Carte Blanche

by Jeffery Deaver

  As they walked through the Green Way building, Bond asked where he could work, hoping that Hydt might take him to Research and Development, now that he was a trusted partner.

  ‘We have an office for you.’ But the man led him past the R &D department to a large, windowless room. Inside were a few chairs, a work table and a desk. He’d been provided with office supplies like yellow pads and pens, dozens of detailed maps of Africa and an intercom but no phone. Corkboards on the walls displayed copies of the pictures that Bond had delivered of the decaying bodies. He wondered where the originals were.

  In Hydt’s bedroom?

  The Rag-and-bone Man asked pleasantly, ‘Will this do?’

  ‘Fine. A computer would be helpful.’

  ‘I could arrange that – for word processing and printing. No Internet access, of course.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘We’re concerned about hacking and security. But for now, don’t worry about writing anything up formally. Handwritten notes are enough.’

  Bond maintained a calm façade as he noted the clock. It was now eight twenty in York. Just over two hours to go. ‘Well, I’d better get down to it.’

  ‘We’ll be up the hall in the main conference room. Go to the end and turn left. Number nine hundred. Join us whenever you like, but make sure you’re there before half twelve. We’ll have something on television I think you’ll find interesting.’

  Ten thirty York time.

  After Hydt had gone, Bond bent over the map and drew circles around some of the areas he’d arbitrarily picked as battle zones when he and Hydt had met at the Lodge Club. He jotted a few numbers – signifying the body counts – then bundled up the maps, a yellow pad and some pens. He stepped into the corridor, which was empty. Orienting himself, Bond went back to Research and Development.

  Tradecraft dictates that simpler is usually the best approach, even in a black bag operation like this.

  Accordingly Bond knocked on the door.

  Mr Hydt asked me to find some papers for him… Sorry to bother you, I’ll just be a moment…

  He was prepared to rush the person who opened the door and use a take-down hold on wrist or arm to overpower them. Prepared for an armed guard too – indeed, hoping for one, so he could relieve the man of his weapon.

  But there was no answer. These staff had apparently been given the day off, too.

  Bond fell back on plan two, which was somewhat less simple. Last night he had uploaded to Sanu Hirani the digital pictures he’d taken of the security door to Research and Development. The head of Q Branch had reported that the lock was virtually impregnable. It would take hours to hack. He and his team would try to think up another solution.

  Shortly thereafter Bond had received word that Hirani had sent Gregory Lamb to scrounge another tool of the trade. He’d be delivering it that morning, along with written instructions on how to open the door. This was what the MI6 agent had handed to Bond in Bheka Jordaan’s office.

  Bond now checked behind him once more, then went to work. From his inside jacket pocket he took out what Lamb had provided: a length of 200-pound-test fishing line, nylon that wouldn’t be picked up by the Green Way metal detector. Bond now fed one end through the small gap at the top of the door and continued until it had reached the floor on the other side. He ripped a strip of the cardboard backing from the pad of yellow paper and tore it, fashioning a J shape – a rudimentary hook. This he slipped through the bottom gap until he managed to snag the fishing line and pull it out.

  He executed a triple surgeon’s knot to fix the ends together. He now had a loop that encircled the door from top to bottom. Using a pen, he made this into a huge tourniquet and began to tighten it.

  The nylon strand grew increasingly taut… compressing the exit bar on the other side of the door. Finally, as Hirani had said would ‘most likely’ happen, the door clicked open, as if an employee on the inside had pushed the bar to let himself out. For the sake of fire safety, there could be no number pad lock release on the inside.

  Bond stepped into the dim room, unwound the tourniquet and pocketed the evidence of his intrusion. Closing the door till it latched, he swept the lights on and glanced around the laboratory, looking for phones, radios or weapons. None. There were a dozen computers, desk- and laptop models, but the three he booted up were password protected. He didn’t waste time on the others.

  Discouragingly, the desks and work tables were covered with thousands of documents and file folders, and none was conveniently labelled ‘Gehenna’.

  He ploughed through reams of blueprints, technical diagrams, specification sheets, schematic drawings. Some had to do with weapons and security systems, others with vehicles. None answered the vital questions of who was in danger in York and where exactly was the bomb?

  Then, at last, he found a folder marked ‘Serbia’ and ripped it open, scanning the documents.

  Bond froze, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

  In front of him there were photographs of the tables in the morgue at the old British Army hospital in March. Sitting on one was a weapon that theoretically didn’t exist. The explosive device was unofficially dubbed the ‘Cutter’. MI6 and the CIA suspected the Serbian government was developing it but local assets hadn’t found any proof that it had actually been built. The Cutter was a hypervelocity anti-personnel weapon that used regular explosives enhanced with solid rocket fuel to fire hundreds of small titanium blades at close to three thousand miles an hour.

  The Cutter was so horrific that, even though it was only rumoured to be in development, it had already been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations. Serbia adamantly denied that it was building one and nobody – even the best-connected arms dealers – had ever seen such a device.

  How the hell had Hydt come by it?

