Carte Blanche

Switzerland and driven to Mont Blanc for five days of skiing and rock and ice climbing.
    His parents’ assurance, however, had been hollow. Two days later they were dead, having fallen from one of the astonishingly beautiful cliff faces of the Aiguilles Rouges, near Chamonix.
    Beautiful cliffs, yes, impressive . . . but not excessively dangerous, not where they had been climbing. As an adult, Bond had looked into the circumstances of the accident. He’d learned that the slope they’d fallen from did not require advanced climbing techniques; indeed, no one had ever been injured, let alone died, there. But, of course, mountains are notoriously fickle and Bond had taken at face value the story the gendarme had told his aunt: that his parents had fallen because a rope frayed at the same time as a large boulder had given way.
    “Mademoiselle, je suis désolé de vous dire . . .”
    When he was young, James Bond had enjoyed traveling with his parents to the foreign countries where Andrew Bond’s company sent him. He’d enjoyed living in hotel suites. He’d enjoyed the local cuisines, very different from that served in the pubs and restaurants in England and Scotland. He’d been captivated with the exotic cultures—the dress, the music, the language.
    He also enjoyed spending time with his father. His mother would hand James over to carers and friends when one of her freelance photojournalism assignments arose but his father would occasionally take him to business meetings in restaurants or hotel lobbies. The boy would perch nearby, with a volume of Tolkien or an American detective novel, while his father talked to unsmiling men named Sam or Micah or Juan.
    James was happy to be included—what son doesn’t like to tag along with his dad? He had always been curious, though, as to why sometimes Andrew insisted that he join him while at others he said no quite firmly.
    Bond had thought nothing more of this . . . until the training sessions at Fort Monckton.
    It was there, in the lessons on clandestine operations, that one instructor had said something that caught his attention. The round, bespectacled man from MI6’s tradecraft training section had told the group, “In most clandestine situations, it’s not advisable for an agent or an asset to be married or have children. If they happen to, it’s best to make sure the family is kept far removed from the agent’s operational life. However, there’s one instance in which it’s advantageous to have a quote ‘typical’ life. These agents will be operating in deepest cover and handling the most critical assignments, where the intelligence to be gathered is vital. In these cases a family life is important to remove the enemy’s suspicions that they’re operatives. Typically their official cover will be working for a company or organization that interests enemy agents: infrastructure, information, armaments, aerospace or government. They will be posted to different locations every few years and take their families with them.”
    James Bond’s father had worked for a major British armaments company. He had been posted to a number of international capitals. His wife and son had accompanied him.
    The instructor had continued, “And in certain circumstances, on the most critical assignments—whether a brush pass or a face-to-face meeting—it’s useful for the operative to take his child with him. Nothing proclaims innocence more than having a youngster with you. Seeing this, the enemy will almost always believe that you’re the real deal—no parent would want to endanger his or her child.” He regarded the agents sitting before him in the classroom, their faces registering varying reactions at his passionless message. “Combating evil sometimes requires a suspension of accepted values.”
    Bond had thought: His father a spy? Impossible. Absurd.
    Still, after he had left Fort Monckton he spent some time looking into his father’s past but found no evidence of a clandestine life. The only evidence was a series of payments made to his aunt for her and James’s benefit, over and above the proceeds from his parents’ insurance policy. These were made annually until James had turned eighteen by a company that must have had some affiliation with Andrew’s employer, though he could never find out exactly where it was based or what the nature of the payments had been.
    Eventually he convinced himself that whole idea was mad and forgot about it.
    Until the