STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (28 page)

84

Cole broke out into the clean, crisp night, watching as the crowds that had recently been inside the Fünf Höfe dispersed through the surrounding streets. There were some curious onlookers who had stopped, nervously staring back at the arched entranceway, wondering if they would see any more of the carnage they had witnessed inside, but most of the people were heading away from the mall as quickly as they could.

Cole was on Theatinerstrasse, a long straight road that led from the mall entrance right down to the Marienplatz precinct and the Munich Christmas market. The world famous market used to run only from Advent to Christmas Eve, but had for the past two years extended its run until New Year; it was simply too valuable to Munich’s tourist economy to limit it to the traditional period alone.

Cole knew the market would be swarming with people, and took off down Theatinerstrasse towards it at a run. Surely he would be able to lose his pursuers there.

85

Cole was at the cross roads further down in less than a minute, dodging in and out of the casual pedestrians as swiftly as he could, anxious to put as much space between him and the agents as possible before he slowed and melted away with the market crowds.

As he ran straight across the junction, car horns blaring as he sprinted straight across to the pedestrianized Weinstrasse, he glimpsed over his shoulder and saw six suited men following close behind, pushing their way through the evening strollers. Cole could see frustration written plain across their faces as the traffic increased at the junction and they were forced to wait for a break between the vehicles.

Cole used the extra time to increase his stride and put even more distance between them.

The Munich Christmas market was vast, almost a town within the city. Hundreds of gift sellers competed with hundreds more food stalls, ranging in size from simple trestle tables to huge tents. In and around the narrow passageways, entertainers vied for the tourists’ attention, with everything from juggling and acrobatics through to classical musicians and carol singers.

There was a warm glow from the small Christmas town, coming from the traditional kerosene lamps that dotted the lanes. It was like something from a bygone era, and Cole was sure that he would be able to lose his pursuers there.

86

Porter had led his men out of the mall, guns now hidden again against their legs – they didn’t want the whole area to descend into a panic. That would just make an already difficult job into an impossible one.

As it was, as Porter and his men chased their quarry down Theatinerstrasse towards Weinstrasse and the Marienplatz, he was unsure of whether they would manage to catch him at all. Although the mall security guards had managed to slow the man down, Cole still had a head start on them, and it would be a relatively simple affair to lose himself in the mass of people that would be gathered at the Christmas market ahead, which was where he was undoubtedly headed.

The only thing in their favour was that Cole was now a little easier to spot – the damage to his face from the shattered glass and the pine needles would be hard to miss.

Porter could only hope that it would be enough.

87

Cole made his way down one of the lanes between the stalls, heading on a rough south easterly course that he knew would take him to the far side of the Marienplatz, where he would slip into a taxi and get the hell out of Munich.

He was, however, all too conscious of the cuts that criss-crossed his face. The blood, still running freely down to his neck and chest, made him far too noticeable, and he just hoped that the tightly-packed crowd would stop his pursuers from getting too close.

His head turned to his left as he heard a siren from that direction, presumably drawn by news of the gun battle at the mall. As his head moved, his eyes caught a glimpse of a man coming out from between one of the stalls, a glint of metal in his hand as it raised level with Cole’s chest.

It was one of the agents, and Cole didn’t have time to dwell on how the man had found him; instead, he jerked his body violently to the side, just as the agent fired the pistol.

Cole felt a searing heat burn his shoulder, but ignored the pain, rolling across the floor towards the food stall on the agent’s left hand side. There was a griddle for meat on the main counter, and the stall was outfitted like a mini-kitchen. There was a stove too, with a chip pan bubbling away, oil burning at over three hundred degrees centigrade.

The agent’s aim was blocked as people reacted to the gunshot and started to run, and Cole used this opportunity to grab the pan in both hands, much to the shock of the stall’s owners.

The space cleared between Cole and the agent, and as the gun turned towards him, Cole was already releasing the pan, the boiling liquid showering the agent in a steaming squall.

The man tried to protect his head and face from the hot oil, taking his aim away from Cole, but he still took the worst of it, screaming wildly as it covered him. Cole continued towards him, then pivoted as he noticed movement from his left; whereas most people were running away, this figure was approaching at speed.

