Carte Blanche

knife,” Philly said, laughing. “I thought the same thing. It’s a leaf. Global warming, pollution and energy are the sexiest subjects in the au courant environmental movement. But rising quickly are planet-friendly rubbish disposal and recycling. And Green Way’s one of the big innovators.”
    “Any Serbian connection?”
    “Through a subsidiary he owns part of a small operation in Belgrade. But, like everybody else in the organization, nobody there has any criminal past.”
    “I just can’t work out his game,” Bond said. “He’s not political, has no terrorist leanings. It almost looks like he’s been hired to arrange the attack, or whatever it’s to be, on Friday. But he hardly needs money.” He sipped his cocktail. “Right, then, Detective Inspector Maidenstone, tell me about the evidence—that other bit of ash from up in March. Six made out the ‘Gehenna plan’ and ‘Friday, 20 May.’ Did Forensics at the Yard find anything else?”
    Her voice dropped, which necessitated his leaning closer. He smelled a sweet but undefined scent. Her sweater, cashmere, brushed the back of his hand. “They did. They think the rest of the words were ‘Course is confirmed. Blast radius must be a hundred feet minimum. Ten thirty is the optimal time.’”
    “So, an explosive device of some kind. Ten thirty Friday— P.M ., according to the original intercept. And ‘course’—a shipping route or plane, most likely.”
    “Now,” she continued, “the metal you found? It’s a titanium-steel laminate. Unique. Nobody in the lab has ever seen anything like it. The pieces were shavings. They’d been machined in the past day or so.”
    Was that what Hydt’s people had been doing in the basement of the hospital? Were they building a weapon with this metal?
    “And Defence still owned the facility but it hasn’t been used for three years.”
    His eyes swept over her marvelous profile from forehead to breasts as she sipped her wine.
    Philly continued, “As for the Serbs, I practically said I’d force them to take on the euro in place of the dinar if they didn’t help me. But they came through. The man working with the Irishman, Aldo Karic, was a load scheduler with the railway.”
    “He’d have known exactly which train the hazmat was on.”
    “Yes.” Then she frowned. “About that, though, James. It’s odd. The material was pretty bad. Methyl isocyanate, MIC. It’s the chemical that killed all those people in Bhopal.”
    “God.”
    “But, look, here’s the inventory of everything on board the train.” She showed him the list, translated into English. “The chemical containers are practically bulletproof. You can drop one from a plane and supposedly it won’t break open.”
    Bond was confused by this. “So a train crash wouldn’t have produced a spill.”
    “Very unlikely. And another thing: the wagon with the chemical contained only about three hundred kilos of MIC. It’s really bad stuff, certainly, but at Bhopal, forty-two thousand kilos were released. Even if a few of the drums had broken open, the damage would have been negligible.”
    But what else would the Irishman have been interested in? Bond looked over the list. Aside from the chemicals, the cargo was harmless: boilers, vehicle parts, motor oil, scrap, girders, timber . . . No weapons, unstable substances, other risky materials.
    Maybe the incident had been an elaborate scheme to kill the train driver or someone living at the bottom of the hill below the restaurant. Had the Irishman been going to stage the death to look like an accident? Until they could home in on Noah’s purpose, there could be no effective response. Bond could only hope that the surveillance he’d reluctantly put into play earlier in the evening would pay off. He asked, “Any more on Gehenna?”
    “Hell.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    Her face broke into a smile. “Gehenna is where the Judeo-Christian concept of hell came from. The word’s a derivation of Gehinnom, or the Valley of Hinnom—a valley in Jerusalem. Ages ago, some people think, it was used as a site to burn rubbish and there may have been natural gas deposits in the rocks that kept the fires going perpetually. In the Bible, Gehenna came to mean a place where sinners and unbelievers would be punished.
    “The only recent significant reference—if you can call a hundred and fifty years ago recent—was in a Rudyard Kipling poem.” She’d memorized the verse and recited, “‘Down to Gehenna