Carte Blanche Part 28

'I will see you tomorrow?' he asked. 'At the plant?'

A faint smile. 'Yes, I'll be there. My leash is pretty short.' She turned and walked quickly through the opening gate.

Then Bond shoved the car into first and skidded away, Jessica Barnes vanishing instantly from his thoughts. His attention was on his next destination and what would greet him there.

Friend or foe?

In his chosen profession, though, James Bond had learnt that those two categories were not mutually exclusive.

49.

All Thursday morning, all afternoon there had been talk of threats.

Threats from the North Koreans, threats from the Taliban, threats from al-Qaeda, the Chechnyans, the Islamic Jihad Brotherhood, eastern Malaysia, Sudan, Indonesia. There'd been a brief discussion about the Iranians; despite the surreal rhetoric issuing from their presidential palace, n.o.body took them too seriously. M almost felt sorry for the poor regime in Tehran. Persia had once been such a great empire.

Threats . . .

But the actual a.s.sault, he thought wryly, was occurring only now, during a tea break at the security conference. M disconnected from Moneypenny and sat back stiffly in the well-worn, gilt drawing room of a building in Richmond Terrace, between Whitehall and the Victoria Embankment. It was one of those utterly unremarkable fading structures of indeterminate age in which the sweat work of governing the country was done.

The impending a.s.sault involved two ministers who sat on the Joint Intelligence Committee. Their heads were now poking through the door, side by side, bespectacled faces scanning the room until they spotted their target. Once an image of television's Two Ronnies had sidled into his head, M could not dislodge it. As they strode forward, however, there was nothing comedic about their expressions.

'Miles,' the older one greeted him. 'Sir Andrew' prefaced the man's surname and those two words were in perfect harmony with his distinguished face and silver mane.

The other, Bixton, tipped his head, whose fleshy dome reflected light from the dusty chandelier. He was breathing hard. In fact, they both were.

M didn't invite them to do so but they sat anyway, upon the Edwardian sofa across from the tea tray. He longed to remove a cheroot from his attache case and chew on it but decided against the prop.

'We'll come straight to the point,' Sir Andrew said.

'We know you have to get back to the security conference,' Bixton interjected.

'We've just been with the foreign secretary. He's in the Chamber at the moment.'

That explained their heaving chests. They couldn't have driven up from the House of Commons, since Whitehall, from Horse Guards Avenue to just past King Charles Street, had been sealed, like a submarine about to dive, so that the security conference might meet, well, securely.

'Incident Twenty?' M asked.

'Just so,' Bixton said. 'We're trying to track down the DG of Six, as well, but this b.l.o.o.d.y conference . . .' He was new to Joint Intelligence and appeared suddenly to realise perhaps he shouldn't be quite so bluntly birching the rears of those who paid him.

'. . . is b.l.o.o.d.y disruptive,' M grumbled, filling in. He had no problem whipping anyone or anything when it was deserved.

Sir Andrew took over. He said, 'Defence Intelligence and GCHQ are reporting a swell of SIGINT in Afghanistan over the past six hours.'

'General consensus is that it's to do with Incident Twenty.'

M asked, 'Anything specific to Hydt Noah or thousands of deaths? Niall Dunne? Army bases in March? Improvised explosive devices? Engineers in Dubai? Rubbish and recycling facilities in Cape Town?' M read every signal that crossed his desk or arrived in his mobile phone.

'We can't tell, can we?' Bixton answered. 'The Doughnut hasn't broken the codes yet.' GCHQ's headquarters in Cheltenham was built in the shape of a fat ring. 'The encryption packages are brand spanking new. Which has stymied everyone.'

'SIGINT is cyclical over there,' M muttered dismissively. He had been very, very senior at MI6 and had earned a reputation for unparalleled skill at mining intelligence and, more important, refining it into something useful.

'True,' Sir Andrew agreed. 'Rather too coincidental, though, that all these calls and emails have popped up just now, the day before Incident Twenty, wouldn't you think?'

Not necessarily.

He continued, 'And n.o.body's turned up anything that specifically links Hydt to the threat.'

