STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (24 page)

60

Cole parked up the stolen Audi in a multi-storey lot in the centre of Stuttgart. He had crossed the border into Germany at Strasbourg earlier that day, having stolen the big estate car from Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, the night before.

His escape from Paris had been easier than he had feared, aided as he was by the darkness of the night and the depth of the snow, which meant searching for him had been extremely taxing for the limited resources available. Hansard probably had nobody else in the city, and the French emergency services were already overstretched with road traffic accidents all over Paris and its outlying areas.

He had gone far enough in the same car though, he had decided, and did not want to tempt fate by driving for too long in the same vehicle.

The radio had been on all the way, but the local news around Paris had yet to pick up on the story of his escape and chase through the city. As he was reaching for the ignition key though, his hand stopped dead.

It was the news headline that caught him, a second or two late as he translated it from German into English in his head.
America Said To Have Been Behind Attack on the Russian President
. He sat back in his seat to listen, eyes wide.

‘The People’s Republic of China has been completely exonerated of any involvement in the recent attack on the Swedish parliament house,’ the reporter began. ‘Instead, it seems that the attack was launched by the United States of America. Reports have come in that it was a CIA paramilitary operation, designed to lay the blame on China’s doorstep. Whether or not this was an officially authorized operation is now the subject of much debate within the international community. Ellen Abrams, the President of the United States, recently issued this statement:

‘My fellow Americans,’ Cole heard her begin in her faint Southern drawl, ‘I come before you today with some sad news. It has come to my attention that there may have been American citizens involved in the recent tragedy in Stockholm.

‘Details are sketchy at the present time, but it appears that the operation may have been carried out with the help or prior knowledge of an unknown number of our own people. Because information at this time is necessarily very limited, I would at least like to take this opportunity to spell out the position of the United States government.

‘I hereby state categorically that, despite the involvement of US citizens, the mission was not sanctioned by myself or the US government. Indeed, I promise that we had no prior knowledge that such an attack would be carried out, or was even being planned.

‘I would like answers as much as the next person, and offer all the assistance I can to our allies across the Atlantic. I am all too aware of the recent escalation of events between Russia and China and wish for us to avoid such a confrontation ourselves. On behalf of the American people, I therefore offer my apologies for the apparent involvement of our citizens in the affair.

‘I am sure we will manage to salvage relationships, and I promise to do everything within my power to help.

‘Thank you for your time, and rest assured we will keep you posted on our progress. God bless you all.’

As the reporter took over once more, Cole finally switched off the ignition and exited the car. He needed to learn more, but couldn’t do it sitting in a stolen car in the middle of a busy parking lot.

Cole didn’t think that President Abrams herself would have been involved. He knew her to a certain extent, having served as part of her protective detail back when she was a Senator on her way up, and he was in DEVGRU. She had been visiting Iraq on a fact-finding mission for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as she was regarded as a high-level target, she had been assigned a four-man contingent from SEAL Team Six for her time in-country.

It was a good job too, as there
had
been an attempt – albeit amateurish – on her life, with a two-man attack on her armoured 4 × 4 on the last day of her visit. The two other SEALs in the back-up car didn’t even have time to react before Cole’s partner had braked, put the car into reverse and pulled a J-turn on the dusty road, whilst Cole leant out of the window and put two bullets in each man’s head.

The Senator had been frightened but impressed, putting Cole and his partner forward for the Bronze Star. She had even spoken at his funeral years later, just before she was starting to get touted as a possible future presidential nominee. Cole had never known whether the speech she gave had been genuine, or just calculated to look good for the troops.

The time he had spent with her in Iraq had given Cole a good impression of her however, and so in spite of his cynicism, he liked to think she was genuine. She had been extremely incisive and intelligent, Cole remembered, never asking the usual inane questions asked by most politicians. She seemed to have a better handle on the situation there than most, and was a definite realist. He had even started to like her, as behind the ruthless efficiency there was the genuine warmth of a true human being. He had been glad when she had been picked as nominee for her party, and been even happier when she had won. He knew what a battle it had been for her to be taken seriously, as sexism was still rife throughout not only the government, but the country as a whole. The fact that her victory had been a landslide indicated that she was indeed a very special woman.