Cole wasted no time in a visual check, instead turning back to the food stall and grabbing a long-bladed knife from a chopping block. Continuing his turn, he saw the second agent stop in front of him, raising both arms to take a more stable two-handed grip on his gun; there was a bark and Cole watched the yellow muzzle flash even as he released the knife.

Cole carried on with his turn, feeling another burn across the top of his chest at the same time as he saw his knife enter the man’s throat, knocking him straight onto his back, dead.

He turned to his left, seeing another figure emerge from the retreating crowd, gun coming towards him. Cole raced forwards, grabbing the agent’s gun arm and head butting him square in the face. The man jerked back, trying to get his gun arm free, but Cole tightened his grip even as he took the man’s collar in his other hand, swinging him back towards the food stall.

Cole stuck out his foot as he turned, pulling the agent up and over as he tripped him, driving the man’s head down onto the griddle.

There was the sickening hiss of burning flesh as the griddle seared the skin from the man’s face, the pain causing him to rear violently backwards out of Cole’s grasp, falling to an agonising heap on the floor.

Cole looked back up to the other side of the lane just as three more figures emerged, all three with guns raised towards him.

Cole didn’t wait for them to fire, but launched himself into a headlong dive over the burning griddle into the food stall, 9mm bullets following his airborne body all the way.

88

Porter couldn’t believe what he saw in front of him; three more of his men down.

Cole was bleeding from the chest and shoulder, but it was clear that neither bullet had caused more than a graze; they certainly weren’t going to slow Cole down.

As it was, the market was going into the same sort of panic that had only minutes earlier occurred in the mall, people running everywhere, tripping and falling in the narrow lanes as others then trampled them into the ground in their rush to escape.

Over the screams of panicked terror, Porter could also hear the sounds of police sirens, much louder now, presumably at the perimeter of the market. The cars would be unable to move down the narrow lanes, but Porter was sure there would be officers entering the market on foot.

Porter watched as Cole leapt over the counter-top of the food stall, just fractionally ahead of their bullets.

The crowd was in panic, the police were on their way, but Porter never considered calling the operation off. They had their orders, and they wouldn’t stop until Cole was dead.

Porter gestured to his two remaining men, and they edged towards the food stall, reloading their weapons as they did so.

89

Cole pushed past the owners of the stall, so startled by the whole thing that they were frozen to the spot, and went out through the back of the stall into a narrow service lane that ran between two parallel rows of stalls.

He immediately entered the rear of the stall on the opposite side, which turned out to sell traditionally crafted wooden toys, and out into the next lane.

The panic hadn’t spread to this side yet, and there was a string quartet playing just outside the toy stall as people gathered round to listen. Cole watched as heads turned left down the lane, and he stifled his surprise as he saw a group of uniformed police officers heading through the crowd.

He re-entered the toy stall, not wishing to draw the officers’ attention by confronting Hansard’s agents directly in front of them. He marched past the elderly owner towards the curtain at the back, snatching up from the display a cup and ball connected by a length of string in one hand, and a beautifully painted wooden train in the other.

He got to the curtain just as the first agent pushed through into the stall. Cole let go with the ball and string, the ball spinning through the air and striking the man on the right wrist, causing him to drop his gun. Cole followed up by smashing the end of the train into the man’s face, smashing the cartilage in his nose up into his brain. The agent died instantly, and Cole wasted no time in targeting the next man through the curtain, slamming the train down into his right forearm, deflecting his aim, before swinging the ball around the agent’s head.

The string looped around the man’s neck, and Cole twisted the ball and cup violently, the string garrotting the agent with deadly efficiency. Two seconds later, the man sagged at Cole’s feet, dead.

Cole backed up, looking right and left. Two down. But where was the third?

90

Porter had let his men go through the curtain at the back of the stall whilst he had gone through the adjacent tent, circling around from the front.

He held his H&K pistol against his thigh again as he saw the policemen striding down the lane, the string quartet playing on, unaware of the violence occurring just feet away.

