Carte Blanche

began fiddling with the components inside. Bond saw that the second track, leading off to the right, was a rusting, disused spur, ending in a barrier at the top of a hill.
    So it was sabotage. They were going to derail the train by shunting it on to the spur. The cars would tumble down the hill into a stream that flowed into the Danube.
    But why?
    Bond turned the monocular toward the diesel engine and the wagons behind it and saw the answer. The first two cars contained only scrap metal but behind them, a canvas-covered flatbed was marked OPASNOST-DANGER! He saw, too, a hazardous-materials diamond, the universal warning sign that told emergency rescuers the risks of a particular shipment. Alarmingly, this diamond had high numbers for all three categories: health, instability and inflammability. The W at the bottom meant that the substance would react dangerously with water. Whatever was being carried in that car was in the deadliest category, short of nuclear materials.
    The train was now three-quarters of a mile away from the switch rails, picking up speed to make the gradient to the bridge.
    Your enemy’s purpose will dictate your response. . . .
    He didn’t know how the sabotage related to Incident 20, if at all, but their immediate goal was clear—as was the response Bond now instinctively formulated. He said to the comrades, “If they try to leave, block them at the drive and take them. No lethal force.”
    He leaped into the driver’s seat of the Jetta. He pointed the car toward the fields where he’d been conducting surveillance and jammed down the accelerator as he released the clutch. The light car shot forward, engine and gearbox crying out at the rough treatment, as it crashed over brush, saplings, narcissi and the raspberry bushes that grew everywhere in Serbia. Dogs fled and lights in the tiny cottages nearby flicked on. Residents in their gardens waved their arms angrily in protest.
    Bond ignored them and concentrated on maintaining his speed as he drove toward his destination, guided only by scant illumination: a partial moon above and the doomed train’s headlight, far brighter and rounder than the lamp of heaven.

Chapter 3
    The impending death weighed on him.
    Niall Dunne crouched among weeds, thirty feet from the switch rails. He squinted through the fading light of early evening at the Serbian Rail driver’s cab of the freight train as it approached and he again thought: a tragedy.
    For one thing, death was usually a waste and Dunne was, first and foremost, a man who disliked waste—it was almost sinful. Diesel engines, hydraulic pumps, drawbridges, electric motors, computers, assembly lines . . . all machines were meant to perform their tasks with as little waste as possible.
    Death was efficiency squandered.
    Yet there seemed to be no way around it tonight.
    He looked south, at the glistening needles of white illumination on the rails from the train’s headlight. He glanced round. The Mercedes was out of sight of the train, parked at just the right angle to keep it hidden from the cab. It was yet another of the precise calculations he had incorporated into his blueprint for the evening. He heard, in memory, his boss’s voice.
    This is Niall. He’s brilliant. He’s my draftsman . . .
    Dunne believed he could see the shadow of the driver’s head in the cab of the diesel. Death . . . He tried to shrug away the thought.
    The train was now four or five hundred yards away.
    Aldo Karic joined him.
    “The speed?” Dunne asked the middle-aged Serb. “Is it all right? He seems slow.”
    In syrupy English the Serbian said, “No, is good. Accelerating now—look. You can see. Is good.” Karic, a bearish man, sucked air through his teeth. He’d seemed nervous throughout dinner—not, he’d confessed, because he might be arrested or fired but because of the difficulty in keeping the ten thousand euros secret from everyone, including his wife and two children.
    Dunne regarded the train again. He calculated speed, mass, incline. Yes, it was good. At this point even if someone tried to wave the train down, even if a Belgrade supervisor happened to notice something was amiss, phoned the driver and ordered him to apply full brakes, it would be physically impossible to stop the train before it hit the switch rails, now configured to betray.
    And he reminded himself: Sometimes death is necessary.
    The train was now three hundred yards away.
    It would all be over in ninety seconds. And