glanced at Leiter. ‘Hydt and al-Fulan are going to the site where the attack is to take place. They’re walking. I’ll follow them. See if you can find out anything more here. The woman and the Irishman are going to stay. Get closer if you can. I’ll call you when I find out what’s going on.’

‘You bet,’ the Texan said.

Bay-at…

Nasad nodded.

Bond checked his Walther and slipped it back into the holster.

‘Wait, James,’ Leiter said. ‘You know, saving these people, the ninety or whatever, well, it could tip your hand. If he thinks you’re on to him, Hydt could rabbit – he’ll disappear – and you’ll never find him, until he comes up with a new Incident Twenty. And he’ll be a lot more careful about keeping it secret then. If you let him go ahead with whatever he’s about to do here, he’ll stay in the dark about you.’

‘Sacrifice them, you mean?’

The American held Bond’s eyes. ‘It’s a tough call. I don’t know that I could do it. But it’s something to think about.’

‘I already have. And, no, they’re not dying.’

He spotted the two men making their way out of the compound.

Crouching, Leiter ran to the building and hauled himself through a small window, disappearing silently on the other side. He reappeared and gestured. Nasad joined him.

Bond slipped back through the breach in the fence and made his way after his two targets. After several blocks of meandering through industrial alleys, Hydt and al-Fulan entered the Deira Covered Souk: hundreds of outdoor stalls, as well as more conventional shops, where you could buy gold, spices, shoes, TV sets, CDs, videos, Mars bars, souvenirs, toys, Middle Eastern and Western clothing… virtually anything imaginable. Only a portion of the population here seemed to be Emirates-born; Bond heard bits of conversation in Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu and Tagalog, but relatively little Arabic. Shoppers were everywhere, hundreds of them. Intense negotiations were going on at every stall and in every shop, hands gesticulating feverishly, brows furrowed, clipped words flying back and forth.

Do Buy…

Bond was following at a discreet distance, looking for any sign of their target: the people who were going to die in twenty-five minutes.

What could the Rag-and-bone Man possibly have in mind? A trial run in anticipation of the carnage on Friday, which would be ten or twenty times as bad? Or was this unrelated? Perhaps Hydt was using his role as an international businessman as a cover. Were he and the Irishman just hired killers? State-of-the-art hitmen?

Bond dodged through the log-jam of merchants, shoppers, tourists and dock workers loading the dhows with cargo. It was very crowded now, just before Maghrib, the sunset prayer. Were the markets to be the site of the attack?

Then Hydt and al-Fulan left the souk and continued to walk for half a block. They stopped and gazed up at a modern structure, three storeys high, with large glass windows, overlooking Dubai Creek. It was a public building, filled with men, women and children. Bond moved closer and saw a sign in Arabic and English. The Museum of the Emirates.

So this was the target. And it was a damn good one. Bond scanned it. At least a hundred people meandered through the ground floor alone and there would surely be many more on the floors above. The building was close to the Creek with only a narrow road in front, which meant that emergency vehicles would have a difficult time getting close to the scene of the carnage.

Al-Fulan looked around uneasily but Hydt pushed through the front door. They vanished into the crowd.

I’m not letting those people die. Bond plugged his earpiece in and called up the eavesdropping app on his phone. He followed the two men inside, paid a small admission fee and eased closer to his targets, blending with a group of Western tourists.

He couldn’t help but think about what Felix Leiter had said. Saving these people might indeed alert Hydt that someone was on to him.

What would M do under these circumstances?

He supposed the old man would sacrifice the ninety to save thousands. He’d been an active-duty admiral in the Royal Navy. Officers at that level had to make hard decisions like this all the time.

But, dammit, Bond thought, I have to do something. He saw children scampering around, saw men and women gazing at and talking animatedly about the exhibits, people laughing, people nodding with rapt interest as a tour guide lectured.

Hydt and al-Fulan moved further into the building. What were they doing? Had they planned to leave an explosive device? Perhaps it was what had been constructed in the hospital basement in March.

Or perhaps the industrial designer al-Fulan had made something else for Hydt.

