by JT Brannan
As Mason – alone in the Oval Office at last – lit up a cigar and took a large sip of brandy, he thought about the fate of President Emelienenko. Mason was surprised that the man had succumbed to a heart attack – he was younger than Mason, slimmer, fitter – but Mason supposed you could never predict the health of a man from looks alone.
And a part of him, forever cynical and suspicious, wondered if Mark Cole – the fabled ‘Asset’, the legendary government assassin – might have had a hand in it.
But from what he’d heard about the man, he’d been close to death in Warsaw, and it wasn’t likely that he’d have been able to manage it.
It must have just been one of those things, Mason supposed; fate had intervened, and it was meant to be.
But he wondered, now, where that bastard Cole was. He wondered, too, about Aoki Michiko, who had also avoided his Forest Hills dragnet. He knew the bitch was dangerous, and he was reluctant to move against the rest of the Force One staff until she could be found.
The same went for Bruce Vinson too; the Russians had taken their best shot at him but – hard bastard that he was – he had survived the attack, and gone into hiding.
Between him and Michiko, they could make life very unpleasant for him, and he had no intention of letting that happen.
There was a knock on his door, and he barked an order for his visitors to be let in.
His Secret Service agents – loyal not to the truth, not to the public, but only to him – opened the door, and he watched as an impressive man walked into his office, tall and well-dressed but hard-looking and slightly menacing at the same time.
The man was Bodi Gillett, the CEO of Apex Security – an outfit populated by ex-special ops personnel, none of whom were disposed to ask questions.
After the initial introductions, Mason was silent, merely passing across the files he had for Cole, Vinson and Michiko and allowing Gillett time to read them.
When the man had had his fill, Mason looked at him evenly, gaze leveled. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Can you find them? Can you take them?’
Gillett looked up from the files and smiled at the president. ‘Absolutely,’ he said confidently. ‘Absolutely.’
3
Kang Xing was terribly disappointed by recent events; it didn’t serve his ultimate purposes at all.
As he sat on the stone bench in his private garden, he remembered the first time he had planted the seeds of ‘Project Europe’ in Dementyev’s head; it had been at a diplomatic dinner between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The SVR man had been posing as a diplomat, but Kang had seen right through him; after all, he already had a file on the man, so how couldn’t he?
Dementyev, Kang had assessed, was precociously talented, vastly intelligent, and unnaturally ruthless; the only problem with the SVR officer was that he didn’t have a project into which he could sink his energies.
‘It would be fantastic,’ Kang had said over cocktails, ‘would it not, if some sort of terrorist attack precipitated a conflict between America and the Middle East? And not a minor conflict, mind you,’ Kang had added, ‘but a major war.’
‘It would be nice, yes,’ Dementyev had said, a little worse for the drink, ‘but why “fantastic”?’
‘Because,’ Kang had whispered conspiratorially, ‘if America – and perhaps an entire coalition – is busy in the desert, then Europe will be ripe for the picking.’
Despite the young SVR officer being half-drunk, Kang saw that his words had struck home, just as he’d known they would; and over the years, Kang had monitored Dementyev’s progress, subtly helping him where he could, while all the time allowing the Russians to think that the entire European project had been their idea.
But Proyekt Yevropy, as the poor, late Colonel Vladimir Dementyev had labeled it, had died on its feet, stillborn.
And that presented problems for Kang’s own plans, which had counted on full-scale European war.
It wasn’t entirely necessary, Kang understood, just as the assassination attempts had not been entirely necessary to Project Europe; but it would have been nice, he thought sadly as he watched the still waters of his garden pond.
It would have been nice.
But, he told himself in an effort to cheer himself up, the most important part of his own plan had been realized; a colossal amount of American forces were bogged down in the mountains and desert-swamps of Iran, and might well be for years to come.
And he knew that this was, ultimately, the only thing that mattered.
THE END
. . . but Mark Cole will return in his seventh adventure, out late 2017!
By J.T. Brannan:
The Mark Cole Series:
STOP AT NOTHING
WHATEVER THE COST
BEYOND ALL LIMITS
NEVER SAY DIE
PLEDGE OF HONOR
THE LONE PATRIOT
SEVEN DAY HERO
(alternative Mark Cole thriller)
The Colt Ryder Series:
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
THE THOUSAND DOLAR HUNT
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR ESCAPE
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT
Other:
ORIGIN
EXTNCTION
Short Stories:
DESTRUCTIVE THOUGHTS
Children’s:
TIME QUEST
