Authors: JT Brannan
STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (29 page)
When Hansard got back to his office, he set about how to deal with the one major problem he still had – Mark Cole.
His own agents had not succeeded in neutralising the man, but Cole
was
now in custody at least. The problem Hansard now faced was what to do with him.
His agents in the area were now sadly depleted - Cole had seen to that. And even if he
did
have reliable personnel available, he couldn’t just send them in to execute the man. Cole was now being kept in a Munich jail cell, and there was the thorny issue of legality to consider. It was one thing to gun a man down in the street – a case could always be made that a deadly threat was being posed, after all – but it was another thing entirely to kill someone who was already in police custody.
He sipped from a glass of cognac and considered the problem. He would need to get Cole extradited back to the United States, where he could be handled ‘in-house’. It would be complicated, but it certainly wasn’t impossible.
He lifted the handset of his secure telephone and dialled the chief of Munich’s municipal police force. He would have Cole on a plane back to Washington within the hour.
He would demand that the man be sedated first, of course. After all, he didn’t want Cole talking before he could be dealt with properly.
Fucking bitch.
Albright looked at himself in the mirror by his bedside.
Fucking bitch!
He was blind in his right eye, which had been gouged out from the socket completely, and his nose was all but destroyed. The surgeons had managed to re-attach it, but it was covered by thick bandages, which wouldn’t be coming off for some time.
He also had bandaging around his head, protecting the small hole in the skull created by the impact with the sharp corner of the bathroom cabinet.
Maybe I should sue the rail company?
, he wondered idly, but the laughter only brought more pain. His temple had been missed by less than an inch, and the doctors felt that it was something of a miracle that he was still alive.
As Albright looked at himself through his remaining eye, part of himself wished he wasn’t. Dark, ugly scabs formed across his previously perfect face, left by the woman’s clawing nails; his once beautifully coiffured blond hair had been shaved off to allow the surgeons access to his skull. And that wasn’t even to mention his eye and his nose. His face, he realized in grim depression, was ruined. Sure, he could always have plastic surgery, and it might even be a pretty good job; but it would no longer be
his
face, and he would always have to live with that.
The part of him that wondered if life was now worth living was easily silenced, however. Of course it was, he reminded himself.
How else am I going to kill that bitch and her entire fucking family?
And so slowly, carefully, yet with grave determination, he unplugged the drips and monitors that surrounded him and raised himself up in the bed, swinging his legs off the side and onto the cold hospital floor.
Back to work
.
Sarah came around towards nine in the evening. She had waited up for Mark’s arrival all afternoon, until the pain became too bad and Steinmeier insisted – indeed, practically forced her – to take more medication. It had laid her out again, and when she awoke in the dark, she was confused and disorientated.
‘Sarah,’ Steinmeier said comfortingly from the armchair near her bed. ‘It’s okay. You’re safe.’
‘Mark?’ she wondered out loud.
‘Still no word, I’m afraid. But there’s no point worrying, you’ll just slow down your recovery. He’ll be here, just not on schedule, that’s all.’
Sarah lay back in bed, thinking. She had always known her husband was capable, and although she knew his work was dangerous, she had never before truly worried about him. Partly this was due to his own nonchalance, brushing away any talk of such danger when the subject came up. But mostly, she now realized, it stemmed from her utter ignorance of the reality of violence, and of the world her husband lived in.
She had now been exposed to that world first hand, and the experience had changed her outlook on things irrevocably. Like an epiphany, her eyes had been opened to the cold, hard, brutal world, and now that she knew what her husband was up against, her faith in his safe return had started to slowly ebb away.
Steinmeier stayed with her, calming her down until she was asleep again, and then took a long hard pull from the vodka bottle by his side. He stared at his friend’s wife for several minutes before leaving the room.
He still didn’t know what he was going to do.
Cole awoke to a dull roar, which seemed to be coming from all sides at once.
At first he didn’t open his eyes all the way, but instead kept them as narrow slits as he scanned his current location.
He was in what looked like a large metal container, securely restrained to a large metal chair, which was in turn secured to the metal floor. A uniformed German police officer sat to one side, working on a small laptop computer.
He remembered being in the stark white cell back in Munich, overhearing the conversation regarding his transfer to Washington. He then remembered being given an injection, and wondering whether it would prove lethal, Hansard executing him whilst in the supposedly safe hands of the German police.
