STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (21 page)
Authors: JT Brannan
Cole couldn’t see, but he could hear voices; first as if far away, or maybe underwater, but gradually becoming clearer. Eventually, he could make out the words. French. He concentrated harder to understand.
‘No, he’s unconscious,’ said one of the voices. There was a pause, as if the man was listening to a reply, indicating the conversation was via telephone, and it was long enough for Cole to remember everything. There’d been a crash; his car had been blasted across the highway, rolling onto its roof and back again. He had lost consciousness soon after, and had no idea how long he’d been out. Given the conditions, it would have taken the emergency services a considerable amount of time to attend the scene. He might have been in the car for hours even.
Police would have attended also. They would know the car was stolen, but would they make any further connections? He listened to the rest of the one-way conversation to find out. ‘Yes, bad crash, I’m with the medical personnel in the ambulance, we’re moving him to the hospital.’ There was another pause. ‘American agents will meet him there?’ The voice did not sound happy. ‘Sir, this is a criminal case, he was driving a stolen car, he –’ There was another, longer pause. ‘Yes, sir. I will sign him over upon arrival. Yes, of course.’
The conversation was at an end, and Cole had the information he needed. They must have matched his description to an APB put out by Hansard. So they knew where he was, and where he was going. That wasn’t good.
Light was starting to filter through his eyelids, and Cole could feel that he was secured down to what he assumed was a stretcher. His arms, legs, body – even his head – had all been strapped in place. He hoped it was merely for security reasons, and not because he was paralysed.
Slowly, carefully, he started tensing and relaxing the muscles through his entire body. Everything ached, but everything seemed to be responding.
Next, he very gently started to open his eyes, careful to be discrete, not wide enough for anyone to realize that he had regained consciousness. There was a uniformed police officer at the foot of the bed, presumably the man on the phone, and Cole took extra note of the Glock pistol in the holster at the side of his belt. There were also two medical personnel, one on either side of him, administering to the various machines he was hooked up to. He hoped one of them wasn’t a morphine drip; he would need his wits about him soon enough, he was sure. If Hansard’s agents were to meet him at the hospital, then they wouldn’t be bringing flowers.
After Albright’s report from Miami, the news from France cheered Hansard up no end.
The man in the stolen car had no ID of course, but Hansard knew it was Cole. The physical description provided by the attending police officer was a match, but perhaps more importantly, the
tactics
of the car thief were a match.
Cole’s continued existence worried Hansard a great deal. What did the man already know, if anything? And if he did know something, then had he told anyone? As he took a sip of his Almagnac, he relaxed slightly. Hansard was sure Cole could not possibly know anything of any real significance. He would realize that Hansard had lied about the reason for Crozier’s assassination, but would have no idea why.
He had another sip, and started to relax even more as he thought about Cole’s current predicament – strapped down in the back of an ambulance, under armed guard, helpless, on his way to meet two more of Hansard’s ‘special’ agents – professional assassins who could be relied upon to get the job done.
It was luck of course, Albright realized. For all his orders, his plans and his directives, despite everything he’d done to track the targets down, in the end it was down to sheer luck. But, Albright considered cheerfully, that was good enough for him.
After they had escaped him in Miami, Albright had put out warnings to every transport hub in the United States, asked for upgraded passport checks, requested local roadblocks, and instigated a hundred other ultimately wasted security precautions.
But despite the vast array of assets ranged against them, the targets had successfully evaded detection at Louis Armstrong International, and then again at Munich Airport, a small Munich bus terminal, and once more at the city’s Hauptbahnhof.
It was a normal train conductor who made the breakthrough in the end, although at the time he had no idea how desperately wanted were the passengers seated in Cabin 4F of the direct train from Munich to Innsbruck.
He only knew that the ‘family’ were travelling on German travel cards, but had been speaking fluent English before he knocked.
And so Stefan Kohl had stamped their passes, smiled politely, wished them a good journey, and excused himself from the cabin. But instead of entering the next cabin along the corridor to check the next set of tickets, he turned on his heel and marched rapidly back the way he had come.
He had been briefed on the methods used by terrorists to move about, and knew that they were not above using children as decoys. And he was sure that this was what he was now dealing with – terrorists. On his train! He’d have to act quickly, he knew that; and so he hurried to the control room at the front of the train, demanding that the driver let him use the radio immediately.
Stefan Kohl’s frantic call was received by Commander Kraus of the Municipal Transport Police, who had been given orders earlier in the day to contact the local representative of the Landespolizei state police if anything –
anything at all
– out of the ordinary was reported. He didn’t know why this was the case, but after receiving the desperate message from Kohl, he hung up and immediately made his own call.
Marcus Hartmann answered the telephone on the second ring, and proceeded to listen with interest. A family, travelling on German passports, who nevertheless spoke English when alone. A woman and two children. Most interesting.
His section had been put on the alert by direct order of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. It was an American matter apparently, but intelligence services across the continent had been asked to cooperate as it involved international terrorism. The suspects were announced as two adults – a man and a woman – travelling with two children, a boy and a girl. The American DIA had provided his department with images and descriptions of each, but asked that the various European agencies be circumspect in issuing their own orders. A panic or a public manhunt was the last thing that was needed, apparently. And so Hartmann had sent out his orders to the police and the national transport services, as well as half a dozen other departments, to immediately report anything out of the ordinary.
His office had been flooded, of course, but he had the advantage of knowing what he was looking for, and was therefore able to immediately disregard the vast majority of calls.
But this latest information looked promising. He put a call through to his contact at the DIA, who then made a formal request for the ‘family’ to be followed, until a US surveillance team could take over. The formal request for an American team to operate on foreign soil had already been made, and approved, for almost all countries on the European mainland, and so Hartmann had agreed, saying that he would send some of his men to board the train at the next station.
