PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘Elizabeth Morgan was killed two months ago?’ Cole asked in amazement. ‘Then who was the woman I was working with?’

  The woman I slept with, Cole didn’t add.

  Michiko shook her head. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ she said cagily, ‘but she was made up to look like Morgan, probably plastic surgery.’ Cole nodded his head, remembering the comments made by her friend outside the school. ‘The only reason the body wasn’t ID’d was because nobody realized that Morgan was missing in the first place. The woman you met must have killed her, and then instantly slipped into her identity.’

  ‘And then you went looking for my Morgan, and found the real one instead.’

  Michiko nodded. ‘And there’s more. I tracked a woman leaving Belgrade on a Serbian passport, face matched with the Morgan you knew. A flight that went up to Estonia.’

  ‘Estonia?’ Cole asked in wonder.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and from Estonia, the overnight train to Moscow.’

  Cole read the expectant look on Vinson’s face, and made the connection he was driving at.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Cole said, ‘you think she’s a Russian agent?’

  Vinson leaned forward from where he was perched on the end of his desk. ‘Rob from our Russian department has heard rumors of an assassin coming from Moscow. Female. Beautiful. Uses the garrote as her weapon of choice.’

  ‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Cole said, shaking his head. ‘She was a Russian assassin? So what the hell did she want with me?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure,’ Vinson said, ‘but it might be that she was covering someone’s tracks, or maybe making sure you didn’t find out too much, or find it out too soon. Maybe she saw you there, the way you dealt with Khan, and her superiors told her to follow you, to find out who you worked for.’ Vinson’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘You didn’t tell her anything, did you?’

  ‘The hell I did,’ Cole spat, although he was asking himself the same question. Had he said anything, while she was lying next to him in bed? Is that why she’d gone to bed with him in the first place, simply to get him to talk?

  ‘If you still need convincing,’ Vinson said next, ‘take a look at this.’

  He swung his desktop monitor around so that Cole could see it and tapped a few keys, footage from what appeared to be a cellphone camera appearing moments later.

  Cole recognized the location immediately. ‘The designer outlet,’ he said. ‘The mall, in Wembley.’

  ‘Yes,’ Michiko said. ‘When the police checked the security tapes initially, they couldn’t find anything, seemed they’d been accidentally erased.’

  ‘Accidentally?’ Cole asked.

  ‘We think Morgan – or whatever her real name is – did it,’ Vinson said.

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Just watch,’ Vinson suggested. ‘A young man was hiding next to one of the shops when this happened, kept silent but filmed this. Too scared to come forward before, but with what happened yesterday, he thought it best to help out.’ Cole watched as Morgan and Cranshaw came in through the rear fire doors, approached a figure that looked like Javid Khan. Cole recognized the café in the distance.

  Khan turned and saw Morgan. ‘You!’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  Morgan ignored the question, striding quickly toward Khan and withdrawing her gun, whispering to the man as she approached.

  ‘Do we know what she’s saying?’ Cole asked.

  ‘Our experts have cleaned it up,’ Michiko explained, ‘it looks like she’s saying ‘grab the gun’ in Urdu.’

  ‘Wait, she told him to grab the gun?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Vinson said, and Cole saw that Morgan just stood there with the pistol out, waiting for Khan to take it from her, encouraging him to wrap his arm around her neck to take her hostage; only grabbing him to wrestle for it when they were closer to the café and all of the witnesses.

  ‘But Cranshaw saw what really happened,’ Cole said.

  ‘Yes,’ Vinson said, ‘which is exactly why she killed him.’

  Cole watched the footage of Cranshaw’s death, understanding now the reason for his shaking hands, the uncertainty of who he should have even been aiming at, Khan or his partner.

  And then Morgan’s handgun went off ‘accidentally’ but – when Michiko broke it down in slow motion, from this angle Cole could now tell that Morgan had taken control of the gun, finger intentionally sliding over Khan’s as it lay inside the trigger guard. A still image saw her looking straight at Cranshaw, just moments before the shot.

  The film played on, and Cole saw the scene repeated, only this time with Khan himself; his arm twisted, blocked from the view of witnesses by his body, and then his finger depressed on purpose by Morgan’s own.

  She was strong, capable. Ruthless.

  Merciless.

  One hell of an actress too; Cole had bought her routine hook, line and sinker, and he realized how he’d been played for a fool, by a pro who had used the oldest trick in the book.

  She had appeared vulnerable, appealed to his male ego, his desire to protect those weaker than him.

  He shook his head as he struggled to take it all in.

