Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [41]
Was that what Hydt’s people had been doing in the basement of the hospital? Were they building a weapon with this metal?
‘And Defence still owns the facility but it hasn’t been used for three years.’
His eyes swept over her marvellous profile from forehead to breasts as she sipped her wine.
Philly continued, ‘As for the Serbs, I practically said I’d force them to take on the euro in place of the dinar if they didn’t help me. But they came through. The man working with the Irishman, Aldo Karic, was a load scheduler with the railway.’
‘He’d have known exactly which train the haz-mat was on.’
‘Yes.’ Then she frowned. ‘About that, though, James. It’s odd. The material was pretty bad. Methyl isocyanate, MIC. It’s the chemical that killed all those people in Bhopal.’
‘God.’
‘But, look, here’s the inventory of everything on board the train.’ She showed him the list, translated into English. ‘The chemical containers are practically bullet-proof. You can drop one from a plane and supposedly it won’t break open.’
Bond was confused by this. ‘So a train crash wouldn’t have produced a spill.’
‘Very unlikely. And another thing: the wagon with the chemical contained only about three hundred kilos of MIC. It’s really bad stuff, certainly, but at Bhopal, forty-two thousand kilos were released. Even if a few of the drums had broken open, the damage would have been negligible.’
But what else would the Irishman have been interested in? Bond looked over the list. Aside from the chemicals, the cargo was harmless: boilers, vehicle parts, motor oil, scrap, girders, timber . . . No weapons, unstable substances, other risky materials.
Maybe the incident had been an elaborate scheme to kill the train driver or someone living at the bottom of the hill below the restaurant. Had the Irishman been going to stage the death to look like an accident? Until they could home in on Noah’s purpose, there could be no effective response. Bond could only hope that the surveillance he’d reluctantly put into play earlier in the evening would pay off. He asked, ‘Any more on Gehenna?’
‘Hell.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Her face broke into a smile. ‘Gehenna is where the Judaeo-Christian concept of hell came from. The word’s a derivation of Gehinnom, or the Valley of Hinnom – a valley in Jerusalem. Ages ago, some people think, it was used as a site to burn rubbish and there may have been natural gas deposits in the rocks that kept the fires going perpetually. In the Bible, Gehenna came to mean a place where sinners and unbelievers would be punished.
‘The only recent significant reference – if you can call a hundred and fifty years ago recent – was in a Rudyard Kipling poem.’ She’d memorised the verse and recited, ‘“Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, / He travels the fastest who travels alone.”’
He liked that and repeated it to himself.
She said, ‘Now, for my other assignment, Steel Cartridge.’
Relax, Bond told himself. He raised an eyebrow nonchalantly.
Philly said, ‘I couldn’t see any connection between the Gehenna plan and Steel Cartridge.’
‘No, I understand that. I don’t think they’re related. This is something else – from before I joined the ODG.’
The hazel eyes scanned his face, pausing momentarily on the scar. ‘You were Defence Intelligence, weren’t you? And before that you were in Afghanistan with the Naval Reserve.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Afghanistan . . . The Russians were there, of course, before we and the Americans decided to pop in for tea. Does it have to do with your assignments there?’
‘Could very well. I don’t know.’
Philly realised she was asking questions he might not want to answer. ‘I got the original Russian data file that our Station R hacked and I went through the metadata. It sent me to other sources and I found out that Steel Cartridge was a targeted killing operation, sanctioned at a high level. That’s what the phrase “some deaths” referred to. I can’t find out whether it was KGB or