By mutual agreement they took no photographs of each other. Theirs was a private relationship.

  So, Bond was faceless online. The tech heads in Regent’s Park, toiling away in their windowless dungeon, like the dwarves in one of Tolkien’s fantasies, kept going by Diet Coke and Nutella, were constantly scouring the Internet, searching for any photographs of Mister James Bond and removing them. They also carefully monitored and amended any mentions of him.

  They had also set up a false identity for Peter Sanbourne, his current alias. Whenever a Double O agent needed an alias, there was one ready for them. The photographs already prepared. James Bond didn’t exist online, but Peter Sanbourne, security expert, had a rich and colourful history. If you knew where to look.

  There was virtually nothing about him on the ‘ordinary web’, as befitted someone in his secretive line of work. And there was precious little more on the dark web. But what there was, was very cleverly constructed and nurtured.

  Whenever a fresh identity was needed for an agent, the old identity would be removed from the Internet and the new one installed. Bond didn’t know how they did it and didn’t care. They probably used AI and algorithms and all that other computer stuff you read about every day. So much of what MI6 did now was in the digital world. It was all about screens and data and hacking. A Double O agent like himself was something of an anachronism, and every year another agent left the service, or died, or was killed like poor 009. Lately they’d mostly stopped being replaced. Outsourcing was a buzz word at MI6, and the use of satellites and drones was increasingly replacing boots on the ground.

  But when it came down to it, ultimately, what Bond did couldn’t be done by a computer.

  It was personal. It was human. It was intimate.

  Bond hated it when he got stuck behind a desk between missions. And he hated it when he had to go in for a briefing with the tech heads. He was bored to tears by their PowerPoint demonstrations, spreadsheets, the endless data and graphs, satellite footage, flow charts, lines of code. He just wanted to run screaming from the room and punch something.

  Which was lucky, because that’s what his job boiled down to.

  He was a fist, clenched and ready to strike.

  Once he’d done a couple of circuits of the market, he picked up his pace, squeezed through an area congested with gawpers, doubled back, and darted out of a corner door. He was through the hanging plastic screens and out into a busy side street in a moment and then ducked through an archway into the service area of the large building opposite.

  It was a bright, clear day, the strong sunlight creating deep shadows so that Bond was well-hidden in the recessed darkness of the service area. The street was busy enough with people to distract the eye of any potential tail, and his own eyes stayed fixed on the exit he had emerged from. Waiting to see which, if any, of the people from the tram might be following him. His money was still on the man in the knitted cap. He would probably have taken his hat off as a simple but effective change of outfit, but, whilst two or three men came out, none was him.

  Just then, an attractive young woman emerged. Natural blonde hair, glowing in the sunlight, a wide mouth, sunglasses, and a chic, belted coat. She was a vision, a radiant presence in this non-descript side street. Bond told himself not to be distracted. To keep his mind on the job, and was just about to look away and forget her, when something clicked.

  Clever.

  This was the young mother on the tram with the toddler. A neat trick. Instead of trying to blend in, she’d made herself so bloody obvious Bond hadn’t given her a second look. She’d been hiding in plain sight, knowing that Bond would dismiss her and be distracted by the toddler. Easy enough to hand the child over to an accomplice when she got off the tram – maybe knitted cap? – remove her greasy wig and swap coats. He applauded their ingenuity. They were good.

  Just not quite good enough.

  Now Bond had permission to study her more closely. She carried herself with confidence and had an athletic build. Her skin was pale, almost luminous. She looked around, annoyed at having lost her quarry, gave a final glance up and down the street, and then headed up to the main road. Once she’d gone a few paces, Bond slipped out of his hiding place and hurried away in the opposite direction. He took a circuitous route to a different tram stop and rode from there a few stops back to the Metro station at the bottom of Andrássy.

