Carte Blanche

called an associate in the Green Way headquarters, who was using some contacts at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea to find out who owned the car.
    But whatever the threat, Hans Groelle would be ready. A Colt 1911 .45 sat snug and warm in his left armpit.
    He glanced once more at the sliver of the Bentley’s gray wing and said to the man in the backseat, “It worked, Harry. We tricked them. Call Mr. Hydt.”
    The two passengers in the back and the man sitting beside Groelle were Green Way workers involved in Gehenna. They resembled Mr. Hydt, Ms. Barnes and Niall Dunne, who were currently en route to an entirely different airport, Gatwick, where a private jet was waiting to fly them out of the country.
    The deception had been Dunne’s idea, of course. He was a cold fish but that didn’t dull his brain. There’d been trouble up in March—somebody had killed Eric Janssen, one of Groelle’s fellow security men. The killer was himself dead but Dunne had assumed there might be others, watching the factory or the house, perhaps both. So he had found three employees close enough in appearance to deceive watchers and had driven them to Canning Town very early that morning. Groelle had then carted suitcases out to the garage, followed by Mr. Hydt, Ms. Barnes and the Irishman. Groelle and the decoys, who’d been waiting in the Audi, then sped toward Luton. Ten minutes later the real entourage got into the back of an unmarked Green Way International lorry and drove to Gatwick.
    Now the decoys would remain in the Audi as long as possible to keep whoever was in the Bentley occupied long enough for Mr. Hydt and the others to get out of UK airspace.
    Groelle said, “We have a bit of a wait.” He gestured at the entertainment console with a glance toward the Green Way workers. “What’ll it be?”
    They voted and Radio 2 took the majority.
    “Ah, ah. It was a bloody decoy,” Osborne-Smith said. His voice was as calm as always but the expletive, if that was what it was nowadays, indicated that he was livid.
    A CCTV camera in the Luton car park was now beaming an image on to the big screen in Division Three and the reality show presently airing was not felicitous. The angular view into the Audi wasn’t the best in the world but it was clear that the couple in the backseats were not Severan Hydt and his female companion. And the passenger in the front, whom he’d taken to be the Irishman, was not the gawky blond man he’d seen earlier, plodding to the garage.
    Decoys.
    “They have to be going to some London airport,” Deputy-Deputy pointed out. “Let’s split up the team.”
    “Unless they decided to cruise up to Manchester or Leeds-Bradford.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    “Send all the Watchers in A Branch Hydt’s picture. Without delay.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Osborne-Smith squinted as he looked at the image broadcast from the CCTV. He could see a bit of the wing of James Bond’s Bentley parked twenty-five yards from the Audi.
    If there was any consolation to the flap, it was that at least Bond had fallen for the ruse too. Combined with his lack of cooperation, his questionable use of the French secret service and his holier-than-thou attitude, the lapse might just signal a significant downsizing of his career.

Chapter 22
    The fifteen-foot lorry, leased to Green Way International but unmarked, pulled up to the curb at the executive flight services terminal at Gatwick Airport. The door slid open and Severan Hydt, an older woman and the Irishman climbed out and collected their suitcases.
    Thirty feet away, in the car park, sat a black and red Mini Cooper, whose interior décor included a yellow rose in a plastic vase wedged into the cup holder. Behind the wheel, James Bond was watching the trio of passengers deploy to the pavement. The Irishman, naturally, was looking around carefully. He never seemed to drop his guard.
    “What do you think of it?” Bond asked, into the hands-free connected to his mobile.
    “It?”
    “The Bentley.”
    “‘It’? Honestly, James, a car like this simply demands a name,” Philly Maidenstone chided. She was sitting in his Bentley Continental GT, at Luton Airport, having chased Hydt’s Audi all the way from Canning Town.
    “I never got into the habit of naming my cars.” Any more than I’d give my gun a gender, he reflected. And kept his eyes on the threesome not far away.
    Bond had been convinced that after the incidents in Serbia and March, Hydt—or the Irishman,