Carte Blanche

by Jeffery Deaver

  Gevaar!!!

  Danger!!!

  Privaat Eiendom

  Private Property

  He’d been off the N7 for several miles when the road divided, with the lorries going to the right. Bond steered down the left fork, with an arrowed sign:

  Hoofkantoor

  Main Office

  Motoring fast through a dense grove of trees – they were tall but looked recently planted – he came to a rise and shot over it, ignoring the posted limit of forty k.p.h., and braked hard as Green Way International loomed. The rapid stop wasn’t because of obstruction or a sharp curve but the unnerving sight that greeted him.

  An endless expanse of the waste facility filled his view and disappeared into a smoky, dusty haze in the distance. The orange fires of some burn-off operation could been seen from at least a mile away.

  Hell indeed.

  In front of him, beyond a crowded car park, was the headquarters building. It was eerie, too, in its own way. Though not large, the structure was stark and bleakly imposing. The unpainted concrete bunker, one storey high, had only a few windows, small ones – sealed, it seemed. The entire grounds were enclosed by two ten-foot metal fences, both topped with wicked razor wire, which glinted even in the muted light. The barriers were thirty feet apart, reminding Bond of a similar perimeter: the shoot-to-kill zone surrounding the North Korean prison from which he’d successfully rescued a local MI6 asset last year.

  Bond scowled at the fences. One of his plans was ruined. He knew from what Felicity had told him that there’d be metal detectors and scanners and, most likely, an imposing security fence. But he’d assumed a single barrier. He’d planned to slip some of the equipment Hirani had provided – a weatherproof miniature communications device and weapon – through the fence into grass or bushes on the other side for him to retrieve once he had entered. That wasn’t going to work with two fences and a great distance between them.

  As he drove forward again, he saw that the entrance was barred by a thick steel gate, on top of which was a sign.

  R EDUCE, R EUSE, R ECYCLE

  The Green Way anthem chilled Bond. Not the words themselves but the configuration: a crescent of stark black metal letters. It reminded him of the sign over the entrance to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, the horrifically ironic assurance that work would set the prisoners free: Arbeit Macht Frei.

  Bond parked. He climbed out, keeping his Walther and mobile with him so that he could find out how effective the security really was. He also had in his pocket the asthma inhaler Hirani had provided; he had hidden under the front seat the other items Lamb had delivered that morning: the weapon and com device.

  He approached the first guardhouse at the outer fence. A large man in uniform greeted him with a reserved nod. Bond gave his cover name. The man made a call and a moment later an equally large, equally stern fellow in a dark business suit came up and said, ‘Mr Theron, this way, please.’

  Bond followed him through the no man’s land between the two fences. They entered a room where three armed guards sat about, watching a football match. They stood up immediately.

  The security man turned to Bond. ‘Now, Mr Theron, we have very strict rules here. Mr Hydt and his associates do most of the research and development work for his companies on these premises. We must guard our trade secrets carefully. We don’t allow any mobiles or radios of any kind in with you. No cameras or pagers either. You’ll have to hand them in.’

  Bond was looking at a large rack, like the cubbyholes for keys behind the front desk in old-fashioned hotels. There were hundreds and most of them had phones in them. The guard noticed. ‘The rule applies to all our employees too.’

  Bond recalled that René Mathis had told him the same thing about Hydt’s London operation – that there was virtually no SIGINT going into or coming out of the company. ‘Well, you have landlines I can use, I assume. I’ll have to check my messages.’

  ‘There are some, but all the lines go through a central switchboard in the security department. A guard could make the call for you but you wouldn’t have any privacy. Most visitors wait until after they leave. The same is true for email and Internet access. If you wish to keep anything metal on you, we’ll have to X-ray it.’

  ‘I should tell you I’m armed.’

  ‘Yes.’ As if many people coming to visit Green Way were. ‘Of course-’

  ‘I’ll have to hand in my weapon too?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Bond silently thanked Felicity Willing for filling him in on Hydt’s security. Otherwise he would have been caught with one of Q Branch’s standard-issue video or still surveillance cameras in a pen or jacket button, which would have shattered his credibility… and probably led to a full-on fight.

