PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘The opposite?’ Vinson asked. ‘How?’

  ‘What if the terrorists – whoever was behind the three killers, whoever hired Khan – didn’t want the Brits to change their way of life? What if they wanted them to show that they haven’t been cowed by what happened, that they would stand up to the threat and not be bullied? What if they wanted Britain to have a memorial event?’

  Vinson now nodded as well, the ramifications immediately evident. ‘Then the memorial event itself might well be the primary target,’ he said, finishing off Michiko’s train of thought. ‘That’s why they picked the school, such an horrific target, such a terrible thing, so that it would cause such moral outrage that a memorial – supported by leaders from all over the world – would almost be guaranteed.’

  Michiko’s face was ashen as she thought about what would happen if the memorial parade, or the later service, were subjected to an attack. The president of the United States herself would be there. But there was no proof; not yet anyway.

  ‘It’s just a theory,’ she said noncommittally.

  ‘Yes,’ Vinson agreed, ‘but it’s a damned good one. It makes too much sense to be ignored.’ He stared at his desk, deep in thought. ‘I’ll speak to Abrams about it, of course, O’Hare too. But the president won’t change a thing, and O’Hare – despite his own desires – will be forced to go along with her. We’ll tell the Brits too, but it’ll be just the same story there – security’s fine, they’ve got everything sewn up tight as a drum, you know the routine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Michiko replied, ‘but security can never be guaranteed, right?’

  Vinson smiled, although his eyes were still distracted with concern. ‘Indeed it can’t,’ he said. ‘You’re learning. We’ll just have to hope that Mark comes through. Where is he now?’

  ‘He and Elizabeth Morgan – the MI5 agent who was also involved in that shooting – are on their way to Serbia, I sourced them tickets for Hungary and they’re going to make their own way from there across the border.’

  Vinson nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Get back to work then, do what you can to help them.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Michiko said, standing to leave.

  ‘And Michiko?’ Vinson called after her when she was nearing the door.

  She turned back and raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you get a chance, look into that Morgan woman. I don’t know anything about her and – like I said before – I’m a suspicious son of a bitch.’

  ‘I’ll do that, sir,’ Michiko responded, before turning on her heel and leaving the director’s office.

  It was time to go to work.

  The man watched the news across several different channels as he sipped his black tea, read the reports in various newspapers and across many websites.

  There was to be a memorial parade through London just as he had hoped – just as he and his people had planned – and the details were now being made public, which meant that it was seriously unlikely that they would now back out of it. If they were to do so, the loss of face would be intolerable to them.

  And it wasn’t just a parade either – there was going to be a candlelit memorial service too, nearly a hundred thousand people crammed into the confines of Wembley Stadium, just a short walk from where his faithful killers had carried out their business with such beautiful efficiency.

  The thought of what was going to happen next, the event which had been made possible by the actions of those men, was wonderful to him, a masterplan of such sublime beauty that it would be talked about for years, for decades, to come.

  The episode with Khan had been unfortunate, and had not played out quite the way he had planned; but at least the man had been silenced before he could talk.

  Even dead, Khan was still a part of his plans; but it was important that the investigation of Khan would lead the British authorities to the group that hired him only after the next phase had been carried out, and absolutely not before.

  The next phase had to go ahead unchallenged.

  This character Mark White could prove to be a problem, he considered. Who was he exactly? Officially, he seemed to be a liaison officer for the FBI; but his source seemed to suspect that White was something rather more than that, and this was troubling. He was not a man who liked the unknown.

  White was following the trail of Khan now, apparently; but how far would he get, and how quickly?

  His fate would depend very much, the man decided, on how these two questions were answered; if White found out who Khan worked for after the next phase of the plan had taken place, then he would actually be helping matters.

  If, however, White did better than expected, discovered things too quickly and threatened to stop the plan before it came to fruition, then there would be no choice.

  He would have to be killed.

  And if White discovered not just what the man wanted to be found, but the real truth?

  But the man just shook his head and chuckled to himself.

  That, he knew, would be simply impossible.

  10

  Cole stood at the security checkpoint at Marseille Provence Airport, showing the guard his passport.

  He was nervous, but it didn’t show at all; such was his mental control that he could make his palms bone-dry, when they really wanted to sweat and be clammy. He was just a normal man going about his business, with every right in the world to be there.

  He was using the secondary ID that had been sourced by Vinson’s contacts in London, the same one he had used to fly in with. He still didn’t know if the Mark White ID had been flagged, and he didn’t want to be detained here for any reason; the longer he remained in the Marseille area, the more likely it was that he would be tied to the carnage back in the city.

  He had two main concerns. The first was that the airport would be crawling with cops, all with his picture taken off any city CCTV footage they had; the second that the Thomas Jameson passport would be flagged too, the authorities having matched any surveillance images they had of him with records of recent entries into France.

