Carte Blanche Part 36

He blinked. 'Oh. I did. But it vanished.'

Bond lost interest in the adventurer's excursion into the bush and moved aside to call London. He was just punching in the number when, a few yards away, he heard a series of loud cracks he recognised instantly as powerful bullets finding a target, followed by the booms of a distant rifle's report.

Bond spun round, his hand going for his Walther as he scanned the grounds. But he saw no sign of the shooter only his victim: Bheka Jordaan, her chest and face a ma.s.s of blood, clawed at the air as she stumbled backwards and rolled into a muddy ditch.

62.

'No!' Bond cried.

His inclination was to run to her aid. But the amount of blood, bone and tissue he'd seen told him she could not have survived the devastating shots.

No . . .

Bond thought of Ugogo, of the fiery orange gleam in Jordaan's eye as they'd taken on the two guards in Elysian Fields, the faint smile.

They have a number of guns and we only have one. That's not fair. We must take one away from them . . .

'Captain!' Nkosi cried, from his position behind a skip nearby. Other SAPS officers were firing randomly now.

'Hold your fire!' Bond shouted. 'No blind shooting. Guard the visible perimeter, look for muzzle flashes.'

The special forces were more restrained, watching for targets from good cover positions.

So the engineer did have an escape plan for his beloved boss. That's what Hydt had been looking for. Dunne would keep the officers pinned down while Hydt fled, probably to where the other security guards were waiting in the woods nearby with a car or perhaps even a helicopter hidden on the grounds. Hydt had not started his sprint to freedom yet, though; he'd still be hiding between the rows of pallets where Jordaan had been questioning him. He'd be waiting for more covering fire.

Crouching, Bond began to make his way there. Any minute now, the man would make a run for the brush, protected by Dunne and perhaps other loyal guards.

And James Bond was not going to let that happen.

He heard Gregory Lamb whisper, 'Is it safe?' but couldn't see him. He realised the man had dived into a full skip.

Bond had to move. Even if it meant exposing himself to Dunne's fine marksmans.h.i.+p, he wouldn't let Hydt escape. Bheka Jordaan would not have died in vain.

He sprinted into the shadowy s.p.a.ce between the tall pallets of oil drums to secure Hydt, his gun raised.

And froze. Severan Hydt was not about to escape anywhere. The Rag-and-bone Man, the visionary king of decay, the lord of entropy, lay on his back, two bullet wounds in his chest, a third in his forehead. A significant part of the back of his skull was missing.

Bond slipped his gun away. Around him the tactical forces began to rise. One called that the sniper had left his shooting position and vanished into the bush.

Then a harsh sound behind him, a woman's voice: 'Sihlama!'

Bond spun around to see Bheka Jordaan crawling from the ditch, wiping her face and spitting blood. She was unharmed.

Either Dunne had missed completely or his boss had been his intended target. The gore on Jordaan was Hydt's it had spattered her as she stood beside him.

Bond pulled her to cover behind the oil drums, smelling the sickly copper scent of blood. 'Dunne's still out there somewhere.'

Nkosi called, 'You are okay, Captain?'

'Yes, yes,' she said dismissively. 'What about Hydt?'

'He's dead,' Bond said.

'Masende!' she snapped.

This brought a smile to Nkosi's face.

Jordaan tugged her s.h.i.+rt off underneath she wore body armour over a black cotton vest and wiped her face, neck and hair with it.

A call came in from officers on the ridge that the perimeter was clear. Dunne, of course, would have had no interest in staying; he'd accomplished what he needed to.

Bond regarded the body once more. He decided that the tight grouping of the shots meant that Hydt had indeed been the intended target. Of course, this made sense; Dunne had had to kill the man to make sure he told the police nothing about him. Now he recalled several glances that Dunne had cast towards Hydt over the past few days, dark looks, hinting at . . . what? Irritation, resentment? Almost jealousy, it seemed. Perhaps there was something else behind the murder of the Rag-and-bone Man, something personal.

Whatever the reason, he'd certainly done a typically proficient job.

Jordaan hurried into the office building. Ten minutes later she emerged. She'd found a shower or tap somewhere; her face and hair were damp but more or less blood-free. She was furious at herself. 'I lost my prisoner. I should have guarded him better. I never thought-'

A ghastly wail interrupted her. Someone was speeding forward, 'No, no, no . . .'

