Carte Blanche

the notes again. None of the information he’d found gave him a clue as to the location of the York bomb, which would explode in a little over an hour. His temples throbbed as he leaned forward over a worktable, staring at the diagram of the device.
    Think, he told himself furiously.
    Think . . .
    For some minutes, nothing occurred to him. Then he had an idea. What was Severan Hydt doing? Assembling useful information from scraps and fragments.
    Do the same, Bond told himself. Put the pieces of the puzzle together.
    And what scraps do I have?
    • The target is in York.
    • One message contained the words “term” and “£5 million.”
    • Hydt is willing to cause mass destruction to divert attention from the real crime he intends to commit, as with the derailment in Serbia.
    • The Cutter was hidden somewhere near March and has just been driven to York.
    • He’s being paid for the attack, not acting out of ideology.
    • He could have used any explosive device but he’s gone to great trouble to build a Cutter with actual Serbian military designations, a weapon not available on the general arms market.
    • Thousands of people will die.
    • The blast must have a radius of 100 feet minimum.
    • The Cutter is to be detonated at a specific time, 10:30 A.M .
    • The attack has something to do with a “course,” a road or other route.
    But rearrange these ragged bits as he might, Bond saw only unrelated scraps.
    Well, keep at it, he raged. He focused again on each shred. He picked it up mentally and placed it somewhere else.
    One possibility became clear: If Hydt and Dunne had re-created a Cutter, the forensic teams doing postblast analysis would find the military designations and believe the Serbian government or army was behind it since the devices weren’t yet available on the black market. Hydt had done this to shift attention away from the real perpetrators: himself and whoever had paid him millions of pounds. It would be a misdirection—just like the planned train crash.
    That meant there were two targets: The apparent one would have some connection to Serbia and, to the public and police, would be the purpose of the attack. But the real victim would be someone else caught in the blast, an apparent bystander. No one would ever know that he or she was the person Hydt and his client really wanted to die . . . and that death would be the one that harmed British interests.
    Who? A government official in York? A scientist? And, goddammit, where specifically would the attack take place?
    Bond played with the confetti of information once more.
    Nothing . . .
    But then, in his mind, he heard a resounding tap. “Term” had ended up next to “course.”
    What if the former didn’t refer to a clause in a contract but a period in the academic year? And “course” was just that—a course of study?
    That made some sense. A large institution, thousands of students.
    But where?
    The best Bond could come up with was an institution at which there was a course, a lecture, a rally, a museum exhibit or the like involving Serbia, at half past ten this morning. This suggested a university.
    Did his reassembled theory hold up?
    There was no time left for speculation. He glanced at the digital clock on the wall, which advanced another minute.
    In York it was nine forty.

Chapter 56
    Carrying the killing-fields map, Bond walked casually down a corridor.
    A guard with a massive bullet-shaped head eyed him suspiciously. The man was unarmed, Bond saw to his disappointment; neither did he have a radio. He asked the guard for directions to Hydt’s conference room. The man pointed it out.
    Bond started to walk away, then turned back as if he’d just remembered something. “Oh, I need to ask Ms. Barnes about lunch. Do you know where she is?”
    The guard hesitated, then pointed to another corridor. “Her office is down there. The double doors on the left. Number one oh eight. You will knock first.”
    Bond moved off in the direction indicated. In a few minutes he arrived and glanced back. No one was in the corridor. He knocked on the door. “Jessica, it’s Gene. I need to talk to you.”
    There was a pause. She’d said she’d be here but she might be ill or have felt too tired to come in, notwithstanding her “short leash.”
    Then, the click of a lock. The door opened and he stepped inside. Jessica Barnes, alone, blinked in surprise. “Gene. What’s the matter?”
    He swung the door shut and his eyes fell