He was making slow progress through the thick snow of a small wood, but the target he had was now in sight. Down a slight incline, there was a small two-lane road that would eventually lead back onto the L69 auto route. If he could take a car here, he could follow the minor auto routes south-east, until he hit the main E60 expressway that would take him towards Innsbruck.
He followed the slope down to the roadside, gathering some fern leaves from the surrounding trees as he went, and then hid himself in a small culvert from where he could watch vehicles as they approached. He spread the leaves over himself to provide some modicum of warmth, and prayed that a car would be along shortly.
55
Sarah heard the door click shut shortly after eleven. She knew the pills normally took an hour or so to take effect, and didn’t want to raise suspicions by falling asleep too early.
After he left, she removed the pills from inside her mouth, and slipped them underneath her pillow. She decided to wait little while longer, until she was confident everyone else had gone to bed, and so remained lying there in the dark, thinking, wide awake.
Still no news about Mark. He was supposed to be here this afternoon, and now it was almost midnight. That made it another day. Where was he?
She was now sure that Phil was dead. There was nothing these people – whoever they were, she still had no idea – wouldn’t do, nothing that would stop them.
Phil was tough, resourceful, experienced – but he wasn’t here, and hadn’t contacted them either. Why not? Chances were, she realized, because he had been killed.
Or – and from the standpoint of self-preservation, the worst option – he had been taken alive and made to talk, which would mean that they might now know where she and her children were.
But Steinmeier didn’t seem concerned, which must mean that he knew that information leaks were not a problem. And yet he had not said that Phil was okay.
Which meant that he was dead, plain and simple.
So what did this mean for her husband? It meant that nobody was invulnerable; the enemy was professional, determined, and numerous. Phil wasn’t here, he hadn’t contacted them; he was dead. Mark was not here, he had not contacted them; he was . . . what? Sarah just didn’t know.
But what she did know was that every second she lay in this damn bed feeling sorry for herself and doing nothing was a wasted second; a second that could mean her husband’s life.
Her father could help her, couldn’t he? Of course he could; he was tied into all manner of sources of information, and was a very powerful man. Anyway, whether he could help or not, there was the possibility that he might be able to, and that alone was reason enough to contact him, even though she had promised herself that she would never speak to him again. But, she decided, it was too late in the day to worry about pride now.
Taking a deep breath, she slowly eased herself up out of bed. Unsteadily, she got to her feet, balancing heavily on her right. Using the bed, the night stand, the wall – anything at all to hold onto – she slowly made her way across the room to the chest of drawers against the far wall. She had started to sweat with the effort, and wiped the cold, clammy skin of her forearm across her forehead before she cautiously picked up the telephone handset that rested there.
Fighting through the pain, she dialled the number from memory. There was a pause as the international code connected, and the phone rang just twice before it was picked up and she could hear the terse, familiar voice announce itself with one word of greeting.
‘Hansard,’ her father said and, for once, Sarah was pleased to hear the sound of his voice.
It was past two in the morning and Hansard had been asleep when the phone rang by his bedside. He was at his flat in Chelsea, which he used when his business kept him in London. This was certainly one of those weeks, and he had been grateful just to get into a bed at all, rather than spending another night at his office.
Stern stirred under the bedclothes next to him as the shrill, high-pitched ring tone broke the still night air, but he remained asleep as Hansard took the call, instantly awake despite his recent lack of sleep. He knew that not many people had access to his private telephone number.
He waited for the caller to introduce themselves, but when the voice came – older and yet so familiar – he was truly taken aback.
‘Daddy?’ his daughter asked, her voice shaking. ‘It’s me. Sarah.’
Hansard took several moments to regain his senses. ‘Sarah?’, he responded eventually. ‘It’s good to hear from you. Are you okay?’
His mind raced into overtime, wondering how to play this unexpected situation. The call was being automatically traced, naturally. But why had she called at all? Was it some plan, some sort of trap? He would have to tread carefully. He didn’t know what Cole might have told her, or even if this was some attempt at deliberate disinformation.
‘It must be ten years . . . What’s wrong?’
‘I . . . I’m married,’ she managed finally. ‘My husband’s in trouble.’
Hansard paused, as he would if he did not already know. ‘What sort of trouble?’
Over the telephone, Hansard could hear her summoning up the courage to get it out of her system, to tell everything to someone, anyone. She was whispering as if she was afraid she might be overheard, but again, that might be part of a ruse and so he discounted it. ‘He . . . He works for the government. His name is Mark Cole. He was on a mission, and it went bad. We escaped, to try and meet him, but he’s not here, I don’t know where he is, where he . . .’
Hansard heard her voice breaking into sobs, and wondered if she was perhaps being honest after all. She wasn’t a woman who cried easily, and his father’s instinct told him it was genuine. Still, he had never been much of a father to her, even he realized that much.
‘It’s alright Sarah, come on, it’s alright,’ he said to console her, in as soothing a voice as he could manage, although it still came out rather like the barked commands of a platoon drill sergeant. ‘Can I help?’ he asked, and he hoped his offer sounded genuine.
