Carte Blanche

closed on it he stopped. The Irishman was dead. Still strapped into the seat, he was inverted, arms dangling over his shoulders. Blood covered his face and neck and pooled on the car’s ceiling.
    Squinting against the fumes, Bond kicked in the driver’s window to drag the body out. He would salvage the man’s mobile and what pocket litter he could, then wrench open the boot to collect luggage and laptops.
    He opened his knife again to cut the seat belt. In the distance: the urgent wah-ha of sirens, growing louder. He looked back up the road. The fire engines were still a few miles away but they’d be here soon. Get on with it! The flames from the engine were increasingly energetic. The smoke was vile.
    As he began to saw away at the belt, though, he thought suddenly: Firefighters? Already?
    That made no sense. Police, yes. But not the fire brigade. He gripped the driver’s bloodied hair and turned the head.
    It was not the Irishman. Bond gazed at the man’s jacket: The Cyrillic lettering was the same as on the lorry he’d nearly hit. The Irishman had forced the vehicle to stop. He’d cut the driver’s throat, strapped him into the Mercedes and sent it over the cliff here, then called the local fire service in order to slow the traffic and prevent Bond pursuing him.
    The Irishman would have taken the rucksack and everything else from the boot, of course. Inside the car, though, on the inverted ceiling, toward the backseat, there were a few scraps of paper. Bond jammed them into his pockets before the flames forced him away. He ran back to the Jetta and sped off toward Highway 21, away from the approaching flashing lights.
    He fished out his mobile. It resembled an iPhone but was a bit larger and featured special optics, audio systems and other hardware. The unit contained multiple phones—one that could be registered to an agent’s official or nonofficial cover identity, then a hidden unit, with hundreds of operational apps and encryption packages. (Because the device had been developed by Q Branch it had taken all of a day for some wit in the office to dub them “iQPhones.”)
    He opened an app that gave him a priority link to a GCHQ tracking center. He recited into the voice-recognition system a description of the yellow Zastava Eurozeta lorry the Irishman was driving. The computer in Cheltenham would automatically recognize Bond’s location and determine projected routes for the truck, then train the satellite to look for any nearby vehicle of this sort and track it.
    Five minutes later he heard his phone buzz. Excellent. He glanced at the screen.
    But the message was not from the snoops; it was from Bill Tanner, chief of staff at Bond’s outfit. The subject heading said:
    CRASH DIVE.
    Shorthand for Emergency. Eyes flipping from the road to the phone, Bond read on.
    GCHQ intercept: Serbian security agent assigned to you in Incident 20 operation died on way to hospital. Reported you abandoned him. Serbs have priority order for your arrest. Evacuate immediately.

Chapter 6
    After three and a half hours’ sleep James Bond was woken at 7 A.M. in his Chelsea flat by the electronic tone of his mobile phone’s alarm clock. His eyes focused on the white ceiling of the small bedroom. He blinked twice and, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, head and knees, rolled out of the double bed, prodded by the urge to get on the trail of the Irishman and Noah.
    His clothes from the mission to Novi Sad lay on the hardwood floor. He tossed the tactical outfit into a training kit bag, gathered up the rest of his clothes and dropped them into the laundry bin, a courtesy to May, his treasure of a Scottish housekeeper who came three times a week to sort out his domestic life. He would not think of having her pick up his clutter.
    Naked, Bond walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it and scrubbed himself hard with unscented soap. Then he turned the temperature down, stood under freezing water until he could tolerate that no longer, stepped out and dried himself. He examined his wounds from last night: two large, aubergine-colored bruises on his leg, some scrapes and the slice on his shoulder from the grenade shrapnel. Nothing serious.
    He shaved with a heavy, double-bladed safety razor, its handle of light buffalo horn. He used this fine accessory not because it was greener to the environment than the plastic disposables that most men employed but simply because it gave a better shave—and