Cole therefore thought that what President Abrams had said in her statement was probably true, although he was realistic enough to know that it could also be total bullshit. At the very least though, elements of the US government had helped orchestrate the attack – Abrams had
admitted
that much – and such paramilitary operations were the sole preserve of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, headed until very recently by William Crozier, the very same man that Hansard had ordered Cole to assassinate.

Finding onward transportation was going to have to wait until he found out just what the hell was going on.

61

Within the hour, Cole was sitting in front of a computer monitor, a strong black coffee steaming in a mug beside him.

He had not gone straight to one of the upmarket cyber cafes that were prevalent in the modern, glass and steel city centre – they were too easy to monitor. Instead, he had asked around before finally being directed to an establishment based in what looked liked somebody’s living room, secreted away down a narrow back alley. It was set up like any other internet café, just a little more utilitarian – work benches and trestle tables for the equipment, coffee coming in thick-handled mugs from the kitchen.

The client base was also decidedly different from that of more conventional establishments. Instead of smart, suited executive-types, the customers here were from the underground German cyber-Goth counter-culture, all leather, tattoos and body piercings. Such an environment meant that security here was good, though. Not foolproof, of course, but good enough for a public access venue. The people who came here wished to live ‘off the grid’, without their actions being monitored too closely by the security services.

The technology was state of the art, and the data security was first-class. Cole knew that the NSA would still be able to access any of it, of course, but they would have to be looking in the first place. All in all though, it was as good a place as Cole could hope to find in such a short space of time.

Ironically, it was the NSA that had trained him to do what he was now doing – hacking into the CIA’s own internal database. The National Security Agency was the foremost electronic communications intelligence organization on the planet, and was where Hansard had sent Cole when he had first joined the Systems Research Group.

Because agents of the SRG had to plan their own missions with minimal official help, it was important that every man and woman was capable of accessing information from a wide range of sources. The NSA had therefore taught Cole everything there was to know about systems security, including how to keep his own communications secure, as well as how to penetrate the security of others.

He had used this training many times over the intervening years, and could be considered to be something of an expert in the field. By piggybacking remotely onto the massive computing power of his home system back in the Caymans, breaking past the firewalls protecting the CIA’s mainframe was still complicated, but accomplished within just twenty minutes of firing up the computer.

The trouble now was the sheer mass of data available to him. He instigated a simple search program and inserted it into the CIA files, and within seconds the search returned items of definite interest.

First of all there was the information that was publicly available, and Cole immediately started downloading it to a pen drive that he had bought from a store on his way to the café.

He then found the classified documents he knew would hold the real information he needed, which mainly seemed to be reports sent between James Dorrell, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Harry Trencher, the head of the CIA’s internal affairs department. It seemed that Dorrell had authorized an investigation into the attack the day after it had happened; it had obviously taken the news media several days to catch up.

From the classified files, it seemed that several months ago a man called Paul Richmond, a newbie at the Special Projects section of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, had been seconded directly to William Crozier.

Crozier had selected Richmond for a special assignment, choosing him due his fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin. He was sent around the country, liasing with immigration officials and interviewing illegal immigrants that were being held in detention. He had been told to specifically seek out men of Chinese origin, preferably with some prior military training, and test them for physical, mental and psychological aptitudes. He was then to choose the thirty most promising candidates, men who would be willing to perform a ‘service’ for the government, in exchange for citizenship of the United States.

Crozier had told Richmond to offer US citizenship not only to the chosen men themselves, but also to their families. Once the team had been assembled, Richmond was then to round the group up, sort out the relevant release paperwork with the authorities, and then book them into the Palace Hotel in Boston.

That was where Richmond’s responsibility ended; he ensconced the thirty men in the hotel, registering them as a trade delegation from South Korea, and then left, to return to his regular duties at headquarters. He reported directly to Crozier; even David Ellison, his official team leader, had not been allowed to debrief him.

