Carte Blanche

different bins—metal, plastic, circuit boards and the like. In the bin liner marked “Media Storage” they saw a fine metal and silicon dust, all that was left of the hard drive. The dangerous e-waste, like the batteries and heavy metals, was deposited in a receptacle marked with warning labels and the benign components were dropped into recycling bins.
    Al-Fulan then directed Hydt and Dunne to a computer monitor, on which a report about the manchine’s efforts scrolled efficiently past.
    Dunne’s icy façade had slipped. He seemed almost excited.
    Hydt, too, was pleased, very pleased. He began to ask a question. But then he looked at a clock on the wall. It was six thirty. He could concentrate on the machinery no longer.

Chapter 28
    James Bond, Felix Leiter and Yusuf Nasad were fifty feet from the factory, crouching beside a large skip, observing Hydt, the Irishman, an Arab in a traditional white robe and an attractive dark-haired woman through a loading-bay window.
    With Bond and Leiter in the American’s Alfa and Nasad in his Ford bringing up the rear, they’d started to follow the Lincoln Town Car from the Intercontinental but both agents immediately recognized that the Arab driver was starting evasion techniques. Worried that they’d be spotted, Bond used an app in his mobile to paint the car with a MASINT profile and took its coordinates with a laser, then uploaded the data to the GCHQ tracking center. Leiter eased off the accelerator and let the satellites follow the vehicle, beaming the results to Bond’s mobile.
    “Damn,” Leiter had drawled, looking at the phone in Bond’s hand. “I want one of them.”
    Bond had followed the Town Car’s progress on his map and directed Leiter, with Nasad following, in the general direction that Hydt was going, which was proving to be a very circuitous route. Finally the Lincoln headed back to the Deira, the old part of town. A few minutes later Bond, Leiter and his asset arrived, left the cars in an alleyway between two dusty warehouses and sliced their way through the chain-link for a closer view of what Hydt and the Irishman were up to. The driver of the Lincoln had remained in the car and could not observe the intruders.
    Bond plugged in an earpiece and trained his phone’s camera eye on the foursome, eavesdropping with an app that Sanu Hirani had developed. The Vibra-Mike reconstructed conversation observed through windows or transparent doors by reading vibrations on glass or other nearby smooth surfaces. It combined what it detected sonically with visual input of lip and cheek movement, eye expression and body language. In circumstances like this it could reconstruct conversations with about 85 percent accuracy.
    After listening to the conversation, Bond told the others, “They’re talking about equipment for the Green Way facilities, his legitimate company. Dammit.”
    “Look at the bastard,” the American whispered. “He knows that around ninety people are going to die in a half hour and it’s like he’s talking to a store clerk about pixels on big-screen TVs.”
    Nasad’s phone buzzed. He took the call, speaking in staccato Arabic, some of which Bond could decipher. He was getting information about the factory. He disconnected and explained to the agents that the place was owned by a Dubai citizen, Mahdi al-Fulan. A picture confirmed he was the man Hydt and the Irishman were with. He was not suspected of having any terrorist ties, had never been to Afghanistan and seemed to be merely an engineer and businessman. He did, however, design and sell his products to, among others, warlords and arms dealers. He had recently developed an optical scanner on a land mine that could differentiate between enemies’ and friendlies’ uniforms or badges.
    Bond recalled the notes he’d found up in March: blast radius . . .
    As conversation in the warehouse resumed, Bond cocked his head and listened once more. Hydt was saying to the Irishman, “I want to leave for the . . . event. Mahdi and I will go there now.” He turned to his Arab associate with eerie, almost hungry, eyes. “It’s not far, is it?”
    “No, we can walk.”
    Hydt said to his Irish partner, “Maybe you and Stella could work out some of the technical details.”
    The Irishman turned to the woman as Hydt and the Arab vanished into the warehouse.
    Bond closed down the app and glanced at Leiter. “Hydt and al-Fulan are going to the site where the attack is to take place.