Seven Day Hero

by J. T. Brannan

  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, and where the children called their ‘father’ Uncle Phil. Most interesting, he decided. Most interesting.

  His section had been put on the alert by direct order of the European JIC. It was a domestic British matter apparently, but intelligence services across the continent had been asked – ordered, actually – to cooperate. The suspects were announced as two adults – a man and a woman – travelling with two children, a boy and a girl. The EJIC 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 EJIC, who then made a formal request for the ‘family’ to be followed, until a British surveillance team could take over. The formal request for a British 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 UK. 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. Hansard’s European JIC really was a good idea, he decided.

  Tarr was concerned, to say the least. The conductor had tried to mask his feelings, but Tarr had noticed the brief, unmistakeable flicker of suspicion in his eyes as he took the travel cards. Tarr 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 – ‘Uncle Phil, what -’ but Tarr 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 Tarr was saying – but the look in his eyes got the message across effectively enough, and Ben was instantly quiet.

  It was his own fault, Tarr knew. He hadn’t warned the others about the possibility that this would happen – and if he had, then he hadn’t done it well enough, it seemed. 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, Tarr decided. They would have to get off at the next station and find another way into Austria.

  34

  Just two hours after they had left Harry’s Gym, Sam Hitchens was ensconced in the IT suite at the Internal Affairs department of CIA Headquarters.

  He had already provided enough information for a passable image to be made of the man who had been meeting with Crozier; the details were missing, but the overall impression was there. The man was big – six feet five and about two hundred and fifty pounds, in his mid-thirties, with short dark hair.

  With the help of the technical artists who probed gently for further details, trying to prompt Hitchens’s memory into revealing what it knew, a good likeness was finally achieved over the next few hours. It was still by no means perfect, but it was a starting point, and the image was immediately distributed across the nation’s police and intelligence services, where other technicians would work hard to get an identification.

  Then started the long and laborious process of trying to find the man who had bumped into Crozier at the cemetery. A different group of technicians in a different room had pulled in all the images of people arriving at Washington Dulles and Reagan National in the days immediately preceding Crozier’s death. The man may well have entered the country by a different route, or indeed have already been in place, but Moses and Arnold had a hunch that he would have flown in shortly before the job – because they were now convinced that Crozier had been assassinated.

  Everyone entering the United States was automatically photographed by a hidden camera, which took perfect, high-resolution shots of the subject’s faces. It was a relatively low-tech back-up, aimed at just such incidents – where people had bypassed the hi-tech security systems and entered the US with false passports and biometric data, and then had to be identified retrospectively.

  The technicians turned the coffee machine on and hoped that Hitchens was patient. Despite the fact that they had entered certain parameters into the system to streamline the search – male, Caucasian, age between twenty-five and fifty – that still left several thousand images to search through, as neither airport was a quiet one.

  Hell, one of the technicians thought forlornly, maybe we’ll get lucky this time?

  Whilst Hitchens was working on the IDs, Moses and Arnold had gone to see Dr Jacobs over in the autopsy section. The news he’d given to Arnold over the telephone had been curious, to say the least, and they wanted further information.

  Jacobs, although his name didn’t hint at it, was American-Chinese. His mother had moved to the US from Hong Kong back in 1956, when her father had received a job offer with a big American firm. Two years later she had met Professor Ian Jacobs, a respected doctor of forensic medicine. Their second son, David Jacobs, was born six years later, and had followed his father’s footsteps into the field of medicine. He was now the CIA’s acknowledged expert in diagnosing cause of death.

  And yet the mystery of Crozier’s death was solved here not so much by his professional acumen as by his mixed parentage.

  ‘Hey guys,’ he said in greeting as Moses and Arnold entered his laboratory. The autopsy was finished, but the body of William Crozier had been left out on the examination table; the white, pallid skin not quite covered by the thin cotton sheet. ‘Thanks for coming over so quickly.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Arnold explained, ‘we appreciate your help. We have a few questions though.’

  Jacobs nodded and smiled. ‘Of course you do. You must have been a little surprised at my call.’