  Bond continued through the files, finding elaborate engineering diagrams and blueprints, along with instructions on machining the blades that were the weapons’ shrapnel and on programming the arming system, all written in Serbian, with English translations. This explained it; Hydt had madeone. He had somehow come into possession of these plans and had ordered his engineers to build one of the damn things. The bits of titanium Bond had found in the Fens army base were shavings from the deadly blades.

  And the train in Serbia – this explained the mystery of the dangerous chemical; it had had nothing to do with Dunne’s mission there. He probably hadn’t even known about the poison. The purpose of his trip to Novi Sad had been to steal some of the titanium on the train to use it in the device – there had been two wagons of scrap metal behind the locomotive. Thosehad been his target. Dunne’s rucksack hadn’t contained weapons or bombs to blow open the chemical drums on rail car three; the bag had been emptywhen Dunne arrived. He’d filled it with unique titanium scraps and taken them back to March to make the Cutter.

  The Irishman had arranged the derailment to make it look like an accident so no one would realise the metal had been stolen.

  But how had Dunne and Hydt got hold of the plans? The Serbs would have done all they could to keep the blueprints and specifications secret.

  Bond found the answer a moment later in a memo from the Dubai engineer Mahdi al-Fulan, dated a year ago.

  Severan:

  I have looked into your request to see if it is possible to fabricate a system that will reconstruct shredded classified documents. I’m afraid with modern shredders the answer is no. But I would propose this: I can create an electric eye system that serves as a safety device to prevent injuries when someone tries to reach into a document shredder. In fact, though, it would double as a hyper-speed optical scanner. When the documents are fed into the system, the scanner reads all the information on them before they are shredded. The data can be stored on a 3- or 4-terabyte hard drive hidden somewhere in the shredder and uploaded via a secure mobile or satellite link, or even physically retrieved when your employees replace the blades or clean the units.

  I further recommend that
you make and offer to your clients shredders that are so efficient they literally turn their documents to dust, so that you will instil confidence in them to hire you to destroy even the most sensitive materials.

  In addition, I have a plan for a similar device that would extract data from hard drives before they are destroyed. I believe it’s possible to create a machine that would break apart laptop or desktop computers, optically identify the hard drive and route it to a special station where the drive would be temporarily connected to a processor in the destruction machine. Classified information could be copied before the drives were wiped and crushed.

  He recalled his tour of Green Way and Hydt’s excitement about the automated computer destruction devices.

  In a few years that will be my most lucrative operation.

  Bond read on. The document-shredder scanners were already in use in every city where Green Way had a base, including at top-secret Serbian military facilities and weapons contractors outside Belgrade.

  Other memos detailed plans to capture less classified but still valuable documents, using special teams of Green Way refuse collectors to gather the rubbish of targeted individuals, bring it to special locations and sort through it for personal and sensitive information.

  Bond noted the value of this: he found copies of credit-card receipts, some intact, others reconstructed from simple document shredders. One bill, for instance, was from a hotel outside Pretoria. The card holder had the title ‘Right Honourable’. Notes attached to it warned that the man’s extramarital affair would be made public if he didn’t agree to a list of demands an opposing politician was making. So, such items would be the ‘special materials’ Bond had seen being shipped here in Green Way lorries.

  There were also pages upon pages of what seemed to be phone numbers, along with many other digits, screen names, pass codes and excerpts of emails and text messages. E-waste. Of course, workers in Silicon Row were looking through phones and computers, extracting electronic serial numbers for mobiles, passwords, banking information, texts, records of instant messages and who knew what else?

  But the immediate question, of course: where exactly was the Cutter going to be detonated?

  He flipped through the notes again. None of the information he’d found gave him a clue as to the location of the York bomb, which would explode in a little over an hour. Leaning forward over a work table, staring at the diagram of the device, his temples throbbed.

  Think, he told himself furiously.

  Think…

  For some minutes, nothing occurred to him. Then he had an idea. What was Severan Hydt doing? Assembling valuable information from scraps and fragments.

  Do the same, Bond told himself. Put the pieces of the puzzle together.

  And what scraps do I have?

  • The target is in York.

  • One message contained the words ‘term’ and ‘£5 million’.

  • Hydt is willing to cause mass destruction to divert attention from the real crime he intends to commit, as with the derailment in Serbia.

  • The Cutter was hidden somewhere near March and has just been driven to York.

  • He’s being paid for the attack, not acting out of ideology.

  • He could have used any explosive device but he’s gone to great trouble to build a Cutter with actual Serbian military designations, a weapon not available on the general arms market.

  • Thousands of people will die.

  • The blast must have a radius of 100 feet minimum.

  • The Cutter is to be detonated at a specific time, ten thirty a.m.

  • The attack has something to do with a ‘course’, a road or other route.

  But rearrange these ragged bits as he might, Bond saw only unrelated scraps.

  Well, keep at it, he raged. He focused again on each shred. He picked it up mentally and placed it somewhere else.

