Carte Blanche Part 4

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

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

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

They'll keep quiet.

'Yes, sir.'

'Of course, sir.'

'Wait over there.'

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

Alone now, Hydt crouched beside the body.

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

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

Besides, why should he give up such a treasure?

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes, sir,' Dennison replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I'm sure they're fine,' he said.

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

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

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

The number of dead . . . close to 100.

His gut twisted pleasantly.

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

'Ah, good.'

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

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

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

Hydt frowned. 'It's-'

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

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

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

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

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

'No. There was a lot of smoke.'

'And Karic?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He meant politics, of course.

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

'Not much room for interpretation,' Bond said.

Tanner chuckled.

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

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

O Branch took up nearly the entire fourth floor.

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

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

'Good morning, Goodnight.'

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

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

'Shall I hold the signals too?' she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there was nothing specific on operational details.

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

'What've you found, Philly?'

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

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

'But the prints on the gla.s.ses were good. The local was Aldo Karic, Serbian. He lived in Belgrade and worked for the national railway.' She pursed her lips in frustration, which emphasised the charming dimple. 'But it's going to take a little longer than I'd hoped to get more details. The same with the haz-mat on the train. n.o.body's saying anything. You were right Belgrade's not in the mood to co-operate.

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

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

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

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

'And the other piece of paper? With the writing on it?'

Boots March. 17. No later than that.

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