Sarah sniffed away the tears before she continued. ‘Have you heard anything? Anything at all?’
Again, Hansard wondered how to respond. As far as Sarah was concerned, Hansard was an important figure in the British government, handling international intelligence issues on behalf of the European Union. She was unaware of quite how far his power stretched, however, and was also unaware of the fact that it was her own father who assigned missions to her husband. As such, she would expect him to be aware of the bigger picture, but not details of individual assignments.
As it was, it had been Hansard that had engineered Cole’s marriage to his daughter in fact, albeit from the shadows. When she had left home and changed her identity, Hansard had discovered all the details within a day. He would never allow his daughter to truly escape him, but he allowed her to at least think that she had.
Sarah had been working at St James’s Hospital as a physical therapist, until Hansard had pulled some strings without her knowledge, and had her transferred to a private clinic in Cyprus. It was a step up the career ladder and a lot more money, and for a girl keen to stand on her own two feet and make her own way, out of her father’s sphere of influence, it was too good an offer to refuse.
One of her first clients was Mark Cole, who Hansard sent for rehabilitation after his return from Pakistan. Hansard worked hard to ensure that Cole’s journey was unobserved, and spent a good deal of money setting up his new identity.
He had undergone facial reconstruction surgery in Vienna, and had new fingerprints grafted on in California, as well as a retinal implant in a secret facility in Paris. By the time he arrived at the Cyprus clinic, he had a new face, a new passport, and a new history.
Sarah was told that he had been injured in a car accident, and needed six months of physical rehabilitation.
Cole wouldn’t ordinarily have gone – he hadn’t felt too bad after his imprisonment, it was more malnutrition than a
nything – but Hansard had insisted. Cole had gone along with it, and put himself into Sarah’s care. He hadn’t realized at the time that she was Hansard’s daughter, although Cole found out eventually.
When he had decided to propose to her, due to the nature of his work he had done a background check and had subsequently found out everything about her family history. He never told her that he knew, as he realized that she didn’t want to speak about the past, and she would almost certainly have objected to the intrusion.
Cole had wondered what Hansard’s plan was, though – he had clearly placed her in Cyprus with the express wish of them developing some sort of relationship.
When Cole had called Hansard to speak about it, Hansard had laughed and said that his daughter was a skilled therapist, and would speed his recovery. Hansard had known from the start that the pair would get along, and he was right.
Before long, Mark and Sarah had fallen in love, exactly as Hansard had hoped.
As their relationship progressed, Cole revealed more and more of himself – but never that he worked for Hansard. It was decided that Sarah would object to her father’s manipulations and call the whole thing off, despite her feelings for Mark.
And so, when the couple were married at a beachside ceremony on Cyprus’s beautiful Akamas peninsula, there were no family members present on either side.
It had been a masterstroke of Hansard’s, and had played out wonderfully – Cole was grateful to him for fixing him up, Sarah considered herself inordinately lucky, and Hansard had increased his own control over both of them.
His foresight was proving itself now, and he was pleased with his forward planning.
For one second, his composure slipped as the reality of the situation hit him – he had already ordered the death of his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchildren, and although attempts had thus far failed, he was being given another chance, and he realized this made him – what? Happy?
He was happy that after all the recent bad news, it appeared things were looking up, of course. Earlier that night, locating Cole had appeared to be something of a lost cause. And he was certainly pleased that he would now have a chance to protect his ultimate plans, which was surely all that mattered. He silently chastised himself for his momentary weakness. Of course that is all that matters.
‘I’ve not heard anything Sarah, I’m sorry,’ he said finally. ‘Where are you?’
56
It had been a mercifully short period of time before the first car had come along the road. Unfortunately for Cole there simply wasn’t the chance to check the car out before he made his move. He therefore didn’t know whether the vehicle he was about to flag down and car-jack would be full of members of the local drug gang, or be driven by a harmless old lady.
Knowing he had to simply take his chances, Cole walked out into the path of the car’s headlights, waving his arms for the car to stop.
The weather had certainly improved from the previous evening, but visibility was still far from perfect, and Cole hoped that the driver would see him.
For a few terrifying moments it seemed that the vehicle wasn’t going to slow down, and Cole thought he was going to have to dive for safety, praying that his half-frozen body would respond. But then the car started to visibly slow, until it came to a gentle halt just a few feet away from Cole.
He still couldn’t make out the occupiers of the car due to the intense glare of the headlights shining straight into his face, but moments later he heard a door opening, and saw a vague silhouette get out of the driver’s side.
‘What the Hell are you doing?’ the man demanded, and from his voice Cole thought he would be in his early twenties, maybe even still in his teens. ‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?’
The passenger door opened too, and a shape emerged that Cole took to be female, probably the young man’s girlfriend curious to find out what was going on.
