Carte Blanche

that was his desk. Finally he slipped the phone away and turned his dark eyes to other matters. And there were many. Green Way was one of the world leaders in the disposal, reclamation and recycling of discard.
    The office was spacious and dimly lit, located on the top story of Green Way’s headquarters, an old meat-processing factory, dating to 1896, renovated and turned into what interior design magazines might call shabby chic.
    On the walls were architectural relics from buildings his company had demolished: scabby painted frames around cracked stained glass, concrete gargoyles, wildlife, effigies, mosaics. St. George and the dragon were represented several times. St. Joan, too. On one large bas-relief Zeus, operating undercover as a swan, had his way with beautiful Leda.
    Hydt’s secretary came and went with letters for his signature, reports for him to read, memos to approve, financial statements to consider. Green Way was doing extremely well. At a recycling-industry conference Hydt had once joked that the adage about certainty in life should not be limited to the well-known two. People had to pay taxes, they had to die . . . and they had to have their discard collected and disposed of.
    His computer chimed and he called up an encrypted e-mail from a colleague out of the country. It was about an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, confirming times and locations. The last line stirred him:
    The number of dead tomorrow will be significant—close to 100. Hope that suits.
    It did indeed. And the desire that had arisen within him when he’d first gazed at the body in the skip churned all the hotter.
    He glanced up as a slim woman in her midsixties entered, wearing a dark trouser suit and black shirt. Her hair was white, cut in a businesswoman’s bob. A large, unadorned diamond hung from a platinum chain around her narrow neck, and similar stones, though in more complex arrangements, graced her wrists and several fingers.
    “I’ve approved the proofs.” Jessica Barnes was an American. She’d come from a small town outside Boston; the regional lilt continued, charmingly, to tint her voice. A beauty queen years ago, she’d met Hydt when she was a hostess at a smart New York restaurant. They’d lived together for several years and—to keep her close—he’d hired her to review Green Way’s advertisements, another endeavor Hydt had little respect for or interest in. He’d been told, however, that she’d made some good decisions from time to time with regard to the company’s marketing efforts.
    But as Hydt gazed at her, he saw that something about her was different today.
    He found himself studying her face. That was it. His preference, insistence, was that she wear only black and white and keep her face free of makeup; today she had on some very faint blush and perhaps—he couldn’t quite be certain—some lipstick. He didn’t frown but she saw the direction of his eyes and shifted a bit, breathing a little differently. Her fingers started toward a cheek. She stopped her hand.
    But the point had been made. She proffered the ads. “Do you want to look at them?”
    “I’m sure they’re fine,” he said.
    “I’ll send them off.” She left his office, her destination not the marketing department, Hydt knew, but the cloakroom, where she would wash her face.
    Jessica was not a foolish woman; she’d learned her lesson.
    Then she was gone from his thoughts. He stared out of the window at his new destructor. He was very aware of the event coming up on Friday but at the moment he couldn’t get tomorrow out of his head.
    The number of dead . . . close to 100.
    His gut twisted pleasantly.
    It was then that his secretary announced on the intercom, “Mr. Dunne’s here, sir.”
    “Ah, good.”
    A moment later, Niall Dunne entered and swung the door shut so that the two were alone. The cumbersome man’s trapezoid face had rarely flickered with emotion in the nine months they’d known each other. Severan Hydt had little use for most people and no interest in social niceties. But Dunne chilled even him.
    “Now, what happened over there?” Hydt asked. After the incident in Serbia, Dunne had said they should keep their phone conversations to a minimum.
    The man turned his pale blue eyes to Hydt and explained in his Belfast accent that he and Karic, the Serbian contact, had been surprised by several men—at least two BIA Serbian intelligence officers masquerading as police and a Westerner, who’d