Carte Blanche

flat.

Had it been dropped accidentally by a hunter? Or left intentionally as a warning?

The KGB’s reference to Operation Steel Cartridge had solidified within Bond the desire to learn whether or not his father had been a secret agent. He had to. He did not need to reconcile himself to the possibility that his father had lied to him. All parents deceive their children. In most cases, though, it’s for the sake of expedience or through laziness or thoughtlessness; if hisfather had lied it was because the Official Secrets Act had compelled him to.

Neither did he need to know the truth so that he could – as a TV psychiatrist might suggest – revisit his youthful loss and mourn somehow more authentically. What nonsense.

No, he wanted to know the truth for a much simpler reason, one that fitted him like a Savile Row bespoke suit: the person who had killed his parents might still be at large in the world, enjoying the sun, sitting down to a pleasant meal or even conspiring to take other lives. If such were the case, Bond knew he would make certain that his parents’ assassin met the same fate as they had, and he would do so efficiently and in accordance with his official remit: by any means necessary.

40

At close to five p.m. on Wednesday, Bond’s mobile emitted the ringtone reserved for emergency messages. He hurried from the bathroom, where he’d just showered, and read the encrypted email. It was from GCHQ, reporting that Bond’s attempt to bug Severan Hydt had been somewhat successful. Unknown to Captain Bheka Jordaan, the flash drive that Bond had given Hydt, holding digital pictures of the killing fields in Africa, also contained a small microphone and transmitter. What it lacked in audio resolution and battery life, it made up for in range. The signal was picked up by a satellite, amplified and beamed down to one of the massive receiving antennae at Menwith Hill in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside.

The device had transmitted fragments of a conversation Hydt and Dunne had had just after they’d left the fictional EJT Services office in downtown Cape Town. The words had finally made their way through the decryption queue and been read by an analyst, who had flagged them as critical and shot the missive to Bond.

He now read the CX – the raw intelligence – and the analysed product. It seemed that Dunne was planning to kill one of Hydt’s workers, Stephan Dlamini, and his family, because the employee had seen something in a secure part of Green Way that he shouldn’t have, perhaps information that related to Gehenna. Bond’s goal was clear: save him at all costs.

Purpose… response.

The man lived outside Cape Town. The death would be made to look like a gang attack. Grenades and firebombs would be used. And the attack would occur at suppertime.

After that, though, the battery died and the device had stopped transmitting.

At suppertime. Perhaps any moment now.

Bond hadn’t managed to rescue the woman in Dubai. He wasn’t going to let this family die now. He needed to find out what Dlamini had learnt.

But he could hardly contact Bheka Jordaan and tell her what he’d found out via illegal surveillance. He picked up the phone and called the concierge.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I have a question for you,’ Bond said casually. ‘I had a problem with my car today and a local fellow helped me out. I didn’t have much cash with me and I wanted to give him something for his trouble. How would I go about finding his address? I have his name and the town he lives in, but nothing more.’

‘What’s the town?’

‘Primrose Gardens.’

There was silence. Then the concierge said, ‘It’s a township.’

A squatters’ camp, Bond recalled, from the briefing material Bheka Jordaan had given him. The shacks rarely had standard postal addresses. ‘Well, could I go there, ask if anyone knew him?’

Another pause. ‘Well, sir, it might not be very safe.’

‘I’m not too worried about that.’

‘I think it would not be practical, either.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The population of Primrose Gardens is around fifty thousand.’

At 17:30 hours, as autumn dusk descended, Niall Dunne watched Severan Hydt leave the Green Way office in Cape Town, striding tall and with a certain elegance to his limousine.

Hydt’s feet didn’t splay, hisposture wasn’t hunched, hisarms didn’t swing from side to side. (‘Oi, lookit the tosser! Niall’s a bleedin’ giraffe!’)

Hydt was on his way home, where he would change, then take Jessica to the fundraiser at the Lodge Club.

Dunne was standing in the Green Way lobby, staring out of the window. His eyes lingered on Hydt as he vanished down the street, accompanied by one of his Green Way guards.

Watching him leave, en route to his home and his companion, Dunne felt a pang.

Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, he told himself. Concentrate on the job. All hell’s going to break loose on Friday and it’ll be your fault if a single cog or gear malfunctions.

Concentrate.

So he did.

Dunne left Green Way, collected his car and drove out of Cape Town towards Primrose Gardens. He would meet up with a security man from the company and proceed with the plan, which he now ran through his mind: the timing, the approach, the number of grenades, the firebomb, the escape.

He reviewed the blueprint with precision and patience. The way he did everything.

This is Niall. He’s brilliant. He’s my draughtsman…

But other thoughts intruded and his sloping shoulders slumped even more as he pictured his boss at the fundraising gala later that night. The pang stabbed him again.

Dunne supposed people wondered why he was alone, why he didn’t have a partner. They assumed the answer was that he lacked the ability to feel. That he was a machine. They didn’t understand that, according to the concept of classical mechanics, there were simplemachines – like screws and levers and pulleys – and complex machines, like engines, which by definition transferred energy into motion.

Well, he reasoned logically, calories were turned into energy, which moved the human body. So, yes, he wasa machine. But so were we all, every creature on earth. That didn’t preclude the capacity for love.

No, the explanation of his solitude was simply that the object of his desire didn’t, in turn, desire him.

How embarrassingly mundane, how common.

And bloody unfair, of course. God, it was unfair. No draughtsman would design a machine in which the two parts necessary to create harmonious movement didn’t work perfectly, each needing the other and in turn satisfying the reciprocal need. But that was exactly the situation in which he found himself: he and his boss were mismatched parts.

Besides, he thought bitterly, the laws of attraction were far riskier than the laws of mechanics. Relationships were messy, dangerous and plagued with waste and while you could keep an engine humming for hundreds of thousands of hours, love between human beings often sputtered and seized just after it caught.