Jeffery Deaver: Carte Blanche

Bond aimed his pistol and fired two shots close to the Irishman, to drive him back to the Mercedes. The man crouched, startled, then vanished fast.

Bond looked towards the restaurant side of the track, where the Mercedes was parked. His mouth tightened. The Serbian agents hadn’t followed his orders. They were now flanking the work shed, having pulled the Irishman’s Slavic associate to the ground and slipped nylon restraints around his wrists. The two were now moving closer to the train.

Incompetence…

Bond scrabbled to his feet and, keeping low, ran towards them.

The Serbs were pointing at the tracks. The rucksack now sat on the ground, among some tall plants near the engine, obscuring a man. Crouching, the agents moved forward cautiously.

The bag was the Irishman’s… but, of course, the man behind it was not. The driver’s body, probably.

‘No,’ Bond whispered into the SRAC. ‘It’s a trick!… Are you there?’

But the older agent wasn’t listening. He stepped forward, shouting, ‘ Ne mrdaj! Do not move!’

At that moment the Irishman leant out of the engine’s cab and fired a burst from his pistol, hitting him in the head. He dropped hard.

His younger colleague assumed that the man on the ground was firing and emptied his automatic weapon into the dead body of the driver.

Bond shouted, ‘ Opasnost! ’

But it was too late. The Irishman leant out of the cab again and shot the younger agent in the right arm, near the elbow. He dropped his gun and cried out, falling backwards.

As the Irishman leapt from the train, he let go half a dozen rounds towards Bond, who returned fire, aiming for the feet and ankles. But the haze and vapours were thick. He missed. The Irishman holstered his gun, shouldered the rucksack and dragged the younger agent towards the Mercedes. They disappeared.

Bond sprinted back to the Jetta, jumped in and roared off. Five minutes later he soared over a hillock and landed, skidding, in the field behind Restoran Roštilj. The scene was one of complete chaos as diners and staff fled in panic. The Mercedes was gone. Glancing towards the derailed train, he could see that the Irishman had killed not only the older agent but his own associate – the Serbian he’d dined with. He’d shot him as he’d lain on his belly, hands bound.

Bond got out of the Jetta and frisked the body for pocket litter but the Irishman had stripped the man of his wallet and any other material. Bond pulled out his own Oakley sunglasses, wiped them clean, then pressed the dead man’s thumb and index finger against the lens. He ran back to the Jetta and sped after the Mercedes, urging the car to seventy miles an hour despite the meandering road and potholes pitting the tarmac.

A few minutes later he glimpsed something light-coloured in a lay-by ahead. He braked hard, barely controlling the fishtailing skid, and stopped, the car engulfed in smoke from its tyres, a few yards from the younger agent. He got out and bent over the man, who was shivering, crying. The wound in his arm was bad and he’d lost a great deal of blood. One shoe was off and a toenail was gone. The Irishman had tortured him.

Bond opened his folding knife, cut the man’s shirt with the razor-sharp blade and bound a wool strip round his arm. With a stick he found just off the lay-by he made a tourniquet and applied it. He leant down and wiped sweat from the man’s face. ‘Where is he going?’

Gasping, his face a mask of agony, he rambled in Serbo-Croatian. Then, realising who Bond was, he said, ‘You will call my brother… You must take me to the hospital. I will tell you a place to go.’

‘I need to know where he went.’

‘I didn’t say nothing. He tried. But I didn’t tell nothing about you.’

The boy had spilt out everything he knew about the operation, of course, but that wasn’t the issue now. Bond said, ‘Where did he go?’

‘The hospital… Take me and I will tell you.’

‘Tell me or you’ll die in five minutes,’ Bond said evenly, loosening the tourniquet on his right arm. Blood cascaded.

The young man blinked away tears. ‘All right! You bastard! He ask how to get to E Seven-five, the fast road from Highway Twenty-one. That will take him to Hungary. He is going north. Please!’

Bond tightened the tourniquet again. He knew, of course, that the Irishman wasn’t going north: the man was a cruel and clever tactician. He didn’t need directions. Bond saw his own devotion to tradecraft in the Irishman. Even before he had arrived in Serbia the man would have memorised the geography around Novi Sad. He’d go south on Highway 21, the only major road nearby. He’d be making for Belgrade or an evacuation site in the area.

Bond patted the young agent’s pockets and pulled out his mobile. He hit the emergency call number, 112. When he heard a woman’s voice answer, he propped the phone beside the man’s mouth, then ran back to the Jetta. He concentrated on driving as fast as he could over the uneven road surface, losing himself in the choreography of braking and steering.

He took a turn fast and the car skidded, crossing the white line. An oncoming lorry loomed, a big one, with a Cyrillic logo. It veered away and the driver hit the horn angrily. Bond swerved back into his lane, missing a collision by inches, and continued in pursuit of the only lead they had to Noah and the thousands of deaths on Friday.

Five minutes later, approaching Highway 21, Bond slowed. Ahead he saw a flicker of orange and, in the sky, roiling smoke, obscuring the moon and stars. He soon arrived at the accident site. The Irishman had missed a sharp bend and sought refuge in what seemed to be a wide grass shoulder but in fact was not. A line of brush masked a steep drop. The car had gone over and was now upside-down. The engine was on fire.

Bond pulled up, killed the Jetta’s motor and got out. Then, drawing the Walther, he half ran, half slid down the hill to where the vehicle lay, scanning for threats and seeing none. As he closed on it he stopped. The Irishman was dead. Still strapped into the seat, he was inverted, arms dangling over his shoulders. Blood covered his face and neck and pooled on the car’s ceiling.

Squinting against the fumes, Bond kicked in the driver’s window to drag the body out. He would salvage the man’s mobile and what pocket litter he could, then wrench open the boot to collect luggage and laptops.

He opened his knife again to cut the seat belt. In the distance: the urgent wah-ha of sirens, growing louder. He looked back up the road. The fire engines were still a few miles away but they’d be here soon. Get on with it! The flames from the engine were increasingly energetic. The smoke was vile.

As he began to saw away at the belt, though, he thought suddenly: firefighters? Already?

That made no sense. Police, yes. But not the fire brigade. He gripped the driver’s bloodied hair and turned the head.

It was not the Irishman. Bond gazed at the man’s jacket: the Cyrillic lettering was the same as on the lorry he’d nearly hit. The Irishman had forced the vehicle to stop. He’d cut the driver’s throat, strapped him into the Mercedes and sent it over the cliff here, then called the local fire service in order to slow the traffic and prevent Bond pursuing him.

The Irishman would have taken the rucksack and everything else from the boot, of course. Inside the car, though, on the inverted ceiling, towards the back seat, there were a few scraps of paper. Bond jammed them into his pockets before the flames forced him away. He ran back to the Jetta and sped off towards Highway 21, away from the approaching flashing lights.

He fished out his mobile. It resembled an iPhone, but was a bit larger and featured special optics, audio systems and other hardware. The unit contained multiple phones – one that could be registered to an agent’s official or nonofficial cover identity, then a hidden unit, with hundreds of operational apps and encryption packages. (Because the device had been developed by Q Branch it had taken all of a day for some wit in the office to dub them ‘iQPhones’.)