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  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll co-ordinate with him.’

  ‘Get on to it, 007. And remember: you’re operating in the UK. Treat it like a country you’ve never been to. Which means, for God’s sake, be diplomatic with the natives.’

  9

  ‘It’s pretty bad, sir. Are you sure you want to see it?’

  To the foreman, the man replied immediately. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right, then. I’ll drive you out.’

  ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘Just the shift chief and the lad what found it.’ Casting a glance at his boss, the man added, ‘They’ll keep quiet. If that’s what you want.’

  Severan Hydt said nothing.

  Under an overcast and dusty sky, the two men left the loading bay of the ancient headquarters building and walked to a nearby car park. They climbed into a people-carrier emblazoned with the logo of Green Way International Disposal and Recycling; the company name was printed over a delicate drawing of a verdant leaf. Hydt didn’t much care for the design, which struck him as mockingly trendy, but he’d been told that the image had scored well in focus groups and was good for public relations (‘Ah, the public,’ he’d responded with veiled contempt and reluctantly approved it).

  He was a tall man – six foot three – and broad-shouldered, his columnar torso encased in a bespoke suit of black wool. His massive head was covered with thick, curly hair, black streaked with white, and he wore a matching beard. His yellowing fingernails extended well past his fingertips, but were carefully filed; they were long by design, not neglect.

  Hydt’s pallor accentuated his dark nostrils and darker eyes, framed by a long face that appeared younger than his fifty-six years. He was a strong man still, having retained much of his youthful muscularity.

  The van started through his company’s dishevelled grounds, more than a hundred acres of low buildings, rubbish tips, skips, hovering seagulls, smoke, dust…

  And decay…

  As they drove over the rough roads, Hydt’s attention momentarily slipped to a construction about half a mile away. A new building was nearing completion. It was identical to two that stood already in the grounds: five-storey boxes from which chimneys rose, the sky above them rippling from the rising heat. The buildings were known as destructors, a Victorian word that Severan Hydt loved. England was the first country in the world to make energy from municipal refuse. In the 1870s the first power plant to do so was built in Nottingham and soon hundreds were operating throughout the country, producing steam to generate electricity.

  The destructor now nearing completion in the middle of his disposal and recycling operation was no different in theory from its gloomy Dickensian forebears, save that it used scrubbers and filters to clean the dangerous exhaust and was far more efficient, burning RDF – refuse-derived fuel – as it produced energy that was pumped (for profit, of course) into the London and Home County power grids.

  Indeed, Green Way International, plc, was simply the latest in a long British tradition of innovation in refuse disposal and reclamation. Henry IV had decreed that rubbish should be collected and removed from the streets of towns and cities on threat of forfeit. Mudlarks had kept the banks of the Thames clean – for entrepreneurial profit, not government wages – and rag pickers had sold scraps of wool to mills for the production of cheap cloth called shoddy. In London, as early as the nineteenth century, women and girls had been employed to sift through incoming refuse and sort it according to future usefulness. The British Paper Company had been founded to manufacture recycled paper – in 1890.

  Green Way was located nearly twenty miles east of London, well past the boxed sets of office buildings on the Isle of Dogs and the sea-mine of the O2, past the ramble of Canning Town and Silvertown, the Docklands. To reach it you turned south-east off the A13 and drove towards the Thames. Soon you were down to a narrow lane, unwelcoming, even forbidding, surrounded by nothing but brush and stalky plants, pale and translucent as a dying patient’s skin. The tarmac strip seemed a road to nowhere… until it crested a low rise and ahead you could see Green Way’s massive complex, forever muted through a haze.

  In the middle of this wonderland of rubbish the van now stopped beside a battered skip, six feet high, twenty long. Two workers, somewhere in their forties, wearing tan Green Way overalls, stood uncomfortably beside it. They didn’t look any less uneasy now that the owner of the company himself, no less, was present.

  ‘Crikey,’ one whispered to the other.

