Carte Blanche

products that ensured they couldn’t be recognized as human remains! Hydt could hardly contain himself. Utterly brilliant. Why, there must be hundreds of opportunities like this throughout the world—Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Latin America . . . and there were killing fields aplenty in Africa. Thousands. His chest pounded.
    “So, that’s my idea. A fifty-fifty partnership. I provide the refuse and you recycle it.” Theron seemed to find this rather amusing.
    “I think we may be able to do business.” Hydt offered his hand to the Afrikaner.

Chapter 35
    The worst risk of James Bond assuming the NOC—nonofficial cover—of Gene Theron was that Niall Dunne had perhaps got a look at him in Serbia or the Fens or had been given his description in Dubai—if the blue-jacketed man who’d been tailing him was in fact working for Hydt.
    In which case when Bond walked brazenly into the Green Way office in Cape Town and sought to hire Hydt to dispose of bodies hidden in secret graves throughout Africa, Dunne would either kill him on the spot or spirit him to their own personal killing field, where the job would be done with cold efficiency.
    But now, having shaken hands with an intrigued Severan Hydt, Bond believed his cover was holding. So far. Hydt had been suspicious at first, of course, but he had been willing to give Theron the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because Bond had tempted him with a dangle, a lure he couldn’t resist: death and decay.
    That morning, at SAPS headquarters, Bond had contacted Philly Maidenstone and Osborne-Smith—his new ally—and they had data-mined Hydt’s and Green Way’s credit cards. They’d learned that he’d not only traveled to the Killing Fields in Cambodia but to Krakow, Poland, where he’d taken several tours of Auschwitz. Among his purchases at the time were double-A batteries and a second flash chip for a camera.
    Man’s got a whole new idea about porn . . .
    Bond decided that to work his way into Hydt’s life he would offer a chance to satisfy that lust: access to secret killing fields throughout Africa and a proposal to recycle human remains.
    For the past three hours Bond had struggled, under the tutelage of Bheka Jordaan, to become an Afrikaner mercenary from Durban. Gene Theron would have a slightly unusual background: He’d had Huguenot rather than Dutch forebears and his parents favored English and French in the household of his youth, which explained why he didn’t speak much Afrikaans. A British education in Kenya would cover his accent. She had, however, made Bond learn something of the dialect; if Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon had mastered the subtle intonation for recent films—and they were American, for heaven’s sake—he could do so too.
    While she’d coached him on facts that a South African mercenary might know, Sergeant Mbalula had gone to the evidence locker and found an incarcerated drug dealer’s gaudy Breitling watch, to replace Bond’s tasteful Rolex, and gold bracelet for the successful mercenary to wear. He’d then sped to a jeweler in the Gardens Shopping Center in Mill Street, where he’d bought a gold signet ring and had it engraved with the initials EJT.
    Meanwhile, Warrant Officer Kwalene Nkosi had worked feverishly with the ODG’s I Branch in London to create the fictional Gene Theron, uploading to the Internet biographical information about the hard-boiled mercenary, with Photoshopped pictures and details about his fictional company.
    A series of lectures on cover identities at Fort Monckton could be summarized in the instructor’s introductory sentence: “If you don’t have a Web presence, you’re not real.”
    Nkosi had also printed business cards for EJT Services Ltd, and MI6 in Pretoria pulled in some favors to get the company registered in record time, the documents backdated. Jordaan was not happy about this—it was, to her, a breach of the sacred rule of law—but since she and the SAPS were not involved, she let it go. I Branch also created a fake criminal investigation in Cambodia about Theron’s questionable behavior in Myanmar, which mentioned shady activities in other countries too.
    The faux Afrikaner was over the first hurdle. The second—and most dangerous—was close. Hydt was on the phone summoning Niall Dunne to meet “a businessman from Durban.”
    After he’d hung up, Hydt said casually, “One question. Would you happen to have pictures of the fields? The graves?”
    “That can be