that Hydt might take him to Research and Development, now that he was a trusted partner.
‘We have an office for you.’ But the man led him past the R &D department to a large, windowless room. Inside were a few chairs, a work table and a desk. He’d been provided with office supplies like yellow pads and pens, dozens of detailed maps of Africa and an intercom but no phone. Corkboards on the walls displayed copies of the pictures that Bond had delivered of the decaying bodies. He wondered where the originals were.
In Hydt’s bedroom?
The Rag-and-bone Man asked pleasantly, ‘Will this do?’
‘Fine. A computer would be helpful.’
‘I could arrange that – for word processing and printing. No Internet access, of course.’
‘No?’
‘We’re concerned about hacking and security. But for now, don’t worry about writing anything up formally. Handwritten notes are enough.’
Bond maintained a calm facade as he noted the clock. It was now eight twenty in York. Just over two hours to go. ‘Well, I’d better get down to it.’
‘We’ll be up the hall in the main conference room. Go to the end and turn left. Number nine hundred. Join us whenever you like, but make sure you’re there before half twelve. We’ll have something on television I think you’ll find interesting.’
Ten thirty York time.
After Hydt had gone, Bond bent over the map and drew circles around some of the areas he’d arbitrarily picked as battle zones when he and Hydt had met at the Lodge Club. He jotted a few numbers – signifying the body counts – then bundled up the maps, a yellow pad and some pens. He stepped into the corridor, which was empty. Orienting himself, Bond went back to Research and Development.
Tradecraft dictates that simpler is usually the best approach, even in a black bag operation like this.
Accordingly Bond knocked on the door.
He was prepared to rush the person who opened the door and use a take-down hold on wrist or arm to overpower them. Prepared for an armed guard too – indeed, hoping for one, so he could relieve the man of his weapon.
But there was no answer. These staff had apparently been given the day off, too.
Bond fell back on plan two, which was somewhat less simple. Last night he had uploaded to Sanu Hirani the digital pictures he’d taken of the security door to Research and Development. The head of Q Branch had reported that the lock was virtually impregnable. It would take hours to hack. He and his team would try to think up another solution.
Shortly thereafter Bond had received word that Hirani had sent Gregory Lamb to scrounge another tool of the trade. He’d be delivering it that morning, along with written instructions on how to open the door. This was what the MI6 agent had handed to Bond in Bheka Jordaan’s office.
Bond now checked behind him once more, then went to work. From his inside jacket pocket he took out what Lamb had provided: a length of 200-pound-test fishing line, nylon that wouldn’t be picked up by the Green Way metal detector. Bond now fed one end through the small gap at the top of the door and continued until it had reached the floor on the other side. He ripped a strip of the cardboard backing from the pad of yellow paper and tore it, fashioning a J shape – a rudimentary hook. This he slipped through the bottom gap until he managed to snag the fishing line and pull it out.
He executed a triple surgeon’s knot to fix the ends together. He now had a loop that encircled the door from top to bottom. Using a pen, he made this into a huge tourniquet and began to tighten it.
The nylon strand grew increasingly taut… compressing the exit bar on the other side of the door. Finally, as Hirani had said would ‘most likely’ happen, the door clicked open, as if an employee on the inside had pushed the bar to let himself out. For the sake of fire safety, there could be no number pad lock release on the inside.
Bond stepped into the dim room, unwound the tourniquet and pocketed the evidence of his intrusion. Closing the door till it latched, he swept the lights on and glanced around the laboratory, looking for phones, radios or weapons. None. There were a dozen computers, desk- and laptop models, but the three he booted up were password protected. He didn’t waste time on the others.
Discouragingly, the desks and work tables were covered with thousands of documents and file folders, and none was conveniently labelled ‘Gehenna’.
He ploughed through reams of blueprints, technical diagrams, specification sheets, schematic drawings. Some had to do with weapons and security systems, others with vehicles. None answered the vital questions of who was in danger in York and where exactly was the bomb?
Then, at last, he found a folder marked ‘Serbia’ and ripped it open, scanning the documents.
Bond froze, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.
In front of him there were photographs of the tables in the morgue at the old British Army hospital in March. Sitting on one was a weapon that theoretically didn’t exist. The explosive device was unofficially dubbed the ‘Cutter’. MI6 and the CIA suspected the Serbian government was developing it but local assets hadn’t found any proof that it had actually been built. The Cutter was a hypervelocity anti-personnel weapon that used regular explosives enhanced with solid rocket fuel to fire hundreds of small titanium blades at close to three thousand miles an hour.
The Cutter was so horrific that, even though it was only rumoured to be in development, it had already been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations. Serbia adamantly denied that it was building one and nobody – even the best-connected arms dealers – had ever seen such a device.
How the hell had Hydt come by it?
Bond continued through the files, finding elaborate engineering diagrams and blueprints, along with instructions on machining the blades that were the weapons’ shrapnel and on programming the arming system, all written in Serbian, with English translations. This explained it; Hydt had
And the train in Serbia – this explained the mystery of the dangerous chemical; it had had nothing to do with Dunne’s mission there. He probably hadn’t even known about the poison. The purpose of his trip to Novi Sad had been to steal some of the titanium on the train to use it in the device – there had been two wagons of scrap metal behind the locomotive.
The Irishman had arranged the derailment to make it look like an accident so no one would realise the metal had been stolen.
But how had Dunne and Hydt got hold of the plans? The Serbs would have done all they could to keep the blueprints and specifications secret.
Bond found the answer a moment later in a memo from the Dubai engineer Mahdi al- Fulan, dated a year ago.