  This Budapest Metro Line 1 is the oldest electrified subway system in the world, built using the shuttered system, where they’d simply dug down through the street and then boarded over the roof. So that the rickety old carriages from the 1930s ran along more of a trench than a tunnel, with the stations just a few steps down from the street. Bond hopped on a train and grabbed one of the worn, leather straps that hung from the roof, taking a moment to admire the immaculate old tiles on the walls, displaying the station name.

  There was no sign of anyone tailing him. He rode the five stops to Opera where he got out and hurried up the steps. He took in the grand old Hungarian Opera House, remembering the time he’d broken an enemy agent’s neck during a performance of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’. Not the most pleasant memory. The smell of blocked drains and urine came back to him vividly. He made his way north up Andrássy, which ran dead straight all the way up to Hero’s Square where the gold statue of the Angel Gabriel stood on its gleaming white column. As he neared his destination, he kept on the lookout for the girl. If she had any sense, she’d have come straight here to be ready for his arrival. Sure enough, he spotted her before she spotted him, her own golden hair as easy to pick out as the statue.

  Bond took out his phone, activated one of the apps and waited for the screen to go dark before pressing on. The girl was standing in a shop doorway, and he was able to sneak up on her behind the screens around some roadworks. Before she knew it, he was walking casually up to her. They locked eyes and he smiled. There was a pleasing moment of confusion in her expression, but she quickly got it under control and gave the briefest of nods to Bond.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, friendly and relaxed. ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘A little.’ The girl had a European accent. Hard to pin down. Possibly Scandinavian.

  Bond pulled his phone out of his pocket and waved it at her. ‘Do you have the time, please, my phone’s died on me.’

  The girl had been put on the back foot. She hesitated, then took off her sunglasses, pulled her own phone out and thumbed it awake.

  Bond looked at her eyes. Why had he not noticed them on the tram? They were grey, flecked with green and slanted slightly upwards. Witch’s eyes. They perfectly suited her face, which had interesting imperfections, so that there was something both ugly and beautiful about her.

  ‘It is seventeen minutes of eleven.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ Bond smiled, put his phone back in his pocket and walked across the street. When the girl woke her phone, it would have transferred all her data onto Bond’s via the neat app that the mechanics in Q branch had installed for him. It had been an untraceable and invisible interaction between their devices. A handshake, a bump, a data exchange, whatever you wanted to call it.

  Bond thought of it as an intimate, digital pickpocketing.

  He found the discreet door for the 360 Bar, where he was meeting his contact, next to the art nouveau Párizsi Nagyáruház department store. It had been a bookshop when Bond was last here but was now sadly closed. The dedicated lift to take guests up to the rooftop was situated in an anonymous office lobby, with an unmanned reception desk. Nobody else was waiting, so Bond took his phone out, tapped it and brought it up to his face, letting it stare back at him. It had more security than a market town pub on a Friday night. Facial recognition. Retinal recognition. Fingerprint recognition. Without passing all three tests, anyone trying to hack into it would end up at a dummy, false front stuffed with innocuous apps and personal data.

  Even if you got past the false front you were confronted with apps that weren’t all they seemed. Bond selected a generic photo-editing app and opened it. Three clicks later, he was past the facade and in through the back door. Now the screen was cleared of all bright colours, whizzy graphics and flashing come-ons. In their place was a list of raw data, black text on grey, with a handful of thumbnail photographs. All showing the girl who was right now stationed across the road, her name spelled out at the top of the page.

  Ragnheiður Ragnarsdóttir.

  Getting to this screen had taken Bond a matter of seconds, but he needed to make his way to the roof as quickly as possible. Ragnheiður would have alerted his contact that he was on his way up. Any delay would look suspicious.

  He pressed the call button for the lift with barely a glance and began scrolling down the screen, absorbing as much information as he could. A gun and a fast and powerful pair of fists were useful in his line of work, but knowledge was the deadliest weapon.

  Ragnheiður looked different in every photograph. Short hair, long hair, number 2 buzzcut, red wig, blonde wig, pigtails … One day she was dressed from head to toe in haute couture, on another it was combat trousers and boots, or bikini, or business suit. She could be punk, goth, country set, nerd, in sunglasses, prescription glasses, and bizarrely, in one picture, she was even wearing a jewelled eye patch.

