Carte Blanche

ago he had gone into the restaurant for a cup of coffee and stuck a listening device inside the front door. A man had arrived at the appointed time and spoken to the headwaiter in English—slowly and loudly, as foreigners often do when talking to locals. To Bond, listening through an app on his phone from thirty yards away, the accent was clearly mid-Ulster—most likely Belfast or the surrounding area. Unfortunately the meeting between the Irishman and his local contact was taking place out of the bug’s range.
    Through the tunnel of his monocular, Bond now studied his adversary, taking note of every detail—“Small clues save you. Small errors kill,” as the instructors at Fort Monckton were wont to remind. He noted that the Irishman’s manner was precise and that he made no unnecessary gestures. When the partner drew a diagram the Irishman moved it closer with the rubber of a propelling pencil so that he left no fingerprints. He sat with his back to the window and in front of his partner; the surveillance apps on Bond’s mobile could not read either set of lips. Once, the Irishman turned quickly, looking outside, as if triggered by a sixth sense. The pale eyes were devoid of expression. After some time he turned back to the food that apparently didn’t interest him.
    The meal now seemed to be winding down. Bond eased off the hillock and made his way through widely spaced spruce and pine trees and anemic undergrowth, with clusters of the ubiquitous white flowers. He passed a faded sign in Serbian, French and English that had amused him when he’d arrived:
    SPA AND RESTAURANT RO TILJ
    LOCATED IN A DECLARED THERAPEUTIC REGION, AND IS RECOMMENDED BY ALL FOR CONVALESCENCES AFTER SURGERIES, ESPECIALLY HELPING FOR ACUTE AND CHRONIC DISEASES OF RESPIRATION ORGANS, AND ANEMIA. FULL BAR.
    He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelled of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant. His two “comrades,” as he thought of them, were waiting here.
    James Bond preferred to operate alone but the plan he’d devised required two local agents. They were with the BIA, the Serbian Security Information Agency, as benign a name for a spy outfit as one could imagine. The men, however, were undercover in the uniform of local police from Novi Sad, sporting the golden badge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
    Faces squat, heads round, perpetually unsmiling, they wore their hair close-cropped beneath navy-blue brimmed caps. Their woolen uniforms were the same shade. One was around forty, the other twenty-five. Despite their cover roles as rural officers, they’d come girded for battle. They carried heavy Beretta pistols and swaths of ammunition. In the backseat of their borrowed police car, a Volkswagen Jetta, there were two green-camouflaged Kalashnikov machine guns, an Uzi and a canvas bag of fragmentation hand grenades—serious ones, Swiss HG 85s.
    Bond turned to the older agent but before he spoke he heard a fierce slapping from behind. His hand moving to his Walther PPS, he whirled round—to see the younger Serb ramming a pack of cigarettes into his palm, a ritual that Bond, a former smoker, had always found absurdly self-conscious and unnecessary.
    What was the man thinking ?
    “Quiet,” he whispered coldly. “And put those away. No smoking.”
    Perplexity sidled into the dark eyes. “My brother, he smokes all time he is out on operations. Looks more normal than not smoking in Serbia.” On the drive here the young man had prattled on and on about his brother, a senior agent with the infamous JSO, technically a unit of the state secret service, though Bond knew it was really a black-ops paramilitary group. The young agent had let slip—probably intentionally, for he had said it with pride—that big brother had fought with Arkan’s Tigers, a ruthless gang that had committed some of the worst atrocities in the fighting in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
    “Maybe on the streets of Belgrade a cigarette won’t be noticed,” Bond muttered, “but this is a tactical operation. Put them away.”
    The agent slowly complied. He seemed about to say something to his partner, then thought better of it, perhaps recalling that Bond had a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian.
    Bond looked again into the restaurant and saw that the Irishman was laying some dinars on the metal tray—no traceable credit card, of course. The partner was pulling on a jacket.
    “All right. It’s