PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (14 page)

And then he put the phone back to his ear. ‘I’ll have to go,’ he whispered to Vinson. ‘The British agent I told you about, Elizabeth Morgan, the one that shot Khan? She’s right outside my door.’

19

‘Mark,’ Morgan said simply as he opened the door to her, and Cole’s mind worked furiously as he tried to figure out why she was there, what sort of a state she was in.

Had she been back to work since the incident? If not, why had she come here instead? And if she
had
been in to Thames House, had she been sent to see him by Bryce Kelly?

‘Can I come in?’ she asked next, and Cole realized that several seconds must have passed, and he was still blocking the doorway, trying to figure her out.

He shook his head, wondered for a moment if it hadn’t actually been because he’d been mesmerized by her bizarre, almost supernatural beauty, and finally regained his composure.

‘Sorry Liz, of course you can, come in, please.’

He moved out of the way, allowing Morgan to pass into the room, trying to assess her mood as he entered. The shock had obviously passed, but was she still upset?

Cole hated himself for it, but his survival instinct made him also consider the fact that she was a threat. Even though it was her weapon that had been used, did she blame Cole for Cranshaw’s death? If so, might she have come looking for vengeance?

As she glided into the hotel room, he checked out the lines of her lithe body, searching for a hidden weapon. He’d observed the way she’d concealed the Sig after drawing it out of the MI5 armory, and knew she was no expert at the art. By the time she’d reached the writing desk on the far side of the bed, Cole was fairly satisfied that she was unarmed.

She pulled out the little wooden chair as Cole closed the door. ‘Can I sit down?’ she asked. ‘It’s been a hell of a day.’

Cole nodded. ‘It has,’ he agreed. ‘Of course you can. Do you want a drink?’

She sighed, her body sagging, and Cole realized she was still emotionally very drained by what had happened.

‘I wouldn’t mind a beer, if you’ve got one,’ she said.

Cole walked over to the minibar and opened it up, checking the contents. ‘Heineken okay?’ he asked, pulling out a can.

‘As long as it’s got alcohol in it, I’m happy,’ she said, and Cole poured it out for her into a glass before getting one of his own and going to sit at the foot of his bed, just opposite her.

‘I’m sorry about what happened today,’ Morgan said, before Cole had the chance to offer sympathies of his own. ‘The entire thing was my fault. I fucked up, and Tom died because of it.’ She took a large swallow from the glass, tears starting to well at her eyes.

‘I’m sorry too,’ Cole said. ‘But I don’t think you can blame yourself, there were a lot of things that contributed to what happened. No offence, but you and Tom should never have been given weapons in the first place. You can’t blame yourself for that.’

‘But I can,’ she said. ‘I could have practiced more, the training’s been there over the years if we’d wanted it.’ Cole started to protest, but she held up a hand. ‘And it was my own stupid fault for blurting out his name like that in the first place, like it was my first day on the job. You must have thought I was a bloody lunatic.’

‘I was surprised,’ Cole said diplomatically. ‘But we all make mistakes.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘I made too many. First the lunatic shouting, then we misjudged the situation at the mall, Tom and I shouldn’t have gone in first, we should have backed off and left it for the SO19 boys. But,’ she continued, taking another large gulp of the Heineken, ‘I felt so shit, having made that first mistake, I wanted to make amends for it.’ The tears started to fall again. ‘You have no idea what I’ve had to put up with, being an agent at Five; all of the men want to fuck me, none of them think I can do the job, and all of the other women hate me.’

Cole nodded in understanding. He did know how it could be, how women in certain positions had to do their jobs twice as well as the men to even be taken half-seriously. And a woman who looked as good as Morgan would get her fair share of lewd comments, as well as the hatred and jealousy of women who simply didn’t look as good.

He knew, also, how she would have felt when Khan had started running – like all the hard work she’d put in over the years would have been for nothing if he got away. She’d have been the laughing stock of Thames House before the day was out.

‘So you had to be the one to catch him,’ Cole finished for her, to show that he
did
understand. ‘To take away attention from alerting him, you knew that the only way would be if you didn’t let him get away.’

Morgan wiped the tears away, looked at Cole. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’

She finished her beer, and Cole threw her another. She snapped open the tab and started drinking from the can, ignoring the glass now.

‘But we let him get too close, he surprised us – surprised
me
– with his speed, he suckered me in and took the gun before I could react.’

‘But then you did react, did the only thing you could and tried to get the weapon back.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘and killed my partner by doing it, shot him straight through the heart, the . . .’

And that was it, the dam broke and all the tears came flooding out, her body wracked with convulsions as she sobbed uncontrollably.

Cole paused, unsure of what exactly he should do. The funny thing was that – if the girl had been a mark, a target, and he’d been on a mission that revolved around gaining her confidence – he would have had no problem in embracing her, giving her a shoulder to cry on. He would have said the right things, made the right moves.