  ‘“A little” would be an understatement,’ Moses chimed in. ‘You’ll forgive us if we’re a touch sceptical.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Jacobs said knowingly. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before myself, that’s why it took a while. I’d heard about such things, but I had to speak to my parents, and then my grandfather back in Hong Kong before I could be sure.’

  Jacobs saw the curious, slightly disbelieving look on the faces of the two agents, and knew he couldn’t blame them. It did seem rather far-fetched. But the evidence was plain to see, wasn’t it? ‘I guess I’d better show you,’ he said finally.

  The doctor approached the metal table, atop which lay the body of Crozier, and drew back the cotton sheet.

  The face was pale – grey, almost
– and although both Moses and Arnold had known him, it was hard to look at the body as anything other than a piece of meat, so lifeless was it now, nothing more than a soulless cadaver lying there for laboratory scientists to probe and explore.

  ‘My first problem,’ Jacobs explained, ‘was ascertaining the exact cause of death.’ He gestured at the surgeon’s incision in the chest, which had since been sewn back up. ‘Investigating the internal organs, it appears to have been the result of a massive heart attack, although I thought it curious that there was none of the attendant damage that normally appears. A heart attack tied in with the initial consensus on cause of death, but because you had asked me to look into it further, of course I examined the body from head to toe, looking for signs of foul play.

  ‘I started by examining the internal organs for toxins and poisons, anything that could have precipitated a coronary attack. Then I looked for needle marks, places where other substances could have been injected into the body. Again, I drew a blank. What I did find though,’ he continued, beckoning the two agents forward, ‘was some interesting bruising at some unusual points on the body. If you look here,’ Jacobs said, indicating a small, dull patch of skin in the centre of the dead man’s right forearm, ‘you’ll notice a small lesion in the skin, possibly caused by a blow with a hard, pointed object of some kind.’ The investigators looked at the mark, but it was barely discernable.

  ‘Doesn’t look like much to me,’ Moses commented, and Arnold grunted in agreement.

  ‘Perhaps not on the surface,’ Jacobs agreed, ‘but let’s have a look beneath, eh?’ At this, he took a pair of forceps and put them to a previous incision made on the skin. Peeling back the various layers of skin, he then pulled away the subcutaneous tissue to reveal the wound underneath.

  Moses and Arnold both gasped involuntarily. The tissue beneath the skin was a mess, blackened and irrevocably damaged. ‘How did that happen?’ Arnold asked.

  ‘I’ll come onto that in just a minute,’ Jacobs responded as he replaced the folds of fat and skin. He gestured then to a similar mark on Crozier’s right shoulder, and another near to the left side of the jaw. ‘There is similar damage beneath all three points.’

  ‘But what caused it?’ Arnold asked again. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘At first I couldn’t really be sure, although I had faint suspicions – based, I’m afraid to say, purely on boyhood stories told by my family on trips back to Hong Kong. But the evidence seemed to fit in so well with those stories that I began to consider whether it could all be true.’

  ‘So tell us your theory,’ Moses asked.

  ‘First of all, tell me what you know of the circumstances of the death. Was there anybody who could have had close contact with Mr Crozier in the time leading up to the heart attack?’

  Moses and Arnold exchanged looks. How much was it safe to tell him? Eventually, Arnold said ‘There is some evidence to indicate that a man bumped into him about an hour before he died.’

  Jacobs looked interested. ‘Oh? Do you know details?’

  The two agents looked at each other again. What the Hell, they decided together. ‘This is classified information,’ Moses explained. ‘If it gets out, then – well, just don’t let it get out, okay?’ The veiled threat was more than clear, and Jacobs nodded his head.

  ‘Okay,’ Arnold started, ‘Crozier used to visit his wife’s grave every morning – not great security procedure, but there you go – and when he got there on the morning of his death, there was a man kneeling at the grave next door. The man got up as Crozier approached the grave, and accidentally backed up into him.’

  ‘And then?’ Jacobs prompted.

  ‘And then checked to see if he was okay, and -’

  ‘How?’ Jacobs interjected eagerly.

