Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

The lead in Cambridge had to be followed up, of course, but – equally important – Bond needed to keep Osborne-Smith diverted. He could simply not allow the Irishman or Noah to be arrested and hauled into Belmarsh, like a drug dealer or an Islamist who’d been buying excessive fertiliser. They needed to keep both suspects in play to discover the nature of Incident Twenty.

So Bond, a keen poker player, had bluffed. He’d taken inordinate interest in the clue about the pub and had mentioned it was not far from Wimpole Road. To most people this would have meant nothing. But Bond guessed that Osborne-Smith would know that a secret government facility connected to Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological weapons research centre in Wiltshire, happened also to be on Wimpole Road. True, it was eight miles to the east, on the other side of Cambridge and nowhere near the pub, but Bond believed that associating the two would encourage the Division Three man to descend on the idea like a seabird spotting a fish head.

This relegated Bond to the apparently fruitless task of wrestling with the cryptic note. Boots – March. 17. No later than that.

Which he believed he had deciphered.

Most of Philly’s suggestions about its meaning had involved the chemist, Boots, which had shops in every town across the UK. She’d also offered suggestions about footwear and about events that had taken place on 17 March.

But one suggestion, towards the end of her list, had intrigued Bond. She’d noted that ‘Boots’ and ‘March’ were linked with a dash and she had found that there was a Boots Road that ran near the town of March, a couple of hours’ drive north of London. She had seen, too, the full stop between ‘March’ and ‘17’. Given that the last phrase ‘no later than that’ suggested a deadline, ‘17’ made sense as a date but was possibly 17 May , tomorrow.

Clever of her, Bond had thought and in his office, waiting for Osborne-Smith, he had gone into the Golden Wire – a secure fibre-optic network tying together records of all major British security agencies – to learn what he could about March and Boots Road.

He had found some intriguing facts: traffic reports about road diversions because a large number of lorries were coming and going along Boots Road near an old army base and public notices relating to heavy plant work. References suggested that it had to be completed by midnight on the seventeenth or fines would be levied. He had a hunch that this might be a solid lead to the Irishman and Noah.

And tradecraft dictated that you ignored such intuition at your peril.

So, he was now en route to March, losing himself in the consuming pleasure of driving.

Which meant, of course, driving fast.

Bond had to exercise some restraint, of course, since he wasn’t on the N-260 in the Pyrenees, or off the beaten track in the Lake District, but was travelling north along the A1 as it switched identities arbitrarily between motorway and trunk road. Still, the speedometer needle occasionally reached 100 m.p.h., and frequently he’d tap the lever of the silken, millisecond-response Quickshift gearbox to overtake a slow-moving horsebox or Ford Mondeo. He stayed mostly in the right lane, although once or twice he took to the hard shoulder for some exhilarating if illegal overtaking. He enjoyed a few controlled skids on stretches of adverse camber.

The police were not a problem. While the jurisdiction of ODG was limited in the UK – carte grise , not blanche , Bond now joked to himself – it was often necessary for O Branch agents to get around the country quickly. Bond had phoned in an NDR – a Null Detain Request – and his number plate was ignored by cameras and constables with speed guns.

Ah, the Bentley Continental GT coupé… the finest off-the-peg vehicle in the world, Bond believed.

He had always loved the marque; his father had kept hundreds of old newspaper photos of the famed Bentley brothers and their creations leaving Bugattis and the rest of the field in the dust at Le Mans in the 1920s and 1930s. Bond himself had witnessed the astonishing Bentley Speed 8 take the chequered flag at the race in 2003, back in the game after three-quarters of a century. It had always been his goal to own one of the stately yet wickedly fast and clever vehicles. While the E-type Jaguar sitting below his flat had been a legacy from his father, the GT had been an indirect bequest. He’d bought his first Continental some years ago, depleting what remained of the life-insurance payment that had come his way upon his parents’ deaths. He’d recently traded up to the new model.

He now came off the motorway and proceeded towards March, in the heart of the Fens. He knew little about the place. He’d heard of the ‘March March March’, a walk by students from March to Cambridge in, of course, the third month of the year. There was Whitemoor prison. And tourists came to see St Wendreda’s Church – Bond would have to trust the tourist office’s word that it was spectacular; he hadn’t been inside a house of worship, other than for surveillance purposes, in years.

Ahead loomed the old British Army base. He continued in a broad circle to the back, which was surrounded by vicious barbed-wire fencing and signs warning against intrusion. He saw why: it was being demolished. So this was the work he’d learnt of. Half a dozen buildings had already been razed. Only one remained, three storeys high, old red brick. A faded sign announced: Hospital.

Several large lorries were present, along with bulldozers, other earth-moving equipment and caravans, which sat on a hill a hundred yards from the building, probably the temporary headquarters for the demolition crew. A black car was parked near the largest caravan, but no one was about. Bond wondered why; today was Monday and not a bank holiday.

He nosed the car into a small copse, where it could not be seen. Climbing out, he surveyed the terrain: complicated waterways, potato and sugarbeet fields and clusters of trees. Bond donned his 5.11 tactical outfit, with the shrapnel tear in the shoulder of the jacket and tainted from the smell of scorching – from rescuing the clue in Serbia that had led him here – then stepped out of his City shoes into low combat boots.

He clipped his Walther and two holsters of ammunition to a canvas web utility belt.

If you hit a speed bump, give me a shout.

He also pocketed his silencer, a torch, tool kit and his folding knife.

Then Bond paused, going into that other place, where he went before any tactical operation: dead calm, eyes focused and taking in every detail – branches that might betray with a snap, bushes that could hide the muzzle of a sniper rifle, evidence of wires, sensors and cameras that might report his presence to an enemy.

And preparing to take a life, quickly and efficiently, if he had to. That was part of the other world too.

And he was all the more cautious because of the many questions this assignment had raised.

Fit your response to your enemy’s purpose.

But what was Noah’s purpose?

Indeed, who the hell was he?

Bond moved through the trees, then cut across the corner of a field dotted with an early growth of sugarbeet. He diverted around a fragrant bog and moved carefully through a tangle of brambles, making his way towards the hospital. Finally he came to the barbed-wire perimeter, posted with warning signs. Eastern Demolition and Scrap was doing the work, they announced. He’d never heard of the company but thought he might have seen their lorries – there was something familiar about the distinctive green-and-yellow colouring.

He scanned the overgrown field in front of the building, the parade grounds behind. He saw nobody, then began to clip his way through the fence with wire cutters, thinking how clever it would be to use the building for secret meetings relevant to Incident Twenty; the place would soon be torn down, which would destroy any evidence of its use.