Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

No workers were nearby but the presence of the black car suggested someone might be inside. He looked for a back door or other unobtrusive entrance. Five minutes later he found one: a depression in the earth, ten feet deep, caused by the collapse of what must have been an underground supply tunnel. He climbed down into the bowl and shone his torch inside. It seemed to lead into the basement of the hospital, about fifty yards away.

He started forward, noting the ancient cracked brick walls and ceiling – just as two bricks dislodged themselves and crashed to the floor. On the ground there were small-gauge rail tracks, rusting and in places covered with mud.

Halfway along the grim passage, pebbles and a stream of damp earth pelted his head. He glanced up and saw that, six feet above, the tunnel ceiling was scored like a cracked eggshell. It looked as if a handclap would bring the whole thing down on him.

Not a great place to be buried alive, Bond reflected.

Then he added wryly to himself, And just where exactly would be?

‘Brilliant job,’ Severan Hydt told Niall Dunne.

They were alone in Hydt’s site caravan, parked a hundred yards from the dark, brooding British Army hospital outside March. Since the Gehenna team had been under pressure to finish the job by tomorrow, Hydt and Dunne had halted demolition this morning and made sure that the crew stayed away – most of Hydt’s employees knew nothing of Gehenna and he had to be very careful when the two operations overlapped.

‘I was satisfied,’ Dunne said flatly – in the tone with which he responded to nearly everything, be it praise, criticism or dispassionate observation.

The team had left with the device half an hour ago, having assembled it with the materials Dunne had provided. It would be hidden in a safe-house nearby until Friday.

Hydt had spent some time walking around the last building to be razed: the hospital, erected more than eighty years ago.

Demolition made Green Way a huge amount of money. The company profited from people paying to tear down what they no longer wanted, and by extracting from the rubble what other people did want: wooden and steel beams, wire, aluminium and copper pipes – beautiful copper, a rag-and-bone man’s dream. But Hydt’s interest in demolition, of course, went beyond the financial. He now studied the ancient building in a state of tense rapture, as a hunter stares at an unsuspecting animal moments before he fires the fatal shot.

He couldn’t help but think of the hospital’s former occupants too – the dead and dying.

Hydt had snapped dozens of pictures of the grand old lady as he’d strolled through the rotting halls, the mouldy rooms – particularly the mortuary and autopsy areas – collecting images of decay and decline. His photographic archives included shots of old buildings as well as bodies. He had quite a number, some rather artistic, of places like Northumberland Terrace, Palmers Green on the North Circular Road, the now-vanished Pura oil works on Bow Creek in Canning Town and the Gothic Royal Arsenal and Royal Laboratory in Woolwich. His photos of Lovell’s Wharf in Greenwich, a testament to what aggressive neglect could achieve, never failed to move him.

On his mobile, Niall Dunne was giving instructions to the driver of the lorry that had just left, explaining how best to hide the device. They were quite precise details, in accord with his nature and that of the horrific weapon.

Although the Irishman made him uneasy, Hydt was grateful their paths had intersected. He could not have proceeded as quickly, or as safely, on Gehenna without him. Hydt had come to refer to him as ‘the man who thinks of everything’ and indeed he was. So, Severan Hydt was happy to put up with the eerie silences, the cold stares, the awkward arrangement of robotic steel that was Niall Dunne. The two men made an efficient partnership, if an ironic one: an engineer whose nature was to build, a rag-and-bone man whose passion was destruction.

What a curious package we humans are. Predictable only in death. Faithful only then too, Hydt reflected and then discarded that thought.

Just after Dunne disconnected, there was a knock on the door. It opened. Eric Janssen, a Green Way security man, who’d driven them up to March, stood in the doorway, his face troubled.

‘Mr Hydt, Mr Dunne, someone’s gone into the building.’

‘What?’ Hydt barked, turning his huge equine head the man’s way.

‘He went in through the tunnel.’

Dunne rattled off a number of questions. Was he alone? Had there been any transmissions that Janssen had monitored? Was his car nearby? Had there been any unusual traffic in the area? Was the man armed?

The answers suggested that he was operating by himself and wasn’t with Scotland Yard or the Security Service.

‘Did you get a picture or a good look at him?’ Dunne asked.

‘No, sir.’

Hydt clicked two long nails together. ‘The man with the Serbs? From last night?’ he asked Dunne. ‘The private operator?’

‘Not impossible, but I don’t know how he could have traced us here.’ Dunne gazed out of the caravan’s dirt-spattered window as if he wasn’t seeing the building. Hydt knew the Irishman was drafting a blueprint in his mind. Or perhaps examining one he’d already prepared in case of such a contingency. For a long moment he was motionless. Finally, drawing his gun, Dunne stepped out of the caravan, gesturing to Janssen to follow.

The smells of mould, rot, chemicals, oil and petrol were overwhelming. Bond struggled not to cough and blinked tears from his stinging eyes. Could he detect smoke too?

The hospital’s basement here was windowless. Only faint illumination filtered in from where he’d entered the tunnel. Bond splayed light from his torch around him. He was beside a railway turntable, designed to rotate small locomotives after they’d carted in supplies or patients.

His Walther in hand, Bond searched the area, listening for voices, footsteps, the click of a weapon chambering bullets or going off safety. But the place was deserted.

He’d entered through the tunnel at the south end. As he moved farther north and away from the turntable, he came to a sign that prompted a brief laugh: Mortuary.

It consisted of three large windowless rooms that had clearly been occupied recently; the floors were dust-free and new cheap work benches were arranged throughout. One of these rooms seemed to be the source of the smoke. Bond saw electricity cables secured to the wall and floor with duct tape, presumably providing power for lights and whatever work had been going on. Perhaps an electrical short had produced the fumes.

He left the mortuary and came to a large open space, with a double door, to the right, east, opening to the parade ground. Light filtered through the crack between the panels – a possible escape route, he noted, and he memorised its location and the placement of columns that might provide cover in the event he had to make his way to it under fire.

Ancient steel tables, stained brown and black, were bolted to the floor, each with its own drain. For post-mortems, of course.

Bond continued to the north end of the building, which ended in a series of smaller rooms with barred windows. A sign here suggested why: Mental Health Ward.

He tried the doors leading up to the ground floor, found them locked and returned to the three rooms next to the turntable. A systematic search finally revealed the source of the smoke. On the floor in the corner of one room there was an improvised hearth. He spotted large curls of ash, on which he could discern writing. The flakes were delicate; he tried to pick one up but it dissolved between his fingers.