PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  For instance, Cole knew that – with the subject offering information – Younesi wasn’t going to refuse it, and would therefore leave the question of his prisoner’s identity until later. ‘And what,’ Younesi asked, ‘did you find out about Mr. Khan?’

  ‘After he ran from the scene in Wembley, and his subsequent death, Khan was investigated. We found out that he paid sums of money to a mob fixer in Marseilles called Cristofanu Ortoli.’

  ‘Who is this ‘we’ you mention?’ Younesi persisted.

  Cole ignored the question and – while his target was still willing to speak – Younesi let it go.

  ‘I followed up with Ortoli in Marseille,’ Cole said. ‘You might have heard that he was shot dead at his home.’

  ‘I had heard that,’ Younesi said, eyebrow raised. ‘That was you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cole said. ‘It turned out that Ortoli was just a money-man though, the real deal-maker had been the number two in the Agostini crime family, Benedettu. He’d been the one who’d spoken to Khan. I bumped into him in a restaurant later the same day.’

  ‘What a coincidence,’ Younesi said with a half-smile.

  ‘Indeed,’ Cole agreed. ‘He tried to run, but eventually we managed to have a little chat.’

  ‘Was that just before he was thrown off the top of a Ferris wheel?’

  Cole shrugged. ‘Maybe. But anyway, he had a few interesting things to say before he died. Admitted that it was his organization who shipped the weapons used by the three killers in London, at Khan’s request.’

  Younesi nodded his head in interest. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He also said that he hadn’t sourced the weapons, that an arms broker in Belgrade called Radomir Milanović had received an order from another party. He organized the guns, the grenades, the rocket launcher, and just needed Agostini to ship them into the UK.’

  ‘So you went to visit this arms broker?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cole admitted. ‘We had a nice little chat too. Turns out that the man who’d asked him to provide the weapons was an old colleague of his. Someone who’d apparently used him many times before, to ship arms supplies to Hezbollah units.’

  ‘Did he give you a name?’ Younesi asked innocently.

  ‘He did,’ Cole said. ‘It was you.’

  Younesi bobbed his head in thought, mouth pursed. ‘Interesting,’ he said at last. ‘And what are your conclusions?’

  ‘Well, I would say it looks very much like you – and therefore the Iranian government – orchestrated the attack on London. You supplied the arms, Khan recruited and helped train the three supposed lone-wolf attackers.’

  ‘And why would we do this? Our relations with the United Kingdom are at an all-time high, is this not so?’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ Cole said. ‘But I don’t think that really matters to the Ayatollah, who you take your orders from. He wants to end Western capitalist dominance, and it seems that the attack on London is only half the story.’

  ‘And what do you mean by this?’

  Cole could see that Younesi was trying to appear innocently curious, but his eyes betrayed his anxiety.

  ‘I mean that the attack on the school was merely a precursor, something to create a secondary event which could then also be attacked. The real target.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ Younesi said, eyebrows furrowed with concern.

  ‘The memorial event at Wembley Stadium, this coming Sunday. Ninety thousand people in an enclosed site, fifty world leaders among them, including the president of the United States. A perfect target. A perfectly engineered target.’

  Younesi looked at him with interest, as if he was reevaluating his prisoner. He was silent for a moment, then hit a button on the intercom on the table which sat between them, let out a burst of rapid Farsi, then sat back in his chair and continued to stare at Cole without speaking.

  A minute or so later, the door to the interview room opened and a guard came in with a large glass of water, which he placed on the table in front of Cole.

  Younesi thanked him and the guard retreated, leaving them alone again.

  Cole took the glass, desperate for the water but knowing that it wouldn’t be good for Younesi to see that desperation. And so he slowed himself down, looked across at Younesi and toasted him with the glass. ‘Thank you,’ he said, before finally allowing himself to take a sip.

  The cool liquid hit his parched lips, and Cole hoped that Younesi couldn’t see the pleasure, the relief, on his face; he didn’t want to present any kind of weakness to this man.

  And so – even though it pained him to do so – he took just one more sip and replaced the glass on the table in front of him.

  ‘Not thirsty?’ Younesi asked in surprise. ‘Please don’t be shy on my behalf, drink as much as you want. I know you have not had water since Belgrade.’

  Cole understood what Younesi was doing, reminding him of who was in charge – Younesi could give him water, or Younesi could take it away. The hidden message was that Younesi had direct control over his prisoner’s life or death.

  But Cole refused to play the game, and left the glass where it was. ‘Thank you for your concern,’ Cole said, ‘but I’m fine.’

  Younesi regarded him with interest. ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘And now that you’ve told me your little story, perhaps you would do me the favor of answering my initial questions? Who are you, and who do you work for?’

  Cole sighed, and slowly – sadly – nodded his head, as if resigned to his fate. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m an international liaison officer with the American FBI, seconded to London to help with the investigation into the recent attacks.’

  ‘FBI?’ Younesi asked with surprise. ‘But you are domestic security only, yes?’