'n.o.body' translated to '007'.

M looked at his wrist.w.a.tch, which had been his son's, a soldier with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The security meeting was set to resume in a half hour. He was exhausted and Friday, tomorrow, would be an even longer session, culminating in a tiresome dinner followed by a speech by the home secretary.

Sir Andrew noted the less-than-subtle glance at the battered timepiece: 'Long story short, Miles, the JIC is of the opinion that this Severan Hydt fellow in South Africa's a diversion. Maybe he's involved but he's not a key player in Incident Twenty. Five and Six's people think the real actors are in Afghanistan and that's where the attack will happen: military or aid workers, contractors.'

Of course, that was what they would say whatever they actually thought. The adventure in Kabul had cost billions of pounds and far too many lives; the more evil that could be found there to justify the incursion, the better. M had been aware of this from the beginning of the Incident Twenty operation.

'Now, Bond-'

'He's good, we know that,' Bixton interrupted, eyeing the chocolate biscuits M had asked not to be brought with the tea but had arrived anyway.

Sir Andrew frowned.

'It's just that he hasn't actually found much,' Bixton went on. 'Unless there've been details that haven't yet circulated.'

M said nothing, merely regarding both men with equal frost.

Sir Andrew said, 'Bond is a star, of course. So the thinking is that it would be good for everybody if he deployed to Kabul post haste. Tonight, if you could make that work. Put him in a hot zone along with a couple of dozen of Six's premier-league lads. We'll tap the CIA too. We don't mind spreading the glory.'

And the blame, thought M, if they get it wrong.

Bixton said, 'Makes sense. Bond was stationed in Afghanistan.'

M said, 'Incident Twenty's supposed to happen tomorrow. It'll take him all night to get to Kabul. How can he stop anything happening?'

'The thinking is . . .' Sir Andrew fell silent, realising, M supposed, that he'd repeated his own irritating verbal filler. 'We aren't sure it can be stopped.'

Silence washed in unpleasantly, like a tide polluted with hospital waste.

'Our approach would be for your man and the others to head up a post-mortem a.n.a.lysis team. Try to find out for certain who was behind it. Put together a response proposal. Bond could even head it up.'

M knew, of course, what was happening here: the Two Ronnies were offering the ODG a face-saving measure. Your organisation could be a star ninety-five per cent of the time, but if you erred even once, with a big loss, you might appear at the office on Monday morning and find your whole outfit disbanded or, worse, turned into a vetting agency.

And the Overseas Development Group was on thin ice to start with, hosting as it did the 00 Section, to which many people objected. To stumble on Incident Twenty would be a big stumble indeed. By getting Bond to Afghanistan forthwith, at least the ODG would have a player in the game, even if he arrived on the pitch a bit late.

M said evenly, 'Your point is noted, gentlemen. Let me make some phone calls.'

Bixton beamed. But Sir Andrew hadn't quite finished. His persistence, infused with shrewdness, was one of the reasons M believed that future audiences with him might take place at 10 Downing Street. 'Bond will be all-hands-on-deck?'

The threat implicit in the question was that if 007 remained in South Africa in defiance of M's orders, Sir Andrew's protection of Bond, M and the ODG would cease.

The irony in giving an agent like 007 carte blanche was that he was supposed to exercise it and act as he saw fit which sometimes meant he would not be on deck with all of the other hands. You can't have it both ways, M reflected. 'As I said, I'll make some calls.'

'Good. We'd better be off.'

As they departed, M stood up and went through the french doors on to the balcony, where he noted a Metropolitan Police Specialist Protection officer, armed with a machine gun. After an examination of and a nod to the new arrival on his turf, the man returned to looking down over the street, thirty feet below. 'All quiet?' M asked.

'Yes, sir.'

M walked to the far end of the balcony and lit a cheroot, sucking the smoke in deep. The streets were eerily quiet. The barricades were not just the tubular metal fences you saw outside Parliament; they were cement blocks, four feet high, solid enough to stop a speeding car. The pavements were patrolled by armed guards and M noted several snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings. He gazed absently down Richmond Terrace towards Victoria Embankment.

