Cole stopped what he was doing and looked up at Hansard. ‘Oh?’ he asked in surprise. ‘What?’
‘This bodyguard who saw you at the graveyard.’ Cole knew what was coming. ‘Could he be a problem?’
‘I don’t believe so, sir, no,’ Cole said emphatically. ‘It was fairly dark due to the time of day, I was wearing a hat, and I’d altered my appearance sufficiently. Besides which, Crozier died of a heart attack. Why should anyone ask questions anyway?’
Hansard nodded, inwardly digesting what Cole had said. ‘Yes, but still, given the circumstances, do you not think it may have been prudent to – ’
‘Kill him?’ Cole finished for him. ‘Absolutely not. A middle-aged man dies of a heart attack, nobody bats an eyelid. That same man’s bodyguard dies on the same day – in any way, whether it’s a heart attack, car accident, or a bullet through the head – then alarm bells will start to ring.’
‘You’re right, you’re right,’ Hansard muttered. ‘I suppose I’m just getting paranoid. No, you did the right thing, Major. Well done. A good op.’ Hansard toasted Cole again, and then the both of them got on with the serious business of eating the delicious food in front of them.
Hansard dabbed at his lips with the linen napkin before placing it carefully down on the table by the side of his empty plate. ‘Excellent,’ he said happily. ‘Quite excellent.’
Cole had to agree. The meal had been delectable. ‘It certainly was,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks? You’re thanking me? My dear Major, our entire nation should be thanking you. You’ll probably never even know the contribution you’ve made to this country’s future.’ Hansard stood. ‘Now, I’m terrible sorry old chap, but I must get cracking. I have another meeting to get to.’ Hansard extended his hand, and Cole took it, shaking it firmly. ‘You’re a good man, Major. Thank you.’
‘Thank you sir. You know, it’s been good to be back in England, if only for a short while.’
Hansard nodded his head in agreement. ‘Yes, there’s nothing quite the same in all the world, is there? You know, I guess I could have flown over to your place again, debriefed you there.’ Cole thought he could detect a change in the old man’s piercing blue eyes, as if they had momentarily clouded over. ‘But I thought it would be nice for you to come home, at least one last time.’ Cole thought he seemed almost sad. ‘It’s the least we can do, eh? You’ve done so much for us, after all.’ Hansard stood still, looking at Cole for several moments before he smiled, inclining his head in farewell. ‘Goodbye, Major.’
Cole inclined his own head in return. ‘Goodbye, sir.’
And with that, Hansard turned and walked towards the twin arches, Stern removing himself from his bar stool and coming over to join him.
Cole looked through as the assistant helped Hansard back into his heavy Crombie overcoat, then watched the two men leave. Cole sighed, then finished the last of his wine. Probably the last time I’ll see the old man, he thought. But at least he hadn’t been given another mission; the meeting was, as the message had originally suggested, purely for a post-action debrief. Now he’d be able to get back to his family.
He’d leave it half an hour – he didn’t want to walk out of the front door so soon after Hansard – and maybe treat himself to a glass of the 1977 vintage port he’d seen on the wine list. He’d then go directly to the airport and get the three o’clock flight to Paris, from where he would then transfer to Madrid before getting a connecting flight back to Grand Cayman. He estimated his arrival back at the house on Cayman Brac at no later than eight the next evening. He wondered idly if Phil Tarr was enjoying himself looking after the place, or if Ben and Amy had driven him insane already.
His thoughts wandered back to Hansard, and the strange look he’d had in his eyes when he’d said his farewells. Probably nothing, Cole decided. He was undoubtedly under enormous pressure at the minute. Who could say what was going on inside that fantastic mind of his?
51
After giving Hansard a good head start, Cole finished his drink and wandered over to the reception area, passing once more beneath one of the archways.
The assistant went to get his coat, and helped him on with it upon her return. Cole didn’t feel like he needed the help, but she looked the sort that might take offence at a rejection of the offer. He thanked her and made a move towards the door, but she put a restraining hand on his arm.