Jessica Barnes was running towards Hydt's body. She flung herself to the ground, oblivious to the grotesque wounds, and cradled her dead lover.

Bond stepped forward, gripped her narrow, quivering shoulders and helped her up. 'No, Jessica. Come over here with me.' Bond led her to cover behind a bulldozer. Bheka Jordaan joined them.

'He's dead, he's dead . . .' Jessica pressed her head against Bond's shoulder.

Bheka Jordaan lifted her handcuffs out of their holster. 'She tried to help me,' Bond reminded her. 'She didn't know what Hydt was doing. I'm sure of it.'

Jordaan put the cuffs away. 'We'll drive her down to the station, take a statement. I don't think we'll have to pursue it beyond that.'

Bond detached himself from Jessica. He took her by the shoulders. 'Thank you for helping me. I know it was hard.'

She breathed in deeply. Then, calmer, she asked, 'Who did it? Who shot him?'

'Dunne.'

She didn't seem surprised. 'I never liked him. Severan was pa.s.sionate, impulsive. He never thought things through. Niall realised that and seduced him with all his planning and his intelligence. I didn't think he could be trusted. But I never had the courage to say anything.' She closed her eyes momentarily.

'You did a good job with the praying,' Bond told her.

'Too good,' she whispered.

On Jessica's cheek and neck were stark patches of Hydt's blood. It was the first time, Bond realised, that he'd seen any colour on her. He looked her in the eye. 'I know some people who can help you when you get back to London. They'll be in touch. I'll see to it.'

'Thank you,' Jessica murmured.

A policewoman led her away.

Bond was startled by a man's voice nearby: 'Is it clear?'

He frowned, unable to see the speaker. Then he understood. Gregory Lamb was still in the skip. 'It's clear.'

The agent scrambled out of his hiding-place.

'Mind the blood,' Bond told Lamb, as he nearly stepped in some.

'Oh, my G.o.d!' he muttered and looked as if he was going to be sick.

Ignoring him, Bond said to Jordaan, 'I need to know how extensive Gehenna is. Can you get your officers to collect all the files and computers in Research and Development? And I'll need your computer-crimes outfit to crack the pa.s.swords.'

'Yes, of course. We'll have them brought to the SAPS office. You can review them there.'

Nkosi said, 'I'll do it, Commander.'

Bond thanked him. The man's round face seemed less wry and irrepressible than earlier. Bond supposed this had been his first firefight. He'd be changed forever by the incident but, from what Bond was seeing, the change would not diminish but rather would enhance the young officer. Nkosi gestured toward some SAPS Forensic Science Service officers and led them inside the building.

Bond glanced at Jordaan. 'Can I ask you a question?'

She turned to him.

'What did you say? After you climbed out of the ditch, you said something.'

With her particular complexion, she might or might not have been blus.h.i.+ng. 'Don't tell Ugogo.'

'I won't.'

'The first was Zulu for . . . I guess you'd say, in English, "c.r.a.p".'

'I have some variations on that myself. And the other word?'

She squinted. 'That, I think, I will not tell you, James.'

'Why not?'

'Because it refers to a certain part of the male anatomy . . . and I do not think it wise to encourage you in that regard.'

63.

Late afternoon, the sun beginning to dip in the north-west, James Bond drove from the Table Mountain Hotel, where he'd showered and changed, to Cape Town's central police station.

As he entered and made for Jordaan's office he noticed several pairs of eyes staring at him. The expressions were no longer curious, he sensed, as had been the case upon his first visit here, several days ago, but admiring. Perhaps the story of his role in foiling Severan Hydt's plan had circulated. Or the tale of how he'd taken out two adversaries and blown up a landfill with a single bullet, no mean accomplishment. (The fire, Bond had learnt, was largely extinguished to his immense relief. He would not have wanted to be known as the man who had burnt a sizeable area of Cape Town to its sandstone foundation.) He was met by Bheka Jordaan in the hall. She'd taken another shower to clean off the remnants of Severan Hydt and had changed into dark trousers and a yellow s.h.i.+rt, bright and cheerful, perhaps an antidote to the horror of the events at Green Way.