  Hydt knew they were also cowed by his black eyes, the tight mass of his beard and his towering frame.

  And then there were those fingernails.

  He asked, ‘In there?’

  The workers remained speechless and the foreman, the name Jack Dennisonstitched on his overalls, said, ‘That’s right, sir.’ Then he snapped to one of the workers, ‘Right, sunshine, don’t keep Mr Hydt waiting. He hasn’t got all day, has he?’

  The employee hurried to the side of the skip and, with some effort, pulled the large door open, assisted by a spring. Inside were the ubiquitous mounds of green bin liners and loose junk – bottles, magazines and newspapers – that people had been too lazy to separate for recycling.

  And there was another item of discard inside: a human body.

  A woman’s or teenage boy’s, to judge from the stature. There wasn’t much else to go on, since, clearly, death had occurred months ago. He bent down and probed with his long fingernails.

  This enjoyable examination confirmed the corpse was a woman’s.

  Staring at the loosening skin, the protruding bones, the insect and animal work on what was left of the flesh, Hydt felt his heart quicken. He said to the two workers, ‘You’ll keep this to yourselves.’

  They’ll keep quiet.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Wait over there.’

  They trotted away. Hydt glanced at Dennison, who nodded that they’d behave themselves. Hydt didn’t doubt it. He ran Green Way more like a military base than a rubbish tip and recycling yard. Security was tight – mobile phones were banned, all outgoing communications monitored – and discipline harsh. But, in compensation, Severan Hydt paid his people very, very well. A lesson of history was that professional soldiers stuck around far longer than amateurs, provided you had the money. And that particular commodity was never in short supply at Green Way. Disposing of what people no longer wanted had always been, and would forever be, a profitable endeavour.

  Alone now, Hydt crouched beside the body.

  The discovery of human remains here happened with some frequency. Sometimes workers in the construction debris and reclamation division of Green Way would find Victorian bones or desiccated skeletons in building foundations. Or a corpse was that of a homeless person, dead from exposure to the elements, drink or drugs, hurled unceremoniously upon the bin liners. Sometimes it was a murder victim – in which case the killers were usually polite enough to bring the body here directly.

  Hydt never reported the deaths. The presence of the police was the last thing he wanted.

  Besides, why should he give up such a treasure?

  He eased closer to the body, knees pressing against what was left of the woman’s jeans. The smell of decay – like bitter, wet cardboard – would be unpleasant to most people but discard had been Hydt’s lifelong profession and he was no more repulsed by it than a garage mechanic is troubled by the scent of grease or an abattoir worker the odour of blood and viscera.

  Dennison, the foreman, however, stood back some distance from the perfume.

  With one of his jaundiced fingernails, Hydt reached forward and stroked the top of the skull, from which most of the hair was missing, then the jaw, the finger bones, the first to be exposed. Her nails too were long, though not because they had grown after her death, which was a myth; they simply appearedlonger because the flesh beneath them had shrunk.

  He studied his new friend for a long moment, then reluctantly eased back. He looked at his w
atch. He pulled his iPhone from his pocket and took a dozen pictures of the corpse.

  Then he glanced around him. He pointed to a deserted spot between two large mounds over landfills, like barrows holding phalanxes of fallen soldiers. ‘Tell the men to bury it there.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Dennison replied.

  As he walked back to the people-carrier, he said, ‘Not too deep. And leave a marker. So I’ll be able to find it again.’

  Half an hour later Hydt was in his office, scrolling through the pictures he’d taken of the corpse, lost in the images, sitting at the three-hundred-year-old gaol door mounted on legs that was his desk. Finally he slipped the phone away and turned his dark eyes to other matters. And there were many. Green Way was one of the world leaders in the disposal, reclamation and recycling of discard.

  The office was spacious and dimly lit, located on the top storey of Green Way’s headquarters, an old meat-processing factory, dating to 1896, renovated and turned into what interior design magazines might call shabby chic.

