PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (34 page)

17

Ellen Abrams looked toward the exit ahead of her forlornly, knowing that to make it there, she would have to allow her Secret Service detail to shoot the civilian masses who had got there first.

She could never give such an order though, and suddenly realized that it probably wouldn’t help her even if she did. The people were trying to break through, to no avail – there were simply too many of them trying to push through too small an exit, into a space outside which, with the huge unregulated crowds beyond, was too small to receive them.

Her lead agent, Hank T. Johnson, looked at her expectantly, weapon drawn. Shots had already been fired at the other side of the arena by the security team of the South African president, but it had done them no good anyway – instead of the people parting the way, they instead fought back, trampling over the security detail like a herd of cattle.

There was chaos and confusion everywhere, but she was being shielded by her men, who formed a protective circle around her like Roman legionaries with their choreographed battle formations; and she instinctively realized that, for the time being at least, that was the safest place she could be.

Barrington piloted the car fast down the suburban roads, quiet now that police vans were out in force, broadcasting messages over their loudhailers for people to remain indoors, not to come out until they were told it was safe to do so.

Michiko had finally got them the address, and a citywide order had been given out to move in on the five-bed red-brick terraced house and to take the pilots out.

But Cole wanted desperately to get there first.

The next wave was almost there at the stadium, and Cole knew that time had almost run out; the latest news from the stadium was that the evacuation had turned into a complete clusterfuck, and if any of the drones got through, most of the people there would die horrible, painful deaths.

The stadium officials were trying desperately to get the roof closed, to help defend against the little drones. But Cole knew that the roof was only designed to close partially, to cover the seats – there would still be a huge gap, and if the drones made it inside, the nerve gas would spread throughout the area anyway.

‘Next wave is three minutes out,’ Michiko said, as Barrington pulled the car up onto the curb outside the narrow red-brick house, ramming the front fender into the front door and knocking it straight through.

‘Sharpshooters!’ Cole told Michiko, knowing she would relay the message; the drones were too small for missiles, but police marksmen might be able to shoot them out of the sky.

He didn’t wait for a reply, was instead already out of the car, jumping onto the car’s hood and racing across it right behind Russakoff, Barrington right behind
him
as they stormed into the house, their weapons up and at the ready, determined to kill the Iranian aviators before their evil little drones could make it to the stadium.

Michiko received the feedback from the police operation, the staff of Force One sitting around her, on the edges of their seats as the drama unfolded.

The drones were two minutes out now, just over a kilometer away, and already the police sharpshooters were reporting their successes.

‘One down,’ came the news, and then, ‘Another one.’

But there were so many, eye witnesses reported more than they’d expected, a wave of
sixty
drones, all headed at twenty miles per hour toward the stadium, and everybody knew that – no matter how skilled the marksmen were – they were never going to be able to stop them all.

And to make matters worse, the most recent news from the Secret Service was that President Abrams was still trapped inside.

Cole and his two teammates had made impressive time up the stairs, considering the fact that four terrorist gunmen had been lying in wait for them.

But the Force One operators, trained to perfection, had steamrollered right over them, taken them out with accurate 9mm submachine gun fire on the run.

They checked rooms as they went, but knew they wanted the roof, the only location the birds could be launched from in such numbers, and the place that the aviators would be guaranteed to have the best reception.

Cole didn’t have to check his watch to know that they had less than a minute left.

But then they were there, kicking down the upper stairwell door and bursting out onto the tar-pitch rooftop.

Two terrorist gunmen opened fire on them as they moved through, but they kept low and darted left and right, firing back in accurate bursts as they went, dropping both remaining guards and leaving the Iranian aviators unprotected.

And still the drone pilots continued to do their jobs, and Cole saw how they could fly so many drones at once, having wired several controllers together to give multiple control from a single device.

They ignored the Force One team, so close now to victory, their drones just seconds away from the stadium, and a single action that would teach the Great Satan a lesson it would never forget.

‘They’re almost there!’ Michiko cried into Cole’s ear, and then the sound of his daughter’s voice was drowned out by the sound of automatic gunfire as they opened up their weapons into the drone pilots, bullets tearing them apart and sending them jerking this way and that across the rooftops, their controls skittering across the tar, useless.

‘Yes!’ Michiko called over Cole’s earpiece. ‘You’ve done it, they’re going down! But . . . But . . .’

But another wave of drones kept right on coming, and Victor Parish, watching from inside the stadium’s control center, through a wide panoramic window, gasped in horror as they carried on right toward the building, until they went out of view.

