Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [133]
Discouragingly, the desks and work tables were covered with thousands of documents and file folders, and none was conveniently labelled ‘Gehenna’.
He ploughed through reams of blueprints, technical diagrams, specification sheets, schematic drawings. Some had to do with weapons and security systems, others with vehicles. None answered the vital questions of who was in danger in York and where exactly was the bomb?
Then, at last, he found a folder marked ‘Serbia’ and ripped it open, scanning the documents.
Bond froze, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.
In front of him there were photographs of the tables in the morgue at the old British Army hospital in March. Sitting on one was a weapon that theoretically didn’t exist. The explosive device was unofficially dubbed the ‘Cutter’. MI6 and the CIA suspected the Serbian government was developing it but local assets hadn’t found any proof that it had actually been built. The Cutter was a hypervelocity anti-personnel weapon that used regular explosives enhanced with solid rocket fuel to fire hundreds of small titanium blades at close to three thousand miles an hour.
The Cutter was so horrific that, even though it was only rumoured to be in development, it had already been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations. Serbia adamantly denied that it was building one and nobody – even the best-connected arms dealers – had ever seen such a device.
How the hell had Hydt come by it?
Bond continued through the files, finding elaborate engineering diagrams and blueprints, along with instructions on machining the blades that were the weapons’ shrapnel and on programming the arming system, all written in Serbian, with English translations. This explained it; Hydt had made one. He had somehow come into possession of these plans and had ordered his engineers to build one of the damn things. The bits of titanium Bond had found in the Fens army base were shavings from the deadly blades.
And the train in Serbia – this explained the mystery of the dangerous chemical; it had had nothing to do with Dunne’s mission there. He probably hadn’t even known about the poison. The purpose of his trip to Novi Sad had been to steal some of the titanium on the train to use it in the device – there had been two wagons of scrap metal behind the locomotive. Those had been his target. Dunne’s rucksack hadn’t contained weapons or bombs to blow open the chemical drums on rail car three; the bag had been empty when Dunne arrived. He’d filled it with unique titanium scraps and taken them back to March to make the Cutter.
The Irishman had arranged the derailment to make it look like an accident so no one would realise the metal had been stolen.
But how had Dunne and Hydt got hold of the plans? The Serbs would have done all they could to keep the blueprints and specifications secret.
Bond found the answer a moment later in a memo from the Dubai engineer Mahdi al-Fulan, dated a year ago.
Severan:
I have looked into your request to see if it is possible to fabricate a system that will reconstruct shredded classified documents. I’m afraid with modern shredders the answer is no. But I would propose this: I can create an electric eye system that serves as a safety device to prevent injuries when someone tries to reach into a document shredder. In fact, though, it would double as a hyper-speed optical scanner. When the documents are fed into the system, the scanner reads all the information on them before they are shredded. The data can be stored on a 3- or 4-terabyte hard drive hidden somewhere in the shredder and uploaded via a secure mobile or satellite link, or even physically retrieved when your employees replace the blades or clean the units.
I further recommend that you make and offer to your clients shredders that are so efficient they literally turn their documents to dust, so that you will instil confidence in them to hire you to destroy even