Carte Blanche

the whole thing.” He sighed. “I’ll be largely incommunicado. Chief of staff will be running the Incident Twenty operation for the Group.”
    “Yes, sir. I’ll coordinate with him.”
    “Get onto it, 007. And remember: You’re operating in the UK. Treat it like a country you’ve never been to. Which means, for God’s sake, be diplomatic with the natives.”

Chapter 9
    “It’s pretty bad, sir. Are you sure you want to see it?”
    To the foreman, the man replied immediately. “Yes.”
    “Right, then. I’ll drive you out.”
    “Who else knows?”
    “Just the shift chief and the lad what found it.” Casting a glance at his boss, the foreman added, “They’ll keep quiet. If that’s what you want.”
    Severan Hydt said nothing.
    Under an overcast and dusty sky, the two men left the loading bay of the ancient headquarters building and walked to a nearby car park. They climbed into a people carrier emblazoned with the logo of Green Way International Disposal and Recycling; the company name was printed over a delicate drawing of a verdant leaf. Hydt didn’t much care for the design, which struck him as mockingly trendy, but he’d been told that the image had scored well in focus groups and was good for public relations (“Ah, the public, ” he’d responded with veiled contempt and reluctantly approved it).
    He was a tall man—six foot three—and broad-shouldered, his columnar torso encased in a bespoke suit of black wool. His massive head was covered with dense, curly hair, black streaked with white, and he wore a matching beard. His yellowing fingernails extended well past his fingertips but were carefully filed; they were long by design, not neglect.
    Hydt’s pallor accentuated his dark nostrils and darker eyes, framed by a long face that appeared younger than his fifty-six years. He was a strong man still, having retained much of his youthful muscularity.
    The van started through his company’s disheveled grounds, more than a hundred acres of low buildings, rubbish tips, skips, hovering seagulls, smoke, dust . . .
    And decay . . .
    As they drove over the rough roads, Hydt’s attention momentarily slipped to a construction about half a mile away. A new building was nearing completion. It was identical to two that stood already in the grounds: five-story boxes from which chimneys rose, the sky above them rippling from the rising heat. The buildings were known as destructors, a Victorian word that Severan Hydt loved. England was the first country in the world to make energy from municipal refuse. In the 1870s the first power plant to do so was built in Nottingham and soon hundreds were operating throughout the country, producing steam to generate electricity.
    The destructor now nearing completion in the middle of his disposal and recycling operation was no different in theory from its gloomy Dickensian forebears, save that it used scrubbers and filters to clean the dangerous exhaust and was far more efficient, burning RDF—refuse-derived fuel—as it produced energy that was pumped (for profit, of course) into the London and Home County power grids.
    Indeed, Green Way International, plc, was simply the latest in a long British tradition of innovation in refuse disposal and reclamation. Henry IV had decreed that rubbish should be collected and removed from the streets of towns and cities on threat of forfeit. Mudlarks had kept the banks of the Thames clean—for entrepreneurial profit, not government wages—and rag pickers had sold scraps of wool to mills for the production of cheap cloth called shoddy. In London, as early as the nineteenth century, women and girls had been employed to sift through incoming refuse and sort it according to future usefulness. The British Paper Company had been founded to manufacture recycled paper—in 1890.
    Green Way was located nearly twenty miles east of London, well past the boxed sets of office buildings on the Isle of Dogs and the sea mine of the O2, past the ramble of Canning Town and Silvertown, the Docklands. To reach it you turned southeast off the A13 and drove toward the Thames. Soon you were down to a narrow lane, unwelcoming, even forbidding, surrounded by nothing but brush and stalky plants, pale and translucent as a dying patient’s skin. The tarmac strip seemed a road to nowhere . . . until it crested a low rise and ahead you could see Green Way’s massive complex, forever muted through a haze.
    In the middle of this wonderland of