And Parish knew that meant one thing, and one thing only – they were now flying over the roof, and within only a few more seconds, they would be above the interior of the stadium itself.

18

Cole knew what had happened, though Barrington got the words out before he could.

‘Shit, there’s only five of them!’ she said, and Cole already knew it was true – two guards, and only five pilots.

Where the hell was the other one?

With the controls wired up as they were, that meant that ten drones were still heading toward the stadium, with five kilos of sarin gas between them.

So where the hell was he?

The three operators started to scour the rooftop, stepping over dead bodies and the small drones that hadn’t been flown yet, the next two waves of attack aircraft, covered in spattered blood and still full of their deadly payloads.

But there was nobody left on the roof, and Cole was pretty sure that they’d checked each room on the way up. Unless they’d missed him? Or was he operating from a different rooftop altogether?

And then, as the seconds ticked on down, Cole considered what he would have done in the pilot’s situation, if he’d had a mission to complete and had heard armed troops heading up the stairs toward him.

Instantly, he ran for the rear of the house, reached the edge of the rooftop and looked down.

And there, crouched low on the fire escape below, was the sixth Iranian aviator, controls in his hands, eyes locked onto the screen as he piloted the drones toward their target.

President Abrams looked upward, the buzzing sound audible now even above the chaotic mewls of the crowds, and saw the drones clear the still-moving sliding roof.

And then the sound of the crowds died down too, until the tens of thousands of people, over thirty world leaders among them, looked upward together in complete silence, unified by fear and final, horrifying understanding as they saw the ten small aircraft that would seal their fate forever.

Cole fired a single shot downward, straight through the top of the aviator’s skull, the force of the round blowing the thin bones of his face outward across the fire escape, covering the drone controller that he had been holding onto so tightly.

Cole peered down at it and, even through the blood that covered the screen, saw with a hollow, empty, gut-churning feeling in the pit of his stomach that he was too late.

The onboard camera was showing a live feed of Wembley Stadium, thousands of people gathered below as the drones dropped through the sky, releasing their contents as they fell.

President Abrams closed her eyes and offered a prayer for the people around her as she saw the remaining drones discharge their nerve agent across the sky above her, the gas slowly descending on them, the crowd silent no longer but racing to get out in one insane charge, trampling each other to death in the process.

But, Abrams realized, it no longer mattered anyway.

Because she knew what sarin gas could do.

And she knew that they were already dead.

EPILOGUE

Clark Mason was sitting in the study of his home at Number One Observatory Circle, preparing for the last speech of his political career, when the news came.

There had been a secondary attack on London, targeting Wembley Stadium on the day of the memorial ceremony.

It had been a drone attack, two hundred aircraft fitted with canisters designed to release sarin nerve gas over the gathered crowds.

Fast-moving intelligence had enabled most of the attack force to be taken out before they’d reached the stadium, but ten drones had come through unscathed, and dropped enough nerve gas on the people there to kill everyone.

Every last one of them.

It was being estimated that upward of seventy thousand people, unable to get out of the stadium, were dead as a result of the gas, including thirty-seven of the fifty leaders in attendance.

Including, he was informed by the Secret Service detail that had barged into his home, Ellen Abrams, the President of the United States of America.

The president.

Dead.

The most obvious ramification of this passed Mason by, such was his shock at the news. It took one of the Secret Service bodyguards to make it clear for him.

‘Do you want to go to the White House now, Mr. President?’ the young man said to him . . .to
him
. . .

And it was only then that he finally made the connection, that he – as Vice President, even if only until Monday – would now have to step automatically into Ellen’s shoes.

Yes
, he breathed out steadily as he came to terms with what had happened.
Yes
.

He tried to hold back the smile as he processed the information.

At last
.

At last!

At last, he was the man he had always wanted to be.

Clark Mason.

46
th
President of the United States of America.

Cole sat in the basement offices of Force One, hidden under the Paradigm Group headquarters in Forest Hills, and drank deeply from the bottle of Scotch that Vinson offered him, still unable to fully deal with what had happened.

He had been so close . . .

So damn close!

But he had failed, they had
all
failed, and now the president was dead, along with seventy thousand other poor souls.

It was too much to take in, it really was.

But his own work had been vindicated at least; with everything he had found out, it was clear that the Iranian regime was behind the whole thing.