Bond circled through the large marble lobby, filled with Arabic art and antiquities. A massive chandelier, in gold, dominated the room. Bond casually pointed the microphone towards the men. He caught dozens of scraps of conversation from others but none between Hydt and al-Fulan. Angry with himself, he adjusted his aim more carefully and finally heard Hydt’s voice: ‘I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I must thank you again for making it happen.’

Al-Fulan: ‘I am pleased to do what I can. It is good we are in business together.’

Distracted, Hydt whispered, ‘I would like to take pictures of the bodies.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. Anything you want, Severan.’

How close can I get to the bodies?

Hydt then said, ‘It’s almost seven. Are we ready?’

What should I do? Bond thought desperately. People are about to die.

Your enemy’s purpose will dictate your response…

On the wall, he noted a fire alarm. He could pull it, evacuate the building. But he also saw CCTVs and security guards. He’d be identified immediately as the man who’d pulled the lever and, though he’d try to flee, the guards and police might stop him, find his weapon. Hydt might see him. He’d easily deduce what had happened. The mission would collapse.

Was there any better response?

He couldn’t think of one and edged close to the fire-alarm panel.

Six fifty-five.

Hydt and al-Fulan were walking quickly to a door at the rear of the lobby. Bond was at the alarm now. He was in full view of three security cameras.

And a guard was no more than twenty feet away. He had noticed Bond now and perhaps registered that his behaviour wasn’t quite what you’d expect of a casual Western tourist in an arcane museum of this sort. The man bent his head and spoke into a microphone attached to his shoulder.

In front of Bond a family stood before a diorama of a camel race. The little boy and his father were laughing at the comical models.

Six fifty-six.

The squat guard turned towards Bond. He wore a pistol. And the protective flap covering it had been unsnapped.

Six fifty-seven.

The guard started forward, his hand near his gun.

Still, with Hydt and al-Fulan merely twenty feet away, Bond reached for the fire-alarm lever.

29

At that moment an announcement in Arabic came over the public-address system.

Bond paused to listen. He understood most of it. The English translation a moment later confirmed his take on the words.

‘Gentlemen. Will ticket holders for the seven o’clock show now proceed through the North Wing door.’

That was the entrance Hydt and al-Fulan were now approaching, at the back of the main hall. They weren’t leaving the museum; if this was the location where the people would die, why weren’t the two men fleeing?

Bond left the alarm panel and stepped to the door. The guard eyed him once more, then turned away, fixing his holster flap.

Hydt and his colleague stood at the entrance to a special show the museum was hosting. Bond exhaled slowly as he understood at last. The title of the exhibition was ‘Death in the Sand’. A notice at the entrance explained that last autumn archaeologists had discovered a mass grave dating back a thousand years, located near Abu Dhabi’s Liwa oasis, about a hundred kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf. An entire nomadic Arab tribe, ninety-two people, had been attacked and slaughtered. Just after the battle, a sandstorm had buried the bodies. When the village had been discovered last year the remains were found perfectly preserved in the hot dry sands.

The exhibition was of the desiccated bodies laid out exactly as they were found, in a re-creation of the village. For the general public, it seemed, the bodies were modestly covered. The special exhibition tonight, at seven – which included only men – was for scientists, doctors and professors. The corpses were not covered. Al-Fulan had apparently managed to get Hydt a ticket.

Bond nearly laughed out loud, and relief flooded over him. Misunderstandings – and even outright errors – are not uncommon in the nuanced business of espionage, where operatives have to make plans and execute them with only fragments of information at their disposal. Often the results of such mistakes are disastrous; Bond couldn’t recall an instance in which the opposite was true, as here, when a looming tragedy turned into an evening’s innocuous cultural excursion. His first thought was that he’d enjoy telling Philly Maidenstone the story.

His amusement dimmed, however, as he reflected soberly: he’d almost destroyed the mission for the sake of ninety people who had been dead for nearly a millennium.

Then his mood grew more sombre yet as he looked into the large exhibition room and caught glimpses of the panorama of death: the bodies, some retaining much of the skin, like leather. Others were mostly skeletons. Hands reaching out, perhaps in a last plea for mercy. Emaciated forms of mothers cradling their children. Eye sockets empty, fingers mere twigs and more than a few mouths twisted into horrific smiles by the ravages of time and decay.

