Carte Blanche

questions about why I am so interested in that insignificant little place called London.”
    “Next time the Dom is on me, René.”
    “But of course. Au revoir. ”
    “ À bientôt, et merci beaucoup. ” Bond hit disconnect.
    In his years as a Royal Naval Reserve commander and as an agent for ODG, he’d been up against some very bad people: insurgents, terrorists, psychopathic criminals, amoral traitors selling nuclear secrets to men mad enough to use them. But what was Hydt’s game?
    Purpose . . . response.
    Well, even if it wasn’t clear what the man’s twisted goal might be, at least there was one response Bond could initiate.
    Ten minutes later he ran down the stairs, fishing the car key from his pocket. He didn’t need to look up Severan Hydt’s address. He’d memorized it last night.

Chapter 20
    Thames House, the home of MI5, the Northern Ireland Office and some related security organizations, is less impressive than the residence of MI6, which happens to be nearby, across the river on the South Bank. Six’s headquarters look rather like a futuristic enclave from a Ridley Scott film (the structure is often referred to as Babylon-upon-Thames, for its resemblance to a ziggurat, and, less kindly, as Legoland).
    But if not as architecturally striking, Thames House is far more intimidating. The ninety-year-old gray stone monolith is the sort of place where, were it a police headquarters in Soviet Russia or East Germany, you would begin answering before questions were asked. On the other hand, the place does boast some rather impressive sculpture (Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Britannia and St. George , for instance) and every few days tourists from Arkansas or Tokyo stroll up to the front door thinking it’s Tate Britain, which is located a short distance away.
    In the windowless bowels of Thames House were the offices of Division Three. The organization conscientiously—for the sake of deniability—rented space and equipment from Five (and nobody has better equipment than MI5), all at arm’s length.
    In the middle of this fiefdom was a large control room, rather frayed at the edges, the green walls battered and scuffed, the furniture dented, the carpet insulted by too many heels. The requisite government regulatory posters about suspicious parcels, fire drills, health and trade union matters were omnipresent, often tarted up by bureaucrats with nothing better to do.

    But the computers here were voracious and the dozens of flat-screen monitors big and bright. Deputy Senior Director of Field Operations Percy Osborne-Smith was standing, arms folded, in front of the biggest and brightest. In brown jacket and mismatched trousers—he’d woken at 4 A.M . and dressed by five past—Osborne-Smith was with two young men: his assistant and a rumpled technician hovering over a keyboard.
    Osborne-Smith bent forward and pressed a button, listened again to the recording that had just been made by the surveillance he’d put in place after the pointless drive up to Cambridge for, as it had developed, the sole purpose of consuming a meal of chicken curry that had turned on him in the night. The snooping didn’t involve the suspect in Incident 20, since no one had been courteous enough to share the man’s identity but Osborne-Smith’s boys and girls had managed to arrange a productive listen-in. Without informing MI5 that they were doing so, the troops had slapped some microphones on the windows of one of the anonymous evildoer’s coconspirators: a lad named James Bond, 00 Section, O Branch, Overseas Development Group, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
    And so Osborne-Smith had learned about Severan Hydt, that he was Noah and that he ran Green Way International. Bond seemed to have neglected to mention that his mission to Boots the road, not Boots the chemist, thank you very much, had resulted in these rather important discoveries.
    “Bastard,” said Osborne-Smith’s adjutant, a lean young man with an irritating mop of abundant brown hair. “Bond’s playing games with lives.”
    “Just calm it now, eh?” Osborne-Smith said to the youngster, whom he referred to as “Deputy-Deputy,” though not in presence.
    “Well, he is. Bastard.”
    For his part, Osborne-Smith was rather impressed that Bond had contacted the French secret service. Otherwise, nobody would have learned that Hydt was about to leave the country and kill ninety-odd people later today or at least be present at their deaths. This