She gestured him into her office. They sat together in chairs before her desk. 'Dunne's managed to get to Mozambique. Government security spotted him there but he got lost in some unsavoury part of Maputo which, frankly, is most of the city. I called some colleagues in Pretoria, in Financial Intelligence, the Special Investigations Unit and the Banking Risk Information Centre. They checked his accounts under a warrant, of course. Yesterday afternoon two hundred thousand pounds were wired into a Swiss account of Dunne's. Half an hour ago he transferred it to dozens of anonymous online accounts. He can access it from anywhere so we have no idea where he intends to go.'

Bond's expression of disgust closely matched hers.

'If he surfaces or leaves Mozambique, their security people will let me know. But until then he's out of our reach.'

It was then that Nkosi appeared, pus.h.i.+ng a large cart filled with boxes the doc.u.ments and laptop computers from the Green Way Research and Development department.

The warrant officer and Bond followed Jordaan to an empty office where Nkosi put the boxes on the floor around the desk. Bond started to lift off a lid, but Jordaan said quickly, 'Put these on. I won't have you ruining evidence.' She handed him blue latex gloves.

Bond gave a wry laugh but took them. Jordaan and Nkosi left him to the job. Before he opened the boxes, though, he placed a call to Bill Tanner.

'James,' the chief of staff said. 'We've got the signals. Sounds like all h.e.l.l's broken loose down there.'

Bond laughed at his choice of words and explained in detail about the shootout at Green Way, Hydt's fate and Dunne's escape. He explained too about the drug company president who had hired Hydt; Tanner would ask the FBI in Was.h.i.+ngton to open an investigation of their own and arrest the man.

Bond said, 'I need a rendition team to capture Dunne if we can find out where he is. Any of our double-one agents nearby?'

Tanner sighed. 'I'll see what I can do, James, but I don't have a lot of people to spare, not with the situation in eastern Sudan. We're helping the FCO and the marines with security. I might be able to get you some special forces SAS or SBS? Would that suit?'

'Fine. I'm going to look through everything we've collected from Hydt's headquarters. I'll call back when I've finished and brief M.'

They rang off and Bond started to lay out the Gehenna doc.u.ments on the large desk in the office Jordaan had provided. He hesitated. Then, feeling ridiculous, he slipped on the blue gloves, deciding that at least they would provide an amusing story for his friend Ronnie Vallance of the Yard. Vallance often said that Bond would make a terrible detective-inspector, given his preference for beating up or shooting perpetrators, rather than marshalling evidence to see them in the dock.

He leafed through the doc.u.ments for almost an hour. Finally, when he felt well enough informed to discuss the situation he telephoned London again.

M said gruffly, 'It's a nightmare here, 007. That fool in Division Three pushed a very big b.u.t.ton. Got all of Whitehall closed up. Downing Street too. If there's anything that plays badly with the tabloids, it's an international security meeting being cancelled because of a b.l.o.o.d.y security alert.'

'Was it groundless?' Bond had been convinced that York was the site of the attack but that didn't mean London wasn't at some risk, as he'd told Tanner during his satellite call from Jessica Barnes's office.

'Nothing. Green Way had its legitimate side, of course. The company's engineers were working with the police to make sure the refuse-removal tunnels around Whitehall were safe. No dangerous radiation, no explosives, no Guy Fawkes. There was a spike in Afghan SIGINT traffic, but that was because we and the CIA descended on the place last Monday. And everybody was wondering what the h.e.l.l we were doing there.'

'And Osborne-Smith?'

'Inconsequential.'

Bond didn't know whether the word referred to the man himself or meant that his fate was not worth discussing.

'Now, what's been going on down there, 007? I want details.'

Bond explained first about Hydt's death and the arrest of his three main partners. He also described Dunne's escape and Bond's plan to execute the Level 2 project order from Sunday, which was still valid, for the Irishman's rendition when they found him.

Then Bond detailed Gehenna Hydt's stealing and a.s.sembling cla.s.sified information the blackmail and extortion, adding the cities where most of his efforts had taken place: 'London, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, New York and Mumbai, and there are smaller operations in Belgrade, Was.h.i.+ngton, Taipei and Sydney.'

There was silence for a moment and Bond imagined M chomping on his cheroot as he took it all in. The man said, 'd.a.m.n clever, putting all that together from rubbish.'