The CIA investigation at this point indicated that the men had been shipped to a civilian facility known as Delta Training, which was apparently often used for mission-specific training for deniable ‘black’ CIA operations. Crozier apparently knew the owner of this facility personally, both men having served in the 82
^nd
Airborne. Crozier had often sent people there for training it seemed, and the owner assumed it was for another CIA-approved mission.

The operation, it appeared, had been planned and executed by Crozier alone at every step of the way, and this was certainly what the ‘official’ CIA investigation was going to show. It declared him to be perhaps delusional, certainly mentally ill. But also highly intelligent, able to evade pick-up on routine psychological evaluations. After the death of his wife, he had dived headfirst into his work, became obsessed, paranoid by perceived threats which weren’t really there. He had apparently seen Russia and China as a major threat to the US, but his fears were ignored time and time again, until eventually he decided to go it alone and solve the problem by himself, without waiting for official authorization, which he had come to believe he would never get.

Interesting
, thought Cole. But not as interesting as the fact that there were two CIA investigations into the US involvement in the attacks occurring simultaneously. The first was to make Crozier the scapegoat for the whole affair, in order to tie things up with as little fuss and with as little diplomatic damage as possible.

The second was to find out what
really
happened, and although this particular investigation was still ongoing, it gave Cole all the evidence he needed.

It seemed that before the attack in Sweden, Crozier had been having a number of secretive, covert meetings with an unknown group. Nothing particularly unusual in that for a man in Crozier’s position, but it was now CIA policy that a record should be made of all such meetings – even Crozier would have to alert the Director at least. But no such record was kept, and Crozier’s bodyguard Sam Hitchens remembered that his boss was always very upset by the meetings, drinking more than normal both before and after.

Hitchens had also been instructed to erase the journey to and from these particular meetings from the car’s black box recorder. He had not been allowed to be present at such meetings, but at one stage had caught a glimpse of two other people, and had worked with the CIA’s team of identification experts to come up with artist’s impressions, which they were now running through their computers for a match.

So although the official line was that William Crozier was acting alone out of some paranoid need to protect American interests, there were fears that Crozier was actually being controlled – perhaps blackmailed – into running the operation by an outside source. The investigative team had no idea who it might be – elements within the government, the military, big business, even a foreign power, they just didn’t know.

But Cole had recognized the artist’s impressions instantly. To a certain extent, the two men were nobodies – just executive protectors like Hitchens himself. James Garrett and Glen Doring were bodyguards trained by the Defence Intelligence Agency, Cole’s own home agency when he was with the SRG, which was why he recognized them.

What was more interesting was who they were protecting, and a quick search came back with two names that left Cole pausing at the computer screen in disbelief.

Garrett was the bodyguard of Clyde Rutherford, the Secretary for Defence, whilst Doring was the bodyguard of Tim Collins, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Cole looked up from the computer screen, blinking his eyes as he looked around the café. Finally his eyes caught the tattooed proprietor’s, and Cole held up his coffee mug with a questioning smile. The man nodded, and went to the kitchen.

Cole stretched his neck and shoulders, hearing the stiffness creaking out of his bones. His ribs still hurt like hell from his fall from the roof in London, and the car crash outside Paris seemed to have left him with a permanent headache. But at least he was still alive.

The owner of the café – six feet six inches of tattoo-covered muscle with hair halfway down his back and a trail of studs running up one side of his nose – brought Cole another mug of steaming hot, super-strength coffee.

Cole thanked the man in fluent German, took a sip of the hearty brew, and then turned back to his computer.

The meetings could of course have had an innocent explanation – it wasn’t unheard of for the Director of the NCS to meet with the SecDef and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – but why erase the car’s black box? The inference was that Crozier didn’t want the Director of Central Intelligence to know about the meetings. Why?

