Carte Blanche

partners and they learn he’s been picked up, they might accelerate whatever’s planned for Friday. Or disappear—and we’ll lose them until they strike again in six or eight months when all the leads’ve gone cold. This Irishman would have planned for a contingency like that, I’m sure of it.”
    The soft nose wrinkled with regret. “It’s just that, well, if we were on the Continent somewhere or padding about in Red Square, I’d be de lighted to sit back and watch you bowl leg or off breaks, as you thought best, but, well, it is our cricket ground here.”
    The whip crack was, of course, inevitable. Bond decided there was no point in arguing. The dandified puppet had a steel spine. He also had ultimate authority and could shut out Bond entirely if he wished to. “It’s your call, of course,” Bond said pleasantly. “So I suppose the first step is to find them. Let me show you the leads.” He passed over a copy of the pub receipt and the note: Boots—March. 17. No later than that.
    Osborne-Smith was frowning as he examined the sheets. “What do you make of them?” he asked.
    “Nothing very sexy,” Bond said. “The pub’s outside Cambridge. The note’s a bit of a mystery.”
    “March the seventeenth? A reminder to drop in at the chemist?”
    “Maybe,” Bond said dubiously. “I was thinking it might be code.” He pushed forward the MapQuest printout that Philly had provided. “If you ask me, the pub’s probably nothing. I can’t find anything distinctive about it—it’s not near anywhere important. Off the M11, near Wimpole Road.” He touched the sheet. “Probably a waste of time. But it ought to be looked at. Why don’t I take that? I’ll head up there and look around Cambridge. Maybe you could run the March note past the cryptanalysts at Five and see what their computers have to say. That holds the key, I think.”
    “I will do. But actually, if you don’t mind, James, it’s probably best if I handle the pub myself. I know the lie of the land. I was at Cambridge—Magdalene.” The map and the pub receipt vanished into Osborne-Smith’s briefcase, with a copy of the March note.Then he produced another sheet of paper. “Can you get that girl in?”
    Bond lifted an eyebrow. “Which one?”
    “The pretty young thing outside. Single, I see.”
    “You mean my PA,” Bond said drily. He rose and went to the door. “Miss Goodnight, would you come in, please?”
    She did so, frowning.
    “Our friend Percy wants a word with you.”
    Osborne-Smith missed the irony in Bond’s choice of names and handed the sheet of paper to her. “Make a copy of this, would you?”
    With a glance toward Bond, who nodded, she took the document and went to the copier. Osborne-Smith called after her, “Double-sided, of course. Waste works to the enemy’s advantage, doesn’t it?”
    Goodnight returned a moment later. Osborne-Smith put the original in his briefcase and handed the copy to Bond. “You ever get out to the firearms range?”
    “From time to time,” Bond told him. He didn’t add: six hours a week, religiously, indoor here with small arms, outdoor with full-bore at Bisley. And once a fortnight he trained at Scotland Yard’s FATS range—the high-definition computerized firearms-training simulator, in which an electrode was mounted against your back; if the terrorist shot you before you shot him, you ended up on your knees in excruciating pain.
    “We have to observe the formalities, don’t we?” Osborne-Smith gestured at the sheet in Bond’s hand. “Application to become a temporary AFO.”
    Only a very few law enforcers—authorized firearms officers—could carry weapons in the UK.
    “It’s probably not a good idea to use my name on that,” Bond pointed out.
    Osborne-Smith seemed not to have thought of this. “You may be right. Well, use a nonofficial cover, why don’t you? John Smith’ll do. Just fill it in and do the quiz on the back—gun safety and all that. If you hit a speed bump, give me a shout. I’ll walk you through.”
    “I’ll get right to it.”
    “Good man. Glad that’s settled. We’ll coordinate later—after our respective secret missions.” He tapped his briefcase. “Off to Cambridge.”
    He pivoted and strode out as boisterously as he’d arrived.
    “What a positively wretched man,” Goodnight whispered.
    Bond gave a brief laugh. He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair and tugged it on, picked up the Ordnance Survey. “I’m going down