  Arnold consulted his notebook to get Hitchens’s exact words. ‘Wait, I’ve got an eyewitness description right here . . . Okay. “The man backed up into Mr Crozier, bumping into him. He then span around, looked surprised, then sorry, raising his hand to the shoulder as if to check he was okay, then touching the side of his face . . .”’ Arnold’s voice trailed off. The good doctor’s thesis perhaps wasn’t as far-fetched as he’d first thought.

  Jacobs just stood there nodding his head, deep in thought, as if going through the scenario in his own mind. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘It fits perfectly.’

  ‘What does?’ Moses asked.

  ‘Okay guys, picture the scene – the guy hears Crozier coming up behind him,’ Jacobs said, as he crouched down in front of Moses, his back facing the big agent. ‘And when he’s close enough, boom!’ He shot up, spinning slightly, his elbow scraping Moses’s arm. ‘And then – check to see if you’re alright,’ he continued, grasping Moses’s shoulder and then reaching for the face. ‘Perfect!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just perfect.’

  The two detectives just watched the show, starting to understand. ‘He shoots an elbow “accidentally” into Mr Crozier’s forearm – or, to be more specific, into a point known in Chinese medicine as Stomach Nine. He then grasps the shoulder – Lower Intestine Five, located at the nerve cluster at the medial deltoid – which just looks like a perfectly natural action. And finally, a light touch to the side of the face – the Seventh Cranial nerve near the jaw hinge, which would have looked like a compassionate gesture, probably used in conjunction with a sincere apology.

  ‘The result in this case seems to have been damage to the blood flow directly serving the heart which, over a period of time, led to massive breakdown of the heart’s muscle tissue and a fatal coronary. In martial arts circles, it is referred to as a delayed death touch.’

  Moses and Arnold exchanged looks. ‘No shit?’ Moses asked eventually.

  Jacobs smiled. ‘No shit. My grandfather knows a lot more about the subject than I do, but it boils down to a disturbance of the body’s energy at key points. One point alone might knock someone out if hit just right, two might cause paralysis or even death; three points, if struck correctly, will have the effect we can see here.’

  ‘Where could someone learn something like that?’ Arnold asked.

  ‘Well,’ Jacobs began, ‘most regions in Asia and the Indian subcontinent have some variant on the theme, and the principles are fairly similar in each. I’m familiar with the Chinese version, but it could just as easily be a Japanese or Indian system.’

  ‘But it’s obviously highly specific,’ Moses probed. ‘I mean, there aren’t that many places teaching this?’

  ‘It’s more than specific. The information is highly guarded, and is normally only taught to family members, or to the top student of a particular school. These aren’t things that you can learn in a karate class at the local Y.’

  ‘Is that something we can use to narrow down our search for the assassin?’ Arnold asked, no doubt in his mind now that Crozier was purposefully killed.

  ‘It’s unlikely, unfortunately. The knowledge is spread far and wide, but in such small individual pockets that tracking exponents down would be a process taking weeks at least, more likely several months or more.’

  After a moment’s reflection, Arnold flicked open his phone. ‘Hell, it’s a lead. We’ll try it anyway.’ He dialled the IA’s technical office and rapidly passed along instructions for a full search for practitioners of all related arts – initially internet and literature-based, but more physical should there be any evidence that warranted it. It was shaky at best, but he figured that something might turn up.

  ‘Come on,’ Arnold said to his partner. ‘Let’s see what Hitchens has come up with.’

  Moses nodded his head, and started moving his massive frame towards the door. ‘Thanks for you time, Doctor Jacobs,’ he said as he left, and the three men exchanged handshakes.

  Passing through into the corridor, he couldn’t help shaking his head in wonder. Delayed death touch, he thought to himself. Both he and Arnold were experts in unarmed combat, and had extensive experience of several martial arts, but this was something else entirely. Where the
Hell do you learn something like that?

  35

  Tarr was beginning to relax slightly. He’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.

  His constant scanning of the surrounding traffic eased his concerns, as he could see clearly that there was nobody following them. More importantly, his gut instinct told him that they weren’t being watched.

  He had probably overreacted anyway, he reflected – the ticket collector had almost certainly forgotten the whole thing, if he had even realized that something was amiss in the first place.

  He 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 four 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 – Tarr had escaped too many times already, and Albright was reluctant to leave it entirely in the hands of others.