Bond looked at Hydt’s face as the Rag-and-bone Man stared down at the victims. He was enraptured; an almost sexual lust glowed in his eyes. Even al-Fulan seemed troubled at the pleasure his business associate was displaying.

I’ve never heard that kind of joy at the prospect of killing…

Hydt was taking picture after picture, the repeated flash from his mobile bathing the corpses in brilliant light and making them all the more supernatural and horrific.

What a bloody waste of time, Bond reflected. All he’d learnt from the trip was that Hydt had some fancy new machinery for his recycling operations and that he got a sick high from images of dead bodies. Was Incident Twenty, whatever it might be, a similar misreading of the intercept? He thought back to the phrasing of the original message and concluded that whatever was planned for Friday was a real threat.

… estimated initial casualties in the thousands, british interests adversely affected, funds transfers as discussed.

That clearly described an attack.

Hydt and al-Fulan were moving deeper into the exhibition hall and, without a special ticket, Bond couldn’t pursue them further. But Hydt was speaking again. Bond lifted the phone.

‘I do hope you understand about that girl of yours. What’s her name again?’

‘Stella,’ al-Fulan said. ‘No, we don’t have any choice. When she finds out I’m not leaving my wife she’ll be a risk. She knows too much. And, frankly,’ he added, ‘she’s been quite a nuisance lately.’

Hydt continued, ‘My associate’s handling everything. He’ll take her out to the desert, make her disappear. Whatever he does, though, will be efficient. He’s quite amazing at planning… well, everything.’

Thatwas why the Irishman had remained at the warehouse.

If he was going to kill Stella, there wassomething more to this trip than legitimate business. He’d have to assume it involved Incident Twenty. Bond hurried from the museum, calling Felix Leiter. They had to save the woman and learn what she knew.

Leiter’s mobile, however, rang four times, then stepped into voicemail. Bond tried again. Why the hell wasn’t the American picking up? Were he and Nasad trying to save Stella at this moment, perhaps fighting with the Irishman or the chauffeur? Or both of them?

Another call. Voicemail again. Bond broke into a run, weaving through the souks as haunting voices calling the faithful to prayer filled the sunset sky.

Sweating hard, gasping, he arrived at al-Fulan’s warehouse five minutes later. Hydt’s Town Car was gone. Bond slipped through the hole they’d cut earlier in the fence. The window Leiter had climbed through was now closed. Bond ran to the warehouse and used a lock pick to open a side door. He slipped inside, drawing the Walther.

The place seemed to be deserted, though he could hear the loud whining of machinery from somewhere nearby.

No sign of the girl.

And where were Leiter and Nasad?

Just a few seconds later Bond learnt the answer to that question, part of it, at least. In the room Leiter had entered, he found bloodstains on the floor, fresh. There were signs of a struggle, with several tools lying nearby… along with Leiter’s pistol and phone.

Bond summoned a scenario of what might have happened. Leiter and Nasad had separated, with the American hiding here. He must have been watching the Irishman and Stella when the Arab chauffeur had slipped up behind and hit him with a spanner or pipe. Had Leiter been dragged off, thrown into the boot of the Town Car and taken to the desert with the girl?

Gun in his hand, Bond headed for the doorway where he heard the sound of the machine.

He froze at what he saw ahead of him.

The man in the blue jacket – his tail from earlier – was rolling the barely conscious form of Felix Leiter into one of the massive rubbish-compacting machines. The CIA agent lay sprawled, feet first, on the conveyor-belt, which wasn’t moving, though the machine itself was running; in the centre two huge metal plates on either side of the belt pressed forward, nearly meeting, then withdrawing to accept a new batch of junk.

Leiter’s legs were a mere two yards from them.

The assailant glanced up and, scowling, stared at the intruder.

Bond steadied his weapon’s sights on the man and shouted, ‘Hands out to your sides!’