As Porter approached the toy stall, he was concerned his men had still not appeared. There had been some muffled sounds, but it was hard to tell above the sounds of the nearby music. Something was obviously going on in the stall, and this was reinforced when he saw the elderly owner frantically running out into the lane just moments later, shouting about a ‘madman’.

The owner’s cries attracted the attention of the inbound police officers, and Porter knew he was running out of time. He crouched down, shuffling along the front of the stall, hidden behind the counter.

He breathed deeply. On the count of three, he would spring up and give Cole the good news with all sixteen 9mm rounds from his handgun, and there was nothing the murderous, terrorist son-of-a-bitch would be able to do about it.

91

Cole was at the counter when the third agent sprang up. He had not known he was there – not for sure anyway – but when the third man had not appeared through the curtain at the back of the stall, it didn’t take a genius to guess he would be circling around to take Cole out from the opposite side.

Cole reacted instantly to the movement in front of him, thrusting both arms out straight ahead, his left arm knocking the man’s gun out to the side even as Cole’s hands slipped around the agent’s head. Cole gripped hard and pulled down even harder, driving the man’s head straight down into the wooden counter top, bouncing it off the hard surface.

Cole took advantage of the man’s disorientation and grabbed the wrist of his gun-arm, twisting it across his body and up across the agent’s chest until the gun was aimed upwards under the man’s chin. Cole didn’t hesitate for even a fraction of a second, pulling down on the man’s trigger finger as soon as the weapon was in position.

There was a loud crack, and the top of the agent’s head exploded outward in a crimson cloud of bone and brain matter.

The music finally stopped, as the crowd realized what had just happened, but Cole ignored them as he grabbed the agent’s gun in a two handed grip and moved forwards into the lane, weapon tracking left and right as he checked for other agents.

He froze as he came left, his gun aimed directly at the men strung across the lane opposite him, the barrels of their own guns pointed directly at him.

92

The police.
Shit
. There were four of them; uniformed officers, two kneeling, two standing with legs braced, all four with their weapons raised towards him.

‘Halt!’ shouted the man on the far right. ‘Polizei!’ There followed the command for Cole to drop his weapon, and the threat that he would be shot if he failed to do so.

Cole instinctively calculated angles and tangents. In his time at SEAL Team Six, he had fired well over twenty thousand rounds in training, in all manner of positions, and Cole knew he could dispatch the four men in under two seconds. It was what he had trained to do, plain and simple.

But he also knew that he could never do such a thing. Killing agents sent directly by Hansard to execute him was one thing; killing members of the law enforcement community was another thing altogether, and something that Cole just couldn’t do. He was an assassin, that much was true; but only against legitimate targets.

And so it was that Mark Cole relaxed his stance, placed the H&K pistol on the ground in front of him, put his hands in the air, and allowed himself to be placed into the custody of the Munich municipal police department.

93

‘Are we still on track?’ Jensen asked over a cup of coffee in the sitting room of his Washington residence. Number One Observatory Circle was a quaint nineteenth century house located within the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory, used by Vice Presidents and their families since the 1920s.

Hansard took a sip of the well-brewed drink from the bone china cup. ‘Well Richard,’ he announced finally, ‘we’ll just have to wait and see.’ He pulled out his pipe and tobacco and started to pack it with a practised economy of motion. He knew Jensen hated the thing, but the man didn’t say anything. It was just as well; with Jensen’s role about to increase exponentially, it wouldn’t do to have him acting above his station already. Charles Hansard was still the Vice President’s mentor, having subtly and unnoticeably guided his career to its present position, and it just wouldn’t do to give the man too much freedom.

Part of Hansard’s plan, in fact, relied upon manipulating Jensen from the shadows; and so it was important for the ex-Governor of Nebraska to know his place, and who it was that
really
gave the orders. He lit his pipe, blowing smoke up to the ceiling.

‘It all appears to be going well so far,’ Jensen offered helpfully.

‘It does,’ Hansard agreed, ‘it does.’ He paused. ‘Is Abrams still set up for the press conference?’

Jensen smiled and nodded his head; he could sniff the prize that awaited just out of reach. ‘Yes sir,’ he confirmed. ‘Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.’

‘Then we’ll soon know for sure.’

Jensen’s smile widened.