Seven Day Hero

by J. T. Brannan

  As some of the assistants gave chase whilst others tried to clear up the mess, and others just looked on in bemusement, not one of them noticed Cole leaving quite calmly through the front door, fully outfitted for the long winter hike ahead.

  31

  Samuel James Hitchens had not been at his home address. He was on leave after Crozier’s death, although his neighbours said that he hadn’t gone anywhere. One of them said that he went to the gym a lot, although they weren’t sure which one. A call to one of his colleagues at Langley’s Executive Protection department, however, and the location was soon confirmed – Harry’s Gym, an old spit and sawdust place just four blocks away.

  Moses and Arnold had read the man’s file, as well as transcripts from the initial interviews. Nothing had been mentioned about secret meetings with possible blackmailers, but then again, reasoned the agents, perhaps the right questions had not yet been asked.

  A flash of their badges at the dilapidated reception desk allowed them immediate access to the gym, and they spotted Hitchens straight away. His file had a picture, of course, but it wasn’t really necessary – Hitchens was the only person there. Moses knew that Delaney and Court’s - a jazzy, hi-tech electronic health club two blocks over - would be full at this time, and he felt a tinge of pity. He knew that more honest sweat would be shed here in an hour than in a week at DC’s.

  Hitchens was halfway through a set of basic squats, his back to the two men as they entered. Arnold went to approach him, but Moses put out a restraining hand; he knew from his football days how dangerous it could be to interrupt a man doing heavy squats. The situation would be delicate enough anyway, without putting the man into a bad mood from the start.

  And these squats were heavy, Moses could see. Seven plates either side of a standard Olympic bar. Moses knew that equalled 675 pounds without having to do the mental arithmetic – he’d once lifted the same himself. But what impressed Moses the most wasn’t the weight on the bar, it was the weight of the man beneath. Hitchens was well under six foot, and couldn’t have been more than a buck sixty-five. When Moses was playing football, he’d been well over a hundred pounds more.

  The two agents waited as Hitchens finished off his last rep, staggering forwards a step to replace the bar on the heavy iron rack, dipping his knees to set the bar back on the pins. Moses heard an audible sigh as the crushing weight came off his shoulders, and the man leaned over the bar, breathing deeply to recover. Hitchens turned as he heard the footsteps.

  ‘Mr Hitchens,’ Arnold said as they approached, monitoring the way the man’s eyes darted reflexively to his gym towel which lay on the bench nearby. ‘CIA Internal Affairs,’ he said by way of explanation, and he saw Hitchens relax at this, if only slightly.

  ‘I’ve already made my statements,’ Hitchens said. ‘I’m on leave.’

  It was clear that the man didn’t like Internal Affairs, but neither Moses nor Arnold were surprised by the frosty reception; they were seldom welcomed with open arms.

  ‘Sorry to bother you again, but this is a matter of some urgency,’ Arnold replied smoothly. ‘A matter of national security, in fact. We’re going to need you to answer a few questions.’

  ‘I told you already, I’m on leave.’ Hitchens’ attitude was edgy, and for good reason. His boss, a man he’d admired a good deal, even liked on occasion, had died; and there had been nothing but questions asked and statements made ever since. And now he’d finally been granted leave, and they were back with more of their damned questions; not even a day of peace! What else was there to know?, he wondered angrily, although at the back of his mind he thought he might have some idea of what it might be, and the realization made him even more defensive.

  ‘We appreciate that,’ Moses interjected calmly. ‘But these questions are important. They’re about Bill.’

  Hitchens scoffed. ‘No shit. What the Hell else they gonna be about?’

  ‘The questions are about Bill,’ Arnold continued coldly, tired of pussyfooting around, ‘and who was paying him off to work against the interests of the United States.’

  Arnold saw the look in the man’s eyes as they at first went dull, as the words started to register, and then vivid white as they widened in sudden rage. Hitchens’ strong, athletic body was in motion instants later, fists flying out towards Arnold.

  Moses had anticipated the attack, however, and drove into the bodyguard with a hard tackle, forcing Hitchens twenty feet across the matted gym floor and onto his back, knocking the air right out of him. He may have carried more muscle in his football days, but he still had a good seventy pounds on the smaller man. By the time they hit the floor, Arnold was over them, his Sig semi-auto trained on Hitchens’ forehead. Hitchens stopped struggling under Moses’ weight as he stared into the barrel of the gun.

  ‘We’re not fucking around here Sam,’ Arnold spat out. ‘We need information, and we need it now. And I will shoot you if you do not cooperate, do you understand me?’

  The angry glare remained in the man’s eyes for several seconds, before they closed in submission.

