by JT Brannan
Veronika Galushka was sitting with two girlfriends on the other side of the bar, chatting animatedly with a cocktail in her hands. She had been there for over an hour, having headed there straight from work at the Bely Dom, the Russian White House where she worked as the private secretary of Boris Manturov.
Manturov was the Russian Prime Minister, second-in-command to Mikhail Emelienenko and the reason why Jake Navarone had targeted Galushka several weeks before. She was a widow, her husband having died fighting in Chechnya. She had no children and was – according to Navarone’s reports – lonely, and looking for companionship. Navarone – having gained access to the Bely Dom as a security guard due to false papers attesting to his prior service with Russia’s elite Airborne Troops, the Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska – had offered her a shoulder to cry on, and developed a relationship with her.
Exploitative it may have been, but Navarone’s operation had been starting to bear fruit; she had been giving away state secrets in the bedroom, and Cole had ordered his operative to guide her towards offering more specific information. Navarone had been on the verge of doing this when he had disappeared.
All that Cole knew of the matter was that Boris Manturov was very concerned about a project being developed by someone at Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was the information Cole had asked Navarone to pursue, and he had to wonder if this was what had led to his friend’s capture.
As Cole looked across the smoke-filled bar at Galushka, he couldn’t help but be reminded of another woman, one he’d met not so long ago; and, he admitted, perhaps one more reason why he was in Russia in the first place.
He had known her as Elizabeth Morgan, an officer within Britain’s Security Service, which was better known as MI5. He had met her after the attack on the school in London, when he’d flown to the UK to help with the investigation, posing as an international FBI liaison agent. Morgan had helped him track down Khan, Agostini and Milanović – or so he’d thought.
During their journey together across Europe, he had even started to develop feelings for her, feelings he had not felt in a long time. They had even made love, one balmy night on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast.
She had been a beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful Cole had ever met, but that hadn’t been what had drawn him to her. It was, clichéd though it sounded even to Cole, the way she had made him feel; as if a part of him that he thought he’d lost years before had been somehow reawakened.
It made the treachery all the worse, of course; for it transpired that Elizabeth Morgan had been killed long before Cole had ever met her, strangled with a garrote.
The woman Cole had been falling in love with was not Morgan; she had killed the MI5 officer and taken her identity, apparently in order to help manipulate the investigation into the terrorist attack. Why? Cole still didn’t know, and it was one of the reasons he hoped to bump into her again here in Moscow – because Vinson and the team at Force One suspected that she was, in reality, a Russian assassin.
It wasn’t merely a desire to confront her that motivated Cole to find her although, he admitted, that was a part of it. But more than that, he believed that the Russians were somehow linked to the atrocities that had occurred in Britain. How, he didn’t yet know; but it was clear that the killer he’d known as Morgan had been involved somehow, manipulating events for her masters. And if she was a Russian agent, then those masters were also Russian, and she could hold the key to discovering who was really behind those attacks.
Cole himself had unmasked Iran as the culprit, but was that also something that had been manufactured? And if so, why?
There were so many questions, and Cole could only hope and pray that he found some of the answers. With a land invasion of Iran hovering just over the horizon, time was running out.
But Cole understood that the assassin he’d known as Elizabeth Morgan was a luxury; he was here to find Jake Navarone, and that had to take priority.
The problem, Cole pondered as he drank his vodka and observed Veronika Galushka from across the bar, was that there were various things which may have happened to his friend. It was feasible that he had been injured or taken ill, and was in a Russian hospital somewhere, unable to summon help; or else he may have been killed in a situation completely unrelated to his operation, hit by a car or stabbed in a street robbery. And yet the technical team at Force One – including his daughter, Michiko – had not been able to find any computerized records of such a fate befalling someone of Navarone’s description, either under his assumed name of Aleksandr Petrushkin, or anything else. Added to which, it was highly unlikely that a man such as Navarone – an ex-Navy SEAL Team Six commando and trained Force One operative – would be so careless as to be hit by a car, and it was even less likely that street thugs could have gotten the better of him.
But the fact that he had been out of contact meant that two options were the most likely – either he had found something important and had intentionally gone missing, and was now on the run, waiting for the right time to contact his colleagues back in Washington; or, and Cole feared that this was the most likely explanation, he had been caught and captured. And if that was the case, then Cole could only hope that his friend was still alive.
If Navarone had been captured, then the presence of Veronika Galushka in this vodka bar was something of a mystery. If Russian security forces had suspected Navarone, then surely they would have known that he’d been sleeping with Galushka? And they would therefore surely also have brought her in for questioning as well. And if she had been questioned, then it was highly unlikely she would now be out drinking with her friends as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
Indeed, as Cole had trailed the woman for the past twenty-four hours, it appeared that her routine seemed remarkably similar to how it must have been before her contact with Navarone – an early night, alone in her small apartment within the city’s Sadovoye Koltso, or Garden Ring; an equally early morning as she had dressed and readied herself for work, and then the subway ride to the Bely Dom, its tall white façade dominating the Krasnopresnenskaya embankment. Cole hadn’t risked continuing the surveillance inside the government building, but had picked her up again at the end of the working day and followed her to the jazz bar.
