‘Forget about it,’ Crozier said, then turned to his wife’s grave, kneeling. The man was forgotten. He didn’t have time to get into a conversation with him. Besides, the guy looked scared enough to pee his pants, Crozier figured. After that display by Hitchens, he’ll just be happy to get out of there.
Crozier was right. Cole was happy to leave. Still with the worried look on his face, he edged away slowly, eyes darting from Crozier to Hitchens; the reactions of any normal citizen who had just been threatened at gun point.
After retreating a safe distance backwards, Cole turned and walked away as quickly as he could off in the opposite direction, back towards the car that was carefully hidden on the road outside the cemetery.
He smiled to himself as he went. The mission had been successfully accomplished.
25
Crozier entered the grand foyer of the CIA Headquarters at Langley just forty minutes later.
It was when he had passed through the first security gate that he first felt it; a sharp pain in his head, a powerful thumping, pounding away at the inside of his skull. At the same time, he felt a loosening of his bowels. He decided immediately to ignore it. Probably just a lack of food and sleep and too much whisky the night before. It would pass.
The feelings returned, even stronger, when he placed his hand over the palm-print identifier that opened the twin steel doors of the executive elevator. As the metal box fired rapidly up the smooth shaft towards the sixth floor and the CIA Director’s office, he began to feel faint. Terribly faint. His chest started to constrict around his lungs, and he felt his breath become caught in his throat.
As soon as they had arrived, the symptoms faded, and the elevator door opened and he made his way down the long corridor towards the next set of security checks before the top-level offices.
Jacob Maitlin, the senior security official on duty that morning, smiled widely as Crozier approached. ‘Hey Bill, how you doing?’ he asked pleasantly.
Crozier smiled. ‘I’m doing good thanks, Jake.’ He handed over his card, which was examined by the officer.
Jake nodded, then gestured for Crozier to lean forward to the machine that would scan his retina. The machine bleeped once and then the light on top turned green. Satisfied, Jake handed Crozier back his pass.
As Crozier was about to step through the security gate, he was swamped by the same feelings; pain in his head, heaviness in his stomach. He staggered to one side slightly.
Jake’s hand went out to steady him. ‘Hey there, Bill, go steady!’ He looked at Crozier’s eyes, saw the redness from the blood vessels that had started to burst. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ Jake, like most of the staff there, knew about Crozier’s alcohol habit, and put the man’s state this morning down to nothing more than a heavy night.
Crozier nodded weakly, and walked through past the metal barrier. Jake reached out for Crozier’s arm and bent his head close to whisper in his ear. ‘Bill, you look awful, man. Take my advice and go a bit easy, okay?’
As Jake wondered if he’d gone too far — did a security officer have any business preaching to the Director of NCS? — he figured that his twenty-eight year tenure at the CIA gave him the privilege of being able to talk straight when necessary.
But Jake needn’t have worried. Because Crozier just looked faintly at him, nodded weakly, and collapsed, dead, on the floor.
26
Cole pushed through the dirty chrome and glass doors into the Greyhound Bus Depot in Baltimore and was immediately accosted by the stench of stale urine, sweat, alcohol and desperation. He looked around the large, dull foyer and saw the groups of winos gathered in little clusters; the young, wide-eyed teens just arriving to the big city from their little rural backwaters; others, only slightly older, restlessly awaiting their transport back to the simplicities of country life, the big bad city having chewed them up and spat them back out; women with their small children running away from their abusive husbands; drug dealers meeting up for deals; students setting out for college. The depot was a true melting pot, a thousand people from all walks of life wanting to take the Greyhound across America for a thousand different reasons.
Cole looked across at the bored, dejected ticket sellers in their reinforced Plexiglas safety cells. They had seen it all before, and if it had ever interested them, it certainly failed to do so now. Cole smiled. The perfect place to escape attention. Nobody cared.
He had left the Chrysler with the Baltimore branch of the rental agency, after first erasing the memory of the vehicle’s satnav device; a laborious task, but an absolute necessity. He had then walked the two miles to the bus depot, his collar turned up against the December chill all the way.
He never returned home by the same route after a mission, nor did he ever use the same identity. New passports were easy enough to come by, and why take a chance? His plan this time was to take the Greyhound to New York, then fly from La Guardia over to Hawaii before connecting back to Grand Cayman. He figured he would be home by late evening the day after. Not bad at all.
He thought briefly of Crozier. He would certainly be dead by now, Cole surmised. Killing a man was never an easy thing, but Cole was not unduly perturbed by his own actions. It was a simple case of numbers. If Crozier had lived, others would probably have died. It was unfortunate that Cole had to be the implement of such a policy, but it was a policy that he could see the intrinsic value of, and he had killed many times in order to protect the lives and interests of his fellow countrymen.
The first time Cole had killed, he had been only twenty years old; a lifetime ago. A newly-badged SEAL, he’d been on a reconnaissance patrol in the border provinces of Iran, when his four-man section was ambushed by a group of approximately twenty — Cole never found out exactly how many it had been — well-armed militiamen. Barely out of training, Cole’s baptism of fire was as short as it was brutal.
Petty Officer 1st Class Pete Miller, the section commander, was an experienced man and was able to keep his men focussed as he screamed out fire orders at them. They blasted their way out of the ambush, killing eight of the militiamen before the others fled the scene. Cole had taken three himself. A Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal had followed, as did a promotion to E5, PO 2nd Class. His officers had congratulated him, and his team-mates had almost drowned him with beer.
It also brought him to the attention of a senior officer who saw Kowalski’s potential and recommended that he attend Officer Candidate School. The young SEAL had never considered becoming an officer, but at the insistence of his own unit commander, he had gone to OCS at Pensacola Naval Air Station and had graduated as an Ensign soon after.
The instructors back at the Naval Special Warfare Training Centre in Coronado had always said that the first kill would be the hardest. Before the team’s deployment, psychologists had had long chats with all the men, going through strategies on how to cope with the guilt and attendant stress and anxiety that came with taking a human life.
Cole had never really experienced such feelings, however; he had just been glad to live through the experience. When the armed militia had opened up on them, the loud chatter of the AK-47s deafening in the close proximity of the mountain pass, Cole had momentarily frozen, scared into immobility. It had taken the kindly words of Petty Officer Miller — ‘Kowalski, snap the fuck out of it and get on that fucking rifle!’ — to move him to action. And when Cole had moved, he had moved well.
The guilt he felt afterwards was not for the taking of a human life — not even three — but for freezing, for nearly letting his buddies down. And he had vowed then and there that he would never let anyone down again through his inaction — not his country, not his friends, and not himself.