  It was unlikely, however, that there would be any accurate, close-up images of his face; the Old Port area was hardly buzzing with CCTV cameras, and anything they did have was probably still being analyzed. None of the police officers would have had a good look at his face either; by the time they’d arrived on the scene, he was already half-way up the Ferris wheel. The gloomy weather also wouldn’t help them identify him, he knew.

  The fact that he’d already passed several armed police officers – many more present now than when he’d arrived from London – and they hadn’t blinked an eye at him suggested that he was safe for the moment; however, he knew that could change at any time, and all it took would be one technician to make a match between any image they had of him and his online-registered passport photograph, and the game would be over.

  But in the end, the guard merely nodded at him, handed the passport back, and gestured him through with a grunt.

  He walked through into the departure lounge, resisting the urge to look behind him to see how Morgan was getting on.

  His cellphone had been destroyed by the sea water, but he’d managed to get in touch with her on a public payphone. She’d had a certain amount of excitement of her own, back on the Rue Sainte; with a few good Samaritans helping her push start the thing, she’d eventually managed to get the car up and running. She knew that it would have been an error to leave it on-site; if the police found it, they would be able to trace it back to them. There was the possibility that witnesses could describe it, perhaps could even remember the license plate; it might also have been caught on surveillance cameras. But tracing it through these secondary measures would take time, and it was certainly worth removing the physical evidence from the scene.

  The damaged rental had been on its last legs, but it had just about been capable of wheezing a few blocks south, where Morgan had left it in an underground parking lot, parked hood-to-wall to make the crash-dam
age less noticeable to anyone walking by.

  She’d then walked out, avoiding the police which were already swarming around the area by circling wide around the Old Port district toward the Gare Saint Charles, the city’s main railway station, where she hired a new car under an assumed name. Her perfect French helped mislead the young man behind the counter, who was far more interested in her beauty than her identification. Cole was sure that he would remember her if questioned by the police, but hopefully by that time it would no longer matter as they would both be long gone from France.

  Morgan had then spent the next hour driving around the streets of Marseille, cellphone on the passenger seat, radio tuned to the local news. When Cole finally called her, she was only five miles away; but rather than meet up immediately, Cole asked her to go and buy him some new clothes and then drive to a concert venue called Le Dôme, toward the north of the city.

  He’d been waiting for her in the parking lot, and had immediately left the stolen car and joined her in the new rental, changing clothes as Morgan drove them the remaining twenty miles northwest to the airport, explaining what he’d learned from Agostini as they went.

  Cole checked flight times and destinations on Morgan’s smartphone as they drove, and selected a budget airline flight to Zadar, a popular tourist spot in on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast famed for its medieval ruins.

  They didn’t book their tickets together, and nor did they travel together, lest anyone describe the couple who had dined in Café Corse and put the police on the trail of a man and woman in partnership.

  One of the reasons that Cole had selected Zadar – in addition to its proximity to Serbia – was that the flight was already boarding when he arrived at the airport, so that they didn’t have to stand about waiting for too long; and no sooner had he passed through security than he was on his way to the boarding gate, trying to pick up Morgan in his peripheral vision.

  The British agent was, as far as he knew, still traveling on her own personal identification, so that – if their investigation paid off – she could eventually claim to have been involved in its success. It was a worry that the passport had been flagged by now but, Cole reminded himself, they’d only flown here this morning and the bureaucratic machine rarely worked so quickly. Still though, it was a concern, and he felt an overwhelming sense of relief as he glimpsed her walking through the departure lounge behind him, happy that she had made it through security too.

  And now, as he waited in the queue at the boarding gate with a couple of dozen passengers separating them, he wondered if his happiness at her making it was solely down to the security implications, or if it was something more.

  Was he developing some kind of attachment to the woman? Feelings of some sort?

  He shook his head, dissuading himself of the notion.

  No, he said firmly. No.

  There is only the mission.

  Nothing else.

  And yet, despite himself, he was already looking forward to seeing her face again after they’d landed in Croatia.

  11

  Ellen Abrams was alone in the Oval Office, seated comfortably behind the famous Resolute desk, a favorite of presidents since Queen Victoria bequeathed it to Rutherford Hayes back in 1880.

  On the desk in front of her was a National Security Council dossier on the British Prime Minister, Adam Gregory; and on the telephone was the man himself, speaking from his home and office at 10 Downing Street in London.

  The presence of the dossier was nothing unusual – before making a call to any world leader, an aide would bring her an intelligence portrait of the man or woman she would be speaking to. It contained general intel about the subject, plus individual idiosyncrasies, domestic political situation, personal health and relationship status, and anything else that the NSC deemed relevant.

  Abrams had accepted the dossier, but had barely glanced at it; she had, after all, known Gregory for years. She had met him many times in person, and spoken to him on the telephone dozens – if not hundreds – more.