Iranian diplomats were trying to blame it on Islamic State and its partners, of course – just as Younesi must have planned – but they weren’t fooling anyone. The documents Cole had recovered from Younesi’s computer were incriminating enough, but there was also the eyewitness testimony of Hassan Hossein; a survivor of the rooftop shooting, he was one of the Iranian aviators responsible for the atrocity.

He had described his recruitment and training by Mohammed Younesi, and confirmed that it was a state-run operation.

What happened now, Cole knew, would be in the hands of the new president, Clark Mason.

‘You think Mason’s gonna try and shut us down?’ Cole asked.

Vinson shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure. It’s a possibility, I guess. But don’t forget the leverage we have over him.’

‘The president is a very powerful person,’ Cole said darkly.

‘Don’t I know it,’ Vinson replied. ‘And I’m all too aware that this one is no friend of ours. But we’ve got more problems than Mason on our plate, my friend.’

Cole shook his head, unable to believe that Clark Mason, that son of a bitch, was now his country’s president.

No good would come of it, Cole was sure.

But Vinson was right, there
was
more to worry about than Clark Mason.

The entire international situation was unprecedented; nearly every European nation had lost their heads of state, along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Many Middle Eastern and Gulf nations had also had terrible losses, along with several throughout Africa, Asia and South America.

It was a tragedy the likes of which the world had never seen before, and Cole knew that the result would be chaos like that at the stadium, but on a global scale.

The thought of it filled him with terror, and he drank down some more of the Scotch.

Michiko knocked on the door, and Vinson called her in.

Father and daughter embraced, tears in the girl’s eyes which were soon matched by Cole’s.

They cried for a number of reasons – Michiko because her father was safe, Cole because his daughter had done such a good job, and both because of the lives that had been lost.

Eventually, Cole pulled away, held her face in his hands and smiled. ‘Thanks, Michiko,’ he said. ‘You know, we almost did it.’

She smiled, and then the realization hit them again that they had only
almost
done it, but not quite managed it, and tens of thousands of people were dead as a result, and they embraced once more, and started to sob softly, their heads buried in the other’s shoulder.

Vinson let them stay like that for some time, before returning to business. ‘Michiko,’ he said gently, ‘do you want to tell Mark what else you found out?’

Michiko nodded her head and, pulling away from her father and wiping her eyes, she also returned to business.

‘I found out what happened to Elizabeth Morgan,’ she said, and Cole’s interest instantly perked up. With everything that had happened, he had almost forgotten about her. Almost, but not quite. And now, at the mention of her name, he realized how much he cared for her. How worried he was about her, and how much he wanted to see her again.

And yet the looks on the faces of Vinson and Michiko indicated that what she had to say was far from good news.

‘Go on,’ Cole urged.

Michiko cleared her throat before continuing. ‘Her body washed up in the Thames,’ she said, and as Cole reacted, she held up a hand. ‘Two
months
ago,’ she said for clarification, ‘her body’s been in a drawer at the morgue ever since, unidentified until last night. Died of strangulation by all accounts, classic garrote, rope with knots in.’

‘Elizabeth Morgan was killed two months ago?’ Cole asked in amazement. ‘Then who was the woman I was working with?’

The woman I
slept
with
, Cole didn’t add.

Michiko shook her head. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ she said cagily, ‘but she was made up to look like Morgan, probably plastic surgery.’ Cole nodded his head, remembering the comments made by her friend outside the school. ‘The only reason the body wasn’t ID’d was because nobody realized that Morgan was missing in the first place. The woman you met must have killed her, and then instantly slipped into her identity.’

‘And then you went looking for
my
Morgan, and found the real one instead.’

Michiko nodded. ‘And there’s more. I tracked a woman leaving Belgrade on a Serbian passport, face matched with the Morgan you knew. A flight that went up to Estonia.’

‘Estonia?’ Cole asked in wonder.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and from Estonia, the overnight train to Moscow.’

Cole read the expectant look on Vinson’s face, and made the connection he was driving at.

‘Hold on a minute,’ Cole said, ‘you think she’s a Russian agent?’

Vinson leaned forward from where he was perched on the end of his desk. ‘Rob from our Russian department has heard rumors of an assassin coming from Moscow. Female. Beautiful. Uses the garrote as her weapon of choice.’

‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Cole said, shaking his head. ‘She was a Russian assassin? So what the hell did she want with
me
?’