  In some of the photographs she looked quite young. No more than 13 or 14. Which meant that she’d struggled with her identity and self-image and had been trying to disguise herself long before she’d got involved with this current operation. She was a chameleon, but Bond would recognise her in any disguise now. He felt he knew her intimately.

  The lift arrived and three young people got out, laughing and chatting. German tourists. He stepped back to let them pass, then got into the lift. Pressing the sole button for the top floor, he waited for the doors to close before returning his attention to his screen.

  He moved on past the photographs to the text.

  He’d already deduced from her name that she was Icelandic. It explained her hard-to-pin-down features. The slightly elfin quality he’d noticed in some Icelandic women. The wide, piercing eyes with an upward slant. Scandinavian mixed with something more mysterious. A witch. A disir. A shape-shifting Viking sea spirit. A nixie.

  By the time he reached the top floor and the doors slid open, revealing a bright blue sky, he’d stitched together a lifetime, his eyes pin-balling from one fact to another. This was his gut sense in action, hardly even computing the information with his conscious mind. The plain list of facts told him everything.

  Ragnheiður Ragnarsdóttir.

  Icelandic.

  28 years old.

  Official employment: The White Dragon Sovereign Nation Institute. Which described itself as an ethical investment fund. She was listed as a ‘consultant’ in their Security Subsidiary, The Hauser Consultancy, which Bond supposed went some way to explaining what she was doing skulking around the streets of Budapest with a borrowed toddler.

  He’d known too many of her type over the years. Poor little rich girl struggling to find an identity and a meaning to her life, not caring who she hurt to find her own peace of mind. Someone who’d been given everything she needed by her parents, except their love. Mummy and Daddy locked into a destructive, dysfunctional relationship. Mother an ex-model, or a socialite, or perhaps a small-time actress. Daddy something in finance, or a media mogul, or an entrepreneur, building a business empire on inherited wealth.

  In this poor little rich girl’s case, her mother was indeed a model, and her father, Ragnar Thorbjörnson, was one of the few people in Iceland who’d managed to make something out of the chaos that had erupted like a volcano when the insane financial bubble burst in 2008. A time when Icelandic fishermen had become bankers overnight and everyone was amazed when the Icelandic economy threw itself off a cliff into the North Sea. Ragnar Thorbjörnson was one of the few who’d been able to climb out of the barrel of rotting fish smelling of roses.

  Who was it who first said that money can’t buy you love? Or happiness. Or a stable upbringing. But it can buy you a lot of drugs and a Lamborghini Gallardo, and a year’s stay in a private hospital when you put the two together and drive into a wall at four o’clock in the morning on the Amalfi Coast. A team of expensive plastic surgeons had had to reconstruct her face, which partly explained the fascinating asymmetrical look of her features that gave her that ugly, beautiful aura.

  A year in hospital gives you a lot of time to think, a lot of time to reassess your life, and a sharper sense of mortality. When she came out, the shapeshifter sloughed off her empty-headed, socialite skin and emerged as a revolutionary, burning to change the world, seeking out protest groups. Starting soft with Stop the City, Extinction Rebellion, Antifa, and Golden Dawn, but growing ever more extreme, joining smaller, more militant, and more obscure groups. She was unfocused. As long as an organisation was anti something, she was pro it. The more disruptive, the more it got up the noses of her parents and the establishment, the so-called mainstream, the more she enjoyed it. The left-leaning groups, the greens, the eco warriors, proved to be too mild for her tastes, too easily accepted by the hated, soft liberal centrists. She started to seek out the violent groups, which were inevitably on the far right. She swapped the anarchists for the fascists. Getting into white supremacy, nationalism, the Great Replacement.

