STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books

by JT Brannan

  He shook his head, looking down at the sink. What was it with her? Why was the woman’s presence affecting him so much? But he knew all too well. He had underestimated her, and had paid the price. He turned his face to the mirror once more, fingers tracing the ugly scabs that traced their way across his forehead and down his cheeks, remnants of Sarah’s explosive gift on the yacht back in the Caymans. Yes, he was under no illusions about his obsession with her. It was revenge, pure and simple.

  His reverie was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He looked at the screen, saw that the number was withheld. Still, not that many people had access to this number. He answered after the second ring.

  56

  ‘Albright,’ Hansard heard the agent say over the secure line.

  ‘This is Hansard,’ he said coolly. ‘Sit rep?’

  He listened as Albright described the operation so far, sipping from a glass of cognac as he sat behind his office desk. He couldn’t remember the last time he had managed to get home, but it was of no consequence. Comfort and relaxation could come later.

  He listened with silent amusement as Albright told him how the targets had been reacquired – the agent tried to dress it up as best he could in order to maximize his own role in the proceedings, but Hansard saw between the lines instantly, recognizing the more important role played by blind luck. Still, he reflected, there was nothing wrong with a little bit of luck now and again. Nothing at all.

  The team of agents had a tight loop around the targets now, it seemed. The only problem would be if they realized they were being followed and called off the RV completely. There was no reason this should happen if the agents exercised caution, but you could never tell what might go wrong. Murphy’s Law was, after all, a regrettable fact of life.

  It wouldn’t mean the end of the operation, of course; the targets could always just be picked up and interrogated, or held as bait for Cole, but such methods were crude and unpleasant, and would not guarantee results. As back-up plans, however, they were better than nothing.

  57

  Was it him? She had only a brief look, but Sarah was positive. He had decided to take a stroll through the train just after it set off, just to double-check that they were safe, and in the very next carriage his attention had been immediately captured. A blond-haired man sitting and staring out of the window. Tanned, blond, with what looked like recent facial injuries. It was the agent from the yacht, the one who had followed them to Miami, she was sure.

  We’ve been found.

  Albright spotted Sarah straight away, of course. Indeed, he had taken a seat in this carriage on purpose, to invite just such a situation. It wasn’t that he was making anything happen. Rather, it all depended upon whether Sarah remained in her own seat, in her own carriage, or whether she went roaming. The way Albright saw it, it was entirely up to fate. And in this instance, fate had been kind.

  Sarah was back in her own carriage soon after, scanning the faces as casually – but as thoroughly – as she could. She didn’t feel that she was being watched., but that didn’t mean anything. The agents were definitely here on the train, and although she had no idea how they had found her, it was now a problem that she would have to deal with.

  She decided quickly what to do, and whispered to her children. Moments later they were on the move.

  Once she had Ben and Amy secreted in a toilet cubicle at the far end of the train, Sarah made her way back through to her original carriage. All that mattered now was her children. If she drew the attention of the agents, maybe they would forget all about Ben and Amy.

  She thought of Mark, wondering where he was. Thinking of her husband reminded her of what they were doing on the train in the first place. She wasn’t angry with him; she had always accepted that something like this might happen one day, and he had made it clear to her when he had proposed. But she had accepted him as he was, risk and all.

  Her children, however, had never asked for the risk, had never asked for their lives to be put in danger. And suddenly she felt shamefully guilty, horrified at the adult selfishness that had resulted in their current predicament.

  Mark had told her she was strong enough to protect them herself, and her husband obviously thought that she was capable as. But do I believe it?, she wondered. At the end of the day though, she realized, her belief didn’t matter; she had to be strong enough, it was as simple as that. Until she reached Mark, she couldn’t rely on anyone else.

  58

  Hansard heard the phone ringing and picked up the receiver immediately, said his name, and then listened intently.

  The news was decidedly bad. Apparently Albright had been spotted on board the train by Sarah, which now raised all sorts of issues. Would she still try and make the RV with her husband, or would she abort? Had she warned him? Arranged another meeting point? Or cancelled the meet entirely, and was now all set to lead them on a merry old goose chase? It was impossible to say with any degree of certainty.

  He mulled the situation over as he turned in his chair to stare out of the large window onto the parking lot below, suburban sprawl beyond. He knew there was only one answer. Thinking further would only delay the inevitable.

  ‘Go to plan B,’ he said coldly. ‘Make her talk.’ With that simple command he replaced the telephone receiver and sat there quietly, staring out towards the river.

  59

  Albright replaced the mobile phone in his pocket and smiled to himself. At last, he thought. At last.