But with a colleague of sorts – if not exactly a friend – he found himself unable to console her, unable to provide the warmth of human comfort. He wondered if it was even in him to give in this way, save for the image of it he kept for when it was an operational necessity.

He wondered – not for the first time – just what sort of person he was. Was he like the empty shell of the actor who lived only for the next part, so that he could live vicariously through the characters he temporarily inhabited? After so many years of covert missions, inhabiting the lives of others, suppressing his own emotions and feelings, was there anything left inside of him?

Even the name Mark Cole, the one name among the many that he used that he could actually identify with, wasn’t really his own. He had been born Mark Kowalski, and the name Cole had only been taken when he’d been declared Killed In Action and had started to work for Hansard as an off-the-books assassin and saboteur.

But he had no answers; and so in the end, he just sipped his beer and waited for her to finish.

Eventually she
did
finish, having cried herself out; so much so that she seemed physically exhausted. She put the can of beer down on the writing table and wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, ‘I’m really sorry. You must really think I’m some sort of crazy person.’ She shook her head, staring down at the carpet. ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

‘You’re not crazy,’ Cole said, knowing something about this subject at least. ‘You’ve just been involved in an incident which has left you shaken, and pretty understandably. There’re no rules about how you should react to something like this.’

He paused, looked at her, waited for her to raise her eyes to his. Eventually she did and – holding her gaze – he continued.

‘But you
did
come and see me, and I think you
do
know why.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I don’t. I really don’t.’

‘It’s because I was there. You’ve probably been talking to people – professional people –all afternoon about this. But they weren’t
there
, how could they know what it was like?’ He shook his head with conviction. ‘They couldn’t, not really, not like you and me know.’

Morgan, he could see, was listening to him closely now. And why not? He’d been through the same thing himself many times over the years.

‘Something bad happens, something traumatic, and they get everyone talking to you – doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, you name it. Right? They talk to you, but they rarely help. Well, maybe that’s not fair; some people they
do
help. But we all handle things in different ways, and they never helped me once. Their hearts are in the right place, but what do they know? Have they ever been in a life or death struggle? Have they been seriously injured by a knife, by a gun? Have they killed anyone, or seen someone they loved killed right in front of them?’ He shook his head, again with conviction. ‘Of course they haven’t. They never will. They sit in their ivory towers with their books and computers, they carry out their research and pass their tests, and go out into the real world to try and counsel people like us. But they can’t, because they’ll never truly understand us, no matter what degree or doctorate they’ve got hanging up on their office wall back home. The last time they’ll have seen any action is a fight in the sand lot when they were kids.’

He finished his beer and grabbed another, threw Morgan a new one too without her asking.

‘You want to know why you came to see me?’ he asked. ‘It’s because I
know.
And maybe, you figure if I say it’s alright, then it’s alright.’

Morgan looked at Cole with her clear, bright blue eyes, and slowly nodded her head. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. You
were
there. You saw it, you know what happened. I can’t stand the others judging me, I can’t even stand them
helping
me. But you . . . you were there, and I don’t mean just today. I mean, that look in your eyes, you look like you’ve really been there before. You look like you know what you’re talking about.’

Cole paused, momentarily taken aback. How had she seen it in his eyes? One of the things he prided himself on was keeping that side of himself in check; many had been the time that people had given themselves away to Cole by their eyes. The soul of a professional killer was hard to disguise, and yet Cole himself had managed to do so successfully for years.

But Morgan could see past the façade he presented, and the thought scared him.

In the end, he decided to roll with it – America was a much more violent country, and his position in the FBI could have necessitated him being involved in more than one gun battle.

‘I do know what I’m talking about,’ Cole admitted. ‘Three firefights as an agent, none of them pretty. I’ve lost friends, and I’ve also . . . yes, I’ve also killed people. The doctors, they try to help, but, well . . .’ – he held up the can of Heineken, raising it in toast to Morgan – ‘. . . sometimes all you need is a friend and a few beers.’

Morgan smiled back at him, and the effect was dazzling. She reached forward and tapped his can with hers.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said, the tears finally gone. ‘I’ll damn well drink to that.’

20

Michiko watched as her colleagues left for the day, eating noodles from a plastic tray at her desk.

Karl Tracy, although eager to start the day, had been one of the first to leave. That was one worry out of the way; she hadn’t wanted her boss to see that she was burning the candle at both ends. But she also didn’t want anyone else in her department listening in to her phone call. Although her father hadn’t mentioned it explicitly, it was clear that he was worried about leaks in the organization, that he believed that it was under some sort of observation.

But eventually, after she’d finished her reheated dinner and her eighth coffee of the day, she found herself alone in the IT center once again.

Immediately, she picked up her phone and dialed a number from memory.