‘Thank Heavens you stopped, thank you, thank you,’ Cole gushed as he approached the driver. ‘We’ve had a bad accident on the road a few miles ahead and need help!’ As he got out of the glare of the headlights, he could see that the young man was indeed about twenty, probably returning from a night out in the city.
Cole continued to talk as he got closer and closer. ‘It was the weather, we just lost control and –’ As he reached the young man, who was distracted by his story, Cole reached out and seized the nerve in the arm above his elbow, squeezing it hard. The driver collapsed on the floor, and Cole displayed a look of concern on his face for the benefit of the girlfriend. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ he asked the fallen man, bending down to check on him even as the girlfriend started to run around the vehicle to see for herself what had happened.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Cole offered as she approached, panic in her eyes, ‘he just collapsed straight on the floor, has he ever –’ The girl’s attention was focussed solely on her boyfriend, and she never even noticed Cole reaching out towards her and tapping her on the neck. Her body fell directly on top of the other, unconscious.
Cole wasted no time in dragging the bodies onto the back seats. They were both unconscious, and Cole thought they would probably be out for no more than six hours, which he thought should give him adequate time. He secured them anyway though, just in case.
He also took the young man’s jacket, and found a hat and gloves in the pockets that he also put on, pleased to finally have some warmth. He got behind the driving seat, pleased to see that the car was a BMW sports coupe – the driver was either into computers or drugs, or it was daddy’s – and turned the air conditioning up full.
As he accelerated off down the road towards the auto route, he spotted two cans of energy drink in the cabin’s cup holders. Things are looking up, he thought gladly as he picked one up and took a long, satisfying gulp.
57
Hansard spent the next several hours sorting out the logistics of getting his agents in place at Cole’s safe house.
Sarah had not told him where she was, and the telephone number she had dialled from had used a quite sophisticated scrambling device, but it was no match for the computational power of GCHQ, the British government’s electronic intelligence agency.
The number originated in the Austrian hamlet of Kreith, just twelve kilometres south-west of Innsbruck. The house was registered to a Helmut Kolbe, although a bit of further digging revealed that the actual occupants were Stefan Steinmeier, his wife Sabine and their three children. Steinmeier was in his fifties but had married late, and the wife and children were relatively young by comparison.
Hansard knew Steinmeier’s name, and was not overly surprised that this was Cole’s contact. Cole had known the man well, and he was an excellent soldier from what Hansard had heard. He was more than capable of protecting Cole’s family, at least under ordinary circumstances. But these were no ordinary circumstances, as Hansard had the power to utilize every available police, security, intelligence, military and paramilitary resource from across the entire European continent to achieve his aims. In fact, the scope of assets Hansard could call upon was part of the reason for the logistical headache he now faced.
He could involve the various local and municipal police and security agencies in the Innsbruck region, but he still wanted to keep the situation in-house as much as possible. When Cole had been lost and they had no idea how to find him, Hansard was happy enough to get everyone involved in the manhunt. But now they had an exact location to concentrate on, he preferred to exclude non-UK personnel. The less everyone knew about Cole the better. Besides which, Hansard’s plans for the house in Kreith didn’t exactly gel with the accepted rules of engagement, and he could trust his own people to a much higher degree than he could those of other nations.
The trouble was, the merry old goose chase his people had been led on during the past few days had left most of his special agents scattered across America and Europe. The order had gone out for them all to convene on Innsbruck, but it would take time.
<
br /> After some checking, Hansard discovered that six members of MI5’s A Branch were on a joint training exercise with the Austrian police at Innsbruck. They could be equipped and ready to go within the next couple of hours, and on-site by daybreak. He immediately sent the order for the men to stake out the house and keep it under surveillance until Cole arrived.
It concerned Hansard that the MI5 team were only ‘watchers’ though – killing people was wildly outside their remit. The earliest any of his own team of operators could be there would be late morning, which might be too late – Cole could have reached the safe house and left for a new location with his family by then, and Hansard wanted Cole eliminated on sight. He’d escaped too many times already, and no more chances could be taken.
The man he called next was far from his first choice. He was badly damaged physically, and possibly mentally too. But Dan Albright, recovering in a hospital in nearby Munich, could be on the scene in time to liaise with the A Branch team.
It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to be done. Without wasting another second, Hansard picked up his phone and dialled Albright’s number.
When Albright took the call, he was no longer in the hospital. After disconnecting himself from the monitors and drip he was hooked up to the previous evening, he had signed himself out. The doctors had at first refused to let him go, but he had demanded it and they had no power to keep him.
It had been necessary for the doctors to remove his eye completely, and it was now protected by a white plastic eye guard. His savaged nose was also covered by a guard, and his shaven head was criss-crossed with scabs. With the addition of light stubble, he now looked nothing like he used to; nothing at all.
After leaving the hospital, he had subsequently booked into a nearby hotel, where he had started making his plans. He had left for the sole purpose of tracking down Sarah Cole and killing her. He decided he was going to kill her kids first, right in front of her, force her to watch every last second. And then he was going to slit her throat from ear to ear.
Seven Day Hero Page 33