‘Sir,’ she began, ‘Mr Hansard thought it might be more prudent to use the back door.’
‘He’s probably right at that,’ he said. ‘Would you care to show me the way?’
‘Of course, sir,’ the assistant replied primly, leading him back through the arch and into the lounge.
She traipsed a path through the sofas and armchairs, arriving at a buttoned leather door, slotted between two of the booths on the left-hand wall. She opened the door for him and led him through into a long corridor, which by Cole’s estimation must have stretched through at least four more of the street’s town houses. It had the same décor as the rest of the building that he’d seen so far, and had several doors coming off both sides. Cole wondered if they were the interview rooms.
The pretty assistant gestured to the first door on the right. ‘Just through there, sir,’ she said, before turning to leave.
‘You’re not seeing me out?’ Cole asked in surprise. He had expected some sort of security lock on the doors that she would have to open.
She smiled at him, as if explaining something to a slow-witted child. ‘No sir, it’s all electronically monitored from here. The doors will open and close automatically for you. Through that door is a little chamber – it’ll be dark at first, but the lights will be activated by your movement – and the exit is right on the other side. The room’s like an airlock, the door will lock behind you and if I went with you, I wouldn’t be able to get back in.’ She nodded her head at him, still smiling. ‘Goodbye, sir.’
He smiled back. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, then pushed at the door. As she had explained, it opened freely, and he took a couple of tentative steps into the darkness. As he entered the room, he suddenly tensed. The door swung shut behind him, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end. Something wasn’t right, and he already thought he knew what it was.
He took another pace forwards into the room, and the lights came on, glaring in their intensity. Shit.
He felt the cold press of steel against the back of his head at the same time as he saw the two men in front of him, dressed in plastic coveralls and aiming their own handguns at him.
Cole had no time to think, only to act. He span round in a tight arc to his right, deflecting the gun arm of the man behind him with his own right arm. Continuing the arc even as the other two agents opened fire, Cole’s body snaked behind that of the man who until moments before had been stood behind him, his hand running down the man’s arm to the pistol.
Holding the agent’s body tightly in front of him, Cole felt the jarring impact of the 9mm rounds as they slammed into the makeshift human shield. As the man’s grip loosened, Cole took the pistol smoothly away, aimed instinctively, and loosed off four rounds in quick succession.
Less than two seconds had elapsed since the door had closed and the lights had come on, and Cole surveyed the carnage. He let his human shield drop to the floor, the man’s body ripped apart by his colleagues’ bullets. Those same two colleagues were also now laid spread-eagled on the floor, two neat little holes in each forehead, the backs of their heads blown out.
All three men were quite clearly dead, and Cole took the opportunity to take a look at the small room. The pretty assistant had at least been telling the truth about one thing, Cole thought bitterly. The room was like a chamber. And this particular chamber had been recently decorated with plastic sheeting, not only for the floor and walls, but also for the ceiling. A professional job for a professional execution.
But Cole had no time to consider the whys and wherefores now – he was a target, and n
eeded to get out. He could work out who wanted him dead and why after he’d managed to escape. He was still feeding off the adrenal dump he’d been given when the lights had come on and he’d seen the guns, and he knew he had to use it while he could, before it left him a shivering, quaking wreck. He had to control it, harness it, and get every last bit of hormonal supercharging that his body would give him.
There was no door on the other side of the room, Cole soon noticed. There was only one way in, and one way out. It was a room with only one purpose, he realized.
Cole checked the door he’d entered through, but it was unsurprisingly locked. He then started a careful search of the room, almost losing his footing on the slippery pools of blood that had collected across the plastic sheeting. There was nothing he could use – no doors, no windows, no hatches. But, he observed with a flash of hope, there were no cameras either. Not the sort of place you’d want permanent records to be kept of, he guessed. But it gave him the briefest glimmer of a chance – it meant that the building’s security probably hadn’t realised what had happened yet.