The train in question was on its way to Austria, and so Hartmann also started to alert his colleagues over the border. It was just good manners, he believed, to give his neighbours a timely heads-up.
Albright received confirmation that a small German team would be put on at the next train stop, whilst he himself was still airborne, two hundred miles away.
Good
, he thought, whilst at the same time hoping that they would not be noticed.
His own team was assembling at the next major stop on the train’s route, which was where Albright would meet them. He had spoken to Hansard earlier, and had received authorization to recall three sections of men, with more en route from the U.S. They had been given permission to operate within mainland Europe, and would receive cooperation from the relevant local services.
Albright wanted to keep the locals out of it as much as he could, but he appreciated the fact that they wouldn’t be hindered.
Sarah was concerned, to say the least. The conductor had tried to mask his feelings, but Sarah had noticed the brief, unmistakeable flicker of suspicion in his eyes as he took the travel cards. She had spoken to the conductor in fluent German, but had the man heard them talking before he entered the cabin? And what would he have thought if he had?
And then Ben had started to talk in front of him – ‘Mommy, what -’ but Sarah had cut him off with a burst of stern German, to the effect that children shouldn’t speak unless spoken to. It was purely for the benefit of the conductor, of course, as Ben had no idea what his mother was saying – but the look in her eyes got the message across effectively enough, and Ben was instantly quiet.
It was her own fault, Sarah knew. Mark had warned her about the importance of always staying in character, but she obviously hadn’t performed well enough. Speaking in English, even within the privacy of a cabin, was just plain careless. But what to do now?
Their tickets had been due to take them all the way across the border to the Austrian city of Innsbruck. The route would now possibly be compromised – and just the fact that there was the possibility meant that the route
was
compromised.
There was noting else for it, Sarah decided. They would have to get off at the next station and find another way into Austria.
Cole didn’t know how much time he had. They were driving slowly due to the conditions, but he had no idea how far away the hospital was, and he therefore had no idea how long it would take to get there.
For the last few minutes he had been working on the leather straps that secured his wrists. He had been trained to escape from such bonds back in DEVGRU, but the situation was made harder by the fact that he couldn’t make any obvious movements that would be seen by either the ambulance crew or the police officer.
From the conversation of the paramedics, Cole had ascertained that he was not seriously injured. Indeed, they had objected to the police officer about the way their patient was strapped down, although the man remained unmoved by such protestations.
He seemed to have some mild bruising and several minor cuts that they had already stitched up, but they were also concerned over his head injuries, suspecting that he might well have a concussion. This didn’t worry Cole unduly however – he’d had plenty in the past, and it had never stopped him before.
After ten agonizing minutes, he’d done it – the wrist straps had been loosened sufficiently that he would be able to pull his hands free when the time was right. His legs, upper arms, torso and head were all still strapped tight, but he had his hands – and that would just have to do.
Andy Truro and Jimmy Vinh pulled into the hospital car park just after midnight. It had been lucky that they had been available – they had recently finished a job and were relaxing at a private resort in the French countryside just outside Paris. They wouldn’t ordinarily have done a job so close to where they were, but the money offered by Hansard for what seem like a fairly easy bit of work made the decision for them.
They were unusual in that they worked as partners, which was generally unheard of for such contract workers. Their history together went all the way back to early childhood, however, and they had been together from the orphanage nursery through to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. When Hansard had approached them about going ‘off the radar’, they had agreed on one condition – that they would be able to continue working together.
At first, Hansard had rejected the idea; but as he cogitated further, he recognized that some missions could benefit from a good working partnership, and so he had taken them on, on a trial basis.
They had since proved to be a formidable addition to Hansard’s team, both ruthless and inventive. They were also committed to each other to the exclusion of all else, which resulted in behaviour to others that bordered on the sociopathic. This was the reason that Hansard generally gave them the lower-end jobs, as he simply could not trust them completely. But it was also the reason Hansard was sending them to kill Cole; there would be no second guessing, no emotion, and no mistakes. They would simply do their job, and then disappear.
Sarah was beginning to relax slightly. She’d given the driver a couple of false destinations, which necessitated some sharp changes of direction and would have revealed the presence of a tail, if there had been one.
Her constant scanning of the surrounding traffic eased her concerns, as she could see clearly that there was nobody following them. More importantly, her gut instinct told him that they weren’t being watched.
She had probably overreacted anyway, she reflected – the ticket collector had almost certainly forgotten the whole thing, if he had even realized that something was amiss in the first place.
She comforted himself with the fact that they hadn’t really lost too much time – Rosenheim was only a short way away, and had a direct connection to Innsbruck. They would still be able to get to Austria by evening, and would be safe not long afterwards, just as soon as they made their rendezvous.
Albright’s helicopter touched down in the parking lot with just three minutes to go. Hartmann had called him to say the family had exited the train at Bad Tölz and then travelled by taxi to Rosenheim Train Station. Jumping out of the doorway, Albright ducked low as he sprinted away from the chopper, the rotors still spinning wildly, whipping up dirt and rubble from the rough concrete.
The last report had delighted him – Hartmann had indicated that all three targets had also now boarded, on Cabin E. Four members of his own team were now aboard the train, seemingly unnoticed, and had occupied the adjoining cabins. They now had the bat, and Hartmann was stood down.
Strictly speaking, Albright had no need to go to the station at all – he could have simply moved to Innsbruck and picked up the tail there. But somehow it just didn’t seem right – Sarah had escaped too many times already, and Albright was reluctant to leave it entirely in the hands of others.
Without a second thought, he increased his pace, legs starting to pump wildly, along with his heart. He knew he just had to follow the group, but his adrenaline started to kick in when he thought about Sarah. Something told him that the future held more than just a simple tail; confrontation was inevitable.