Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

‘Consulting?’ Bond said sourly, then realised that M would have done some impressive negotiating to achieve that much. ‘Thank you, sir.’

M deflected the words with a jerk of his head. ‘You’ll be working with someone from Division Three, a fellow named Osborne-Smith.’

Division Three… British security and police operations were like human beings: forever being born, marrying, producing progeny, dying and even, Bond had once joked, undergoing sex-change operations. Division Three was one of the more recent offspring. It had some loose affiliation with Five, in much the same way that the ODG had a gossamer thin connection to Six.

Plausible deniability…

While Five had broad investigation and surveillance powers, it had no arrest authority or tactical officers. Division Three did. It was a secretive, reclusive group of high-tech wizards, bureaucrats and former SAS and SBS tough boys with serious firepower. Bond had been impressed with its recent successes in taking down terrorist cells in Oldham, Leeds and London.

M regarded him evenly. ‘I know you’re used to having carte blanche to handle the mission as you see fit, 007. You have your independent streak and it’s served you well in the past.’ A dark look. ‘ Most of the time. But at home your authority’s limited. Significantly. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

So, no longer carte blanche , Bond reflected angrily, more carte grise .

Another dour glance from M. ‘Now, a complication. That security conference.’

‘Security conference?’

‘Haven’t read your Whitehall briefing?’ M asked petulantly.

These were administrative announcements about internal government matters and, accordingly, no, Bond did not read them. ‘Sorry, sir.’

M’s jowls tightened. ‘We have thirteen security agencies in the UK. Maybe more as of this morning. The heads of Five, Six, SOCA, JTAC, SO Thirteen, DI, the whole lot – myself included – will be holed up in Whitehall for three days later in the week. Oh, the CIA and some chaps from the Continent too. Briefings on Islamabad, Pyongyang, Venezuela, Beijing, Jakarta. And there’ll probably be some young analyst in Harry Potter glasses touting his theory that the Chechnyan rebels are responsible for that damned volcano in Iceland. A bloody inconvenience, the whole thing.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll be largely incommunicado. Chief of staff will be running the Incident Twenty operation for the Group.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll co-ordinate with him.’

‘Get on to it, 007. And remember: you’re operating in the UK. Treat it like a country you’ve never been to. Which means, for God’s sake, be diplomatic with the natives.’

‘It’s pretty bad, sir. Are you sure you want to see it?’

To the foreman, the man replied immediately. ‘Yes.’

‘Right, then. I’ll drive you out.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Just the shift chief and the lad what found it.’ Casting a glance at his boss, the man added, ‘They’ll keep quiet. If that’s what you want.’

Severan Hydt said nothing.

Under an overcast and dusty sky, the two men left the loading bay of the ancient headquarters building and walked to a nearby car park. They climbed into a people-carrier emblazoned with the logo of Green Way International Disposal and Recycling; the company name was printed over a delicate drawing of a verdant leaf. Hydt didn’t much care for the design, which struck him as mockingly trendy, but he’d been told that the image had scored well in focus groups and was good for public relations (‘Ah, the public ,’ he’d responded with veiled contempt and reluctantly approved it).

He was a tall man – six foot three – and broad-shouldered, his columnar torso encased in a bespoke suit of black wool. His massive head was covered with thick, curly hair, black streaked with white, and he wore a matching beard. His yellowing fingernails extended well past his fingertips, but were carefully filed; they were long by design, not neglect.

Hydt’s pallor accentuated his dark nostrils and darker eyes, framed by a long face that appeared younger than his fifty-six years. He was a strong man still, having retained much of his youthful muscularity.

The van started through his company’s dishevelled grounds, more than a hundred acres of low buildings, rubbish tips, skips, hovering seagulls, smoke, dust…

And decay…

As they drove over the rough roads, Hydt’s attention momentarily slipped to a construction about half a mile away. A new building was nearing completion. It was identical to two that stood already in the grounds: five-storey boxes from which chimneys rose, the sky above them rippling from the rising heat. The buildings were known as destructors, a Victorian word that Severan Hydt loved. England was the first country in the world to make energy from municipal refuse. In the 1870s the first power plant to do so was built in Nottingham and soon hundreds were operating throughout the country, producing steam to generate electricity.

The destructor now nearing completion in the middle of his disposal and recycling operation was no different in theory from its gloomy Dickensian forebears, save that it used scrubbers and filters to clean the dangerous exhaust and was far more efficient, burning RDF – refuse-derived fuel – as it produced energy that was pumped (for profit, of course) into the London and Home County power grids.

Indeed, Green Way International, plc, was simply the latest in a long British tradition of innovation in refuse disposal and reclamation. Henry IV had decreed that rubbish should be collected and removed from the streets of towns and cities on threat of forfeit. Mudlarks had kept the banks of the Thames clean – for entrepreneurial profit, not government wages – and rag pickers had sold scraps of wool to mills for the production of cheap cloth called shoddy. In London, as early as the nineteenth century, women and girls had been employed to sift through incoming refuse and sort it according to future usefulness. The British Paper Company had been founded to manufacture recycled paper – in 1890.

Green Way was located nearly twenty miles east of London, well past the boxed sets of office buildings on the Isle of Dogs and the sea-mine of the O2, past the ramble of Canning Town and Silvertown, the Docklands. To reach it you turned south-east off the A13 and drove towards the Thames. Soon you were down to a narrow lane, unwelcoming, even forbidding, surrounded by nothing but brush and stalky plants, pale and translucent as a dying patient’s skin. The tarmac strip seemed a road to nowhere… until it crested a low rise and ahead you could see Green Way’s massive complex, forever muted through a haze.

In the middle of this wonderland of rubbish the van now stopped beside a battered skip, six feet high, twenty long. Two workers, somewhere in their forties, wearing tan Green Way overalls, stood uncomfortably beside it. They didn’t look any less uneasy now that the owner of the company himself, no less, was present.

‘Crikey,’ one whispered to the other.

Hydt knew they were also cowed by his black eyes, the tight mass of his beard and his towering frame.

And then there were those fingernails.

He asked, ‘In there?’

The workers remained speechless and the foreman, the name Jack Dennison stitched on his overalls, said, ‘That’s right, sir.’ Then he snapped to one of the workers, ‘Right, sunshine, don’t keep Mr Hydt waiting. He hasn’t got all day, has he?’

The employee hurried to the side of the skip and, with some effort, pulled the large door open, assisted by a spring. Inside were the ubiquitous mounds of green bin liners and loose junk – bottles, magazines and newspapers – that people had been too lazy to separate for recycling.