He rose and pulled down several Ordnance Survey maps from the shelf. He flipped through one, scanning carefully.

Mary Goodnight appeared in the doorway. 'James, someone downstairs to see you. From Division Three, he says. Percy Osborne-Smith.'

Philly must have caught the sea change in Bond's expression. 'I'll make myself scarce now, James. I'll keep on at the Serbs. They'll crack. I guarantee it.'

'Oh, one more thing, Philly.' He handed her the signal he'd just been reading. 'I need you to catch everything you can about a Soviet or Russian operation called Steel Cartridge. There's a little in here, not much.'

She glanced down at the printout.

He said, 'Sorry it's not translated but you can probably-'

'Ya govoryu po russki.'

Bond smiled weakly. 'And with a far better accent than mine.' He told himself never to sell her short again.

Philly examined the printout closely. 'This was hacked from an online source. Who has the original data file?'

'One of your people would. It came out of Station R.'

'I'll contact the Russia Desk,' she said. 'I'll want to look at the metadata coded in the file. That'll have the date it was created, who the author was, maybe cross references to other sources.' She slipped the Russian doc.u.ment into a manila folder and took a pen to tick off one of the boxes on the front. 'How do you want it cla.s.sified?'

He debated for a moment. 'Our eyes only.'

'"Our"?' she asked. That p.r.o.noun was not used in official doc.u.ment cla.s.sification.

'Yours and mine,' he said softly. 'No one else.'

A brief hesitation and then, in her delicate lettering, she penned at the top: Eyes only. SIS Agent Maidenstone. ODG Agent James Bond. 'And priority?' she wondered aloud.

At this question Bond did not hesitate at all. 'Urgent.'

11.

Bond was sitting forward at his desk, doing some research of his own in government databases, when he heard footsteps approaching, accompanied by a loud voice.

'I'm fine, just great. You can peel off now, please and thank you I can do without the sat-nav.'

With that, a man in a close-fitting striped suit strode into Bond's office, having discarded the Section P security officer who'd accompanied him. He'd also bypa.s.sed Mary Goodnight, who had risen with a frown as the man stormed past, ignoring her.

He walked up to Bond's desk, thrusting out a fleshy palm. Slim but flabby, unimposing, he nonetheless had a.s.sertive eyes and large hands at the end of his long arms. He seemed the sort to deliver a bone-crusher so Bond, darkening his computer screen and standing up, prepared to counter it, shooting his hand in close to deny him leverage.

In fact, Percy Osborne-Smith's clasp was brief and harmless, though unpleasantly damp.

'Bond. James Bond.' He motioned the Division Three officer to the chair Philly had just occupied and reminded himself not to let the man's coiffure dark blond hair combed and apparently glued to the side of his head pouting lips and rubbery neck deceive. A weak chin did not mean a weak man, as anyone familiar with Field Marshal Montgomery's career could certify.

'So,' Osborne-Smith said, 'here we are. Excitement galore with Incident Twenty. Who thinks up these names, do you wonder? The Intelligence Committee, I suppose.'

Bond tipped his head noncommittally.

The man's eyes swept around the office, alighted briefly on a plastic gun with an orange muzzle used in close-combat training and returned to Bond. 'Now, from what I hear Defence and Six are firing up the boilers to steam down the Afghan route, looking for baddies in the hinterland. Makes you and me the awkward younger brothers, left behind, stuck with this Serbian connection. But sometimes it's the p.a.w.ns that win the game, isn't it?'

He dabbed his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. Bond couldn't recall the last time he'd seen anyone under the age of seventy employ this combination of gesture and accessory. 'Heard about you, Bond . . . James. Let's go with givens, shall we? My surname's a bit of a mouthful. Crosses to bear. Just like my t.i.tle Deputy Senior Director of Field Operations.'

Rather unskilfully inserted, Bond reflected.

'So, it's Percy and James. Sounds like a stand-up act at a Comic Relief show. Anyway, I've heard about you, James. Your reputation precedes you. Not "exceeds", of course. At least, not from what I hear.'

