Carte Blanche

to the armory to collect my gun and after that I’ll be out for three or four hours.”
    “What about the firearms form, James?”
    “Ah.” He picked it up, tore it into neat strips and slipped them into the map booklet to mark his places. “Why waste departmental Post-it notes? Works to the enemy’s advantage, you know.”

Chapter 12
    An hour and a half later, James Bond was in his Bentley Continental GT, a gray streak speeding north.
    He was reflecting on his deception of Percy Osborne-Smith. He’d decided that the lead to the Cambridge pub wasn’t, in fact, very promising. Yes, possibly the Incident 20 principals had eaten there—the bill suggested a meal for two or three. But the date was more than a week ago, so it was unlikely that anyone on the staff would remember a man fitting the Irishman’s description and his companions. And since the man had proved to be particularly clever, Bond suspected he rotated the places where he dined and shopped; he would not be a regular there.
    The lead in Cambridge had to be followed up, of course, but—equally important—Bond needed to keep Osborne-Smith diverted. He could simply not allow the Irishman or Noah to be arrested and hauled into Belmarsh like a drug dealer or an Islamist who’d been buying excessive fertilizer. They needed to keep both suspects in play to discover the nature of Incident 20.
    And so Bond, a keen poker player, had bluffed. He’d taken inordinate interest in the clue about the pub and had mentioned it was not far from Wimpole Road. To most people this would have meant nothing. But Bond guessed that Osborne-Smith would know that a secret government facility connected to Porton Down, the Ministry of Defense biological weapons research center in Wiltshire, happened also to be on Wimpole Road. True, it was eight miles to the east, on the other side of Cambridge and nowhere near the pub, but Bond believed that associating the two would encourage the Division Three man to descend on the idea like a seabird spotting a fish head.
    This relegated Bond to the apparently fruitless task of wrestling with the cryptic note. Boots—March. 17. No later than that.
    Which he believed he had deciphered.
    Most of Philly’s suggestions about its meaning had involved the chemist, Boots, which had shops in every town across the UK. She’d also offered suggestions about footwear and about events that had taken place on March 17.
    But one suggestion, toward the end of her list, had intrigued Bond. She’d noted that “Boots” and “March” were linked with a dash and she had found that there was a Boots Road that ran near the town of March, a couple of hours’ drive north of London. She had seen, too, the full stop between “March” and “17.” Given that the last phrase, “no later than that,” suggested a deadline, “17” made sense as a date but was possibly 17 May, tomorrow.
    Clever of her, Bond had thought and in his office, waiting for Osborne-Smith, he had gone into the Golden Wire—a secure fiber-optic network tying together records of all major British security agencies—to learn what he could about March and Boots Road.
    He had found some intriguing facts: traffic reports about road diversions because a large number of lorries were coming and going along Boots Road near an old army base, and public notices relating to heavy plant work. References suggested that it had to be completed by midnight on the seventeenth or fines would be levied. He had a hunch that this might be a solid lead to the Irishman and Noah.
    And tradecraft dictated that you ignored such intuition at your peril.
    So he was now en route to March, losing himself in the consuming pleasure of driving.
    Which meant, of course, driving fast.
    Bond had to exercise some restraint since he wasn’t on the N-260 in the Pyrenees or off the beaten track in the Lake District but was traveling north along the A1 as it switched identities arbitrarily between motorway and trunk road. Still, the speedometer needle occasionally reached 100 mph and frequently he’d tap the paddle of the silken, millisecond-response Quickshift gearbox to overtake a slow-moving horsebox or Ford Mondeo. He stayed mostly in the right lane, although once or twice he took to the hard shoulder for some exhilarating, if illegal, passing. He enjoyed a few controlled skids on stretches of adverse camber.
    The police were not a problem. While the jurisdiction of ODG was limited in the UK—carte grise, not