The man did so but suddenly lunged to his right and slapped a button on the machine, then sprinted away, vanishing from sight.

The conveyor-belt began rolling steadily forward, with Leiter easing towards the thick steel plates, which came within six inches of each other then shot back to allow more refuse into their path.

Bond sped to the unit and slapped the red OFF button, then started after the attacker. But the heavy-duty motor didn’t stop immediately; the belt continued to carry his friend towards the deadly plates, pulsing relentlessly back and forth.

Oh, God!… Bond holstered his Walther and turned back. He grabbed Leiter and struggled to pull him out of the machinery. But the conveyor-belt was dotted with pointed teeth, to improve its grip, and Leiter’s clothing was caught.

Head lolling, blood streaming into his eyes, he continued to be drawn towards the compactor mechanism.

Eighteen inches away, sixteen… twelve.

Bond leapt on to the belt and jammed a foot against the frame, then wound Leiter’s jacket around his hands and gripped furiously hard. The momentum slowed but the massive motor continued to drive the belt relentlessly under the faces of the plates shooting back and forth.

Leiter was eight inches, then six, from the plates that would turn his feet and ankles to pulp.

His arm and leg muscles in fiery agony, Bond tugged harder, groaning at the effort.

Three inches…

Finally the belt stopped and, with a hydraulic gasp, so did the plates.

Struggling for breath, Bond reached in and untangled the American’s trousers from the teeth on the belt and pulled him out, easing him to the floor. He ran to the loading bay, drawing his weapon, but there was no sign of the man in blue. Then, scanning for other threats, Bond returned to the CIA agent, who was coming round. He sat up slowly, Bond helping, and oriented himself.

‘Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I?’ Bond asked, masking the horror he’d felt at his friend’s near fate, as he examined the wound in the man’s head and mopped it with a rag he’d found nearby.

Leiter gazed at the machine. Shook his head. Then his familiar grin spread across his lean face. ‘You Brits’re always barging in at the wrong time. I had him just where I wanted him.’

‘Hospital?’ Bond asked. His heart pounded from the effort of the rescue and relief at the outcome.

‘Naw.’ The American examined the rag. It was bloody but Leiter seemed more angry than injured. ‘Hell, James, we’re past the deadline! The ninety people?’

Bond explained about the exhibition.

Leiter barked a harsh laugh. ‘What a screw-up! Brother, did we misread that one. So Hydt gets off on dead bodies. And he wanted picturesof them? Man’s got a whole new idea of porn.’

Bond collected Leiter’s phone and weapon and returned them to him. ‘What happened, Felix?’

Leiter’s eyes stilled. ‘The driver of the Town Car came into the warehouse right after you left. I could see him and that Irishman talking, looking at the girl. I knew something was going down, and that meant she’d know something. I was going to finesse it somehow and save her. Claim we were safety inspectors or something. Before I could move, they grabbed the girl and taped her up, dragged her toward the office. I sent Yusuf around to the other side and started toward them but that bastard nailed me before I got ten feet – the guy from the shopping centre, your tail.’

‘I know. I spotted him.’

‘Man, the SOB knows some martial-arts crap, I’ll tell you that. He clocked me good and I was down for the count.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Grunted a lot. When he hit me.’

‘Was he working with the Irishman or al-Fulan?’

‘Couldn’t tell. I didn’t see them together.’

‘And the girl? We’ve got to find her if we can.’

‘They’re probably on their way out to the desert. If we’re lucky, Yusuf’s following them. Probably tried to call when I was out.’ With Bond helping, the agent struggled to his feet. He took his phone and hit speed dial.

And from nearby came the chirp of a ringtone, a cheerful electronic tune. But muted.

Both men looked around.

Then Leiter turned to Bond. ‘Oh, no,’ the American whispered, closing his eyes briefly. They hurried to the back of the compactor. The sound was coming from inside a large, filled bin liner, which the machine had automatically sealed with wire and then disgorged on to the loading-bay platform to be carted off for disposal.

Bond, too, had realised what had happened. ‘I’ll look,’ he said.

‘No,’ Leiter said firmly. ‘It’s my job.’ He unwound the wire, took a deep breath and looked inside the bag. Bond joined him.