  On the walls were architectural relics from buildings his company had demolished: scabby painted frames around cracked stained glass, concrete gargoyles, wildlife, effigies, mosaics. St George and the dragon were represented several times. St Joan, too. On one large bas-relief Zeus, operating undercover as a swan, had his way with beautiful Leda.

  Hydt’s secretary came and went with letters for his signature, reports for him to read, memos to approve, financial statements to consider. Green Way was doing extremely well. At a recycling-industry conference Hydt had once joked that the adage about certainty in life should not be limited to the well-known two. People had to pay taxes, they had to die… and they had to have their discard collected and disposed of.

  His computer chimed and he called up an encrypted email from a colleague out of the country. It was about an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, confirming times and locations. The last line stirred him: The number of dead tomorrow will be significant – close to 100. Hope that suits.

  It did indeed. And the desire that had arisen within him when he’d first gazed at the body in the skip churned all the hotter.

  He glanced up as a slim woman in her mid-sixties entered, wearing a dark trouser suit and black shirt. Her hair was white, cut in a businesswoman’s bob. A large, unadorned diamond hung from a platinum chain around her narrow neck, and similar stones, though in more complex arrangements, graced her wrists and several fingers.

  ‘I’ve approved the proofs.’ Jessica Barnes was an American. She’d come from a small town outside Boston; the regional lilt continued, charmingly, to tint her voice. A beauty queen years ago, she’d met Hydt when she was a hostess at a smart New York restaurant. They’d lived together for several years and – to keep her close – he’d hired her to review Green Way’s advertisements, another endeavour Hydt had little respect for or interest in. He’d been told, however, that she’d made some good decisions from time to time with regard to the company’s marketing efforts.

  But as Hydt gazed at her, he saw that something about her was different today.

  He found himself studying her face. That was it. His preference, insistence, was that she wore only black and white and kept her face free of make-up; today she had on some very faint blush and perhaps – he couldn’t quite be certain – some lipstick. He didn’t frown but she saw the direction of his eyes and shifted a bit, breathing a little differently. Her fingers started towards a cheek. She stopped her hand.

  But the point had been made. She proffered the ads. ‘Do you want to look at them?’

  ‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll send them off.’ She left his office, her destination not the marketing department, Hydt knew, but the cloakroom where she would wash her face.

  Jessica was not a foolish woman; she’d learned her lesson.

  Then she was gone from his thoughts. He stared out of the window at his new destructor. He was very aware of the event coming up on Friday, but at the moment he couldn’t get tomorrow out of his head.

  The number of dead… close to 100.

  His gut twisted pleasantly.

  It was then that his secretary announced on the intercom, ‘Mr Dunne’s here, sir.’

  ‘Ah, good.’

  A moment later, Niall Dunne entered and swung the door shut so that the two were alone. The cumbersome man’s trapezoid face had rarely flickered with emotion in the nine months they’d known each other. Severan Hydt had little use for most people and no interest in social niceties. But Dunne chilled even him.

  ‘Now, what happened over there?’ Hydt asked. After the incident in Serbia, Dunne had said they should keep their phone conversations to a minimum.

  The man turned his pale blue eyes to Hydt and explained in his Belfast accent that he and Karic, the Serbian contact, had been surprised by several men – at least two BIA Serbian intelligence officers masquerading as police and a Westerner, who’d told the Serbian agent he was with the European Peacekeeping and Monitoring Group.

  Hydt frowned. ‘It’s-’

  ‘There is no such group,’ Dunne said calmly. ‘It had to be a private operation. There was no back-up, no central communications, no medics. The Westerner probably bribed the intelligence officers to help him. It isthe Balkans, after all. May have been a competitor.’ He added, ‘Maybe one of your partners or a worker here let slip something about the plan.’

  He was referring to Gehenna, of course. They did everything they could to keep the project secret but a number of people around the world were involved; it wasn’t impossible that there’d been a leak and some crime syndicate was interested in learning more about it.

