meet me sunday at restaurant rostilj outside novi sad, 20:00. i am 6+ foot tall, irish accent.

Then the Irishman – who’d courteously, if inadvertently, supplied his own nickname – had destroyed the phone or flicked out the batteries, as had the other text recipients.

In London the Joint Intelligence Committee and members of COBRA, the crisis management body, met into the night to assess the risk of Incident Twenty, so-called because of Friday’s date.

There was no solid information on the origin or nature of the threat but MI6 was of the opinion that it was coming out of the tribal regions in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and its affiliates had taken to hiring Western operatives in European countries. Six’s agents in Kabul began a major effort to learn more. The Serbian connection had to be pursued, too. And so at ten o’clock last night the rangy tentacles of these events had reached out and clutched Bond, who’d been sitting in an exclusive restaurant off Charing Cross Road with a beautiful woman, whose lengthy description of her life as an under-appreciated painter had grown tiresome. The message on Bond’s mobile had read,

NIACT, Call COS.

The Night Action alert meant an immediate response was required, at whatever time it was received. The call to his chief of staff had blessedly cut the date short and soon he had been en route to Serbia, under a Level 2 project order, authorising him to identify the Irishman, plant trackers and other surveillance devices and follow him. If that proved impossible, the order authorised Bond to conduct an extraordinary rendition of the Irishman and spirit him back to England or to a black site on the Continent for interrogation.