Oh, G.o.d, Bond thought, his patience already worn thin. He pre-empted a continuation of the monologue and explained in detail what had happened in Serbia.

Osborne-Smith took it all in, jotting notes. Then he described what had happened on the British side of the Channel, which wasn't particularly informative. Even enlisting the impressive surveillance skills of MI5's A Branch known as the Watchers no one had been able to confirm more than that the helicopter carrying the Irishman had landed somewhere north-east of London. No MASINT or other trace of the chopper had been found since.

'So, our strategy?' Osborne-Smith said, though not as a question. Rather, it was a preface to a directive: 'While Defence and Six and everybody under the sun are prowling the desert looking for Afghans of ma.s.s destruction, I want to go all out here, find this Irishman and Noah, wrap them up in tidy ribbons and bring them in.'

'Arrest them?'

'Well, "detain" might be the happier word.'

'Actually, I'm not sure that's the best approach,' Bond said delicately.

For G.o.d's sake, be diplomatic with the natives . . .

'Why not? We don't have time to surveille.' Bond noticed a faint lisp. 'Only to interrogate.'

'If thousands of lives are at risk, the Irishman and Noah can't be operating alone. They might even be pretty low in the food chain. All we know for sure is that there was a meeting at Noah's office. Nothing ever suggested he was in charge of the whole operation. And the Irishman? He's a triggerman. Certainly knows his craft but basically he's muscle. I think we need to identify them and keep them in play until we get more answers.'

Osborne-Smith was nodding agreeably. 'Ah, but you're not familiar with my background, James, my curriculum vitae.' The smile and the smarminess vanished. 'I cut my teeth grilling prisoners. In Northern Ireland. And Belmarsh.'

The infamous so-called 'Terrorists' Prison' in London.

'I've sunned myself in Cuba too,' he continued. 'Guantnamo. Yes, indeed. People end up talking to me, James. After I've been going at them for a few days, they'll hand me the address where their brother's hiding, won't they? Or their son. Or daughter. Oh, people talk when I ask them . . . ever so politely.'

Bond wasn't giving up. 'But if Noah has partners and they learn he's been picked up, they might accelerate whatever's planned for Friday. Or disappear and we'll lose them until they strike again in six or eight months when all the leads've gone cold. This Irishman would have planned for a contingency like that, I'm sure of it.'

The soft nose wrinkled with regret. 'It's just that, well, if we were on the Continent somewhere or padding about in Red Square, I'd be delighted to sit back and watch you bowl leg or off breaks, as you thought best, but, well, it is our cricket ground here.'

The whip crack was, of course, inevitable. Bond decided there was no point in arguing. The dandified puppet had a steel spine. He also had ultimate authority and could shut out Bond entirely if he wished to. 'It's your call, of course,' Bond said pleasantly. 'So, I suppose the first step is to find them. Let me show you the leads.' He pa.s.sed over a copy of the pub receipt and the note: Boots March. 17. No later than that.

Osborne-Smith was frowning as he examined the sheets. 'What do you make of them?' he asked.

'Nothing very s.e.xy,' Bond said. 'The pub's outside Cambridge. The note's a bit of a mystery.'

'March the seventeenth? A reminder to drop in at the chemist?'

'Maybe,' Bond said dubiously. 'I was thinking it might be code.' He pushed forward the MapQuest printout that Philly had provided. 'If you ask me, the pub's probably nothing. I can't find anything distinctive about it it's not near anywhere important. Off the M11, near Wimpole Road.' He touched the sheet. 'Probably a waste of time. But it ought to be looked into. Why don't I take that? I'll head up there and look around Cambridge. Maybe you could run the March note past the crypta.n.a.lysts at Five and see what their computers have to say. That holds the key, I think.'

'I will do. But actually, if you don't mind, James, it's probably best if I handle the pub myself. I know the lie of the land. I was at Cambridge Magdalene.' The map and the pub receipt vanished into Osborne-Smith's briefcase, with a copy of the March note. Then he produced another sheet of paper. 'Can you get that girl in?'

Bond lifted an eyebrow. 'Which one?'

'The pretty young thing outside. Single, I see.'

