Carte Blanche

by Jeffery Deaver

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

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

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

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

  Not a great place to be buried alive…

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A moment later his knees were held fast.

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

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

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

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

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

  Trapped…

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

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

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

  ‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči!’

  Swinging around, Bond looked for a target.

  But the voice came from a loudspeaker on the wall.

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

  Warning?

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

  Bond shone the torch around the room.

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

  Three minutes…

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

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

  Get on with it!

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

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

  The two-minute warning resounded through the room.

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

  Electricity…

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči!’

  14

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

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

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

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

  ‘Fifteen seconds,’ Dunne said.

  Silence as Hydt mouthed the countdown.

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

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

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

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

  ‘Severan,’ Dunne persisted.

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

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

  A hundred deaths…

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

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

  15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’ll get on to it.’

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

  Bond stabbed the button. ‘Percy.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘And the pub?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Keep him busy…

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

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

  ‘What are you talking about?’

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

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

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

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

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What’s on the other piece of ash?’

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