Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [86]
At the end of the corridor, he went through the fire doors of the stairwell, put the tray down and picked up the newspaper with its deadly contents. Then he descended a flight of stairs, quietly, to the ground floor.
Looking out through a porthole in the swing door, he spotted his target, sitting in an armchair in the shadows of a far corner of the lobby, nearly invisible. Facing away from Bond, he was scanning from his newspaper to the lobby to the first-floor balcony. Apparently he had missed Bond’s escape.
Bond gauged distances and angles, the location and number of guests, staff and security guards. He waited while a porter wheeled a cart of suitcases past, a waiter carried a tray bearing a silver coffee pot to another guest at the far end of the lobby, and a cluster of Japanese tourists moved en masse out of the door, taking with them his target’s attention.
Bond thought clinically: now.
He pushed out of the stairwell and walked fast towards the back of an armchair over which the crown of his target’s head could just be seen. He circled around it and dropped into the chair just opposite, smiling as if he’d run into an old friend. He kept his finger off the trigger of the Walther, which Corporal Menzies had fine-tuned to a feather-light pull.
The freckled ruddy face glanced up. The man’s eyes flashed wide in surprise that he’d been duped. In recognition too. The look said, no, it wasn’t a coincidence. He had been conducting surveillance on Bond.
He was the man Bond had seen at the airport that morning, whom he’d originally taken for Captain Jordaan.
‘Fancy seeing you here!’ Bond said cheerfully, to allay the suspicions of anybody witnessing the rendezvous. He lifted the curled newspaper so that the muzzle of the silencer was focused on the bulky chest.
But, curiously, the surprise in the milky green eyes was replaced not by fear or desperation but amusement. ‘Ah, Mr . . . Theron, is it? Is that who we are at the moment?’ The accent was Mancunian. His pudgy hands swung up, palms out.
Bond cocked his head to one side. ‘These rounds are nearly subsonic. With this suppressor, you’ll be dead and I’ll be gone long before anybody notices.’
‘Oh, but you don’t want to kill me. That would go down rather badly.’
Bond had heard plenty of monologues at moments like this when he’d got the draw on an opponent. Usually the bons mots were to buy time or for distraction as the target prepared himself for a desperate assault. Bond knew to ignore what the man was saying and watch his hands and body language.
Still, he could hardly dismiss the next lines issuing from the flabby lips. ‘After all, what would M say if he heard you’d gunned down one of the Crown’s star agents? And in such a beautiful setting.’
38
His name was Gregory Lamb, confirmed by the iris and fingerprint scan app – MI6’s man on the ground in Cape Town. The agent Bill Tanner had told him to avoid.
They were in Bond’s room, sans beer and sandwich; to his consternation, the tray containing his lunch had been whisked out of the stairwell by an efficient hotel employee by the time he and Lamb had returned to the first floor.
‘You could’ve got yourself killed,’ Bond muttered.
‘I wasn’t in any real danger. Your outfit doesn’t give out those double noughts to trigger-happy fools . . . Now, now, my friend, don’t get all ruffled. Some of us know what your Overseas Development outfit really does.’
‘How did you know I was in town?’
‘Put it together, didn’t I? Heard about some goings-on and got in touch with friends at Lambeth.’
One of the disadvantages in having to use Six or DI for intelligence was that more people knew about your affairs than you might prefer. ‘Why didn’t you just contact me through secure channels?’ Bond snapped.