  He had advised this approach right from the start; rather than waste valuable time and resources following the Coles, why not just send in a team, pick them up and interrogate them? Albright himself was well versed in the art, and knew that some of the more recent techniques were practically guaranteed to get accurate information from the subject. But no, Hansard had wanted to play it safe, an order that surprised Albright. Hansard normally preferred the direct approach.

  Still, he thought happily, better late than never. He knew he wouldn’t be able to use the sophisticated methods that were available back at ‘Block C’, the DIA’s secure interrogation facility outside Virginia, but he would not let this deter him. He was certainly no stranger to the ‘old school’, more hands-on approach. In fact, from a strictly personal perspective, he actually preferred it. He told his colleagues that he felt it gave him a better ‘contact’ with ‘the client’, but they knew the real reason; he just enjoyed it, plain and simple.

  He had just gone through the first carriage when he saw her, staring straight at him. Hi Sarah. She looked away quickly, but Albright knew he’d been recognized. Probably the damn scabs on his face, he realized. He couldn’t help but admire her calmness as she casually sat down and turned to stare out of the window.

  Where are you going?, he wondered. You’ve got nowhere to go.

  60

  Cole parked up the stolen Audi in a multi-storey lot in the centre of Stuttgart. He had crossed the border into Germany at Strasbourg earlier that day, having stolen the big estate car from Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, the night before.

  His escape from Paris had been easier than he had feared, aided as he was by the darkness of the night and the depth of the snow, which meant searching for him had been extremely taxing for the limited resources available. Hansard probably had nobody else in the city, and the French emergency services were already overstretched with road traffic accidents all over Paris and its outlying areas.

  He had gone far enough in the same car though, he had decided, and did not want to tempt fate by driving for too long in the same vehicle.

  The radio had been on all the way, but the local news around Paris had yet to pick up on the story of his escape and chase through the city. As he was reaching for the ignition key though, his hand stopped dead.

  It was the news headline that caught him, a second or two late as he translated it from German into English in his head. America Said To Have Been Behind Attack on the Russian President. He sat back in his seat to listen, eyes w
ide.

  ‘The People’s Republic of China has been completely exonerated of any involvement in the recent attack on the Swedish parliament house,’ the reporter began. ‘Instead, it seems that the attack was launched by the United States of America. Reports have come in that it was a CIA paramilitary operation, designed to lay the blame on China’s doorstep. Whether or not this was an officially authorized operation is now the subject of much debate within the international community. Ellen Abrams, the President of the United States, recently issued this statement:

  ‘My fellow Americans,’ Cole heard her begin in her faint Southern drawl, ‘I come before you today with some sad news. It has come to my attention that there may have been American citizens involved in the recent tragedy in Stockholm.

  ‘Details are sketchy at the present time, but it appears that the operation may have been carried out with the help or prior knowledge of an unknown number of our own people. Because information at this time is necessarily very limited, I would at least like to take this opportunity to spell out the position of the United States government.

  ‘I hereby state categorically that, despite the involvement of US citizens, the mission was not sanctioned by myself or the US government. Indeed, I promise that we had no prior knowledge that such an attack would be carried out, or was even being planned.

  ‘I would like answers as much as the next person, and offer all the assistance I can to our allies across the Atlantic. I am all too aware of the recent escalation of events between Russia and China and wish for us to avoid such a confrontation ourselves. On behalf of the American people, I therefore offer my apologies for the apparent involvement of our citizens in the affair.

  ‘I am sure we will manage to salvage relationships, and I promise to do everything within my power to help.

  ‘Thank you for your time, and rest assured we will keep you posted on our progress. God bless you all.’

  As the reporter took over once more, Cole finally switched off the ignition and exited the car. He needed to learn more, but couldn’t do it sitting in a stolen car in the middle of a busy parking lot.

  Cole didn’t think that President Abrams herself would have been involved. He knew her to a certain extent, having served as part of her protective detail back when she was a Senator on her way up, and he was in DEVGRU. She had been visiting Iraq on a fact-finding mission for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as she was regarded as a high-level target, she had been assigned a four-man contingent from SEAL Team Six for her time in-country.

  It was a good job too, as there had been an attempt – albeit amateurish – on her life, with a two-man attack on her armoured 4 × 4 on the last day of her visit. The two other SEALs in the back-up car didn’t even have time to react before Cole’s partner had braked, put the car into reverse and pulled a J-turn on the dusty road, whilst Cole leant out of the window and put two bullets in each man’s head.

  The Senator had been frightened but impressed, putting Cole and his partner forward for the Bronze Star. She had even spoken at his funeral years later, just before she was starting to get touted as a possible future presidential nominee. Cole had never known whether the speech she gave had been genuine, or just calculated to look good for the troops.