  Arnold backed over to the bench, removed the small revolver that was hidden underneath the gym towel, and then gestured towards the two men on the floor. ‘Okay Ted, bring him over.’

  ‘Shit,’ Hitchens said a little over ten minutes later. ‘Shit. I never put it together, but – shit, you might be right. It just seems so – I don’t know, weird, you know? Bill was always a stand-up guy, one of the good guys. This is too much. You sure about this?’ The question was hopeful, but the eyes were resigned to the answer already.

  Moses nodded. He and Arnold were sitting on a couple of collapsible easy chairs that they had requisitioned from the office, whilst Hitchens sat on the bench, towel draped over his shoulders for warmth. It wasn’t exactly an interview room, but they knew a public gym wouldn’t be bugged, and the receptionist had strict instructions not to let anyone else in until they’d finished.

  ‘We’re sure that the mission was CIA-linked, and that it was organized by Bill. It was not officially sanctioned, but Bill must have got the order from someone – and we need to know who.’

  ‘You think they were blackmailing him?’ Hitchens asked, clearly disgusted by the notion.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Arnold replied. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Hey, it’s tough, you know? Bill was the DDO, he didn’t really keep me in the loop. Need to know and all that. There were a lot of things about his work that I wasn’t allowed to know about. He was always meeting people.’

  ‘We can appreciate that,’ Moses said, ‘but you don’t get to your position in the EP department without being an expert in observation. So humour us. Did any of those meetings stand out in any way? Did he react differently before or after any of them?’

  Hitchens paused as he thought, although he already knew the answer. The thing was, was it really safe to tell these guys?

  Arnold seemed to read his mind. ‘Look, whatever happens now, Bill’s reputation is gone, you know that. The whole thing’s gonna get blamed on him, so the situation doesn’t spiral out of control. We don’t want to get into a real confrontation with ERA, after all. But if you’ve got anything, anything at all, on the people who made Bill do it, we’ll help get them, take them down.

  ‘Now that might, or might not, be made public – but we’ll do it. Believe me, we’ll do it’

  The look in Arnold’s eyes made Hitchens believe him. And the investigator was right anyway, wasn’t he? What did it matter to Bill now anyway?

  ‘There was a man he met with,’ Hitchens said finally, ‘although I never knew his name. He – ’

  The sentence was interrupted by the shrill ringing of Arnold’s cell phone. He looked at the number on the screen and immediately excused himself, answering the call as he strode off towards the long dumbbell rack at the other side of the gym.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Moses said. ‘Please, carry on.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hitchens replied, his eyes darting briefly over
to Arnold. ‘He kept things real quiet, met in out of the way places. Now normally when Bill had to go meet sensitive sources, they’d still be a record of the meeting made somewhere, you know?’

  Moses nodded, willing the man to continue. ‘Well, in these cases, no records were kept. And I mean none whatsoever, he even made me erase the details from the car’s little black box that tells you where we’ve been. I asked him about it, he just said it was ultra sensitive, he was worried about leaks, security, you know? So he tells me he can trust me, we were both in the 82nd, you know, swears me to secrecy about the meetings. What else could I do? He was the DDO, if he said something was ultra top secret, who was I to argue? It seemed a little kooky at the time, a little out of the ordinary, but then like I said, a lot of the things the Ops Directorate get up to are a little out of the ordinary, you know? I knew not to ask too many questions.’

  ‘How was Bill before and after those meetings? How did he react? Any change in behaviour that you noticed?’

  ‘Well, that was the thing that stands out,’ Hitchens said. ‘He was normally so calm, so controlled – but he’d be nervous as Hell before those meetings, drank even more than –’ Hitchens stopped, hoping he’d not said too much.

  Moses merely nodded in understanding. ‘We know about the drinking,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ Hitchens continued, relieved. ‘Well, he’d drink even more than usual, and then even more when the meeting was over. And he never wanted to talk after – about anything, never mind just the meeting. I figured it must be pretty heavy, but never –’

  ‘How many times did they meet?’ Moses interjected, keeping Hitchens back on track.

  ‘Only about a half dozen times, maybe six or seven. The third one was the weirdest, he didn’t talk for days after that. It really shook him up, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About . . . May last year. The guy met with him twice before that, once in February, once in April. After the third meeting, there was another just a few days later, then the others were much further apart, the last one was early this month, about four weeks ago.’

  Moses thought about the pattern. An initial meeting, just to establish the contact – or re-establish an old contact – and to hint at what the future might hold. A second to drive the message home, show evidence for the blackmail, whatever it might have been. The third meeting would have been when the order was given, and the fourth would have been to get Bill’s answer, yes or no.

  The dates tied in with the intel they had regarding the mission planning timetable. The other meetings would have been for progress reports, and to make sure that Bill was still playing ball. If, Moses reminded himself, their theory of blackmail was correct in the first place.