  ‘We have close links to the UK, we often supply agents to help with terrorist investigations in friendly nations, especially if we feel that it might be a danger we can one day expect to face at home.’

  Younesi nodded his head in understanding. ‘But combat missions to France and Serbia are hardly under your remit,’ he persisted.

  Cole smiled. ‘You’re right, of course. But – after London – I’ve not exactly been operating on official business.’

  Younesi looked at him across the table for several moments, eyes narrowed. ‘We will come back to that in a moment,’ he said. ‘But I am still waiting for your name?’ he asked again.

  ‘Mark White,’ Cole answered at last.

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘October twelfth, nineteen seventy-eight.’

  Smiling, Younesi picked up a telephone that sat on the table next to the intercom, dialed an internal number and again rattled off some rapid-fire Farsi. Cole, translating quickly in his head, understood that Younesi was asking for a background check to be run on him immediately.

  ‘Okay,’ Younesi said, watching as Cole casually sipped from his glass of water, ‘while we wait for confirmation of your identity, let us get back to this ‘unofficial’ story you were giving me. Perhaps it can help with another issue that has been puzzling me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why did you contact my men in Belgrade? Why did you mention my name to them? What I would most like to know, Mr. White, is – officially or unofficially – what it is that you want?’

  This is it, Cole thought; time to see if his plan would work.

  It wasn’t a great plan, Cole knew; but it was better than nothing, and it was all he had.

  ‘When your colleagues check my ID,’ he said, ‘they’ll find out that I’ve been disavowed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Younesi asked, eyes narrowing.

  ‘I mean that – since the Javid Khan incident back in London – the FBI is saying I’ve gone rogue, I can’t be trusted. That’s why I didn’t have back-up in Europe,’ Cole explained.

  ‘Then why have you been doing what you’ve been doing?’

  Cole sighed. ‘I’ve been cleaning up after you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Younesi said in surprise,
bordering on anger. ‘What do you mean? Explain yourself!’

  ‘With the information from Khan, MI5 have been all over you. They sent an agent across to France to investigate, I managed to sneak over alongside her; and every time she found a link in the chain, I eliminated it. No witnesses, no evidence. I’ve been hiding your tracks all over Europe.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Younesi spat.

  ‘Is it?’ Cole asked. ‘Look at the evidence. Whenever MI5 found someone, they ended up dead. And I killed them.’

  Younesi looked unconvinced. ‘Let us say that you did,’ he allowed. ‘Why on earth would you do this?’

  ‘After all my years in the Bureau, all my sacrifices, all the time spent working my ass off all over the world – after all that, when I made a mistake, they crucified me, just wanted to wash their hands of me, just like that,’ Cole said in disgust. ‘And so I decided that I didn’t want MI5, the FBI, or anyone else to solve this thing. Sonsofbitches, who do they think they are? They rely on people like me, without us they’d have nothing at all. And that’s what I want to give them. Nothing at all.’

  Younesi laughed. ‘So you are protecting me?’

  Cole nodded, in spite of the laughter. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And if you want your second attack to go ahead, you should listen very carefully to what I have to say.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  Cole opened his mouth to respond, but the telephone rang at the same time and Younesi answered it.

  The spy chief listened for several minutes to the person on the other end of the line, grunting on occasion, asking for confirmation on others. In the end, he thanked the caller and put the phone down, eyes locked onto Cole’s.

  ‘Okay Mr. White,’ he said, ‘it looks like you check out. So I’m listening carefully to what you have to say. And, for your sake, it had better be good.’

  5

  ‘Come on,’ Director Noah Graham said, ‘you’ve got to tell us something, Ms. Aoki. Don’t you understand what’s going to happen to you if you don’t help us? We’ll get you shipped back to Japan, okay? And I think there are some people over there you’d rather not see, aren’t there?’

  Michiko was disgusted by Noah Graham. Here was the Director of the FBI, one of the highest law enforcement officials in the country, trying to bully a teenaged girl. He acted so high and mighty when he was talking to Jones and Mason, on the recordings she’d made of their conversations, making constant reference to ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘protecting the constitution’, but he was willing to pervert those same principals in order to protect them.

  Like these trumped-up charges she’d been pulled in for, completely bogus accusations of providing terrorist support, based upon evidence that had been dredged up from her criminal ties back in Japan.

  She also knew that the threat of sending her back over there was groundless; she was a United States citizen, her paperwork signed by the president herself. She had explained these things already, of course, but still Graham persisted.

  She wouldn’t have to put up with his bullshit for much longer though, she thought as she checked her watch; just a few more minutes should do it.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ Graham asked, noting her looking at the time. ‘Look here honey, this is the F-B-fucking-I you’re dealing with now, and you’d best get with the program if you know what’s good for you. So I’ll ask you again. Tell me everything you know about Dr. Alan Sandbourne, and anything strange that you’ve noticed going on at the Paradigm Group. That’s all I want, and I can make all of these charges against you go away.’

  Michiko had been arrested in the lobby of the Paradigm Group in a nighttime raid, when there was just a skeleton staff on at the Forest Hills campus. They were tired of waiting for her to leave, and so Mason had insisted that they go in and arrest her on-site.