Cole picked up the two guns that had fallen to the floor and quickly checked them. Six rounds left in one, seven in the other. The gun he’d taken initially had twelve rounds left. He tucked the other two pistols into the waistband of his trousers, then searched all three men. He found an extra fifteen round magazine on all three of them, and slipped these into his pockets.
Only moments later, the door started to open and the first man of a clean-up crew entered the room. There were three men in total, mops and buckets in hand, and their eyes went wide at the dead bodies on the floor in front of them. They started to react, turning and going for their weapons, but it was too late; Cole fired just three shots and all three men dropped dead, the 9mm rounds exploding through their skulls with sickening force, spraying the plastic-covered walls with blood, bright red in the harsh lighting.
He was sure that they were all good men, just doing their job, but Cole never even considered letting them live. Shooting guns out of men’s hands was all well and good for John Wayne, but in real life, things just didn’t happen that way. Cole had to escape and, innocent or not, there were now three less men to follow him. Like Cole, they had known the risks of their chosen profession when they had signed up to take the Queen’s shilling. The guilt would creep up on him one day, perhaps a week later, perhaps a month, but Cole would shed no tears for them. After all, they would have shed none for him.
He spun out into the hallway, keeping close to the doorframe for cover, his eyes tracking the path of his guns as they scanned quickly up and down the corridor. They was nobody else there. He dropped the two pistols he was holding, and immediately crouched over two of the new bodies, quickly searching them. He removed identical handguns from holsters on the waists of both men, and stood up. Better to have two fully loaded weapons, he figured. He felt sure he would be using them again.
As if to prove his scepticism, a crash sounded at the other end of the corridor. Spinning out once more into the hallway, his eyes went wide as he saw another four men rushing out of the huge doorway at the other end of the corridor. Shit. A silent alarm, tripped by the security force that was undoubtedly surveilling the corridor by means of hidden CCTV.
A burst of gunfire from a compact Heckler and Koch submachine gun that narrowly missed his head focussed his attention like a laser beam. Instantly, Cole adopted a low, side-on kneeling position to minimize the target he would present and fired down the long corridor with both guns, rapidly stroking the triggers until both weapons were empty. Even at that distance, all four men went down; perhaps not dead, but certainly out of action. Their inexperience had been clear to Cole from their first shots – fired on the run, without rooting themselves to take proper aim. Cole, on the other hand, had preserved sufficient presence of mind to do so, and the results were apparent.
Another sound started to echo down the room, and it took several precious moments for Cole to realize what it was – doors locking. The sound had started at the far end of the corridor and was working its way rapidly down the hall. All his exits were being cut off. Cole barely had time to wonder if the entire corridor would become an airlock, allowing them to kill him with some sort of poison gas, before he saw the door to the chamber out of which he had escaped also swing shut and lock with a solid clunk.
Spinning round desperately, he dropped his guns as he reached out for the door that led back into the lounge area. He only barely managed to grab the handle and yank the door open, mere fractions of a second before the lock electronically activated, thick steel bolts shooting out from the inside edge of the door; mercifully not into the housings in the doorframe, but into fresh air.
Hearing more noises behind him, he just had time to glance back through the doorway as more armed men poured into the far end of the hallway, before he jumped through the gap and into the lounge bar, swinging the heavy door shut behind him. He heard the impacts of the bullets on the far side of the door, but ignored them. Instead, he immediately surveyed the room in which he now found himself, analysing his every option. As he quickly took in every feature of the big lounge, he realised with disheartening realism that there were not many choices open to him.
As he watched, armoured doors slid powerfully shut across the arched entranceways through which he had initially passed earlier that morning. There didn’t seem to be any other doors, except for one on the library’s mezzanine level, on the right hand side opposite that of the one on the ground floor, although it was undoubtedly securely locked by now.
