Carte Blanche

was frowning, her eyes turned to one of Bond’s dim windows. “A shame, isn’t it? About Philly.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I thought you’d heard? Tim broke it off. He sat her down a few days ago—they even had the church booked, and her hen do was planned. A girls’ weekend in Spain. I was going.”
    How observant am I? Bond thought. That ’s what was missing from her desk on the third floor. The pictures of her fiancé. Probably the engagement ring had gone MIA too.
    “What happened?” he asked.
    “I suppose it’s always more than one thing, isn’t it? They hadn’t been getting on well recently, more than a few bad patches—rows about her driving too fast and working all hours. She missed a big family reunion at his parents’. Then, out of the blue, he had the chance of a posting to Singapore or Malaysia. He took it. They’d been together for three years, hadn’t they?”
    “Sorry to hear that.”
    The discussion of the drama ended, though, with the arrival of the person in question.
    Not noticing the still atmosphere into which she’d walked, Philly strode past Goodnight with a smile and into Bond’s office, where she dropped breezily into a chair. Her sensuous face seemed to have narrowed and her hazel eyes shone with the intensity of a hunter picking up sure track. It made her even more beautiful. A hen party in Spain with the girls? God, he simply could not picture that, any more than he could see Philly lugging home two Waitrose carrier bags to assemble a hearty dinner for a man named Tim and their children Matilda and Archie.
    Enough! he upbraided himself and concentrated on what she was telling him. “Our people could read one scrap of the ash. The words were ‘the Gehenna plan.’ And below that ‘Friday, May 20.’”
    “Gehenna? Familiar but I can’t place it.”
    “There’s a reference to it in the Bible. I’ll find out more. I only ran ‘Gehenna plan’ through the security agencies and criminal databases. It returned negative.”
    “What’s on the other piece of ash?”
    “That was more badly damaged. Our lab could make out the words ‘term’ and ‘five million pounds’ but the rest was beyond them. They sent it to Specialist Crime at the Yard, under an eyes-only order. They’ll get back to me by this evening.”
    “‘Term’ . . . terms of the deal, I’d guess. Payment or down payment of five million for the attack or whatever it’s to be. That suggests Noah’s doing it for money, not for the sake of politics or ideology.”
    She nodded. “About the Serbian connection: My Hungarian ploy didn’t work. The folk in Belgrade are really quite cross with you, James. But I had your I Branch set me up as somebody from the EU—the head of the Directorate of Transportation Safety Investigations.”
    “What the hell’s that?”
    “I made it up. I did a pretty good Swiss-French accent, though I say it myself. The Serbs are dying to do anything they can to keep the European Union happy so they’re scurrying to get back to me about hazmats on the train and more details about Karic.”
    Philly was truly golden.
    “And Eastern Demolition have headquarters in Slough. They were low bidders for the demolition project at the British Army base in March.”
    “Is it a public limited company?”
    “Private. And owned by a holding company, also private: Green Way International. It’s quite big and operates in half a dozen countries. One man owns all the shares. Severan Hydt.”
    “That’s really his name?”
    She laughed. “At first I wondered what his parents were thinking. But it seems he changed it by deed poll when he was in his twenties.”
    “What was his birth name?”
    “Maarten Holt.”
    “Holt to Hydt,” Bond mused. “I don’t see the point—though it’s hardly remarkable—but Maarten to Severan? Why, in heaven’s name?”
    She shrugged. “Green Way is a huge rubbish-collection and recycling operation. You’ve seen their lorries but probably haven’t thought much about them. I couldn’t find a great deal because they’re not public and Hydt stays clear of the press. Article in the Times dubbed him the world’s richest rag-and-bone man. The Guardian ran a profile of him a few years ago and was fairly complimentary but he gave them only a few generic quotes and that was it. I found out he was Dutch-born, kept dual citizenship for a time and is now just British.”
    Philly’s body language and the hunter’s sheen in her eyes