Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [27]
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 associating 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 identities 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 coupé . . . 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