It had just been a sedative though, as it turned out – presumably to stop Cole from talking before Hansard’s agents picked him up from Andrews Air Force Base, where the aircraft would almost certainly be landing.
Cole checked his suroundings again. He recognized the interior of the metal container now as that of a C-130 Hercules military transport plane, a four-prop beast used by almost every nation in the world. He had parachuted out of the back of such planes more times than he could count, and the internal architecture was more than familiar to him.
He knew that Germany was one of the only countries in the world that
didn’t
make use of the Hercules, but the aeroplane’s internal layout told him it was the C-130K, as used by the British RAF. It figured; the Brits still had plenty of military forces in Germany, and Hansard would undoubtedly have been able to pull some strings in order to get him in transportation as soon as possible.
Next, he re-checked how exactly he was being secured. It seemed that the large metal clasps around his wrists and ankles were electromagnets, and he knew there would be no possible way to break free of them.
But there was also no possible way he could let this plane land at Andrews. He would surely be killed within an hour of landing, and Cole could just not allow that to happen.
The information he had discovered was too important to be lost.
Hansard’s plan, Cole had discovered, operated on many levels and had been many years in the making. Essentially though, it amounted to profiteering on an unprecedented scale, at the risk of the world descending into nuclear chaos.
It seemed that Hansard, from his position as Head of the DIA’s Department X, had spent time recruiting young up-and-coming politicians, military officers, intelligence agents and businesspeople. He had spent time researching their backgrounds, understanding their motivations, helping their early careers.
Eventually, when he had been given the Mentor role at the JMIC, he had used his contacts to make sure that they had all been seconded to the school at the same time, in the same class.
Here, Hansard spent the next twelve months moulding the men and women under his care, subtly influencing their perceptions and attitudes to the world. It didn’t take much on Hansard’s part – they were almost on his wavelength right from the start, which was why he had selected them in the first place.
By their graduation, the group was a close-knit family unit, with Hansard as their father figure. Since then they had mutually assisted each other up through the levels of Washington power politics, until now each and every one of them occupied important positions within the American political, financial and military infrastructure.
It seemed they were all still loyal to Hansard, willing to follow and support his audacious plan.
The plan itself was already well on its way. Crozier’s attack had already created a situation which had pushed Russia and China together, with America shunned. Hansard and his group hoped such events would create two opposing power blocs, with Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States on the other. The group would now work to exacerbate the situation, encouraging a formal alliance between Russia and China whilst increasing tensions between them and the US.
This new Cold War would lead to massive new defence contracts as conventional military arms would again make a comeback – aircraft carriers, fighter jets, bombers, tanks, artillery. The group knew that these big-ticket items were where the money was made, and the owners of the four big private military contractor companies on the list were standing by with contracts ready to be signed.
From what Cole could make out, the figures were projected at near to two trillion dollars, and each member of Hansard’s group stood to make billions from the deals.
But this wasn’t the most frightening thing about the plan. The elite little club needed those contracts signing, and there was no way to guarantee – no matter how dangerous this new ‘Cold War’ situation looked – that President Abrams would sign them.
Steve Mancini was not part of the core group, but was one of the hundreds of staff who worked loyally for the members. Mancini was Ellen Abrams’ personal Secret Service bodyguard, and Charles Hansard had recruited him to the mission before the agent had even joined the Service.
And tomorrow morning, at 0900 Eastern Standard Time, Steve Mancini would accompany his protectee to the White House Press Briefing Room, ensure she got to the podium in safety, then draw back behind her to keep watch.
And then, when all the cameras were on her, along with the eyes of the entire world, Mancini would pull out his 10mm Sig Sauer pistol and blow Ellen Abrams’ brains out, live on television.
Mancini would almost certainly be killed by the other Secret Service agents – there was nothing in anything that Cole read to indicate that Mancini was expected to survive, at any rate, and Cole wondered for a moment what motivated the man.
Why was he willing to sacrifice himself?
Maybe it was the thirty million dollars that had been promised to his children.
Planted evidence would later suggest that Mancini had been working for the Russians, and it would then be suggested that the whole thing was a revenge attack for the assassination attempt on Danko, and the whole of the United States would be in uproar. There would be no conclusive evidence – there couldn’t be, otherwise the US would have to declare war on Russia – but everyone would believe that this was the case.
