Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [119]
Sir Andrew took over. He said, ‘Defence Intelligence and GCHQ are reporting a swell of SIGINT in Afghanistan over the past six hours.’
‘General consensus is that it’s to do with Incident Twenty.’
M asked, ‘Anything specific to Hydt – Noah – or thousands of deaths? Niall Dunne? Army bases in March? Improvised explosive devices? Engineers in Dubai? Rubbish and recycling facilities in Cape Town?’ M read every signal that crossed his desk or arrived in his mobile phone.
‘We can’t tell, can we?’ Bixton answered. ‘The Doughnut hasn’t broken the codes yet.’ GCHQ’s headquarters in Cheltenham was built in the shape of a fat ring. ‘The encryption packages are brand spanking new. Which has stymied everyone.’
‘SIGINT is cyclical over there,’ M muttered dismissively. He had been very, very senior at MI6 and had earned a reputation for unparalleled skill at mining intelligence and, more important, refining it into something useful.
‘True,’ Sir Andrew agreed. ‘Rather too coincidental, though, that all these calls and emails have popped up just now, the day before Incident Twenty, wouldn’t you think?’
Not necessarily.
He continued, ‘And nobody’s turned up anything that specifically links Hydt to the threat.’
‘Nobody’ translated to ‘007’.
M looked at his wristwatch, which had been his son’s, a soldier with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The security meeting was set to resume in a half hour. He was exhausted and Friday, tomorrow, would be an even longer session, culminating in a tiresome dinner followed by a speech by the home secretary.
Sir Andrew noted the less-than-subtle glance at the battered timepiece: ‘Long story short, Miles, the JIC is of the opinion that this Severan Hydt fellow in South Africa’s a diversion. Maybe he’s involved but he’s not a key player in Incident Twenty. Five and Six’s people think the real actors are in Afghanistan and that’s where the attack will happen: military or aid workers, contractors.’
Of course, that was what they would say – whatever they actually thought. The adventure in Kabul had cost billions of pounds and far too many lives; the more evil that could be found there to justify the incursion, the better. M had been aware of this from the beginning of the Incident Twenty operation.
‘Now, Bond—’
‘He’s good, we know that,’ Bixton interrupted, eyeing the chocolate biscuits M had asked not to be brought with the tea but had arrived anyway.
Sir Andrew frowned.
‘It’s just that he hasn’t actually found much,’ Bixton went on. ‘Unless there’ve been details that haven’t yet circulated.’
M said nothing, merely regarding both men with equal frost.
Sir Andrew said, ‘Bond is a star, of course. So the thinking is that it would be good for everybody if he deployed to Kabul post haste. Tonight, if you could make that work. Put him in a hot zone along with a couple of dozen of Six’s premier-league lads. We’ll tap the CIA too. We don’t mind spreading the glory.’
And the blame, thought M, if they get it wrong.
Bixton said, ‘Makes sense. Bond was stationed in Afghanistan.’
M said, ‘Incident Twenty’s supposed to happen tomorrow. It’ll take him all night to get to Kabul. How can he stop anything happening?’
‘The thinking is . . .’ Sir Andrew fell silent, realising, M supposed, that he’d repeated his own irritating verbal filler. ‘We aren’t sure it can be stopped.’
Silence washed in unpleasantly, like a tide polluted with hospital waste.
‘Our approach would be for your man and the others to head up a post-mortem analysis team. Try to find out for certain who was behind it. Put together a response proposal. Bond could even head it up.’
M knew, of course, what was happening here: the Two Ronnies were offering the ODG a face-saving measure. Your organisation could be a star ninety-five per cent of the time, but if you erred even once, with a big loss, you might appear at the office on Monday morning and find your whole outfit disbanded or, worse, turned into a vetting agency.
And the Overseas Development Group