‘We don’t know for sure,’ Vinson said, ‘but it might be that she was covering someone’s tracks, or maybe making sure you didn’t find out too much, or find it out too soon. Maybe she saw you there, the way you dealt with Khan, and her superiors told her to follow you, to find out who you worked for.’ Vinson’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘You didn’t tell her anything, did you?’

‘The hell I did,’ Cole spat, although he was asking himself the same question. Had he said anything, while she was lying next to him in bed? Is that why she’d gone to bed with him in the first place, simply to get him to talk?

‘If you still need convincing,’ Vinson said next, ‘take a look at this.’

He swung his desktop monitor around so that Cole could see it and tapped a few keys, footage from what appeared to be a cellphone camera appearing moments later.

Cole recognized the location immediately. ‘The designer outlet,’ he said. ‘The mall, in Wembley.’

‘Yes,’ Michiko said. ‘When the police checked the security tapes initially, they couldn’t find anything, seemed they’d been accidentally erased.’

‘Accidentally?’ Cole asked.

‘We think Morgan – or whatever her real name is – did it,’ Vinson said.

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Just watch,’ Vinson suggested. ‘A young man was hiding next to one of the shops when this happened, kept silent but filmed this. Too scared to come forward before, but with what happened yesterday, he thought it best to help out.’ Cole watched as Morgan and Cranshaw came in through the rear fire doors, approached a figure that looked like Javid Khan. Cole recognized the café in the distance.

Khan turned and saw Morgan. ‘You!’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

Morgan ignored the question, striding quickly toward Khan and withdrawing her gun, whispering to the man as she approached.

‘Do we know what she’s saying?’ Cole asked.

‘Our experts have cleaned it up,’ Michiko explained, ‘it looks like she’s saying ‘grab the gun’ in Urdu.’

‘Wait, she told him to grab the gun?’

‘It looks that way,’ Vinson said, and Cole saw that Morgan just stood there with the pistol out, waiting for Khan to take it from her, encouraging him to wrap his arm around her neck to take her hostage; only grabbing him to wrestle for it when they were closer to the café and all of the witnesses.

‘But Cranshaw saw what really happened,’ Cole said.

‘Yes,’ Vinson said, ‘which is exactly why she killed him.’

Cole watched the footage of Cranshaw’s death, understanding now the reason for his shaking hands, the uncertainty of who he should have even been aiming at, Khan or his partner.

And then Morgan’s handgun went off ‘accidentally’ but – when Michiko broke it down in slow motion, from this angle Cole could now tell that Morgan had taken control of the gun, finger intentionally sliding over Khan’s as it lay inside the trigger guard. A still image saw her looking straight at Cranshaw, just moments before the shot.

The film played on, and Cole saw the scene repeated, only this time with Khan himself; his arm twisted, blocked from the view of witnesses by his body, and then his finger depressed on purpose by Morgan’s own.

She was strong, capable. Ruthless.

Merciless
.

One hell of an actress too; Cole had bought her routine hook, line and sinker, and he realized how he’d been played for a fool, by a pro who had used the oldest trick in the book.

She had appeared vulnerable, appealed to his male ego, his desire to protect those weaker than him.

He shook his head as he struggled to take it all in.

Had she called out Khan’s name on purpose, back outside the school? Had she seen Cole notice Khan, was afraid that Cole would capture him, question him? Had she shouted out like that so Khan would instead run, be chased down and eventually killed?

And if so, then why?

‘We suspect that she was the one who erased the security film. A couple of guards remember her being in there. I think they were a bit hypnotized by her looks, you know? Let her just stroll in there, play around with the computers, and walk out again.’

Cole nodded, knowing – with a certain horror – how easy it was to be taken in by those looks, surgically augmented or not.

‘We think she tipped off the Serbians, anyway,’ Vinson said. ‘That’s why they were waiting for you like that in the hotel.’

Cole nodded. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe. But why? What the hell does a Russian agent have to do with all of this?’

Vinson shrugged. ‘Who can possibly say? But Mikhail Emelienenko wasn’t at that stadium, and I’m beginning to think that the Iranians might have had some outside help.’

‘The Russians?’ Cole asked. ‘But why the hell would they do that?’

‘We believe that your friend Jake Navarone might have some of the answers,’ Vinson said. ‘But we still can’t get in touch with him.’

‘In Moscow?’ Cole asked for confirmation.

‘Yes,’ Vinson answered. ‘In Moscow.’

‘Sounds like the answers to a lot of questions might be found in Moscow.’

Vinson smiled. ‘It does indeed.’