Carte Blanche

invention.”
    “Have you named it?”
    Bond smiled to himself, recalling that the waiter at Antoine’s in London had wondered about the drink too. “Not yet.” He had a flash of inspiration from his conversation with M several days earlier. “Though I think I will now. I’ll call it the Carte Blanche. In your honor.”
    “Why?” she asked, her narrow brow furrowed.
    “Because if your donors drink enough of them, they’ll give you complete freedom to take their money.”
    She laughed and squeezed his arm, then picked up the menu.
    Sitting closer to her now, Bond could see how expertly she’d applied her makeup, accentuating the feline eyes and the thrust of her cheeks and jaw. A thought came to him. Philly Maidenstone was classically attractive but hers was a passive beauty. Felicity’s was far more assertive, forceful.
    He upbraided himself for dwelling on the comparison, reached for the menu and began to study it. Scanning the extensive card he learned that the restaurant, Celsius, was famed for its special grill, which reached 950 degrees centigrade.
    Felicity said, “You order for us. Anything to start but I must have a steak for my main course. There’s nothing like the grilled meat at Celsius. My God, Gene, you’re not a vegan, are you?”
    “Hardly.”
    When the waiter arrived, Bond ordered fresh grilled sardines, to be followed by a large rib-eye steak for two. He asked if the chef could grill it with the bone in—known in America as the “cowboy cut.”
    The waiter mentioned that the steaks were typically served with exotic sauces: Argentinian chimichurri, Indonesian coffee, Madagascan peppercorn, Spanish Madeira or Peruvian anticuchos . But Bond declined them all. He believed that steaks had flavor enough of their own and should be eaten with only salt and pepper.
    Felicity nodded that she was in agreement.
    Bond then selected a bottle of South African red wine, the Rustenberg Peter Barlow cabernet 2005.
    The wine came and was as good as he’d expected. They clinked glasses again and sipped.
    The waiter brought the first course and they ate. Bond, deprived of his lunch by Gregory Lamb, was starving.
    “What do you do for a living, Gene? Severan didn’t say.”
    “Security work.”
    “Ah.” A faint chill descended. Felicity was obviously a tough, worldly businesswoman and recognized the euphemism. She would guess he was in some way involved with the many conflicts in Africa. War, she’d said during her speech, was one of the main causes for the plague of hunger.
    He said, “I have companies that install security systems and provide guards.”
    She seemed to believe this was at least partly true. “I was born in South Africa and have been living here now for four or five years. I’ve seen it change. Crime is less of a problem than it used to be but security staff are still needed. We have a number of them at the organization. We must. Charitable work doesn’t exempt us from risk.” She added darkly, “I’m happy to give food away. I won’t have it stolen from me.”
    To divert her from asking more questions about him Bond inquired about her life.
    She’d grown up in the bush, in the Western Cape, the only child of English parents, her father a mining company executive. The family had moved back to London when she was thirteen. She was an outsider at boarding school, she confessed. “I might have fitted in a bit better if I’d kept my mouth shut about how to field-dress gazelles—especially in the dining hall.”
    Then it had been the London Business School and a stint at a major City investment bank, where she’d done “all right”; her dismissive modesty suggested she’d done extremely well.
    But the work had proved ultimately unsatisfying. “It was too easy for me, Gene. There was no challenge. I needed a steeper mountain. Four or five years ago I decided to reassess my life. I took a month off and spent some time back here. I saw how pervasive hunger was. And I decided to do something about it. Everybody told me not to bother. It was impossible to make a difference. Well, that was like waving a red flag at a bull.”
    “Felicity Willful.”
    She smiled. “So, here I am, bullying donors to give us money and taking on the American and European megafarms.”
    “‘Agropoly.’ Clever term.”
    “I coined it,” she said, then burst out, “They’re destroying the continent. I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
    The serious discussion was cut short