The dense jigsaw of sharp metal pieces, wires and nuts, bolts and screws were entwined with a mass of gore and bloody cloth, bits of human organs, bone.

The glazed eyes in Yusuf Nasad’s crushed, distorted face stared directly between the two men.

Without a word, they returned to the Alfa and checked the satellite tracking system, which reported that Hydt’s limo had returned to the Intercontinental. It had made two brief stops on the way – presumably to transfer the girl to another car, for her last trip out to the desert, and to collect Hydt from the museum.

Fifteen minutes later Bond piloted the Alfa past the hotel and into the car park.

‘Do you want to get a room?’ Bond asked. ‘Take care of that?’ He gestured at Leiter’s head.

‘Naw, I need a goddamn drink. I’ll just wash up. Meet you in the bar.’

They parked and Bond opened the boot. He collected his laptop bag, leaving the suitcase inside. Leiter pulled his own small bag over his shoulder and found a cap – branded, so to speak, with the logo of the University of Texas Longhorns gridiron team. He pulled it gingerly over his wound and stuffed his straw-coloured hair underneath. They took the side entrance into the hotel.

Inside, Leiter went to wash and Bond, making sure none of the Hydt entourage was in the lobby, passed through it and stepped outside. He assessed a group of limo drivers standing in a cluster and talking busily. Bond saw that none of them was Hydt’s driver. He gestured to the smallest of the lot and the man walked over eagerly.

‘You have a card?’ Bond asked.

‘Indeed, yes, I do, sir.’ And offered one. Bond glanced at and pocketed it. ‘What would like, sir? A dune bashing trip? No, I know, the gold souk! For your lady. You will bring her something from Dubai and be her hero.’

‘The man who hired that limo?’ Bond’s gaze swept quickly over Hydt’s Lincoln.

The driver’s eyes went still. Bond wasn’t worried; he knew when somebody was for sale. He tried once more. ‘You know him, don’t you?’

‘Not especially, sir.’

‘But you drivers always talk among yourselves. You know everything that goes on here. Especially regarding a curious fellow like Mr Hydt.’

He slipped the man five hundred dirhams.

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir. I may have heard something… Let me think. Yes, perhaps.’

‘And what might that have been?’

‘I believe he and his friends have gone to the restaurant. They will be there for two hours or so. It’s a very good restaurant. Meals are leisurely.’

‘Any idea where they’re going from here?’

A nod. But no accompanying words.

Another five hundred dirhams joined their friends.

The man laughed softly and cynically. ‘People are careless around us. We are simply people to shepherd folks around. We are camels. Beasts of burden. I’m referring to the fact that people think we don’t exist. Therefore whatever they say in front of us they believe we do not hear, however sensitive it might be. However valuable.’

Bond held up more cash, then returned it to his pocket.

The driver glanced about briefly then said, ‘He’s flying to Cape Town tonight. A private jet, leaving in about three hours. As I told you, the restaurant downstairs is known for its sumptuous and leisurely dining experience.’ A fake pout. ‘But your questions tell me you probably do not want me to have an associate book a table. I understand. Perhaps on your next trip to Dubai.’

Now Bond handed over the rest of the money. He then withdrew the man’s business card and, flicking it with his thumb, asked, ‘My associate? The man who came in with me? Did you see him?’

‘Tough one?’

‘Very tough. I will be leaving Dubai soon but he will be staying. He most sincerely hopes your information about Mr Hydt is accurate.’

The smile blew away like sand. ‘Yes, yes, sir, it is completely accurate, I swear to Allah. Praise be to Him.’

30

Bond went into the bar and took a table on the outdoor terrace overlooking Dubai Creek, a peaceful mirror dotted with swaying reflections of coloured light, which utterly belied the horror he had witnessed at al-Fulan’s works.

The waiter approached and asked what he would like. American bourbon was Bond’s favourite spirit, but he believed vodka was medicinal, if not curative, when served bitingly cold. He now ordered a double Stolichnaya martini, medium dry, and asked that it be shaken very well, which not only chilled the vodka better than stirring but bruised – aerated – it too, improving the flavour considerably.

