Carte Blanche

went on. “Unless there’ve been details that haven’t yet circulated.”
    M said nothing, merely regarded 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 posthaste. 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, realizing, 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 postmortem analysis 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 organization could be a star 95 percent 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 20 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.”
    Bixton beamed. But Sir Andrew hadn’t quite finished. His persistence, infused with shrewdness, was one of the reasons M believed that future audiences with him might take place at 10 Downing Street. “Bond will be all-hands-on-deck?”
    The threat implicit in the question was that if 007 remained in South Africa in defiance of M’s orders, Sir Andrew’s protection of Bond, M and the ODG would cease.
    The irony in giving an agent like 007 carte blanche was that he was supposed to exercise it and act as he saw fit—which sometimes meant he would not be on deck with all of the other hands. You can’t have it both ways, M reflected. “As I said, I’ll make some calls.”
    “Good. We’d better be off.”
    As they departed, M stood up and went through the French doors on to the balcony, where he noted a Metropolitan Police Specialist Protection officer, armed with a machine gun. After an examination of and a nod to the new arrival on his turf, the man returned to looking down over the street, thirty feet below. “All quiet?” M asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    M walked to the far end of the balcony and lit a cheroot, sucking the smoke in deep. The streets were eerily quiet. The barricades were not just the tubular metal fences you saw outside Parliament; they were cement blocks, four feet high, solid enough to stop a speeding car. The pavements were patrolled by armed guards and M noted several snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings. He gazed absently down Richmond Terrace toward Victoria Embankment.
    He took out his mobile and called Moneypenny.
    Only a single ring before she answered. “Yes, sir?”
    “I need to talk to the chief of staff.”
    “He’s popped down to the canteen. I’ll connect you.”
    As he waited, M squinted and gave a gruff laugh. At the intersection, near the barricade, there was a large lorry and a few men were dragging bins to and from it. They were employees of Severan Hydt’s company, Green Way International. He realized he’d been watching them for the past few minutes yet not actually noticing them. They’d been invisible.
    “Tanner here, sir.”
    The dustmen vanished from M’s thoughts. He plucked the cheroot from between his teeth and said evenly, “Bill, I need to talk to you about 007.”

Chapter 50
    Guided by sat-nav, Bond made his way through central Cape Town, past businesses and residences. He found himself in an area of small, brightly colored houses, blue, pink, red and yellow, tucked under Signal Hill. The narrow streets were largely cobbled. The area reminded him of villages in