Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

The camera latched on to the German car. ‘There’s a good lad,’ he said to the technician.

The Audi speeded up. Bond was following discreetly but never missing a turn. As skilful as the driver of the German car was, Bond was better – anticipating when the chauffeur would try something clever, some aborted turn or unexpected lane change, and counter the measure. The cars zipped through green, amber and red alike.

‘Going north. Prince Regent Lane.’

‘So London City airport’s out.’

The Audi hit Newham Way.

‘All right,’ Deputy-Deputy enthused, tugging at his eruption of hair. ‘It’s either Stansted or Luton.’

‘Going north on the A406,’ another technician, a round blonde woman who had materialised from nowhere, called.

Then, after some impressive fox and hound driving, the competitors, Audi and Bentley, were on the M25 going anticlockwise.

‘It’s Luton!’ the assistant cried.

More subdued, Osborne-Smith ordered, ‘Get the whirly-bird moving.’

‘Will do.’

In silence they followed the progress of the Audi. Finally it sped into the short-term car park at Luton airport. Bond wasn’t far behind. The car parked carefully out of view of Hydt’s.

‘Chopper’s setting down on the anti-terror pad at the airport. Our people’ll deploy towards the car park.’

No one got out of the Audi. Osborne-Smith smiled. ‘I knew it! Hydt’s waiting to meet associates. We’ll get them all. Tell our people to stay under cover until I give the word. And get all the eyes at Luton online.’

He reflected that the CCTV cameras on the ground might make it possible for them to see Bond’s shocked reaction when the Division Three teams descended like hawks and arrested Hydt and the Irishman. That hadn’t been Osborne-Smith’s goal in ordering the video, of course… but it would be a very nice bonus.

Hans Groelle sat behind the wheel of Severan Hydt’s sleek, black Audi A8. The thickly built, blond Dutch Army veteran had done some motocross and other racing in his younger days and he was pleased Mr Hydt had asked him to put his driving skills to use this morning. Relishing the memory of the frantic drive from Canning Town to Luton airport, Groelle listened absently to the three-way conversation of the man and woman in the back seat and the passenger in the front.

They were laughing about the excitement of the race. The driver of the Bentley was extremely competent but, more important, intuitive. He couldn’t have known where Groelle was going so he’d had to anticipate the turns, many of them utterly random. It was as if the pursuing driver had had some sixth sense that told him when Groelle was going to turn, to slow, to speed forward.

A natural driver.

But who was he?

Well, they’d soon find out. No one in the Audi had been able to get a description of the driver – he was that clever – but they’d pieced together the number plate. Groelle had called an associate in the Green Way headquarters, who was using some contacts at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea to find out who owned the car.

But whatever the threat, Hans Groelle would be ready. A Colt 1911.45 sat snug and warm in his left armpit.

He glanced once more at the sliver of the Bentley’s grey wing and said to the man in the back seat, ‘It worked, Harry. We tricked them. Call Mr Hydt.’

The two passengers in the back and the man sitting beside Groelle were Green Way workers involved in Gehenna. They resembled Mr Hydt, Ms Barnes and Niall Dunne, who were currently en route to an entirely different airport, Gatwick, where a private jet was waiting to fly them out of the country.

The deception had been Dunne’s idea, of course. He was a cold fish, but that didn’t dull his brain. There’d been trouble up in March – somebody had killed Eric Janssen, one of Groelle’s fellow security men. The killer was dead, but Dunne had assumed there might be others, watching the factory or the house, perhaps both. So he had found three employees close enough in appearance to deceive watchers and had driven them to Canning Town very early that morning. Groelle had then carted suitcases out to the garage, followed by Mr Hydt, Ms Barnes and the Irishman. Groelle and the decoys, who’d been waiting in the Audi, then sped towards Luton. Ten minutes later the real entourage got into the back of an unmarked Green Way International lorry and drove to Gatwick.

Now the decoys would remain in the Audi as long as possible to keep whoever was in the Bentley occupied long enough for Mr Hydt and the others to get out of UK airspace.

Groelle said, ‘We have a bit of a wait.’ He gestured at the radio with a glance toward the Green Way workers. ‘What’ll it be?’

They voted and Radio 2 took the majority.

‘Ah, ah. It was a bloody decoy,’ Osborne-Smith said. His voice was as calm as always but the expletive, if that was what it was nowadays, indicated that he was livid.

A CCTV camera in the Luton car park was now beaming an image on to the big screen in Division Three and the reality show presently airing was not felicitous. The angular view into the Audi wasn’t the best in the world but it was clear that the couple in the back seats were not Severan Hydt and his female companion. And the passenger in the front, whom he’d taken to be the Irishman, was not the gawky blond man he’d seen earlier, plodding to the garage.

Decoys.

‘They have to be going to some London airport,’ Deputy-Deputy pointed out. ‘Let’s split up the team.’

‘Unless they decided to cruise up to Manchester or Leeds-Bradford.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Send all the Watchers in A Branch Hydt’s picture. Without delay.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Osborne-Smith squinted as he looked at the image broadcast from the CCTV. He could see a bit of the wing of James Bond’s Bentley parked twenty-five yards from the Audi.

If there was any consolation to the flap, it was that at least Bond had fallen for the ruse too. Combined with his lack of co-operation, his questionable use of the French secret service and his holier-than-thou attitude, the lapse might just signal a significant downsizing of his career.

The fifteen-foot lorry, leased to Green Way International but unmarked, pulled up to the kerb at the executive flight services terminal at Gatwick airport. The door slid open and Severan Hydt, an older woman and the Irishman climbed out and collected their suitcases.

Thirty feet away, in the car park, sat a black-and-red Mini Cooper, whose interior décor included a yellow rose in a plastic vase wedged into the cup holder. Behind the wheel, James Bond was watching the trio of passengers deploy to the pavement. The Irishman, naturally, was looking around carefully. He never seemed to drop his guard.

‘What do you think of it?’ Bond asked, into the hands-free connected to his mobile.

‘It?’

‘The Bentley.’

‘“It”? Honestly, James, a car like this simply demands a name,’ Philly Maidenstone chided. She was sitting in his Bentley Continental GT, at Luton airport, having chased Hydt’s Audi all the way from Canning Town.

‘I never got into the habit of naming my cars.’ Any more than I’d give my gun a gender, he reflected. And kept his eyes on the threesome not far away.

Bond had been convinced that after the incidents in Serbia and March, Hydt – or the Irishman, more likely – would suspect he might be tailed in London. He was also concerned that Osborne-Smith had arranged to follow Bond himself. So, after he had talked to René Mathis, he’d left his flat and sped to a covered car park in the City, where he’d met Philly to swap cars. She was to trail Hydt’s Audi, which Bond was sure would be a decoy, in his Bentley, while he, in her Mini, would wait for the man’s true departure, which came just ten minutes after the German car had sped away from Hydt’s Canning Town home.