Part 28 (1/2)

'I will see you tomorrow?' he asked. 'At the plant?'

A faint smile. 'Yes, I'll be there. My leash is pretty short.' She turned and walked quickly through the opening gate.

Then Bond shoved the car into first and skidded away, Jessica Barnes vanis.h.i.+ng instantly from his thoughts. His attention was on his next destination and what would greet him there.

Friend or foe?

In his chosen profession, though, James Bond had learnt that those two categories were not mutually exclusive.

49.

All Thursday morning, all afternoon there had been talk of threats.

Threats from the North Koreans, threats from the Taliban, threats from al-Qaeda, the Chechnyans, the Islamic Jihad Brotherhood, eastern Malaysia, Sudan, Indonesia. There'd been a brief discussion about the Iranians; despite the surreal rhetoric issuing from their presidential palace, n.o.body took them too seriously. M almost felt sorry for the poor regime in Tehran. Persia had once been such a great empire.

Threats . . .

But the actual a.s.sault, he thought wryly, was occurring only now, during a tea break at the security conference. M disconnected from Moneypenny and sat back stiffly in the well-worn, gilt drawing room of a building in Richmond Terrace, between Whitehall and the Victoria Embankment. It was one of those utterly unremarkable fading structures of indeterminate age in which the sweat work of governing the country was done.

The impending a.s.sault involved two ministers who sat on the Joint Intelligence Committee. Their heads were now poking through the door, side by side, bespectacled faces scanning the room until they spotted their target. Once an image of television's Two Ronnies had sidled into his head, M could not dislodge it. As they strode forward, however, there was nothing comedic about their expressions.

'Miles,' the older one greeted him. 'Sir Andrew' prefaced the man's surname and those two words were in perfect harmony with his distinguished face and silver mane.

The other, Bixton, tipped his head, whose fleshy dome reflected light from the dusty chandelier. He was breathing hard. In fact, they both were.

M didn't invite them to do so but they sat anyway, upon the Edwardian sofa across from the tea tray. He longed to remove a cheroot from his attache case and chew on it but decided against the prop.

'We'll come straight to the point,' Sir Andrew said.

'We know you have to get back to the security conference,' Bixton interjected.

'We've just been with the foreign secretary. He's in the Chamber at the moment.'

That explained their heaving chests. They couldn't have driven up from the House of Commons, since Whitehall, from Horse Guards Avenue to just past King Charles Street, had been sealed, like a submarine about to dive, so that the security conference might meet, well, securely.

'Incident Twenty?' M asked.

'Just so,' Bixton said. 'We're trying to track down the DG of Six, as well, but this b.l.o.o.d.y conference . . .' He was new to Joint Intelligence and appeared suddenly to realise perhaps he shouldn't be quite so bluntly birching the rears of those who paid him.

'. . . is b.l.o.o.d.y disruptive,' M grumbled, filling in. He had no problem whipping anyone or anything when it was deserved.

Sir Andrew took over. He said, 'Defence Intelligence and GCHQ are reporting a swell of SIGINT in Afghanistan over the past six hours.'

'General consensus is that it's to do with Incident Twenty.'

M asked, 'Anything specific to Hydt Noah or thousands of deaths? Niall Dunne? Army bases in March? Improvised explosive devices? Engineers in Dubai? Rubbish and recycling facilities in Cape Town?' M read every signal that crossed his desk or arrived in his mobile phone.

'We can't tell, can we?' Bixton answered. 'The Doughnut hasn't broken the codes yet.' GCHQ's headquarters in Cheltenham was built in the shape of a fat ring. 'The encryption packages are brand spanking new. Which has stymied everyone.'

'SIGINT is cyclical over there,' M muttered dismissively. He had been very, very senior at MI6 and had earned a reputation for unparalleled skill at mining intelligence and, more important, refining it into something useful.

'True,' Sir Andrew agreed. 'Rather too coincidental, though, that all these calls and emails have popped up just now, the day before Incident Twenty, wouldn't you think?'

Not necessarily.

He continued, 'And n.o.body's turned up anything that specifically links Hydt to the threat.'

'n.o.body' translated to '007'.

M looked at his wrist.w.a.tch, which had been his son's, a soldier with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The security meeting was set to resume in a half hour. He was exhausted and Friday, tomorrow, would be an even longer session, culminating in a tiresome dinner followed by a speech by the home secretary.

Sir Andrew noted the less-than-subtle glance at the battered timepiece: 'Long story short, Miles, the JIC is of the opinion that this Severan Hydt fellow in South Africa's a diversion. Maybe he's involved but he's not a key player in Incident Twenty. Five and Six's people think the real actors are in Afghanistan and that's where the attack will happen: military or aid workers, contractors.'

Of course, that was what they would say whatever they actually thought. The adventure in Kabul had cost billions of pounds and far too many lives; the more evil that could be found there to justify the incursion, the better. M had been aware of this from the beginning of the Incident Twenty operation.

'Now, Bond-'

'He's good, we know that,' Bixton interrupted, eyeing the chocolate biscuits M had asked not to be brought with the tea but had arrived anyway.

Sir Andrew frowned.

'It's just that he hasn't actually found much,' Bixton went on. 'Unless there've been details that haven't yet circulated.'

M said nothing, merely regarding both men with equal frost.

Sir Andrew said, 'Bond is a star, of course. So the thinking is that it would be good for everybody if he deployed to Kabul post haste. Tonight, if you could make that work. Put him in a hot zone along with a couple of dozen of Six's premier-league lads. We'll tap the CIA too. We don't mind spreading the glory.'

And the blame, thought M, if they get it wrong.

Bixton said, 'Makes sense. Bond was stationed in Afghanistan.'

M said, 'Incident Twenty's supposed to happen tomorrow. It'll take him all night to get to Kabul. How can he stop anything happening?'

'The thinking is . . .' Sir Andrew fell silent, realising, M supposed, that he'd repeated his own irritating verbal filler. 'We aren't sure it can be stopped.'

Silence washed in unpleasantly, like a tide polluted with hospital waste.

'Our approach would be for your man and the others to head up a post-mortem a.n.a.lysis team. Try to find out for certain who was behind it. Put together a response proposal. Bond could even head it up.'

M knew, of course, what was happening here: the Two Ronnies were offering the ODG a face-saving measure. Your organisation could be a star ninety-five per cent of the time, but if you erred even once, with a big loss, you might appear at the office on Monday morning and find your whole outfit disbanded or, worse, turned into a vetting agency.

And the Overseas Development Group was on thin ice to start with, hosting as it did the 00 Section, to which many people objected. To stumble on Incident Twenty would be a big stumble indeed. By getting Bond to Afghanistan forthwith, at least the ODG would have a player in the game, even if he arrived on the pitch a bit late.

M said evenly, 'Your point is noted, gentlemen. Let me make some phone calls.'