But speeding tickets were one thing. What the GPS tracker showed when the getaway driver hit the M25 clockwise was something else entirely: something that could only be described as black magic. The Bond had followed her onto the motorway but after two junctions she was pulling away so fast that continuing the pursuit invited humiliation (not to mention a potentially fatal collision). The Bond swore bitterly and used the next roundabout exit to reverse direction. If he couldn’t keep up with her in a chase, he’d just have to ambush her instead.
The Bond tracked the Deliverator as she finished a complete lap of London and then slowed right down, driving back into the beating heart of the capital. But she wasn’t coming back to the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea as he’d expected: instead she headed for the trackless squalor of the East End, where no self-respecting billionaire would dream of setting foot.
Well then. Time for Plan B. The Bond opened his briefcase and pulled out a slim notebook computer which he attached to the picocell head unit. It took a few minutes but he narrowed his suspects down to two cellphone IMEIs that came up consistently: one of them had a SIM that resolved to a corporate account owned by HiveCo; both IMEIs had been in tight proximity for the entire duration of the Deliverator’s wild ride, and the HiveCo phone had messaged the other one some time after they stopped moving. The Bond opened a map view, then made a call to ask for some additional information. Yes, the Porsche was parked round the corner from the thief-taker’s home address. Well. The Bond smiled sharkishly and tapped his steering wheel, then settled down for a wait.
The getaway driver didn’t stay at the thief-taker’s pad for long. The car stayed parked, but the Deliverator’s phone slowly meandered towards Liverpool Street via a bus route, before abruptly dropping off the cellphone network. Underground, probably. The phone popped up again at High Street Kensington tube station, then drifted at walking pace towards the park before veering into a side-street leading to—the fuck? The Bond thought, confused—a royal palace? I thought the Queen lived in Buckinghamshire? He shook his head. Maybe there were more than one palace—oh. The cellphone’s location plot jumped and the focus narrowed. Obviously there was some signal bounce, and now she was walking along a side-street just to one side of the park.
And then she stopped moving.
Well, well, well. This wasn’t what the Bond had been expecting of a petty crook, not at all! But it was extremely suggestive, and begged to be checked out.
The Bond retreated to his hotel room. Over the next two hours he sniffed around the quiet street electronically. He used Shodan to probe for unsecured camera feeds, the cellco tracking databases to isolate stationary phones in the vicinity of his target, and other, less obvious, research tools.
The picture that slowly emerged was decidedly hinky. Kensington Palace Gardens wasn’t just any old road: it had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive residential street in the world (unless you counted the Japanese Imperial Palace in Tokyo). The average town house on the street sold for over fifty million pounds and was the property of an offshore investment vehicle, typically a shell company in the Cayman Islands or Dubai owned by a sovereign wealth fund. The Bond thought Rupert de Montfort Bigge was rich; Rupert probably considered himself to be rich; but Rupert could barely afford a tumbledown garden shack on this street.
Bizarrely, none of these billion-dollar residences were inhabited. The entire street was decaying, with rotting roofs, broken windows, and water running down the grand staircases behind cover of their steel security fences and CCTV cameras. These houses were too valuable for mere humans to be permitted to live in them. They were all uninhabited … except for the house two down from the end of the street. That one had four smartphones sucking signal and a business broadband cable. And when the Bond looked for its security cameras, their feeds had been hacked to relay the view of a different house, three doors along.
After breaking for a late lunch—a Happy Meal: not ideal, but he could grab it and eat in the car—the Bond drove to the nearest halfway normal street to Kensington Palace (defined as one that featured houses inhabited by human beings rather than abstract corporate asset management vehicles) and parked up. He opened his briefcase and unpacked the drone, swapped out camera modules, then programmed in a flight path, being careful to avoid the no-fly zone around the junior royalty clubhouse. Opening the car door, he checked for rubberneckers before releasing the quadrotor. It buzzed away across the rooftops, camera turret swiveling to bear on the target. He checked his phone. Eight minutes later, dead on the nail, the drone returned.
Replaying the footage it sent back confirmed his suspicions. Viewed from above, using the far-infrared camera on the drone, his target stuck out like a sore thumb. Heat radiated through the walls—but the front and back windows were oddly dark, as if there was a layer of cold air trapped just inside them. Other hot spots in the walls suggested running electrical appliances, in stark contrast with the neighboring properties which were dark and derelict. However, it wasn’t putting out enough heat to suggest an urban cannabis farm: this was a domicile rather than a factory, albeit a camouflaged one.
Target confirmed, the Bond drove back to his hotel’s parking garage and went up to his room for a shower and a brief nap, then began to get his kit ready for an evening out on the town.
“He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present controls the future.” The Denizen of Number Ten held His cut-crystal goblet of sherry up to catch the