  Playing the tough mercenary, he scoffed at the inconvenience, but handed over his gun and phone, programmed to reveal only information about his Gene Theron cover identity, should anyone try to crack it. Then he stripped off his belt and watch, placed them and his keys in a tray for the X-ray.

  He strode through quickly and was reunited with his possessions – after the guard had checked that the watch, keys and belt held no cameras, weapons or recording devices.

  ‘Wait here, please, sir,’ the security man said. Bond sat where indicated.

  The inhaler was still in his pocket. If they had frisked him, found and dismantled the device, they would have discovered it was in fact a sensitive camera, constructed without a single metal part. One of Sanu Hirani’s contacts in Cape Town had managed to find or assemble the device that morning. The shutter was carbon fibre, as were the springs operating it.

  The image-storage medium was quite interesting – unique nowadays: old-fashioned microfilm, the sort spies had used during the Cold War. The camera had a fixed-focus lens and Bond could snap a picture by pressing the base, then twisting it to advance the film. It could take thirty pictures. In this digital age, the cobwebbed past occasionally offered an advantage.

  Bond looked for a sign to Research and Development, which he knew from Stephan Dlamini contained at least some information about Gehenna, but there was none. He sat for five minutes before Severan Hydt appeared, in silhouette but unmistakable: the tall stature, the massive head framed with curly hair and beard, the well-tailored suit. He paused, looming, in the doorway. ‘Theron.’ His black eyes bored into Bond’s.

  They shook hands and Bond tried to ignore the grotesque sensation he experienced as Hydt’s long nails slid across his palm and wrist.

  ‘Come with me,’ Hydt said and led him into the main office building, which was much less austere than the outside suggested. Indeed, the place was rather nicely appointed, with expensive furniture, art, antiques, and comfortable work spaces for the staff. It seemed like a typical medium-sized company. The front lobby was furnished with the obligatory sofa and chairs, a table with trade magazines and a Cape Town newspaper. On the walls there were pictures of forests, rolling fields of grain and flowers, streams and oceans.

  And everywhere, that eerie logo – the leaf that looked like a knife.

  As they walked along the corridors, Bond kept an eye open for the Research and Development department. Finally, towards the rear of the building, he saw a sign pointing to it and he memorised the location.

  But Hydt turned the other way. ‘Come along. We’re going for the fifty-rand tour.’

  At the back of the building Bond was handed a dark-green hard hat. Hydt donned one too. They walked to a rear door, where Bond was surprised to see a second security post. Curiously, workers coming intothe building from the rubbish yard were checked. Hydt and he stepped outside on to a patio overlooking scores of low buildings. Lorries and forklift trucks moved in and out of each one like bees at a hive. Workers in hard hats and uniforms were everywhere.

  The sheds, in neat rows like barracks, reminded Bond again of a prison or concentration camp.

  ARBEIT MACHT FREI…

  ‘This way,’ Hydt called loudly, striding through a landscap
e cluttered with earth-moving equipment, skips, oil drums, pallets holding bales of paper and cardboard. Low rumblings filled the air, and the ground seemed to quiver, as if huge underground furnaces or machines were at work, a counterpoint to the high-pitched shrieks of the seagulls that swooped in to pick up scraps in the wake of the lorries entering through a gate a quarter-mile to the east. ‘I’ll give you a brief lesson in the business,’ he offered.

  Bond nodded. ‘Please.’

  ‘There are four ways to rid ourselves of discard. Dump it somewhere out of the way – in tips or landfill now mostly, but the ocean’s still popular. Did you know that the Pacific has four times as much plastic in it as zooplankton? The biggest rubbish tip in the world is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, circulating between Japan and North America. It’s at least twice the size of Texas and could be as big as the entire United States. Nobody actually knows. But one thing iscertain: it’s getting bigger.

