PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  He opened his mouth to speak but Cole didn’t give him the chance; the sock filled with pool balls whipped out instead, cracking the man in the skull and dropping him to the floor, instantly unconscious.

  The impromptu weapon had been made from some of the simple items Cole had picked up at the hypermarket, and as he stepped over the body into the hallway and saw another guard going for the gun at his belt, Cole withdrew another of those items and threw it hard across the room.

  His aim was perfect, and the razor-sharp kitchen paring knife struck the second man squarely in the throat; his hands left the gun and went straight for his neck, hoping to hold in the gouts of blood that pumped out over the tiles as he slipped, gargling in near-silence, to the floor.

  He felt arms go round him then, huge arms that attacked him from behind, enveloping him like tree trunks and threatening to crush the very life out of him.

  Cole’s head snapped back reflexively, but hit only the man’s chest. He stamped down on the feet, but again, the grip didn’t break; but it did give him an extra couple of inches of space to move the pool ball-filled sock that he still held, whipping it down and around into the big man’s shin.

  He grunted in pain, and Cole finally felt the grip give way enough to jab an elbow back into his ribs, opening him up even more; and then he span round and unleashed the sock at full speed, seeing the big man now, eyes on his gigantic head as the makeshift sap connected hard with his temple.

  Cole was sure it must have killed him, but he watched as the eyes merely went momentarily fuzzy, then cleared as the man shook his head; but Cole was already moving, withdrawing another of the kitchen knives he had bought and driving it straight through the giant’s chest. There was a loud hiss of breath, both from the guard’s mouth and the opening wound in his breast bone and – impaled through the heart – the man dropped to the ground next to his colleague, blood pulsing out over the tiles.

  Three down, and Cole stooped to retrieve the second man’s weapon, an FN Five-seveN semi-automatic pistol, before clearing the rest of the downstairs rooms.

  They were all empty, which left only Ortoli upstairs, along with one other – in theory at least.

  He headed toward the stairs, but stopped as he saw a pair of bare feet coming down toward him, tanned lower legs covered by a silk bathrobe.

  ‘Claude?’ the man said, as Cole moved swiftly to one side, maneuvering himself underneath the open staircase with only a second to spare. ‘Qui est á la porte?’

  Who’s at the door?

  Cole watched as the bare legs came down the stairs above him, in front of him, so close he could touch them.

  ‘Henri? Jacques? Allons, que faites-vous?’

  Come on, what are you doing?

  And then – just as Ortoli was in a position to see the blood in the hallway, the dead bodies, but before he had the chance to shout out – Cole’s hands shot out through the staircase and grabbed his ankles, jerking back and sending the Corsican mob fixer toppling painfully down the last few steps to the hard floor below.

  The man’s wrist cracked as he tried to save his face from hitting the tiles, and he cried out in pain. Cole rushed toward him and cracked the pistol round his head, taking him out of the game for long enough to enable Cole to check upstairs; if the fourth person with a cell phone was an armed guard, the screams of his boss would undoubtedly bring him running.

  Cole quickly ran up the staircase, handgun leveled out in front of him, scanning left and right as he hit the top floor landing.

  To his left, a half-naked woman peering out from behind a door screamed and raced back inside; there was no movement anywhere else.

  He knew that the woman might have been getting herself a weapon of some sort, but he decided that he knew where she was at least, and would therefore clear the other rooms first. He did it quickly and methodically, three other bedrooms and a bathroom, before returning to the room into which the woman had fled – the master bedroom, where she’d been spending her morning with Cristofanu Ortoli.

  He stood to one side of the door and tapped it with the barrel of his gun, wondering if he would be met with a hail of bullets. When there was none, he spoke.

  ‘Je ne veux pas te faire de mal,’ Cole said, ‘mais je viens dans la chambre, et je vais vous tirer dessus si vous essayez quoi que ce soit’ – I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m coming into the bedroom and I’ll shoot you if you try anything.

  With that he kicked open the door and charged inside, pistol up and scanning the room; but it was empty except for the girl cowering in the corner, unarmed and still half-naked.

  Cole put his own hands up, making a show of pocketing the pistol in his waistband.

  ‘It’s all clear,’ Cole told Morgan over the cellphone line. ‘Stay where you are while I question Mr. Ortoli, let me know if anyone approaches the house.’

  ‘Will do,’ Morgan replied. ‘Everything okay there?’

  Cole looked at the woman and smiled. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ he said.

  3

  It turned out that the woman hadn’t been a girlfriend, but a working girl, a prostitute working for Ortoli’s gang; it helped explain why she used an unregistered cellphone, at least.

  Apparently Ortoli often sent for the girls and – to hear the woman tell it at least – she wasn’t too upset about anything that Cole might do to the man.

  Still, he could hardly have her wander off with just her word that she wouldn’t say anything, and so he blindfolded and gagged her and left her tied to the bed, with the promise that when he had finished with Ortoli and had gone far away, he would inform the police and send them to rescue her.