‘Lemon peel only.’

When the drink arrived, suitably opaque – evidence of a proper shaking – he drank half immediately and felt the oxymoronic burning chill flow from throat to face. It helped dull the frustration that he hadn’t been able to save either the young woman or Yusuf Nasad.

It did nothing, however, to mitigate the memory of Hydt’s eerie expression as he gazed, lusting, at the petrified bodies.

He sipped again, staring absently at the television above the bar, on whose screen the beautiful Bahraini singer Ahlam was swirling through a video edited in the jerky style fashionable on Arab and Indian TV. Her infectious, trilling voice floated from the speakers.

He drained the glass, then called Bill Tanner. He explained about the false alarm at the history museum and the deaths and added that Hydt would head for Cape Town that night. Could T Branch arrange a ride for Bond? He could no longer hitchhike on his friend’s Grumman, which had gone back to London.

‘I’ll see what I can do, James. Probably have to be commercial. I don’t know if I can get you there ahead of Hydt, though.’

‘I just need a watcher to meet the flight and see where he goes. What’s the Six situation down there?’

‘Station Z’s got a covert operator on the Cape. Gregory Lamb. Let me check his status.’ Bond heard typing. ‘He’s up in Eritrea at the moment – that sabre-rattling on the Sudanese border’s got worse. But, James, we don’t want to get Lamb involved if we can avoid it. He doesn’t have an entirely irreproachable record. He went native, like some character out of a Graham Greene novel. I think Six have been meaning to hand him a redundancy package but haven’t got round to it. I’ll find somebody local for you. I’d recommend SAPS, the police service, rather than National Intelligence – NIA’s been in the news lately and not in a good way. I’ll make some calls and let you know.’

‘Thanks, Bill. Can you patch me to Q?’

‘Will do. Good luck.’

A thoughtful voice was soon on the line: ‘Q Branch. Hirani.’

‘It’s 007, Sanu. I’m in Dubai. I need something fast.’

After Bond had explained, Hirani seemed disappointed at the simplicity of the assignment. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Intercontinental, Festival City.’

Bond heard typing.

‘All right. Thirty minutes. Just remember: flowers.’

They rang off, as Leiter arrived, sat down and ordered a Jim Beam, neat. ‘That means no ice, no water, no fruit salad, no nothing. But it does mean a double. And I could live with a triple.’

Bond ordered another martini. When the waiter left he asked, ‘How’s the head?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Leiter murmured. He didn’t seem badly injured and Bond knew that his subdued mood was due to the loss of Nasad. ‘You find out anything about Hydt?’

‘They’re leaving tonight. A couple of hours. Going to Cape Town.’

‘What’s down there?’

‘No idea. That’s what I have to find out.’

And find out within three days, Bond reminded himself, if he wanted to save those thousands of people.

They fell silent as the waiter brought their drinks. Both agents scanned the large room as they sipped. There was no sign of the dark-haired man with the earring, or of watchers paying too much attention – or not enough – to the men in the corner.

Neither man raised a toast to the memory of the asset who’d just died. As tempted as you were, you never did that.

‘Nasad?’ Bond asked. ‘His body?’ The thought of an ally going to such an ignominious grave was hard.

Leiter’s lips tightened. ‘If Hydt and the Irishman were involved and I called in a team, they’d know we were on to them. I’m not risking our cover at this point. Yusuf knew what he was getting into.’

Bond nodded. It was the right way to handle it, though that didn’t make the decision any easier.

Leiter inhaled the fumes of his whiskey, then drank again. ‘You know, in this business, it’s choices like that that’re the hard ones – not pulling out your six-shooter and playing Butch Cassidy. That, you just do without thinking.’

Bond’s mobile buzzed. T Branch had booked him an overnight flight on Air Emirates to Cape Town. It left in three hours. Bond was pleased with the choice of carrier. The airline had studiously avoided becoming just another mass market operation and treated its passengers to what he guessed was the quality service that typified the golden age of air travel fifty or sixty years ago. He told Leiter of his departure arrangements. He added, ‘Let’s get some food.’