It was as if Jake Navarone had never existed.
Cole scanned his surroundings, wondering what he was to make of that.
Something about the situation just wasn’t right, and Cole felt his awareness rising as the feeling in his gut told him that there was danger nearby.
He had learned to listen to his gut over the years, and it had saved his skin on more than one occasion. The times that Cole had faced death, and conquered it – often taking others in his place – were almost too many to count. Indeed, he had long since stopped trying to calculate how many lives he himself had extinguished.
It just made the nightmares worse.
He had been born Mark Antoni Kowalski in the Polish enclave of Hamtramck, Michigan, almost too long ago to remember now. An energetic and restless youth, he had joined the US military at his first opportunity, soon passing the selection for the elite Navy SEALs. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan followed, along with many decorations for courage under fire and a recommendation to attend officer selection. He’d graduated from OCS at Pensacola as an Ensign, and had then gone on to join SEAL Team Six, where he’d made Lieutenant Commander before crossing paths with the charismatic Charles Hansard, the director of a secret unit known as the Systems Research Group. The SRG was a shadowy unit created in the aftermath of 9/11 to perform covert ops for the American intelligence services, and Cole had received extensive additional training in espionage tactics and tradecraft.
He had performed remarkably well over the years, until he had been caught during a deniable mission in Pakistan. Imprisoned for nearly a year, Cole had learned the death-strike system of Marma Adi from the man in the cell next to him, a blind Indian called Panickar Thilak. Marma Adi was a part of the an
cient Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu, and Cole had learned its secrets well; by the time Cole was rescued by Hansard, he had become an expert in the system and was able to kill through the subtle manipulation of the body’s pressure points. He was even able to attack a human’s nerve points in such a way that death would not result immediately, but up to several days later; it was truly the assassin’s art par excellence.
Upon his release, Hansard had immediately recognized what a weapon his agent had become, and had made Lieutenant Commander Kowalski an offer to serve his country once again; and the young man, still gripped by patriotic fervor, had agreed.
Months later, Kowalski – declared Killed In Action back in Pakistan – had become Mark Cole, a diving instructor living in the Cayman Islands with no military history and no links to the US government of any kind. Nobody knew the truth, including Kowalski’s family back in Hamtramck; even his ex-wife thought that he was dead.
Over the years, Cole married again, had children, and continued to operate a diving school in the Cayman Islands; but when orders came from his ‘control’, he would become the ‘Asset’, a government assassin who could kill enemies of the state in a manner which was entirely undetectable.
Paid a million dollars a job, Cole’s life in the Caymans had been both luxurious and idyllic, until the time that he discovered that Hansard had been using him as his own private executioner over the years. The missions he’d been given had not – as he’d believed – originated in the White House, but had been at the whim of his trusted mentor, who was now the Director of National Security.
Cole uncovered a plot by Hansard to instigate a covert coup that would have reopened the Cold War with the threat of nuclear Armageddon, in order to make him and his cronies in the military-industrial complex billions of dollars. Cole had saved the president from assassination, and pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war, but had also lost his wife and two young children in the process, brutally killed by one of Hansard’s men.
The psychological impact of the loss had been great, but eventually Cole had found himself once more and – unable to change, unable to become something he was not – he had become a warrior again, committed to protecting the United States through the covert unit known as Force One.
It had been during one of his operations for the new unit that he had discovered that he had a daughter, completely unknown to him before. Aoki Michiko had been born to Aoki Asami, a woman with whom Cole had had a brief relationship while in Thailand, on leave from SEAL Team Two.
Asami had – again, unknown to Cole – been the wife of a Japanese Yakuza gangster, on the run from the abusive relationship. The man had tracked her down years later and killed her, and her young daughter had been taken into the Omoto-gumi crime family, where she’d become invaluable for her computer skills, used to hack into the mainframes of big corporations so that they could be blackmailed for huge sums of money.
Michiko had been told by her yakuza family that her mother had been raped by an American soldier, and she had lived with hatred in her heart ever since. She had eventually tracked Cole down and tried to kill him, before learning the truth about what had happened to her mother.
Rescued from the Omoto-gumi by her father, the girl was now a US citizen, the status granted by Ellen Abrams herself, and worked with Cole at Force One. It was nice to have some sort of family again, Cole considered; the loss of his wife and children had been hard, and the presence of Michiko in his life helped to make things easier.
He sometimes wondered about his family back in Hamtramck – indeed, often used his resources to check up on them, see that they were okay – but he could never go and see them, not even his parents, who he knew were still alive.
For he understood that Mark Kowalski was dead, and only Cole remained.
Cole’s attention turned back to the room, and he was disappointed that he’d allowed himself to get distracted with thoughts of his past. He supposed it was his age, and hoped that he wasn’t losing that razor’s edge that – in his line of work – so often made the difference between death and survival.
