Carte Blanche

at the wire fence, staring at Hydt’s plane.
    My God—it was Bond .
    So, the bloody clever ODG agent, with a fancy car and without permission to carry a firearm in the UK, had tailed Hydt, after all. Osborne-Smith wondered briefly who’d been in the Bentley. The ruse, he knew, had been not only to fool Hydt but to fool Division Three.
    With considerable contentment he watched Bond turn from the fence and head back to the car park, head down and speaking into his mobile, undoubtedly enduring a verbal lashing from his boss for having let the fox slip away.

Chapter 23
    Usually we never hear the sound that wakes us. Perhaps we might, if it repeats: an alarm or an urgent voice. But a once-only noise rouses without registering in our consciousness.
    James Bond didn’t know what lifted him from his dreamless sleep. He glanced at his watch.
    It was just after 1 P.M .
    Then he smelled a delicious aroma: a combination of floral perfume—jasmine, he believed—and the ripe, rich scent of vintage champagne. Above him he saw the heavenly form of a beautiful Middle Eastern woman, wearing a sleek burgundy skirt and long-sleeved golden shirt over her voluptuous figure. Her collar was secured with a pearl, which was different from the lower buttons. He found the tiny cream dot particularly appealing. Her hair was as blue-black as crow feathers, pinned up, though a teasing strand fell loose, cupping one side of her face, which was subtly and meticulously made-up.
    He said to her, “ Salam alaikum .”
    “ Wa alaikum salam, ” she replied. She set the crystal flute on the tray table in front of him, along with the elegant bottle of the king of Moëts, Dom Pérignon. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bond, I’ve woken you. I’m afraid the cork popped more loudly than I’d hoped. I was just going to leave the glass and not disturb you.”
    “ Shukran, ” he said, as he took the glass. “And don’t worry. My second favorite way to wake up is to the sound of champagne opening.”
    She responded to this with a subtle smile. “I can arrange some lunch for you too.”
    “That would be lovely, if it’s not too much trouble.”
    She returned to the galley.
    Bond sipped his champagne and looked out of the private jet’s spacious window, the twin Rolls-Royce engines pulsing smoothly as it flew toward Dubai at 42,000 feet, doing more than 600 miles an hour. The aircraft was, Bond reflected with amusement, a Grumman, like Severan Hydt’s, but Bond was in a newer, faster model, with a greater range than the Rag-and-Bone Man’s.
    Bond had started the chase four hours ago, with the modern equivalent of a scene from an old American police movie, in which the detective leaps into a taxi and orders, “Follow that car.” He’d decided that the commercial flight would get him to Dubai too late to stop the killings, so he’d placed a call to his Commodore Club friend, Fouad Kharaz, who had instantly put a private jet at his disposal. “My friend, you know I owe you,” the Arab assured him.
    A year ago he had approached Bond awkwardly for help, suspecting he did something that involved government security. On his way home from school, Kharaz’s teenage son had become the target of some thugs, nineteen or twenty years old, who flaunted their antisocial behavior orders like insignias of rank. The police were sympathetic but had little time for the drama. Worried sick about his son, Kharaz asked if there was anything Bond could recommend. In a moment of weakness, the knight errant within Bond had prevailed and he had trailed the boy home from school one day when nothing much was going on at the ODG. When the tormentors had moved in, so had Bond.
    With a few effortless martial arts maneuvers he had gently laid two of them out on the pavement and pinned the third, the ringleader, to a wall. He had taken their names from their driving licenses and whispered coldly that if the Kharaz boy was ever troubled again, the hoods’ next visit from Bond would not end so civilly. The boys had strode off defiantly but the son was never troubled again; his status at school had soared.
    So Bond had become Fouad Kharaz’s “best friend of all best friends.” He’d decided to call in the favor and borrow one of the man’s jets.
    According to the digital map on the bulkhead, beneath the airspeed and altitude indicators, they were over Iran. Two hours to go until they touched down in Dubai.
    Just after takeoff, Bond had called Bill Tanner and told him of his