Carte Blanche

by Jeffery Deaver

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

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

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

  Which he believed he had deciphered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Which meant, of course, driving fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Fit your response to your enemy’s purpose.

  But what was Noah’s purpose?

  Indeed, who the hell was he?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Brilliant job,’ Severan Hydt told Niall Dunne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘He went in through the tunnel.’

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

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

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

  ‘No, sir.’

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

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

  13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Careful, he told himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Get down now!’

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

  The phone stopped ringing.

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

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

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