The American waved over a waiter and asked for a mezzeplatter. ‘And then bring us a grilled hammour. Bone it, if y’all’d be so kind.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Bond ordered a bottle of a good premier cruChablis, which arrived a moment later. They sipped from the chilled glasses silently until the first course arrived: kofta, olives, hummus, cheese, aubergine, nuts and the best flatbread Bond had ever had. Both men began to eat. After the waiter had cleared away the remnants, he brought the main course. The simple white fish lay steaming on a bed of green lentils. It was very good, delicate yet with a faint meatiness. Bond had eaten only a few mouthfuls when his phone hummed again. Caller ID showed only the code for a British government number. Thinking Philly might be ringing from a different office, Bond answered.

He immediately regretted doing so.

31

‘James! James! James! Guess who? Percy here. Long time no speak!’

Bond’s heart sank.

Leiter frowned at the glower on Bond’s face.

‘Percy… yes.’

Division Three’s Osborne-Smith enquired, ‘You well? No altercations requiring anything more than a plaster, I trust.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Delighted to hear it. Now, things are proceeding apace here. Your boss has briefed everyone about the Gehenna plan. You were perhaps too busy fleeing the jurisdiction to be in touch.’ He let that hang for a moment, then said, ‘Aha. Just winding you up, James. Fact is, I’m calling for several reasons and the first is to apologise.’

‘Really?’ Bond asked, suspicious.

The Division Three man’s voice grew serious. ‘In London this morning, I’ll admit I had a tac team ready to grab Hydt at the airport, bring him in for some tea and conversation. But it turns out you were right. The Watchers picked up a scrap and managed to decrypt it. Hold on – I quote from the record. Here we go: something garbled, then “Severan has three main partners… any one of them can push the button if he’s not available.” So you see, James, arresting him wouldhave been a disaster, just as you said. The others would have scurried down the rabbit hole and we’d’ve lost any chance to find out what Gehenna was about and stop it.’ He paused for breath. ‘I was a touch whingey when we met and I’m sorry about that too. I want to work with you on this, James. Apologies accepted? Bygones turned to bygones with a swipe of Hermione’s magic wand?’

In the intelligence world, Bond had learnt, your allies sought forgiveness for their transgressions against you about as often as your enemies did. He supposed that some of Osborne-Smith’s contrition was based on staying in the game for part of the glory, but that was all right with Bond. All he cared about was learning what the Gehenna plan was and preventing thousands of deaths.

‘I suppose.’

‘Good. Now, your boss sent us a signal about what you found up in March and I’m following it up. The “blast radius” is pretty obvious – an IED – so we’re tracking down any reports of stray explosives. And we know that one of the “terms” of the deal involves five million quid. I’ve called in some favours at the Bank of England to check SFT activity.’

Bond too had thought of calling the Bank with a request to flag suspect financial transactions. But nowadays five million pounds was such small change that he’d believed there would be far too many responses to plough through. Still, it couldn’t hurt for Osborne-Smith to go ahead.

The Division Three man added, ‘As for the reference to the “course” being confirmed, well, until we know more, there’re no aircraft or ships to monitor. But I’ve put the aviation and port chaps on alert to move fast if we need to.’

‘Good,’ Bond said, without adding that he’d asked Bill Tanner to do much the same. ‘I’ve just found out that Hydt, his lady friend and the Irishman are on their way to Cape Town.’

‘Cape Town? Now that’s worth chewing over. I’ve been peering into Hydt’s recesses, so to speak.’

This was, Bond supposed, what passed for a comradely joke with Percy Osborne-Smith.

‘South Africa is one of Green Way’s biggest operations. His home from home. I bet Gehenna must have some connection with it – Lord knows, there’re plenty of British interests there.’

Bond told him about al-Fulan and the girl’s death. ‘All we learnt specifically is that Hydt gets a kick out of pictures of dead bodies. And the Arab’s company probably has something to do with Gehenna. He’s supplied equipment to arms dealers and warlords in the past.’

‘Really? Interesting. Which reminds me. Take a look at the photo I’m uploading. You should have it now.’