  The time he had spent with her in Iraq had given Cole a good impression of her however, and so in spite of his cynicism, he liked to think she was genuine. She had been extremely incisive and intelligent, Cole remembered, never asking the usual inane questions asked by most politicians. She seemed to have a better handle on the situation there than most, and was a definite realist. He had even started to like her, as behind the ruthless efficiency there was the genuine warmth of a true human being. He had been glad when she had been picked as nominee for her party, and been even happier when she had won. He knew what a battle it had been for her to be taken seriously, as sexism was still rife throughout not only the government, but the country as a whole. The fact that her victory had been a landslide indicated that she was indeed a very special woman.

  Cole therefore thought that what President Abrams had said in her statement was probably true, although he was realistic enough to know that it could also be total bullshit. At the very least though, elements of the US government had helped orchestrate the attack – Abrams had admitted that much – and such paramilitary operations were the sole preserve of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, headed until very recently by William Crozier, the very same man that Hansard had ordered Cole to assassinate.

  Finding onward transportation was going to have to wait until he found out just what the hell was going on.

  61

  Within the hour, Cole was sitting in front of a computer monitor, a strong black coffee steaming in a mug beside him.

  He had not gone straight to one of the upmarket cyber cafes that were prevalent in the modern, glass and steel city centre – they were too easy to monitor. Instead, he had asked around before finally being directed to an establishment based in what looked liked somebody’s living room, secreted away down a narrow back alley. It was set up like any other internet café, just a little more utilitarian – work benches and trestle tables for the equipment, coffee coming in thick-handled mugs from the kitchen.

  The client base was also decidedly different from that of more conventional establishments. Instead of smart, suited executive-types, the customers here were from the underground German cyber-Goth counter-culture, all leather, tattoos and body piercings. Such an environment meant that security here was good, though. Not foolproof, of course, but good enough for a public access venue. The people who came here wished to live ‘off the grid’, without their actions being monitored too closely by the security services.

  The technology was state of the art, and the data security was first-class. Cole knew that the NSA would still be able to access any of it, of course, but they would have to be looking in the first place. All in all though, it was as good a place as Cole could hope to find in such a short space of time.

  Ironically, it was the NSA that had trained him to do what he was now doing – hacking into the CIA’s own internal database. The National Security Agency was the foremost electronic communications intelligence organization on the planet, and was where Hansard had sent Cole when he had first joined the Systems Research Group.

  Because agents of the SRG had to plan their own missions with minimal official help, it was important that every man and woman was capable of accessing information from a wide range of sources. The NSA had therefore taught Cole everything there was to know about systems security, including how to keep his own communications secure, as well as how to penetrate the security of others.

  He had used this training many times over the intervening years, and could be considered to be something of an expert in the field. By piggybacking remotely onto the massive computing power of his home system back in the Caymans, breaking past the firewalls protecting the CIA’s mainframe was still complicated, but accomplished within just twenty minutes of firing up the computer.

  The trouble now was the sheer mass of data available to him. He instigated a simple search program and inserted it into the CIA files, and within seconds the search returned items of definite interest.

  First of all there was the information that was publicly available, and Cole immediately started downloading it to a pen drive that he had bought from a store on his way to the café.

  He then found the classified documents he knew would hold the real information he needed, which mainly seemed to be reports sent between James Dorrell, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Harry Trencher, the head of the CIA’s internal affairs department. It seemed that Dorrell had authorized an investigation into the attack the day after it had happened; it had obviously taken the news media several days to catch up.

  From the classified files, it seemed that several months ago a man called Paul Richmond, a newbie at the Special Projects section of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, had been seconded directly to William Cro
zier.

  Crozier had selected Richmond for a special assignment, choosing him due his fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin. He was sent around the country, liasing with immigration officials and interviewing illegal immigrants that were being held in detention. He had been told to specifically seek out men of Chinese origin, preferably with some prior military training, and test them for physical, mental and psychological aptitudes. He was then to choose the thirty most promising candidates, men who would be willing to perform a ‘service’ for the government, in exchange for citizenship of the United States.

  Crozier had told Richmond to offer US citizenship not only to the chosen men themselves, but also to their families. Once the team had been assembled, Richmond was then to round the group up, sort out the relevant release paperwork with the authorities, and then book them into the Palace Hotel in Boston.

  That was where Richmond’s responsibility ended; he ensconced the thirty men in the hotel, registering them as a trade delegation from South Korea, and then left, to return to his regular duties at headquarters. He reported directly to Crozier; even David Ellison, his official team leader, had not been allowed to debrief him.

  The CIA investigation at this point indicated that the men had been shipped to a civilian facility known as Delta Training, which was apparently often used for mission-specific training for deniable ‘black’ CIA operations. Crozier apparently knew the owner of this facility personally, both men having served in the 82nd Airborne. Crozier had often sent people there for training it seemed, and the owner assumed it was for another CIA-approved mission.