  ‘Would you recognize the other man?’ Moses asked next.

  ‘Oh yeah. I only saw his face the once – they were that careful when they met, but I wanted to get a look at him – but I got a good memory for faces. Like you said, us EP guys aren’t too bad at observation.’

  ‘Ever seen him before, any idea who he is?’

  ‘No, none whatsoever. Never saw him before, never seen him since.’

  ‘Okay, I think what we’ll do is go back to headquarters and – if it’s okay with you – get you to work with one of our techs, come up with an artist’s impression. If you can remember the exact dates and locations of all the meets as well, that would be great. Maybe there’ll be some surveillance tapes or something else we can use.’

  Hitchens nodded his head. ‘Okay, no problem –’ he started, but was interrupted as Arnold came back over, snapping his phone shut.

  ‘That was Dr Jacobs,’ Arnold said, and Moses knew it was the information on Crozier’s autopsy that they’d been waiting for. The look in his partner’s eyes told Moses that the results were significant, but he knew better than to ask in front of Hitchens.

  ‘If I remember the transcript of one of your interviews,’ Arnold began, ‘you said that there was another man at the cemetery the morning Bill died.’

  Hitchens thought back, nodding his head slowly. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Bumped right into him.’

  Moses looked at Arnold, wondering where this was leading.

  Arnold just nodded his head encouragingly. ‘Tell me about him.’

  32

  ‘He knows more than he is letting on,’ President Chalois said as soon as the transatlantic video conference with President Abrams ended. ‘He is involved, I am sure of it.’

  Gregory smiled. Hansard had told him that Chalois would be forthright in his accusations against the US. Danko would be also, Gregory was sure. It was, indeed, exactly what was needed, and what he and Hansard had been working towards. But for now, the UK would remain the voice of reason.

  ‘We all know more than we let on, it’s a political fact of life,’ he began. ‘So Abrams hasn’t given us all the details; would we, in his position? And so he may, or may not, be more involved than he says. The fact is, we simply don’t know.’

  ‘Mr Gregory is right,’ agreed Tomasz Kandinski, the Polish President. ‘American power is still absolute, whatever we would prefer the situation to be, and we should tread carefully. We certainly do not want to rock that particular boat.’

  ‘So you suggest we do nothing?’ Chalois answered in disgust. ‘They orchestrate an attack – a military attack – on the defences of Europe, and we do nothing? Tell me again why we have created this Alliance? So we can appear weak together? President Danko,’ Chalois appealed to the big man to his right, ‘surely you see the madness of inaction? We must do something to illustrate that we are not a lame duck, and that we cannot be bullied!’

  Danko was silent at first, large hands spread out on the desk as he contemplated his position. ‘Of course, I agree that we cannot appear impotent,’ he began. ‘That would destroy all that we have desired to create, foil us before we have begun.’ He raised his hands from the desk. ‘But,’ he continued, holding them up in placation, ‘what is strength without knowledge? As has been said already, we simply do not know how high up the chain of command the order came. Perhaps it was the work of one man, a renegade agent, as Abrams would have us believe. I do not believe so personally, but belief is not what is important here. What is important, however, is finding out the truth.’

  Danko settled back into his chair. ‘President Abrams has been kind enough,’ he said without irony, ‘to offer our own investigators unlimited access. So before we jump feet first into a confrontation that we may not win, why not take advantage of that offer?’

  ‘They will just show us what they want us to see,’ complained Chalois, disappointed that Danko was not more supportive.

  ‘Even so, we will have a better chance to assess matters once we have our own people there,’ Danko returned. ‘I am by no means a patient man,’ he continued, ‘but I advise that we wait for more concrete information before deciding how to act. The attack was on me specifically, and I have a vested interest in concluding the matter, but I do not want such possible action to be wasted. No,’ he concluded, ‘we will wait for more information and, if we then discover that the US government was involved in any way, even if they just had prior knowledge of such an attack, then I will press for action. On an unprecedented level.’

  The meaning of Danko’s statement was clear, as was the chilling look in his eyes as he said it, and Gregory smiled. The meeting would continue for the rest of the day, but the outcome was essentially already decided. Diplomacy would continue for the time being, whilst the feelings of impotence would grow and grow until if – or, indeed, when, if Hansard did his job right – it was discovered that the attack had official sanctioning, the combined heads of ERA would be clamouring for something to be done. And then Gregory would step in with the solution. And it would, Gregory knew, be too good an offer to refuse.

  33

  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. Not that that was so strange, in and of itself. But one of the children had called the supposed father ‘Uncle Phil’, and that certainly was strange – especially as the name on the big man’s travel card was Günter Steinbeck.

  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.