Part 21 (1/2)

Lamb rose and hovered awkwardly. 'Well, I stand ready to a.s.sist. I'm at your service. Really, anything you need.' He seemed painfully sincere.

'Thanks.' Bond felt the urge, absurdly, to slip him twenty rand.

Before he left, Lamb returned to the minibar and relieved it of two miniatures of vodka. 'You don't mind, do you? M's got a positively ma.s.sive budget; everyone knows that.'

Bond saw him out.

Good riddance, he thought, as the door closed. Percy Osborne-Smith was a charmer by comparison with this fellow.

39.

Bond sat at the expansive desk in the hotel suite, booted up his computer, logged on via his iris and fingerprint and scrolled through the information Bheka Jordaan had uploaded. He was ploughing through it when an encrypted email arrived.

James: For your eyes only.

Have confirmed Steel Cartridge was a major active measure by KGB/SVR to a.s.sa.s.sinate clandestine MI6 and CIA agents and local a.s.sets, so that the extent of Russian infiltration would not be learnt, in attempt to promote detente during fall of Soviet Union and improve relations with the West.

The last Steel Cartridge targeted killings occurred late '80s or early '90s. Found only one incident so far: the victim was a private contractor working for MI6. Deep cover. No other details, except that the active measures agent made the death appear to be an accident. Actual steel cartridges were sometimes left at the scenes of the deaths as warning to other agents to keep quiet.

Am continuing investigation.

Your other eyes, Philly Bond slouched back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. Well, what do I do with this? he asked himself.

He read the message again, then sent a brief email thanking Philly. He rocked back and, in the mirror across the room, caught a glimpse of his eyes, hard and set like a predator's.

He reflected: so, the KGB active measures agent killed the MI6 contract op in the late eighties, early nineties.

James Bond's father had died during that period.

It had happened in December, not long after his eleventh birthday. Andrew and Monique Bond had dropped young James off with his aunt Charmian in Pett Bottom, Kent, leaving behind the promise that they would return in plenty of time for Christmas festivities. They had then flown to Switzerland and driven to Mont Blanc for five days of skiing and rock and ice climbing.

His parents' a.s.surance, however, had been hollow. Two days later they were dead, having fallen from one of the astonis.h.i.+ngly beautiful cliff faces of the Aiguilles Rouges, near Chamonix.

Beautiful cliffs, yes, impressive . . . but not excessively dangerous, not where they had been climbing. As an adult, Bond had looked into the circ.u.mstances of the accident. He'd learnt that the slope they'd fallen from did not require advanced climbing techniques; indeed, no one had ever been injured, let alone died, there. But, of course, mountains are notoriously fickle and Bond had taken at face value the story the gendarme had told his aunt: that his parents had fallen because a rope frayed at the same time as a large boulder had given way.

'Mademoiselle, je suis desole de vous dire . . .'

When he was young, James Bond had enjoyed travelling with his parents to the foreign countries where Andrew Bond's company sent him. He'd enjoyed living in hotel suites. He'd enjoyed the local cuisines, very different from that served in the pubs and restaurants in England and Scotland. He'd been captivated with the exotic cultures the dress, the music, the language.

He also enjoyed spending time with his father. His mother would hand James over to carers and friends when one of her freelance photojournalism a.s.signments arose, but his father would occasionally take him to business meetings in restaurants or hotel lobbies. The boy would perch nearby, with a volume of Tolkien or an American detective novel, while his father talked to unsmiling men named Sam or Micah or Juan.

James was happy to be included what son doesn't like to tag along with his dad? He had always been curious, though, as to why sometimes Andrew insisted that he join him while at others he said no quite firmly.

Bond had thought nothing more of this . . . until the training sessions at Fort Monckton.

It was there, in the lessons on clandestine operations, that one instructor had said something that caught his attention. The round, bespectacled man from MI6's tradecraft training section had told the group, 'In most clandestine situations, it's not advisable for an agent or an a.s.set to be married or have children. If they happen to, it's best to make sure the family is kept far removed from the agent's operational life. However, there's one instance in which it's advantageous to have a quote ”typical” life. These agents will be operating in deepest cover and handling the most critical a.s.signments, where the intelligence to be gathered is vital. In these cases a family life is important to remove the enemy's suspicions that they're operatives. Typically their official cover will be working for a company or organisation that interests enemy agents: infrastructure, information, armaments, aeros.p.a.ce or government. They will be posted to different locations every few years and take their families with them.'

