Carte Blanche Part 32

Bond said evenly, 'Percy, that's not what's going on. He's not going to use Green Way people directly for the attack. It's too obvious. He'd be implicated himself.'

'Then how do you explain our little find in the tunnels? Radiation.'

'How much?' Bond asked bluntly.

A pause. Osborne-Smith replied in his petulant lisp, 'About four millirems.'

'That's nothing, Percy.' All O Branch agents were well versed in nuclear exposure statistics. 'Every human being on earth gets. .h.i.t with sixty millirems from cosmic rays alone each year. Add an X-ray or two and you're up to two hundred. A dirty bomb's going to leave more trace than four.'

Ignoring him, Osborne-Smith said brightly, 'Now, about York, you misheard. It must be the Duke of York pub or the theatre in London. Could be a staging area. We'll check it. In the event, I cancelled the security meeting, moved everyone to secure locations. Bond, I've been thinking about what makes Hydt tick ever since I saw he was living in Canning Town and you told me all about his obsession with thousand-year-old dead bodies. He revels in decay, cities crumbling.'

Dunne was now walking slowly forward, making directly for the Subaru.

Bond said, 'I know, Percy, but-'

'What better way to promote social decay than to take down the security apparatus of half the Western powers?'

'Dammit, fine. Do what you want in London. But have SOCA or some teams from Five follow up in York.'

'We don't have the manpower, do we? Can't spare a soul. Maybe this afternoon but for now, afraid not. Nothing's going to happen till tonight, anyway.'

Bond explained that the time of the operation had been moved forward.

A chuckle. 'Your Irishman prefers the twenty-four-hour clock, does he? . . . Bit fine-tuned, that. No, we'll stick with my plan.'

This was why Osborne-Smith had backed M's stand to have Bond remain in South Africa; he hadn't in fact believed Bond was on to anything. He had simply wanted to steal the thunder. Bond disconnected and started to dial Bill Tanner.

But Dunne was at the door, yanking it open. 'Come on, Theron. You're keeping your new boss waiting. You know the drill. Leave the phone and the gun in the car.'

'I thought I'd check them in with your smiling concierge.'

If it came down to a fight, he hoped to be able to pick up his weapon and to communicate with the outside world.

But Dunne said, 'Not today.'

Bond didn't argue. He secured his phone and the Walther in the car's glove box, joined Dunne and locked the car with the key fob.

As he once again endured the rituals at the security post, Bond happened to glance at a clock on the wall. It was nearly eight a.m. in York. He had just over two and a half hours to find out where the bomb was planted.

55.

The Green Way lobby was deserted. Bond supposed Hydt or, more likely, Dunne had arranged for the staff to have the day off so that the meeting and the Gehenna plan's maiden voyage could go forward without interruption.

Severan Hydt strode up the hall, greeting Bond warmly. He was in good spirits, ebullient even. His dark eyes shone. 'Theron!'

Bond shook his hand.

'I'll want you to make a presentation to my a.s.sociates about the killing-fields project. It'll be their money too that'll fund it. Now, you don't need to do anything formal. Just outline on a map where the major graves are, how many corpses roughly are in each one, how long they've been in the ground and what you think your clients will be willing to pay. Oh, by the way, one or two of my partners are in lines of work similar to yours. You might know each other.'

The alarming thought now occurred to Bond that these men might wonder the opposite: why they had not heard of the ruthless Durban-based mercenary Gene Theron, who'd seeded the African earth with so many bodies.

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 facade 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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, fas.h.i.+oning a J shape a rudimentary hook. This he slipped through the bottom gap until he managed to snag the fis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sword protected. He didn't waste time on the others.

Discouragingly, the desks and work tables were covered with thousands of doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments.

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 a.s.sets 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 t.i.tanium 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 n.o.body even the best-connected arms dealers had ever seen such a device.

How the h.e.l.l 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 made one. He had somehow come into possession of these plans and had ordered his engineers to build one of the d.a.m.n things. The bits of t.i.tanium 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 t.i.tanium on the train to use it in the device there had been two wagons of sc.r.a.p metal behind the locomotive. Those had 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 empty when Dunne arrived. He'd filled it with unique t.i.tanium sc.r.a.ps 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 cla.s.sified doc.u.ments. 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 doc.u.ment shredder. In fact, though, it would double as a hyper-speed optical scanner. When the doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments 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. Cla.s.sified 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 doc.u.ment-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 cla.s.sified but still valuable doc.u.ments, 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 doc.u.ment shredders. One bill, for instance, was from a hotel outside Pretoria. The card holder had the t.i.tle '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 s.h.i.+pped 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, pa.s.s 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, pa.s.swords, 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? a.s.sembling valuable information from sc.r.a.ps and fragments.

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

And what sc.r.a.ps do I have?

* The target is in York.

* One message contained the words 'term' and '5 million'.

* Hydt is willing to cause ma.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps.

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 two targets: 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 that death would be the one that harmed British interests.

Who? A government official in York? A scientist? And, G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 inst.i.tution, thousands of students.