  ‘The second way is to burn discard, which is very expensive and can produce dangerous ash. Third, you can recycle it – that’s Green Way’s area of expertise. Finally, there’s minimising, which means making sure that fewer disposable materials are created and sold. You’re familiar with plastic water bottles?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They’re a lot thinner now than they used to be.’

  Bond took his word for it.

  ‘It’s called “lightweighting”. Much easier to compact. You see, generally the products themselves aren’t the problem when it comes to discard. It’s packagingthat causes most of the volume. Discard was easily handled until we shifted to a consumer manufacturing society and started to mass-produce goods. How to get the products into the hands of the people? Encase it in polystyrene foam, put that in a cardboard box and then, for God’s sake, put thatin a plastic carrier bag to take home with you. Ah, and if it’s a present, let’s wrap it up in coloured paper and ribbon! Christmas is an absolute hurricane of discard.’

  Standing tall, looking over his empire, Hydt continued, ‘Most waste plants extend over fifty to seventy-five acres. Ours here is a hundred. I have three others in South Africa and dozens of transfer stations, where the carters – the lorries you see on the streets – take all the discard for compacting and shipment to treatment depots. I was the first to set up transfer stations in the South African squatters’ camps. In six months the countryside was sixty to seventy per cent cleaner. Plastic carrier bags used to be called “South Africa’s national flower”. Not any more. I’ve dealt with that.’

  ‘I saw the lorries bringing rubbish from Pretoria and Port Elizabeth to the yard here. Why from so far away?’

  ‘Specialised material,’ Hydt said dismissively.

  Were those substances particularly dangerous? Bond wondered.

  His host continued, ‘But you must get your vocabulary right, Theron. We call wet discard “garbage” – left-over food, for instance. “Trash” means dry materials, like cardboard and dust and tins. What the bin collectors pick up from in front of homes and offices is “municipal solid waste”, or “MSW”. That’s also called “refuse” or “rubbish”. “C and D” is construction and demolition debris. Institutional, commercial and industrial waste is “ICI”. The most inclusive term is “waste” but I prefer “discard”.’

  He pointed east to the rear of the plant. ‘Everything that’s not recyclable goes there, to the working face of the landfill, where it’s buried in layers of plastic lining to keep bacteria and pollution from leaching into the ground. You can spot it by looking for the birds.’

  Bond followed his gaze towards the swooping gulls.

  ‘We call the landfill “Disappearance Row”.’

  Hydt led Bond to the doorway of a long building. Unlike the other work sheds here, this one had imposing doors, which were sealed. Bond peered through the windows. Workers were disassembling computers, hard drives, TVs, radios, pagers, mobile phones and printers. There were bins overflowing with batteries, light bulbs, computer hard drives, printed circuit boards, wires and chips. The staff were wearing more protective clothing than any other employees – respirators, heavy gloves and goggles or full face masks.

  ‘Our e-waste department. We call this area “Silicon Row”. E-waste accounts for more than ten per cent of the deadly substances on earth. Heavy metals, lithium from batteries. Take computers and mobiles. They have a life expectancy of two or three years at most, so people just throw them out. Have you ever read the warning booklet that comes with your laptop or phone, “Dispose of properly”?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Of course not. No one does. But pound for pound computers and phones are the most deadly waste on earth. In China, they just bury or burn them. They’re killing their population by doing that. I’m starting a new operation to address this situation – separating the components of computers at my clients’ companies and then disposing of them properly.’ He smiled. ‘In a few years that will be my most lucrative operation.’

  Bond recalled the device he’d seen demonstrated at al-Fulan’s, the one near to the compactor that had taken Yusuf Nasad’s life.

  Hydt pointed, with a long, yellow fingernail. ‘And at the back of this building there is the Dangerous-materials Recovery department. One of our biggest money-making services. We handle everything from paint to motor oil to arsenic to polonium.’

