He yanked the door open, as if he’d been struggling to do so for some time. Cole acted suitably surprised as the door finally opened and came hurtling towards him at speed, taking a defensive step backwards. The move would also give him a chance to react if he’d been wrong about the person on the other side of the door. Cole had been correct in his initial assumption however, and the passenger stumbled forwards from pushing against the door, surprise written plainly across his own face.
‘Sorry mate,’ said Cole breathlessly, pretending to try and regain his composure, ‘bloody door must have got stuck!’
The other man was trying to regain his own composure, and smiled back at Cole in a mixture of embarrassment and confusion. ‘No worries mate,’ he replied, moving past Cole into the bathroom, ‘I’m just desperate!’ Cole smiled in return, and moved past the man into the corridor.
Although he hadn’t seen the faces of the men in the parking zone, he recognized them instantly now, standing across the passageway, their backs to the outside window. It was the eyes that did it, as always. Neither of them could conceal the surprise, the confusion, the fear.
Cole moved off instantly down the walkway to the left. He would have to care of these two somewhere else.
16
Albright followed the Cole family in the impromptu surveillance car he had earlier hired from the Hertz rental desk. Another of Hansard’s own agents, who was on liaison duty in Miami and had introduced himself as Andy Cragg, drove the vehicle, but there were just the two of them.
His targets had left the airport suddenly, just minutes before they were due to board the domestic flight to San Francisco, and jumped into a waiting taxi outside the terminal. Albright had expected some sort of trick, not really believing Sarah would do something as obvious as catching a connecting flight from the same airport, and had waited in the foyer with Cragg.
There had only been two other of Hansard’s men who’d been able to get to Miami in the time available, and they had boarded the plane ahead of the targets. When Albright had seen Sarah race with the kids out of the terminal, it was too late. Out of radio contact, the other half of his surveillance team were now on their way across continental America.
Hansard had instructed him that he was to keep a low profile with the local authorities; the mission wasn’t something he wanted people to know about.
As the taxi ahead of them took a left turn, Albright cursed his bad luck. Three cars would have been ideal, although even just two would have been better than what he had. But he would just have to cope. The taxi up ahead, its dark windows glinting brightly in the hot sun, was turning left again. As Cragg changed lanes and indicated left, Albright couldn’t help but wonder what their plan was.
17
In the back of the taxi, Sarah was playing a game with Ben and Amy. Her nerves were shredded, but she knew on an intellectual level that the plan was sound. So why wasn’t she calm?
Sarah knew all too well why she was panicking — this was a different world to her, and going through drills and exercises was inherently very different to the real thing, where there were real lives at stake, including those of her children.
She was, however, quickly getting used to hiding her feelings of fear, and was now able to play I Spy out of the cab windows without Ben and Amy realising anything was amiss.
The last half an hour had revealed that they were being followed. The driver, at Sarah’s request, had followed a circuitous route, doubling back twice in a deceptive circle designed to trap a surveillance car into giving away its position.
The fact that the same silver Chrysler Voyager was still there, four cars behind them, indicated that there was only one car tracking them. If there had been more then they would have been in radio contact, swapping around at regular intervals to disguise their movements, and Sarah would have never spotted them.
The realization warmed her immensely — it meant that the opposition’s forces were limited, and would make the next step of the plan just that little bit easier.
18
Albright was angry with himself. It was only after the third turn that he’d recognized the counter-surveillance technique, and by that time it was too late; he knew Sarah would have already spotted him.
Damn her! It was only because Albright hadn’t wanted to let the woman out of his sight that he’d let himself fall into the trap. If only he hadn’t lost the two men on the aeroplane, they would have had that second car and he wouldn’t have been caught like that.
No matter, Albright decided finally. The die had been cast now, and he’d just have to do his best with the limited resources he had. Sarah might know he was there, but there was no point calling off the chase; Albright would keep following them to the end.
19
Cole had led the two agents on a little tour of the ship, not giving them any time to settle or get into a routine; it was strictly stop-start all the way. The method had the added benefit of disguising the place where Cole was really leading them — back to the parking zone where he’d heard the men initially.
He’d had a good look at the two agents now and, as he had been trained to all those years before, had assigned names to them. The trouble with choosing names for undercover operatives was, of course, the fact that they were not physically very distinctive. The very nature of their profession demanded that they aroused no suspicions, and so deciding on a feature to lock onto was certainly harder than with most people. Both men wore nondescript clothes and had decidedly nondescript faces.
The first two had been easier, which indicated to Cole that this pair was the more professional, and therefore the more dangerous. Cole had many years experience of watching and observing people, however, and it was only a matter of seconds before he had latched onto the main differentiating characteristic of the two men. The first agent had a slim build, emphasized by a scrawny neck. To his credit, he tried to hide it by doing his shirt up high, but it was still apparent. The second man evidently liked to work out, although again he tried to hide his physique with his loose clothes. But he couldn’t completely hide the size of his neck, which stood out in stark contrast to his partner. Pencil Neck and the Bull it was then, Cole decided.
He remembered the layout of the parking sector from his earlier visit precisely, including the location and angles of the various CCTV cameras dotted around the vast cavern. He chose to re-enter the parking zone through the same door he had left through earlier — he knew the type and location of the nearby vehicles, and had already decided on how he was going to solve the problem of his two pursuers.
Cole crouched in the cold darkness, off to one side of the wide metal door, and waited patiently for the two men to appear. On the upper level, he had made a show of checking the area, pretending not to see the two agents before he crept through into the stairwell and headed downstairs. He hoped that Pencil Neck and the Bull would assume that Cole didn’t realize he was being followed, and would therefore confidently follow him downstairs in the hope of surprising him.
It was taking longer than Cole had anticipated for the men to appear however, and he began to wonder if they had seen through his plan, or had perhaps been ordered to stand down, or –
The door moved, opening quietly, slowly. Cole’s eyes pierced the dark, straining to make the identification. It was Pencil Neck. Cole exploded upwards, jumping straight into the agent and lashing out viciously. Holding the thumb and second knuckle of his index finger together in a solid point, he thrust the callused weapon straight into the man’s unprotected throat. The strike was as fatal as if he had used the knife he had taken earlier, but a lot less messy.