James Bond's father had worked for a major British armaments company. He had been posted to a number of international capitals. His wife and son had accompanied him.

The instructor had continued, 'And in certain circ.u.mstances, on the most critical a.s.signments whether a brush pa.s.s or a face-to-face meeting it's useful for the operative to take his child with him. Nothing proclaims innocence more than having a youngster with you. Seeing this, the enemy will almost always believe that you're the real deal no parent would want to endanger his or her child.' He regarded the agents sitting before him in the cla.s.sroom, their faces registering varying reactions at his pa.s.sionless message. 'Combating evil sometimes requires a suspension of accepted values.'

Bond had thought: his father a spy? Impossible. Absurd.

Still, after he had left Fort Monckton he spent some time looking into his father's past, but found no evidence of a clandestine life. The only evidence was a series of payments made to his aunt for her and James's benefit, over and above the proceeds from his parents' insurance policy. These were made annually until James had turned eighteen by a company that must have had some affiliation with Andrew's employer, though he could never find out exactly where it was based or what the nature of the payments had been.

Eventually he convinced himself that whole idea was mad and forgot about it.

Until the Russian signal about Steel Cartridge.

Because one other aspect of his parents' death had been largely overlooked.

In the accident report that the gendarmes had prepared, it was mentioned that a steel rifle cartridge, 7.62mm, had been found near his father's body.

Young James had received it among his parents' effects and, since Andrew had been an executive with an arms company, it was a.s.sumed that the bullet had been a sample of his wares to show to customers.

On Monday, two days ago, after he had read the Russian report, Bond had gone into the online archives of his father's company. He'd learnt that it did not manufacture ammunition. Neither had it ever sold any weapons that fired a 7.62mm round.

This was the bullet that sat now in a conspicuous place on the mantelpiece of his London flat.

Had it been dropped accidentally by a hunter? Or left intentionally as a warning?

The KGB's reference to Operation Steel Cartridge had solidified within Bond the desire to learn whether or not his father had been a secret agent. He had to. He did not need to reconcile himself to the possibility that his father had lied to him. All parents deceive their children. In most cases, though, it's for the sake of expedience or through laziness or thoughtlessness; if his father had lied it was because the Official Secrets Act had compelled him to.

Neither did he need to know the truth so that he could as a TV psychiatrist might suggest revisit his youthful loss and mourn somehow more authentically. What nonsense.

No, he wanted to know the truth for a much simpler reason, one that fitted him like a Savile Row bespoke suit: the person who had killed his parents might still be at large in the world, enjoying the sun, sitting down to a pleasant meal or even conspiring to take other lives. If such were the case, Bond knew he would make certain that his parents' a.s.sa.s.sin met the same fate as they had, and he would do so efficiently and in accordance with his official remit: by any means necessary.

40.

At close to five p.m. on Wednesday, Bond's mobile emitted the ringtone reserved for emergency messages. He hurried from the bathroom, where he'd just showered, and read the encrypted email. It was from GCHQ, reporting that Bond's attempt to bug Severan Hydt had been somewhat successful. Unknown to Captain Bheka Jordaan, the flash drive that Bond had given Hydt, holding digital pictures of the killing fields in Africa, also contained a small microphone and transmitter. What it lacked in audio resolution and battery life, it made up for in range. The signal was picked up by a satellite, amplified and beamed down to one of the ma.s.sive receiving antennae at Menwith Hill in the beautiful Yorks.h.i.+re countryside.

The device had transmitted fragments of a conversation Hydt and Dunne had had just after they'd left the fictional EJT Services office in downtown Cape Town. The words had finally made their way through the decryption queue and been read by an a.n.a.lyst, who had flagged them as critical and shot the missive to Bond.

He now read the CX the raw intelligence and the a.n.a.lysed product. It seemed that Dunne was planning to kill one of Hydt's workers, Stephan Dlamini, and his family, because the employee had seen something in a secure part of Green Way that he shouldn't have, perhaps information that related to Gehenna. Bond's goal was clear: save him at all costs.

Purpose . . . response.

The man lived outside Cape Town. The death would be made to look like a gang attack. Grenades and firebombs would be used. And the attack would occur at suppertime.

After that, though, the battery died and the device had stopped transmitting.

At suppertime. Perhaps any moment now.