Judging that the train was of no consequence to himself and his plans, James Bond turned the scope back to the restaurant of the spa and hotel and once again regarded his target through the window. The weathered building was large, yellow stucco with brown trim. Apparently it was a favourite with the locals, from the number of Zastava and Fiat saloons in the car park.
It was eight forty and the Sunday evening was clear here, near Novi Sad, where the Pannonian Plain rose to a landscape that the Serbs called ‘mountainous’, though Bond guessed the adjective must have been chosen to attract tourists; the rises were mere hills to him, an avid skier. The May air was dry and cool, the surroundings as quiet as an undertaker’s chapel of rest.
Bond shifted position again. In his thirties, he was six foot tall and weighed 170 lb. His black hair was parted on one side and a comma of loose strands fell over one eye. A three-inch scar ran down his right cheek.
This evening he’d taken some care with his outfit. He was wearing a dark green jacket and rainproof trousers from the American company 5.11, which made the best tactical clothing on the market. On his feet were well-worn leather boots that had been made for pursuit and sure footing in a fight.
As night descended, the lights to the north glowed more intensely: the old city of Novi Sad. As lively and charming as it was now, Bond knew the place had a dark past. After the Hungarians had slaughtered thousands of its citizens in January 1942 and flung the bodies into the icy Danube, Novi Sad had become a crucible for partisan resistance. Bond was here tonight to prevent another horror, different in nature but of equal or worse magnitude.
Yesterday, Saturday, an alert had rippled through the British intelligence community. GCHQ, in Cheltenham, had decrypted an electronic whisper about an attack later in the week.
meeting at noah’s office, confirm incident friday night, 20th, estimated initial casualties in the thousands, british interests adversely affected, funds transfers as discussed.
Not long after, the government eavesdroppers had also cracked part of a second text message, sent from the same phone, same encryption algorithm, but to a different number.
meet me sunday at restaurant rostilj outside novi sad, 20:00. i am 6+ foot tall, irish accent.
Then the Irishman – who’d courteously, if inadvertently, supplied his own nickname – had destroyed the phone or flicked out the batteries, as had the other text recipients.
In London the Joint Intelligence Committee and members of COBRA, the crisis management body, met into the night to assess the risk of Incident Twenty, so-called because of Friday’s date.
There was no solid information on the origin or nature of the threat but MI6 was of the opinion that it was coming out of the tribal regions in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and its affiliates had taken to hiring Western operatives in European countries. Six’s agents in Kabul began a major effort to learn more. The Serbian connection had to be pursued, too. And so at ten o’clock last night the rangy tentacles of these events had reached out and clutched Bond, who’d been sitting in an exclusive restaurant off Charing Cross Road with a beautiful woman, whose lengthy description of her life as an under-appreciated painter had grown tiresome. The message on Bond’s mobile had read,
NIACT, Call COS.
The Night Action alert meant an immediate response was required, at whatever time it was received. The call to his chief of staff had blessedly cut the date short and soon he had been en route to Serbia, under a Level 2 project order, authorising him to identify the Irishman, plant trackers and other surveillance devices and follow him. If that proved impossible, the order authorised Bond to conduct an extraordinary rendition of the Irishman and spirit him back to England or to a black site on the Continent for interrogation.
So now Bond lay among white narcissi, taking care to avoid the leaves of that beautiful but poisonous spring flower. He concentrated on peering through the Restoran Rostilj’s front window, on the other side of which the Irishman was sitting over an almost untouched plate and talking to his partner, as yet unidentified but Slavic in appearance. Perhaps because he was nervous, the local contact had parked elsewhere and walked here, providing no number plate to scan.
The Irishman had not been so timid. His low-end Mercedes had arrived forty minutes ago. Its plate had revealed that the vehicle had been hired today for cash under a false name, with a fake British driving licence and passport. The man was about Bond’s age, perhaps a bit older, six foot two and lean. He’d walked into the restaurant in an ungainly way, his feet turned out. An odd line of blond fringe dipped over a high forehead and his cheekbones angled down to a square-cut chin.
Bond was satisfied that this man was the target. Two hours ago he had gone into the restaurant for a cup of coffee and stuck a listening device inside the front door. A man had arrived at the appointed time and spoken to the head waiter in English – slowly and loudly as foreigners often do when talking to locals. To Bond, listening through an app on his phone from thirty yards away, the accent was clearly mid-Ulster – most likely Belfast or the surrounding area. Unfortunately the meeting between the Irishman and his local contact was taking place out of the bug’s range.
Through the tunnel of his monocular, Bond now studied his adversary, taking note of every detail – ‘Small clues save you. Small errors kill,’ as the instructors at Fort Monckton were wont to remind. He noted that the Irishman’s manner was precise and that he made no unnecessary gestures. When the partner drew a diagram the Irishman moved it closer with the rubber of a propelling pencil so that he left no fingerprints. He sat with his back to the window and in front of his partner; the surveillance apps on Bond’s mobile could not read either set of lips. Once, the Irishman turned quickly, looking outside, as if triggered by a sixth sense. The pale eyes were devoid of expression. After some time he turned back to the food that apparently didn’t interest him.
The meal now seemed to be winding down. Bond eased off the hillock and made his way through widely spaced spruce and pine trees and anaemic undergrowth, with clusters of the ubiquitous white flowers. He passed a faded sign in Serbian, French and English that had amused him when he’d arrived:
SPA AND
RESTAURANT ROSTILJ
Located in a declared therapeutic region, and is recommended by all for convalescences after surgeries, especially helping for acute and chronic diseases of respiration organs, and anaemia.
Full bar
He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelt of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant. His two ‘comrades’, as he thought of them, were waiting here.
James Bond preferred to operate alone but the plan he’d devised required two local agents. They were with the BIA, the Serbian Security Information Agency, as benign a name for a spy outfit as one could imagine. The men, however, were undercover in the uniform of local police from Novi Sad, sporting the golden badge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Faces squat, heads round, perpetually unsmiling, they wore their hair close-cropped beneath navy-blue brimmed caps. Their woollen uniforms were the same shade. One was around forty, the other twenty-five. Despite their cover roles as rural officers, they’d come girded for battle. They carried heavy Beretta pistols and swathes of ammunition. In the back seat of their borrowed police car, a Volkswagen Jetta, there were two green-camouflaged Kalashnikov machine guns, an Uzi and a canvas bag of fragmentation hand grenades – serious ones, Swiss HG 85s.
Bond turned to the older agent, but before he spoke he heard a fierce slapping from behind. His hand moving to his Walther PPS, he whirled round – to see the younger Serb ramming a pack of cigarettes into his palm, a ritual that Bond, a former smoker, had always found absurdly self-conscious and unnecessary.
What was the man
