Carte Blanche

electronic lock on the flap and sealed it. With his shoulder he tipped a chest of drawers and pushed the pouch underneath. It might be found and stolen, of course, but any attempt to open it without his thumbprint on the lock would send an encrypted message to the ODG’s C Branch, and Bill Tanner would send a Crash Divetext to alert him that his cover had been compromised.

He rang room service and ordered a club sandwich and a Gilroy’s dark ale. Then he showered. By the time he’d dressed in a pair of battleship grey trousers and a black polo shirt, the food was at the door. He ran a comb through his damp hair, checked the peephole and let the waiter in.

The tray was placed on the small table, the bill signed as E. J. Theron – in Bond’s own handwriting; that was one thing you never tried to fake, however deep your cover. The waiter pocketed his tip with overt gratitude. When Bond stepped back to the door to see the young man out and refix the chain, he automatically scanned the balcony and the lobby below.

He squinted, gazing down, then shut the door fast.

Damn.

Glancing with regret at the sandwich – and even more regretfully at the beer – he stepped into his shoes and flung open his suitcase. He screwed the Gemtech silencer on to the muzzle of his Walther and, although he’d done so recently at SAPS headquarters, eased the slide of the pistol back a few millimetres to verify that a round was in the chamber.

The gun went into the folds of today’s edition of the Cape Times, which Bond then set on the tray between his sandwich and the beer. He lifted it one-handed over his shoulder and left the room, the tray obscuring his face. He was not dressed in a waiter’s uniform but he moved briskly, head down, and might have been mistaken by a casual observer for a harried member of staff.

At the end of the corridor, he went through the fire doors of the stairwell, put the tray down and picked up the newspaper with its deadly contents. Then he descended a flight of stairs, quietly, to the ground floor.

Looking out through a porthole in the swing door, he spotted his target, sitting in an armchair in the shadows of a far corner of the lobby, nearly invisible. Facing away from Bond, he was scanning from his newspaper to the lobby to the first-floor balcony. Apparently he had missed Bond’s escape.

Bond gauged distances and angles, the location and number of guests, staff and security guards. He waited while a porter wheeled a cart of suitcases past, a waiter carried a tray bearing a silver coffee pot to another guest at the far end of the lobby, and a cluster of Japanese tourists moved en masse out of the door, taking with them his target’s attention.

Bond thought clinically: now.

He pushed out of the stairwell and walked fast towards the back of an armchair over which the crown of his target’s head could just be seen. He circled around it and dropped into the chair just opposite, smiling as if he’d run into an old friend. He kept his finger off the trigger of the Walther, which Corporal Menzies had fine-tuned to a feather-light pull.

The freckled ruddy face glanced up. The man’s eyes flashed wide in surprise that he’d been duped. In recognition too. The look said, no, it wasn’t a coincidence. He hadbeen conducting surveillance on Bond.

He was the man Bond had seen at the airport that morning, whom he’d originally taken for Captain Jordaan.

‘Fancy seeing you here!’ Bond said cheerfully, to allay the suspicions of anybody witnessing the rendezvous. He lifted the curled newspaper so that the muzzle of the silencer was focused on the bulky chest.

But, curiously, the surprise in the milky green eyes was replaced not by fear or desperation but amusement. ‘Ah, Mr… Theron, is it? Is that who we are at the moment?’ The accent was Mancunian. His pudgy hands swung up, palms out.

Bond cocked his head to one side. ‘These rounds are nearly subsonic. With this suppressor, you’ll be dead and I’ll be gone long before anybody notices.’

‘Oh, but you don’t want to kill me. That would go down rather badly.’

Bond had heard plenty of monologues at moments like this when he’d got the draw on an opponent. Usually the bons motswere to buy time or for distraction as the target prepared himself for a desperate assault. Bond knew to ignore what the man was saying and watch his hands and body language.

Still, he could hardly dismiss the next lines issuing from the flabby lips. ‘After all, what would M say if he heard you’d gunned down one of the Crown’s star agents? And in sucha beautiful setting.’

38

His name was Gregory Lamb, confirmed by the iris and fingerprint scan app – MI6’s man on the ground in Cape Town. The agent Bill Tanner had told him to avoid.

They were in Bond’s room, sansbeer and sandwich; to his consternation, the tray containing his lunch had been whisked out of the stairwell by an efficient hotel employee by the time he and Lamb had returned to the first floor.

‘You could’ve got yourself killed,’ Bond muttered.

‘I wasn’t in any real danger. Your outfit doesn’t give out those double noughts to trigger- happy fools… Now, now, my friend, don’t get all ruffled. Some of us know what your Overseas Development outfit reallydoes.’

‘How did you know I was in town?’

‘Put it together, didn’t I? Heard about some goings-on and got in touch with friends at Lambeth.’

One of the disadvantages in having to use Six or DI for intelligence was that more people knew about your affairs than you might prefer. ‘Why didn’t you just contact me through secure channels?’ Bond snapped.

‘I was going to, but just as I got here I saw somebody playing shadow.’

Now Bond paid attention. ‘Male, slim, blue jacket? Gold earring?’

‘Well, now, didn’t see the earring, did I? Eyes aren’t what they used to be. But you’ve got the general kit right. Hovered about for a while, then vanished like the Tablecloth when the sun comes out. You know what I mean: the fog on Table Mountain.’

Bond was in no mood for travelogues. Dammit, the man who killed Yusuf Nasad and who had nearly done the same to Felix Leiter had learned he was here. He was probably the man Jordaan had told him about, the one who’d slipped into the country that morning from Abu Dhabi on a fake British passport.

Who the hell was he?

‘Did you get a picture?’ Bond asked.

‘Drat no. The man was fast as a waterbug.’

‘Spot anything else about him, type of mobile, possible weapons, vehicle?’

‘None. Gone. Waterbug.’ A shrug of the broad shoulders, which Bond supposed were as freckled and red as the face.

Bond said, ‘You were at the airport when I landed. Why did you turn away?’

‘I saw Captain Jordaan. She never took to me, for some reason. Maybe she thinks I’m the great white hunter colonist here to steal back her country. She gave me a bloody tongue lashing a few months ago, didn’t she?’

‘My chief of staff said you were in Eritrea,’ Bond said.

‘I was indeed – there and across the border in Sudan for the past week. Looks like their hearts’re set on war so I tooled on up to make sure my covers would survive the gunplay. I got that sorted and