It would further push Russia and China together, and would ingrain a hatred of the two countries in the minds of the American people.
It would also push Richard Jensen into the Presidency, where he would declare a formal start to the new Cold War, with a commensurate build-up of the United States conventional military machine.
And with Richard Jensen, the new President of the United States, being manipulated from behind the scenes, Cole knew with chilling certainty that this would put Vice Admiral Charles Hansard in indirect control of the entire country.
Hansard relaxed in his leather armchair, allowing himself just the slightest of hope that his plans might soon come to fruition.
He was a rich man anyway, but the arms deals that would be made over the coming weeks and months would bring him untold billions more. He didn’t need the money of course, but the truth was that money bought power, and that was what he truly craved.
And yet he had no desire to be a famous politician. He had decided early on in his career that he was much happier directing things from behind the scenes, much like a puppet master would have done in the shows he used to watch as a young boy.
From a purely practical point of view, the plan also made sense for the country’s security. The trouble as Hansard saw it – along with all the rest of the Alumni – was that America had no consistency in its present enemy.
Since 9/11, the United States had concentrated almost all of her military and intelligence resources on the War on Terror. Terrorism, however, was not an easy enemy to fight against. Its sheer unpredictability meant that victory was never likely. Terrorists dressed like civilians, lived with civilians, hid behind civilians.
America would never be able to win against such an enemy without creating such massive civilian collateral damage that it would virtually guarantee another generation of anti-American jihadists, thereby ensuring that America would not win at all, but merely prolong the conflict further.
The War on Terror was simply a no-win situation. The oil contracts had already been signed, and with the United States’ Middle Eastern oil routes guaranteed already there was simply no reason to continue with it.
Hansard had been pleased, in fact, when US forces had finally been withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. They were low-level conflicts, with a large emphasis on special forces, reconnaissance and foot soldiers – all of which made for bad publicity when such men and women were killed on the front lines, but none of which generated the sort of revenues that were possible from a conventional conflict.
Or even – as Hansard strongly believed – the
threat
of conventional conflict.
Back in the days of the Cold War, the huge military machine that had been built up under Reagan was immense – though hardly ever used. Thus aircraft carriers, logistics craft, submarines, fighter planes, bombers, reconnaissance vehicles, artillery pieces, battle tanks, and all the associated weaponry to go with them, were financed, researched, developed, purchased, tested, exercised, repaired and finally replaced, all without being used in anger, generating massive incomes for the contractors and their political allies whilst not exposing the American people or their military to much in the way of direct danger.
It was a truism during the Cold War that stretched from the late 1940s all the way into the early 1990s that many ‘hot war’ incidents were avoided due to the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction – both the US and the USSR had massive nuclear stockpiles, and both were aware of the ramifications of their use. Thus, nothing happened except for small local conflicts fought by proxy, with the exceptions of the Korean and Vietnam wars of course.
It was Hansard’s dream to see this same sort of perverse stability recreated in the present day. He wanted the US to abandon its war on terror and get back to conventional warfare – it was safer, infinitely more predictable and, as a result, infinitely more profitable.
Diana Westlake of Westlake Inc. would be one of the major new contractors on President Jensen’s new program of nuclear rearmament. It was part of the Alumni’s plan to have America’s nuclear arsenal increase by a factor of ten over the next five years. Not only would it create an income for companies owned by the Alumni of close to a trillion dollars – in addition to the trillion or so dollars from other conventional weapons systems whose contracts were already in place – it would guarantee a similar build-up on the other side of the world by China and Russia.
Such build-ups would once again mean that any future conflict might result in MAD – and as such would surely be avoided at all costs, thus ensuring long-term American security.
It seemed a perverse way of looking at the world, but Hansard and his cabal truly believed that it would be better for the country this way. The threat of nuclear war on the global scale would so far overshadow the threat of a terrorist attack that terrorism would simply be ignored, and would thus no longer be effective – and would thus cease to exist.
So not only would the plans of the group make them billionaires many times over, it would also make the entire country a safer place. The Alumni
were
patriots, after all.
And the fact that Vice Admiral Charles Hansard, wealthy scion of a famous American family, would finally have control of the country through his manipulations of the new President, his cabinet and the entire US legislature, would just be the icing on the cake.
Reclining in his chair, Hansard puffed on his pipe, sipped from his glass of brandy, and smiled.