It also concerned Cole that Hitchens was sure there were many more people at the meeting; it was only that he had caught sight of two, and they had turned out to be only bodyguards. Cole wondered who else would have been at the meetings, and what their connection was.

To get some background, Cole did a brief search of his own home computer files and brought up a wealth of information on Rutherford and Collins. He traced their biographies and professional resumes, then re-read them. An interesting coincidence seemed to have cropped up that aroused Cole’s instincts immediately.

Joint Military Intelligence College
. Both men had attended the college from 1999 to 2000, taking their Masters in Science of Strategic Intelligence.

Working quickly, he called up the information on Crozier he had read before travelling to Washington to kill him.

There it was.
Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence, Joint Military Intelligence College, 2000
.

Shit
. Cole took a deep breath, a slug of the thick black coffee, and began to interrogate the files of the National Defence Intelligence College, the name the JMIC was now operating under.

Who else had graduated from the class that year?

Before long, Cole had the entire class list for the JMIC’s Masters programme for 1999 to 2000.

His breathing was shallow as he read from the computer screen in front of him.

JMIC MASTER OF SCIENCE OF STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE 2000 ALUMNI:

JERRY ADAMS

TIM COLLINS

WILLIAM CROZIER

ALBERT FRASIER

ELIZABETH HARDEN

RICHARD JENSEN

DONALD NORLAND

DENNIS PITTMAN

FRANKLIN RICHARDS

CLYDE RUTHERFORD

DIANA WESTLAKE

He knew many of the names, and Google searched the ones he didn’t. The repercussions hit him instantly. The list was like a who’s who of Washington power brokers.

Although back in 2000 they had yet to hit the heady heights they now enjoyed, they had all been vibrant, go-getting up-and-comers, and it seemed they must have been mutually supporting each other ever since.

Their current positions demonstrated their success, and Cole made a mental note of the details:

JERRY ADAMS – DIRECTOR OF THE DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

TIM COLLINS – CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

WILLIAM CROZIER – DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL CLANDESTINE SERVICE

ALBERT FRASIER – CHAIRMAN OF AMERICAN AEROSPACE INC

ELIZABETH HARDEN – SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

RICHARD JENSEN – VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

DONALD NORLAND – OWNER OF TRANSWORLD ARMAMENTS INC

DENNIS PITTMAN – CEO OF ALLLIED DEFENCE SYSTEMS INC

FRANKLIN RICHARD – NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

CLYDE RUTHERFORD – SECRETARY OF DEFENCE

DIANA WESTLAKE – PRESIDENT OF WESTLAKE INC

It was almost too much to take in. The JMIC alumni list for 2000 was incredible.
Richard Jensen, the Vice President of the United States of America himself was on the list!

But what did it all mean?

Cole interrogated the JMIC files again, looking for further information. When he found it, his stomach tightened reflexively.

MASTER OF SCIENCE OF STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE GROUP MENTOR 1999-2001 – REAR ADMIRAL CHARLES HANSARD USN

So that was it. They were all linked, all – controlled? – by Charles Hansard himself.

Some of the most powerful political, military, intelligence and business leaders in the United States, all unified under one man, a man who had recently ordered the death of one of their own number, William Crozier.

So why had Crozier’s death been ordered if he was one of the group? It seemed quite obvious now, Cole thought sadly.

The attack in Sweden had obviously been concocted by this group, and the work had been farmed out to Crozier, as Director of the NCS. He had obviously run the operation effectively, but had then perhaps expressed opinions on the outcome which were contrary to the group’s own opinion. The result? Crozier’s execution, followed by Cole’s own death in order to get rid of any links.

It all started to make some sort of sick sense, but there remained one burning question –

Why had an elite, secret Washington cabal ordered an attack on the Russian President and sought to blame China? And how was this industrial-military complex enshrined in Hansard’s private little club going to benefit?

Cole knew he would not have time to make his conclusions now though – the CIA would register the security breech before long, and he wanted to be long gone from the café by the time they picked it up. He therefore downloaded every available piece of information to his pen drive, before completely purging the computer he had been working on.