  One possibility became clear: if Hydt and Dunne had re-created a Cutter, the forensic teams doing post-blast analysis would find the military designations and believe the Serbian government or army was behind it since the devices weren’t yet available on the black market. Hydt had done this to shift attention away from the real perpetrators: himself and whoever had paid him millions of pounds. It would be a misdirection – just like the planned train crash.

  That meant there were twotargets: the apparent one would have some connection to Serbia and, to the public and police, would be the purpose of the attack. But the real victim would be someone else caught in the blast, an apparent bystander. No one would ever know that he or she was the person Hydt and his client really wanted to die… and thatdeath would be the one that harmed British interests.

  Who? A government official in York? A scientist? And, goddamn it, where specifically would the attack take place?

  Bond played with the confetti of information once more.

  Nothing…

  But then, in his mind, he heard a resounding tap. ‘Term’ had ended up next to ‘course’.

  What if the former didn’t refer to a clause in a contract but a period in the academic year? And ‘course’ was just that – a course of study?

  That made some sense. A large institution, thousands of students.

  But where?

  The best Bond could come up with was an institution at which there was a course, a lecture, a rally, a museum exhibit or the like involving Serbia, at half past ten this morning. This suggested a university.

  Did his reassembled theory hold up?

  There was no time left for speculation. He glanced at the digital clock on the wall, which advanced another minute.

  In York it was nine forty.

  56

  Carrying the killing-fields map, Bond walked casually down a corridor.

  A guard with a massive bullet-shaped head eyed him suspiciously. The man was unarmed, Bond saw to his disappointment; neither did he have a radio. He asked the guard for directions to Hydt’s conference room. The man pointed it out.

  Bond started to walk away, then turned back as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Oh, I need to ask Ms Barnes about lunch. Do you know where she is?’

  The guard hesitated, then pointed to another corridor. ‘Her office is down there. The double doors on the left. Number one oh eight. You will knock first.’

  Bond moved off in the direction indicated. In a few minutes he arrived and glanced back. No one was in the corridor. He knocked on the door. ‘Jessica, it’s Gene. I need to talk to you.’

  There was a pause. She’d said she’d be here but she might be ill or have felt too tired to come in, notwithstanding her ‘short leash’.

  Then, the click of a lock. The door opened and he stepped inside. Jessica Barnes, alone, blinked in surprise. ‘Gene. What’s the matter?’

  He swung the door shut and his eyes fell on her mobile phone, lying on her desk.

  She sensed immediately what was happening. Her dark eyes wide, she went to the desk, grabbed the mobile and backed away from him. ‘You…’ She shook her head. ‘You’re a policeman. You’re after him. I should’ve known.’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  ‘Oh, I get it now. Yesterday, in the car… you were, what do the Brits say? Chatting me up? To get on my good side.’

  Bond said, ‘In forty-five minutes Severan’s going to kill a lot of people.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘It’s true. Thousands are at risk. He’s going to blow up a university in England.’

  ‘I don’t believe you! He’d never do that.’ But she hadn’t sounded convinced. She’d probably seen too many of Hydt’s pictures to deny her partner’s obsession with death and decay.

  Bond said, ‘He’s selling secrets and blackmailing and killing people because of what he reconstructs from their rubbish.’ He stepped forward, his hand out for the phone. ‘Please.’

  She backed further away, shaking her head. Just outside the open window there was a puddle from a recent storm. She thrust her hand out and held the mobile
over it. ‘Stop!’

  Bond did. ‘I’m running out of time. Please help me.’

  Interminable seconds passed. Finally her narrow shoulders slumped. She said, ‘He has a dark side. I used to think it involved just pictures of… well, terrible pictures. His sick love of decay. But I’ve always suspected there was more. Something worse. In his heart he doesn’t want to be just a witness to destruction. He wants to causeit.’ She stepped away from the window and handed him the phone.

  He took it. ‘Thank you.’

  Just then the door flew open. The guard who’d given Bond directions stood there. ‘What is this? There are no phones for visitors here.’

  Bond said, ‘I have an emergency at home. There’s an illness in my family. I wanted to see about it. I asked to borrow Ms Barnes’s mobile and she was kind enough to say yes.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Well, I think I will take it.’

  ‘I think you won’t,’ Bond replied.

  There was a heavy pause. The man launched himself at Bond, who tossed the phone on to the desk and went into a systemadefence position. The fight began.

  The man had three or four stones on Bond and he was talented – very talented. He’d studied kick-boxing and aikido. Bond could counter his moves but it took a lot of effort, and manoeuvring was difficult because the office, though large, was cluttered with furniture. At one point the massive guard backed up fast, slamming into Jessica, who screamed and fell to the floor. She lay stunned.

  For sixty seconds or so they sparred fiercely, Bond realising that systema’s evasive moves would not be enough. His opponent was strong and showed no sign of tiring.

  His eyes focused and fierce, the man judged angles and distances and came in with a kick – or so it seemed. The move was a feint. Bond had anticipated this, though, and when the huge man twisted away, Bond delivered a powerful thrust of his elbow into his kidney, a blow that would not only be excruciatingly painful but could permanently damage the organ.