Carte Blanche

“It’s a township.”
    A squatters’ camp, Bond recalled, from the briefing material Bheka Jordaan had given him. The shacks rarely had standard postal addresses. “Well, could I go there, ask if anyone knew him?”
    Another pause. “Well, sir, it might not be very safe.”
    “I’m not too worried about that.”
    “I think it would not be practical, either.”
    “Why is that?”
    “The population of Primrose Gardens is around fifty thousand.”
    At 17:30 hours, as autumn dusk descended, Niall Dunne watched Severan Hydt leave the Green Way office in Cape Town, striding tall and with a certain elegance to his limousine.
    Hydt ’s feet didn’t splay, his posture wasn’t hunched, his arms didn’t swing from side to side. (“Oi, lookit the tosser! Niall’s a bleedin’ giraffe!”)
    Hydt was on his way home, where he would change, then take Jessica to the fund-raiser at the Lodge Club.
    Dunne was standing in the Green Way lobby, staring out of the window. His eyes lingered on Hydt as he vanished down the street, accompanied by one of his Green Way guards.
    Watching him leave, en route to his home and his companion, Dunne felt a pang.
    Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, he told himself. Concentrate on the job. All hell’s going to break loose on Friday and it’ll be your fault if a single cog or gear malfunctions.
    Concentrate.
    So he did.
    Dunne left Green Way, collected his car and drove out of Cape Town toward Primrose Gardens. He would meet up with a security man from the company and proceed with the plan, which he now ran through his mind: the timing, the approach, the number of grenades, the firebomb, the escape.
    He reviewed the blueprint with precision and patience. The way he did everything.
    This is Niall. He’s brilliant. He’s my draftsman. . . .
    But other thoughts intruded and his sloping shoulders drooped even more as he pictured his boss at the fund-raising gala later that night. The pang stabbed him again.
    Dunne supposed people wondered why he was alone, why he didn’t have a partner. They assumed the answer was that he lacked the ability to feel. That he was a machine. They didn’t understand that, according to the concept of classical mechanics, there were simple machines—like screws and levers and pulleys—and complex machines, like engines, which by definition transferred energy into motion.
    Well, he reasoned logically, calories were turned into energy, which moved the human body. So, yes, he was a machine. But so were we all, every creature on earth. That didn’t preclude the capacity for love.
    No, the explanation of his solitude was simply that the object of his desire didn’t, in turn, desire him.
    How embarrassingly mundane, how common.
    And bloody unfair, of course. God, it was unfair. No draftsman would design a machine in which the two parts necessary to create harmonious movement didn’t work perfectly, each needing the other and in turn satisfying the reciprocal need. But that was exactly the situation in which he found himself: He and his boss were mismatched parts.
    Besides, he thought bitterly, the laws of attraction were far riskier than the laws of mechanics. Relationships were messy, dangerous and plagued with waste, and while you could keep an engine humming for hundreds of thousands of hours, love between human beings often sputtered and seized just after it caught.
    It betrayed you too, far more often than machinery did.
    Bollocks, he told himself with what passed for anger within Niall Dunne. Forget all this. You have a job to do tonight. He ran through his blueprint again and then once more.
    As the traffic thinned he drove quickly east of the city, heading toward the township along dark roads gritty and damp as a riverside dock.
    He pulled into a shopping-center car park and killed the engine. A moment later a battered van stopped behind him. Dunne climbed from his car and got into the other vehicle, nodding to the security man, very large, wearing military fatigues. Without saying a word, they set off at once and, in ten minutes, were driving through the unmarked streets of Primrose Gardens. Dunne climbed into the back of the van, where there were no windows. He was, of course, distinctive here, with his height, his hair. More significant, he was white and would be extremely conspicuous in a South African township after dark. It was possible that the drug dealer who was threatening Dlamini’s daughter was white or had whites who worked for him. But