'You mean my PA,' Bond said drily. He rose and went to the door. 'Miss Goodnight, would you come in, please?'

She did so, frowning.

'Our friend Percy wants a word with you.'

Osborne-Smith missed the irony in Bond's choice of names and handed the sheet of paper to her. 'Make a copy of this, would you?'

With a glance towards Bond, who nodded, she took the doc.u.ment and went to the copier. Osborne-Smith called after her, 'Double-sided, of course. Waste works to the enemy's advantage, doesn't it?'

Goodnight returned a moment later. Osborne-Smith put the original in his briefcase and handed the copy to Bond. 'You ever get out to the firearms range?'

'From time to time,' Bond told him. He didn't add: six hours a week, religiously, indoor here with small arms, outdoor with full-bore at Bisley. And once a fortnight he trained at Scotland Yard's FATS range the high-definition computerised firearms training simulator, in which an electrode was mounted against your back; if the terrorist shot you before you shot him, you ended up on your knees in excruciating pain.

'We have to observe the formalities, don't we?' Osborne-Smith gestured at the sheet in Bond's hand. 'Application to become a temporary AFO.'

Only a very few law enforcers authorised firearms officers could carry weapons in the UK.

'It's probably not a good idea to use my name on that,' Bond pointed out.

Osborne-Smith seemed not to have thought of this. 'You may be right. Well, use a nonofficial cover, why don't you? John Smith'll do. Just fill it in and do the quiz on the back gun safety and all that. If you hit a speed b.u.mp, give me a shout. I'll walk you through.'

'I'll get right to it.'

'Good man. Glad that's settled. We'll co-ordinate later after our respective secret missions.' He tapped his briefcase. 'Off to Cambridge.'

He pivoted and strode out as boisterously as he'd arrived.

'What a positively wretched man,' Goodnight whispered.

Bond gave a brief laugh. He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair and tugged it on, picked up the Ordnance Survey. 'I'm going down to the armoury to collect my gun and after that I'll be out for three or four hours.'

'What about the firearms form, James?'

'Ah.' He picked it up, tore it into neat strips and slipped them into the map booklet to mark his places. 'Why waste departmental Post-it notes? Works to the enemy's advantage, you know.'

12.

An hour and a half later, James Bond was in his Bentley Continental GT, a grey streak speeding north.

He was reflecting on his deception of Percy Osborne-Smith. He'd decided that the lead to the Cambridge pub wasn't, in fact, very promising. Yes, possibly the Incident Twenty princ.i.p.als had eaten there the bill suggested a meal for two or three. But the date was more than a week ago so it was unlikely that anyone on the staff would remember a man fitting the Irishman's description and his companions. And since the man had proved to be particularly clever, Bond suspected he rotated the places where he dined and shopped; he would not be a regular there.

The lead in Cambridge had to be followed up, of course, but equally important Bond needed to keep Osborne-Smith diverted. He could simply not allow the Irishman or Noah to be arrested and hauled into Belmarsh, like a drug dealer or an Islamist who'd been buying excessive fertiliser. They needed to keep both suspects in play to discover the nature of Incident Twenty.

So Bond, a keen poker player, had bluffed. He'd taken inordinate interest in the clue about the pub and had mentioned it was not far from Wimpole Road. To most people this would have meant nothing. But Bond guessed that Osborne-Smith would know that a secret government facility connected to Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological weapons research centre in Wiltshire, happened also to be on Wimpole Road. True, it was eight miles to the east, on the other side of Cambridge and nowhere near the pub, but Bond believed that a.s.sociating the two would encourage the Division Three man to descend on the idea like a seabird spotting a fish head.

This relegated Bond to the apparently fruitless task of wrestling with the cryptic note. Boots March. 17. No later than that.

Which he believed he had deciphered.

Most of Philly's suggestions about its meaning had involved the chemist, Boots, which had shops in every town across the UK. She'd also offered suggestions about footwear and about events that had taken place on 17 March.

