PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (16 page)

‘Then he’ll do what it takes to protect the country, as he’s sworn to do. It’ll be up to us to convince him that the best way to do that is to impeach the president and arrest everyone involved at the Paradigm Group, Sandbourne and Vinson chief among them. Everything in Forest Hills, everything at their home addresses, will be impounded to be used as evidence.’ He paused, sipped at his drink. ‘Including any copies of that DVD you star in, copies that could well go . . .
missing
during the course of the investigation.’

‘That
is
good news,’ Mason said with a wide smile before throwing back his brandy and pouring another for both him and Jones. ‘Damn good news. So when do we start?’

‘Graham’s already started,’ Jones said, eyes glinting as he checked his watch. ‘Aoki Michiko is under FBI surveillance as we speak.’

2

Marseille was not at its best in November, Cole couldn’t help but notice. The sunshine for which the south of France was famed was not greatly in evidence, and the clouds were looking decidedly ominous, as if the London rain had followed them.

It was warmer though, Cole supposed, although fifty degrees was a few degrees off being what he would regard as pleasant.

But on the other hand, they were here for business, not pleasure, and he reminded himself of that as he watched the light stone exterior of Cristofanu Ortoli’s villa, situated within Marseille’s fashionable sixth arrondissement.

He and Morgan had parted ways the night before to pack and get ready, then met up again bright and early the next morning for their four o’clock flight to Marseille, which brought them into the city at just after seven, local time.

Cole hadn’t booked out of his hotel, and had left the majority of his things in his room; if anyone checked, they would just assume he was out sightseeing, especially as he’d used a different passport.

He’d been forced to make contact with the friends that Vinson had mentioned, and he’d been glad to find out that they were indeed solid, reliable people – one an ex-SAS sergeant major, the other a retired SIS agent handler. His request for a new passport, driving license and credit cards had been acted upon instantly, despite the late hour, and by the time Cole had arrived at Heathrow for the flight to France the following morning, they had been waiting for him in the parking lot with everything he’d asked for.

I wasn’t too likely that he would be searched for; Kelly and MI5 might not like him very much, but he was hardly a wanted man. And yet he used the new ID, in the name of Thomas Jameson, anyway; it never hurt to play it too safe, after all.

Morgan had decided to use her own ID, to provide them with official cover if they needed it at any stage. She might have been involved in a shooting, but it had been in the course of work, and had therefore been authorized; there was obviously no directive that had been sent out restricting her movement, as she too had passed through security at the airport without being stopped.

They’d eaten breakfast at the airport, hired a car, and driven straight for the address that Michiko had given him. There was not going to be the time for a protracted surveillance of this man, Cristofanu Ortoli. If there were others behind the London killers, it could well mean that other operations were afoot; and with the news media reporting that fifty world leaders were due in London on Sunday, time was of the essence. Cole didn’t know why, but he felt that whatever had been started by those three assassins was still far from over.

They were parked up in a small, wealthy suburban avenue, half way up a zig-zagging hill that led down to Ortoli’s villa. The site offered a decent view of the house, while remaining relatively discreet. Still, Cole knew that if Ortoli was high up in the gangland scene here, there might well be bodyguards inside, watching for strangers; on their drive past the far side of the house they hadn’t seen anyone patrolling the gardens, but – visually at least – they had no idea how many people Ortoli might have inside.

Luckily though, they didn’t have to rely on vision alone. Cole had told Vinson about what he was up to and where he was going, and had also told him about Michiko helping him. He had objected at first but, like Cole, Vinson was a pragmatist at heart and readily accepted that the ends justified the means in this particular case. Vinson would therefore give Michiko access to everything she needed, while keeping her involvement a secret.

Cole was in touch with her now, having asked her to check on the number of cell phones active within the villa. Michiko had logged on to the network, accessed data from the nearest masts, and pinpointed the units bouncing off those masts to Ortoli’s house.

Not including Ortoli’s, there were four cell phones on site. The background data showed that he had no wife or children, but Cole accepted that one or more of the phones could belong to visiting girlfriends; however, the fact that the cells were all untraceable pay-as-you-go units, with no user information available, indicated that they probably belonged to criminal acquaintances of Ortoli, at least some of whom would be bodyguards, probably armed.

There was also the possibility that there were others inside, either without phones, or with their phones turned off.

But Ortoli plus four others was as good a starting point as any, given the rushed circumstances. No matter how many it was, Cole knew he would have to act soon.

On their way there, Cole and Morgan had stopped off at a twenty-four hour hypermarket, where they’d picked up a couple of cheap pairs of binoculars, along with a few other essential items that Cole thought they might need.

Cole looked through those binoculars now, confirming the layout of the place. The information package that Michiko has sent him had, at his request, contained the original architect’s plans for the house. It was amazing what that girl would get her hands on, and he could see her becoming a real asset to the Force One team. Funny that when she’d called him, he’d already been thinking about bringing her into the fold.

What he saw outside the house corresponded to the plans he had displayed on his tablet, and – as satisfied as he could be at this point – he put the binoculars down and turned to Morgan.

‘I’m going in,’ he told her.

Cole pressed the doorbell and heard it chime loudly inside. He’d left Morgan back with the car, not because he was sexist – he’d seen some incredibly capable female combat veterans in his time, some of whom he’d recruited into Force One – but because he had seen her in action, and she hadn’t performed in a manner he could reply upon.

She’d put up a fight with Khan, and he admired her for that; she just lacked the technique, and the experience, to make the right calls under pressure. As such, she would be a potential liability, and he would have to distract his own attention from the job at hand to keep an eye on her.

He also couldn’t judge if the incident with Khan had damaged her psychologically in any way, and couldn’t take the risk that she’d undergo a complete meltdown if directly exposed to the same sorts of stress so short a time after.

And so she just watched the scene from the car through her binoculars, connected to him by cell phone via the wireless earpiece he wore.

He could hear footsteps coming toward him down the hall, and then Morgan’s voice in his ear. ‘There was a twitch at the window above you, a man’s face. Could have been Ortoli’s.’

Cole didn’t respond, but took on board the information. Most criminals worked odd hours, and he wouldn’t be surprised if Ortoli had still been in bed mid-morning; it corresponded to the architect’s plans, which put the master bedroom directly over the front door.

A moment later the heavy wooden door opened, and Cole saw a man in his forties stood in front of him; big and ugly, he looked like he’d been in the game his entire life, a career criminal through and through.

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 wreck.

‘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.