Carte Blanche Part 21

Lamb rose and hovered awkwardly. 'Well, I stand ready to a.s.sist. I'm at your service. Really, anything you need.' He seemed painfully sincere.

'Thanks.' Bond felt the urge, absurdly, to slip him twenty rand.

Before he left, Lamb returned to the minibar and relieved it of two miniatures of vodka. 'You don't mind, do you? M's got a positively ma.s.sive budget; everyone knows that.'

Bond saw him out.

Good riddance, he thought, as the door closed. Percy Osborne-Smith was a charmer by comparison with this fellow.

39.

Bond sat at the expansive desk in the hotel suite, booted up his computer, logged on via his iris and fingerprint and scrolled through the information Bheka Jordaan had uploaded. He was ploughing through it when an encrypted email arrived.

James: For your eyes only.

Have confirmed Steel Cartridge was a major active measure by KGB/SVR to a.s.sa.s.sinate clandestine MI6 and CIA agents and local a.s.sets, so that the extent of Russian infiltration would not be learnt, in attempt to promote detente during fall of Soviet Union and improve relations with the West.

The last Steel Cartridge targeted killings occurred late '80s or early '90s. Found only one incident so far: the victim was a private contractor working for MI6. Deep cover. No other details, except that the active measures agent made the death appear to be an accident. Actual steel cartridges were sometimes left at the scenes of the deaths as warning to other agents to keep quiet.

Am continuing investigation.

Your other eyes, Philly Bond slouched back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. Well, what do I do with this? he asked himself.

He read the message again, then sent a brief email thanking Philly. He rocked back and, in the mirror across the room, caught a glimpse of his eyes, hard and set like a predator's.

He reflected: so, the KGB active measures agent killed the MI6 contract op in the late eighties, early nineties.

James Bond's father had died during that period.

It had happened in December, not long after his eleventh birthday. Andrew and Monique Bond had dropped young James off with his aunt Charmian in Pett Bottom, Kent, leaving behind the promise that they would return in plenty of time for Christmas festivities. They had then flown to Switzerland and driven to Mont Blanc for five days of skiing and rock and ice climbing.

His parents' a.s.surance, however, had been hollow. Two days later they were dead, having fallen from one of the astonis.h.i.+ngly beautiful cliff faces of the Aiguilles Rouges, near Chamonix.

Beautiful cliffs, yes, impressive . . . but not excessively dangerous, not where they had been climbing. As an adult, Bond had looked into the circ.u.mstances of the accident. He'd learnt that the slope they'd fallen from did not require advanced climbing techniques; indeed, no one had ever been injured, let alone died, there. But, of course, mountains are notoriously fickle and Bond had taken at face value the story the gendarme had told his aunt: that his parents had fallen because a rope frayed at the same time as a large boulder had given way.

'Mademoiselle, je suis desole de vous dire . . .'

When he was young, James Bond had enjoyed travelling with his parents to the foreign countries where Andrew Bond's company sent him. He'd enjoyed living in hotel suites. He'd enjoyed the local cuisines, very different from that served in the pubs and restaurants in England and Scotland. He'd been captivated with the exotic cultures the dress, the music, the language.

He also enjoyed spending time with his father. His mother would hand James over to carers and friends when one of her freelance photojournalism a.s.signments arose, but his father would occasionally take him to business meetings in restaurants or hotel lobbies. The boy would perch nearby, with a volume of Tolkien or an American detective novel, while his father talked to unsmiling men named Sam or Micah or Juan.

James was happy to be included what son doesn't like to tag along with his dad? He had always been curious, though, as to why sometimes Andrew insisted that he join him while at others he said no quite firmly.

Bond had thought nothing more of this . . . until the training sessions at Fort Monckton.

It was there, in the lessons on clandestine operations, that one instructor had said something that caught his attention. The round, bespectacled man from MI6's tradecraft training section had told the group, 'In most clandestine situations, it's not advisable for an agent or an a.s.set to be married or have children. If they happen to, it's best to make sure the family is kept far removed from the agent's operational life. However, there's one instance in which it's advantageous to have a quote "typical" life. These agents will be operating in deepest cover and handling the most critical a.s.signments, where the intelligence to be gathered is vital. In these cases a family life is important to remove the enemy's suspicions that they're operatives. Typically their official cover will be working for a company or organisation that interests enemy agents: infrastructure, information, armaments, aeros.p.a.ce or government. They will be posted to different locations every few years and take their families with them.'

James Bond's father had worked for a major British armaments company. He had been posted to a number of international capitals. His wife and son had accompanied him.

The instructor had continued, 'And in certain circ.u.mstances, on the most critical a.s.signments whether a brush pa.s.s or a face-to-face meeting it's useful for the operative to take his child with him. Nothing proclaims innocence more than having a youngster with you. Seeing this, the enemy will almost always believe that you're the real deal no parent would want to endanger his or her child.' He regarded the agents sitting before him in the cla.s.sroom, their faces registering varying reactions at his pa.s.sionless message. 'Combating evil sometimes requires a suspension of accepted values.'

Bond had thought: his father a spy? Impossible. Absurd.