But one suggestion, towards the end of her list, had intrigued Bond. She'd noted that 'Boots' and 'March' were linked with a dash and she had found that there was a Boots Road that ran near the town of March, a couple of hours' drive north of London. She had seen, too, the full stop between 'March' and '17'. Given that the last phrase 'no later than that' suggested a deadline, '17' made sense as a date but was possibly 17 May, tomorrow.

Clever of her, Bond had thought and in his office, waiting for Osborne-Smith, he had gone into the Golden Wire a secure fibre-optic network tying together records of all major British security agencies to learn what he could about March and Boots Road.

He had found some intriguing facts: traffic reports about road diversions because a large number of lorries were coming and going along Boots Road near an old army base and public notices relating to heavy plant work. References suggested that it had to be completed by midnight on the seventeenth or fines would be levied. He had a hunch that this might be a solid lead to the Irishman and Noah.

And tradecraft dictated that you ignored such intuition at your peril.

So, he was now en route to March, losing himself in the consuming pleasure of driving.

Which meant, of course, driving fast.

Bond had to exercise some restraint, of course, since he wasn't on the N-260 in the Pyrenees, or off the beaten track in the Lake District, but was travelling north along the A1 as it switched ident.i.ties arbitrarily between motorway and trunk road. Still, the speedometer needle occasionally reached 100 m.p.h., and frequently he'd tap the lever of the silken, millisecond-response Quickshift gearbox to overtake a slow-moving horsebox or Ford Mondeo. He stayed mostly in the right lane, although once or twice he took to the hard shoulder for some exhilarating if illegal overtaking. He enjoyed a few controlled skids on stretches of adverse camber.

The police were not a problem. While the jurisdiction of ODG was limited in the UK carte grise, not blanche, Bond now joked to himself it was often necessary for O Branch agents to get around the country quickly. Bond had phoned in an NDR a Null Detain Request and his number plate was ignored by cameras and constables with speed guns.

Ah, the Bentley Continental GT coupe . . . the finest off-the-peg vehicle in the world, Bond believed.

He had always loved the marque; his father had kept hundreds of old newspaper photos of the famed Bentley brothers and their creations leaving Bugattis and the rest of the field in the dust at Le Mans in the 1920s and 1930s. Bond himself had witnessed the astonishing Bentley Speed 8 take the chequered flag at the race in 2003, back in the game after three-quarters of a century. It had always been his goal to own one of the stately yet wickedly fast and clever vehicles. While the E-type Jaguar sitting below his flat had been a legacy from his father, the GT had been an indirect bequest. He'd bought his first Continental some years ago, depleting what remained of the life-insurance payment that had come his way upon his parents' deaths. He'd recently traded up to the new model.

He now came off the motorway and proceeded towards March, in the heart of the Fens. He knew little about the place. He'd heard of the 'March March March', a walk by students from March to Cambridge in, of course, the third month of the year. There was Whitemoor prison. And tourists came to see St Wendreda's Church Bond would have to trust the tourist office's word that it was spectacular; he hadn't been inside a house of worship, other than for surveillance purposes, in years.

Ahead loomed the old British Army base. He continued in a broad circle to the back, which was surrounded by vicious barbed-wire fencing and signs warning against intrusion. He saw why: it was being demolished. So this was the work he'd learnt of. Half a dozen buildings had already been razed. Only one remained, three storeys high, old red brick. A faded sign announced: Hospital.

Several large lorries were present, along with bulldozers, other earth-moving equipment and caravans, which sat on a hill a hundred yards from the building, probably the temporary headquarters for the demolition crew. A black car was parked near the largest caravan, but no one was about. Bond wondered why; today was Monday and not a bank holiday.

He nosed the car into a small copse, where it could not be seen. Climbing out, he surveyed the terrain: complicated waterways, potato and sugarbeet fields and cl.u.s.ters of trees. Bond donned his 5.11 tactical outfit, with the shrapnel tear in the shoulder of the jacket and tainted from the smell of scorching from rescuing the clue in Serbia that had led him here then stepped out of his City shoes into low combat boots.

He clipped his Walther and two holsters of ammunition to a canvas web utility belt.

If you hit a speed b.u.mp, give me a shout.

He also pocketed his silencer, a torch, tool kit and his folding knife.