Carte Blanche

that weren’t quite so official. Thanks to you, some fellows who could have caused quite a lot of mischief never got the chance.”
    Bond was about to sip from his glass of Puligny Montrachet, the highest incarnation of the chardonnay grape. He set the glass down without doing so. How the devil had the old man learned about those ?
    In a low, even voice the man said, “There’s no shortage of Special Air or Boat Service chaps about who know their way around a knife and sniper rifle. But they don’t necessarily fit into other, shall we say, subtler situations. And then there are plenty of talented Five and Six fellows who know the difference between”—he glanced at Bond’s glass—“a Côte de Beaune and a Côte de Nuits and can speak French as fluently as they can Arabic—but who’d faint at the sight of blood, theirs or anyone else’s.” The steel eyes zeroed in. “You seem to be a rather rare combination of the best of both.”
    The Admiral put down his knife and fork on the bone china. “Your question.”
    “My . . . ?”
    “About a new version of the Special Operations Executive. The answer is yes. In fact, it already exists. Would you be interested in joining?”
    “I would,” Bond said without hesitation. “Though I should like to ask: What exactly does it do?”
    The Admiral thought for a moment, as if polishing burrs off his reply. “Our mission,” he said, “is simple. We protect the Realm . . . by any means necessary.”

Chapter 7
    In the sleek, purring Bentley, Bond now approached the headquarters of this very organization, near Regent’s Park, after half an hour of the zigzagging that driving in central London necessitates.
    The name of his employer was nearly as vague as that of the Special Operations Executive: the Overseas Development Group. The director-general was the Admiral, known only as M.
    Officially the ODG assisted British-based companies in opening or expanding foreign operations and investing abroad. Bond’s OC, or official cover, within it was as a security and integrity analyst. His job was to travel the world and assess business risks.
    No matter that the moment he landed he assumed an NOC—a nonofficial cover—with a fictitious identity, tucked away the Excel spreadsheets, put on his 5.11 tactical outfit and armed himself with a .308 rifle with Nikon Buckmasters scope. Or perhaps he’d slip into a well-cut Savile Row suit to play poker with a Chechnyan arms dealer in a private Kiev club, for the chance to assess his security detail in a run-up to the evening’s main event: the man’s rendition to a black site in Poland.
    Tucked away inconspicuously in the hierarchy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the ODG was housed in a narrow, six-story Edwardian building on a quiet road, just off Devonshire Street. It was separated from bustling Marylebone Road by lackluster—but camouflaging—solicitors’ quarters, NGO offices and doctors’ surgeries.
    Bond now motored to the entrance of the tunnel leading to the car park beneath the building. He glanced into the iris scanner, then was vetted again, this time by a human being. The barrier lowered and he eased the car forward in search of a parking bay.
    The lift, too, checked Bond’s blue eyes, then took him up to the ground floor. He stepped into the armorer’s office, beside the pistol range, and handed the locked steel box to redheaded Freddy Menzies, a former corporal in the SAS and one of the finest firearms men in the business. He would make sure the Walther was cleaned, oiled and checked for damage, the magazines filled with Bond’s preferred loads.
    “She’ll be ready in half an hour,” Menzies said. “She behave herself, 007?”
    Bond had professional affection for certain tools of his trade but he didn’t personify them—and, if anything, a .40-caliber Walther, even the compact Police Pistol Short, would definitely be a “he.” “Acquitted itself well,” he replied.
    He took the lift to the third floor, where he stepped out and turned left, walking down a bland, white-painted corridor, the walls a bit scuffed, their monotony broken by prints of London from the era of Cromwell through Victoria’s reign and of battlefields aplenty. Someone had brightened up the windowsills with vases of greenery—fake, of course; the real thing would have meant employing external maintenance staff to water and prune.
    Bond spotted a young woman in front of a desk at the end of a large open area