Still, after he had left Fort Monckton he spent some time looking into his father's past, but found no evidence of a clandestine life. The only evidence was a series of payments made to his aunt for her and James's benefit, over and above the proceeds from his parents' insurance policy. These were made annually until James had turned eighteen by a company that must have had some affiliation with Andrew's employer, though he could never find out exactly where it was based or what the nature of the payments had been.

Eventually he convinced himself that whole idea was mad and forgot about it.

Until the Russian signal about Steel Cartridge.

Because one other aspect of his parents' death had been largely overlooked.

In the accident report that the gendarmes had prepared, it was mentioned that a steel rifle cartridge, 7.62mm, had been found near his father's body.

Young James had received it among his parents' effects and, since Andrew had been an executive with an arms company, it was a.s.sumed that the bullet had been a sample of his wares to show to customers.

On Monday, two days ago, after he had read the Russian report, Bond had gone into the online archives of his father's company. He'd learnt that it did not manufacture ammunition. Neither had it ever sold any weapons that fired a 7.62mm round.

This was the bullet that sat now in a conspicuous place on the mantelpiece of his London 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 his father 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' a.s.sa.s.sin 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 ma.s.sive receiving antennae at Menwith Hill in the beautiful Yorks.h.i.+re 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 a.n.a.lyst, who had flagged them as critical and shot the missive to Bond.

He now read the CX the raw intelligence and the a.n.a.lysed 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 towns.h.i.+p.'

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, his posture wasn't hunched, his arms didn't swing from side to side. ('Oi, lookit the t.o.s.s.e.r! 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 b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous, he told himself. Concentrate on the job. All h.e.l.l'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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.sical mechanics, there were simple machines 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 was a 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 embarra.s.singly mundane, how common.

And b.l.o.o.d.y unfair, of course. G.o.d, 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. Relations.h.i.+ps 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.

It betrayed you too, far more often than machinery did.

b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, he told himself with what pa.s.sed for anger within Niall Dunne. Forget all this. You have a job to do tonight. He ran through his blueprint again and then once more.

As the traffic thinned he drove quickly east of the city, heading towards the towns.h.i.+p along dark roads gritty and damp as a riverside dock.

He pulled into a shopping-centre car park and killed the engine. A moment later a battered van stopped behind him. Dunne climbed from his car and got into the other vehicle, nodding to the security man, very large, wearing military fatigues. Without saying a word, they set off at once and, in ten minutes, were driving through the unmarked streets of Primrose Gardens. Dunne climbed into the back of the van, where there were no windows. He was, of course, distinctive here, with his height, his hair. More significant, he was white and would be extremely conspicuous in a South African towns.h.i.+p after dark. It was possible that the drug dealer who was threatening Dlamini's daughter was white or had whites who worked for him, but Dunne decided it was better to stay hidden at least until the time to throw the grenades and fire bombs through the windows of the shanty.

They drove along the endless paths that served as roads in the shanty town, past packs of running children, skinny dogs, men sitting on doorsteps.

'No GPS,' the huge security man said, his first words. He wasn't smiling and Dunne didn't know if he was making a joke. The man had spent two hours that afternoon tracking down Dlamini's shack. 'There it is.'

They parked across the road. The place was tiny, one storey, as were all the shacks in Primrose Gardens, and the walls were constructed of mismatched panels of plywood and corrugated metal, painted bold red, blue, yellow, as if in defiance of the squalor. A clothes-line hung in the yard to the side, festooned with laundry for a family ranging in age, it seemed, from five or six to adulthood.

This was an efficient location for a kill. The shack was opposite a patch of empty ground so there would be few witnesses. Not that it mattered the van had no number plate, and white vehicles of this sort were as common in the Western Cape as sea gulls at Green Way.

They sat in silence for ten minutes, just on the verge of attracting attention. Then the security man said, 'There he is.'

Stephan Dlamini was walking down the dusty road, a tall, thin man with greying hair, wearing a faded jacket, orange T-s.h.i.+rt and brown jeans. Beside him was one of his sons. The boy, who was about eleven, carried a mud-streaked football, and wore a Springboks rugby s.h.i.+rt, without a jacket, despite the autumn chill.

Dlamini and the boy paused outside to kick the ball back and forth for a moment or two. Then they entered their home. Dunne nodded to the security man. They pulled on ski masks. Dunne surveyed the shanty. It was larger than most, but the explosives and incendiary were sufficient. The curtains were drawn across the windows, the cheap fabric glowing with light from inside.

For some reason Dunne found himself thinking again about his boss, at the event that night. He put the image away.

He gave it five minutes more, to make sure that Dlamini had used the toilet if there was one in the shack and that the family was seated at the dinner table.

'Let's go,' Dunne said. The security guard nodded. They stepped out of the van, each holding a powerful grenade, filled with deadly copper shot. The street was largely deserted.

Seven family members, Dunne reflected. 'Now,' he whispered. They pulled the pins on the grenades and flung them through each of the two windows. In the five seconds of silence that followed, Dunne grabbed the firebomb a petrol can with a small detonator and readied it. When stunning explosions shook the ground and blew out the remaining gla.s.s, he threw the incendiary through the window and the two men leapt into the van. The security man started the engine and they sped off.

Exactly five seconds later, flames erupted from the windows and, spectacularly, a stream of fire from the cooking stove chimney rose straight into the air twenty feet, reminding Dunne of the fireworks displays he'd so enjoyed as a boy in Belfast.