  Dunne continued, ‘I don’t want to minimise the risk – they were pretty clever. But it wasn’t a major co-ordinated effort. I’m confident we can go forward.’

  Dunne handed Hydt a mobile phone. ‘Use this one for our conversations. Better encryption.’

  Hydt examined it. ‘Did you get a look at the Westerner?’

  ‘No. There was a lot of smoke.’

  ‘And Karic?’

  ‘I killed him.’ The blank face registered the same emotion as if he’d said, ‘Yes, it’s cool outside today.’

  Hydt considered what the man had told him. No one was more precise or cautious when it came to analysis than Niall Dunne. If he was convinced this was no problem, then Hydt would accept his judgement.

  Dunne continued, ‘I’m going up to the facility now. Once I get the last materials up there the team say they can finish in a few hours.’

  A fire flared within Hydt, ignited by an image of the woman’s body in the skip – and the thought of what awaited up north. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Dunne said nothing. Finally he asked in a monotone, ‘You think that’s a good idea? Might be risky.’ He offered this as if he’d detected the eagerness in Hydt’s voice – Dunne seemed to feel that nothing good could come out of a decision based on emotion.

  ‘I’ll chance it.’ Hydt tapped his pocket to make certain his phone was there. He hoped there’d be an opportunity to take some more photographs.

  10

  After leaving M’s lair, Bond walked up the corridor. He greeted a smartly dressed Asian woman keyboarding deftly at a large computer and stepped into the doorway behind her.

  ‘You’ve bought the duty,’ he said to the man hunched over a desk as loaded with papers and files as M’s was empty.

  ‘I have indeed.’ Bill Tanner looked up. ‘I’m now the grand overlord of Incident Twenty. Take a pew, James.’ He nodded to an empty chair – or, rather, the empty chair. The office boasted a number of seats, but the rest were serving as outposts for more files. As Bond sat, the ODG’s chief of staff asked, ‘So, most important, did you get some decent wine and a gourmet meal on SAS Air last night?’

  An Apache helicopter, courtesy of the Special Air Service, had plucked Bond from a field south of the Danube and whisked him to a NATO base in Germany, where a Hercules loaded with van
parts completed his journey to London. He said, ‘Apparently they forgot to stock the galley.’

  Tanner laughed. The retired army officer, a former lieutenant colonel, was a solid man in his fifties, ruddy of complexion and upright – in all senses of the word. He was in his usual uniform: dark trousers and light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Tanner had a tough job, running the ODG’s day-to-day operations, and by rights he should have had little sense of humour, though in fact, he had a fine one. He’d been Bond’s mentor when the young agent had joined and was now his closest friend within the organisation. Tanner was a devout golfer and every few weeks he and Bond would try to get out to one of the more challenging courses, like Royal Cinque Ports or Royal St George’s or, if time was tight, Sunningdale, near Windsor.

  Tanner was, of course, generally familiar with Incident Twenty and the hunt for Noah, but Bond now updated him – and explained about his own downsized role in the UK operation.

  The chief of staff gave a sympathetic laugh. ‘ Carte grise , eh? Must say you’re taking it rather well.’

  ‘Hardly have much choice,’ Bond allowed. ‘Is Whitehall still convinced that the threat’s out of Afghanistan?’

  ‘Let’s just say they hopeit’s based there,’ Tanner said, his voice low. ‘For several reasons. You can probably work them out for yourself.’

  He meant politics, of course.

  Then he nodded towards M’s office. ‘Did you catch his opinion on that security conference he’s been shanghaied to attend this week?’

  ‘Not much room for interpretation,’ Bond said.

  Tanner chuckled.

  Bond glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘I’ve got to meet a man from Division Three. Osborne-Smith. You know anything about him?’

  ‘Ah, Percy.’ Bill Tanner raised a cryptic eyebrow and smiled. ‘Good luck, James,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s best just to leave it at that.’