Of course, he realized now, the presence of Veronika Galushka – happy and seemingly carefree – here in this bar was the sign of only one thing.
It was a trap.
They had Navarone; maybe they’d broken him and he’d talked, maybe not – but either way, they would know that he hadn’t been working alone. And if the man was out of contact, then wouldn’t whoever he worked for send people to find him?
And if Navarone was using Galushka for information, wouldn’t the Russian security forces use the same woman as bait?
The room was crowded and it was hard to make out individual faces; there was a lot of movement, a lot of distractions.
But, now that he knew what he was looking for, Cole could identify two possible threats. He hadn’t seen them directly, not at first; it was their energy that he picked up on. But now, as he casually observed them, he could see that they were not enjoying the bar as the other patrons were; despite their best efforts to fit in, Cole saw how they scanned the room with the professional eye of trained agents.
Cole shifted unnoticeably in his seat, subtly stretching his muscles; where there were two, he figured, there could well be more. Perhaps inside the bar, but certainly there would be additional agents outside, ready to react to communications from the first two men.
Had they seen him already? Had they observed him earlier, as he’d watched Veronika Galushka go about her business? He’d been careful, but he was all too aware that age was catching up with him, and he perhaps wasn’t the same man he’d been all those years before.
Still, he supposed, it wasn’t athletics he was involved in; it was surveillance and counter-surveillance, and experience played a bigger part in its successful application than did youthful vigor.
No, he thought carefully, he hadn’t been spotted outside the girl’s apartment; he would have known.
But did they know he was here now?
It was possible, he realized; lone drinkers were hardly unknown in Moscow, but he would certainly stand out compared to some of the other clientele. They would have definitely seen him, but would they suspect him?
The way they continued to subtly watch the crowds indicated that they hadn’t zeroed in on him quite yet, but what if there were more agents in here, that he hadn’t yet identified? And what if they’d seen him?
He was starting to feel hemmed in and all-too-vulnerable. He wasn’t a man who liked to be at the mercy of others, and so – with no more energy wasted on worrying about what might happen – he decided to take matters into his own hands, and act.
He had two tracking devices on his person – one in his cell phone and, in case that was lost, another inserted underneath the skin of his upper chest – and he pressed the transmit button on his cell that would alert the extraction team at the nearby safe house that he had potentially been compromised. Already monitoring his movements, they would increase their readiness to move in. It was one thing to have lost Navarone already; Force One couldn’t afford to lose another.
Cole was confident in the team’s abilities, having interviewed and selected the troops himself, as he always did. And the fact that they were led by Julie Barrington, a highly skilled officer from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, offered even more reassurance.
He stood from the table, observing how the two agents’ eyes swept toward him; if he hadn’t been sure about them before, he was now. He allowed himself to sway slightly, pretending to be more drunk than he really was – all the better to put the men off their guard. Cole was careful not to look their way, lest he arouse their suspicions further.
He left his empty glass on the table and started to make his way through the growing crowds. He paid no attention to Veronika Galushka or her friends; physical surveillance was a write-off for the evening. He would only see what the security services wanted him to see anyway; following her would be of no use while the deck wa
s so stacked against him.
It hadn’t been an entirely wasted evening, though; when he’d entered the bar, he’d brushed past Galushka on his way to his table. He’d used the opportunity to drop a micro-transmitter – the same as that found in his cellphone, and under his skin – into her coat pocket. It could be used to track her remotely, and might give Cole some further clues as to how to get to her at a later stage.
The fact that Galushka was being observed by others was also interesting in itself, and provided a not insignificant amount of information about Navarone’s situation.
None of it, unfortunately, was good.
Cole continued on through the bar, passed the jazz quartet on his way to the bathroom; saw a couple of subtle nods from the observers, watched as one of them detached himself from his spot on the wall and began to follow him.
His mind wanted to go into overdrive in order to process the choices, the options available to him. Where should he go? How should he move? Should he try and grab a glass, a bottle, a weapon of some sort? He might become trapped in the bathroom, should he still head for it or divert to the exit? Or would that only make him appear even more suspicious?
But he emptied his mind as soon as the chaos threatened to overwhelm his conscious thought processes, entering the state known to Japanese martial artists as mushin – ‘no mind’ – wherein the organism acted and reacted on instinct, without interference from the active brain. Athletes talk of it as the ‘zone’, that state of ultimate performance whereby the body seems to take control of itself, doing the right thing every time, seemingly with no effort.
And he felt nothing as his body carried itself on toward the Duma bathroom, a Russian agent following close behind; could only hope that it was doing the right thing.
For he knew that a mistake could well cost him his life.
2
Clark Mason was back in Washington, pleased at how things had gone at the UN. It came as no surprise to him, of course; the world was primed to be receptive, after what had happened. But it pleased him nevertheless, especially the positive response his speech had garnered in the world media.
