Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [137]
‘There you are, sir!’
The voice startled him. Two beefy guards appeared and walked in front of him, barring his way. Their faces revealed no emotion. Bond wondered if they’d discovered Jessica and the man he’d trussed up. Apparently not. ‘Mr Theron, Mr Hydt is looking for you. You were not in your office so he sent us to bring you to the conference room.’
The smaller one regarded him with eyes as hard as a black beetle’s carapace.
There was nothing for it but to go with them. They arrived at the conference room a few minutes later. The larger guard knocked on the door. Dunne opened it, examined Bond with a neutral face and beckoned the men inside. Hydt’s three partners sat around a table. The huge dark-suited security man who’d escorted Bond into the plant yesterday stood near the door, arms crossed.
Hydt called, with the excitement he’d exhibited earlier, ‘Theron! How have you been getting on?’
‘Very well. But I’ve not quite finished. I’d say I need another fifteen or twenty minutes.’ He glanced at the door.
But Hydt was like a child. ‘Yes, yes, but first let me introduce you to the people you’ll be working with. I’ve told them about you and they’re eager to meet you. I have about ten investors altogether but these are the three main ones.’
As introductions were made, Bond wondered if anyone of the three would be suspicious that they had not heard of Mr Theron. But Mathebula, Eberhard and Huang were distracted by the day’s business and, contrary to Hydt’s comment, apart from brief nods they ignored him.
It was five past ten in York.
Bond tried to leave. But Hydt said, ‘No, stay.’ He nodded at the TV, which Dunne had turned on to Sky News in London. He lowered the volume.
‘You’ll want to see this, our first project. Let me tell you what’s going on here.’ Hydt sat down and explained to Bond what he already knew: that Gehenna was about the reconstruction or scanning of classified material, for sale, extortion and blackmail.
Bond lifted an eyebrow, pretending to be impressed. Another glance at the exits. He decided he could hardly bolt for the door; the huge security man in the black suit was inches from it.
‘So you see, Theron, I was not quite honest with you the other day when I described the Green Way document-shredding operation. But that was before we had our little test with the Winchester rifle. I apologise.’
Bond shrugged it off and measured distances and assessed the strength of the enemy. His conclusions were not good.
With his long, yellowing nails, Hydt raked at his beard. ‘I’m sure you’re curious about what’s happening today. I started Gehenna merely to steal and sell classified information. But then I grasped there was a more lucrative . . . and, for me, more satisfying use for resurrected secrets. They could be used as weapons. To kill, to destroy.
‘Some months ago I met with the head of a drug company I’d been selling reconstructed trade secrets to – R and K Pharmaceuticals, in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was pleased with that but he had another proposition for me, something a bit more extreme. He told me of a brilliant researcher, a professor in York, who was developing a new cancer drug. When it came to market, my client’s company would go out of business. He was willing to pay millions to make sure that the researcher died and his office was destroyed. That was when Gehenna truly blossomed.’
Hydt then confirmed Bond’s other deductions – about using a prototype of a Serbian bomb they’d constructed from reassembled plans and blueprints that people in Hydt’s Belgrade subsidiary had managed to piece together. This would make it appear that the intended target was another professor at the same university in York – a man who’d testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He was teaching a course in Balkan history in the room next to the cancer researcher’s. Everyone would think that the Slav was the intended target.
Bond glanced at the time on the TV programme crawl. It was ten fifteen