  ‘Polonium?’ Bond gave a cool laugh. This was the radioactive material that had been used to kill the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, an expatriate in London, a few years ago. It was one of the most toxic substances on earth. ‘It’s just thrown out? That has to be illegal.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s the thing about discard, Theron. People throw away an innocent-looking anti-static machine… that just happens to contain polonium. But nobody knows that.’

  He led Bond past a car park where several lorries stood, each about twenty feet long. On the side was the company name and logo, along with the words Secure Document Destruction Services.

  Hydt followed Bond’s gaze and said, ‘Another of our specialities. We lease shredders to companies and government offices, but smaller outfits would rather hire us to do it for them. Did you know that when the Iranian students took over the American embassy in the 1970s, they were able to reassemble classified CIA documents that had been shredded? They learnt the identities of most of the covert agents there. Local weavers did the work.’

  Everyone in the intelligence community knew this but Bond feigned surprise.

  ‘At Green Way we perform DIN industrial-standard level-six shredding. Basically our machines turn the documents to dust. Even the most secret government installations hire us.’

  He then led Bond to the largest building on the plant, three storeys high and two hundred yards long. A continuous string of lorries rolled in through one door and came out through another. ‘The main recycling facility. We call thisarea “Resurrection Row”.’

  They stepped inside. Three huge devices were being fed an endless stream of paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, polystyrene, scrap metal, wood and hundreds of other items. ‘The sorters,’ Hydt shouted. The noise was deafening. At the far end the separated materials were being packed into lorries for onward shipment – tins, glass, plastic, paper and other materials.

  ‘Recycling’s a curious business,’ Hydt yelled. ‘Only a few products – metals and glass mostly – can be recycled indefinitely. Everything else breaks down after a while and has to be burnt or go to landfill. Aluminium’s the only consistently profitable recyclable. Most products are far cheaper, cleaner and easier to make from raw materials than recycled ones. The extra lorries for transporting recycling materials and the recycling process itself add to fossil fuel pollution. And remanufacturing uses morepower than the initial production, which is a drain on resources.’

  He laughed. ‘But it’s politically correct to recycle… so people come to me.’

  Bond followed his tour guide outside and noticed Niall Dunne approaching on his long legs, his gait cl
umsy and feet turned outward. The fringe of blond hair hung down above his blue eyes, which were as still as pebbles. Putting aside the memory of Dunne’s cruel treatment of the men in Serbia and his murder of al-Fulan’s assistant in Dubai, Bond smiled amiably and shook his wide hand.

  ‘Theron.’ Dunne nodded, his own visage not particularly welcoming. He looked at Hydt. ‘We should go.’ He seemed impatient.

  Hydt motioned for Bond to get into a nearby Range Rover. He did so, sitting in the front passenger seat. He was aware of a sense of anticipation in the two men, as if some plan had been made and was now about to unfurl. His sixth sense told him something had perhaps gone awry. Had they discovered his identity? Had he given something away?

  As the other men climbed in, with the unsmiling Dunne taking the driver’s seat, Bond reflected that if ever there was a place to dispose of a body clandestinely, this was it.

  Disappearance Row…

  46

  The Range Rover bounded east along a wide dirt road, passing squat lorries with massive ribbed wheels, carrying bales or containers of refuse. It passed a wide chasm, at least eighty feet deep.

  Bond looked down. The lorries were dropping their loads, and bulldozers were compacting them against the face of the landfill site. The bottom of the pit was lined with thick dark sheets. Hydt had been right about the seagulls. They were everywhere, thousands of them. The sheer number, the screams, the frenzy were unsettling and Bond felt a shiver trickle up his spine.

  As they drove on, Hydt pointed to the flames Bond had seen earlier. Here, much closer, they were giant spheres of fire – he could feel their heat. ‘The landfill produces methane,’ he said. ‘We drill down and extract it to power the generators, though there’s usually too much gas and we have to burn some off. If we didn’t, the entire landfill site could blow up. That happened in America not too long ago. Hundreds of people were injured.’