Police would have attended also. They would know the car was stolen, but would they make any further connections? He listened to the rest of the one-way conversation to find out. ‘Yes, bad crash, I’m with the medical personnel in the ambulance, we’re moving him to the hospital.’ There was another pause. ‘American agents will meet him there?’ The voice did not sound happy. ‘Sir, this is a criminal case, he was driving a stolen car, he —’ There was another, longer pause. ‘Yes, sir. I will sign him over upon arrival. Yes, of course.’
The conversation was at an end, and Cole had the information he needed. They must have matched his description to an APB put out by Hansard. So they knew where he was, and where he was going. That wasn’t good.
Light was starting to filter through his eyelids, and Cole could feel that he was secured down to what he assumed was a stretcher. His arms, legs, body — even his head — had all been strapped in place. He hoped it was merely for security reasons, and not because he was paralysed.
Slowly, carefully, he started tensing and relaxing the muscles through his entire body. Everything ached, but everything seemed to be responding.
Next, he very gently started to open his eyes, careful to be discrete, not wide enough for anyone to realize that he had regained consciousness. There was a uniformed police officer at the foot of the bed, presumably the man on the phone, and Cole took extra note of the Glock pistol in the holster at the side of his belt. There were also two medical personnel, one on either side of him, administering to the various machines he was hooked up to. He hoped one of them wasn’t a morphine drip; he would need his wits about him soon enough, he was sure. If Hansard’s agents were to meet him at the hospital, then they wouldn’t be bringing flowers.
37
After Albright’s report from Miami, the news from France cheered Hansard up no end.
The man in the stolen car had no ID of course, but Hansard knew it was Cole. The physical description provided by the attending police officer was a match, but perhaps more importantly, the tactics of the car thief were a match.
Cole’s continued existence worried Hansard a great deal. What did the man already know, if anything? And if he did know something, then had he told anyone? As he took a sip of his Almagnac, he relaxed slightly. Hansard was sure Cole could not possibly know anything of any real significance. He would realize that Hansard had lied about the reason for Crozier’s assassination, but would have no idea why.
He had another sip, and started to relax even more as he thought about Cole’s current predicament — strapped down in the back of an ambulance, under armed guard, helpless, on his way to meet two more of Hansard’s ‘special’ agents — professional assassins who could be relied upon to get the job done.
38
It was luck of course, Albright realized. For all his orders, his plans and his directives, despite everything he’d done to track the targets down, in the end it was down to sheer luck. But, Albright considered cheerfully, that was good enough for him.
After they had escaped him in Miami, Albright had put out warnings to every transport hub in the United States, asked for upgraded passport checks, requested local roadblocks, and instigated a hundred other ultimately wasted security precautions.
But despite the vast array of assets ranged against them, the targets had successfully evaded detection at Louis Armstrong International, and then again at Munich Airport, a small Munich bus terminal, and once more at the city’s Hauptbahnhof.
It was a normal train conductor who made the breakthrough in the end, although at the time he had no idea how desperately wanted were the passengers seated in Cabin 4F of the direct train from Munich to Innsbruck.
He only knew that the ‘family’ were travelling on German travel cards, but had been speaking fluent English before he knocked.
And so Stefan Kohl had stamped their passes, smiled politely, wished them a good journey, and excused himself from the cabin. But instead of entering the next cabin along the corridor to check the next set of tickets, he turned on his heel and marched rapidly back the way he had come.
He had been briefed on the methods used by terrorists to move about, and knew that they were not above using children as decoys. And he was sure that this was what he was now dealing with — terrorists. On his train! He’d have to act quickly, he knew that; and so he hurried to the control room at the front of the train, demanding that the driver let him use the radio immediately.
39
Stefan Kohl’s frantic call was received by Commander Kraus of the Municipal Transport Police, who had been given orders earlier in the day to contact the local representative of the Landespolizei state police if anything — anything at all — out of the ordinary was reported. He didn’t know why this was the case, but after receiving the desperate message from Kohl, he hung up and immediately made his own call.
Marcus Hartmann answered the telephone on the second ring, and proceeded to listen with interest. A family, travelling on German passports, who nevertheless spoke English when alone. A woman and two children. Most interesting.
His section had been put on the alert by direct order of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. It was an American matter apparently, but intelligence services across the continent had been asked to cooperate as it involved international terrorism. The suspects were announced as two adults — a man and a woman — travelling with two children, a boy and a girl. The American DIA had provided his department with images and descriptions of each, but asked that the various European agencies be circumspect in issuing their own orders. A panic or a public manhunt was the last thing that was needed, apparently. And so Hartmann had sent out his orders to the police and the national transport services, as well as half a dozen other departments, to immediately report anything out of the ordinary.
His office had been flooded, of course, but he had the advantage of knowing what he was looking for, and was therefore able to immediately disregard the vast majority of calls.
But this latest information looked promising. He put a call through to his contact at the DIA, who then made a formal request for the ‘family’ to be followed, until a US surveillance team could take over. The formal request for an American team to operate on foreign soil had already been made, and approved, for almost all countries on the European mainland, and so Hartmann had agreed, saying that he would send some of his men to board the train at the next station.
The train in question was on its way to Austria, and so Hartmann also started to alert his colleagues over the border. It was just good manners, he believed, to give his neighbours a timely heads-up.
40
Albright received confirmation that a small German team would be put on at the next train stop, whilst he himself was still airborne, two hundred miles away. Good, he thought, whilst at the same time hoping that they would not be noticed.
His own team was assembling at the next major stop on the train’s route, which was where Albright would meet them. He had spoken to Hansard earlier, and had received authorization to recall three sections of men, with more en route from the U.S. They had been given permission to operate within mainland Europe, and would receive cooperation from the relevant local services.