  Had she called out Khan’s name on purpose, back outside the school? Had she seen Cole notice Khan, was afraid that Cole would capture him, question him? Had she shouted out like that so Khan would instead run, be chased down and eventually killed?

  And if so, then why?

  ‘We suspect that she was the one who erased the security film. A couple of guards remember her being in there. I think they were a bit hypnotized by her looks, you know? Let her just stroll in there, play around with the computers, and walk out again.’

  Cole nodded, knowing – with a certain horror – how easy it was to be taken in by those looks, surgically augmented or not.

  ‘We think she tipped off the Serbians, anyway,’ Vinson said. ‘That’s why they were waiting for you like that in the hotel.’

  Cole nodded. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe. But why? What the hell does a Russian agent have to do with all of this?’

  Vinson shrugged. ‘Who can possibly say? But Mikhail Emelienenko wasn’t at that stadium, and I’m beginning to think that the Iranians might have had some outside help.’

  ‘The Russians?’ Cole asked. ‘But why the hell would they do that?’

  ‘We believe that your friend Jake Navarone might have some of the answers,’ Vinson said. ‘But we still can’t get in touch with him.’

  ‘In Moscow?’ Cole asked for confirmation.

  ‘Yes,’ Vinson answered. ‘In Moscow.’

  ‘Sounds like the answers to a lot of questions might be found in Moscow.’

  Vinson smiled. ‘It does indeed.’

  Cole smiled back, for the first time that day. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you’ve got me. When do I leave?’

  Clark Mason watched his people as they flocked around him, fresh from his congressional confirmation as President of the United States.

  They adored him.

  And why wouldn’t they?

  But he was already reading the critics’ responses in the papers, watching the commentaries in the evening news.

  Some people thought he wouldn’t be tough enough to deal with Iran, that because he hadn’t been in the military or served in a defense post in the administration, that he was going to let the bastards get away with it.

  As he took the podium in the White House press room to answer his first questions as president, however, he was determined to show his people that he had a backbone made of steel, that he would never back down in the face of the enemy.

  The first interview questions dealt with how he felt about becoming president in such circumstances, his memories of Abrams, his reactions to recent events.

  To all of them, his answers were clear and well thought-out, passionate and heartfelt.

  And then came the one he had been waiting for, the one that would enable him to prove himself, to show his ad
oring people that – despite what the critics said – he was a president who could be trusted to look after national security with the best of them.

  ‘What are your intentions toward Iran now?’ asked the reporter from ABC News.

  ‘My intentions?’ he asked. ‘Well, son, my intentions are the same as the rest of the American people, the same as the rest of the world. Everyone’s angry, right? Sure we are, Iran has just wiped most of our leaders clean off the face of the planet, including our own, the damn president of the United States of America, the leader of the greatest country in the world. So what are my intentions? Son, my singular intention is to wipe Iran clean off the face of the planet.’

  There, he’d said it, and the bemused – even shocked – looks on the faces of the gathered reporters confirmed what he’d expected.

  He’d caught them off guard.

  Trumped them.

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed to the surprised crowd, ‘I am stating here and now that I intend to go to war with Iran, and the military is making plans as we speak. We will put together an international coalition – which I’m sure Britain and the rest of our European allies will be a part of, at the very least – and dismantle the regime of the so-called Islamic Republic in its entirety.’

  Ha!

  He would show them.

  He was a president with backbone, and they would not soon forget it.

  Vladimir Dementyev watched the press conference held by the new US president with interest, and not a little professional pride.

  ‘You’re psychological evaluation of the Vice President was perfectly correct,’ said the man at the opposite side of the huge desk. ‘In fact, everything you said has turned out as you predicted. You have done well, my friend.’

  Dementyev smiled as he sipped at his black tea, knowing that Mikhail Emelienenko, President of the Russian Federation, was right; he had done well.

  ‘So that concludes phase one of Proyekt Yevropy,’ Emelienenko said happily.

  ‘Yes,’ Dementyev confirmed. ‘When America and her allies start their invasion of Iran, anyway, which surely won’t be long.’

  ‘Let us hope not,’ Emelienenko said. ‘Our own forces are on standby for phase two, ready to move at a moment’s notice.’

  Dementyev smiled. Project Europe was his baby, and phase two was guaranteed to change the face of the world forever.

  ‘Excellent,’ Dementyev said, raising his teacup to the president in toast. ‘I cannot wait to see what happens next.’

  THE END

  . . . but Mark Cole will return in his sixth adventure, out in 2016!