Carte Blanche

the weapons’ shrapnel and on programming the arming system, all written in Serbian, with English translations. This explained it: Hydt had made one. He had somehow come into possession of these plans and had ordered his engineers to build one of the damn things. The bits of titanium Bond had found in the Fens army base were shavings from the deadly blades.
    And the train in Serbia—this explained the mystery of the dangerous chemical; it had had nothing to do with Dunne’s mission there. He probably hadn’t even known about the poison. The purpose of his trip to Novi Sad had been to steal some of the titanium on the train to use it in the device—there had been two wagons of scrap metal behind the locomotive. Those had been his target. Dunne’s rucksack hadn’t contained weapons or bombs to blow open the chemical drums on railcar three; the bag had been empty when Dunne arrived. He’d filled it with unique titanium scraps and taken them back to March to make the Cutter.
    The Irishman had arranged the derailment to make it look like an accident so no one would realize the metal had been stolen.
    But how had Dunne and Hydt got hold of the plans? The Serbs would have done all they could to keep the blueprints and specifications secret.
    Bond found the answer a moment later in a memo from the Dubai engineer Mahdi al-Fulan, dated a year ago.
    Severan:
    I have looked into your request to see if it is possible to fabricate a system that will reconstruct shredded classified documents. I’m afraid with modern shredders the answer is no. But I would propose this: I can create an electric eye system that serves as a safety device to prevent injuries when someone tries to reach into a document shredder. In fact, though, it would double as a hyperspeed optical scanner. When the documents are fed into the system, the scanner reads all the information on them before they are shredded. The data can be stored on a 3- or 4-terabyte hard drive hidden somewhere in the shredder and uploaded via a secure mobile or satellite link, or even physically retrieved when your employees replace the blades or clean the units.
    I further recommend that you make and offer to your clients shredders that are so efficient they literally turn their documents to dust, so that you will instill confidence in them to hire you to destroy even the most sensitive materials.
    In addition, I have a plan for a similar device that would extract data from hard drives before they are destroyed. I believe it’s possible to create a machine that would break apart laptop or desktop computers, optically identify the hard drive, and route it to a special station where the drive would be temporarily connected to a processor in the destruction machine. Classified information could be copied before the drives were wiped.
    He recalled his tour of Green Way and Hydt’s excitement about the automated computer destruction devices.
    In a few years that will be my most lucrative operation. . . .
    Bond read on. The document-shredder scanners were already in use in every city where Green Way had a base, including at top-secret Serbian military facilities and weapons contractors outside Belgrade.
    Other memos detailed plans to capture less classified but still valuable documents, using special teams of Green Way refuse collectors to gather the rubbish of targeted individuals, bring it to special locations and sort through it for personal and sensitive information.
    Bond noted the value of this: He found copies of credit-card receipts, some intact, others reconstructed from simple document shredders. One bill, for instance, was from a hotel outside Pretoria. The cardholder had the title “Right Honorable.” Notes attached to it warned that the man’s extramarital affair would be made public if he didn’t agree to a list of demands an opposing politician was making. So, such items would be the “special materials” Bond had seen being shipped here in Green Way lorries.
    There were also pages upon pages of what seemed to be phone numbers, along with many other digits, screen names, pass codes and excerpts of e-mails and text messages. E-waste. Of course, workers in Silicon Row were looking through phones and computers, extracting electronic serial numbers for mobiles, passwords, banking information, texts, records of instant messages and who knew what else?
    But the immediate question, of course: Where exactly was the Cutter going to be detonated?
    He flipped through