  He was looking at Ortoli now, a grizzled fifty-five-year-old whose body had weathered the hard life better than his face. The man was a trim one hundred and fifty pounds, and obviously worked out; but the face was lined and marked, worn hard by the sun and a life spent on the wrong side of the law. But the eyes, now open, harbored a cruel intelligence that Cole was sure would have served the man well over the years.

  The men were in the kitchen, sitting opposite each other on kitchen chairs. Ortoli was secured to his with duct tape, another purchase Cole had made from the hypermarket earlier that morning.

  ‘Okay Monsieur Ortoli,’ Cole began, ‘I know you can speak English, so don’t piss me off by pretending otherwise.’

  Ortoli smiled at Cole with a mouth half-full of gold crowns. ‘You fucking idiot,’ he said in English with an accented, gravelly voice, ‘you don’t know what you’ve done.’ The smile widened. ‘You are a dead man, my friend. You, and your fucking family.’

  He spat at Cole’s face. ‘Hah, your fucking dog’s dead, you fucking peasant, everything you know and love. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.’

  Cole at first didn’t reply, just reached forward and jammed a rolled up towel into Ortoli’s mouth before turning to where Ortoli’s left forearm was duct-taped to the kitchen table, placing his fingers on the man’s broken wrist.

  And then – using his knowledge of pressure points – he used his iron-hard fingertips to manipulate the tissues and nerves around the broken bone to create levels of pain that Ortoli had never even known existed.

  His body tossed and turned against his restraints, and he bit down hard on the towel as he tried to scream, to beg for mercy; but only when it looked like Ortoli was about to pass out did Cole stop the manipulations and sit back in his own chair.

  Cole removed the towel from Ortoli’s mouth and was about to start the questioning, but Ortoli recovered more quickly than Cole would have expected and spat once again at his tormentor’s face.

  Again, without a word Cole merely put the towel back in the man’s mouth to cover the screams, and let his fingers go to work.

  It took four more repetitions of the unpleasant routine for the man’s will to break; but when it went, Cole was pleased to see that it had gone for good, Cristofanu Ortoli – fixer for the Corsican mob – reduced to a sobbing, quivering wre
ck.

  ‘Okay,’ he said through the tears, ‘okay, you win, you fucking win, okay? I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything!’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ Cole said. ‘So let’s get right on with it and start with the big one. Tell me everything you know about Javid Khan, the weapons you shipped to him, and who he was actually working for.’

  Less than an hour after he’d left the car, Cole was back inside as Morgan piloted the vehicle down the narrow suburban streets toward the city proper, having told the British agent everything he had learned from Ortoli.

  He had left everyone dead back there, save for the girl. He wondered if it had been necessary, but cut off the doubts quickly; he hadn’t wanted them running to their gang friends with a full description and a desire for revenge. Besides which, they were hardened criminals involved in gambling, drugs, prostitution and arms dealing – not a nice bunch of people. Taking them out – though yet another stain on Cole’s conscience – would undoubtedly save lives in the long run.

  But, his mind screamed as the rental car passed through the high ancient walls of the town’s outskirts, who are you to judge?

  He sighed. Who had he ever been to judge? And yet he had done so before, on too many occasions to remember. At the house, he’d killed two of the men in self-defense, and he had no problem with that whatsoever. But the guard he’d put down with the makeshift sap, and Ortoli himself – those two, he’d executed in cold blood.

  Had he had a choice?

  Of course he had; he could have left them – like he’d left the hooker – for the police to find.

  And yet he’d been driven to kill them – to cover his tracks, yes; but also to ensure that they were no longer able to ply their deadly trade on the innocents of the world, those whom Cole had pledged himself to protect.

  Had it been the right thing to do? Was there any way he could justify himself?

  He breathed out slowly; there had to be, didn’t there? It was a moral judgement he made, the lives of the guilty paid to protect those of the innocent, predators permanently stopped from stalking the prey.

  Somebody had to do it, didn’t they? And if he’d left them for the police, they’d have been back on the streets in hours.

  No, he decided, his way was best.

  His way was final.

  And if he made any mistakes, he was prepared to pay for them in hell.

  4

  Cole looked down at his wild boar stew, forked some into his mouth, and then allowed his peripheral vision to once again take in the table across to his left.

  He and Morgan were eating lunch in Café Corse, a traditional Corsican restaurant in Marseille’s Old Port district, just a block or two south of the Quai de Rive Neuve and its views from the harbor out across the Mediterranean.

  Ortoli had assured him that the restaurant was a regular haunt of Benedettu Agostini, the man who had supposedly been the main point of contact between the Corsican mafia and Javid Khan. Ortoli claimed he had only been the money man, and had merely been the conduit for the funds; it was Agostini that involved himself with the details.

  Benedettu was the oldest son of Antone Agostini, the head of Marseille’s Agostini Family, which was one of the region’s most feared crime organizations. Similar in organization to the Sicilian Mafia but far more secretive and tightly-knit, not a great deal was known about the Corsican mob as a whole; it became well-known back in the 1970s for its heroin trading links to the United States which had been labeled the ‘French Connection’, but since then it had managed to keep its secrets intact.

  What was known was that it was highly organized, quick to use violence, and had its fingers in a whole host of pies – money laundering, racketeering, drugs and arms trafficking, extortion, prostitution, loan sharking and contract killing were just some of the Agostini Family’s specialties.