He took out his mobile and called Moneypenny.

Only a single ring before she answered. 'Yes, sir?'

'I need to talk to the chief of staff.'

'He's popped down to the canteen. I'll connect you.'

As he waited, M squinted and gave a gruff laugh. At the intersection, near the barricade, there was a large lorry and a few men were dragging bins to and from it. They were employees of Severan Hydt's company, Green Way International. He realised he'd been watching them for the past few minutes yet not actually noticing them. They'd been invisible.

'Tanner here, sir.'

The dustmen vanished from M's thoughts. He plucked the cheroot from between his teeth and said evenly, 'Bill, I need to talk to you about 007.'

50.

Guided by sat-nav, Bond made his way through central Cape Town, past businesses and residences. He found himself in an area of small, brightly coloured houses, blue, pink, red and yellow, tucked under Signal Hill. The narrow streets were largely cobbled. It reminded him of villages in the Caribbean, with the difference that here careful Arabic designs patterned many homes. He pa.s.sed a quiet mosque.

It was six thirty on this cool Thursday evening and he was en route to Bheka Jordaan's house.

Friend or foe . . .

He wound the car through the uneven streets and parked nearby. She met him at the door and greeted him with an unsmiling nod. She had shed her work clothing and wore blue jeans and a close-fitting dark red cardigan. Her shiny black hair hung loose and he was taken by the rich aura of lilac scent from a recent shampooing. 'This is an interesting area,' he said. 'Nice.'

'It's called Bo-Kaap. It used to be very poor, mostly Muslim, immigrants from Malaysia. I moved here with . . . well, with someone years ago. It was poorer then. Now the place is becoming very chic. There used to be only bicycles parked outside. Now it's Toyotas but soon it'll be Mercedes. I don't like that. I'd rather it was as it used to be. But it's my home. Besides, my sisters and I take turns to have Ugogo living with us, and they're close so it's convenient.'

'Ugogo?' Bond asked.

'It means "grandmother". Our mother's mother. My parents live in Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, some way east of here.'

Bond recalled the antique map in her office.

'So we look after Ugogo. That's the Zulu way.'

She didn't invite him in, so, on the porch, Bond gave her an account of his trip to Green Way. 'I need the film in this developed.' He handed her the inhaler. 'It's eight-millimetre, ISO is twelve hundred. Can you sort it?'

'Me? Not your MI6 a.s.sociate?' she asked acerbically.

Bond felt no need to defend Gregory Lamb. 'I trust him but he raided my minibar of two hundred rands' worth of drink. I'd like somebody with a clear head to handle it. Developing film can be tricky.'

'I'll take care of it.'

'Now, Hydt has some a.s.sociates coming into town tonight. There's a meeting at the Green Way plant tomorrow morning.' He thought back to what Dunne had said. 'They're arriving at about seven. Can you find out their names?'

'Do you know the airlines?'

'No, but Dunne's meeting them.'

'We'll put a stake-out in place. Kwalene is good at that. He jokes, but he's very good.'

He certainly is. Discreet, too, Bond reflected.

A woman's voice called from inside.

Jordaan turned her head. 'Ize balulekile.'

Some more Zulu words were exchanged.

Jordaan's face was still. 'Will you come in? So Ugogo can see you're not someone in a gang. I've told her it's no one. But she worries.'

No one?

Bond followed her into the small flat, which was tidy and nicely furnished. Prints, hangings and photos decorated the walls.

The elderly woman who'd spoken to Jordaan was sitting at a large dining table set with two places. The meal had largely concluded. She was very frail. Bond recognised her as the woman in many of the pictures in Jordaan's office. She wore a loose orange and brown frock and slippers. Her grey hair was short. She started to rise.

'No, please,' Bond said.

She stood anyway and, hunched, shuffled forward to shake his hand with a firm, dry grip.

'You are the Englishman Bheka spoke of. You don't look so bad to me.'

Jordaan glared at her.

The older woman introduced herself: 'I'm Mbali.'

'James.'