Jeffery Deaver - Carte Blanche

‘He’s dead, he’s dead…’ Jessica pressed her head against Bond’s shoulder.

Bheka Jordaan lifted her handcuffs out of their holster. ‘She tried to help me,’ Bond reminded her. ‘She didn’t know what Hydt was doing. I’m sure of it.’

Jordaan put the cuffs away. ‘We’ll drive her down to the station, take a statement. I don’t think we’ll have to pursue it beyond that.’

Bond detached himself from Jessica. He took her by the shoulders. ‘Thank you for helping me. I know it was hard.’

She breathed in deeply. Then, calmer, she asked, ‘Who did it? Who shot him?’

‘Dunne.’

She didn’t seem surprised. ‘I never liked him. Severan was passionate, impulsive. He never thought things through. Niall realised that and seduced him with all his planning and his intelligence. I didn’t think he could be trusted. But I never had the courage to say anything.’ She closed her eyes momentarily.

‘You did a good job with the praying,’ Bond told her.

‘Too good,’ she whispered.

On Jessica’s cheek and neck were stark patches of Hydt’s blood. It was the first time, Bond realised, that he’d seen any colour on her. He looked her in the eye. ‘I know some people who can help you when you get back to London. They’ll be in touch. I’ll see to it.’

‘Thank you,’ Jessica murmured.

A policewoman led her away.

Bond was startled by a man’s voice nearby: ‘Is it clear?’

He frowned, unable to see the speaker. Then he understood. Gregory Lamb was still in the skip. ‘It’s clear.’

The agent scrambled out of his hiding-place.

‘Mind the blood,’ Bond told Lamb, as he nearly stepped in some.

‘Oh, my God!’ he muttered and looked as if he was going to be sick.

Ignoring him, Bond said to Jordaan, ‘I need to know how extensive Gehenna is. Can you get your officers to collect all the files and computers in Research and Development? And I’ll need your computer-crimes outfit to crack the passwords.’

‘Yes, of course. We’ll have them brought to the SAPS office. You can review them there.’

Nkosi said, ‘I’ll do it, Commander.’

Bond thanked him. The man’s round face seemed less wry and irrepressible than earlier. Bond supposed this had been his first firefight. He’d be changed forever by the incident but, from what Bond was seeing, the change would not diminish but rather would enhance the young officer. Nkosi gestured toward some SAPS Forensic Science Service officers and led them inside the building.

Bond glanced at Jordaan. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

She turned to him.

‘What did you say? After you climbed out of the ditch, you said something.’

With her particular complexion, she might or might not have been blushing. ‘Don’t tell Ugogo.’

‘I won’t.’

‘The first was Zulu for… I guess you’d say, in English, “crap”.’

‘I have some variations on that myself. And the other word?’

She squinted. ‘That, I think, I will not tell you, James.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it refers to a certain part of the male anatomy… and I do not think it wise to encourage you in that regard.’

Late afternoon, the sun beginning to dip in the north-west, James Bond drove from the Table Mountain Hotel, where he’d showered and changed, to Cape Town’s central police station.

As he entered and made for Jordaan’s office he noticed several pairs of eyes staring at him. The expressions were no longer curious, he sensed, as had been the case upon his first visit here, several days ago, but admiring. Perhaps the story of his role in foiling Severan Hydt’s plan had circulated. Or the tale of how he’d taken out two adversaries and blown up a landfill with a single bullet, no mean accomplishment. (The fire, Bond had learnt, was largely extinguished – to his immense relief. He would not have wanted to be known as the man who had burnt a sizeable area of Cape Town to its sandstone foundation.)

He was met by Bheka Jordaan in the hall. She’d taken another shower to clean off the remnants of Severan Hydt and had changed into dark trousers and a yellow shirt, bright and cheerful, perhaps an antidote to the horror of the events at Green Way.

She gestured him into her office. They sat together in chairs before her desk. ‘Dunne’s managed to get to Mozambique. Government security spotted him there but he got lost in some unsavoury part of Maputo – which, frankly, is most of the city. I called some colleagues in Pretoria, in Financial Intelligence, the Special Investigations Unit and the Banking Risk Information Centre. They checked his accounts – under a warrant, of course. Yesterday afternoon two hundred thousand pounds were wired into a Swiss account of Dunne’s. Half an hour ago he transferred it to dozens of anonymous online accounts. He can access it from anywhere so we have no idea where he intends to go.’

Bond’s expression of disgust closely matched hers.

‘If he surfaces or leaves Mozambique, their security people will let me know. But until then he’s out of our reach.’

It was then that Nkosi appeared, pushing a large cart filled with boxes – the documents and laptop computers from the Green Way Research and Development department.

The warrant officer and Bond followed Jordaan to an empty office where Nkosi put the boxes on the floor around the desk. Bond started to lift off a lid, but Jordaan said quickly, ‘Put these on. I won’t have you ruining evidence.’ She handed him blue latex gloves.

Bond gave a wry laugh but took them. Jordaan and Nkosi left him to the job. Before he opened the boxes, though, he placed a call to Bill Tanner.

‘James,’ the chief of staff said. ‘We’ve got the signals. Sounds like all hell’s broken loose down there.’

Bond laughed at his choice of words and explained in detail about the shootout at Green Way, Hydt’s fate and Dunne’s escape. He explained too about the drug company president who had hired Hydt; Tanner would ask the FBI in Washington to open an investigation of their own and arrest the man.

Bond said, ‘I need a rendition team to capture Dunne – if we can find out where he is. Any of our double-one agents nearby?’

Tanner sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do, James, but I don’t have a lot of people to spare, not with the situation in eastern Sudan. We’re helping the FCO and the marines with security. I might be able to get you some special forces – SAS or SBS? Would that suit?’

‘Fine. I’m going to look through everything we’ve collected from Hydt’s headquarters. I’ll call back when I’ve finished and brief M.’

They rang off and Bond started to lay out the Gehenna documents on the large desk in the office Jordaan had provided. He hesitated. Then, feeling ridiculous, he slipped on the blue gloves, deciding that at least they would provide an amusing story for his friend Ronnie Vallance of the Yard. Vallance often said that Bond would make a terrible detective-inspector, given his preference for beating up or shooting perpetrators, rather than marshalling evidence to see them in the dock.

He leafed through the documents for almost an hour. Finally, when he felt well enough informed to discuss the situation he telephoned London again.

M said gruffly, ‘It’s a nightmare here, 007. That fool in Division Three pushed a very big button. Got all of Whitehall closed up. Downing Street too. If there’s anything that plays badly with the tabloids, it’s an international security meeting being cancelled because of a bloody security alert.’

‘Was it groundless?’ Bond had been convinced that York was the site of the attack but that didn’t mean London wasn’t at some risk, as he’d told Tanner during his satellite call from Jessica Barnes’s office.