  Bond had always thought that the far right was closer to the far left than it was to the centre. He disliked anybody, and any movement, that was too ‘far’ in any direction. If that made him bourgeoise, if that made him dull and mainstream, then so be it.

  He’d spent his life cleaning up the mess these people left and he was sick of it.

  He took one last look at Ragnheiður. Wasn’t it always the way that the child who most rebelled in their early years was the one that ended up most like their parents in later life?

  Bond stepped out of the lift into bright sunlight and slipped on his Persol aviators.

  He was on the roof of the building, which was covered in decking. There was a small, L-shaped bar in the centre, with removable screens for walls. But the most eye-catching feature of the place were eight transparent, heated, plastic domes, like igloos, with seats and tables inside.

  Bond made his way to a low perimeter wall and leant on a shelf for resting one’s drinks, admiring the view.

  By the standards of New York or Dubai, he might as well still be at ground level. No buildings in the city were taller than 96 metres. Which was about eight storeys. Looking around at the view, there was a pleasing and unfamiliar uniformity to the city. None of the views blighted by ostentatious dick-waving skyscrapers. There were no Gherkins, or Shards, or Walkie Talkies here. And you didn’t need to go up into the heavens and risk a nosebleed to get an uninterrupted view. Only two buildings stood out above the others – St Stephen’s Basilica and the Hungarian Parliament Building. Both completed around the turn of the 19th century. Both the same height: 96 metres.

  Bond was looking west towards the river. On the far side was the great castle on a high promontory. Funny how places built to impose military might were now picturesque tourist attractions. To the left of the castle was the Gellért Hill Liberty Statue.

  Initially put up by the Soviets just after the war, to celebrate the release of Hungary from German occupation, and its new status as a Soviet satellite state, the statue was of a woman holding a giant palm leaf above her head.

  Neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia had been welcome here, though. They were two sides of the same dirty, debased coin. After the Hungarians had kicked out their Soviet overlords, the statue was changed to an all-purpose personification of liberty. And now it celebrated freedom from the whole damned lot of them.

  Which is why Bond felt a deep sense of gloom that this beautiful, civilised, orderly country had been dragged back towards the far right by Viktor Orban, using the crude but effective nationalist playbook. Stirring Hungarians up with his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and crude, ‘Make Hungary Great again’, anti-immigration rhetoric. He’d aligned himself with the likes of Trump and Le Penn and Putin, and, just like them, he was using a paper-thin front of Patriotism to mask rampant self-interest.

  In this uncertain world, the age-old lure of the Strong Man held an irresistible appeal to all those who felt left behind and bewildered by change.

  Bond had no love of autocrats of whatever hue. From what he’d read in M’s file, Æthelstan of Wessex was a friend of Orban. It was no coincidence that Æthelstan, whilst purporting to be an arch British patriot, had set up camp, not in some archetypal English town like Royal Tunbridge Wells, or Westward Ho!, or Stratford-on-Avon, but here, in Hungary, with Orban’s blessing. And his protection. There was no way to make an open and overt move against Æthelstan. Which is why Bond was here.

  He became aware that someone was standing at his side, leaning over and admiring the same view.

  ‘Budapest is beautiful in the spring.’

  Bond hesitated a moment before replying, ‘The crocuses are blooming in the churchyard,’ and went on gazing at the scenery.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Isn’t that the code that agents are supposed to say to each other when they meet? Granted, “Budapest is beautiful in the spring” is one degree less corny, but, really, do we have to go through this bullshit? Your amateur hour tailing operation. Coded greetings. You know who I am. Peter Sanbourne. You’ve no doubt got a picture of me on your phone. And you’re Canner Lyle. I’ve definitely got a picture of you on mine.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean, buddy.’ Canner Lyle’s voice was bland and unconcerned.

  Bond sighed and gave the prearranged answer in a weary monotone. ‘I hear it can get very humid in the summer.’

  ‘That’s better.’ This time Canner sounded cold and annoyed. ‘You’d have saved us both a lot of time if you’d just given that response straight away.’