The line rang several times, and she was starting to think it would never be answered, when she heard the familiar voice come through.

‘Yes?’

‘Mark,’ she said quickly – still not quite being able to call him Dad, ‘it’s me. Michiko.’ She could hear noise over the line, people shouting, music blaring. ‘Where are you? Can you talk?’

‘Give me a minute,’ her father said, and for a moment all she could hear was the muffled sounds of crowds and music. But soon it filtered out, and Cole came back on the line. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘what’s up? You okay?’

‘Yeah Mark, I’m okay.’ Damn, why did he have to be so protective? Although sometimes, she had to admit, she was happy that there was finally someone who wanted to look out for her. ‘Anyway, so you’re in London, right?’

She hadn’t been told exactly where he was, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. But there was a silence on the other end of the line, and she knew he would be reluctant to tell her anything at all, even to confirm the obvious.

She took a deep breath, summoning up the courage to continue. He was seriously into this secrecy shit, she could see that; what would he say about what she’d been up to? Would the ends justify the means?

Well, she decided, there was only one way to find out.

‘Okay, I know you’re in London, Mark. I’ve accessed the data, I know your cover, and I know what happened today.’ Aware that Cole would be wanting to immediately challenge her on this, she carried straight on without a pause. ‘The investigation isn’t going anywhere. Khan’s a lead, but your probably not going to be able to pursue it through the Security Service – latest internal emails between the DG and Bryce Kelly is that you won’t be working on it, despite what – and I’m quoting here – ‘the fucking Yanks’ want.’

‘Michiko,’ Cole started, ‘what the hell have you been – ’

‘Mark,’ Michiko interrupted, ‘you can chew me out later if you still want to, but listen to me, please. I’m betting you want to crack this thing more than you want to have a go at me for breaking some rules, right? And I can help you. Trust me, I can help you.’

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, and Michiko knew that her father was trying to make a decision. ‘Okay, he said finally, ‘what do you have for me?’

Michiko smiled, and looked up at the information on her computer screen. ‘I uploaded images from MI5’s JTAC,’ she said with no small hint of pride, ‘pictures of some of the evidence, originally from the Met Police but later transferred to the Security Service. I pulled them when the images were being electronically transferred. I’ve got details of the weapons used – makes, models, some serial numbers. Obviously Balkan sourced. But how did they get to the three killers in London?’

‘Go on,’ Cole urged.

‘Well, I was following the bank accounts of the dead terrorists,’ Michiko continued, ‘but I was getting a blank. No funds in or out, not to speak of, anyway. I tried tracing the weapons but – even with the serial numbers – I was coming up against a brick wall. But then you found Javid Khan and – although I know Five are investigating him – it looks like I’m faster. He’s got his accounts squirreled away very securely, hard to find, even harder to access.’

‘But you’ve done it?’

‘Yes,’ Michiko said. ‘From the weapons list, I found out what sort of value a cache like that normally sells for on the black market, researched the usual routes of such materiel into the UK, then looked for payments from Khan’s accounts.

‘It’s been a pain the ass, but eventually I found a succession of payments from different accounts connected to Khan – for about the amounts normally required for an order like this – into accounts controlled by Cristofanu Ortoli.’

‘And who’s he?’

‘He’s a fixer for the Corsican mafia, operating out of Marseilles. The group is heavily into drug smuggling and gun running, and they deal with a lot of surplus weapons from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.’

‘You have details for this man?’

‘Everything – email, cell, home address, you name it.’

‘Anything else you can tell me?’

‘I’m following up other financials, to see if Ortoli got funding from elsewhere, see if it makes any other connections back to Khan. If there are, it might indicate who Khan was working with. And in the same way, I’m trying to track Khan’s own accounts in more detail, see where his own money came from. The trouble is, a lot of terrorist money is transferred in person nowadays, cash or valuables; they’re wary about our surveillance techniques now, and with good reason. But they still deal in the normal way with outside agents such as Ortoli, which is how I found that link so fast. But I’ll keep on with the other stuff, I might still be able to find something that’s going to help.’

‘Okay,’ Cole said, and Michiko knew his mind would be working at lightning speed as he processed the information he’d just heard, deciding on the best courses of action to pursue. ‘First of all,
thank you
. It was brave of you to look into this, then to contact me. You know what’s important, and that’s national security; sometimes the rules have to be bent. And so that’s what we’ll keep on doing. You’re a smart woman, I’m sure you know that I’m not one hundred percent happy with everything over there in Forest Hills. So we’ll keep your involvement under the radar, for now at least. You’ll be my inside agent, my secret weapon. Think you can handle it?’

Michiko laughed. ‘I’ve handled it all my life,’ she said. And it was true, too.

She was relieved – delighted, actually – that her father hadn’t bawled her out, had instead seen her interference as patriotic, had even
thanked
her. But at the end of the day, she wanted something more concrete than mere appreciation.

