Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [9]
‘The hospital . . . Take me and I will tell you.’
‘Tell me or you’ll die in five minutes,’ Bond said evenly, loosening the tourniquet on his right arm. Blood cascaded.
The young man blinked away tears. ‘All right! You bastard! He ask how to get to E Seven-five, the fast road from Highway Twenty-one. That will take him to Hungary. He is going north. Please!’
Bond tightened the tourniquet again. He knew, of course, that the Irishman wasn’t going north: the man was a cruel and clever tactician. He didn’t need directions. Bond saw his own devotion to tradecraft in the Irishman. Even before he had arrived in Serbia the man would have memorised the geography around Novi Sad. He’d go south on Highway 21, the only major road nearby. He’d be making for Belgrade or an evacuation site in the area.
Bond patted the young agent’s pockets and pulled out his mobile. He hit the emergency call number, 112. When he heard a woman’s voice answer, he propped the phone beside the man’s mouth, then ran back to the Jetta. He concentrated on driving as fast as he could over the uneven road surface, losing himself in the choreography of braking and steering.
He took a turn fast and the car skidded, crossing the white line. An oncoming lorry loomed, a big one, with a Cyrillic logo. It veered away and the driver hit the horn angrily. Bond swerved back into his lane, missing a collision by inches, and continued in pursuit of the only lead they had to Noah and the thousands of deaths on Friday.
Five minutes later, approaching Highway 21, Bond slowed. Ahead he saw a flicker of orange and, in the sky, roiling smoke, obscuring the moon and stars. He soon arrived at the accident site. The Irishman had missed a sharp bend and sought refuge in what seemed to be a wide grass shoulder but in fact was not. A line of brush masked a steep drop. The car had gone over and was now upside-down. The engine was on fire.
Bond pulled up, killed the Jetta’s motor and got out. Then, drawing the Walther, he half ran, half slid down the hill to where the vehicle lay, scanning for threats and seeing none. As he closed on it he stopped. The Irishman was dead. Still strapped into the seat, he was inverted, arms dangling over his shoulders. Blood covered his face and neck and pooled on the car’s ceiling.
Squinting against the fumes, Bond kicked in the driver’s window to drag the body out. He would salvage the man’s mobile and what pocket litter he could, then wrench open the boot to collect luggage and laptops.
He opened his knife again to cut the seat belt. In the distance: the urgent wah-ha of sirens, growing louder. He looked back up the road. The fire engines were still a few miles away but they’d be here soon. Get on with it! The flames from the engine were increasingly energetic. The smoke was vile.
As he began to saw away at the belt, though, he thought suddenly: firefighters? Already?
That made no sense. Police, yes. But not the fire brigade. He gripped the driver’s bloodied hair and turned the head.
It was not the Irishman. Bond gazed at the man’s jacket: the Cyrillic lettering was the same as on the lorry he’d nearly hit. The Irishman had forced the vehicle to stop. He’d cut the driver’s throat, strapped him into the Mercedes and sent it over the cliff here, then called the local fire service in order to slow the traffic and prevent Bond pursuing him.
The Irishman would have taken the rucksack and everything else from the boot, of course. Inside the car, though, on the inverted ceiling, towards the back seat, there were a few scraps of paper. Bond jammed them into his pockets before the flames forced him away. He ran back to the Jetta and sped off towards Highway 21, away from the approaching flashing lights.
He fished out his mobile. It resembled an iPhone, but was a bit larger and featured special optics, audio systems and other hardware. The unit contained multiple phones – one that could be registered to an agent’s official or nonofficial cover identity, then