Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

Oh, one cubicle was occupied and the other was jammed so I went for another one. Didn’t want to bother you when you were on the phone.

Plausible deniability…

Bond remembered where he’d seen the sign when he’d entered. He now hurried down a deserted hallway.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. RESTRICTED

The metal security door was operated by a number pad, in conjunction with a key card reader. Bond palmed the inhaler and took several pictures, including close-ups of the pad.

Come on, he urged an unsuspecting confederate inside the room – someone must be thinking about a visit to the loo or fetching some coffee from the canteen.

But no one co-operated. The door remained shut and Bond decided he had to get back to Hydt. He turned on his heel and hurried down the corridor again. Thank God, Hydt was still on his mobile. He looked up when Bond was past the bathroom door; to Hydt’s mind he had just exited.

He disconnected. ‘Come this way, Theron.’

He led Bond down a corridor and into a large room that seemed to serve as both an office and living quarters. A huge desk faced a picture window, with a view of Hydt’s wasteland empire. A bedroom, curiously, was off to the side. Bond noticed that the bed was unmade. Hydt diverted him away from it and closed the door. He gestured Bond to a sofa and coffee-table in a corner.

‘Drink?’

‘Whisky. Scotch. Not a blend.’

‘Auchentoshan?’

Bond knew the distillery, outside Glasgow. ‘Good. A drop of water.’

Hydt tipped a generous quantity into a glass, added the water and handed it to him. He poured himself a glass of South African Constantia. Bond knew the honey-sweet wine, a recently revived version of Napoleon’s favourite drink. The deposed emperor had had hundreds of gallons shipped to St Helena, where he spent his last years in exile. He had sipped it on his deathbed.

The gloomy room was filled with antiques. Mary Goodnight was forever reporting excitedly on bargains she’d found in London’s Portobello Road market, but none of the items in Hydt’s office looked as if they’d fetch much money there; they were scuffed, battered, lopsided. Old photographs, paintings and bas-reliefs hung on the walls. Slabs of stone showed fading images of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, though Bond couldn’t tell who they were supposed to be.

Hydt sat and they tipped their glasses towards one another. Hydt gazed affectionately at the walls. ‘Most of these have come from buildings my companies demolished. To me, they’re like relics from the bodies of saints. Which also interest me, by the way. I own several – though that is a fact no one in Rome is aware of.’ He caressed the wineglass. ‘Whatever is old or discarded gives me comfort. I couldn’t tell you why. Nor do I care to know. I think, Theron, most people waste far too much time wondering why they are as they are. Accept your nature and satisfy it. I love decay, decline… the things others shun.’ He paused, then asked, ‘Would you like to know how I got started in this business? It’s an informative story.’

‘Yes, please.’

‘I had some difficult times in my youth. Ah, who didn’t, of course? But I was forced to start work young. It happened to be at a rubbish collection company. I was a London binman. One day my mates and I were having tea, taking a break, when the driver pointed to a flat over the road. He said, “That’s where one of those blokes with the Clerkenwell crowd lives.”’

Clerkenwell: perhaps the biggest and most successful organised-crime syndicate in British history. It was now largely dismantled but for twenty years its members had brutally ruled their turf around Islington. They were reportedly responsible for twenty-five murders.

Hydt continued, his dark eyes sparkling, ‘I was intrigued. After tea we continued on our rounds, but without the others knowing I hid the rubbish from that flat nearby. I went back at night and collected the bag, brought it home and went through it. I did that for weeks. I examined every letter, every tin, every bill, every condom wrapper. Most of it was useless. But I found one thing that was interesting. A note with an address in East London. “Here,” was all it said. But I had an idea what it meant. Now, in those days I was supplementing my income as a detectorist. You know about them? Those folks who walk along the beach at Brighton or Eastbourne and find coins and rings in the sand after the tourists have gone for the day. I had a good metal detector and so the next weekend I went to the property mentioned in the note. As I’d expected, it was a vacant lot.’ Hydt was animated, enjoying himself. ‘It took me ten minutes to find the buried gun. I bought a fingerprint kit and, though I was no expert, it seemed that the prints on the gun and the note matched. I didn’t know exactly what the gun had been used for but-’

‘But why bury it if it hadn’t been used to murder somebody?’

‘Exactly. I went to see the Clerkenwell man. I told him that my solicitor had the gun and the note – there was no solicitor, of course, but I bluffed well. I said if I didn’t call him in an hour he would send everything to Scotland Yard. Was it a gamble? Of course. But a calculated one. The man blanched and immediately asked me what I wanted. I named a figure. He paid in cash. I was on my way to opening a small collection company of my own. It eventually became Green Way.’

‘That gives a whole new meaning to the word “recycling”, doesn’t it?’

‘Indeed.’ Hydt seemed amused by the comment. He sipped his wine and gazed out at the grounds, the spheres of the burn-off flames glowing in the distance. ‘Did you know that there were three man-made phenomena you could see from outer space? The Great Wall of China, the Pyramids… and the old Fresh Kills landfill in New Jersey.’

Bond did not.

‘To me discard is more than a business,’ Hydt said, ‘It’s a window on to our society… and into our souls.’ He sat forward. ‘You see, we may acquire something in life unintentionally – through a gift, neglect, inheritance, fate, error, greed, laziness – but when we discard something, it’s almost always with cold intent.’

He took a judicious sip of wine. ‘Theron, do you know what entropy is?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Entropy,’ said Hydt, clicking his long, yellow nails, ‘is the essential truth of nature. It’s the tendency towards decay and disorder – in physics, in society, in art, in living creatures… in everything. It’s the path to anarchy.’ He smiled. ‘That sounds pessimistic, but it isn’t. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. You can never go wrong by embracing the truth. And truth it is.’

His eyes settled on a bas-relief. ‘I changed my name, you know.’

‘I didn’t,’ Bond said, thinking: Maarten Holt.

‘I changed it because my surname was my father’s and my given name was selected by him. I wished to have no more connection with him.’ A cool smile. ‘That childhood I mentioned. I chose “Hydt” because it echoed the dark side of the protagonist in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , which I’d read at school and enjoyed. You see, I believe we all have a public side and a dark side. The book confirmed that.’

‘And “Severan”? It’s unusual.’

‘You wouldn’t think so if you’d lived in Rome in the second and third centuries AD.’

‘No?’

‘I read history and archaeology at university. Mention ancient Rome, Theron, and most people think of what? The Julio-Claudian line of emperors. Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. At least they think so if they read I, Claudius or saw Derek Jacobi in brilliant form on the BBC. But that whole line lasted a pathetically short time – slightly over a hundred years. Yes, yes, mare nostrum , Praetorian guards, films staring Russell Crowe… all very decadent and dramatic. “My God, Caligula, that’s your sister !” But for me, the truth of Rome was revealed much later in a different family line, the Severan emperors, founded by Septimius Severus many years after Nero killed himself. You see, they presided over the decay of the Empire. Their reign culminated in what historians called the Period of Anarchy.’