Bond minimised the active-call screen on his mobile and opened a secure attachment. The picture was of the Irishman. ‘That’s him,’ he told Osborne-Smith.

‘Thought it might be. His name’s Niall Dunne.’ He spelt it out.

‘How did you find him?’

‘Footage from the CCTVs at Gatwick. He’s not in the databases but I had my indefatigable staff compare the pic with street cameras in London. There were some close hits of a man with that weird fringe inspecting tunnels that Green Way’s building near the Victoria Embankment. It’s the latest thing – underground rubbish transfer and collection. Keeps the roads clear and the tourists happy. A few of our boys pretended they were from Public Works, flashed his picture and got his real name. I’ve sent his file to Five, the Yard and your chief of staff.’

‘What’s Dunne’s story?’ Bond asked. In front of him the fish cooled but he’d lost interest in it.

‘It’s curious. He was born in Belfast, studied architecture and engineering, came top of his year. Then he became a sapper in the Army.’

Sappers were combat engineers, the soldiers who built bridges, airports and bomb shelters for the troops, as well as laid and cleared minefields. They were known for their improvisational skills, building defensive or offensive machinery and bulwarks with whatever supplies were available and under less-than-ideal conditions.

The ODG’s Lieutenant Colonel Bill Tanner had been a sapper and the soft-spoken, golf-loving chief of staff was one of the cleverest and most dangerous men Bond had ever met.

Osborne-Smith continued, ‘After he left the service he became a freelance engineering inspector. I didn’t know that any such line of work existed but it turns out that in constructing a building, ship or plane, the project has to be inspected at hundreds of stages. Dunne would look over the work and say yea or nay. He was apparently at the top of his game – he could find flaws that nobody else could. But suddenly he quit and became a consultant, according to Inland Revenue records. He’s a damn good one, too – he makes about two hundred grand a year… and doesn’t have a company logo or cute mascots like Wenlock and Mandeville.’

Bond found that, since the apology, he felt less impatient with Osborne-Smith’s wit, such as it was. ‘That’s probably how they met. Dunne inspected something for Green Way and Hydt hired him.’

Osborne-Smith continued, ‘Data mining’s placed Dunne going to and from Cape Town over the past four years. He’s got a flat there and one in London, which we’ve been through, by the way, and found nothing of interest. The travel records also show he’s been in India, Indonesia, the Caribbean and a few other places where trouble’s brewing. Working on new outposts for his boss, I’d guess.’ He added, ‘Whitehall’s still looking at Afghanistan, but I don’t give a toss about their theories. I’m sure you’re on the money, James.’

‘Thanks, Percy. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘Delighted to be of service.’ The words that Bond would have found condescending yesterday now sounded sincere.

They rang off and Bond told Felix Leiter what Osborne-Smith had turned up.

‘So that scarecrow Dunne’s an engineer? We call ’em geeks in the states.’

A hawker had entered the restaurant and was moving from table to table selling roses.

Leiter saw the direction of Bond’s gaze. ‘Listen up, James, I’ve had a wonderful dinner but if you’re thinking of sealing the deal with a bouquet, it ain’t gonna happen.’

Bond smiled.

The hawker stepped up to the table next to Bond’s and extended a flower to a young couple seated there. ‘Please,’ he said to the wife, ‘the lovely lady will have this for free, with my compliments.’ He moved on.

After a moment Bond lifted his napkin and opened the envelope he’d casually removed from the man’s pocket in a perfect brush pass.

Remember: flowers…

Discreetly he examined the forgery of a South African firearms permit, suitably franked and signed. ‘We should go,’ he said, noting the time. He didn’t want to run into Hydt, Dunne and the woman on the way out of the hotel.

‘We’ll put this on Uncle Sam,’ Leiter said and settled the bill. They left the bar and slipped out by a side door, heading for the car park.

Within half an hour they were at the airport.

The men gripped hands and Leiter offered in a low voice, ‘Yusuf was a great asset, sure. But more than that, he was a friend. You run across that son-of-a-bitch in the blue jacket again and you have a shot, James, take it.’