  She was downstairs in the Force One area when they came, but had come up to meet them on Vinson’s recommendation. They’d presented a warrant for her arrest, and taken her away; and then they’d presented Vinson with a warrant to search her computers, due to the fact that she’d been designated a terrorist suspect.

  Vinson had known that it was just a ruse to get access to the group’s systems however, and had held his ground. He’d immediately presented them with a presidential order protecting the compound from investigation, unless ordered by congress.

  So for now, Michiko was all they had; and she was confident that they wouldn’t have her for very much longer.

  She checked her watch again, and was pleased to see the angry veins threatening to burst in Graham’s temples.

  ‘I think you’d better check the news,’ she said.

  ‘You think I’d better check the news?’ he repeated. ‘Who are you to be telling me what to do? I’m the director of the fucking FBI, I tell you what to do, not the other way around!’

  ‘Trust me,’ she said with a wink.

  Graham couldn’t conceal the fury on his face, but there was something about the way she spoke to him with such confidence that caused him to stop in his tracks.

  What if there was something on the news? Had the vice president’s little home movie finally made it onto the networks uncut?

  He left the room without a word to the girl, strode off down the corridor to the nearest rec room and – to the disgruntled comments of the people watching, at least until they realized who he was – he turned the TV off the baseball game and onto CNN.

  The images in front of him were beyond disturbing – they showed Air Force Colonel Manfred Jones being greeted at his front door by a section of military police. He presented something of a comic figure, standing there in his nightgown, a look of complete shock on his pale face, and yet Graham failed to see anything funny about it at all. What the hell was going on?

  But the news flash trailing along the bottom of the screen said it all –

  HIGH RANKING MILITARY OFFICER ACCUSED OF SABOTAGE.

  He reached forward to turn the volume up.

  ‘Last night,’ the voiceover narration said, ‘an unidentified military officer – but suspected to be the commander of the US Joint Special Operations Command – was arrested on suspicion of sabotaging the parachute of a fellow officer, General Miley Cooper, the suspect’s predecessor at JSOC.

  ‘Evidence – including eyewitness testimony – has apparently emerged suggesting that the suspect was in the rigging room, with General Cooper’s parachute, before a night descent a few months ago that saw the general suffering two broken legs and a broken pelvis. Data from the jump computer attached to the general during the incident seems to indicate that the parachute malfunctioned, causing the general to veer off course.

  ‘It has been suggested that the suspect – named, I’m hearing now, as Air Force Colonel Manfred Jones – benefitted from the general’s injuries directly because, as deputy, he was the man assigned to step into the commander’s shoes in such a situation.

  ‘The colonel’s records and files are being thoroughly examined, just in case he was encouraged to do this by unfriendly nations – Joint Special Operations Command is America’s spearhead fighting force, and the security ramifications would be immense if the reason for the sabotage was anything more than personal greed and ambition.’

  The story segued into the weather, and Graham just stood there for some time, eyes locked on the television but seeing nothing.

  What the hell had just happened?

  The Director of the FBI returned to the interview room a shadow of his previous self.

  He walked forward to the desk and turned off the recording device that sat in front of Michiko.

  ‘What did you do?’ he asked her softly.

  ‘It’s not what I did,’ Michiko replied. ‘Didn’t you just listen to the news? It’s what your friend did.’

  ‘It’s complete bullshit,’ Graham complained.

  ‘Is it?’ Michiko said. ‘You didn’t actually know him then, so it might be true, mightn’t it? You just never know. But what we do know is tha
t there’s sufficient evidence for the military police – and, I guess, the FBI too, if there’s a feeling he’s a stooge for some unfriendly foreign power – to keep him under lock and key for a little while at least. And believe me, even if he’s found innocent, his military career is over. No more commander of JSOC, goodbye to dreams of ever getting into the offices of the Joint Chiefs. He’s finished.’

  ‘You bitch,’ Graham breathed, unable to believe what he was hearing.

  Michiko shrugged. ‘It’s nothing you wouldn’t have done, right?’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about me being here in this room with you,’ Michiko answered, ‘brought in on some bullshit charge.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing at all,’ Graham said, his features hardening. ‘The charges are clear, you’re a threat to national security. And if you think your games with Colonel Jones are going to scare me off, you’ve got another thing coming, lady. The Paradigm Group is a front for a covert action unit, a hit team for the president, and you’re all going down, believe it.’

  ‘You don’t think what you’ve done is the same?’ Michiko asked. ‘Really?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Graham said decisively. ‘I would never misuse my position.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Michiko said. ‘Do you have your cell phone?’

  ‘Why?’ Graham said suspiciously.

  ‘There’s something you need to listen to.’

  Graham pulled out his phone. ‘What?’

  ‘Dial this number,’ she said, before reeling it off.

  Eyes suspicious, Graham nevertheless did as she said, listening as the line rang.

  And Michiko just watched him as he listened to the recorded message.