The people in the room were the same group as when he had left just minutes earlier; various types and ages, scattered around the lounge, some half-way through their lunch, others still digesting the daily newspapers. But all now looked fearful, terrified. Having entered MI6’s protective custody, they would all assume that Cole had been sent as an emissary of their own respective governments to kill them.
A thought suddenly entered Cole’s mind suddenly, unannounced and unbidden. My family. He suddenly realised that it would not just be himself that would be in danger; he had been betrayed and now his family would also be a target. He couldn’t die here; he had to escape. He had to. He had to get out and warn them. Instantly, he decided that nothing would stop him; nothing would stand in his way.
A collective scream echoed around the room, and everyone dived for cover, fearing that they would be next. Cole knew his time was running out. The security team would be at the door within the next couple of seconds, and they’d want blood; Cole had already killed or seriously wounded eleven of their colleagues. Sprinting over to the bar, which offered the furthest point from the doorway, Cole grabbed hold of a short, spectacled man in what appeared to be his mid-forties, who was cowering on the ground, hands over his head. Cole yanked him to his feet and placed his gun to the side of his head just as the door burst open.
A team of eight men entered the room, fanning out down that side of the lounge, taking up positions in front of the dining booths. The two men on the far sides had H&K SH sniper rifles; a little bit of overkill for this sort of environment, Cole couldn’t help thinking, but it made him a little more cautious of just where exactly he angled the short man’s body. Cole crouched slightly to better cover himself, and saw the other six men all had assault rifles, pointing directly at him.
‘Don’t shoot!’ Cole shouted violently. ‘Don’t fucking shoot! I’ll put a bullet in this guy’s fucking head, you know I will!’ The men exchanged looks with one another, before looking to the man just right of centre, who Cole took to be the section leader. As the man seemed to consider matters before giving his orders, Cole hoped beyond hope that the guy he’d grabbed was of significant importance to someone.
The section leader shook his head slightly, and Cole could see the subtle relaxation of the other men’s trigger fingers. For long moments, nobody moved, and nobody talked. Cole pressed the gun harder into the short man’s temple as he saw the small black holes at
the end of the multiple barrels all pointing unwaveringly at him. The other occupants of the room just held the floor for dear life, not even risking a glance upwards. The huge lounge was eerily quiet.
The section leader at last made his move, and placed his weapon down on the ground in front of him, standing with his hands held out placatingly in front of him. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Just let him go.’ He turned to his men. ‘Hold your fire,’ he ordered them. ‘Okay. We’ll get you out of here.’
‘Do it now!’ Cole shouted, trying to ignore the man’s attempts to relax the situation; Cole wanted everyone to remain tense, keyed up.
‘Please, just calm down,’ the section leader said calmly. His words were designed to be soothing, to lower Cole’s guard; but his actions betrayed him. A brief flicker of the man’s eyes upwards told Cole everything he needed to know, and suddenly time seemed to slow for Cole. It was a sensation he had experienced before in such adrenaline-charged situations, where the mind seemed to subconsciously grasp the severe danger of the circumstances, and automatically changed the way the brain interpreted its signals and perceived time. What happened next occurred very slowly for Cole, but was over in mere seconds.
Cole’s head first of all snapped to the right and up, in the direction of the section leader’s quick glance. His gun hand was moving too, as he already knew what would be there; his prior survey of the room had provided the clue. His trigger finger depressed just fractions of a second later, the bullet finding its target just instants after that. The sniper that had entered quietly through the mezzanine level door and positioned himself over the library balcony, to the right and slightly behind Cole, was rocked back by the impact. The body fell backwards into the doorway, jamming the door open, whilst the rifle fell from the man’s hands onto the carpeted floor of the landing.
The heads of all the men in the security team turned to look at the descending rifle, mesmerized for precious instants, and Cole took the opportunity to act. Pushing the short man away from him into the centre of the room, Cole took two quick shots towards the men as he raced for the staircase just fifteen feet away to his right. Both rounds hit their targets, and the two snipers on each side of the room were both hit.
Seven Day Hero Page 14