  Antone was still the titular head of the family, but much of the day-to-day running of the clan had now been devolved to his son.

  Cole could only hope that Ortoli was right, and Benedettu would have some further information on the deal that had been made with Khan.

  A quick check of Ortoli’s cell had given him Agostini’s number, and a quick call to Michiko had confirmed the cell phone’s location. When she’d first checked, the phone – and presumably the man himself – was in a large townhouse over to the east of the city in La Tirone.

  Cole considered driving over there, but Michiko placed twelve other cells in the immediate vicinity and Cole decided that the risk was probably just too high there. Instead, he decided to take Ortoli at his word, set up shop inside Café Corse nice and early, and wait for his man there; and updates from Michiko, who was tracking the movement of his cell phone, had soon indicated that Agostini was en route as promised.

  The restaurant was small, with just a dozen tables set up for no more than forty diners, and Cole considered this to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. It would restrict his own movements, and ensure that he was noted by the bodyguards; but on the other hand, it made it natural for him to be sitting so close to Agostini, who had turned up just ten minutes after Cole and Morgan. In a larger venue, it would have been more difficult to ensure he was nearby, and if Cole had forced the issue it would have been obvious.

  As it was, Agostini and his entourage, when they’d arrived, had been shown to three tables that had been reserved for them, just a single table away. They were up against the far wall, Agostini in the corner for both privacy and security.

  He was a more handsome man by far than Ortoli, with unlined Mediterranean good looks more usually found in television soap opera stars than in violent gangsters. His file said he was sixty-one, but he looked twenty years younger. Like Ortoli, he looked like he worked out too, his athletic body covered by an expensive, well-tailored suit.

  Across from him sat a younger man that – from the pictures that Michiko had been able to drag out of the French National Police files at such short notice – seemed to be his brother, Saveriu Agostini. To Saveriu’s right was an older man who Cole recognized from the files as Matteu Mariani, supposedly a lawyer and a key adviser to the Agostini regime.

  The fourth man on that table was unknown, but from his posture and body language, Cole pegged him as a bodyguard. Presumably a trusted man, as he was seated at the table where business would surely be discussed over cannelloni and Corsican wine.

  The other two tables – one behind the older Agostini, the other positioned obliquely between the senior table and Cole’s – were filled with lower-ranking gunmen, bodyguards for the top boys. Cole could see that they were all armed, and wasn’t too happy about his chances at the moment.

  There would doubtlessly be others outside too, including a driver in a car with the engine running in case the Agostinis needed to make a quick exit.

  Cole and Morgan had discussed her waiting outside in order to feed him information about who was out there, but in the end it was decided that the street was too small and she would be spotted too easily. It also made Cole’s presence in the restaurant less threatening; the gunmen may well have approached him if he’d been there himself, whereas a couple having lunch together was much less suspicious.

  The only trouble was, Cole was still struggling to come up with a viable plan for actually getting his hands on Agostini.

  He’d already checked out the restroom, just in case it was possible to follow the man in there, knock him out and drag him out through a window. But the restroom’s windows were tiny, and there was no other way out; the door also led directly into the restaurant itself, which would mean Cole dragging the man’s unconscious body back toward all his armed friends.

  The other option would be to ambush Agostini in the restroom and then put a gun to his head, holding him hostage, and bluff his way out of the restaurant.

  But this wouldn’t be a guaranteed success either; it wasn’t even very likely that the man’s bodyguards would allow their boss to use the restroom when someone else was alre
ady there. Gangland assassinations were a constant fear for these people, and they had developed practices to avoid them at all costs.

  Cole scanned the room again, taking in the details once more.

  There were nine gunmen in the restaurant, not including the two brothers and the lawyer who were probably also armed, nor the unknown quantity of other guards outside.

  He was armed now though, both with the FN Five-seveN, and a Glock 17 he’d taken from Ortoli’s bathrobe. He’d considered letting Morgan have one of the pieces, but had thought better of it; he’d have to give her a bit of coaching first, and there’d been no time.

  The FN held twenty rounds, the Glock seventeen; that made thirty-seven rounds for the nine bodyguards inside.

  Was it doable?

  He considered the matter as he ate the stew – which was actually quite delicious – and made small-talk with Morgan.

  It was doable, he decided in the end – if he shifted a few more pieces around the chessboard to put things a little more in his favor.

  Just twenty minutes later – just when Agostini and his men were tucking into dishes of pasta, meatballs, salmon and roasted lamb – it happened.

  ‘Pig!’ Morgan said with utter disgust, rearing up out of her seat and jerking her wine glass toward Cole, the contents showering his face and clothes. Without another word – and with everyone in the restaurant watching her – she turned and stormed out of the front door without another word.

  Cole had known that the outburst, combined with Morgan’s almost supernatural beauty, would distract every single man in the room; and her figure would continue to distract them as she left, their eyes drawn to her legs, her ass.

  As she left, Cole started to wipe himself down with a large napkin. The men turned back to him; some offered him their condolences, either in French or in broken English, while others were still watching wistfully after Morgan.