Carte Blanche

of governing a country is done.
    The impending assault 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 sit but they did anyway, upon the Edwardian sofa across from the tea tray. He longed to remove a cheroot from his attaché case and chew on it but he 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 bloody conference . . .” He was new to Joint Intelligence and appeared suddenly to realize perhaps he shouldn’t be quite so bluntly birching the rears of those who paid him.
    “. . . is bloody disruptive,” M grumbled, filling in. He had no problem whipping anyone or anything when it was deserved.
    Sir Andrew took over. He said, “Defense 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 e-mails have popped up just now, the day before Incident Twenty, wouldn’t you think?”
    Not necessarily.
    He continued, “And nobody’s turned up anything that specifically links Hydt to the threat.”
    “Nobody” translated to “007.”
    M looked at his wristwatch, which had belonged to his son, 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 20 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