Carte Blanche

hinted that she hadn’t revealed all.
    “And?” Bond asked.
    She smiled. “I found some online references to when he was a mature student at the University of Bristol, where he did rather well, by the way.” She explained that Hydt had been active in the university’s sailing club, captaining a boat in competitions. “He not only raced but built his own. It earned him a nickname.”
    “And what was it?” Bond asked, though he had a feeling he knew.
    “Noah.”

Chapter 16
    The time was now half past five. Since it would be several hours before Philly received the intelligence she was waiting for, Bond suggested they meet for dinner.
    She agreed and returned to her workstation, while Bond composed an encrypted e-mail to M, copying in Bill Tanner, saying that Noah was Severan Hydt and including a synopsis of his background and what had happened in March. He added that Hydt referred to the attack involved in Incident 20 as the “Gehenna plan.” More would be forthcoming.
    He received a terse reply:
    007—
    Authorized to proceed. Appropriate liaison with domestic organizations expected.
    M
    My carte grise. . . .
    Bond left his office, took the lift to the second floor and entered a large room filled with more computers than an electronics shop. A few men and women labored at monitors or at the type of workstations to be found in a university chemistry laboratory. Bond walked to a small, glass-walled office at the far end and tapped on the window.
    Sanu Hirani, head of the ODG’s Q Branch, was a slim man of forty or so. His complexion was sallow and his luxuriant black hair framed a face handsome enough to get him roles in Bollywood. A brilliant cricketer, known for his fast bowling, he had degrees in chemistry, electrical engineering and computer science from top universities in the UK and America (where he had been successful in everything except introducing his sport to the Yanks, who could neither grasp the game’s subtleties, nor tolerate the length of a Test match).
    Q Branch was the technical support enclave within the ODG, and Hirani oversaw all aspects of the gadgetry that has always been used in tradecraft. Wizards for departments like Q Branch and the CIA’s Science and Technology Division spent their time coming up with hardware and software innovations like miniature cameras, improbable weapons, concealments, communications devices and surveillance equipment—such as Hirani’s latest: a hypersensitive omnidirectional microphone mounted within a dead fly. (“A bug in a bug,” Bond had commented wryly to its creator, who had replied that he was the eighteenth person to make the joke and, by the way, a fly was not, biologically speaking, a bug.)
    Since the ODG’s raison d’être was operational, much of Hirani’s work lay in ensuring he had sufficient monoculars, binoculars, camouflage, communications devices, specialized weapons and countersurveillance gear to hand. In this regard he was like a librarian who made sure the books were checked out appropriately and returned on time.
    But Hirani’s particular genius was his ability to invent and improvise, coming up with devices like the iQPhone. The ODG was, of all things, the patent holder on dozens of his inventions. When Bond or other O Branch agents were in the field and found themselves in a tight spot, one call to Hirani, at any time of day or night, and he would find a solution. He or his people might put something together in the office and pop it into the FCO diplomatic pouch for overnight delivery. More often, though, time was critical and Hirani would enlist one of his many wily innovators and scroungers around the world to build, find or modify a device in the field.
    “James.” The men shook hands. “You’ve bought Incident Twenty, I hear.”
    “Seems so.”
    Bond sat down, noticing a book on Hirani’s desk: The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith . It was one of his own favorites on the history of gadgetry in espionage.
    “How serious is it?”
    “Rather,” Bond said laconically, not sharing that he’d nearly been killed twice already in pursuing the assignment, which he’d had for less than forty-eight hours.
    Sitting beneath pictures of early IBM computers and Indian cricketers, Hirani asked, “What do you need?”
    Bond lowered his voice so that the closest Q Branch worker, a young woman raptly staring at her screen, could not hear. “What kind of surveillance kits do you have that one man could put in place?