  Abrams found the telephone to be a pleasant anachronism in the frighteningly hi-tech world she generally inhabited; given the option of texting, emailing, Skyping or video-conferencing, the simple telephone still offered the personal touch that Abrams liked, the basic sound of the human voice and all it held within it. It was also pretty secure, as her intelligence experts kept telling her.

  ‘So how’s the investigation going?’ Abrams asked.

  ‘Slowly,’ Gregory admitted from the other side of the Atlantic. ‘We’re not too much further ahead than we were yesterday, to be honest. We’ve got background on Khan, plus an address where he’d been staying in London, but nothing that your own people won’t already have by now. All of our agencies are looking into his financials, trying to find any money going to or from him that might implicate others. But so far, nothing.’

  ‘Do you think he was connected to the three killers?’ Abrams asked next. She’d already been briefed on the situation by Vinson, but she wondered what Gregory knew, if anything; and if there was anything, what he’d be willing to share back with her. Vinson had warned her about telling the prime minister what she knew, as they didn’t want to endanger Cole; but it was a tricky call, seeing as how there might even now be more unfriendly elements in Britain looking at orchestrating a second attack.

  It was a balancing act – what to tell the Brits, and how soon? If she told Gregory what they’d learned so far, then he might well be able to order his forces to help find the second terrorist group, if there was one; but on the other hand, if they showed their hand too soon then they might cause the terrorists to change their plans, and then they would be back in the dark again.

  At least if Cole managed to find out something worthwhile, they would have a window in which to act, and clear evidence for doing so.

  Abrams’ strategy was therefore to give Cole as much time as she could before sharing what they knew with her British counterparts; but if there was no new information developed by Saturday, she would have to tell them everything and hope for the best.

  The suggestion from Vinson that the memorial event planned for the city on Sunday was actually the entire purpose of the initial attack, was disturbing to say the least. If he was right, then she would be putting herself willingly into harm’s way.

  But what choice did she have?

  She sipped coffee from her china cup as she waited for Gregory to respond to her question.

  ‘Personally, I think he must be,’ the prime minister answered eventually. ‘A man like that, with his history, why else would he be there? And it certainly appears that the three young men who actually carried out the attack would hardly have had the contacts, or the resources, to get hold of those weapons. Our experts here rather think that they must have had training as well, and Khan would have been well-placed to organize that for them, given his background.’

  ‘But there’s no proof of a connection?’

  ‘Nothing solid so far, just suspicion – which is hardly enough, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  ‘I understand,’ Abrams said. ‘But is there a feeling that there was someone else behind Khan? A terrorist organization, or even state sponsorship of some sort?’

  It was an idea that her own intelligence chiefs had all suggested independently, not one of them feeling that the lone-wolf scenario was credible.

  ‘Not as far as I can gather,’ Gregory said to Abrams’ surprise. ‘JTAC here think that perhaps Khan had gone independent, that he’s the lone-wolf, encouraging proxy attacks and the like.’

  Abrams tried to hide her surprise. ‘And do you agree with that theory?’ she asked.

  ‘Not sure really,’ came the honest answer. ‘Sounds about as reasonable as anything else, given that we’ve got no actual proof.’

  ‘Okay,’ Abrams began slowly, ‘I can understand that. My own people think differently, however. In fact, one current theory we’re developing is that the attack on the school was only a precursor,
a move designed to initiate the memorial event on Sunday.’

  ‘You’re suggesting that the deaths of those children was merely to create a secondary event that could then also be attacked?’ Gregory said in surprise, and Abrams could imagine him in his study three and a half thousand miles away, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Ellen, please understand that I have the utmost respect for your intelligence agencies, but this claim is beyond the pale. Are you really suggesting that whoever was behind the attack on the school actually had the foresight to plan so far ahead? Do you actually think that they were crazy enough to kill all of those kids just on the off-chance that we’d hold a memorial event?’

  ‘I think that the memorial event could have been predicted,’ Abrams answered, ‘given what happened in Paris a few years back. It was then just a question of orchestrating something so vile that you had no choice but to commemorate the victims.’

  ‘I see,’ Gregory said. ‘Yes, I suppose I see where your people are coming from. But don’t you think that gives the terrorists rather more credit than they deserve? I mean, has any group ever done anything remotely like this before?’

  ‘My people suggest that this is precisely why we should take it seriously,’ Abrams said. ‘Look at Nine Eleven – we weren’t expecting terrorists to fly passenger jets into buildings, and we ignored some good early indicators because we weren’t expecting it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll mention it to the heads of Five and SIS, but I’m not sure they’ll be sold on it.’

  ‘I’d still appreciate it if you could raise it with them,’ Abrams said, ‘at least that it’s a possible concern.’

  ‘I will, but – ’

  ‘I don’t expect Sunday’s events to be called off,’ Abrams interjected, anticipating the prime minister’s words. ‘I agree that there’s not enough evidence to support cancelling it. But we should at least be vigilant to the possibility of a secondary attack.’