Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

Warning?

‘ Evacuate immediately! Danger! Explosive charges have been set!’

Bond shone the torch around the room.

The wires! They weren’t to provide electricity for construction – they were attached to explosives. Bond hadn’t seen them since the charges were taped to steel joists high in the ceiling. The entire building had been rigged for demolition.

Three minutes…

The torch revealed dozens of packets of explosive, enough to turn the stone walls around him to dust – and Bond into vapour. And all the exits had been sealed. His heart rate ratcheting, sweat dotting his forehead, Bond slipped the torch and pistol away and gripped one of the iron bars over a window. He tugged hard, but it held.

In the hazy light trickling through the glass, he looked about, then climbed a nearby girder. He ripped one of the explosive packets down and leapt back to the floor. The charges were an RDX composite, to judge from the smell. With his knife he cut off a large wad and jammed it against the knob and lock on the door. That should be enough to blow the lock without killing himself in the process.

Get on with it!

Bond stepped back about twenty feet, steadied his aim and fired. He hit the explosive dead on.

But, as he’d feared, nothing happened – except that the yellow-grey mass of deadly plastic fell undramatically to the floor with a plop. Composites explode only with a detonator, not with physical impact, even that of a bullet travelling at 2,000 feet per second. He’d hoped this substance might prove the exception.

The two-minute warning resounded through the room.

Bond looked up, to where the detonator he’d pulled from the charge now dangled obscenely. But the only way to set it off was with an electric current.

Electricity…

The loudspeakers? No, the voltage was far too low to set off a blasting cap. So was the battery in his torch.

The voice rang out again, giving the one-minute warning.

Bond wiped the sweat from his palms and worked the pistol’s slide, ejecting a bullet. With his knife he prised out the lead slug and tossed it aside. He then pressed the cartridge, filled with gunpowder, into the wad of explosive, which he moulded to the door.

He stepped back, aimed carefully at the tiny disc of his cartridge and squeezed off a round. The bullet hit the primer, which set off the powder and in turn the plastic. With a huge flare the explosion blew the lock to pieces.

It also knocked Bond to the floor, amid a shower of wood splinters and smoke. For a few seconds he lay stunned, then struggled to his feet and staggered to the door, which was open, though jammed. The gap was only about eight inches wide. He grabbed the knob and began to slowly wrest the heavy panel open.

‘ Attention! Opgelet! Groźba! Nebezpeči!’

In the site caravan, Severan Hydt and Niall Dunne stood beside each other, watching the old British Army hospital, in tense anticipation. Everybody – even the gear-cold Dunne, Hydt speculated – enjoyed watching a controlled explosion bring down a building.

Since Janssen had not answered his phone and Dunne had heard a gunshot from inside, the Irishman had told Hydt he was sure the security man, Eric Janssen, had to be dead. He had sealed the hospital exits, then sprinted back to the caravan, running like an awkward animal, and had told Hydt that he was going to detonate the charges in the building. It was scheduled to come down tomorrow but there was no reason that the demolition couldn’t be brought forward.

Dunne had activated the computerised system and pressed two red buttons simultaneously, starting the sequence. An insurance liability policy required that a 180-second recorded warning be broadcast throughout the building in languages representing those spoken by ninety per cent of the workers. It would have taken longer to override the safety measure but if the intruder wasn’t buried in the tunnel he was stuck in the mortuary. There was no way he could escape in time.

If, tomorrow or the next day, someone came asking about a missing person Hydt could reply, ‘Certainly, we’ll check… What? Oh, my God, we had no idea! We did all we were supposed to with the fence and the signs. And how could he have missed the recorded warnings? We’re sorry – but we’re hardly responsible.’

‘Fifteen seconds,’ Dunne said.

Silence as Hydt mouthed the countdown.

The timer on the wall now hit 0 and the computer sent its prearranged signal to the detonators.

They couldn’t see the flash of the explosions at first – the initial ones were internal and low, to take out the main structural beams. But a few seconds later bursts of light flared like paparazzi cameras, followed by the sound of Christmas crackers, then deeper booms. The building seemed to shudder. Then, as if kneeling to offer its neck to an executioner’s blade, the hospital slowly dipped and went down, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling outwards fast.

After a few moments, Dunne said, ‘People will have heard it. We should go.’

Hydt, though, was mesmerised by the pile of debris, so very different from the elegant if faded structure it had been a few moments ago. What had been something had become naught.

‘Severan,’ Dunne persisted.

Hydt found himself aroused. He thought of Jessica Barnes, her white hair, her pale, textured skin. She knew nothing about Gehenna so he hadn’t brought her today, but he was sorry she wasn’t there. Well, he’d ask her to meet him at his office, then drive home.

His belly gave a pleasant tap. A sensation supercharged by the memory of the body he’d found at Green Way that morning… and in anticipation of what would happen tomorrow.

A hundred deaths…

‘Yes, yes.’ Severan Hydt collected his briefcase and stepped outside. He didn’t climb into the Audi A8 immediately, though. He turned to study once more the dust and smoke hovering over the destroyed building. He noted that the explosive had been skilfully set. He reminded himself to thank the crew. Rigging charges is a true art. The trick is not to blow up the building but simply to eliminate what keeps it upright, allowing nature – gravity, in this case – to do the job.

Which was, Hydt now reflected, a metaphor for his own role on earth.

Early-afternoon zebra bands of sun and shadow rolled over the low rows of sugarbeet in the Fenland field.

James Bond lay on his back, arms and legs splayed, like a child who’d been making angels in snow and didn’t want to go home. Surrounded by the sea of low green leaves, he was thirty yards from the pile of rubble that had been the old army hospital… the pile of rubble that had very nearly entombed him. He was – temporarily, he prayed – deprived of his hearing, thanks to the shockwaves from the plastic explosive. He’d kept his eyes closed against the flash and shrapnel, but he’d had to use both hands to manage his escape, wrenching open the mental-health ward’s door, as the main charges detonated and the building came down behind him.

He now rose slightly – sugar beet in May provided scant cover – and gazed around for signs of a threat.

Nothing. Whoever had been behind the plan – the Irishman, Noah or an associate – wasn’t searching for him; they were probably convinced he had died in the collapse.

Breathing hard to clear his lungs of dust and sour chemical smoke, he got to his feet and staggered from the field.

He returned to the car and dropped into the front seat. He fished a bottle of water from the back and drank some, then leant outside and poured the rest into his eyes.

He fired the massive engine, comforted that he could now hear the bubble of the exhaust, and took a different route out of March, heading east to avoid running into anyone connected with the demolition site, then doubling back west. Soon he was on the A1, heading back to London to decipher whatever cryptic messages about Incident Twenty the scraps of ash he’d collected might hold.