‘I’m happy to keep looking into things, and I’ll inform you the minute I find out anything new, including inside gossip from your friends at MI5. But,’ she added, ‘when you get back, I want to be made official. Force One – I want in.’

Michiko was faced with another pause on the end of the line. Had she gone too far? Had she pushed her luck?

The answer came soon enough.

‘You got it,’ Cole answered. ‘If you help find out who was behind this thing, you’re in.’

After saying their farewells, and with promises from his daughter to send him all the information she had on Ortoli and the Corsican mob, Cole replaced the secure cell phone in his pocket and turned back from the chilly night to the brightly lit interior of the busy bar in which he and Morgan had continued to drink once the hotel room’s minibar had run dry.

There had been closer drinking holes, but they had both wanted to avoid Westminster, populated as it was by off-duty intelligence and law enforcement officers having after-work drinks. Cole wasn’t really supposed to leave the hotel until his fate was decided, and he didn’t fancy running into Bryce Kelly or any of his cronies.

But he had wanted to keep Morgan company, knowing that sometimes the best way of dealing with tragic incidents was to have drinks with friends; and in the seeming absence of any other friends in the woman’s life, Cole figured that he was all she had.

The bar they’d found in the busy tourist hub of Leicester Square wasn’t half bad, either; it had a good list of beers, and had a table from which Cole could easily watch all the entrances and exits.

Despite himself, and his avowed rule of never becoming involved with a colleague, he had found himself starting to like Morgan more and more as the evening wore on. It wasn’t just her beauty either; she was bright, ambitious, and – when she’d relaxed – had been pretty damn funny too.

But the presence of physical attraction had been undeniable, and Cole had been forced to try and recollect when he’d last been with someone. It had been well over a year, he’d realized in the end, one of a series of meaningless dalliances he’d involved himself in during his self-imposed exile in Thailand. And since then – nothing.

Before the call from Michiko, he had been seriously entertaining the thought of continuing the night with Morgan at a more intimate level, but now those thoughts were gone entirely, and he was ashamed for ever having them. He was on a mission, after all and – while there might have been a roadblock or two in his way – he had no right to be thinking of anything else except how to successfully complete that mission.

But now he was back on track, and with a real lead, too. Cristofanu Ortoli, fixer for the Corsican mob in Marseilles.

It was something he had, and the Brits didn’t. Should he share what he knew? Ordinarily he might have done, but the reaction of Kelly to what had happened today made him instinctively not trust the man, or his organization. He didn’t want the lead squandered.

‘What was that about?’ Morgan asked as he returned to the table, eyebrow raised.

Should he tell her? After all, he also didn’t want to cut the Brits out entirely; with the scene of the crime based in England, he might well need their cooperation in the future.

‘Something about the case?’ she asked, and Cole was once again taken aback. Had she read that on his face too? It was entirely unnerving, as if the woman had direct access into his mind.

In the end, he shrugged. ‘It’s a lead,’ he said, still unsure of exactly what to do.

Morgan sat forward in her chair, eager anticipation on her face. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Share.’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ Cole said. ‘Unconfirmed.’

‘Bounce it off me, then. Come on, what do you have to lose?’

Again, Cole thought long and hard. What he had to lose was Morgan reporting the lead back to her superiors at Five, and the internal bureaucracy losing it entirely.  But then again, Morgan was intelligent, and highly motivated; she was also on a temporary suspension, and therefore not under any direct obligation to her employer.

Cole breathed out, long and hard, before taking a gulp of beer and looking back up at the British agent.

‘Some colleagues of mine,’ he began, ‘have tracked the source of the weapons – the group that shipped them into the UK, anyway.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Corsican mafia operating out of Marseille.’

‘How were they tracked?’

‘Financials from Khan’s accounts.’

‘Do you have further details?’

‘A name. Telephone numbers. An address.’

‘A name and address?’ Morgan said, eyes wide. ‘Then what are we waiting for?’

‘We?’ Cole asked with a raised eyebrow of his own.

‘Yes,’ Morgan said, “we’. We’re both persona non grata round here, wouldn’t you say? We’ve both got things to prove, we’re both desperate to get to the bottom of this thing. I’m no action hero, but I’m one hell of an investigator, trust me. We can work together, can’t we?’

Cole saw the needy look in her eye, and understood how much it meant to her. He knew why, too – it would be a way to make amends for what she had done, both professionally – in terms of getting her job back – and personally, in terms of an opportunity to reinstall the confidence that would have been so badly dented by that morning’s tragedy.

Cole didn’t know if it was the alcohol talking, the attraction he undeniably felt for Morgan, or if he was actually making the decision because it was the best professional choice; but in the end, he leveled his gaze with hers and nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you’re in. We’ll leave for Marseille in the morning.’